Alexandrovsky Palace, Tsarskoye Selo.
Autumn had arrived early in Saint Petersburg, tinting the imperial gardens a melancholic gold that foreshadowed the long Russian winter. However, the cold Alexei felt in his playroom didn't come from the open windows, it came from the map of Africa he had unfolded on the Persian carpet.
His sisters were there, summoned for an emergency meeting of their spy game. The door was closed and secured with a chair, a precaution the adults respected as part of the game.
Alexei was standing on the Belgian Congo.
"What is Katanga?" Olga asked. At thirteen, the Grand Duchess was beginning to have that sharp intuition. She looked at her little brother with concern, she had never seen him so pale, not even when he had fever.
"It's a province in central Africa," Alexei responded. His voice lacked inflection. He pointed to a specific spot in the south of the Belgian colony. "Here. Shinkolobwe."
Tatiana, seated cross-legged with a notebook in her lap, frowned.
"The cable says mining rights have been purchased. Is it gold? Diamonds?"
"It's something worse," Alexei said.
Alexei crouched down and touched the point on the map. His mind traveled to the future, to the grainy images of Hiroshima, to the shadows burned on the asphalt. He knew, from his studies at Oxford in his previous life, that the Shinkolobwe mine was a geological anomaly, one of the few the planet possessed. While most uranium mines in the world had a concentration of 0.5%, Shinkolobwe ore had a purity of 65%.
It wasn't ore as such... it was almost ready-to-use fuel.
If those who wanted to have it controlled it in mid-1909, they didn't need to enrich uranium with complex centrifuges for years. They could skip decades of development. They could build a rudimentary atomic pile in five years. And a dirty bomb in ten.
"They're building a weapon, Tanya," Alexei explained, translating the horror into language his sisters could process. "A weapon so terrible that a single bomb could erase Saint Petersburg from the map in a second. Nothing would remain. Not the palace, not the people, not the shadows."
Olga brought a hand to her mouth.
"But... that's impossible. God wouldn't allow such a thing."
"God isn't buying land in the Congo, Olga. English bankers are," Alexei replied harshly. "And we need to stop them. But we can't."
That was the crushing reality. Alexei was five years old. He had a small engineering company and some influence over Stolypin. But he didn't have an expeditionary army to invade a Belgian colony. He couldn't buy the mine because those who bought the rights had, so to speak, unlimited funds.
"Then what do we do?" Tatiana asked, the pragmatic one. Her pen was ready on the paper. "Do we tell Papa? Do we tell Uncle Willy in Germany?"
"No. If governments know what's there, a race will begin to see who arrives first," Alexei reasoned, walking in circles around the map. "The Kaiser, the British, the French... everyone will want the weapon. And a world war will break out just to control that hole in the ground."
He stopped. He looked at his little lead soldiers.
'If you can't capture the enemy's fortress, and you can't destroy it... then you flood the battlefield with chaos.'
"We can't keep it secret," Alexei murmured. A dark and dangerous idea was taking shape. "We know someone wants the mine in secret. They want to extract the ore quietly. So we're going to make a lot of noise."
He turned toward his sisters.
"Remember what we read about the Curies? About Radium?"
"Yes," Olga said. "They say it glows in the dark. And that it cures cancer."
In 1909, the world was still living through the scandalous Radium fever. Radioactivity wasn't seen as a mortal danger. Radioactive water was sold, chocolate with radium, glowing cosmetics. It was the madness of the era. All this because radium was said to be a miraculous element with supposed infinite curative and vitalizing properties.
"Exactly," Alexei said. "Tanya, we're going to write an anonymous letter to the most sensationalist newspapers in Paris and Brussels. Le Petit Journal and L'Indépendance Belge."
"What are we going to tell them?"
"We're going to tell them that a dying explorer has found the world's largest source of 'Miraculous Radium Salts' in Katanga," Alexei dictated, his eyes shining with calculated malice. "We're going to say the stones there cure blindness and grant eternal life. We're going to unleash a radium gold rush in the area."
Tatiana smiled slowly, understanding the strategy.
"If everyone believes there's a magical treasure there..."
"...Then thousands of adventurers, swindlers, journalists, and second-rate spies will invade Katanga in a month," Alexei completed. "Therefore those who want that won't be able to work in secret. They'll have to deal with intruders, with greedy Belgian bureaucrats who'll want their share, and with total chaos. We'll turn their secret laboratory into a public circus."
It was a dirty move. Alexei knew many of those people would get sick from radiation. He knew he was sending the ignorant into a toxic trap. But it was the necessary cost to delay the dirty bomb and perhaps the atomic bomb.
"Write, Tanya," he ordered. "Put lots of drama. Make it sound like a legend, a myth."
While his sister began writing the lie that would save the world (or at least buy it time), Alexei approached the window. He looked toward the golden trees of the park.
He felt old.
Until that day, his mission had been to save the Russian Empire, modernize industry, prevent a revolution. But Shinkolobwe had changed everything. Now he wasn't just fighting for the throne, now he had to fight for the survival of the human species.
"I've finished the draft," Tatiana said a few minutes later. "How do we sign it? 'A friend'?"
Alexei shook his head.
"Sign it as 'The Ghost of Leopold.' Belgians like ghost stories."
Olga approached and put a hand on his shoulder.
"Are you okay, Alyosha?"
Alexei looked at his reflection in the window's dark glass. A small child in a sailor suit looked back at him.
"No, Olga," he responded softly.
The sun finally set, and the first star of the night appeared in the sky. Alexei wondered if, in some alternative future, that star would actually be the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion he couldn't prevent.
"To bed," he said, breaking the spell. "Tomorrow we have French lessons."