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Inspector Pekkala felt a drop of sweat moving slowly down his neck. It meandered along the trench of his spine, pausing at the knot of each vertebra before continuing its journey. The passage of that droplet filled Pekkala’s mind, until he could focus on nothing else. He shrank away from it inside his coat, as if, by some contortion of his body, he might separate his flesh from any contact with his clothes.

Pekkala was a tall, broad-shouldered man. His dark hair, greying at the temples, was swept straight back upon his head. His eyes, a deep, shadowy brown, contained a peculiar silveriness, which people only noticed when he was looking straight at them.

The Great Hall of St George, in which he stood, was filled to capacity. Lining the walls, some in chairs but most of them having remained on their feet, was the entire Russian court, decked out in their formal tailcoats, starched white collars gripping at their throats. Among them waited representatives from all branches of the Russian military. Like exotic birds among the dreary black of politicians stood hussars in scarab-beetle-green tunics, generals of Artillery in strawberry red and men of the elite Chevalier Guard in close-fitting dove-grey uniforms. Present were admirals of the Tsar’s Navy, their midnight-blue tunics bisected by the white sashes of the Pacific Fleet at Vladivostok, the pale blue sashes of the Baltic Fleet and the red sashes of the Black Sea Flotilla. The silver-buttoned jackets worn by members of the State Police, known as the Gendarmerie, winked in bolts of sunlight which flooded into the room through the tall window frames, causing the bone-white walls to shimmer like the inside of an abalone shell. And there were a few, like Pekkala himself, who wore no uniform but that which they had chosen for themselves in carrying out their secret duties for the Tsar. These were the men of the Okhrana. They lived in the shadows of the Romanov Empire, hunting its enemies one by one through back alleys where the bomb builders, the contract killers, the anarchists, the poison makers and the forgers plied their trade. For the most deadly of these, the Tsar would always call upon Pekkala. No one else had earned such sacred trust.

Ever since the Tsar had picked him out of a group of military cadets, newly arrived from Finland, which at that time was still a colony of Russia, Pekkala had been trained for one task only – to be the Tsar’s personal investigator, answerable to Nicholas II alone, and with no rank or badge of service other than a gold medallion, as wide across as the length of his little finger. Across the centre was a stripe of white enamel inlay, which began at a point, widened until it took up half the disc and narrowed again to a point on the other side. Embedded in the middle of the white enamel was a large, round emerald. Together, the white enamel, the gold and the emerald formed the unmistakable shape of an eye. And it was from this that Pekkala had earned the name by which he was now known across the length and breadth of Russia – the Emerald Eye.

Pekkala shifted uncomfortably in his heavy boots, rocking slowly back and forth from his heels to the balls of his feet. The leather creaked with a sound that reminded him of a wooden boat rolling with the tide. Although the windows had been opened, there was no breeze but that which slithered from the rooftops of St Petersburg, heated on the snake-like scales of slate until it felt like the breath of an oven. Inside hung rows of golden chandeliers, each one of which could burn more than a hundred candles simultaneously. At winter gatherings, these chandeliers would fill the hall with soft light and the soothing smell of beeswax. But now they were extinguished and their presence seemed more menacing, suspended above the bowed and unprotected heads as if they were the blades of guillotines.

Nobody spoke. The only sound came from the clearing of parched throats and the involuntary sighs of those who wondered how long they could last without fainting in a heap upon the polished marble floor.

At the far end of the hall, on a platform raised waist high above the crowd and reached by a series of long, shallow and difficult-to-negotiate steps, knelt the Tsar. He wore a white military tunic and dark trousers tucked into knee-length boots.

Normally, he would have been facing the gathered assembly of dignitaries, seated on a red-and-gold throne, which was sheltered from above by a red velvet canopy, trimmed with yellow brocade and embroidered in gold bullion thread with the double-headed eagle of the Romanovs. On this occasion, however, the throne had been put to one side, making way for a wooden easel as tall as a man and covered with several layers of gold paint, on which rested a small, but vividly painted icon known simply as
The Shepherd
.

The painting showed a man in a white robe, standing beside a large stone. Leaning up against the stone was a stylised version of a shepherd’s crook. The man stood at the edge of a lake, on which there were many small islands, all of them crowded with sheep.

Set against the hall’s bewildering array of pillars, and the thousands of embellishments growing like moss from every corner, the icon appeared almost too crude to have deserved such a place of honour in the room. Only those who knew its history could understand the reason why the Tsar of all the Russias knelt before it.

The icon had been painted by an unknown artist in Constantinople, sometime in the eleventh century. From there, it had been carried by Crusaders to the city of Kazan, where it was placed for safekeeping in a monastery. In the year 1209, Kazan was overrun by the Tartars, who held it for the next 350 years. It was during this time that
The Shepherd
disappeared and, for generations afterwards, was presumed to have been destroyed. In 1579, as a fire raged across the city, many of Kazan’s inhabitants were forced to flee into the surrounding countryside. According to legend, a boy named Nestor, whose family had joined this flood of refugees, received a vision. Jesus appeared before him, wearing the robe of a shepherd, and ordered the boy to return to the house they had recently abandoned. There, the vision told him, something of great value had been hidden. He appealed to his parents, who refused to help, knowing that by now their home had been reduced to ashes. The next night, the vision appeared again. Once more Nestor begged his parents to return and for a second time they refused. When the vision appeared a third time, the parents finally relented. They retraced their steps to the smouldering remains of what had been their house, where, beneath the charred floorboards of his room, Nestor discovered the icon, wrapped in oilcloth and undamaged by the flames.

The following year, the family entrusted
The Shepherd
to Tsar Ivan IV, known as ‘Ivan the Terrible’, who promised that he, and those who came after him, would keep it safe for all eternity. From then on, the icon was established as the spiritual guardian of the Tsars. Jealously guarded by generations of rulers, it was eventually brought to a secret chamber in the Church of the Resurrection, private chapel of the Tsars on their summer estate at Tsarskoye Selo, just outside St Petersburg. Only in moments of supreme importance was
The Shepherd
brought out from its hiding place and shown to the people of Russia as proof of God’s blessing upon the Tsar and his safeguarding of the country.

Now the Tsar rose slowly to his feet. His face was flushed and, for the first time, the others who waited in the hall could see that he too was suffering in this oppressive August heat.

Unsteadily, he walked down the steps to the floor of the hall, where he was joined by his wife of twenty years, the Tsarina Alexandra, formerly the Grand Duchess of the German State of Hesse, against whose native country Russia was about to declare war. She wore a floor-length dress made of a wispy, off-white fabric, with a white ruffled shirt that covered her entire neck. Her wide-brimmed hat was decorated at the front with a spray of feathers and she carried a white parasol in her right hand. For a moment, their hands touched, his right against her left, and then the Tsar reached into the pocket of his tunic and withdrew a neatly folded sheet of paper.

The silence in the room grew more intense. The crowd watched, leaning forward so as not to miss a word of what was spoken. Even the faint, persistent rhythm of their breathing had been hushed.

The paper trembled in the Tsar’s hand as he began to read.

There was no mystery to what he had to say. Those who had filed into the hall two hours before to await the arrival of the Romanovs could have guessed, some of them syllable for syllable, the exact words the Tsar would use to unleash the Russian war machine upon Germany and the crumbling Habsburg Empire.

Barely a month before, on 28 June, a sickly-looking, narrow-shouldered man named Gavrilo Princip had stepped up on to the running board of a Model 1911 Gräf & Stift Double Phaeton saloon transporting the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and fired a bullet into his neck, severing the jugular vein, before putting another bullet into his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. In the last seconds of his life, Ferdinand turned to her and, with blood pouring from his mouth on to his powder-blue tunic, begged her not to die. But it was already too late for the Duchess, and the Archduke himself perished before he reached the hospital.

Princip had been part of a small group of anarchists in Serbia who called themselves the Black Hand and had sworn to strike at the Habsburgs on behalf of their Bosnian brothers, whose country had long ago been swallowed up by Austro-Hungarians. They chose, as the date of their attack, the anniversary of Bosnia’s inclusion in the Empire and, as their target, the man who had been sent there to commemorate the day.

Armed with hand grenades and Browning automatic pistols supplied to them by a Serbian Intelligence officer, Dragutin Dimitrijević, who went by the code name ‘Apis’, members of the Black Hand stationed themselves along the route that had been planned for the Archduke’s tour of Sarajevo.

As the Archduke’s motorcade made its way across the city, one of the assassins, a man named Nedeljko Čabrinović, threw a hand grenade under the car. The grenade had a ten-second fuse and, by the time it exploded, the Archduke’s saloon had already passed by. The bomb detonated beneath a car which was travelling behind the Archduke, injuring several of his retinue and a number of nearby civilians.

Čabrinović ran for his life, chased by police and outraged members of the public. Unable to outpace his pursuers, he swallowed a vial of poison and jumped off a bridge into the Miljacka River. The poison failed to work. Čabrinović was hauled out of the water, which was less than a foot deep at that time of year, and nearly beaten to death by the crowd.

Although he was advised against it, the Archduke decided to continue his tour of the city, during which time his motorcade passed by several other members of the band who had sworn to kill him. But confronted by the physical presence of a man and a woman who had, until that moment, been only symbols to them, the assassins hesitated, one after the other, and the moment for action was lost.

An hour later, by which time he had covered most of his planned tour, the Archduke ordered his chauffeur, Leopold Lojka, to proceed to the hospital where those who had been injured earlier in the day were being treated.

Princip, considered by the other members of the Black Hand to be the least reliable of their number, was standing outside Moritz Schiller’s restaurant when the Archduke’s car drove past on its way to the hospital.

It was 10.55 a.m.

The street was bustling with pedestrians, slowing the Archduke’s progress, and a local governor, Oskar Potiorek, shouted to the chauffeur that he should have taken a different route instead.

The chauffeur, who was unfamiliar with the city, became confused and attempted to back up, but stalled the car when putting it into reverse, almost directly in front of where Princip was waiting.

Faced with this opportunity, and contrary to the expectations of his fellow assassins, Princip decided to carry out his sworn duty.

Believing that he lacked the courage to shoot the couple in cold blood, Princip initially made up his mind to throw a hand grenade, but there were so many people crowding the sidewalk that Princip doubted he would have enough room to throw the bomb and still escape the blast. Instead, he drew his pistol, stepped out into the street, and leapt on to the running board, which acted as a step for passengers climbing in and out of the vehicle. Princip fired the gun without aiming. He was even seen to close his eyes, turning his head to the side as he pulled the trigger twice. Before he could fire a third shot, Princip was dragged to the ground by a guard of the local militia named Smail Spahović.

Hauled away to prison, Princip would die there four years later, wasted away from the effects of tuberculosis.

Within days of the assassinations, Austria had delivered a series of ultimatums to Serbia, a country only a fraction the size of the Habsburg Empire. When Serbia attempted to negotiate the details of the ultimatum, Austria responded by sending troops across the border to occupy the country.

The incursion by the Habsburgs into what Russia considered a ‘buffer state’ between itself and the potential threat of invasion by a western army forced the Tsar to begin mobilising his troops. It was no secret, to the Russians or anyone else, that at least six weeks would be required for Russia to bring its army into full preparedness for war. In that length of time, Germany and Austria-Hungary could not only mobilise their troops but could have launched a full-scale invasion. It was vital to the Russians, therefore, that they began mobilising first, if they were to have any hope of defending their country.

But Germany had plans of its own.

If Russia began to mobilise, Germany military policy dictated that the Kaiser must order his own troops to prepare for battle.

With such inflexible strategies in place, the outbreak of war became a foregone conclusion. Long-standing alliances between Britain, France and Russia on one hand, and Germany, Turkey and Austria-Hungary on the other, assured that hostilities would spread.