Last Snow (38 page)

A small but terrible finger of ice seemed to pierce Paull’s gut. “What does that have to do with General Brandt?”

Thomson, sitting stonily beside Benson, was positively white-faced.

Benson briefly glanced at him before he said heavily, “General Brandt has issued an immediate sanction on Jack McClure.”

Paull knew this, of course, but he saw no advantage in letting them know it. In fact, quite the contrary. He was now sure that he had more information about Brandt’s latest activities than they did, which meant that, like Kurtz, like Rheault, Brandt had lost touch with his superiors, or at least his coconspirators. As Benson had said, the General was now in his own private heart of darkness. What this meant for all of them he had no idea, but much to his own consternation, he became aware of a subtle shift in how he perceived these two men. Not that enemies had suddenly, recklessly morphed into friends, but the polar opposites of black and white seemed to be breaking down into shades of gray.

At length, he said, “How the devil does General Brandt think he can order a sanction?”

“That,” Thomson said, at last unthawing, “is what we’ve brought you here to discuss.”

E
VER VIGILANT
when it came to Alli, Jack saw a blurred shadow out of the corner of his eye and knew it was her. He turned away from Kharkishvili to see Alli racing across the rocky headland toward the cliff’s edge. Without a second’s thought he broke away and ran, calculating vectors as he did so, in order to ensure he would intercept her before she . . . did what? Was she going to hurl herself off the cliff? Was she suicidal? Had she exhibited any warning signs that he might have missed when he was paying attention to Annika?

The dogs, barking hysterically, followed him, loping uneasily, as if they had picked up on his mounting anxiety. She was still running full tilt toward the cliff’s edge when he caught up with her. Her headlong momentum pulled him along for a pace or two, which brought both of them perilously close to the steep drop-off. The dogs growled, their haunches quivering, the hair at the back of their necks ruffled, until he had dragged her back from the brink.

They fell to the rocky ground, and the dogs moved in, licking
their faces until Kharkishvili called them off, and the wolfhounds scampered back to where he was standing some distance away.

“Alli,” Jack said, out of breath from both his sprint and the fright she had given him, “what on earth do you think you’re doing?”

“Get off me!” She shoved him. “Get away from me!”

She was crying hysterically, and probably had been, judging by her tear-streaked cheeks, for some time.

“What happened?” he said, alarmed. “What’s gotten into you?”

She turned her head away, into the grass, her body wracked by sobs.

“Alli, talk to me.” Annika had said that Alli wanted to tell him what Morgan Herr did to her, that her need to tell someone about her week of terror would eventually override her reticence. “You can tell me anything, you know that, don’t you?”

She struck him then, just a glancing blow to the side of his head, but he was shocked enough to lose his grip on her, and she scrambled away, first on all fours, like a wounded animal, and then, regaining her feet, making another jagged, confused run for the edge of the cliff.

Jack sprinted after her and, scooping her up, ran back in the direction of the manor house, but he stumbled over an outcropping of rock and had to put her down. For some reason he wasn’t seeing clearly, and when he raised a hand to his eyes it came away wet with tears. He sat on the grass, panting and crying, while all three wolfhounds circled the two of them protectively as he had seen them do with Kharkishvili.

To his credit the Russian kept his distance. He had turned toward the mansion, where, Jack saw, Annika had emerged. Taking in the scene, she began to run toward him. Long before she got there Kharkishvili intercepted her, turning her away so that Jack and Alli could remain alone.

Jack felt the sea wind in his hair and on his cheeks. It was soft and
moist with salt and phosphorus. The clouds overhead seemed unable to stir, as if some great hand had pinned them in place. He tried to listen for the crash of the waves, but he heard nothing. It was as if the world were holding its breath.

“Alli,” he said softly, but made no move to touch her, or even to move nearer, “you don’t want to kill yourself, I know you don’t.”

Trembling and shivering, she stared at him, red-eyed, and shouted, “I’ve had fucking enough of people climbing inside my head, telling me what to do!”

“Alli, please tell me—”

“I can’t, I can’t!” she cried. Her hands curled into fists, and then they began to beat against his chest, as if he were the physical manifestation of the terror that gripped her.

In the face of her mounting hysteria he knew he had to remain calm. He didn’t stop her attack, but he didn’t withdraw from it, either. “Why can’t you?”

“Because . . .”

She seemed to want to hurt him, and perhaps through him, herself.

“Because—” Her voice was so thin and cracked he had to pull her close to hear her. “—you’ll hate me, you’ll hate me forever.”

“Where did you get that idea? Why would I hate you?”

“Because I lied to you.” A dreadful fear seemed to come over her. “I lied, I didn’t tell you the whole truth.”

He closed his arms around her and said in her ear, “I could never hate you. I love you unconditionally.” Kissing her on her cheek, he said, “But I think you ought to tell me whatever it is that’s causing you so much pain. It isn’t healthy to sit with it.”

She snorted in tearful derision. “You say you love me, but that’ll all change the moment I tell you.”

“Do it then.” He held her at arm’s length so he could look her in the eyes. Her fists had uncurled, the fingers trembling against
his chest. “Let me decide instead of you deciding for me. Trust me. Trust
us.
”

The light had gone out in her eyes, she stared at him as if without recognition, and he pulled her to him again, murmuring to her: “Don’t go away, Alli. Stay here with me, you’re safe, you’re safe,” just as he had when he’d rescued her from the black place where Morgan Herr had taken her.

Her head lay heavily against his chest, she seemed to be scarcely breathing.

“Alli, please, I won’t hate you, no matter what, I promise.”

He felt her sigh against him, a long exhalation that was as much resignation as it was a surrender. Her entire body seemed limp and frail, as if she needed to give up everything, even her physical presence, in order to make the terrifying leap he asked of her.

“I . . . I lied to you about what happened the morning Emma was killed.”

“What?” He had expected some terrible revelation about what Morgan Herr had done to her, not this.

“I knew it.” She squirmed in his arms, trying to pull away. “I knew I shouldn’t’ve opened my big mouth.”

“No, no,” he said quickly. “Go on. What happened that morning?”

Her voice was muffled, as if she were talking into him rather than to him, as if she wanted to speak to something inside him with which she desperately needed to connect. “I . . . When you asked me I told you that I wasn’t around, that I didn’t know what Emma was up to.”

“You told me in retrospect you thought she was going to see Herr.”

“That was the lie. I knew where she was going because she told me.” Alli’s voice was further clouded by guilt and despair. “I was there. She asked me to drive her, she said she’d been up all night and
was in no shape to drive.” She was weeping again as she clung to him. “I told her I couldn’t, I gave a totally bogus excuse because I was scared, I didn’t want to get involved. And because I was so chicken-shit, she died. If I’d been driving nothing bad would have happened, she’d be alive now.”

“I
RAN
,” P
RESIDENT
Yukin said, “is a topic of the utmost strategic importance.” He shook his craggy head. He had eyes like nuggets of coal that had been burned deep into his face. The bulb of his nose was pocked and cratered, possibly from a childhood disease. “I have said this before, President Carson, but I see that I must say it again in order to underscore the weight the Kremlin reserves for such matters.”

“You needn’t bother,” Edward Carson said. “I am well aware of the special status between Russia and Iran.”

“Special status?” Yukin mashed his fleshy lips together, as if he wished to grind Carson’s words to ash. “No, no, you misunderstand us. We have certain business dealings, yes, but as for—”

“Such as sending them nuclear reactor parts and refined uranium.”

That statement hit the room, or more accurately, Yukin’s ears, like a detonation. An awkward silence ensued. Carson, Yukin, General Brandt, and Panin, a high-level Kremlin apparatchik who
had not been further identified, were sitting in a palatial room inside the Kremlin. The ceilings, twenty feet in height, perhaps more, were arched as in a cathedral, a comparison whose irony wasn’t lost on Carson.

“Since the debacle in Iraq your fact-finding spies have been notoriously inaccurate,” Yukin said at length. “This lie is but another example.”

At Carson’s gesture the General removed a dossier from his briefcase and handed it to his commander in chief. Without a word the president opened the dossier and spread half a dozen photographs on the table. One by one, he turned them so they faced Yukin.

“What’s this?” Yukin said, not even bothering to look at them.

“Surveillance photos of enriched uranium being transferred from Russian transports to Iranian transports.” Carson’s forefinger tapped a photo. “Here you can clearly see the symbol indicating radioactive material.”

Yukin shrugged. “Photoshopped.” But something was caught in his eyes, a shadow mixing anger and embarrassment at being caught out.

“I have no intention of making these photos public.” Carson gathered up the photos, shoved them back in dossier, and slid it across the table to Yukin. “But I must be clear: The position of the United States on the security accord will not change from where it was an hour ago, or yesterday. You cease your dealings with Iran and we dismantle the missile shield around Russia, we become security allies. We are done making changes; it’s time for us to sign the accord that will prove to be invaluable to both of our countries.”

Yukin sat very still for some time. The breathing of the four men seemed to come in concert, inhalations and exhalations caught on the tide of tension that had sprung up in the room moments before. Then the Russian president gave a brief nod. “You’ll have my answer within the hour.”

_____

“T
HIS HAS
become a perilous game,” General Brandt said as he and Carson strode the frigid Kremlin corridors, the president’s usual entourage strung out behind them. “If you had told me you were going to show Yukin those photos I would have cautioned you to find another way.”

“There was no other way,” Carson said shortly.

“Mr. President, may I point out that you’re on the verge of signing the most historic accord with Russia in the history of the United States, one that will ensure the safety of the American—”

“I seem to be more concerned with the American people than you are,” Carson snapped. “I won’t sign the accord with the points that Yukin has insisted on.” He didn’t care for Brandt’s admonishing tone, the inference that he, a neophyte when it came to the Russians, had acted rashly, that he should have deferred to the old Russian hand. “I get the feeling that Yukin is playing us to see how far he can push us, how many of his demands we’ll accede to. I won’t have it. I won’t be pushed around, either by him or, quite frankly, by you, General.”

“G
ENERAL
B
RANDT
,” Benson said.

“Where to begin with General Brandt?” Thomson said as if he hadn’t been interrupted. He sighed, as if stymied by the enormity of the task before him.

“We recruited Brandt some time ago,” Benson said helpfully.

“Three years, more or less,” Thomson leapt back in. “Midway along in the second term. We saw the handwriting on the wall. The president and his other senior advisors were hell-bent on continuing down the same path we’d all started down when he was first elected.”

“It wasn’t working anymore,” Benson said. “The commanders were telling us that privately, and the troops were worn down. The
stop-loss program, though increasingly necessary, was, in practical terms, a disaster, plus it was a PR nightmare.”

“Just the fact that we needed stop-loss should have sent a signal to the president’s advisors, but they ignored it, just like they ignored every news event or incident that contradicted their vision.”

Paull was familiar with stop-loss. It was a program instituted by the military, who, running short on recruits, abrogated the rights of its members to be rotated out of service. Stop-loss kept them in and fighting on the front lines in Felluja or Kabul, or wherever the power that be deigned to send them.