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Of course, neither of theuesswork alone, so they had asked Selma to do a feasibility study: Were there any exploitable weaknesses in Bondaruk’s home security? There were, she found One, he kept his antique collection on display at the estate, along with a small team of experts who maintained and supervised the pieces Two, the estate itself was sprawling and steeped in history, a piece of which Selht offer them a way in

They cliazed north Acoast, perched before a rock bridge jutting from the cliff face, was Bondaruk’s hundred-acre estate, officially nae, undercut by millennia of erosion, extended to a pillar of rock that rose from the ocean like a skyscraper

Bondaruk’s home was a five-story, thirty-thousand-square-foot Kievan Rus-style castle, coabled s, and onion-domed copper minarets, all surrounded by a lohite-stuccoed stone wall and serpentine groves of evergreen trees

Khotyn began its life in the hteenth century as home to a Criol Golden Horde in the sixteenth century to settle in the area After a hundred years the chieftain’s clan was ousted by Muscovite Russian forces led by a Zaporozhian Cossack hetman who claimed it as a spoil of war only to have it taken from him thirty years later by a yet more powerful hetman

During the Crimean War, Khotyn was commandeered by Tsar Nicholas II’s most prominent Black Sea Fleet admiral, Pavel Stepanovich Nakhied four times, first as a museum dedicated t

o the Siege of Sevastopol; then as a Wehrain as a h commanders after the city was liberated Froain into ruin, sitting mostly abandoned until Bondaruk purchased it froovernment in 1997

Given the estate’s rich history, Sel research trails to follow, but in the end it was one of the basest of huave away the chink in Khotyn’s armor

“Give ain,” Sah his binoculars

“His nadan Abdank,” Remi replied “He was the Zaporozhian Cossack who took it over frools”

“Right”

“Seems Abdank was only a part-tieht he could sell on the black market, he trafficked Problem was, there were plenty of other Cossack clans and Kievan Rus warlords anted to take over Abdank’s action”

“But old Bogdan was crafty,” Sa to the subject

“And industrious”

According to the online archives Selma was able to unearth in the National Taras Shevchenko University of Kiev, Abdank had used slave labor to dig into the cliffs and hills surrounding Khotyn a series of tunnels in which to hide his illicit goods Cargo ships laden with Roian prostitutes bound for the West would weigh anchor in the waters below Khotyn for off-loading into launches, which would then disappear into the night, ostensibly for further off-loading into the sler’s tunnels beneath the mansion

“So, more caves in our future,” Remi said now