Last Snow (43 page)

“That security accord is pure poison. Once it’s signed Yukin and Batchuk will send their
Trinadtsat
troops across the border into Ukraine, Russia will take possession of the uranium strike, and because of the accord with the United States no one will dare to stop him.”

“The United States itself—President Carson—will stop him.”

“Do you really think so?” Magnussen said. “You know very well that the prime reason for President Carson agreeing to the accord is to get the Iranian nuclear card off the table. In this particular matter Yukin will be as good as his word. He has decided to throw Iran to the wolves in exchange for this massive uranium strike, which will serve Russia’s burgeoning nuclear power plant needs for decades to come.”

Jack’s mind was working furiously. “If Carson lifts a hand against the Russian incursion into Ukraine, he risks Yukin reinstituting its nuclear commerce with Iran. And of course he doesn’t dare do that; the entire architecture of the accord is to neuter Iran’s nuclear program.”

Kharkishvili nodded. “You have it entirely.”

All of a sudden Jack’s mind gave him a different view of the situation. “This is about General Brandt, isn’t it?” he said. “Brandt has a
private deal with Yukin; in return for getting the accord done he’s going to receive a piece of the action here in Ukraine.”

There was absolute silence in the room. Kharkishvili turned to Magnussen and said, “You see, Mikal, I was right to entrust this part of our plan to Annika.” He turned to her. “You found us the perfect person, my dear. Congratulations.”

“S
O AS
you can see,” Thomson said, “the problem is Brandt. He has moved beyond our control. We have no power in this administration, but you do.”

Paull took a deep breath. “Let me get this straight. You recruited Brandt and now you want me to clean up his dirty work, and yours?” He laughed. “Why on earth would I do that?”

“Because if you don’t,” Benson said, “your president is going to end up with egg on his face—egg that won’t be easy to scrape off, I can assure you—when the deal Brandt has made with Yukin comes to light.”

“After which, he can kiss a second term good-bye.” Thomson was still in professorial mode. “You and Edward Carson have a personal relationship, don’t you? I mean to say you’re friends.”

“ ‘Friends don’t let friends drive drunk,’ ” Benson said, quoting the oft-heard TV ad. “Bottom line, General Brandt is driving the president’s car and he’s very, very drunk.”

Paull ran a hand through his hair, but he kept his expression neutral. He felt as if he were walking on eggshells around these two. Right now he needed to take a step back in order to assess the rapidly shifting situation with a clear eye and a calm mind. It was apparent that these two men made their living feeding off other people’s weaknesses and mistakes, but now they themselves had made a mistake or a miscalculation. Or they had seriously underestimated Brandt. From the evidence they had put forward so far this was a possibility that they had overlooked, and Paull was not about to bring their attention
to it. The two choices as outlined were, one, General Brandt had gone Kurtz, as Benson so colorfully put it, or, two, he had cleverly outmaneuvered them, using their resources to forge his relationship with Yukin only to abandon them as the metaphorical clock ticked close to midnight. Yukin and Carson were about to sign the historic accord that, if Thomson and Benson were telling the truth, would give the world the picture of a high-level American military man, one of the president’s closest advisors, in league with the president of Russia.

There was, of course, the other possibility, standing out as surely as a black swan: that the two of them were working a con on a massive scale in order to get him to stop Carson from signing an accord that would do the very thing the president and everyone in his administration was praying for it to do: pull the plug on Iran’s nuclear program. Without Russia’s imported parts, fuel, and expertise the Iranians would have no choice but to drastically scale back the program, or shut it down entirely.

This was the enigma presented to Dennis Paull, the web from which he needed to extricate both himself and the president without damaging the president’s reputation or jeopardizing the security accord. It reminded him of the classic conundrum of an explorer traveling through a country inhabited by two tribes. The members of one tribe always tell the truth, the members of the other tribe always lie. The tribe that always lies are headhunters and cannibals. The explorer comes across a tribal hunting party, which quickly surrounds him. However, he is unable to distinguish which tribe they represent, and now he understands his dreadful predicament. He needs to ask two questions: the first is, Which tribe are you from? The second is, Will you eat me? But whichever tribe the men belong to they are going to give the same answer: We’re from the tribe that never lies, and we’re not going to eat you. And yet the outcome will be polar opposites, either the explorer will be safe or he will die a horrible death.

Paull was now facing a similar situation, lethal in the political sense with no room to be wrong. Were Thomson and Benson members of the tribe that tells the truth or the tribe that lies? If he acted on their information and they were in fact lying, he would jeopardize not only Edward Carson’s presidency but the future security of America. But if they were telling the truth and he
didn’t
act, out of a belief that they were lying, the same terrible scenario would come about.

“Why did General Brandt order a sanction on Jack McClure?” Paull asked.

“We don’t know,” Thomson said, “except to say that Brandt must feel that McClure presents an immediate danger to his private deal with Yukin.”

Now Paull knew he had to tell the president, get the sanction rescinded before Jack was killed. He wished with very fiber of his being that Jack McClure were with him. Jack would unravel this seemingly no-win situation, because he’d be able to see the sides of it Paull could not. But Jack wasn’t here, and Paull knew he’d have to make the crucial decision as to what to tell Carson himself. He racked his brain to find a way out, or at least to swing the odds from fifty-fifty to a percentage that was more favorable to him and the president.

What was clear, what he had hard evidence proving, was that General Brandt had seriously—terminally—overstepped his authority. This fact—the only one Paull had—argued that Thomson and Benson were telling the truth. That conclusion was far from certain, but what in this life, he asked himself, was ever certain? He had to trust these two, but only as far as he could throw them.

“All right,” he said, breaking the lengthy silence, “I’ll call the president.”

O
RIEL
B
ATCHUK
sat in the ultrabright, candy-colored confines of the Baskin-Robbins in the Globus shopping center on Maidan Neza-lezhnosti, which rose on one side of Kiev’s Independence Square. He was surrounded by bubbling Ukrainians dressed in Tommy Hilfiger or Pierre Cardin, trying their hardest to be American.

His mind, drifting, returned to the past, to his confrontation with Dyadya Gourdjiev, an encounter he had hoped never to have, but that he saw now, with the perfect clarity of hindsight, was inevitable. Their relationship was bound to end in tears, as the British were wont to say, because it was all artifice, meticulously constructed by the two of them out of lies, fabrications, disavowals, and obfuscation. The truth was they had both made compromises and, yes, sacrifices—not so very difficult for men who lacked a moral compass—in order to live in the world with one another, in order not to tear the other limb from limb. The emotions that ran between them, that bound them together in a private arena, were both lava hot and
ice cold, how could it be otherwise, considering the hideous stroke of fate that had befallen them?

But of course now that he looked around the Technicolor store with blind eyes he realized that it was no coincidence that he had ordered the rendezvous here at this particular place, because it was on this very spot, long before Globus was even an idea in the mind of its developer, that he had first seen Nikki. She had been walking with Gourdjiev, he remembered the moment as if it had been transferred from his retinas, seared into his brain, an image that could neither fade nor crumble. That first sight of Nikki transcended time, existed outside it, as if he had caught a glimpse of a creature beyond human ken. For Batchuk, who had never before allowed himself an emotional connection with another human being, the response to Nikki was galvanizing. In fact, he was forced to sit down, though it was not yet time for his meeting with Gourdjiev. He watched, transfixed, as Nikki, arm in arm with Gourdjiev, floated at his side. Then she detached herself and, running past startled shoppers, flew into the arms of a tall, regal-looking man with black hair and hazel eyes. The man, laughing, lifted her up, whirling her around while Gourdjiev stood by, a fatuous grin on his face.

When Nikki planted a kiss on the man’s lips a tiny, involuntary noise escaped Batchuk’s mouth, terrifying him. It was as if an ice pick had been shoved into his belly. He felt sick and dizzy, and was thus at a disadvantage when Gourdjiev left the blissful couple and came to where Batchuk was slumped over in his chair.

“Are you ill?” Gourdjiev said as he slid onto a chair opposite Batchuk. “You’re sweating like a pig.”

“An excess of vodka last night,” Batchuk improvised, “or I should say this morning.”

Gourdjiev laughed as if he didn’t have a care in the world. “Your partying will be the death of you, Oriel Jovovich, of that there can be no doubt.”

This was in the days before Batchuk had been named deputy prime minister, before Yukin has ascended to his self-styled throne, but the two were already close, stars rising in tandem through the perilous firmament of the Russian political chop shop. In fact, it was Batchuk who had introduced Yukin to Gourdjiev, who was then already the éminence grise in the power politics of Ukraine, in all of Eastern Europe, in fact. At that time it was essential to have Gourdjiev’s backing and influence in order to rise to the first tier of power. Batchuk, who loved Roman history, thought of his friend as Claudius, a man who had decided to step away from the bloody turbulence at the center of Eastern European politics, but not from the corridors of power, where he manipulated people and events from deep within its shadowed recesses. Like Claudius he was an unprepossessing man, a man you assumed to be in the twilight of his life, who, like the generals of antiquity, was content to gaze out over the Palatine hill to the magnificent centurion cypresses, dreaming of past glories. Until you came in contact, or perhaps conflict was the correct word, with his astonishing intellect.

For many years Batchuk had stood in awe of Gourdjiev, dealing with Yukin and others as the older man did, with discretion, shrewdness, and diabolical foresight, but try as he might Gourdjiev’s mind was always six or seven steps ahead of him, and in denying the lack in himself he began to envy Gourdjiev, and this malice slowly and inexorably curdled their friendship.

“Who is that man with Nikki?” he said almost as soon as Gourdjiev sat down. He had not meant to, but to his dismay—or, more accurately, horror—he couldn’t help himself.

“That’s Alexsei Mandanovich Dementiev,” Gourdjiev said.

It disgusted Batchuk that he could not take his eyes off her. He’d heard about her, of course, but until this moment Gourdjiev had kept her away from him. Was it by design, he wondered. He watched Nikki and Alexsei, absurdly jealous that they seemed to fit together like two
pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, as if their births were also the birth of a shared destiny. They cleaved to one another, so blissful only a cataclysm, he was certain, could separate them. He said naively, stupidly, “They’re seeing one another?” and immediately despised himself for it.

“You could say that.” Gourdjiev laughed again. “He and Nikki are getting married next month.”

With a start, Batchuk returned to the unpleasant present. The candy-colored world of the Baskin-Robbins, with its yammering kids and harried-looking parents, turned his stomach. Sick to his soul, he rose and stalked out, only to return and glare at them all.

“I’
LL CALL
the president,” Jack said, “and tell him what’s going on. He’ll take the appropriate actions as far as General Brandt is concerned.”

“He may, indeed, do that,” Magnussen said, “but do you really think he will hold up the signing of this historic accord based on your say-so?” He shook his head. “We have no hard evidence of Brandt’s personal involvement.”

“But I know he ordered a sanction on Annika,” Jack said. “That, surely, is overstepping his authority.”

“It may or it may not, we have no way of knowing,” Kharkishvili said. “But the thornier issue, the conundrum that we cannot even begin to solve, is if someone is behind General Brandt and, if so, who it is. This is why we need you. Because getting rid of Brandt, even stopping the signing may not be enough to keep Yukin and Batchuk from ordering their troops across the border. You have no idea how desperate Russia is for new energy sources, how far Yukin is prepared to go in order to obtain them.”

“Either way,” Jack said, “I’m going to have to inform the president.”