Beloved Enemy (33 page)

She shook her head. “It’s too dangerous. If Rolan wakes up while we’re gone he’ll come looking for us.”

Namazi’s hand moved upward. “Let him. He won’t find us.”

“Once he’s gone up and down the aisle, he’ll know where we are and what we’re doing.”

“So?”

“Iraj, he’s my husband.”

“He stopped being your husband seven years ago when your grandfather admitted him to the Assumption of Mary Clinic.”

Annika stared at him. Her face was a perfect mask, revealing nothing of the emotions that battered her like a fierce storm. For the first time, she understood why Dyadya had insisted on keeping alive the lie that Rolan had died during the Syrian’s raid. He was playing God, giving her a clear field to seduce first Namazi and then Jack. The trouble came when she discovered that she had fallen in love with Jack—a sad, doomed love between two people on opposite sides of history. Once he saw her align herself with the Syrian—a man he was pledged to destroy—there was no chance of reconciliation. They were enemies, now and forever—beloved enemies. She did love him deeply, with a passion she had never felt for anyone before, not even Rolan. What cruel fate had set them at odds with each other and kept them that way? There were times when she was desperate to find a way out, a way for them to be together, but there was none, no matter what Caro said. She knew it, but she couldn’t accept it.

“Annika.” Namazi’s voice, though lower, had become urgent. “Annika, come on. While we have the chance. The more we fight the more I burn for you.”

She rose from her seat and, feeling him trailing after her, went to the unoccupied lavatory.

Iraj closed and locked the door as soon as he had followed her in. He pulled her to him, his hips molding against hers. She could feel his heat and his size prodding her like a great mailed fist.

She reared back over the tiny oval sink and struck him across the face as hard as she could. After a moment’s shocked paralysis, he locked his hand around her throat. He snarled at her, his lips drawn back from his teeth.

“That’s right,” she said as his other hand slithered inside her blouse, “take me right here, rape me. That will surely cement our partnership.”

“I could,” he said. “You know I could.”

“Says every man to every woman down to the dawn of time.” Her disdain for him was unmistakable. “You do what you have to do, Iraj, and I’ll do the same.”

There was a moment then when they were locked together, the gulf between them, having been revealed, of unutterable depth.

“I never should have…” Namazi began.

“Never should have what?”

He stared at her with blank eyes, his mind seeming far away. Then, with a feral grunt, he let her go, turned his back on her, unlocked the door, and stepped out.

Annika relocked the door, even though the plane was already in its final descent toward Zurich Airport. For long moments, she stood absolutely still, listening to her heartbeat, the breath soughing in and out of her lungs.

Had Iraj changed or just her perception of him? What did it matter? Iraj had become his own most adoring fan; with every day that went by now, he spent more time burnishing his own legend than seeing to business—a business that was shrinking because Caro had presciently locked him out of his own trove of funds. Having become larger than life, Iraj had turned inward, becoming, in the process, a hollowed-out straw man, no longer fit to rule his vast regime.

She stood inches away from the shining precipice of the future—a future without Iraj, a future with her at the helm of his regime, restructuring it, turning it to her grandfather’s design. Or was it her own? She could no longer tell. She felt it now as one feels a sudden rush of blood to the head. She was dizzy with the revelation that there was no limit to which she would not go.

When she lifted her hand to smooth back her hair, she saw someone in the mirror she did not fully recognize and for some reason felt a terrible fear grip her.

Bending over, she vomited up everything that had been inside her.

*   *   *

“What does she want from me?” Jack said. “There are only so many times she can betray me.”

“Annika wants what her grandfather wanted,” Noemie said.

Jack looked at her. “And what is that?”

“We don’t know,” Radomil said.

“You don’t know.” Jack looked at both of them in turn. “You’re spending your life taking orders from an old man and now from his granddaughter, and you don’t know why.” He shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

“But you do,” Radomil said. “You knew Gourdjiev.”

“I spent time with him,” Jack said. “That’s hardly the same thing.”

“He trusted you, Jack,” Noemie said.

Jack gave her a bitter smile. “I keep hearing that. The trouble is, I don’t believe it.”

“If he didn’t trust you, he never would have allowed you to get near Annika.” Radomil drummed his fingers against the art racks. “Listen to me, four years ago, when you were in Moscow with the president, he sent Annika to fetch you, to bring you to him.”

“Through trickery and lies.”

“Would you have come of your own free will?”

“I was with the president; I had a job to do. Gourdjiev didn’t figure into it.”

“Well, in fact he did,” Radomil said. “It was through his indirect help that the president was able to sign the security treaty with Russia. True or false?”

“Okay, but that seemed to be a by-product of Gourdjiev getting what he wanted.”

“Does that matter?” Radomil asked.

“We’re back to means and ends,” Jack said, “and being damned—all of us whom he’s involved in his schemes.”

“All this talk is meaningless,” Noemie said.

“If you were in my position,” Jack said, “you wouldn’t think so.”

Radomil cocked his head. “Annika tells me you have an uncanny ability to see patterns before anyone else.”

It’s hardly uncanny,
Jack thought. “She isn’t wrong,” he said, “but this puzzle is impenetrable. I have no idea what Dyadya Gourdjiev’s endgame might be.”

“Then let’s ask Giles Legere,” Radomil said.

Jack shook his head. “I’m going after Legere alone.”

“Radomil will drive you,” Noemie said firmly. “He’ll also protect you, should circumstances warrant it.”

“I don’t need a nanny—”

“We have our orders,” she interrupted. “Besides, you’re a wanted man.”

*   *   *

Alix stepped into the back of the car Director Krofft had sent for her at precisely eight o’clock. The sky looked ghostly gray, stark against the apartment buildings. Not a breath of air was stirring.

Alix, in a sea-green tube skirt, white blouse, open at the throat, soft leather ankle boots, sat back against the plush seat. She was aware that she was dressed more like Jonatha, but thought, Fuck it, why not?

“Where are we going?” she said to the back of the bulky driver’s head. “Are we picking up the Director at work?”

“He had a late meeting.”

Alix chuckled, thinking of Krofft—Robby—saying “
I’m up to my ass in meetings.
”

“He’ll meet you at the Inn at Little Washington.”

Out in the country
, Alix thought,
at one of the best restaurants in the D.C. area. Just the director of the CIA and me
. She stared out the window as they crossed the Potomac on Route 66. Up ahead, the lights of Virginia sparked and glistened.
And he’s going to offer me a job. Oh my God, not to be constantly hounded by hordes of reporters, all wanting scoops. Not to be held hostage to the POTUS’s idiot whims.
She was elated. It amazed her how unknowable life was. One minute she had been cast into a black pit, the next she was scaling new heights, lifted up by Robby’s helping hand.

She saw the driver’s eyes regarding her in the rearview mirror and she smiled, almost preening.
I am the honored guest
, she thought.
Consort to the director of the CIA, even if only for this one glorious night
.

Feeling an eerie sense of power flooding through her, she leaned forward. “Would you turn on the radio, please? I’d like some music.”

“Sure thing, Ms. Ross.”

A moment later, Dusty Springfield was singing “Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa,” a terribly sad, terribly exciting song that had always been one of her favorites. She was so happy she sang along for a few bars. “I hate to do this to you/But I found somebody new…”

She hummed along for the rest of the song.

They crossed over into Virginia and, soon enough, were in the countryside, on the last lap to the Inn at Little Washington and her starry, starry night.

“Ms. Ross,” the driver said, “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind.” His eyes engaged hers again in the mirror. “I haven’t been out from behind the wheel in hours.”

“Sure,” she said. “Of course.”

“Hey, thanks.” He smiled. “My bladder is bursting.”

He slowed, pulled over to the verge of the road, and stopped. It was darker here the night more true to its foundations, starlit.

Star-crossed
, she thought with a smile.

The driver turned. “Ms. Ross?”

“Yes.”

She was staring right at him when he pointed the silenced pistol at her and shot her point-blank between the eyes.

“
Hold on, Alix
.”

Was that Jonatha’s voice?

But it didn’t matter now. Alix’s irises rolled up into her head. There was no breath left inside her.

Lana Del Rey was singing, “Born to Die.”

T
WENTY

G
ALINA
Y
EMCHEVYA,
now in her late forties, had lost none of the singular glamour or heady sensuality that had made men weak-kneed around her for the past thirty years. Time had worked one of its inscrutable miracles, so that, if anything, she was now even more transfixing than she had been in her youth.

Emerald-eyed Galina, skiing down the vertiginous, serpentine black diamond course outside Méribel, was as fit as any twenty-year-old athlete. With the limbs of a swimmer, the face of a goddess, and the heart of a lion, she was a modern-day griffin. As Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about one of his most indelible characters, Galina possessed “the face of the most beautiful of women and the mind of the most resolute of men.”

She had been skiing all morning, starting in the eerie oyster darkness just before dawn, carrying a torch, like the ancient Olympians, the flame guiding her through the crystalline wind and powdery snow. Galina, who looked Aryan rather than Russian, was, in fact, a great admirer of Leni Riefenstahl. Galina owned a 35mm copy of Riefenstahl’s
The Blue Light
and her infamous Nazi propaganda film,
Triumph of the Will
, a chronicle of the Nuremberg Rally, as well as several of her lesser-known works, including an extremely rare twelve-minute reel of her interpretation of
Tiefland
, Adolf Hitler’s favorite opera, a project the director never completed.

So far as Galina was concerned, nothing except a strenuous bout of sex beat a run down the snow-covered mountains of Méribel just as the sun was rising, flooding the slopes with bloody light. But by ten o’clock, she was ensconced in her massive chalet, enjoying a multicourse breakfast prepared by their private chef. By her left hand was, as always, a pack of cigarettes, a chunky, masculine lighter, and a thick cut-glass ashtray.

Her newspapers were spread out for her, each page ironed the way English butlers in the nineteenth century used to do so their masters’ hands wouldn’t be dirtied by the ink.

She was scanning the papers, in her opinion, the way news was meant to be disseminated, and was halfway through her leisurely breakfast when Giles Legere made his appearance. Unlike her, he was still in his purple silk jacquard dressing gown. His sandy-gray hair was tousled and there were still night creases on one cheek where his head had met the pillow.

“For God’s sake,” Galina said without looking up, “the least you could do is make yourself presentable for breakfast.” She reached for a cigarette and, with a practiced motion, lit it.

Legere shot her a poisonous glare before seating himself. “Just coffee,” he snapped at the maid, who had brought over a copper chafing dish of scrambled eggs and sausage. Shuddering as she let smoke drift from her nostrils, he said, “It’s barbaric the way you smoke at this ungodly hour.”

“It’s going on eleven,” Galina said. She was absorbed with the story of the massacre in the downtown Zurich hotel, for which the police claimed they had no leads. “God has been awake and active for ages.”

All Legere could produce was a noncommittal grunt. He stirred his coffee absently, though he had leavened it with neither milk nor sugar. Guiding the spoon was simply a way to keep himself occupied while he tried to outshine Galina. He scarcely knew why he tried; he’d never been successful before, and now, of course, it was impossible.

“Pyotr’s dead,” he said, because he could think of nothing else to say.

“Clearly.” Galina stubbed out her cigarette, looked up at last. “You seem to have taken it well.”

“Not as well as you, I daresay.”

“Stop trying to sound like David Niven,” she snapped. “It ill becomes you.”

“You have no idea what becomes me,” he said dully.

She stared at him for a moment. “Perhaps you’re right,” she said, returning to the unhelpful and, in her opinion, poorly written news story and then muttering something.

“What was that?” he said.

Her emerald eyes rose above the top of the paper. “I was just musing on why you would build a vertical ski chalet.”

“We live in a vertical world. Méribel is a vertical town, this mountain is vertical.”

“Who cares? You could have just as easily cut across the mountain as others did.”

“If the house makes you uncomfortable,” he said slowly, “why don’t you leave?”

Their eyes locked for a moment, then went their separate ways. As it always seemed, nowadays. Of course, she wouldn’t leave, and Giles knew why. She was hanging on for a piece of Gourdjiev’s legacy. He shouldn’t, in all fairness, blame her, though he did, with a vengeance.

Legere drank some coffee. “Things are bound to change now,” he said after a time. “In that, at least, Pyotr was useful.”