Last Snow

SEVENTEEN

HARRY MARTIN, hanging on the phone in the middle of a bustling Kiev street, didn’t like his job—in point of fact he loathed it with a seething, poisonous intent. The truth was he was sick to death of all the double-dealing, disinformation, obfuscation, and outright lies that came so easily to him. And that, of course, was what he despised most of all—that all the artifice was second nature to him now, ingrained like the whorls of his fingerprints or the pattern of his DNA. He simply did not know any other way to live, if this was living at all, which he’d begun to seriously doubt. And therein lay the rub, as the good Bard wrote, he thought, because the only thing to fear was doubt. He knew from his mentors that the moment you allowed doubt to creep into your thinking—doubt about your ability, about the people around you, about the dark and gravelike profession you were in—you were as good as dead. It was time to get out while you were still on your own two legs, rather than lying in a coffin stiff as a log. Doubt made you hesitate, doubt clouded your judgement and, worse, dulled your instincts, because, really, when you came down to it, your instincts were all that kept you alive. Instincts and, to an extent, experience.

Feeling as apart from those around him as the shadows on the building facades, he listened while the electronic connections were made, one by one, like the tumblers of a lock or a safe falling into place. He knew his call was being routed and rerouted through a complex network. This was how his boss liked his security; this was how it was done, no questions were ever asked by anyone within the system, least of all Martin himself.

Doubt felled few of his kind, however. More often, if it wasn’t a bullet or old age, years of stress delivered the knockout blow via a dyspeptic stomach, ulcers, or worst of all, irritable bowel syndrome. Nothing, he thought, would take you out of the field faster than having to hug the porcelain horse unexpectedly and in debilitating succession. Martin had developed none of these symptoms. Not that he didn’t feel the stress; it worked its corrosive magic on even the most inhuman of agents. But he relieved the stress by being angry; the more stress he felt the angrier he got. Anger kept him sharp, kept him close to his instincts. Even more important, it kept doubt at bay.

“Yes?”

At last his master’s voice entered his ear via his cell phone. “Can you talk?”

“What do you have for me?” General Atcheson Brandt, said.

“There’s another faction in the field,” Martin said.

“What, precisely, do you mean?”

Martin could feel in those words the General coming to full attention, as if he were a pointer who’d smelled blood. “Someone else was at Rochev’s dacha—someone who belongs neither to Kirilenko nor to the SBU.”

“I trust you can be more specific,” Brandt said with all the considerable asperity at his disposal.

Martin began walking, more to dispel nervous energy than toward any specific destination. His lack of success in finding Annika Dementieva was going to be last on his discussion list with the General.

“There was a sharpshooter hidden in the woods,” Martin said. “He took a shot at one of the people who were in the dacha—” He stopped right there, knowing he’d made a mistake.

“You let them get away?” Brandt’s voice was like a rumble of thunder heading Martin’s way at tremendous speed. “How did that happen?”

At this very instant Martin hated his job with a malevolence that set his heart palpitating. “There was a fire, confusion, everything collapsed into chaos, and when we—”

“Most convenient, that fire, wouldn’t you say? Most clever.”

Martin, leaning wearily against the plate-glass window of a men’s clothing store, found himself staring at an Italian cashmere sweater he yearned for but couldn’t afford. He needed to slow his heart rate, to learn not to hate so much, but it was too late, the venom was in his blood, in the very marrow of his bones.

“Yes, sir. They used the fire to escape.”

“They, you keep saying ‘they.’ ” Brandt’s voice buzzed in his ear like a trapped wasp. “Who, precisely, are ‘they’? Besides Annika Dementieva, of course.”

That was the crux of the issue, Martin thought sourly—he didn’t know and, worse, he couldn’t tell the General that he didn’t know. It was clear that he had to change the subject, go on the offensive, take the pressure off himself, deflect the General’s questions by raising others the General needed to answer.

“I hope to God you haven’t been keeping anything from me—”

“Keeping what?” the General said. “What are you talking about?”

“—because out here in the field where tough decisions, terrible decisions, life-and-death decisions have to be made in an instant, not knowing the complete playing field could prove fatal.”

“Listen—”

“If you know anything—anything at all—about this other faction, who, it must be assumed, are after the same thing you are, then I need to know about it now, not tomorrow, not later.”

“I don’t cotton to being interrupted.”

The General’s voice was like a fistful of fury, and Martin knew it was fortunate that he wasn’t in the same room with his boss. There was a story about Brandt: As a senior in the Academy he threw a rival out a second-floor window, breaking his leg. Anyone else would have been summarily expelled, but Brandt was so brilliant, his family so well connected, that no disciplinary action was taken nor was there a civil suit filed. Though the story might very well be apocryphal it nevertheless served the General well, having lent him a mythical sheen all through his career.

“It goes without saying that if I knew anything about a rival faction in the field I’d let you know,” the General said, filling the awful void that had sprung up between them. “I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I’ll tell you one thing: I sure as hell am going to find out.”

While staring at the cashmere sweater with its V-neck, double stitching, and magnificent silky texture, he discovered that he didn’t believe the General, not for a minute. On the contrary, he knew in his bones, in their very venom-riddled marrow, that the General was lying through his teeth. Of course he knew about “another faction,” he’d known from the beginning of this wretched assignment. And at that precise moment Martin suspected this mission would be the death of him. Worse—far worse, as far as he was concerned—he finally understood, with a godforsaken clarity, the underlying reason why he loathed his job with a seething, poisonous intent. The General was like Harry Martin’s father, so much so, in fact, that he now couldn’t for the life of him understand why he hadn’t seen it before.

“In that regard,” the General carried on, “your instructions visà-vis Annika Dementieva are hereby changed. Finding her and taking her into custody will no longer suffice. I want her terminated ASAP.”

Leaning with his forehead against the cool plate-glass window, he closed the phone and at the same time thought, It’s that damn cashmere sweater. It reminded him so much of the one his father used to wear around the house, swapping his suit jacket for the sweater, but never taking off his tie, not at dinner, not afterward. Martin remembered wondering whether his father slept in his tie, except the next morning he’d emerge from the marital bedroom in a crisp white or blue shirt with a different tie knotted perfectly at his Adam’s apple.

I want that cashmere sweater because it was my father’s, Martin thought now. He turned away from the shop window display, lurched over to the gutter and, bending over the gap between two parked cars, vomited up his breakfast. He hadn’t done that since he was fifteen and, sneaking home after curfew, had encountered his father in the lightless foyer, who had struck him so hard across the face his outsized knuckles had drawn blood from his son’s nose and cheek. Turning on his heel, the old man had climbed the stairs and closed the door to his bedroom without uttering a single word.

Martin had raised himself to his knees and, without thinking, spent the next twenty minutes wiping his blood and vomit off the wooden floor, scrubbing and polishing the boards until they shined even through the darkness. With each tread he climbed, his dread at encountering his father again mounted until, as he reached the second-floor landing, his hands were shaking and his knees refused to carry him any further. He collapsed there, rolling onto his side, curled up like an injured caterpillar, and eventually fell into a sleep made fitful by images of himself running from a pack of grinning dog-faced boys in military uniforms.

Standing abruptly erect Martin staggered away from the scene of his unspeakable humiliation and sought refuge in a tea shop down the block, where he slid onto a chair by the window and stared bleakly at the hurrying masses of bundled, red-faced Ukrainians. What his mind saw, though, was the General, or rather his father—now they were murderously interchangeable. He thought when he’d buried his father that would be the end of his misery, his suffering, his neediness, but no, he had chosen a job, or perhaps it had chosen him, that mimicked the relationship he had found both intolerable and indispensable. What was he now in middle age, he asked himself, but the same adolescent whom he’d despised for so desperately needing the approval of a man he loathed. How does the human mind do it? he wondered. How can it thrive on antithetical, antagonistic, diametrically opposed absolutes?

And then, his mind still unable to let go of that cashmere sweater, he began to think of Sherrie because—and this was the really strange part—in the wintertime she had liked to walk around the apartment in an oversized man’s V-neck cashmere sweater. Just the sweater and nothing else, her long, pale legs emerging from the bottom, and when she turned around, a glimpse of the bottom of her lush buttocks. She liked to tease him that way, a behavior that must have been a form of revenge, because one evening when he returned from overseas—Munich or perhaps Istanbul, he couldn’t remember which—she was gone: Sherrie, her suitcase, and her cashmere sweater; the drawers in the bedroom, the shelf in the bathroom, the half of his closet he’d ceded to her empty. The smell of her lingered like a last cigarette, but only for a day or so. By that time he’d called her more than a dozen times, had gone by her apartment at night, like a stalker, looking for lights, for her silhouette against the drawn Roman shades. Nothing moved, nothing remained, and eventually he forgot her.

But he hadn’t forgotten her, because here she was now, or at least the memory of her, as he stared bleakly out into the crowded Kiev street, haunting him as if she had just left him moments before, or yesterday, instead of three years ago. He wished she were here now, though what he’d say to her he had no idea. Not that it mattered; he was alone. There was no Sherrie, or any of the girls before or after her, whose faces folded into each other along with their names. They were all gone, they’d never actually been there, he hadn’t let them.

The waitress took his order, returning almost immediately with a small pitcher of cream and miniature bowls of sugar and honey. She smiled at him but he didn’t return it.

His eyes were red-rimmed with bloodlust, his heart a blackened cinder beyond any hope of repair or remediation. He wanted neither; he wanted only to kill someone, to steep his hands in blood, Annika Dementieva’s blood.

“YUKIN IS going to want tangible concessions,” General Brandt said as he and President Carson landed in Sheremetyevo airport. “That’s how it works here, they’re Russians, talk means nothing—less than nothing. People say things here—Yukin among them—they don’t mean. The air needs to be filled with buzzing, any form of buzzing will do, in fact, the less truthful the better.”

“I know all this,” Edward Carson said. “Lies obfuscate, and as far as the Russians are concerned, the more obfuscation the better.” He wore a neat charcoal suit with a red tie and an enamel pin of the American flag affixed to his lapel. Brandt, on the other hand, had decided to come to Russia in his military uniform, complete with his chestful of medals. Uniforms impressed the Russians, they always had. They were like the worst bullies on the block, lashing out with strained aggression to compensate for their insecurities. They knew better than anyone that the Western powers viewed them as semicivilized, as if they were apes pretending to be human beings.

Having slowed to nominal ground speed, Air Force One turned off the runway and began the long slow taxiing to the VIP terminal.

“We have prioritized the concessions we’ve put into the final draft of the accord,” Carson continued, “chief among them the revision of our missile defense deployments around Russia.”

“The conservatives are going to scream about that one,” the General said.

“They forfeited the right to complain when they fucked things six ways from Sunday when they were in power,” the president said. “Besides, General, you and I both know the technology for the missile defense system is still not in place. If we had to implement it today or next week or even six months from now it would be a joke.”

“It’s real enough to President Yukin.”

“Because it surrounds Russia like a noose.”

The General nodded. “I’ve gone on record on both ABC and CNN that our proposed MDS is the main reason for Yukin’s recent aggression into Georgia.”

Carson lifted a finger. “One thing I need to make clear. Yukin can’t expect unilateral support from us, I’m not coming to him on bended knee.”

“Absolutely not. That would give him an advantage he’d never relinquish. But that can’t happen now, because he wants something from us only we can give him.”

“I hope to God you’re right, General. Everything depends on this security accord being signed.”

Brandt sat back, never more sure of the plan he’d outlined to the president days after his taking over the Oval Office. It was crucial, he’d argued, to enlist Russia in the crusade to keep nuclear weapons out of Iranian hands. They knew through intelligence and back-channel diplomatic sources precisely what missile parts Russia was selling to Iran. Nothing the previous administration had done had had any effect on Yukin’s business dealings with Iran, a result Brandt had predicted with unerring accuracy. Carson was different, however; he’d listened to reason, had agreed when Brandt had outlined an alternative method of weaning Yukin away from the dangerous Iranian teat.

If the diplomatic rapprochement was the foundation method, then the security accord was the cornerstone to its success. Which was why Brandt was replaying in his mind the disturbing phone call from Harry Martin. Of course he knew about the other faction in the field—that was the whole point of Martin’s mission to intercept Annika Dementieva. Annika was the key to everything. That Martin had not yet been able to find her was unsettling enough, but the fact that he had now gotten wind of the other faction meant that it was far more advanced in its plans than he knew about or had been led to believe. One of two conclusions could be drawn from this: Either the other faction had suddenly gained in power or the sources he’d been relying on had underestimated it. Neither possibility was a happy thought, especially with the accord signing imminent.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, unbuckling his seat belt and standing up. “I need to make a call.”

Going forward down the wide aisle, he punched in a number that was too secret to keep either on his speed dial or in the cell’s phone book. It was a number he’d committed to memory the moment it had been given to him.

As the connection was going through he reflected on just how much he hated dealing with the Russians. To a man, they were a treacherous lot, the long shadow of Josef Stalin stretching into the present. They were all Stalin’s students, the General thought, whether or not they were aware of it. His viperous double- and triple-dealing became the political template—not to mention the KGB’s modus operandi—set in the kind of monumental stone it was impossible to undermine, let alone destroy.

Brandt himself had become a secret student of Stalin’s, of his history of blood, broken bones, and broken promises, in order to prepare himself for taking on the Soviet Bear. The dissolution of the USSR hadn’t fooled him the way it had others. Russia’s power might have been broken, but he knew it to be temporary; its flinty spine, fortified by Uncle Joe’s vampiric shadow, was still very much intact.

“I have three minutes.”

The voice in Brandt’s ear caused him to bristle inwardly, but he swallowed his outrage because he knew that, in fact, he only had three minutes. “My man in the field has just informed me that the opposition is gaining ground.”

“Even if that’s the case,” Oriel Jovovich Batchuk said, “these people are no match for Trinadtsat. They have neither the manpower nor the resources to take advantage of the situation.”

Batchuk wasn’t denying it! Brandt massaged his forehead with his fingertips while shielding his eyes with the palm of his hand, dispelling the possibility that anyone on board Air Force One might inadvertently see the expression of consternation on his face. “It seems to me that we have to entertain the possibility that the situation on the ground is being rewritten even as we stand here talking to one another.”

“A hiccup, that’s all,” the deputy prime minister said. “We still hold the high ground, that’s all that matters.”

Batchuk had power in spades, that was indisputable, but what they were aiming for was so complex that no one man could guarantee its success. Acknowledging this reality was, after all, the prime reason he and Batchuk had forged this risky alliance and even riskier plan, why each of them was wagering their power and their influence—everything they possessed—with their respective presidents. For Brandt, however, there was another matter: money. He’d never had it, had been forced by his expertise at political maneuvering to be around those who did, and he burned with envy. He wanted his share of the gravy train and God help anyone who stood in his way.

“To ensure our success,” he said now, putting stress on every word, “I’ve put out an immediate sanction on Annika Dementieva.” He expected a response, possibly an irate one, from Batchuk, but his words were met only by silence. “I’m convinced she’s causing this hiccup, as you call it. A cure is needed, even for a hiccup.”

“I would find it difficult to disagree with you,” Batchuk said. “Who has been given the assignment?”

“Harry Martin. He’s the assassin-in-place.”

“Where is he at the moment? At Zhulyany, I assume.”

“If he was at the Kiev airport,” the General said, growing annoyed at the note of condescension in Batchuk’s voice, “I’m sure he would have told me.”

“Hmm, interesting.”

Now the General really was annoyed. “How so?”

“Rhon Fyodovich Kirilenko, the FSB officer your man Martin is supposed to be shadowing—”

“I know who the hell Kirilenko is,” the General said, beginning to lose his temper despite himself.

“Kirilenko’s name has just shown up on a flight manifest departing Zhulyany in forty-three minutes, bound for Simferopol North Airport in the Crimea.” Batchuk cleared his throat, the better to emphasize what he said next: “Either your man Martin is an incompetent or he’s decided to play both ends against the middle.”

“I know Harry,” the General said, “and he’s neither.”

“Then figure out your own explanation,” Batchuk said.

The General immediately phoned Martin and informed him of Kirilenko’s whereabouts. The moment he heard the surprise in Martin’s voice he resolved to put another man in the field ASAP. This he did the moment his call to Martin was over.

He shifted from one leg to another, his body creaky and diminished inside the perfectly pressed uniform with its splendid show of medals and commendations.

“General, it’s time.”

The president’s voice, strong and firm as always, caused him to return down the aisle at his usual crisp pace to where Carson was now standing, waiting for the door to open while the contingent of Secret Service operatives buzzed around him like horseflies.

“You look gray-faced, Archie,” the president said under his breath. “Is there anything wrong, anything I need to know?”

“No, sir,” Brandt said, struggling to regain his composure, “of course not.”

“Because we’re on the firing line now, about to go into battle and, to paraphrase Sonny Corleone, I don’t want to come out of this aircraft with only my dick in my hand.”

The General nodded. “Understood, sir. I have your back, your guns are loaded, and all your ammunition is dry and awaiting your orders.”

“That’s the spirit,” Carson said with a tight smile.

The flight attendant spun the door wheel and it opened inward. The first of the president’s agents took command of the rolling stairs, then others checked out the immediate vicinity. For a moment, they spoke with their opposite numbers in the Russian secret service, then one of them turned, gave a brief, reassuring nod to his commander in chief.

“Okay, General,” the president said. “Here we go.”

THESE DAYS Dennis Paull never slept; he never stayed in one place for very long, either. It was as if he needed to keep one step ahead of the banshee that was on his trail. That banshee—or demon or ghost, whatever you wanted to call it—had a name: Nina, the woman he’d had an affair with who had almost killed Edward Carson at his inauguration. Only Jack McClure’s timely intervention had saved the president. For that Paull would be eternally grateful. If only Jack could exorcize the demon or ghost or banshee that haunted Paull’s waking life, but Jack was just a man, not a sorcerer.

Paull, who had set up a temporary office in a Residence Inn on the outskirts of the District, planned to spend his nights unearthing all there was to know about the members of Edward Carson’s inner circle. He sat at a drab desk in front of his souped-up laptop, scanning a screen full of information from yet another government database he’d hacked into. Factoids from the public and private lives of Vice President Crawford, Kinkaid Marshall, G. Robert Kroftt, and William Rogers floated across his screen like messages from a phosphorescent universe. He was particularly interested in Crawford. Like John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson before him, Carson had been drawn into a shotgun wedding with the old-line and conservative Crawford in order to carry Texas and the other swing states in the old South. The two men never got along. Though their public face was all smiles, behind closed doors their politics was fraught with friction and, at times, animosity. Though Crawford wasn’t nearly as bad as some of the intransigent members of the party, Paull didn’t like him; he certainly didn’t trust his style of backroom wheeling and dealing. Who knew what insidious pols Crawford was in bed with.

This was the work Paull had been doing since he arrived at just after six in the evening. It was now half past eleven. To one side was an open cardboard box with the remaining two slices of pepperon-cini pizza from Papa John’s. He rose, went to the bathroom, and washed the olive oil off his hands. Then he crossed to the window, peering through the slatted blinds at the smeared headlights on the highway. The traffic’s constant drone made him feel as if he were inside a beehive, an appropriate sound track for his working environment.

All at once he shivered and, focusing on the reflection of the room in the glass, thought he saw Nina, or more accurately her shadow, passing from right to left. Whirling, he confronted the half-dark room, lit only by the lamp that shed a pool of light over the desk, his work area, one corner of the stained pizza box, bloody with tomato sauce.

He wanted to laugh at the empty space, at his own foolish fears, but something stopped him, a sense of foreboding, perhaps, that he couldn’t shake. There was, for him, a sense of things ending, instead of beginning as they should have with the installation of the new administration. The world appeared to be sliding away from him, as if it were falling off the edge of a table into darkness.

Of course he was furious for allowing himself to be deceived by Nina, but that was in the past and it belonged there. Nevertheless, he was still furious, possibly more so, because he couldn’t forget her, because he missed her. She hadn’t been just another fuck, she hadn’t been just another sexy woman. When she betrayed him she’d devoured a piece of him he now knew he’d never get back. In the wake of her betrayal he felt diminished, not simply foolish or abashed. She’d stolen something vital.

Turning back to the window he stared out at a world hustling by, indifferent to his pain. He was alone, as he would be in the moment before death took him, and this made him think of his father, who was alone when he died because Paull was busy studying for his graduate school finals. He wished his father were here now, because he was the only person Paull had ever been able to confide in. Even Edward Carson, arguably his best friend, didn’t know everything Paull’s father had. The man had been compassionate enough to forgive Paull his sins and mistakes no matter their severity. “Why wouldn’t I forgive you,” he said once, “you’re my son.” And then, continuing, said, “Your mother’s gone and forgotten. You’re all I’ve got, I have to forgive you.” And yet he died alone, Paull thought, as we all do, whether we forgive or not, whether we hold people close to us or push them away, as Paull had his own wife, who was in the final, horrifying stages of Alzheimer’s, locked away in a facility. He went to see her less and less these days; she didn’t know him, but what did that matter, he had an obligation, didn’t he, he’d taken an oath: in sickness and in health. But he’d distanced himself from her, both physically and emotionally. She was like a painting, or someone perpetually asleep, dreaming a life he could never understand. Did a radish dream, or a head of cabbage? She never responded in the slightest way to the music he put on during his visits—Al Hibbler singing “After the Lights Go Down Low,” for instance, or the Everly Brothers singing “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” songs they had loved and, in their youth, had danced to. He’d thought of this, a calming consolation, when six months ago he’d taken up one of the spare pillows and prepared to lower it over her face that, in her infirmity, had grown round and shiny as a metal globe. She wouldn’t know what was happening, what he was doing to her, and if she did, he was certain she’d be grateful. What kind of life was this she led? Even cows had it better, but not, perhaps, radishes. He was seconds away from doing it, his fingers gripping the sides of the pillow, his mind already made up, set on its path, when the music came on: Roy Hamilton’s “Don’t Let Go.” It seemed somehow sacrilegious to commit murder—even compassionate murder—while that song was playing (“I’m so happy I got you here/Don’t let go, don’t let go”), and something inside him shifted, everything changed and, turning, he put the pillow back where he’d found it. Then, without a backward glance at his wife or the radish, he left and hadn’t been back since.

He turned back into the hotel room, away from the glare of the headlights, and sat back down at the dingy desk and the endless lines of information scrolling across his laptop’s screen.

Why wouldn’t he forgive Nina, she was all he had.

But Nina was beyond his forgiveness, Jack had shot her through the heart before she’d had a chance to poison everyone at the inauguration with the vial of anthrax given to her by Morgan Herr. This, then, was Dennis Paull’s dilemma as he sat scrolling through the so-far innocuous mountain of electronic data: He was indebted to Jack McClure for saving Edward Carson, but he hated Jack for killing Nina.

RHON FYODOVICH Kirilenko had just enough time to swing by his office and pick up the photos his assistant had pulled off the CCTV cameras at Zhulyany Airport before transferring to a waiting FSB vehicle that took him, at reckless speed, to board his scheduled flight to Simferopol.

While his driver was weaving through the clogged arteries of Kiev he studied each of the three photos. The first was of the three people: Annika Dementieva he could see clearly enough. Behind her, his face partially obscured, was a man who looked vaguely familiar. Kirilenko spent several fruitless minutes trying to place the visible features before moving on. The second photo was of the young girl, who bore no resemblance to anyone in Kirilenko’s memory bank. He studied this photo in a rather abstract manner; for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what she was doing with the two adults. To his knowledge, which was extensive to the point of encyclopedic, Annika Dementieva had no sisters, and the girl was too old to be her daughter. So who on earth was she? Sighing in frustration he turned to the third and last photo, which was a full-face shot of the man. Almost immediately a galvanic shock rode up his spine. He knew this man, he worked for the President of the United States. What the hell was he doing with Annika Dementieva?

Kirilenko stared out the window, seeing nothing but his own muddled thoughts. He knew his duty was to inform his superior of this shocking development, but something—a stubbornness, resentment, a feeling of being at once played and betrayed—stayed his hand. He was tired of being manipulated. Bad enough to be fucked over by the Americans, that kind of treatment was a given, but to be fucked by his own people, who had to know they were throwing him into an international arena filled with land mines, was more than he could tolerate. But there was something else—something deeper—at work in his mind. He was finally in possession of information not available to his superiors; now, fate had given him a modicum of power, and he was not willing to part with it so quickly. Shoving the photos away, he resolved to keep his own counsel until he could determine just what was going on.

IT WAS too bad for Kirilenko that he wasn’t carrying the only copies of the photos his assistant had taken off the airport CCTV. Twenty minutes before he’d arrived, Oriel Jovovich Batchuk, standing in front of Kirilenko’s desk, confronted his assistant. He received the latest oral report from a young man he’d found it ridiculously easy to suborn, with half his mind still chewing over his disturbing conversation with Gourdjiev.

When it came to the subject of Annika there could be no equivocating, no ending, no exit for either of them. No matter how hard either of them tried to fight it their roles were set in stone, there was no reversing position, no going back. But the knowledge of what had happened, of what could never be changed, was a hateful thing, a spider spinning its malevolent web in his mind. And this was because of one simple fact he’d never uttered to anyone, but which he suspected Gourdjiev knew: Even if he possessed the impossible power to change the past, he wouldn’t. He did what he had to do, something a man like Gourdjiev could never understand, let alone condone. Batchuk was a man who could not afford to second-guess himself; rather, he preyed on others’ not wanting to know, not wanting to see the truth about themselves or those whose acquaintance was politically or financially important to their careers; preyed on people afraid of conviction, of being wrong, who would rather close their eyes and listen to his guidance. Gourdjiev had done that once—only once—to his unending sorrow, a situation Batchuk could read on his face every time they met.

A certain silence made it clear that Kirilenko’s assistant had finished his oral report. Nodding, Batchuk ordered him to make copies of the photos. He took them without comment and, turning on his heel, left.

He was already on his cell phone as he descended in the elevator and exited the huge, intimidating lobby of the FSB building, striding through the slush of Red Square.

GENERAL BRANDT, seated next to President Carson and across a gleaming marble table from President Yukin, received Batchuk’s call at a most inconvenient time. Nevertheless, seeing who was calling, he excused himself, went out of the room and partway down the corridor, out of earshot of the various Secret Service personnel from both sides who were flanking the door like sphinxes.

“There’s been a new development,” Batchuk said without preamble. “Annika Dementieva isn’t moving on her own. I’m looking at a photo of her from one of the closed-circuit cameras at Zhulyany Airport. She’s with two other people, one of whom is the American Jack McClure.”

“President Carson’s Jack McClure?” the General said, and almost immediately regretted the stupidity of the question. Of course it was Edward’s Jack McClure. “I don’t understand.”

“Carson is playing you,” Batchuk said tersely. “He’s got an agenda he’s keeping from you, which means he no longer trusts you.”

The General gave an involuntary glance over his shoulder, toward the silent bodyguards and closed door that led to the negotiating room, where Carson was even now locking horns with Yukin. “But that’s impossible.”

“Nothing’s impossible,” Batchuk said with unconcealed fury. “Clearly. This is on you, General. McClure is your mess, I suggest you clean it up with all the haste you can muster.”

“I can’t imagine what Carson is playing at, putting McClure into the field, and with Annika Dementieva, no less.”

“It doesn’t matter what either of them are up to. McClure needs to be extinguished, expunged, immolated. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly.” The General was too taken aback to be off ended by Batchuk’s taking control. They were facing a mess, he’d trusted Carson, and in doing so had allowed matters to get out of control. They were all finished if McClure remained alive, of that he was absolutely certain.

“Don’t worry,” he said, gathering himself. “McClure won’t live to see another sunrise, that I promise you.”