Last Snow (32 page)

He thanked her in his charming, rather formal old-school manner. Waiting until she had disappeared behind the locked door at the end of the hallway, he knocked on the door twice, waited five seconds, then knocked three times.

Without waiting for a reply he opened the door, stepped through, shut and locked the door behind him. He found himself in a square, dimly lighted room with furniture covered in yellow and pink chintz. The one window overlooked a steep green bank down to the somnambulant Dnieper River. Young children, overseen by their mothers, rolled down the embankment, laughing and shrieking, while two lovers lost in themselves stood arm in arm staring out across the gunmetal water.

“Did she try to get you into bed?” Riet Boronyov said.

Gourdjiev nodded. “Again.”

“She wouldn’t charge you, you know.” Boronyov jackknifed his small but very fit frame off the bed on which he’d been reclining, almost as if he had been daydreaming. “She’s hot for you.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev thought of the widow Tanova, her tea and fresh-baked stollen, and laughed. “She’s just rising to a challenge.”

“Don’t tell me you think you’re too old,” Boronyov clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, “because I wouldn’t believe it.”

“I’m not here to speak about Ekaterina or my sex life.”

“No, of course not.” Boronyov gripped the older man’s hand in friendship. “But it would make her happy, and a happy employee is a productive employee.”

“I don’t see how Ekaterina could be more productive than she already is. You take a great deal of money out of this business.”

“Indeed.”

Boronyov looked more like a bug-eyed wizard than an oligarch. When you were a billionaire, Gourdjiev thought, you could afford to be strange-looking without fear of anyone commenting on it. Everyone wanted to be your friend, unless they were too terrified to approach you, and those people were of no use to you anyway. “But because of that shitbag Yukin this is the only one of my businesses that’s currently making money. He and that cocksucker Batchuk are appropriating every last vestige of capitalism I acquired in the nineties. It’s all illegal, of course, but the judges have their heads stuck so far up Yukin’s ass they can’t hear the complaints.”

Gourdjiev had heard this rant many times before, of course, but like Batchuk, Boronyov needed to find some temporary release from his resentment and outrage. He was a capitalist, after all, and anyone who interfered with the free market system was anathema. Besides, his companies and much of his fortune had been stolen by a rigged system, rife with legal nihilism. Had he not fled Moscow just ahead of the armed commandos Batchuk had sent to take him into custody, he would be in a Siberian prison now, stripped of both freedom and money.

It had been Gourdjiev who had warned him of his imminent arrest, not because he held any particular love for the oligarch, but his business model was sadly preferable to that of Yukin and Batchuk, whose level of corruption was staggering both in its scope and its abuses. He had needed Boronyov’s brains and contacts.

Unlike Yukin and, no doubt, Batchuk, Gourdjiev viewed the reign of the oligarchs as a necessary evil, a bridge between Soviet Communism, which had proved to be an abject failure, and a free-market economy. But the oligarchs’ hubris had sealed their own doom. High on the enormous wealth they had amassed in just a few
years, they began to shoulder their way into the political arena. Yukin, whose instincts for self-preservation were acute, moved against them as soon as he detected a threat to his absolute power. He brought down the monarch of the oligarchs, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then the head of Yukos, the largest oil company in Russia. With Khodor-kovsky’s fall the other oligarchs turned into Yukin’s fawning toadies. All save a precious few. To Gourdjiev’s way of thinking Yukin’s steps to renationalize the largest companies in Russia smacked not of socialism, but of a twenty-first-century fascism that was far more pernicious.

“I need to know who gave the FSB orders to assist an American spy who went by the legend ‘Harry Martin,’” Dyadya Gourdjiev said. “And I need to know the name of Harry Martin’s handler.”

Boronyov sat down in one of the chintz chairs and crossed his legs. Surrounded by yellow and pink he looked healthy and robust. Perhaps he was, perhaps life outside Russia agreed with him, or maybe it was his new clandestine life in which he was reveling, his life as a dissident.

Steepling his fingers he said with a Mona Lisa smile, “These are strange days, indeed. I sometimes feel as if I’ve become a seer.” His smile deepened. “Odd to say, but exile can sometimes do that. Wrenched away from the nexus, you become an Outsider, and in order to not merely survive but to be resurrected you’re forced to change your point of view, forced from the subjective to the objective. It’s like putting on a pair of contact lenses, or recovering from cataract surgery, everything becomes clear, sharply delineated. Motives reach the surface at last, and all becomes transparent.”

“So you know the aim of
Trinadtsat.
”

“I know it as well as I know the aim of AURA.” He rose, and with that the color seemed to drain from his face. “But far more importantly, I know your role in both.”

_____

A
FTER THE
first shot, Jack put himself between Alli and the gunman, but they had already made significant progress through the field and the bullets lacked the range, falling harmless behind them. Still, there were two cops running full tilt at them, steel truncheons gripped in their hands like batons in a relay race. Unlike their compatriot, they hadn’t bothered to draw their sidearms, having decided to concentrate on closing the gap between them and their quarry.

“We’re never going to make it,” Annika said. “They’ll be in pistol range any minute now.”

“What do you suggest?” Jack said.

Before he had a chance to react, she slowed and, turning, drew her gun. “Keep going!” she shouted. “Don’t slow down!”

Jack had to drag Alli along with him as she started to drop back. “Come on!” he said urgently. “She’s right.”

“We can’t just leave her,” Alli cried.

“If we stop we’ll all be killed.” He nodded at the figure sprinting ahead of them. “In this instance Kirilenko has the right idea.”

Behind them, Annika knelt and, cupping one hand beneath the butt to steady the gun, aimed at the leading cop. Her left arm felt as if it were on fire. She took long, deep, slow breaths to manage the pain. The cops saw that she’d stopped and began a peppering fire in order to distract her, but she ignored the bullets whistling by her, squeezed off one shot, missed. The second shot caught the lead cop in the right side of his chest, spinning him around before he collapsed. The second cop started to zigzag, stutter-stepping in order to make himself a more difficult target. He fired as he came, forcing Annika to roll, come up on one knee, squeeze off a shot, then roll again.

Looking back, Alli broke away from Jack’s grip and ran back toward Annika. She ignored Jack’s yell, closed her ears to the pounding of his feet behind her. Neither Annika nor the cop were as yet aware of her, and she dropped her gaze to the field across which she ran. At last
finding what she was searching for she slowed and scooped up a rock. Planting her feet with her left leg forward, she threw it with unerring accuracy. It struck the cop on the forehead, just a glancing blow, but it was enough to stop him in his tracks, enough time for Annika to come up on one knee, aim, and shoot him twice in the chest.

“M
Y GOOD
Riet Medanovich,” Dyadya Gourdjiev said, “you should know there are two members of
Trinadtsat
downstairs even as we speak.”

“So after all this time you were playing us.” Boronyov drew a small-caliber pistol from his vest pocket. “You’ve betrayed us and everything we stand for.”

“Don’t be idiotic, I’ve done nothing of the sort,” Gourdjiev said dismissively. “Do you actually think you know what
Trinadtsat
is all about?”

“I know they’re after the same prize we desperately need if we’re to align ourselves with AURA and rise again as a dissident force Yukin can’t stamp out or bully.”

“Then you don’t know anything. Do us both a favor and keep your mind on what you’re meant to do. AURA needs your expertise and your contacts.” Gourdjiev put his back against the window and leaned on the broad sill. “Now please tell me what I want to know about who gave the FSB orders to assist Harry Martin and who Martin’s handler was.”

Boronyov said, “Let’s go down and talk to Batchuk’s ambassadors of pain.”

Gourdjiev was genuinely alarmed. “And announce to them that you’re still alive after all the trouble we went through to ‘kill’ you? That’s the last thing we’re going to do.” He came off the windowsill. “Where is this sudden aggression coming from?”

“Your relationship with Oriel Jovovich Batchuk. You two go way back, you grew up together, had each other’s back for years.”

A whiff of a revelation came to Gourdjiev. “This suspicion isn’t your style, Riet Medanovich.”

“No? Whose style is it?”

“Kharkishvili.”

Boronyov stared at him, silent as a sphinx.

“You understand what he’s doing.”

“He’s questioning the special relationship you have with Batchuk.”

As a gesture of frustration Gourdjiev jammed his hands into his coat pockets. “I’ve explained that.”

“No, you’ve explained nothing, or at least not to anyone’s satisfaction.”

“Be truthful, Riet Medanovich—”

“Have you been truthful with us?”

“I set you all up,” Gourdjiev said. “You, Kharkishvili, Malenko, the others. And now you think—”

“Kharkishvili says it’s all a con—a long con you cooked up with your good friend Batchuk.”

“That’s insane,” Gourdjiev said. “And furthermore don’t tell me you believe it, because I’ll laugh in your face.”

“At this delicate stage, when everything is at stake, it really doesn’t matter what I think or believe.”

“I see. All that matters is what Kharkishvili believes.”

“Think what you will.”

“Oh, I know what he’s done, Riet Medanovich, I’ve known it for some time,” Gourdjiev said. “Ever since I brought him on board he’s sowed the seeds of distrust in order to gain power, in order to displace me. It’s a ploy as old as time, but what it will do is rend us asunder, in civil war we will all fail.”

“He has a better plan.”

“That’s what all would-be tyrants and usurpers say.”

Boronyov appeared unmoved, or at least unconvinced. “We can
end the speculation, distrust, and suspicion right now. All we have to do is go downstairs and talk to the ambassadors of pain.”

“Who was Harry Martin and who was his handler?”

Boronyov stared at him unblinkingly for a moment. “You know who I’m going to have to call to get the answers.”

Gourdjiev waved his hand in the air, Boronyov punched in a number on his cell phone, and spoke briefly to Kharkishvili. “All right,” he said finishing up. “Five minutes,” he said to Gourdjiev, who turned to stare out the window.

The kids and their mothers were gone but the lovers were still there, holding hands, talking perhaps about wedding plans. Their whole lives were ahead of them, Gourdjiev thought. His legs had begun to ache.

He did not turn around even when Boronyov’s cell burred. A moment later Boronyov said, “Harry Martin is a deep-cover assassin out of the American National Security Agency. His handler is General Atcheson Brandt.”

Good God
, Gourdjiev thought in mounting agitation,
now I know why he was after Annika
. However, when he turned back to Boronyov his face was serene and untroubled.

“Now let’s forget all about you going downstairs. Yukin and Batchuk think you’re dead. You’ve got to remain in the shadows.”

Boronyov lifted the gun. “That assumes we’re going to allow these men to walk away.”

Gourdjiev’s mind was working overtime. “You want us to kill the deputy prime minister’s men?”

“No,” Boronyov said, unlocking the door, “I want to watch while you kill them.”

J
ACK GRABBED
Alli around the waist, swung her off her feet, and ran with her toward the far side of the field where, on a rise, a chain-link
fence separated it from the parking lots. No one followed them. Annika was up and running after them. As she came abreast of them she gave Alli a fierce grin. Fifty yards still separated them from the fence. Kirilenko was scrambling up the slope toward it. Gaining the crest, he hooked his fingers through the links and began to climb. There was no razor wire at the top so he had little difficulty reaching it.

They were close to him, having reached the slope themselves. They were scrambling up it when they heard the sharp crack. Kirilenko’s body arched backward as he lost his grip. The second bullet took part of his skull off, and he tumbled backward toward them. His trousers caught on a link, and he hung there, upside down, his rageful eyes glaring at them fixedly as blood turned his hair black and shiny as oil.

M
ONDAN
L
IMONEV
folded the butt of the SVD-S Dragunov sniper rifle. He spent precisely twenty seconds admiring what he’d done to Rhon Fyodovich Kirilenko, whose corpse hung like a plastic sack of garbage from the chain-link fence. Without conscious thought he broke down the lightweight Dragunov with its polymer furniture. It was gas-operated, quieter yet more deadly than other rifles, and it fit in a case small enough to carry beneath one arm, like a baseball bat or a pool cue. The 7.62x54R steel-core rounds he’d fired into Kirilenko had done a satisfying amount of damage.