Last Snow (49 page)

“Alexsei, think for a minute, if I were having an affair with Oriel would either of us be stupid enough to meet in public, let alone at a restaurant frequented by your colleagues?”

“I know him, he wants to throw the affair in my face, he’s out to humiliate me, he wants everyone to know that he’s taken you away from me.”

“You speak of me as if I were a horse or a sack of wheat.”

That was when Gourdjiev turned on his heel and left. No good would come from him inserting himself between them, especially when emotions were running so high. It was only when he emerged from the building and saw the spotlit domes of the Kremlin that he knew there was only one place for him to go.

“Is everything all right?” Magnussen said now, wrenching Gourdjiev back to the present. They stood in the villa’s entryway. “We didn’t expect you.”

“Yes, I know,” Gourdjiev said, “but there was no place else to go.”

B
ATCHUK WAS
inside the perimeter of the manor house before he saw a guard. The brick wall surrounding the property was high but
not particularly difficult to scale or to get over. The real difficulty was in keeping his silhouette from being seen in the gloaming of dawn. There were no trees on the cliff top, no foliage to mask his movements, but luck was with him, a light fog was billowing in off the water in ghostly waves.

Dropping down off the top of the wall he heard faraway barking and he crouched down, still as a rock. If there were dogs on the property, particularly hunting dogs, they would present a problem. With the onshore wind they would already have picked up his scent, or would at any moment. Close to the front of the house he saw the Zil. As he watched, a guard emerged from the house and drove the Zil around to where a number of other cars were parked.

As soon as the guard was back inside Batchuk ran as fast as he could, zigzagging, still bent over, heading for the left side of the manor house. He reached it without incident, but now he heard a chorus of barks, close enough for him to identify them as belonging to Russian wolfhounds. Wolfhounds were not in themselves dangerous, they liked people too much, but they would certainly sound the alarm for those inside the house. Any moment now other guards would come pouring out, following the dogs who, he was now certain, had picked up his scent.

He knew the feeling, he’d had a hound coming after him the night Nikki told him that she couldn’t see him anymore, that Alexsei had found out about them and was causing a terrible row. She told him unequivocally to stay away when he said he was coming to make sure she would be safe.

“I don’t need you to feel safe,” she had told him. “I don’t need you at all.”

“You do need me,” he had replied like an idiot, as if he were seventeen, “I know you do, Nikki, no matter what you say you can’t hide it from me.”

“You are so deluded,” she shot back, “I was a fool, weak and sad,
and you caught me in that moment, you took advantage of me and climbed all over me.”

“Don’t give me that,” he said, “you loved every minute of it, it was you who climbed all over me, if memory serves, you couldn’t get enough.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” she shrieked, clearly terrified.

“I did what you wanted me to do, nothing more.”

“Liar! It was what
you
wanted.”

“You can’t fight it, Nikki, I don’t understand why you even try.”

“Idiot, because I’m married.”

“You’ll divorce him, I’ll make it easy for you.”

All at once she sounded desperate. “I pledged my heart, my life to Alexsei, don’t you get it? But, no, I don’t suppose you do, why would you? You have no soul, no humanity, you’re heartless, pitiless, you want what you want, that’s the beginning and the end of it.”

“Then why did you give in to me? Why did you scream over and over in ecstasy?” He barely got out the last word when she hung up on him.

An hour later Gourdjiev came for him, baying at his door, and he had had no choice but to let him in, no choice because Gourdjiev knew he was home, and if he’d ignored the repeated knocking he’d become a prisoner in his own apartment. He had plenty of power, it was true, but so did Gourdjiev; he had no wish for an all-out war that would bring an end to both their political careers, he had too much on the line to take that risk. And so he opened the door, accepted his medicine, the righteous indignation, the affronted anger, the howl of the animal that feels its off spring threatened.

Visibly chastened, he did not argue, he acquiesced. Whatever Gourdjiev wanted of him he did without argument or protest, let him win this battle, let the war wait in abeyance, all the players frozen in place, until the moment when he himself dictated that the next act would begin.

______

B
UT THE
dogs would not wait, the wolfhounds came tearing through the carefully manicured foliage—sculpted boxwood and cotoneaster, as close-clipped as a general’s hair—to where Batchuk had crouched under the eaves at the back of the house, but he was no longer there, and they ran in dizzying circles, barking and yelping, their nostrils full of his scent, but with nowhere to go.

“That badger again,” one of the guards said, after he and his companion had had a thorough look around, “or maybe this time an opossum.”

J
ACK WAS
just finishing up his call with Dennis Paull, having at last found the time to answer his urgent voice mail, when he caught sight of Annika. She was in the entryway, talking with Dyadya Gourdjiev, of all people, obviously just arrived, as he stood in his water-beaded overcoat. At this hour, as misty dawn light crept slowly up to the manor house, everyone should have been sleeping, they should have been in bed hours ago, sleeping through the small hours of the morning, when the country was quiet and indolent, dreaming of yesterday or the day after tomorrow, when sorrow’s heartbeat was stilled at last, overcome by hope. But Vlad’s attempt on Jack’s life had turned the world within the manor house upside down; at Kharkishvili’s urging several of the guards had hustled the inhabitants outside while Ivan Gurov and his crew interrogated the kitchen crew, discovered Vlad’s treachery, and slowly, feeling shaken, chilled, and desolate, everyone had filtered back inside, where they puddled in the library, knocking back glasses of slivovitz and watching each other with ambushed eyes.

Jack told Paull his location and said, “Now have my would-be NSA assassins turn their skills to good use,” before he disconnected.

Dyadya Gourdjiev had seen Jack, and Annika turned and ran toward him, flung her arms around him, and held him tight.

“I was so frightened for you,” she whispered in his ear. “I was terrified they had succeeded.”

“They?” he said as he held her at arm’s length. “Who do you mean?”

“The Americans, of course.” Her carnelian eyes studied him with complete candor. “The Izmaylovskaya’s reach doesn’t extend to the Crimea. At least you’re safe from them, if not from your own despicable people.”

She had put him in danger the moment she had lured him into the alley behind the nightclub in Moscow, but there had been no real danger from Izmaylovskaya revenge, she was with him, and the supposed dead Ivan Gurov, loyal, brave, and more clever than he appeared, had been watching over both of them. Then the game had unexpectedly opened up, as General Brandt sent NSA agents after them, and now, after those agents had been withdrawn from the field, another—Vlad the Poisoner—had been dispatched by Alizarin Global. For what reason? Why did Alizarin want to kill him? Time to find out.

“Annika, listen, I need to speak with Vasily Andreyev, but I want you and Dyadya Gourdjiev with me as witnesses. I know Gourdjiev just arrived and he must be tired, but can you see if you can convince him to do that now?”

“All right.” She nodded and went back to the entryway, where Gourdjiev was immersed in what appeared to be a heated discussion or argument with Kharkishvili, who had stopped on his way out.

She touched his arm and, though reluctant to cut short the discussion or argument, he could not refuse her. She spoke briefly in his ear and he glanced at Jack, who stood ready and waiting. Then he nodded, said something curt to Kharkishvili that, to Jack, looked something like, “Don’t forget what I’ve told you, we’ll continue this later.” Kharkishvili stalked out as Annika and Dyadya Gourdjiev approached him.

Having taken a stroll around the main level with Alli, his brain had automatically memorized the floor plan as a three-dimensional space. He therefore knew that the best place for privacy was the old-fashioned drawing room. It had mullioned leaded-glass windows out to the west side of the house and only one entrance, double doors that opened onto the short corridor that ended with the kitchen, pantry, and back door.

Jack found Andreyev, his hair disheveled, his black button eyes furtively glancing at Alli every chance he got. A glass of slivovitz in one hand and a cigar in the other, he stood against the mantel; either he or it required propping up. The other oligarchs were now nowhere to be seen, Andreyev said that Magnussen had suggested they go for a walk to clear their heads before breakfast, but he hadn’t felt up to it. So that’s where Kharkishvili was off to. Two guards and, of course, the three Russian wolfhounds had accompanied them. By Jack’s count that left Alli and two guards remaining on the property. Gurov was gone, transporting Vlad the Poisoner back to Simferopol North Airport for delivery to the FSB. The emptying out of the manor house suited Jack’s purpose.

Andreyev accompanied Jack and Alli out of the library, down the rear hallway, and into the more private drawing room, where Annika and Dyadya Gourdjiev greeted them. Jack saw in Annika’s face a sense of great expectation, of a mystery about to be solved. As for Gourdjiev, he had his usual sphinxlike expression, calm and unruffled, despite the tension of the moment.

“You should have told me you were part of AURA,” Jack said as he clasped the old man’s hand. His grip was still firm and sure.

“No need to burden you with something you didn’t then need to know.” He gave Jack a grandfatherly smile. “Annika tells me that you will solve the dilemma of the uranium field, of Yukin’s land grab, the specter of a spreading conflagration.”

Jack’s eyes flicked to her and back. “Annika puts great faith in me.”

“She does,” Gourdjiev acknowledged. “She has from the very beginning; she is an unerring judge of character and, just as importantly, of potential.” He paused, waiting expectantly.

“May I ask,” Andreyev said in his furtive manner, “why you have brought me here, Mr. McClure?”

“Certainly.” Jack put him firmly under his gaze. “I am extremely unhappy with the unwanted attention and inappropriate advances you have made on my daughter.”

“You must be mistak—”

The beginning of Andreyev’s transparent denial was cut off by two short bursts of semiautomatic fire. Jack, racing to the double doors, was about to thrust them open when they opened from the outside. Oriel Batchuk stood in the doorway, an OTS-33 Pernach machine pistol in his hand. Reacting immediately, Jack chopped down on his wrist, knocking the Pernach to the floor, but Batchuk shoved past him, raised his left arm at Andreyev as if he were accusing him of being alive. The lethal dart struck the oligarch in the neck. Clawing at it, he fell to his knees, the terrible clicking sound of massed insects coming from his throat before he pitched over, dead.

“Step back.” Batchuk swiveled his arm. “Step back or Annika dies next.”

Jack did as he said, and Batchuk, crouching down, plucked the Pernach off the floor. “All right,” he said, standing and pointing the machine pistol at them. “Time to disarm yourselves.”

“T
IME TO
disarm yourself,” Batchuk said.

“I will kill you now.” Alexsei Dementiev was silhouetted in the doorway of his apartment, in which Batchuk was already standing, a Makarov pistol in his hand.

During one of his earliest evenings there before his affair with Nikki began, Batchuk had made a wax impression of her key, had a copy made so that he could gain entrance any time he chose. Though he was not given to introspection, he nevertheless understood that the complete domination of her privacy was essential to his conquest. At work, at court, inside the Kremlin, or elsewhere in Moscow, it pleased him to know that he was always, in one way or another, intimate with her.

“I’m not joking or bluffing,” Alexsei said.

His face was drawn, deeply etched with tension and misery. To Batchuk he looked ten years older than when they had first met at court, only eighteen months ago.

“I’m quite certain you’re not, I assure you that I take the threat quite seriously.” But by the way Alexsei held the pistol Batchuk knew he was no expert in firearms. In fact he wondered whether Alexsei had ever fired a Makarov, or any pistol for that matter.

“You deserve to die.” Alexsei was growing tenser, more anxious. “For what you have done to my wife I will be justified in taking you out with the rest of the garbage.”

“Tell me, Alexsei,” Batchuk said, “have you ever killed a human being?” He cocked his head. “No? As someone who has killed many men, let me assure you it’s no easy thing, no, not at all. You never forget the face of the first person you kill, the look in his eyes as the light goes out.”