expression changing from confusion to wonder. He narrowed his gaze. “Where did you find this?”
“It was given to me by a retired angelologist named Nadia Ivanova,” Vera said. She could see his
excitement growing as she explained the jeweled egg that had led them to the 8mm film featuring
Angela Valko, which in turn brought them to Nadia and Rasputin’s album of flowers.
Azov shook his head in disbelief. “I was beginning to think I was a lunatic for spending the last
thirty years working on this, and then something happens and I see a glimmer of reason to what I’m
doing, and I know I’m on the right track. You know that Nadia’s husband, Vladimir, was a friend of
mine.”
“He was in Angela Valko’s film,” Vera said. “I had no idea you two knew each other.”
Azov smiled. “Angelologists behind the Iron Curtain relied on very old friendships, some made
before the revolution. My network is made up of the children and grandchildren of tsarist agents.
Vladimir was a good friend. He was able to transmit messages to me even before the fall of the
Berlin Wall, through a network of old contacts. But what strikes me most powerfully about what
you’ve just told me is this: I briefly worked in the service of Angela Valko. I know her research well.
Indeed, I contributed in some ways to her findings.”
Vera was silent, her surprise upon hearing this information overwhelming.
Azov continued. “Unfortunately, the Soviet union didn’t allow me to travel, and so I never met her
in person. But we were in continual contact for a couple of years in the early eighties. She was
extremely particular about what she wanted, and I found the instructions strange, to say the least.
When she was murdered in 1984, I feared my contributions to her work were to blame. Her father,
Raphael, assured me that everyone in the society was grappling with the same guilt. The reach of her
influence and collaboration was that vast.”
“You knew Raphael Valko as well?” Vera asked.
“I know him still,” Azov said.
How Azov’s society connections had eluded her all these years was something that Vera wanted to
understand. She’d always thought of him as a genius in exile, and yet he seemed to be at the very
center of everything that mattered in angelology. “It is most likely that, when she contacted you,
Angela Valko was working to decode the contents of this album.”
Azov opened the album and turned through the pages, his eyes falling over the flowers. “I knew that
she was creating a chemical compound,” he said. “She didn’t disclose the nature of the compound,
only that it required ancient ingredients. I was so young then, and my work in the field had just begun.
Looking back, I suppose my willingness to participate in her rather unusual experiments made me
useful to her.”
“Now that you have the full story of why she contacted you,” Vera said, “what do you think?”
Azov removed the folded piece of paper upon which Angela Valko had scrawled the famous
passage from Jubilees. “This passage has been dismissed so often in the past that it was difficult for
Angela to believe its importance. I’m the one who made her take it seriously. Jubilees is one of the
books of the Bible that the founding fathers considered to be in the canon of angelological studies.
The Book of Jubilees—like the Book of Enoch — was not included in the Bible, although scrolls were
circulated among theologians and it had influence upon the texts that eventually became the Bible. The
discovery in Qumran of the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed that Jubilees was read and revered just after
the time of Christ. It is essentially a list of holidays and religious commemorations, but there is one
very important element to the text that has great significance to my work, and one passage in
particular that relates to the battle between humans and Nephilim.”
Sveti recited it as if on cue: “And Noah wrote down all things in a book as we instructed him
concerning every kind of medicine. Thus the evil spirits were precluded from harming the sons of
Noah.”
“It refers to the Book of Medicines,” Azov said. “At least, that is a modern name for it, one
invented by angelologists. But it is an accurate description for the writings mentioned in Jubilees.
They contained Noah’s observations and his reflections about the destruction of human civilization
during the Flood. As you have seen, Noah wrote of his mission to preserve the earth’s fauna and
flora. He recorded the technical details of protecting and mating the animals, the process of planting
and harvesting the seeds. Sveti and I have also found allusions to a medicine, or elixir, that disarms