Her scar stung as if it were a raw incision. Her memories cut just as raw. She recalled every moment of the operation Aleksandr Rubashov had performed on her at Greywolf. A hundred thousand precise moments of agony. “We must be near,” Ebner whispered. “We are,” she said. “I sense him.” Now, after four years of her thinking him dead, could the good doctor actually be hiding here? In this . . . tomb? The servers in the Copernicus Room had cross-referenced thousands of fragments of data about the Rubashov brothers, reducing them to a list of thirty-eight possible origins for the encrypted message meant for Boris. The moment one of those fragments—the name Vorkuta—had been identified as the mine where the Rubashovs’ father had died, Galina had been certain. No doubt her failed episode in Venice had given the same information to the Kaplans, if they knew enough to decipher whatever code Aleksandr had used. “How ironic life and death are,” Ebner mused. “A man we believed to be dead sends a message to a man he believes to be alive.
