Last Snow (33 page)

For precisely ten seconds he listened to the rushing of blood in his inner ears, the tympani of his heart within his ribs, and he felt the familiar exhilaration. There was nothing like the proximity to death to make him feel alive, vibrant, potent. What was life but mastery over others? He inhabited a universe of gods, who could snuff out mortal life with the slow pull of a trigger or the flick of a shining blade. What was Kirilenko now, nothing his mother would recognize, that was for certain.

He rose from his position on the top of a parked car and, clambering down, walked through the lot at a measured pace.

_____

“C
HRIST, IS
he dead?” Annika said.

“As a doorpost,” Jack, who was in a better position to see, answered.

“We’re pinned down here,” Annika said.

It was Jack who saw the figure rise from the top of a car in the parking lot and, with a small case under one arm, leap down and begin to walk away.

He led Alli and Annika to a spot along the fence far enough away from Kirilenko so Alli wouldn’t have a clear look at the aftermath of the murder. “I don’t think he’s interested in us.”

Peering through the fence he waited until he could no longer see the figure, then he said to Annika, “Okay, it’s safe. Up you go.”

She scaled the chain-link fence without question and, as soon as she was on the other side, Jack boosted Alli up. Climbing and scrambling, she rolled her body over the top and descended until she was met with Annika’s outstretched hands. Jack followed, ascending and descending as quickly as he could.

Once in the parking lot Annika took them to the area cordoned off for airport personnel. Fortunately, there weren’t that many cars, as a majority of the workers used public transportation to and from the airport. With less than twenty-four cars to check, they found the one they were looking for within five or six minutes, a beaten-up Zil. By that time, however, more sirens were tearing through the afternoon, pitched louder as the police cars approached the airport from the city of Simferopol.

Annika slid behind the wheel with Alli beside her. Jack took possession of the backseat, armed with the pistol they’d taken from Kirilenko. Annika started the car without difficulty, eased out of the parking space, and drove to the exit as the convoy of police cars careened by. Jack noted that her hands were perfectly still on the wheel, not even the hint of a tremor visible.

After the police cars had passed, she waited, breathing deeply and slowly. The tension mounted to almost unbeatable levels, Alli squirming in her seat, but it was imperative they avoid the danger of calling attention to themselves by appearing to flee the scene. In this way, three minutes crawled by while their hearts beat furiously and their pulses pounded in their temples.

At last, Annika put the Zil in gear, took a left turn out of the lot, and drove south toward Simferopol and, eventually, the coast around Alushta. Jack, with his back to them, kept an eye out behind them for any sign of a police vehicle. He counted six civilian cars on the road behind them, but nothing official. With a sigh of relief he swiveled around, watching, as Annika and Alli did, the unlovely countryside that would, at length, lead them to Magnussen’s villa on the Black Sea coast, where, he hoped, many questions would be answered.

T
HREE CARS
and a hundred yards behind them a man known only as Mr. Lovejoy drummed his blunt steel-worker’s fingers on the steering wheel of his rented car. Though it might be something of a conceit to think of himself as a steel worker, his blue-collar Detroit background dictated his way of thinking. Uncomfortable with the suits he’d been obliged to rub shoulders with when he’d come to D.C. as a very young man, he had transferred out of the office and into field work with what some around him had deemed unseemly haste. But he was happy now and never looked back.

He’d asked for and by the grace of God had received a rental with a cassette player, an old but serviceable Toyota. The first thing he did after starting up the car was to slide in a cassette, turn the volume up to maximum, and when the first few bars of Breaking Benjamin’s “Evil Angel” ripped and roared through the interior, his lips drew back from his teeth in a contented grin.

His gaze fixed on the Zil, he saw himself as a winged creature who, having caught sight of its prey, rides the thermals high above,
following, following in twists and turns, dips and rises, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

R
IET
B
ORONYOV
accompanied Dyadya Gourdjiev out of the brothel. In the elevator Gourdjiev pulled out his gun and replaced the three bullets he’d fired earlier. Boronyov looked on with a mixture of superiority and tacit approval. Downstairs, the lobby seemed as chill as a meat locker, colder certainly than the outside temperature, which had moderated as the afternoon wore on.

The two
Trinadtsat
agents, stalwart and intimidating, were cooling their heels on the corner, smoking indolently, speaking very little, and generally acting as if they owned the block of buildings. They saw Gourdjiev approaching at the same time and their hands went to the pockets of their ominous black trench coats. Gourdjiev already had his gun aimed at them, and he shook his head, causing them to freeze for a moment, then slowly remove their hands, presenting them in what in other people could have been interpreted as a sign of surrender or placation. Not in these two, of this Dyadya Gourdjiev was certain.

It was at this moment that Boronyov, walking behind the older man, chose to show himself. The
Trinadtsat
agents, even as well trained as they were, could not keep the expression of consternation off their faces. Their bewilderment served as entertainment for Boronyov, and he laughed, reveling in their dire predicament.

That was when Gourdjiev turned the weapon on him and shot him point-blank in the side of the head. Boronyov’s laughter turned to a burbling gurgle and then to stunned silence as he pitched to the pavement.

The
Trinadtsat
agents scarcely had time to register what had happened when Gourdjiev said, “Bring this traitor to Oriel Jovovich Batchuk. Tell him Boronyov is a gift from me. Tell him he can stop looking for Annika Dementieva. He now has the answer to what she is doing here in Ukraine.”

A
FTER HOURS
of wildly pumping adrenaline a stunning fatigue had set in. Jack lay back against the seat, closed his eyes, and allowed the vibration of the car to lull him to a kind of shallow sleep.

“
Dad. Dad, tell me that story again.
”

He opened his eyes, turned his head slightly, and there was Emma sitting beside him. So it wasn’t a dream, or perhaps it was, perhaps he was still sleeping.

“Which story?” His voice was so soft it barely registered over the road noise. Besides, Alli and Annika were talking to each other in low tones.

She was turned partway toward him, her right leg drawn up beneath her, the other one hanging down, the heel of her shoe tap-tap-tapping against the seat. “
The one about the scorpion and the turtle.
”

“I told you that so many times.”

“
Dad, please tell it again.
”

There was a tension in her voice, an intensity he found disquieting,
so he told her about the scorpion and the turtle who meet on the bank of a river. The scorpion asks the turtle to ferry him across on his back. “Why would I do that?” the turtle says. “You’ll sting me and I’ll die.” “I can’t swim,” the scorpion says. “If I sting you I’ll die, too.” The turtle, a logical creature, is swayed by the scorpion’s reply, so he allows the scorpion to climb on his back and out they go into the river. Midway across, the scorpion stings the turtle. “Why?” the turtle cries. “Why did you lie to me?” “It’s my nature,” the scorpion says, just before they both drown.

Jack looked into Emma’s dark eyes, as if trying to peer beyond the veil of life. “Why did you want me to tell you that story again?”

“
I wanted to make sure you remembered it
,” she said.

“How could I forget it?”

“
That’s what I thought, but I guess you need a reminder.
”

“I don’t understand, honey.”

“
Dad, everyone is lying to you.
”

He was suddenly tense. There was a knot in his stomach. “What do you mean everyone is lying to me?”

“
You know what I mean, Dad.
”

“I don’t. Everyone, like Edward?”

“
The president
,” she said.

“And, what? Alli?”

“
Alli, as well.
”

“Why would Alli lie to me? Come on, Emma. What is this?”

“
Dad, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.
”

“You always tell me things I don’t know,” he said.

“
About us, yes. The two of us. That’s why I’m still here. But about everything else, no, I can’t.
”

“The way you say it . . . as if it’s some kind of law.”

“
I suppose you could look at it that way.
”

“A universal law, like physics or quantum mechanics?”

He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles just in case he really was
sleeping. But when he opened them, whether in fact he was asleep or awake, he found himself alone in the backseat. There was no one to answer his question.

“
N
OTHING IS
inherently good or evil,” Annika was saying to Alli as Jack looked around for his daughter, “it’s just disappointing.”

“Give me an example,” Alli said.

Annika, her eyes on the road, thought for a moment. “All right. In ancient Rome, there was a man, Marcus Manlius, who had masterminded the plan to save the Capitol from destruction when Rome had been overrun by the Gauls. This was in, oh, three ninety, B.C. Anyway, in the aftermath of the war that drove the invaders out, as in all wars, the soldiers who had so bravely defended their homeland were now out of a job, and soon so deep in debt they were thrown in prison, an injustice Marcus Manlius would not tolerate. He used much of his great fortune to buy these heroes their freedom, an act of altruism that pissed off the patricians of the city, so much so that they accused him of building his own private army in order to force his way into power. The plebs, incited by the patricians’ charges, sentenced Marcus Manlius to death. They threw him off the Tarpeian Rock.”

Alli remembered that the Tarpeian Rock had fascinated Emma because it was the spot where criminals were hurled to their death. It was named after the traitor who opened the gates of Rome to the Sabines for the promise of gold bracelets. Instead, when she let them in, they crushed her with their shields, which they wore on the same arm as the bracelets so coveted by Tarpeia—a vestal virgin, no less! How ironic. She was buried at the base of the rock that came to bear her name, which rose from the summit of a steep cliff on the southern face of Capitoline Hill, overlooking the Forum.

Rome had been founded by thieves, outlaws, murderers, and slaves who’d been clever enough to escape their masters. The only
trouble was there were no women, which is why these early Romans, as they called themselves, decided to steal females from the neighboring Sabines. It was this infamous rape—the Latin
raptio
, meaning kidnapping—of the women that led to the Sabines’ revenge, using Tarpeia as their cat’s-paw.

This dark side of Romans—of Rome itself—had caught and held Alli’s attention, because in addition to being responsible for the invention of roads, the aqueduct, and numerous other innovations, it was the Romans who, infamously, had created the homicidal system of election. Those leaders they didn’t like, learned to dislike, feared, found fault with, or about whom they invented transgressions (out of envy or greed) were murdered forthwith. Alli, having been born to and brought up in the incubator of politics, felt the tension, the unspoken fear of assassination that swirled around her father in ever thicker layers the higher on the political ladder he climbed. And when she’d come to Moscow she almost immediately had intuited how similar it was to ancient Rome, how much the modern-day political system had been infected by that of the Romans: institutionalized murder as a means to an end.

“So,” Alli said after her moment’s thought, “what you’re saying is that even the best intentions turn to shit.”

“I’m saying that all of us are doomed to disappointment. I’m saying I embrace that disappointment because it’s the ultimate leveler, it doesn’t care about class or money or power. It’s the great reaper.”

“You mean the
grim
reaper,” Alli said. “That’s death.”

Annika shrugged. “Take your pick.”

T
HE CALL
came in to Dennis Paull’s cell phone at three thirty in the morning. He was in the middle of a labyrinth of data he’d finally been able to pull off of General Brandt’s cell phone records, as well as a definitive report on his comings and goings over the last year. In fact, Paull was busy reading the item that interested him the most:
two unofficial round-trip flights to Moscow, both in the last six months, both over weekends, that were neither recorded or expensed by any government agency. That wouldn’t have necessarily set off an alarm bell in Paull’s mind, but there were a number of oddities. For one thing, General Brandt paid cash for first-class tickets. For another, both flights had been on Aeroflot, not Delta, an American airline, which by all rights he should have taken. Where in the world did the General get ten thousand in cash for two trips to Moscow? He hacked into the General’s bank account at District National. A day before the withdrawal, ten thousand was wired into the account from Alizarin Global, an entity Paull had never heard of.