The Romanov Legacy Read Online Free Page A

someone who claimed he has access to the lost
tsarist funds in the Bank of England.”
    Vadim cut him short.  “I’m not interested in ancient
history.  Tell Valery I have better things to do.”
    “Are you familiar with the Rumkowski file?”
    Vadim shivered.  No one had mentioned that file aloud
in years, not since Yeltsin.  He reached to the back of his desk phone and
toggled off the automatic recording switch.  “What about it?”
    “Do you remember what it said?”
    “Of course.”
    “Whoever wrote this letter claims to have the password.”
    Vadim frowned.  “But no civilian knows there is a password.  The contents of that file were never declassified.  The
only people who saw it are in the Kremlin or in the ground.  As a matter
of fact, Mikhail Vasilievich, how do you know about it?”
    “My father was one of the men Rumkowski used to infiltrate
the bank.”
    “Jesus Christ.”  Vadim scribbled a note to have
Kadyrov’s file brought up from the archives.  “What else does it
say?” 
    “The writer claims two of the four Grand Duchesses wrote
letters to people on the outside during their captivity, each with the password
inside.  Just before the family was murdered in 1918, those letters were
smuggled out of the Ipatiev House—by this person’s great-grandfather.”  
    “Rumkowski didn’t say anything about the password leaving
that house.”
    “No,” the ambassador said pointedly.  “He didn’t.”
    Alarm bells began ringing in Vadim’s head.  Something
Yeltsin had said to him once, when he asked why Yeltsin chose to raze the
mansion in which the Romanovs were massacred.  “For all we knew,” Yeltsin
said, “the password was still in there.  We had to take it apart piece by
piece.  It was the only way to know for sure.”  That had been in
1977, when Yeltsin was first secretary of the Sverdlovsk District Central
Committee and Vadim a junior secretary in the Moscow City Party
Committee.  No one had ever said anything about looking for the password outside the Ipatiev house—until now. 
    Still, this lunatic letter writer was probably a fortune
hunter, someone who read too many thrillers.  “What does he want?”
    “Asylum, citizenship, and immunity.”
    Vadim snorted.  “Is that all?”
    “He also says that if we don’t give him what he wants, he’ll
sell the password to the highest bidder.”
    “Does he really think someone will pay more than the tsar
left behind?”
    “Think about it, Vadim.  Maybe there’s more than money
in the account.  If he knows about the password, what else might he
know?”  
    It was a possibility Vadim hadn’t even considered. 
“Why does this fool believe we’ll do as he asks?”
    “Because he’s already shared his information with someone
else, a professor named Elizabeth Brandon.  I had to look her up, but it
seems she’s quite well known in university circles.  Her new book is about
Tsar Nicholas II.  It’s a revisionist history, of all things.”
    “Jesus Christ, I hate Americans.”
    “The letter writer says he’ll contact me again within 24
hours.  If he doesn’t like my answer, he’ll offer the password to the
Chechens and then the Georgians.”
    “He’s bluffing.  He’d never give it up.”
    “Can we be sure of that?  If he gets enough money from
the fanatics in Grozny, he might be better off letting the rest of us fight
over the tsar’s inheritance while he retires on a beach in the South
Pacific.”  Kadyrov breathed out a deep, troubled sigh.  “Vadim, I
know this is a bad situation.  We don’t know what’s in the account or if
it even exists.  But Rumkowski believed it.  My father did, too.”
    “And you?” Vadim asked.  “What do you believe?”
    “My father wouldn’t have wasted his life looking for
something that doesn’t exist.”
    Vadim tried to remember the last time he’d read Rumkowski’s
file.  The damn thing had six levels of classification on it and he’d only
ever