Winter Palace Read online

  © 1993 by T. Davis Bunn

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

  www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

  Ebook edition created 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owners. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  ISBN 978-1-4412-7089-4

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  All scripture quotations, unless indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version ®. NIV ®. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.© Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

  The “NIV” and “New International Version” trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

  It is important to note that, except as specifically mentioned within the Acknowledgments section, this story is entirely a creation of the author’s imagination. No parallel between any persons, living or dead, is intended.

  “Of all the burdens Russia has had to bear, heaviest and most relentless of all has been the weight of her past.”

  Tibor Szamuely

  “The Russian Tradition”

  “When the sun of publicity shall rise upon Russia, how many injustices will it expose to view! Not only ancient ones, but those which are inacted daily will shock the world.”

  Marquis de Custine

  Visitor to the Russian Nobility

  1839

  “Everything is collapsing.”

  Mikhail Gorbachev

  In an address to parliament,

  August, 1991

  “The situation before and after the February 1917 revolution is absolutely the contemporary situation in Russia today. There is still hatred for authorities, the same horror of hunger, the same disorder, and so on. It is the same situation.”

  Edvard Radzinsky

  Russian Political Historian

  In an interview with the Washington Post, July, 1992

  “The fullness of God’s salvation cannot be confined to one or several historical patterns, to one or several Christological titles, to one or several doctrines; it can only be told in a varied multitude of stories which tell us what experiences to expect when trusting in Jesus Christ.”

  Edward Schweizer

  “How good and pleasant it is

  When brothers live together in unity . . .

  For there the Lord bestows his blessing,

  Even life forevermore.”

  Psalm 133:1, 3

  This book is dedicated to

  W. Lee Bunn

  Beloved brother.

  Trusted friend.

  And to his wonderful wife,

  Pamela

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Epigraphs

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Other Books by Author

  Prologue

  The loudest sound on the dark Saint Petersburg street was that of Peace Corps volunteer Leslie Ann Stevens’ shoes scrunching along the grit-encrusted cobblestones.

  There was no movement around her, none at all. Leslie Ann resisted the urge to look upward, to search the blank and darkened windows and see if anyone was spying on her. The sensation of being watched remained with her always, downfall of Communism or not.

  Beside her, rusting metal latticework lined the Fontanka Canal. Once this neighborhood had been a most prestigious address, boasting winter homes for nobility from the length and breadth of Russia. Now the royal residences were split into rabbit warrens of crumbling, overcrowded apartments, and the canal itself was nothing more than a scummy pool.

  As she approached the end of Fontanka, she thought she heard a murmur of voices and shifting footfalls. She stopped, her heart in her throat, and debated going back. Behind her was the safety of the relatively well-lit Nevsky Prospekt. But the other way back to her apartment meant walking almost a mile farther, and she was tired.

  Ahead were the former royal stables of the czars. Once it had been a palace in itself, with quarters both for officers and members of the royal household. Now it sheltered the city’s fleet of garbage trucks. Leslie Ann searched the blackness ahead of her, saw nothing, and heard no other sound. She decided to continue on her way.

  * * *

  When President Kennedy had established the Peace Corps in the sixties, the organization was intended to assist emerging nations and to contradict the Soviets’ accusation that Americans were only interested in profit, in exploitation. Volunteers had been ordered to go forth and proclaim the goodness of both the nation and the people.

  In Leslie Ann’s view, the survivors of Russia’s Communist era were now accepting that message a little too wholeheartedly.

  Her host family tended to take everything she said as coming from the mouth of God. As best she could, Leslie Ann tried to explain that not everything in America was perfect. Not everyone drove a brand-new car. Not everyone had a swimming pool in his backyard. Not all citizens could afford to eat prime beef three times a day.

  In her halting Russian, Leslie Ann also tried to introduce the family members to the deeply held faith that had brought her to Russia in the first place. She shared her beliefs, led them through a prayer, and gave them a Cyrillic Bible. All the while, though, she had a nagging impression that they listened because of where she came from, not because of the message she was trying to share.

  With every passing day, Leslie Ann also felt a chasm growing between her and the other volunteers assigned to the Saint Petersburg area. Some days, in fact, it seemed the only things she had in common with her companions were her age and her training as an English teacher.

  As far as she could tell, none of the others who had signed up for two years’ duty in Russia shared her faith. She guessed that believers joined Christian evangelical organizations instead of the Peace Corps. But Leslie Ann did not see herself as an evangelist, at least, not in the normal sense. She was
an English teacher who loved God and who intended to carry her faith with her all her life, in everything she did. Yet while the Peace Corps allowed her to practice her chosen profession in an exciting foreign land, it also left her totally isolated in beliefs and motives from most of her companions.

  The Peace Corps central bulletin board pretty much summed it all up. About a third of the space was given over to helpful hints on how to survive in the crumbling Soviet empire: which street vendor sold fairly fresh meat, who had a new stock of bottled water, where a trustworthy and affordable Russian language teacher might be found, who was stocking toilet paper. The remainder contained offers of parties, overnight love affairs, companions for cross-country wanderings.

  Still, its irreverent humor and homegrown cynicism was one of her few connections to Stateside. Like all the other volunteers, Leslie Ann checked it daily. And just a few weeks earlier, the bulletin board had produced solid gold.

  That morning she had come into the office to find a new notice pinned in the bottom left-hand corner, announcing church services in English. Although the card had been up less than twenty-four hours, already its borders had been covered with irreverent scrawls.

  The pastor turned out to be an American Baptist missionary, the church a series of interconnected rooms in a filthy back-street building. For Leslie Ann Stevens, entering the newly whitewashed makeshift chapel had been like coming home. And in the space of three weeks, the church had become Leslie Ann’s island refuge in a sea of bewildering confusion.

  Tonight she had broken one of her own safety rules and stayed at the church until after dark. But it was hard to leave the laughter and the warmth and return to the smelly apartment house where her host family—husband and wife, three children, the wife’s mother, and the husband’s unmarried sister—lived crowded together into three small rooms. The fourth room had been vacated for Leslie Ann in return for the incredible sum of twenty American dollars per month, more than a professional engineer earned in three.

  Saturday evenings, a trip to the floor’s only communal bathroom meant struggling down a fetid hallway past clusters of teenagers playing mournful guitars and smoking foul-smelling Russian cigarettes, ignoring the slurred curses of men passing around bottles of vodka, flinching at the screams and shouts that punched through thin apartment walls. For Leslie Ann Stevens, Saturday evenings were the most difficult times for her to recall why she had volunteered for a Saint Petersburg assignment in the first place.

  Her feeble flashlight beam played across the rubble-strewn street, and she walked as fast as the darkness and the irregular pavement allowed. She arrived at the end of the Fontanka, turned beside the silent royal stables, and faltered.

  Up ahead loomed one of the city’s numerous winter palaces, built by royal families who controlled hundreds of square miles of land and thousands of serfs. Now its hulking presence was battered by seventy years of Communism. At the front gate, several men hustled to unload a truck. Over the broad central gates, a single flickering bulb in a metal cage swung from a rusty iron rod. The dim light transformed the men into a series of swiftly moving, softly cursing shadows.

  To her utter terror, all movement ceased as she came into view. Leslie Ann turned and started to flee back to the church. Then two of the shadows detached themselves and hustled toward her.

  She did not even have time to scream.

  Chapter 1

  Jeffrey Sinclair sat on the hard journey-bench, bracing himself against the furious jouncing and squealing turns by gripping the leather overhead strap with one hand and the cold metal edge of Alexander’s stretcher with the other. Their siren’s howl accompanied the racing engine as they sped through a London summer evening. The medic bent over Alexander’s motionless form while flashing lights painted his tense features with ghostly hues of the beyond.

  An entirely alien universe flashed by outside the ambulance. Windows tainted by the multitude of tragedies transported within showed glimpses of a hard, cold cityscape. Jeffrey craned and searched for some sign that the hospital was drawing near and found nothing familiar, comfortable, hopeful. Beyond panic, he wondered at this strange world where it took hours and hours and hours in a screaming, jouncing ambulance to arrive at the emergency room.

  Several times the medic raised up from his thrusting and prodding and listening to Alexander’s chest to shout in some strange tongue at the two drivers up front. The sounds were then repeated into a microphone and repeated back to them through a metallic speaker. Jeffrey understood none of it.

  All he could see was the needle in Alexander’s bared arm and the closed eyes and the electric voltage exploding his gray-skinned body up in a pantomime of painful exertion.

  Jeffrey felt bleak helplessness wrap itself around his own heart and squeeze. And squeeze. And squeeze.

  He gripped the end of the stretcher with both hands, leaned over as far as he could, and screamed out the plea, “BREATHE!”

  No one even looked his way. His action was perfectly in order with the controlled pandemonium holding them all.

  The hospital appeared, announced by a dual shout from both people in front. The driver misjudged the emergency room entrance and hit the curb so hard that Jeffrey’s head slammed into the unpadded metal roof. Stars exploded in his head.

  The ambulance stopped and the back doors slammed open. Impatient hands threw him out and aside with practiced motions. Through blurred eyes Jeffrey saw the stretcher slapped onto a gurney and wheeled away. He reached forward, but his rubber legs would not follow. They could not.

  He did not know how long he stood there before the perky little nurse came out to ask, “Did you come with the gentleman with the heart?”

  He nodded, then groaned aloud as the movement sent a painful lance up his neck. He gripped the ambulance’s open door for support.

  “Don’t worry yourself so,” the nurse said, misunderstanding his reaction. “You’ll only make matters worse, going on like this. The gentleman needs your strength just now.”

  His eyes did not seem to want to focus. He strained, saw the young woman growing steadily more impatient, then his eyes watered over.

  “You’ll have to stop that, and right smart,” she snapped, and raised her clipboard. “I need some information on the gentleman in there. What’s his name, now?”

  Jeffrey opened his mouth, tried to reply, wanted to say, that man is my boss and my relative and my best friend. But the blanket of blackness rose up and covered him.

  ****

  Jeffrey awoke to a blinding white light.

  “Don’t move, please,” a professionally cold female voice ordered. “Can you tell me your full name?”

  “Jeffrey Allen Sinclair,” he replied weakly.

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “At the hospital. Is my friend—”

  “Just a moment. Look to your left, no, move only your eyes. Now to your right. Up, please. Can you flex your fingers? Fine. Now your toes.”

  “How is Alexander,” he demanded, more strongly this time.

  “The gentleman you arrived with? Cardiac arrest? He appears to have stabilized.” Fingers probed his head, the back of his skull, his neck, worked down his spine. “Any discomfort?”

  “No,” he lied. “How long was I—”

  “A few moments only.” She then spoke to someone Jeffrey could not see. “No immediately visible damage to skull or vertebrae. Possible mild concussion, probable muscle contusion in the cervical area. Have a complete set of spinal x-rays done, then fit him with a neck brace.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “You’ll be staying with us for a bit, I’m afraid.” A tired woman’s face came into view and gave him a brief smile. “We’ll need to keep you under observation for a day or so. Anyone who passes out at our front door can’t be allowed to get off easy.”

  The longer he was awake, the more his head and neck throbbed. Even blinking his eyes brought discomfort. “All right.”

  “Popped your head on th
e ambulance roof, did you?”

  “Yes.”

  She was not surprised. “The casualty department’s entranceway is too narrow by half. You’re the third one this year who’s knocked his noggin. First time we’ve had one delivered on a gurney, though. You must have caught it right smart. Well, not to worry. Anyone we should contact for you?”

  Jeffrey gave the number for Katya, his soon-to-be wife. “Are you sure my friend—”

  “He’s as well as can be expected, given the circumstances. Now, off to x-ray with you.” The weary smile reappeared briefly. “And, Nurse, best give our patient something for the pain he claims he doesn’t feel.”

  Chapter 2

  Цáрю небéсний, утiши́телю, Дýше ícтини, що всю́ди єси́ i все наповня́єш, скáрбе дiбр i життя́ подáтелю, прийди́ i всели́ся в нас, i очи́сти нас вiд уся́коï сквéрни, i спаси́, благи́й, дýшi нáшi.

  “Heavenly King, Advocate, Spirit of Truth, who are everywhere present and fill all things, Treasury of Blessings, Bestower of Life, come and dwell within us; cleanse us of all that defiles us and, O Good One, save our souls.”

  The newly reopened Ukrainian Rites Catholic Church of St. Stanislav sat on the outskirts of Lvov, the second largest city in the newly reinstituted nation of the Ukraine. When the congregation had intoned their amen, the priest continued with the liturgy from John of Chrysostom, reciting the words as they had been spoken in more than a hundred tongues for over fifteen hundred years: “Blessed be our God, always, now and for ever and ever. May the Lord God remember you in His kingdom always, now and for ever and ever. Lord, you will open my lips, and my mouth shall declare your praise.”

  Ivona Aristonova stood with the others waiting before the bishop’s confessional and droned another amen, her thoughts elsewhere. She did not much care for confession to the bishop, and was grateful that the man was normally too busy to perform this duty himself. Yet today he was here, and as his private secretary she was obliged to stand and wait; to do otherwise would have set a hawk among the pigeons.