Last Snow (28 page)

Jack, who absorbed and analyzed all these intangibles in less than a second, answered her in what at first appeared to be an enigmatic manner: “Who do you think that is?”

Annika shifted her gaze while she admonished Alli. “Don’t stare, for the love of God.”

Alli obeyed, albeit with a pout.

“There’s a man who just came in from Kiev,” Jack explained in a low voice. “It looks as if he’s trying to find someone by showing what might be photos or sketches to airport personnel.”

“Christ, I know him.” Annika, worrying her lower lip, had turned back. “That’s Rhon Fyodovich Kirilenko. He’s an FSB homicide detective. The man’s a fucking bloodhound. What’s he doing here?”

“I think he’s after us,” Jack said.

“But how? It’s the Izmaylovskaya who is after us. We killed Ivan Gurov and Milan Spiakov, two members of the
grupperovka
family.”

“Unless Kirilenko is
Trinadtsat
.” Jack turned to her. “You told me
Trinadtsat
was composed of members of the Izmaylovskaya and the FSB.”

“Not FSB, per se,” Annika corrected. “Batchuk’s people, who could be FSB, but are also likely to be Kremlin apparatchiks, interior ministers, secret services, who the hell knows who he’s recruited.”

“That certainly doesn’t rule out your friend Kirilenko.”

“He’s not my friend,” Annika said sharply. “I hate his guts.”

“Part of a long line, I gather.” Jack nodded. “Look, he’s heading toward the airport facilities.”

“I wonder what he’s up to?” Annika said.

“Let’s find out.”

Jack rose, and the others with him. Staying within the clots of
people, they followed Kirilenko as he entered a corridor with doors on either side. Hanging back, they saw him open a door on the left, halfway down the corridor, and as he went inside, they hurried along toward it.

“He’s gone into the CCTV control room,” Annika said.

“What does that mean?” Alli asked.

“He’s going to look at the closed-circuit video tapes of arrivals and departures,” Annika said.

“I’m willing to bet he has photos of us.” Jack rubbed his jaw meditatively. “We must have been picked up on the cameras at Zhulyany Airport in Kiev.”

Annika took an involuntary step back. “Which means he’s recognized me and has photos of the two of you.”

“Alli’s disguised,” Jack said, “but do you think he knows who I am?”

“Doubtful,” Annika said. “But even so it won’t take long for him to discover who you are.”

Jack eyed the closed door. “Then we’ll have to stop him from finding out.”

D
ENNIS
P
AULL
had been staring at his computer for nine hours straight, scrolling through one restricted database after another in search of a chink in the cabinet members’ red, white, and blue armor. His bladder was full and he felt as if all the low-grade mozzarella he’d consumed had congealed in the pit of his stomach like a bocce ball. Pushing himself away from the screen, he rose and stumbled into the bathroom to relieve himself.

When he returned to his battle station he saw that a new piece of information had popped onto his screen. He’d just used his cursor to copy it when it vanished. Switching windows, he brought up a new Word document into which he deposited—he hoped, he prayed—what he’d snagged off the database. An instant later two lines of
enciphered words appeared on a field of pristine white, followed by an echelon code Paull knew belonged to General Atcheson Brandt.

For a moment he stared at the gibberish, trying to place the cipher pattern, which seemed familiar to him. Then he had it: It was a particular NSA cipher used exclusively for Eyes-Only interdepartmental communications on its cell phones.

Switching to another Firefox tab, he logged on to the Department of Homeland Security site, then, using his proprietary ID code, accessed his department’s algorithm database. Once there, he fed the two lines of enciphered text into the algorithm engine, hit the Enter key, and sat back, waiting for the database to find the algorithm that would decipher the message Brandt had just sent.

While he waited he thought about the choices he’d made in his life, the people he had had to befriend, rely on, depend on, even though he knew that at some point, if the opportunity arose, they would betray him or denounce him in order to advance their own career path. With the possible exception of Edward Carson he was surrounded by a pack of sharks all too eager to take a chunk out of him the moment they smelled blood in the water, or even before, in some cases. And yet he’d gone ahead and forged these alliances, even, when the occasion demanded it, putting himself in these people’s debt. He forced himself not to see what he didn’t want to see, what would otherwise stop him from doing what had to be done in order to rise to his position of power within the current administration.

Was there nothing people like General Brandt wouldn’t do to gain power, he asked himself rhetorically. Was there really no line that these people—he among them—wouldn’t cross to keep accumulating power?

A moment later he had his answer. The two lines of gibberish were replaced by the deciphered text:
XEX ANNIKA DEMENTIEVA AND JACK MCCLURE
.

Jesus
, he thought as he ran a trembling hand through his hair.
Jesus Christ
. At first he thought it must be a mistake, perhaps he inputted the encrypted text incorrectly, so he sent it back through the department’s algorithm engine, careful to get each letter right. The same message came back at him like a punch in the solar plexus.

It couldn’t be, but there it was in front of him in black and white. “EX” meant that General Brandt had put out a sanction—an immediate death sentence—on the subjects. The “X” prefix meant “use all available methods at your disposal.”

“K
IRILENKO MUST
have been with the team that surrounded us at Rochev’s dacha,” Annika said.

“What a joke,” Alli said. “He must think we killed Rochev’s mistress. That’s why he’s coming after us.”

Jack and Annika stared at her. “It’s no joke,” they both said, more or less at once.

They were still in the mouth of the corridor leading to Airport Services. Jack was looking around for security personnel who were sure to be patrolling the area, while Annika kept an eye on the door to the CCTV control room through which Kirilenko had disappeared not five minutes ago.

“There’s no doubt he’s looking for us,” Annika said. “And, as Alli pointed out, now we’re suspects in three murders.” She shook her head. “There’s no help for it, we’re going to have to terminate him.”

“What?” Jack spun around. “Are you crazy? We can’t attack an FSB officer.”

“I didn’t say attack.” Annika’s carnelian eyes never looked harder. “I said terminate.”

“As in kill?” Alli said.

“Yes, dear. We have to kill him in order to save ourselves.”

“I won’t hear of it,” Jack said.

“Then we’re doomed.” Annika indicated the door with her chin.
“Unless we put him six feet under, I promise you this sonuvabitch won’t stop until he’s either killed us or dragged us back to Moscow in manacles.”

A look of pure terror distorted Alli’s face. “Jack—”

“If not for us, then for the safety of the girl,” Annika pressed her point. “For so many reasons, we can’t allow anything to happen to her.”

Jack shook his head. He knew she was right, but he wasn’t willing to give in just yet. “There’s got to be another way.”

“I’m telling you there isn’t, we’ve got to do it now while we have the chance,” Annika said urgently.

As if to underscore her anxiety, the door to the CCTV control room opened. They shrank back into the shadows as Kirilenko emerged, his face marred by a smug look that told Annika everything she needed to know.

Without another word to either of her companions, she sprinted from the shadows and, while he drew out his cell phone, she delivered a vicious blow to his kidneys, wrapped her crooked arm across his throat, and with astonishing power, jerked him backward off his feet.

G
ENERAL
A
TCHESON
Brandt was the last person Dennis Paull had suspected of treachery—so much so, in fact, that in nine hours of eye-watering work he hadn’t yet gotten around to shining his investigatory spotlight on Brandt or his life.

Paull had finally quit his room, reeking of human sweat and the peculiar odor of heated electronics. It was two thirty in the morning and he was walking down the hallway of the Residence Inn, looking for the cigarette vending machine he’d noticed when he’d checked in. In these days of universal smoking bans, cigarettes were hard to find, never mind an old-fashioned vending machine that sold them. Nevertheless,
there was one here, crouching on a brown carpet whose pattern failed to hide stains even steam cleaning couldn’t get out.

He hadn’t smoked in twenty years, but the pressurized developments of the last half hour had caused his old craving to reassert itself. He’d tried to fight it, but it was no use. Like most vices, once it lodged in your mind it couldn’t be denied.

Slitting open the pack, he tore the filter head off a cigarette, then lit it with a match from a pack thoughtfully provided with his purchase. He used the key card to his room to open the side door to the parking lot, went out into the chilly night. It had rained sometime while he’d been working and the concrete walkway was slick and wet; cars gleamed in the security lights. The hum of traffic from the highway was reduced to the inconstant hiss of occasionally passing cars on their way to or from mysterious errands. What were people doing up at this hour, he wondered. Whatever it was he doubted they had the weight of the world on their shoulders as he did.

The smoke, deep in his lungs, calmed him, or at least gave him the illusion that he had time to make a decision. The night was quiet, not another soul stirring in all of the Residence Inn, though as he looked up at the facade he could see lights on in several rooms, a reminder that insomnia lurked like a ghost here as everywhere.

He smoked the cigarette down to the end without coming to a decision. His mouth felt dry and stale, but he ripped off the filter on another cigarette, stuck it between his chapped lips, and lit up. With the information he had on General Brandt the road before him forked in several directions. He could inform the president, but that would surely distract him, in the process derailing the delicate negotiation process with President Yukin. He could call Jack and warn him, which again would expose his knowledge of the General’s treachery. McClure was a good friend of Edward Carson’s—they knew each other long before Paull himself met Carson. Therefore,
Jack could be counted on to inform the president ASAP even if Paull begged him not to disturb Carson until the crucial accord was signed.

As Paull walked up and down the walkway, growing colder and colder, he realized that he was on the horns of a serious moral dilemma. How could he allow Jack to remain uninformed about the sanction? How could he allow the U.S.-Russia accord to be disrupted? He had no doubt that General Brandt was insane. He had determined that his own self-interest was paramount, anyone who threatened it was to be terminated. He could call Edward and tell him what he’d discovered, but he had no solid proof and the call would only serve to muddy waters that were already fouled.

Grinding the second butt beneath his heel, he scrabbled in the pack. He was going through cigarettes as if they were Tic Tacs. Well, why not, considering the behemoth he was confronting. The fact that Jack had somehow become a clear and immediate danger to Brandt was of less concern to Paull than why Jack was threatening the General’s self-interest.

What the hell was the General up to? And then he remembered a bit of the conversation he’d had with Edward Carson in the presidential limo following Lloyd Berns’s interment. The president had complained that Brandt had been pushing to sign the accord. Why would he do that, Paull asked himself. Of course the General was one of the primary supporters of the current rapprochement with Russia. In fact, Carson had leaned heavily on the General’s advice for why to engage Russia and how. But Brandt was smarter than to advise the president to elide over minor details Carson wasn’t comfortable with, especially with the Russians.

However, his restless mind was turning over the question of paramount importance at the moment because there was a clear-cut decision to be made: To warn Jack or not to warn Jack, that was the question. And the answer hinged on morality and self-interest, one of which was clear-cut while the other was nebulous, open to interpretation
of every kind. He wasn’t like Edward, whose enduring sentimental feelings for family and friends was both a weakness and a blinder to the harsher aspects of reality. Paull understood the truth that the president refused to acknowledge: The notion of morality was a squishy subject, never more so than nowadays when there were mountains of information, factoids, and electronic data to sift through that provided a multitude of reasons for making or not making a decision. There were always extenuating circumstances, hidden explanations coming to light like corpses in a river appearing at the first spring thaw. Nowadays there were any number of ways to make a decision understandable, credible, acceptable, convincing.