The Romanov Conspiracy Read online

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  FOR KIM AND LUKE,

  AND ALL THE KILGORES AND REDMONDS

  WITH LOVE

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Part One

  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

  Part Two

  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

  Part Three

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Part Four

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Part Five

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Part Six

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Part Seven

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Acknowledgments

  About Glenn Meade

  Copyright

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  All stories find their own lover.

  I fell in love with this one when I visited the village of Collon, on Ireland’s northeast coast, in the distant shadows of the majestic Mountains of Mourne.

  It was in the burial grounds of the village’s Presbyterian church, dating from 1813, with its beautiful stained glass windows, where I found the forgotten graves of a group of Russians who fled to Ireland during their homeland’s October Revolution.

  And it was here that I heard the first echoes of a remarkable plot to rescue the Russian tsar and his family in 1918, an event still shrouded in some secrecy. This was one of the most difficult stories I’ve researched, for it proved to be a deeply rooted enigma with many tendrils.

  What began in St. Petersburg in the fevered days of the Russian Revolution ended in a cluster of graves in an Irish country churchyard. In between are long-lost clues to an intricate conspiracy, one that may well answer the twentieth century’s most enduring mystery.

  Many of the characters named in this book existed, as did the shadowy order sometimes known as the Brotherhood of St. John of Tobolsk.

  Much of what you are about to read is true.

  The rest, but a small part, is fiction, part of the mosaic of storytelling that a writer must employ to bring life to his tale.

  But as to which part is truth and which small part is fiction, I will leave that for you to decide.

  My dear Maria, history may never reveal what truly happened to all of the Tsar’s children. The answer is so secret that for now I cannot speak of it.

  —LENIN, IN REPLY TO HIS SISTER IN JULY 1918, AFTER SHE INFORMED HIM THAT SHE HAD HEARD RUMORS OF THE ROMANOVS’ EXECUTIONS

  Anna Anderson is part of a much deeper mystery than any of us can comprehend, for she left behind so many unanswered questions. One of the most startling questions is this: how could a supposedly simple, deranged peasant woman manage to confound the world’s brightest and most respected legal and investigative minds for over six decades? In this regard, I’m reminded of a saying that I once heard: “There are always three sides to every story. There’s your side, there’s my side. And then there’s the truth.”(tinku)

  —GREGORY ANTONOV, ON ANNA ANDERSON, ONCE REPUTED TO BE THE TSAR’S YOUNGEST DAUGHTER, ANASTASIA, WHO ALLEGEDLY SURVIVED EXECUTION AT THE HANDS OF HER CAPTORS

  1

  EKATERINBURG, RUSSIA

  I believe that the greatest secrets lie buried and only the dead speak the truth.

  And in a way that was how I came to be in the woods that morning when we found the bodies. It was raining in the City of Dead Souls, a heavy downpour that drenched the summer streets.

  “Traffic isn’t bad this morning. Thirty minutes, no more,” my Russian driver said as our Land Rover skirted imposing granite buildings, the remnants of a grander civilization long since past.

  I sat back and watched the old imperial city flash by. Named in honor of Catherine the Great in 1723, Ekaterinburg lies in the shadow of the Ural Mountains. The landscape resembles the rugged beauty of Alaska—thick woods filled with wolves and bears, deep ravines and snowcapped peaks. Rich ore mines contain the greatest treasures in the world: platinum and emeralds, gold and diamonds honeycomb the soaring mountain ranges that lie beyond this sprawling Siberian city.

  As my Land Rover left Ekaterinburg and drove past heavily forested birch slopes, I snapped open the leather briefcase on my lap and plucked out a file. The label on the blue cover said:

  PRELIMINARY FINDINGS: EKATERINBURG FORENSIC ARCHAEOLOGICAL DIG DR. LAURA PAVLOV, FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST, JOINT DIRECTOR

  I reviewed the thick clutch of pages, the results of my work for the last three months. This was my first visit to Ekaterinburg and our team came from all over: forensic archaeologists, scientists, and students fro
m America, Britain, Germany, and Italy; and of course our host, Russia. The brief of our cooperative venture was simple—to dig in the forests for evidence of mass executions during the Russian Revolution’s Red Terror.

  Many thousands perished, not least the Romanovs, the Russian royal family—the tsar and tsarina, and their four pretty daughters and their youngest son, thirteen-year-old Alexei—shot and bayoneted to death, their skulls smashed by rifle butts and their corpses doused in sulfuric acid.

  The Ipatiev House, where they were held captive, was known locally as the House of Dead Souls. But the Reds executed so many victims, their bodies dumped in mine shafts and unmarked graves in the vast forests outside Ekaterinburg, that the locals coined their city a new name: the City of Dead Souls.

  What I hadn’t counted on was the heat and the mosquitoes. Siberia is an icebox in winter but during its brief, hot summer the temperatures can soar. The forest comes alive with flies and mosquitoes. The heat makes the trees drip with sweet-smelling resin and the fragrant perfume drenches the air.

  The rain stopped as my driver turned onto a narrow, worn track, rutted and muddy from the movement of heavy vehicles. The Land Rover headed toward a collection of temporary huts and heavy canvas walk-in tents erected in the middle of a clearing in a birch forest. A painted wooden sign said in English and Russian:

  THIS SITE IS

  PRIVATE PROPERTY

  NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY

  Something else I hadn’t counted on that summer’s morning as we pulled up beside one of the tents. I came to these resin-scented woods to exhume the ghosts of the past. Yet absolutely nothing could have prepared me for the bizarre secret that I was to stumble upon when the frozen Siberian earth offered up its dead.

  For with the dead came truth.

  And with truth came the first whispers of the most incredible story I have ever heard.

  I stepped out of the car and tore open the entrance flap into my tent. I went to sit behind my work desk as my dig supervisor, Roy Moran, came in. “Hey, baby.”

  Memphis Roy we call him, and he always called me baby. In Memphis, everyone calls everyone else baby. The fact that a woman was in charge of the dig didn’t make any difference—if I’d been a man, Roy still would have called me baby.

  Roy’s a big, bony, no-nonsense guy and one of the best in the business. I tore open my briefcase, ready to attack some paperwork, and said, “I thought you were supposed to be digging shaft number seven this morning.”

  “Baby, I sure am.” Roy stood there, hands on his hips and a little out of breath. The look on his face was a cross between excitement and puzzlement. He raised the grimy Tigers baseball cap he always wore, wiped sweat from his forehead, and grinned. “Turns out seven may just be our lucky number.”

  “Spit it out.”

  “We went down as far as we could and hit a peaty layer of near permafrost. But we’ve found something, Laura. I mean seriously found something.”

  I threw down my pen. Roy wasn’t a man to get wound up about anything. But at that moment he seemed energized, delight bubbling from him like an excited twelve-year-old. “Tell me,” I said.

  “Hey, baby, you really need to see this for yourself.”

  I followed Roy through the scented woods. He walked slowly, his muscled legs picking a way through a path of rain-drenched ferns and old fallen trees. He said, “The shaft mouth goes down about sixty feet. It’s pretty deep.”

  The entire clearing was crammed with mining equipment, wooden staves, and scaffolding, and dotted with a bunch of trucks and SUVs. “Why do I feel an and coming on? You still haven’t told me what you’ve found.”

  Roy grinned, not changing his pace, his excitement infectious. Beads of sweat glistened on his forehead and his eyes sparked. “Baby, it’s a woman. We believe there may be another body down there, too, but it’s too deeply buried to see what we’ve got. Who knows? There might even be more.”

  I felt excited as we moved between clumps of silver birch trees and halted at the mouth of a mine shaft. I smelled the rich, earthy brown scent of peat. The shaft was a hole in the ground, about eight feet square, the sides buttressed with thick wooden planks. One of several mines we explored during the dig, looking for any evidence we could find of artifacts from the Romanov era, when much of this region was a killing ground.

  On the night of July 16–17, 1918, in Ekaterinburg, the Romanov family—then the world’s wealthiest royals—vanished. Eyewitness accounts suggested that the entire family was massacred.

  But for whatever reasons the Bolsheviks chose not to confirm their deaths and rumors persisted that some if not all of the family had escaped execution. There were even suggestions of secret plots to rescue them from their imprisonment in Ekaterinburg. Reports flourished for years that one or more of the tsar’s daughters and their brother, Alexei, had escaped death.

  The family had sewn precious stones—diamonds and other gems—into their underclothing, in the hope that such valuables would come in useful in the event of their escape. It was believed those same precious stones had impeded or prolonged their deaths.

  Such stories had held me spellbound in childhood. No matter what the truth, like so many others fascinated by the mystery I wanted to believe Anastasia and Alexei escaped.

  The mystery deepened and decades later on separate occasions, digs outside the city uncovered the remains of six adults. Among them was believed to be the tsar, his wife, and two of his daughters. DNA tests affirmed the likely identities by a possible blood connection to the British royal family.

  But the discovery was shrouded in some controversy. Many experts believed the bones belonged to the Romanovs. But just as many didn’t, citing among other reasons the fact that countless royal relatives were executed in the region and that the bones could have been theirs.

  A later dig in a forest pit west of Ekaterinburg discovered two more sets of human remains. DNA tests suggested that they belonged to the tsar’s missing daughter and son, Anastasia and Alexei. But one of the sets of remains was never completely proven to be those of Anastasia—a probability existed, but it couldn’t go beyond all doubt. And so the tests were branded as being inconclusive by some scientists and hardened doubters within the Russian Orthodox Church. It left a nagging feeling that the mystery persisted, that the puzzle was somehow still unsolved.

  Above the shaft mouth our engineers had rigged up a motorized winch with an old harness chair, driven by an electric generator. The scent of peat wafted up. I said to Roy, “You mean bones, or a complete skeleton?”

  “I mean a woman. She’s complete, mummified in the permafrost, and she’s perfectly preserved by the bog peat and the cold.”

  I felt a raw tingle of anticipation down my spine. I leaned my hand against one of the silver birch trees, the bark bleached white by the sun. “How old?”

  “At an educated guess and from the way she’s dressed, we’re talking the Romanov period.”

  Roy went down first. He descended with a wave of his hand as the motorized harness whirred him down into the dark pit. A few minutes later the harness returned empty. I climbed aboard and strapped myself in.

  For the last month working at Ekaterinburg we’d unearthed a bunch of material: rust-covered Mosin-Nagant rifles, green-corroded copper coins, spent ammunition cases, a pair of eyeglasses, even several caches of silver and gold tsarist ingots, along with personal effects and jewelry. So many wealthy families with tsarist connections had fled here during the revolution, hoping to escape the bloodshed, but the Reds caught up with them.

  Not all the victims were wealthy. My own past lies buried in these woods. Long before I saw Ekaterinburg I knew about this city by the snaking, broad banks of the Iset River, where my grandmother Mariana lived as a young girl. She was eleven when the October Revolution’s Red Guards invaded her city. Her family were hardy mujiks—tough Russian peasants—who worked backbreaking hours digging ore from the icy permafrost, the rock-hard peaty Siberian earth that remains frozen even
in summer.

  Three of Mariana’s brothers were executed in the forests beyond the town, including her beloved Pieter, barely fifteen. Their crime? They protested when the Reds seized their small mining company, a ragged enterprise that barely fed their family of twelve. Lenin didn’t believe in personal ownership.

  Everything a man possessed now belonged to the Soviets. If anyone protested, they were imprisoned. If they protested still, they were shot, all part of the brutal Red Terror that swept Russia once Lenin seized power.

  Fleeing for their lives, my grandmother’s family traveled across the frozen landscape one malignant winter and boarded a rusty steamship in St. Petersburg, bound for America. The only memories they carried in their cloth bags were some faded sepia family photographs and postcards of Imperial Ekaterinburg, the brittle pages yellow with age and smelling of wood smoke. I still recall that peaty wood smell when as a child I would leaf through the family album, filled with the faded images from another world.

  Once, as a child, among the album pages I found an old black-and-white photograph and next to it a crushed handful of dried flowers, kept in an ancient fold of greaseproof paper, the edges stained with age.

  “What’s this, Nana?” The photograph showed an imposing railway station, decorated with fluttering Imperial Russian flags. On the steps of the station stood the unmistakable image of the Romanovs: the tsar and his wife waving to a crowd, next to them their son and daughters. I recognized Anastasia wearing a white dress and shoes and a simple bow in her hair, a bouquet of flowers clutched in her hands.

  “That was the day in 1913 when the tsar and his family came to visit Ekaterinburg. Before the war, before everything turned bad in Russia.” Her blue eyes watered, as if she recalled some long-cherished memory.

  “And the flowers?”

  “Of all the royal family, Anastasia was the most rebellious, the most sparkling. That day on the station steps she threw her bouquet to the children in the crowd. You can imagine there was such a rush, I was almost killed, but I managed to grab some of the bouquet. I’ve always cherished it.”

  I looked down at the photographic images and gingerly used the tip of my fingers to barely touch the fragile handful of dried flowers. “You saw Anastasia? She actually threw these flowers?”