It was a cloudy and damp night. A fierce storm had thundered in the night before. The streets glistened as the lights shone on them. The air smelled brisk and clean, like someone had just ordered the wind to come through to freshen things up. It was on this very cold and dreary night that Paul Mathews was preparing to scale the building at 3 Ponchikov Way. This was the building where Carl Fabergé constructed some of his most beautiful gold Fabergé eggs for the crown heads of Europe and Russia. His creations used jewels that were handpicked by him. Pearls from Japan, diamonds from London, blue sapphires from Australia, rubies from Burma, and emeralds from Colombia.
Just before the revolt in 1917, when the Red Army stormed the palace, Tsar Nicholas II had hidden two of his most famous and personal Imperial Fabergé eggs in a secret space deep in the cellar of the Alexander Palace. He was going to retrieve them at a later date, along with the gold coins and jewels that he’d been secretly hiding over the past several months. However, later never came. These special Imperial Fabergé eggs, which would never be delivered to their intended recipients, also held a secret that would be devastating to Russia. The pair of the Imperial Fabergé eggs was almost lost until Walter saw a painting in the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow while he was on tour with the Minister of the Moscow Museum of Archeology.
Walter knew what this would mean to the European monarchy and consequently felt an obligation to get the painting at almost any cost. It was one of the four pieces of the puzzle to the location of the treasure that the Tsar had hidden. It was a bold and calculated risk to break into one of the most heavily fortified buildings in the world – Moscow Armory building’s top floor. There was a window in the corner office that belonged to General Stanislaw Ogorski. He was the last person that knew about the famous pair of Imperial Fabergé eggs called Constellation and Karelian Birch. The Tsar had originally confided in him when he gave him the painting. What the General didn’t know was the secret within each egg
Some of the spoils that were handed down from the last surviving Romanov were the treasures the parents and grandparents accumulated from various wars and then inherited by the current generation. Their most prized possessions were world famous, like the Imperial Fabergé eggs that were made almost exclusively for the Romanov family, Nicholas I and Nicholas II by Carl Fabergé.
The Romanov family spent millions on construction of opulent buildings, especially their own residences, which housed jewelry worn by tsarinas before Alexandra Feodorovna. However, they also harbored a secret that only exclusive members of the executive cabinet knew about. When Count Olav Stravinsky was born, he was quickly and quietly shipped off to live with cousins of the Tsar on Long Island, New York. He lived behind a heavily fortified gate in the estate once owned by a famous robber baron. He left his estate when he was six years old when he was asked by his father to visit him in St. Petersburg just before Nicholas II and his family were killed. Count Olav, and he alone, knew the dark secret of the matching Imperial Fabergé eggs that David R. Francis, the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, was to give to Kristina of the Habsburg Family in Austria and the other one to Woodrow Wilson, then President of the United States.
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