Last Snow (35 page)

“This isn’t possible,” Jack said as the hulking figure stopped in front of him. “I shot you dead in the alley behind the Bushfire club.”

“Aren’t you going to thank me? No?” Ivan Gurov waggled the M72 slightly. “Don’t be rude. Without me you would have gone over the cliff instead of the American agent sent to kill you.”

Portia:
“Think you I am no stronger than my sex,
Being so father’d and so husbanded?”
—W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE
,
   
Julius Caesar

“
D
AD, EVERYONE
is lying to you
.”

With the echo of Emma’s voice in his head Jack turned on Annika. “What the hell is going on?” He was so filled with fury his voice had turned guttural. “What are you playing at?”

“There’s an explanation—,” Annika began.

“Of course there’s a fucking explanation.” His voice rose even more. “You and Gurov were in on this from the beginning. Do you think I need an explanation from either of you now? I used Gurov’s gun to shoot him, but it couldn’t have been loaded with live ammo. That scene in the alley was a con.” He turned on Gurov. “The other man, your pal . . .”

“Spiakov.”

“Yes, Spiakov, where is he?”

Gurov shrugged. “Six feet under, I imagine. We required verisimilitude.”

“
Verisimilitude
.” Jack turned back to Annika. “You murdered a man for verisimilitude?”

“It had to be real,” Annika said. “At least part of it.”

Jack was only dimly aware of Alli getting out of the car and approaching them, precisely what he told her not to do. “What I want to know is why you lied to me. Why are you offering an explanation now, at this late date?”

“Because now we’ve gotten you here,” Annika said simply. “Because, dammit, it’s time.”

“You told me you hated Gurov, that he was an assignment.”

“He
is
part of my assignment.” Annika was getting worked up herself. “I only lied to you when it was absolutely necessary.”

“And that makes it okay? That’s a forgivable offense?”

“Don’t confuse me with your ex-wife, who lied to you constantly,” Annika said hotly. “Believe me, I haven’t confused you with anyone else. You’ve made that quite impossible.”

“What is that, your idea of a fucking compliment?”

Jack took a threatening step toward her, and the confrontation might have degenerated into physical violence if Alli hadn’t stepped between them before Gurov could make a move.

“Stop it, the two of you!” she cried.

“If you’ll only give me a chance to explain,” Annika said, taking her cue from Alli.

“Jack, don’t you want an explanation?” Alli chimed in.

“I already have an explanation.” It was clear he was furious. “She’s been lying to me from the moment I met her.”

“Maybe she had a good reason.”

“There’s no good reason for lying,” he said.

“You know that’s not true.”

“Why are you taking her side?”

“I’m not taking anyone’s side,” Alli said. “Anyway, even if you don’t want to know what’s really going on, I do.”

That slowed him down a bit, at least enough for Annika to say, “I’m sorry, Jack, really and truly sorry.”

He saw a change in her, perhaps because she was asking for forgiveness, but, probing beneath the surface, more possibly because of her proximity to Alli, or Alli’s palliative words, as if being near Alli or even hearing her voice changed her subtly, brought her back to herself, whatever lay under her mask, in her unknown and unknowable heart Jack had talked about last night.

“If this could have been done another way,” Annika continued, “I promise you it would have been. But we had no choice.”

“We?” he said, more calmly in response to his probing. “Who is ‘we’?”

“AURA,” Annika said.

But immediately his anger fired up. “The entity or business or whatever you claimed to know nothing about.”

Alli put a hand on his arm. “Let’s not go there again,” she said.

“It may be necessary.” Jack’s eyes were on Annika.

“We’ll deal with that then,” Alli said as if she were the smartest person in the group. Certainly she was the calmest.

He looked over at her, and taking in her tentative smile, nodded his assent. “All right,” he said to Annika, “who or what is Aura?”

She said, “It’s an acronym for the Association of Uranium Refining Allies. It’s made up of—”

All at once, Ivan Gurov stepped forward. “Annika, no. This is a very bad idea.”

She shook her head. “He has a right to know, Ivan.”

“This could lead to dire consequences.”

“Your job is done. Stay out of it.”

Addressing Jack again, she continued: “AURA is made up of a group of Ukrainian businessmen, certain international energy interests in the Ukraine, and a small circle of dissident Russian oligarchs.”

The moment Ivan Gurov had returned from the dead Jack had
seen the nature of the universe into which he had plunged. Now, at last, he saw its structure, as clearly as if he were looking at a scale model of Earth’s solar system.

“So we have AURA on one side,” Jack said, “and Yukin, Batchuk, and their creation,
Trinadtsat
, on the other.”

“Observe, Ivan, this is a man who sees more than you or I,” Annika said. “A man who—how shall we put it?—sees around corners. How much he has gleaned from only the stray bits and pieces he’s picked up along the way, he’s a chess master who sees the endgame forming the moment his opponent makes the first move.”

The sound of an approaching car brought them all into awareness of their surroundings.

“I think,” Gurov said, glancing dubiously at the wreck of the Zil, “I’d best get the car.”

T
HE CAR
in question turned out to be a clunky cab, decrepit but, because of that, absolutely anonymous.

“Where are we going?” Alli said.

“The Magnussen estate,” Ivan Gurov said.

“You knew this all along,” Jack said to Annika. His anger was still smoldering.

She shook her head. “I swear I didn’t know where we needed to go. It was protocol. In the event we got picked up I couldn’t tell our interrogators our destination.”

“Interrogators,” Jack said. “Charming.” And Alli shuddered.

“Mikal Magnussen’s father purchased fifty-five acres perched on a cliff overlooking the Black Sea,” Gurov said as he drove, “high up so he could look down on his neighbors, all of whom consider themselves rich.”

It was five thirty on an evening marked by towering clouds building along the horizon. Not a breath of wind stirred the trees. It was just over thirty-one miles from the airport to the thickly forested area
above Alushta where Magnussen’s father had built his summer compound. They had already come seven-tenths of the way, so in less than twenty minutes they turned off the road and came to a stop before stainless-steel gates, modern and as impregnable-looking as a castle’s portcullis. The gates were attached to a pair of fluted twelve-foot-tall granite columns.

Gurov rolled down his window in order to press a red button and recite something, perhaps a code phrase, into the grill of a small speaker. A moment later, the gates swung soundlessly open and they rolled through, tires crunching on a wide, looping bed of crushed shells.

The Magnussen estate was something out of a storybook, or a gothic novel, possibly
Wuthering Heights
, because its high stone walls, turreted garrets, and dizzying spires were more appropriate for the English or Scottish moors than for a seaside playground. Nonetheless it was impressive and, furthermore, gave an excellent window onto the elder Magnussen’s predilections.

As the taxi approached the house a pair of black-and-white Russian wolfhounds came bounding out of the front door, their eyes bright and curious, their pink tongues lolling.

“Boris and Sasha,” Gurov said helpfully.

“Don’t look at me, I’ve never been here,” Annika said, in response to Jack’s silent query. “I’m surprised that Ivan has, but then I shouldn’t be, our sliver of the world is so compartmentalized—watertight, as we say. That’s how superior security is built brick by brick from the foundation up.”

The wolfhounds—thick, shining coats; small, spear-point heads—pounced on the people as they piled out of the car. Initially they went right to Gurov, but gradually they became interested in Alli who, alone among all of them, knelt on the gravel, engaging them at their own level.

As Jack watched her distractedly a man appeared, came down the
wide front steps, and approached them with the easy gait of someone born to money or power, possibly both.
So this is Mikal Magnussen
, he thought, making his first appraisal of the man he took to be the leader, or one of the leaders, of AURA.

He was a sturdy, even stolid man with startling platinum hair and even more startling blue eyes. His nose, like the prow of a wrecked ship, and ruddy, almost feminine lips, advertised an unsettling dissidence that set off in those who met him a sense of impending disaster. He wore a casual outfit that made Jack think he’d spent the afternoon hunting grouse. The wolfhounds circled him like moons, their tails wagging unrelentingly, licking his polished knee-length leather boots. Those boots, the color of burnt sulfur, were another curious contradiction: hunting boots, clearly handmade of glove-soft leather, without a scratch on their gleaming surface.

His bowlike mouth broke into a smile as he held out his hand. “Jack McClure, at last you’ve found us.” His hand enclosed Jack’s in a firm, dry grip, but he spoke to the others. “Ms. Dementieva, thank you for bringing him, and Ivan, thank you for ensuring they got here safely.”

He had not yet let go of Jack’s hand, and now he returned his attention to him. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Mr. McClure. May I introduce myself? My name is Grigor Silinovich Kharkishvili.”

D
ENNIS
P
AULL
did not see it coming, but then you never do, not this kind of ferocious death, or at least deadly intent. There are people out there in the world who mean you harm, who think of your ending, plot your demise as meticulously as a military campaign. These people don’t matter in the end, the ones who wish you harm, who conspire at arm’s length, studying methods of destruction in small, windowless rooms, swept daily for electronic listening devices, only to return home at the dwindling of the day to their wives and families, their potent cocktails and robust meals. It is their agents,
the ones who you come face-to-face with, who matter, because they’re the ones who carry your destruction in the palms of their hands or on their fingertips as if it were a bottle of champagne to pour over you, or a bouquet of flowers to lay on your grave.

Having been up all night, neither wanting nor needing sleep, Paull prepared to go to his day job as Secretary of Homeland Security. He showered in very hot, then very cold water, shaved and dressed. Uncharacteristically, he spent five minutes aligning the dimple in his tie so that it was in the exact center of the knot. His fingers worked both tirelessly and unconsciously as his mind ticked off the items on his agenda today. The first was stopping off to make arrangements at the funeral home where he’d instructed Nancy Lettiere to send Louise’s body, then the office for six meetings that would take him through two o’clock, possibly three. At four, he was scheduled to hammer out interagency protocol with Bill Rogers, the national security advisor. At five thirty he had a phone appointment with Edward Carson who, he was certain, would be anxious for an update on what he had discovered about the activities of the president’s inner circle. There might be some time to wolf down a bite of food somewhere in there, but he doubted it, so he resolved to stop at a McDonald’s or a Denny’s, whichever popped up first, for a breakfast on the run.