Last Snow

TWENTY-ONE

AFTER HOURS of wildly pumping adrenaline a stunning fatigue had set in. Jack lay back against the seat, closed his eyes, and allowed the vibration of the car to lull him to a kind of shallow sleep.

“Dad. Dad, tell me that story again.”

He opened his eyes, turned his head slightly, and there was Emma sitting beside him. So it wasn’t a dream, or perhaps it was, perhaps he was still sleeping.

“Which story?” His voice was so soft it barely registered over the road noise. Besides, Alli and Annika were talking to each other in low tones.

She was turned partway toward him, her right leg drawn up beneath her, the other one hanging down, the heel of her shoe tap-tap-tapping against the seat. “The one about the scorpion and the turtle.”

“I told you that so many times.”

“Dad, please tell it again.”

There was a tension in her voice, an intensity he found disquieting, so he told her about the scorpion and the turtle who meet on the bank of a river. The scorpion asks the turtle to ferry him across on his back. “Why would I do that?” the turtle says. “You’ll sting me and I’ll die.” “I can’t swim,” the scorpion says. “If I sting you I’ll die, too.” The turtle, a logical creature, is swayed by the scorpion’s reply, so he allows the scorpion to climb on his back and out they go into the river. Midway across, the scorpion stings the turtle. “Why?” the turtle cries. “Why did you lie to me?” “It’s my nature,” the scorpion says, just before they both drown.

Jack looked into Emma’s dark eyes, as if trying to peer beyond the veil of life. “Why did you want me to tell you that story again?”

“I wanted to make sure you remembered it,” she said.

“How could I forget it?”

“That’s what I thought, but I guess you need a reminder.”

“I don’t understand, honey.”

“Dad, everyone is lying to you.”

He was suddenly tense. There was a knot in his stomach. “What do you mean everyone is lying to me?”

“You know what I mean, Dad.”

“I don’t. Everyone, like Edward?”

“The president,” she said.

“And, what? Alli?”

“Alli, as well.”

“Why would Alli lie to me? Come on, Emma. What is this?”

“Dad, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.”

“You always tell me things I don’t know,” he said.

“About us, yes. The two of us. That’s why I’m still here. But about everything else, no, I can’t.”

“The way you say it . . . as if it’s some kind of law.”

“I suppose you could look at it that way.”

“A universal law, like physics or quantum mechanics?”

He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles just in case he really was sleeping. But when he opened them, whether in fact he was asleep or awake, he found himself alone in the backseat. There was no one to answer his question.

“NOTHING IS inherently good or evil,” Annika was saying to Alli as Jack looked around for his daughter, “it’s just disappointing.”

“Give me an example,” Alli said.

Annika, her eyes on the road, thought for a moment. “All right. In ancient Rome, there was a man, Marcus Manlius, who had masterminded the plan to save the Capitol from destruction when Rome had been overrun by the Gauls. This was in, oh, three ninety, B.C. Anyway, in the aftermath of the war that drove the invaders out, as in all wars, the soldiers who had so bravely defended their homeland were now out of a job, and soon so deep in debt they were thrown in prison, an injustice Marcus Manlius would not tolerate. He used much of his great fortune to buy these heroes their freedom, an act of altruism that pissed off the patricians of the city, so much so that they accused him of building his own private army in order to force his way into power. The plebs, incited by the patricians’ charges, sentenced Marcus Manlius to death. They threw him off the Tarpeian Rock.”

Alli remembered that the Tarpeian Rock had fascinated Emma because it was the spot where criminals were hurled to their death. It was named after the traitor who opened the gates of Rome to the Sabines for the promise of gold bracelets. Instead, when she let them in, they crushed her with their shields, which they wore on the same arm as the bracelets so coveted by Tarpeia—a vestal virgin, no less! How ironic. She was buried at the base of the rock that came to bear her name, which rose from the summit of a steep cliff on the southern face of Capitoline Hill, overlooking the Forum.

Rome had been founded by thieves, outlaws, murderers, and slaves who’d been clever enough to escape their masters. The only trouble was there were no women, which is why these early Romans, as they called themselves, decided to steal females from the neighboring Sabines. It was this infamous rape—the Latin raptio, meaning kidnapping—of the women that led to the Sabines’ revenge, using Tarpeia as their cat’s-paw.

This dark side of Romans—of Rome itself—had caught and held Alli’s attention, because in addition to being responsible for the invention of roads, the aqueduct, and numerous other innovations, it was the Romans who, infamously, had created the homicidal system of election. Those leaders they didn’t like, learned to dislike, feared, found fault with, or about whom they invented transgressions (out of envy or greed) were murdered forthwith. Alli, having been born to and brought up in the incubator of politics, felt the tension, the unspoken fear of assassination that swirled around her father in ever thicker layers the higher on the political ladder he climbed. And when she’d come to Moscow she almost immediately had intuited how similar it was to ancient Rome, how much the modern-day political system had been infected by that of the Romans: institutionalized murder as a means to an end.

“So,” Alli said after her moment’s thought, “what you’re saying is that even the best intentions turn to shit.”

“I’m saying that all of us are doomed to disappointment. I’m saying I embrace that disappointment because it’s the ultimate leveler, it doesn’t care about class or money or power. It’s the great reaper.”

“You mean the grim reaper,” Alli said. “That’s death.”

Annika shrugged. “Take your pick.”

THE CALL came in to Dennis Paull’s cell phone at three thirty in the morning. He was in the middle of a labyrinth of data he’d finally been able to pull off of General Brandt’s cell phone records, as well as a definitive report on his comings and goings over the last year. In fact, Paull was busy reading the item that interested him the most: two unofficial round-trip flights to Moscow, both in the last six months, both over weekends, that were neither recorded or expensed by any government agency. That wouldn’t have necessarily set off an alarm bell in Paull’s mind, but there were a number of oddities. For one thing, General Brandt paid cash for first-class tickets. For another, both flights had been on Aeroflot, not Delta, an American airline, which by all rights he should have taken. Where in the world did the General get ten thousand in cash for two trips to Moscow? He hacked into the General’s bank account at District National. A day before the withdrawal, ten thousand was wired into the account from Alizarin Global, an entity Paull had never heard of.

His cell buzzed. He was plunged so deep in thought he almost didn’t answer it.

A local number not recognized by caller ID. “Hello?”

“Mr. Paull?”

“Yes?”

“This is Nancy Lettiere, we’ve met several times. I run the Alzheimer’s wing at Petworth Manor. I’m sorry to report that Mrs. Paull expired at three eleven this morning.”

For a long time after that Paull sat very still. His eyes still ran over the lines of information on his laptop just as they had during the long hours before the call, but now nothing registered in his brain, which was suddenly filled with a dreadful little refrain repeated over and over—“You weren’t there, you weren’t there, you weren’t there when she died”—as if it were a ridiculous children’s song coming out of a ghostly radio in her room. All at once he was suffocating in the sickly-sweet odor of her, of . . . good God, he couldn’t even say her name, she’d been a vegetable for so long. And yet now he was choking on what was left of her, of Louise, as if he’d inhaled the ashes of her funeral pyre.

He pushed back his chair, rose, and left the room without retrieving his coat. The fire stairs echoed harshly with his hurried footfalls. Outside, he lit a cigarette, but almost immediately the night manager appeared behind the glass door, pointed to the cigarette, and shook his head vigorously. Paull took a deep drag and blew the smoke against the glass.

The night manager frowned, slid his key card into the slot, and opened the door. “I’m sorry, sir, but federal regulations prohibit any smoking within twenty feet of the building.”

Paull said nothing, stood looking at him while he continued to smoke.

“Sir, did you not hear me? If you persist I’m going to have to call the authorities—”

He gave a startled yelp as Paull grabbed him by the lapels and slammed him up against the wall, then struck the man in the stomach. As he doubled over, Paull hit him in the side of the head, then flush on his nose, which immediately gushed blood.

For a moment Paull drew smoke into his lungs and let it out in a luxurious plume. He was dizzy with the onrush of adrenaline. At length, he knelt down and showed the night manager his credentials.

“I am the fucking authority, buddy.” He hauled the man to his feet and pushed him roughly through the door. “So fuck off before I turn you in as a suspected terrorist.”

Alone again, Paull stamped out his ruined cigarette and lit another. He stepped out onto the asphalt lot. Shouldn’t it be raining, he thought, gloomy weather to match his mood? Instead, a brilliant butter-colored moon rode in the sky, and all at once he was thrust back twenty-eight years, when he used to read Claire Goodnight Moon. He read it so often that she had soon memorized it and then she recited it aloud with him as he read.

He took another long drag and let the smoke drift out on its own. Seven years ago Claire had visited for a long weekend with her then boyfriend, one of those young men full of entitlement based on an inflated assessment of their own self-worth. She was nothing but smiles and laughs, even when they had gone together to visit Louise, who, at that time, might on occasion still recognize her daughter.

Following dinner on Saturday night, in an awkward attempt at male bonding, the boyfriend had invited Paull out onto the back porch. Producing a pair of cigars, he boasted that they were Cubans. Not a good way to get into Paull’s good graces. Nevertheless they smoked together companionably for a time while the boyfriend spoke about his important job on Wall Street, his conservative views on politics, religion, and morality, his plans for the future, which appeared to include Paull’s daughter.

It wasn’t until late in the day on Sunday that Claire told him she was pregnant, that she wanted to marry the boyfriend as soon as possible, which, Paull intuited, was the underlying reason for the visit. He did not argue with her, he said scarcely anything at all. She no doubt thought he took the news quite well, but then he’d done an excellent job of making her think he liked the boyfriend who, Claire made clear, as yet knew nothing of her changed physical state. In fact, she was excited about telling him, having picked out the time and the place that to her seemed the most romantic. “It’ll be just like a scene from the movies,” she gushed, her eyes shining.

For his part, Paull chose his own time and place to tell the boyfriend, watched in satisfaction as the young man choked on an inhalation of Cuban cigar smoke when he delivered the news.

“I expect you to do the right thing and marry Claire,” he said, which was a risk he’d carefully calculated. Instead, as he’d suspected, the boyfriend cleared out, wanting nothing to do with a child conceived out of wedlock. What a hypocrite, Paull thought. He had no trouble taking my daughter to bed before their wedding night but his moral righteousness kicked in the moment the consequences of his reckless fornication reared their ugly head. He was enraged and had been since the cigar-smoking incident of the night before when the boyfriend had stupidly revealed himself, telling Paull how important he was, how much he made, talking about the house he had his eye on in Connecticut, giving his bona fides for buying Claire at any price, as if she were an expensive cut of meat, or a racehorse, he rode her well enough.

The only problem was Claire. Instead of being grateful to him for saving her from such a shallow hypocrite, she railed against him endlessly, screams and tears bursting forth in equal measure before she slammed out of the house. Certain that her hysterics would pass he allowed several days to go by before he phoned her. She wouldn’t take his calls, and to this day never again spoke to him. He had a grandson, this much he knew, but whether or not his daughter had married, or married the hypocrite, or whether she was a single mother he had no idea. Once, he’d hired a private detective to find out, but paid him off a day later, sick of the whole sorry issue. The only thing he was grateful for was that Louise was too far gone to understand the unpleasant mess that without warning had been dropped into his lap.

As for Claire, he rarely thought about her now, except at odd times like these, and then he recalled her not with a twinge of nostalgia, but with a pang of disappointment. He did miss knowing about his grandson, even if he was the offspring of entitlement and hypocrisy, but only because someone would have to wean the boy off those tendencies before they poisoned his system. He found it sad, tragic even, that it wouldn’t be him.

The thought of his anonymous grandson living an unknown life burned his skin as if he had thrust his arm into the furnace that would soon enough consume the sadly wasted remains of Louise. He stared down at his open hand, pulsing with blood, and for the first time came face-to-face with what it meant to be alive, to look back and see nothing but loss, a diminution of self, of his soul. He backed up against the cold wall that still held a smear of the night manager’s blood, slid slowly down it. The moon was hidden from him now. Goodnight Claire, goodnight nameless little boy of seven, goodnight moon.

UPSTAIRS IN his darkened room, which sudden and unwanted sentiment had caused him to vacate, a brief but telling hacker’s probe scanned General Brandt’s private data over which Paull had been poring like the devil’s advocate, then it captured the ISP address of Paull’s computer. Within fifteen minutes of the probe being withdrawn an anonymous car hit the road, driven by a man who looked like an accountant, or possibly a schoolteacher, but who, having received his orders, was fully weaponized and ready to destroy life.

MR. LOVEJOY KNEW this road like the back of his hand. The Crimea had been his theater of operations for five years now. Not that he’d ever gotten used to it. The food still lay like a leaden ball in his stomach, his skin always itched from some fungus or other, and he hadn’t slept in the same bed for more than three straight nights. The saving grace was the women, who were young, tall, blond, and plentiful. They loved foreigners, particularly Americans, who they hoped to rope into marriage in order to get them out of the hellhole into which they had been born. Once you knew that about them you could entice anything out of them. Mr. Lovejoy was looking forward to this evening’s festivities, which he’d already set in motion, anticipating a quick resolution to this commission.

The road had risen up as it reached the cliff face. Already he could see the aquamarine sparkle of the Black Sea as the road began its long sweep around the coastline. Checking his odometer he saw there was less than a kilometer to the apex of the curve where the commission would be, as he put it, realized. It was time and, pressing down on the accelerator, he moved the Toyota into position.

The great sweep of the Black Sea, now darkly bruised by lowhanging clouds on the horizon, was rapidly opening up as he approached the apex. The Zil had already entered the first part of it. Swinging out into the oncoming traffic lane, he put on a sudden burst of speed. A moment more and he’d slam his off-side front fender into the left rear quarter of the Zil, launching it into a death spiral that, by his calculations, would send it over the cliff during its second rotation.

“MORE SPEED!” Jack shouted from the backseat.

“Hang on!” Annika called back to him.

As he saw the Toyota pull out into the left-hand lane, he added, “Jesus, he wants to send us over the cliff.”

“This damn auto.” Annika’s hands gripped the wheel as firmly as possible, but it had begun to vibrate alarmingly as the Zil started to shimmy. “If I go any faster we’ll go over the damn cliff without his help.”

“Here he comes!” Jack said. “Alli, curl yourself into a ball and stay that way.”

He rolled down the window and began firing at the oncoming Toyota, but their own car was behaving badly, shaking as if at any moment it would fly apart from the excessive stress it was under. Jack was thrown back and forth, making it impossible to get off a clean shot.

“Annika, for God’s sake, put on more speed!”

She did as he asked, and for a moment it appeared as if the maneuver would work. They began to pull ahead of the Toyota, but then something lurched, forcing Annika to flutter the brake to stop them from flying off the road into thin air.

In that moment, the Toyota hit them and they slewed badly, beginning their spin. Jack, thrown against the open window, caught a glimpse of the Toyota before they spun around in a circle.

Annika threw the Zil into neutral and turned off the ignition. The car continued to spin, coming perilously close to the edge before she was able to regain a semblance of control. Not that it mattered, Jack thought, because the Toyota would hit them again, the driver finishing what he had started. But as he caught a second glimpse behind them, something slammed so violently into the Toyota it rose into the air. An instant later, it exploded, hurtling down the cliff face, and the choking smell of burning gasoline engulfed them.

By this time, Annika had brought the Zil to a shuddering stop on the right verge of the road.

“Alli,” Jack said, scrambling across the backseat, “are you all right?”

She came slowly out of her defensive position and, slightly dazed, nodded. It was then that Jack saw the movement out of the corner of his eye and, turning, watched a figure walking down off the high embankment on the landward side of the road. In one hand he carried an M72 LAW, an antitank weapon, the lightweight successor to the World War II bazooka, but he held it loosely, pointed at the ground. His size made it look like a child’s toy. The man continued to walk heavily across the road toward the Zil. Jack’s mind was working on the appearance of this man in the same way it had calculated the vectors of their run toward the oncoming jet, trying to find explanations in the extraordinary, working backward from the moment the Toyota exploded to the filthy back alley in Moscow. He came up with various explanations, possibilities, conflicting judgments, and fantastic speculation, but, unfortunately, no definitive conclusions. He had come to one of those moments when assumptions are derailed by a reality you could not have imagined, like turning a Rubik’s Cube and finding a fourth dimension you hadn’t calculated into your reasoning. In fact, for the moment the rational had been obliterated, logic was of no use whatsoever. Death and life had merged, or changed places, and everything else had come to a standstill.

“Stay inside the car,” he told Alli.

She turned and, peering out the driver’s side window, saw the man coming across the road. “Who is he? Jack, what’s going on?”

“Please, Alli, just do as I say.”

As if in a trance he opened the door and got out. The large, bearlike man came on, his slicked-back hair shining in the sunlight, and Jack experienced an eerie chill that went clear through him. The fourth dimension of the far side of the Rubik’s Cube was almost upon him. In an attempt to make sense of the present his mind flashed back to the hotel bar in Moscow, where the man facing him had been arguing with Annika and her friend; the back alley where the bearlike man and his partner had lain in wait to kill Annika; the pitched battle that had followed, at the end of which the bearlike man lay in a pool of his own blood.

In self-protective reflex Jack pointed the gun at him, but Annika, having emerged from the collapsing automobile, strode quickly up to him and pushed down the barrel.

“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.”