“You are the youngest sister,” he had once confided to her, “but it is you to whom a special destiny is granted. Even your name — Anastasia — means ‘the breaker of chains.’ Did you know that, my child?”

So she had heard; in her honor, her father had freed some youthful political prisoners on the day of her birth.

But as for what chains she herself would ever break, the monk had never said, and she had never had the courage to ask.

Her mother was drawing the starets toward the bed, and Dr. Botkin diplomatically stepped away. Ana knew that there was no love lost between the doctor and Rasputin, but she also knew that her mother had placed her ultimate faith in the holy man and not the physician. Everyone else knew it, too.

Most of all, Rasputin.

The monk stood at the foot of the bed, towering over the ailing Tsarevitch, and with his eyes raised to heaven, began to murmur a prayer. In one hand, he clutched a heavy pectoral cross — emerald-encrusted and hanging from his neck on a silver chain. Ana had once seen it in the cabinets of her mother’s mauve boudoir, along with the rest of the renowned Romanov jewels.

His beard jutted out like a stiff black beehive, and his words rumbled like the echo of a distant train. Low, and constant, and though Ana could barely make out what he was saying, the sound alone was strangely comforting. She could see her brother’s tortured eyes turning toward Rasputin, and after a minute or two, his moaning ceased, and his breathing appeared to become more regular. It was a transformation she had seen before though neither she, nor anyone else, seemed to know what caused it. Her mother ascribed it to the power of God—“the Lord speaks through Father Grigori”—but the court physicians remained baffled.

Rasputin came around to the side of the bed and clasped the boy’s hands between his own rough paws. “The bleeding will stop,” he said, “the pain will go away.” He stroked the Tsarevitch’s hands, as the Tsaritsa looked on through a flood of her own tears. He repeated these words, again and again, before saying, “You will rest, Alexei. You will rest. And when you wake, you will be better. Your leg will not be so swollen, you will not feel the pain.” He leaned forward, his beard covering the boy’s face and the emerald cross dangling into the bedclothes, to kiss him lightly on his forehead. “And you will sing out for your oatmeal with honey and jam.” He smiled, a smile as crooked as the part that ran down the center of his matted hair, and uttered another prayer under his breath. As he stepped back from the bed, his muddy boots left a puddle on the carpet.

But Alexei wasn’t writhing in pain. He was, miraculously, asleep, and with a silent wave of his arms, Rasputin — as if he were the Tsar himself — ushered them all into the next room.

“You, too, little Ana,” he whispered, draping a hand on the shoulder of her blue silk robe, before closing the doors to the bedchamber behind him. The emerald cross, swinging against his cassock, winked in the glow from the hearth, and on a sudden impulse, she kissed it.

Rasputin said, “Ah, Christ speaks to you, doesn’t he, little one?”

Ana did not know the answer to that, any more than she knew why she had just done what she just did.

But Father Grigori smiled through his broken teeth as if he knew full well.

Although Dr. Levinson had spoken with a touch of hyperbole, Slater soon discovered that she’d meant what she said. He was instructed to draw up a game plan and risk assessment, a preliminary budget (though Dr. Levinson had made it clear on his way out that cost was to be no object), put together a team of whatever specialists he would require, and have it all on her desk in seventy-two hours. Normally, it was the kind of thing that would have taken weeks, if not months — not only to be put together but to be vetted by everyone else in the chain of command. But again, Dr. Levinson had made it plain that this project would have the highest-priority clearance not only from AFIP, but from the Army, the Air Force, and the Coast Guard, all of which would have to be involved at one stage or another. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta had also offered their full cooperation and support. “But I don’t want them meddling,” Levinson had said. “They take a month to make a cup of coffee.”

Dr. Slater had returned to his offices, rolled up his sleeves, and started making out the ideal roster to assist him. He would need a team of people who were as dedicated as they were skilled, and as competent as they were fearless. They would be performing some of the most sensitive and dangerous work imaginable, and under what were sure to be very tricky and adverse conditions. It was one thing to do an autopsy in a state-of-the-art lab; it was altogether another to take organ core samples in an open graveyard, on a freezing island, where the ground beneath your feet could give way at any time. He would have to choose his people very carefully.

First of all, the logistics would be crucial. There would be tons of gear — quite literally — that would have to be brought to the island site. Everything from decontamination tents to jackhammers, generators to refrigerators (even in Alaska). For a job this big and complicated, there was only one man he trusted — Sergeant Jerome Groves, who was due to be redeployed to some hot zone in the Middle East at the end of the week. All things considered, he might be glad to get the call.

Slater put his name at the top of the list.

The next thing he’d need would be that geologist he’d been thinking about earlier. Before Slater and his team put even one shovel into the earth, they would need to use ground-penetrating radar to assess what lay beneath the soil, and to make sure — before doing irreversible damage — that the coffins, and the bodies inside, had not shifted or become separated from each other over the past century. During a typhoid outbreak in Croatia, he had once worked with a Russian who had read the underground water tables as easily as if he were reading a menu in a restaurant. He was attached at the time to the Trofimuk United Institute of Geology, Geophysics and Mineralogy, the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, but Slater had no idea what he was doing now. Still, Professor Vassily Kozak was the man he wanted, and he added his name to the list.

As for the virology and autopsy work, Slater could take care of most of that himself. But he would still need another pair of hands, and another set of eyes, to assist him in the cemetery, and to help him run the lab. It took him only a few seconds to come up with Dr. Eva Lantos, a virologist with a Ph.D. from M.I.T. and a mind like a steel trap. The last time he’d heard from her, she’d been living in Boston with her latest girlfriend, and working on the mole-rat genome, but if anybody was up for an adventure, it would be Eva.

Slater made a few calls, left a few messages that were, because of the top secret nature of the mission, a lot more cryptic than he’d have liked, and started burrowing through the accompanying paperwork the AFIP had gathered for him. By the time he had written a preliminary request list and sent the memo back to Dr. Levinson’s office, he glanced out the window and saw that it was already dark out; he’d forgotten to have lunch and had somehow powered himself through the day with nothing but black coffee and a packet of trail mix he’d found in his desk. As a doctor — particularly one who suffered from recurring bouts of malaria — he knew perfectly well that he needed to keep to a healthy and well-regulated diet, and do whatever he could to lower his stress levels. But that was a laugh, of course. He had no sooner escaped spending five years in the brig than he’d been posted to an Arctic island on a Level-3 mission. Fishing his pill case out of his pocket, he swallowed a couple of Chloriquine tablets, flicked off the desk lamp, and went down to get something to eat.