“It’s an island in the middle of nowhere,” Rebekah said, hanging up. “I don’t know why you ever expected to get any reception.”

“I’m hungry,” Bathsheba said from the backseat.

“We should have eaten in town,” Rebekah said to Charlie. “Now you’ll have to pull over at that roadhouse we passed on the Sound.”

Charlie was about to protest, but he realized that he was hungry, too — it was just in his nature to be contrary — and it was going to be a long drive back. The road between Nome and Port Orlov, if that’s what you could call it, ranged from asphalt to gravel to hardpan — a compacted layer of dirt just beneath the topsoil — and most of it could be bumpy and rutted and washed out even in summer.

And this was sure as hell not summer.

In the snowy wastes around them, it was hard to see much, but mired in the moonlit fields there were old, abandoned gold dredges squatting like mastodons. Occasionally, you could come across one of these that was still in operation — growling like thunder as it devoured rocks and brush and muck in a never-ending quest for the gold that might be mixed up in it. Even more eerily, railroad engines were stranded in the frozen tundra — left to rust on sunken tracks that had lost their purpose the moment the gold ran out. Their smokestacks, red with age, were the tallest things in the treeless fields.

“There it is,” Rebekah said, pointing to the parking-lot lights of the roadhouse — a prefab structure on pylons — perched beside the Nome seawall. The granite wall, erected in the early fifties by the Army Corps of Engineers, was over three thousand feet long and sixty-five feet wide at the base, and it stood above what had once been known as Gold Beach, a place where the prospectors and miners of 1899 had discovered an almost miraculous supply of gold literally lying on the sands, just waiting to be collected.

“You coming in?” Rebekah asked, but they both knew Charlie wouldn’t want to have to climb in and out of the van again. Pulling up onto the gravel, he parked and said, “Bring me a sandwich and get the thermos filled with tea. Peppermint if they’ve got it. And don’t take forever.”

The sisters got out of the car, buried under their long coats, and scurried up the ramp. Since he’d had no luck reaching Harley’s cell phone, he tried calling Eddie’s number, then Russell’s, but they weren’t working, either. What was happening on St. Peter’s Island? Had they found a safe harbor for the Kodiak, and a secluded cave to hide out in? More important, had they started digging and found anything yet? Charlie had high hopes, but not a lot of confidence; he hadn’t exactly dispatched the A-Team and he knew it.

Waves were crashing on the breakwater out beyond the roadhouse. After the gold had been discovered on the beach — in such quantities that 2 million dollars’ worth was gathered in the summer of 1899 alone — steamships from San Francisco and Seattle had carried so many eager prospectors to Nome that a tent city had soon stretched thirty miles along the shore, all the way to Cape Rodney. Charlie had seen pictures of it hanging on the walls of the Nugget Inn in town. Mile after mile of canvas and stretched hides, shacks and lean-tos, all packed with desperate men and women struggling to make their fortunes. He felt the weight of the cross in his pocket and wondered how much had really changed since then? Alaska was still the Wild West in many ways — probably the last of it that was left — where loners and free spirits, people down on their luck or looking to find it in the first place, could come and make a fresh start.

While he waited in the warm car, he kneaded the tops of his dead legs. He couldn’t feel anything below the groin, but he knew that it was a good idea to keep the circulation going and the muscles from atrophying. Everything happened for a reason, that’s what he’d had to keep telling himself every day since the accident, and if this was God’s way of bringing him back into the fold, then so be it.

The sisters, coming out of the roadhouse, with their white faces and wisps of black hair blowing free from the buns at the back of their heads, reminded him of a couple of strutting crows. Bathsheba was carrying the thermos and Rebekah had the sandwich in a paper bag. Salmon salad on whole wheat toast, as it turned out. At least she got that sort of thing right. He ate it while playing a CD of a biblical sermon — sometimes he got ideas for his own broadcasts this way — and then backed the car out of the lot.

They could have spent the night in Nome, but Charlie hated to waste money, and besides, he liked to be back in his own place, with the ramps and everything else he needed to be comfortable. Not to mention the fact that the chances of hearing any news out of nearby St. Pete’s were going to be better there than in distant Nome. This first part of the road was blissfully asphalt, with a white line down the center and shoulders on either side, but he knew the rest of the way back wasn’t going to be that smooth. At least the van was equipped for it, with two spare cans of gas (a necessity when traveling in the wilderness regions of Alaska), plastic headlight covers to ward off the flying gravel, and, in case he collided with anything big, a wire mesh screen in front to protect the radiator and the paint job. If you hit a moose head-on, it could be curtains for more than the moose.

He hadn’t gone twenty miles before he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that Bathsheba had slumped over in the backseat, fast asleep. Rebekah noticed it, too, and in a low voice, said, “So, how much did you get from Voynovich?”

“Nothing.”

“What are you talking about?” She glanced into the backseat again to make sure her sister was out. Some things they kept from her, for fear she could blurt out a piece of news she wasn’t supposed to know.

“I hung on to it,” he said, patting his breast pocket.

Rebekah folded her arms across her breast and, barely containing herself, said, “You want to tell me why?”

“Because he offered me a grand up front.”

Now she really looked puzzled.

“And if it was worth that much to him just to keep me from walking out of the store with it, it must be worth a helluva lot more. If Harley and his idiot friends manage to find any more stuff like it on the island, I’m going to go on down to Tacoma and fence it all myself.”

In a mollified tone, she asked, “Did he at least tell you what it said on the back?”

“Yeah, but it’s just an endearment. Nothing that says Romanov about it.” Or at least so far as he knew. When he got home, and wasn’t online ministering to Vane’s Holy Writ flock, he planned to be doing whatever research he could. Dollars to donuts, Voynovich was already doing exactly the same thing.

He drove on into the night, sipping the tea, and watching as, first, the center white line disappeared, then as the breakdown lane evaporated; the road became a narrow, serpentine trail, wending its way through snowy hills and along frozen streambeds. There were old wooden bridges, reinforced and supported on cement blocks, stretching across frozen gullies, and highway signs warning of wildlife crossings. Moose, bear, elk, caribou, fox, Dall sheep. At the right times of year, if you had a mind to, you could survive off the roadkill alone in these parts.

Rebekah, too, soon fell asleep, her head leaning against her doorjamb, and Charlie tried to stay awake by paying attention to the biblical sermon on the CD. The preacher was an old man called the Right Reverend Abercrombie, and he spoke in a lulling, monotonous tone.

“And when we read, in Exodus 7–12, about the ten plagues that descended upon the Egyptians, what are we to make of them?” the reverend said. “What was God’s purpose?”

To kick Egyptian ass, Charlie thought, and to kick it hard.

“The purpose of the Lord was twofold,” the reverend continued. “Of course he wanted to persuade the Pharaoh to free the Israelites. But he also had a second reason — and that was to show just how strong the God of Israel was in comparison to the gods of Egypt. It was a point he wanted to make not only to the Egyptians, but to the Israelites themselves.”