Last Snow

TWENTY-FIVE

“JACK, I’M sorry.” Alli turned her face into his shoulder. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry about, honey. You had no way of knowing what would happen. And what if the two of you had died, have you considered that possibility?”

She shook her head mutely.

Jack’s heart constricted. He felt blindsided by Alli’s revelation. He didn’t blame her for her decision, he didn’t see it as a betrayal of her deep and abiding friendship with Emma, only a deep and abiding ache in his heart that she had been carrying this anguish around in addition to her terror at what Herr had done to her.

“Jack, please say something,” Alli said with a clear note of desperation.

It was no good wondering what would have happened if Alli had been behind the wheel the morning of Emma’s death, Jack knew; no one would ever know what it was that caused Emma to swerve off the road at speed and into the tree. He could ask Emma, of course, the next time she appeared, but he suspected that she didn’t know or couldn’t remember. And, in any case, she had already urged him to move on from his own guilt, and this set his mind, expanding outward to absorb the different points of view, on the right track.

He saw Annika standing beside Kharkishvili, watching them, and he turned Alli away from her to face him. “Listen to me, we’re both carrying guilt about the choices we made the morning of Emma’s death, and maybe that wound will never fully heal, but I can assure you that we’ll never know unless we let go of the guilt and stop punishing ourselves. That’s what Emma wants for us now, more than anything.”

Alli’s eyes were glittering with held-back tears. “I don’t know . . . I don’t know if I can.”

“You have to want to. Alli, so much has been taken away from you.” A dark flicker passed across her face and it seemed as if she might crumble in front of him. He continued, still calm but with a subtle underlayer of urgency. “It’s time you put things back inside yourself.”

She shook her head. “What do you mean?”

“I think you know.” He took a breath. “Did you think Herr was going to kill you, that you were going to die?”

“I want to go back inside.”

“No one’s stopping you.” Jack was careful not to take hold of her.

Alli looked away, chewing on her lower lip, then nodded in a jerky motion. “At one point I was absolutely sure I wouldn’t survive.”

“That’s when it happened,” he said, “a little death, a partial death, your mind preparing itself for oblivion.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re both alive and dead.” Jack moved closer to her as he lowered his voice. “Something in you died, or at least grew critically ill, during that week with Herr.”

“You’re wrong, you’re wrong!” she cried.

“If you can see yourself from this perspective, everything you say and do makes perfect sense. You’re full of rage, contempt, spite, then you turn around and become the most warm and loving creature imaginable. You have trouble sleeping, and when you do sleep, you’re beset by nightmares. You adore Emma but are also terrified of her, terrified Emma will somehow seek vengeance for what you see as your betrayal of her—walking away from her when, in hindsight, Emma needed you most.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I want to die now.”

“Is it comforting to say that, because I don’t think you really mean it.”

Anger flashed in her teary eyes. “Don’t tell me what I—”

“Alli, stop this.” His voice was stern but not unkind. “You know, I was really pissed off at you when you showed up on the plane. I was going to send you back, but your mother more or less coerced me into taking you. But during the few days you’ve been with me I’ve seen something in you—a determination, as well as a fierce will to survive—so don’t tell me that you want to die because I know it’s only something you’ve gotten into the habit of saying or thinking. It isn’t real, you know it isn’t.”

Alli seemed calmer now, or at least better able to listen to what he had to say. She was still in shock, so he understood that it would take her some time to digest their conversation, to allow her thoughts and emotions to find the equilibrium from which she could definitively move on.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded, put her head against his chest, leaning heavily against him as if she were exhausted.

Having walked slowly in their direction, Annika apparently decided it was now more or less safe to approach them. “Jack, Alli’s violent reaction was my doing.”

“You’re going to have to explain that.”

And Annika did. She told him about the conversation she’d had with Alli, how it had become more abrasive, more contentious, how she had been trying to force Alli out of her debilitating shell.

“What were you thinking?” He put his arm protectively around Alli’s shoulders, holding her close.

“I forced her to look at herself,” Annika said softly. “She had to get to this place, she had to sink so far down the only way to go was up.”

“And what if she had jumped off the cliff?”

She put her hand tenderly on the back of Alli’s head. “She’s not suicidal, Jack. If she had been she’d have killed herself before this.”

Jack looked at her and knew what she said was true. He looked around then as if suddenly aware of their surroundings and saw Kharkishvili standing at some remove, watching them with a mixture of pity and forbearance. The oligarch called his wolfhounds, who bounded toward him, and he turned with them at his heels, heading back to the estate at a quickened pace.

“We’d better follow him,” Jack said, eyeing the rapidly darkening sky. The wind had picked up, gusting in off the water, and the sudden dampness foretold the coming rain.

DEPUTY PRIME minister Oriel Batchuk was waiting outside Dyadya Gourdjiev’s building when Gourdjiev returned home. He lurked in the doorway like a wraith, wrapped in his leather trench coat, which was both sinister and absurd. He had a thirties-style fedora pulled low on his forehead. He looked like he was auditioning for The Thin Man or Five Graves to Cairo, and in another time and another place the sight might have tickled Gourdjiev’s funny bone. As it was he felt only a deep sense of fate having its way with him.

As he approached, Batchuk stepped out of the doorway, but he brought his own shadows with him.

“I received your burnt offering,” he said, referring to the sacrifice of Boronyov, whose still warm corpse Gourdjiev had laid at his agents’ feet, “but this time I’m afraid it’s insufficient.”

Gourdjiev stood his ground, trying his best to appear unperturbed. “Meaning?”

“This time Annika has gotten in the shit too deep, beyond even my ability to cover for her.”

Gourdjiev let go of a sudden spurt of anger, deep-seated and long-simmering. “Is that what you’ve done? I wasn’t aware that you’ve ever done anything for her—”

“Contrary to your peculiar delusion of omniscience you don’t know everything.”

“Please. You’ve been too busy doing things to her.”

The two men stood staring at each other with such malevolent intensity that it was possible to entertain the incredible notion that they were trying to destroy one another with their minds.

“I understand and sympathize with your frustration,” Batchuk said at length. “Only Annika and I know what happened. She won’t tell you and I certainly won’t.”

“She was only five, only a child!”

“She certainly didn’t act like a child.” Batchuk’s smile was both smug and contemptuous. “You see, you never really knew her, you never suspected what she was capable of, you missed the point of her entirely.”

“I’m the one she calls dyadya.”

“Indeed you are.” Batchuk’s tone made it clear this statement was anything but a concession. “And you’re the ignorant one, the scales have not yet dropped from your eyes. Unlike Saul of Tarsus you haven’t yet had your road to Damascus moment, but then it seems you were untimely born.”

“Untimely born?”

“ ‘Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me,’ ” Batchuk quoted. “Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.”

“For a devout atheist you’re quite the biblical scholar.”

“I like to probe the weaknesses of my enemies,” Batchuk said, with a meaning directed at Gourdjiev. The tenuous cord was broken, they were no longer frenemies. “In any event I came to warn you, or more accurately, to give you the opportunity to warn Annika. I’m coming for her—me, myself, not someone I’ve hired or ordered to do a piece of work. This I do personally, with my own hands.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev fairly trembled in barely suppressed rage. “How can . . . This is monstrous. How can you do this?”

“Given the decisions she has made how can I not?”

“You know what this means.”

Batchuk nodded. “I do.”

“Nothing will ever be the same between us.”

“My dear Dyadya Gourdjiev,” Batchuk said, using Annika’s nickname for him in a mocking manner, “nothing was ever the same between us from the moment I first saw Annika.”

“I DID what I thought was right,” Annika said, “but I know I don’t always make the right choice.”

Jack studied her at some length. They were standing in the entry-way to the Magnussen mansion, just outside the bathroom where Alli had gone. Neither of them wanted to leave her alone at the moment, and as for Jack, the feeling of having been boxed in by both Alli’s impetuosity and her mother’s inability to control her had reasserted itself with a vengeance. And yet he knew quite well that there was no use in railing against this situation; as he had since he’d taken off from Sheremetyevo he resigned himself to the responsibility of keeping her safe, both from others who might want to kidnap her and do her harm, and from herself.

“In that you and Alli are alike,” he said. “She seems to lack the ability to know what’s good for her, or maybe it’s her own self-hatred that pushes her to seek out dangerous situations.”

Annika smiled what might best be described as a secret smile, or at least an ironic one, as if his words had triggered hidden memories.

“You see her in such a clear and perfect light, Jack, I admire that, I really do. I mean, she’s such a complex person, not that most people aren’t complex, but there’s something about her that—”

She stopped abruptly, as if changing her mind, and her eyes seemed to drift away to another time, another place. It wasn’t the first time Jack had observed this phenomenon in her, and he was struck by its similarity to what he sometimes observed in Alli. And now, as this particular Rubik’s Cube shifted perspective in his mind, he began to wonder how many more similarities there were between the two women.

Her carnelian eyes came back to him, in the light of the entryway their mineral quality making them transparent. “Jack, you don’t hate me for what I did, do you?”

“Did? What did you do?”

“What I said to Alli.”

“No, not at all. She needs all the help she can get, even if that help is sometimes difficult for her to hear.”

“I’m relieved then.” She placed a hand on his arm. “After all that’s happened—”

“But that’s just it.” Jack suddenly decided to take the bull by the horns. “I don’t know what happened to you.”

“What? I told you.”

“But you didn’t, not really. When I first saw the scars I decided not to ask you how you got them because I thought it might be an invasion of your privacy, but now I’d like to know.”

“Why? Why is it important now?”

“I’ve already told you, you have a particular affinity for understanding a young woman you met just days ago. I want to know how that works.”

Soft echoes of footfalls, of muffled voices came to them now and again. Since their arrival the mansion had come alive as if it had been waiting for them. A number of cars were parked on the generous expanse of gravel outside and the interior exhibited the air of expectancy, the bustle of hastily arranged preparations.

“It works,” Annika said, “because we’re both broken.”

Her mineral eyes studied him with a frightening intensity. In those eyes it was possible to get lost, moreover, to want to get lost. Jack felt himself losing his sense of time and place, and he enfolded her in his arms, felt the slight tremors of her emotions firing along her bare arms.

“It works,” she said, “because, like her, I was taken. It works because I’m just like her.”

“DARLING, YOU’VE only taken one bite of your stollen,” the widow Tanova admonished. “Did I put in too much cinnamon?”

Dyadya Gourdjiev smiled vaguely. “No, Katya. I was just thinking about the past.”

Katya Tanova came and sat beside him at the dining room table. They were in her apartment, which was smartly furnished in the latest Western style. She was not a person to become stuck in amber like so many of her friends who had not moved on from the things they had liked in their thirties and forties. Their homes were like museums or mausoleums, depending on your level of cynicism. Katya’s public persona—cool, proper, even a bit formal—was in stark contrast with her private demeanor, or at least her behavior with Gourdjiev, which was very private, indeed. With him she was like a young woman, coquettish, bantering. She often threw her head back and laughed, or else she engaged him with an intellectual rigor he found positively erotic.

“For most people that’s not so good, darling, but for you it’s terrible.”

He nodded with gravity. “That may be true, but I can’t help it.”

“She came to see you, didn’t she? You saw Annika.”

He stared out the window at the hideously bare branches of a tree.

Katya wore a sleeveless flowered dress short enough to show off her strong legs, but not so short as to be unseemly. She had kicked off her shoes when she sat down. Her feet, wrapped in sheer stockings, were quite beautiful.

“You always become so melancholy when you see her. And the past—”

“Sometimes I can fool myself into thinking I’m happy, or satisfy myself at being so clever at this game or that. Once in a very great while I can even feel young again, but it always fades, this feeling, and then I realize that I’ve simply deluded myself. I expend so much energy trying to ignore the past, or forget it or—and this would be best of all—erase it, but it comes back to haunt me again and again.” He turned from the window with a bleak smile. “How can it not?”

“But, darling, how can you keep blaming yourself, when—”

“It wasn’t my fault? I should have known, I should have foreseen—”

“How could you, you’re not a sorcerer.”

“If only I were, I could obliterate the past, alter it with a wave of my hand!” he cried in anguish. “Such a terrible ending. No one deserves that.”

“Especially not Nikki. She was your wife but she was my best friend, we both miss her terribly.” Katya put her hand over his. “But we’re not really talking about Nikki now, are we? She’s dead and gone, beyond pain, beyond suffering. But Annika—”

“I cannot quantify Annika’s suffering, because to this day I don’t know what happened to her.”

“And if you did know, of what possible use would it be to you, except to bring you more heartache and self-recrimination? And, darling, you are full up on those things already.” She pushed the plate of stollen closer to him. “Come now, have something to eat, you’ll feel better.”

“Dammit! Nothing’s going to make me feel better!” He pulled away from her, in almost the same movement rose, and in rising, swept the plate off the table. It crashed to the highly polished floor, where it burst into a hundred pieces. Crumbs of stollen went everywhere.

He stood against the wall, biting his knuckle, while Katya’s Siamese crept out from under the sofa, where she had slunk at the instance of commotion, and with her head down and shoulders working, began to methodically eat the pastry.

Katya said nothing. She went into the kitchen, returned with a broom and dustpan, and knelt down.

“Don’t,” he said. “I’ll do it.” Stooping, he very gently took the implements from her hand and spent the next several minutes cleaning up. The cat came up to him and, arching her back, rubbed herself against his leg. When he was finished there wasn’t a shard of china, a crumb of stollen left on the floor. The Siamese, licking her lips, didn’t seem to mind; she’d eaten her fill. Katya had trained her to be dainty in her eating habits. A genuine little lady.

“I’ll wax the floor tomorrow,” Katya said, gesturing for him to sit down opposite her after he had returned from emptying the dustpan.

He did as she bade, sat silently with his hands clasped between his legs like a schoolboy caught making mischief.

“Darling, listen to me, there are some things in this life we aren’t meant to know, some questions, though asked over and over, that have no answer. You must try to accept this, though I know better than most this cuts across the grain of your personality. You’re a man born to find the answers to the thorniest questions, and when this becomes the norm, it isn’t easy to look at a blank wall and say, Is this all there is? Because, yes, that’s all there is, darling. When it comes to Annika there are essential secrets in her heart you cannot know. The darkness behind that wall is hers, not yours, no matter what you may believe. I know you’ve taken this as a failure—‘I should have known, I should have foreseen’—these are the words of the seeker. As Apollo brought light to the world each day you find answers—but because you don’t have the answer to what happened to Annika—”

“I should have protected her.”

“In a perfect world, yes,” Katya said, “but, darling, in a perfect world you wouldn’t need to protect her.” Her eyes found his and she smiled. “This world is far from perfect, however, and nothing is easy or quick or the way we want it to be. The world is incomprehensible, and the harder we strive to understand it the more mysterious it becomes. And do you know why? Life is all moral compromises, and with each compromise we make a tiny piece of us gets lost. And when it isn’t compromises that we must make, it’s sacrifices, and sacrifices change us irrevocably, until we look like that tree outside.

“Consider what you have sacrificed for Annika—you have gone to the edge of the world, the place where even maps fail, where the devil resides, in order to keep her safe. I beg you to ponder that the next time you feel compelled to say ‘I should have known, I should have foreseen.’ ”

“Yes, yes, it’s true,” he said in a voice that betrayed him, for his mind thought one thing and his heart felt another. It took some effort to return her smile, but by the look on her face he knew that she appreciated it. “Everything you said is true.” He looked around as if awaking from a dream. “I’ll buy you a new plate.”

“Thank you, but don’t bother. That wasn’t the first one you’ve smashed and it won’t be the last.” She laughed. “That’s why I put out this particular service, it was a wedding present from my mother and I never did like it. It’s so, I don’t know, Victorian. Very her—not me at all.”

“Your mother and her lies,” he said, with a rueful shake of his handsome head.

“Lies are what drew you and me together,” she said. “Lies we had to create and then, far worse, perpetuate, in order to go on living. And these lies required both moral compromises and sacrifices that, while regretting, we wouldn’t change. I lied to my husband and you lied to Batchuk. I became friends with my husband so he would never find out how much I loathed him, and his money allowed me the freedom to live my life. For him I did not exist as a sexual object, or, if I did, it was only for a matter of months, if not weeks.

“As for you, my darling—” She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “You made your peace with Batchuk because everything in your world depended on your alliance with him. It took all your skill and charm to convince him that you were sincere, since he knew very well that you had every reason to want him destroyed. How did you manage it, I wonder? I wouldn’t have been able to pull it off, even though I’ve certainly honed my acting skills over the years.”

“He made a request of me and I complied,” he said. “There was someone in his way, someone he couldn’t touch, couldn’t even get near. I could. Simple as that.”

He stood up and, hands in his trousers pockets, stood staring out at the gnarled tree.

“You of all people, darling, should know that nothing is simple,” Katya said, “especially when finding an answer brings an end to a life.”

“I know you’re not judging me, because you know very well what was at stake. When he made the request he knew I’d have to comply, which is why he enjoyed asking me. The idea of giving me an order appealed to him. It must have given him immense satisfaction knowing I would do it, knowing that he was causing me pain at the same time he was ridding himself of a thorn in his side he couldn’t pull out himself.”

“It was that death that kept Annika safe, is that what you’re saying?”

He nodded, but didn’t turn around. “What Batchuk did was monstrous, unspeakable, depraved. It’s as if Stalin has risen from the grave.”

Katya rose, then, and went to stand by his side. “You’re not thinking about anything foolish, something that could get you killed, are you? Leave matters the way they are.”

“It’s too late, events have been set in motion. Batchuk is here in Kiev. He is looking for Annika.”

“You trained her well.”

“Because I was forced to make a deal with the devil. Are you saying I should withdraw my protection?”

She slid her arm around his waist. “Look at that tree. It has withstood drought, hailstorms, lightning, and torrential rains that turned the ground around it to a river of mud. But there it is. Its roots never gave way, it was never split asunder. It may be ugly and leaning, it may not be as tall as it once was, but it abides, darling, it abides.”

“TIME,” MILES Benson said, standing in the doorway to the shadowed study. The brightest light came from Aaron’s iPhone. “Mr. Secretary, it’s imperative that we finish our conversation now.” But so fierce was the glare that Claire gave him he had no recourse but to take a step back, just as if she had pushed him.

“All right,” Paull said, but he never took his eyes off his daughter, who, it seemed to him now, had never looked more beautiful. She had been a child when she had left him; now she was a mature, self-confident woman. How the devil had that happened, he wondered. Seven years wasn’t that long a time; on the other hand, it was a lifetime for small creatures, an eternity for others. Claire had made the most of those seven years, and what had he done with the time?

“Wait for me,” he said to her. “I won’t be long.”

“Even if you are,” Aaron said, his bright, transparent eyes serenely regarding his newly discovered grandfather, “Mom and I won’t leave without you.” He looked up at Claire. “Right, Mom?”

MORGAN THOMSON was waiting for them. He had opened the glass doors to the library and when he saw them approaching, said with a sweep of his hand, “Let’s take a walk.”

There was a Japanese-style footpath made of slate-colored stepping stones, each slightly different yet related to one another, that led down to the pond and the moon bridge. As they neared the water Paull could see flashes of black, white, silver, and orangey-gold beneath the surface as the ornamental carp swam into the sunlight and out. Much to his surprise Benson took out a handful of dry food and sprinkled it on the surface. The greedy carp rose, their mouths open and gasping to suck in the food.

Assuming the professorial demeanor he so adored Thomson said, “Believe it or not this accord is going to consolidate President Yukin’s power both inside and outside Russia.”

At once Paull thought back to his conversation with Edward Carson in the limo on the day they had buried Lloyd Berns. Carson had voiced consternation that Brandt was trying to push through the accord despite the president’s unease. Paull assumed an expression of bland attention.

Thomson’s hands were clasped behind his back, his head tilted slightly upward as if he were sniffing the air for eavesdroppers, or clues to their ultimate fate. “As you no doubt know, since Yukin has been in power the government’s ownership of companies comprising the Russian stock market has ballooned from twenty-five percent to forty percent.”

“If that isn’t totalitarianism,” Benson said, staring down at the swarming carp, “I don’t know what is.”

“He has also made a mockery of the state governors’ races,” Thomson continued as if Benson hadn’t spoken. “No one can get on a slate unless expressly endorsed by Yukin.”

“Or his lord high executioner, Oriel Jovovich Batchuk,” Benson said without apparent irony.

Thomson shrugged. “It amounts to the same thing. Batchuk is deputy prime minister, he’s thrown in his lot with Yukin, he rises and falls on the strength of Yukin’s power. But in a sense Miles is correct: In his own right Batchuk is a formidable opponent.”

“A fucking latter-day Stalin,” Benson said. “There’s so much blood on his hands they say he lives in an abattoir.”

“Very funny,” Paull said.

“He’s a Russian,” Benson said levelly, “so who the hell knows, it might be true.”

“He’s a clever bastard, this Batchuk.” Thomson’s eyes met Paull’s. “More clever, even, than Iosif Vissarionovich.” He meant Stalin.

“Where is this all leading?” Paull asked.

“An excellent question.” Thomson began to move, and the other two men followed him as he mounted the moon bridge. At the apex of the arc he stopped and, placing his forearms on the railing, stared down into the depths of the pond. “General Brandt has made some sort of private deal with President Yukin, the details of which we have no idea, but I can tell you unequivocally that the moment we discovered the fact we severed all ties with him. Nevertheless, Brandt is out there operating on his own, taking the law into his own hands, and we have no way of stopping him.”

“BATCHUK IS in charge of Trinadtsat,” Kharkishvili said to Jack, “which is a secret cadre—”

“I know what Trinadtsat is,” Jack said.

“You surprise me at every turn, Mr. McClure, you really do.” Kharkishvili’s eyebrows arched. “But possibly you don’t know this: Trinadtsat was created by Batchuk for one reason—a secret discovery of an enormous deposit of uranium—possibly one of the largest in the world—in northeastern Ukraine, very near the Russian border. Add to this the fact that the Kremlin has determined Russia’s owninground supply of uranium is far smaller than had been thought, and you have a major crisis in the making.

“What is crucial to understanding why the current situation has become a crisis is that Russia is firmly committed to nuclear power,” Kharkishvili continued. “We—that is, the members of AURA—were and are just as firmly committed to keeping the nuclear power industry in private hands in order to mitigate the Kremlin’s expansionist plans. We fought Yukin as long as we could, but he consolidated his power too quickly and too well. With Batchuk’s help he got inside our defenses, accused us of fiscal malfeasance or, in cases when that didn’t work or wasn’t for some reason sufficient, outright treason. He seized our companies and would have sent us to Siberia if we hadn’t been warned and fled here to Ukraine.”

Heavy weather had blown in off the Black Sea, and rain was beating at the windowpanes as Jack, Annika, and Alli sat at an enormous gleaming wood table in the vast dining room of Mikal Magnussen’s manor house. Four members of AURA sat at the table, big-shouldered men with guileful eyes but a singular lack of delicacy. Between them lay platters of food and cut-crystal flasks of vodka, slivovitz, and soda water, a feast for more than a dozen, but not one was eating.

“Now the worst has happened,” Kharkishvili continued. “With us gone, Yukin has nationalized the uranium consortium, just as he did with Gazprom. Yukin has come to the same conclusion we did almost a decade ago, that Russia’s dependence on foreign oil—especially Iran’s—puts it at a strategic disadvantage. That’s why he’s agreed to this U.S.-Russian accord. He doesn’t mind making concessions as far as his traditional business ties with Iran as long as he has a steady supply of uranium.”

“But without the huge Ukraine uranium strike he won’t have it.”

They all turned as a man entered the room. He was darkly handsome with the rough-hewn features of a Sean Connery or a Clive Owen. His hair was shot through with gray, the color of his eyes, as if he’d trekked through a snowstorm to arrive here. And, who knew, there may have been a number of metaphorical snowstorms in his past.

He turned to Jack. “I’m Mikal Magnussen, I apologize for not being available when you arrived.” He paused now, waiting while an aide appeared at Kharkishvili’s side and whispered briefly in his ear. Kharkishvili shot Annika an involuntary glance, which was so quick, so circumspect, it was possible that only Jack noticed it.

“So Yukin means to steal it,” Magnussen said, “using soldiers who are Trinadtsat personnel.”

“It’s my understanding that it takes a decade to get a uranium mine up and running,” Jack said. “I don’t understand how an incursion into Ukrainian territory is going to accomplish anything.”

“Ah, well, here’s the true genius of Batchuk’s plan.” This from Malenko, another of the dissident oligarchs. Burly and bald, making him look like a tenpin, he had the prominent jaw of a carnivore and tiny ears absurdly low on his skull. “The troops will be sent in under the guise of aiding Ukraine, but once they’re in the area they won’t leave. Instead, they’ll set up a perimeter so that Russian tanks can roll in across the border.”

“It’ll be a fucking mini-Czech,” Glazkov, another oligarch, said, referring to the Soviet Union’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, “except the Russians will stop at the border to the uranium discovery.”

“They can’t just invade Ukraine on any pretext,” Jack said.

“They will, just as they did in Georgia, where their troops are still deployed,” Kharkishvili said.

“The economic situation in Ukraine, particularly the east, is dire, so much so that riots have broken out in several cities and are gaining momentum throughout the country.” Magnussen had talked to the table, but remained standing. “Experience tells me that Yukin will use this economic crisis to doubtless claim his troops are there to protect both Russian and Ukrainian interests.”

“But our problem—and yours, Mr. McClure—is not only the Kremlin,” Kharkishvili said, “but one of your own countrymen. Yukin is being aided by an American by the name of Brandt. A general in your military, an advisor to your president.”

“General Brandt is the architect of the current accord being hammered out between Yukin and President Carson,” Jack said. “Carson’s success as president is more or less tied to the accord being ratified by both sides.”

“That security accord is pure poison. Once it’s signed Yukin and Batchuk will send their Trinadtsat troops across the border into Ukraine, Russia will take possession of the uranium strike, and because of the accord with the United States no one will dare to stop him.”

“The United States itself—President Carson—will stop him.”

“Do you really think so?” Magnussen said. “You know very well that the prime reason for President Carson agreeing to the accord is to get the Iranian nuclear card off the table. In this particular matter Yukin will be as good as his word. He has decided to throw Iran to the wolves in exchange for this massive uranium strike, which will serve Russia’s burgeoning nuclear power plant needs for decades to come.”

Jack’s mind was working furiously. “If Carson lifts a hand against the Russian incursion into Ukraine, he risks Yukin reinstituting its nuclear commerce with Iran. And of course he doesn’t dare do that; the entire architecture of the accord is to neuter Iran’s nuclear program.”

Kharkishvili nodded. “You have it entirely.”

All of a sudden Jack’s mind gave him a different view of the situation. “This is about General Brandt, isn’t it?” he said. “Brandt has a private deal with Yukin; in return for getting the accord done he’s going to receive a piece of the action here in Ukraine.”

There was absolute silence in the room. Kharkishvili turned to Magnussen and said, “You see, Mikal, I was right to entrust this part of our plan to Annika.” He turned to her. “You found us the perfect person, my dear. Congratulations.”

“SO AS you can see,” Thomson said, “the problem is Brandt. He has moved beyond our control. We have no power in this administration, but you do.”

Paull took a deep breath. “Let me get this straight. You recruited Brandt and now you want me to clean up his dirty work, and yours?” He laughed. “Why on earth would I do that?”

“Because if you don’t,” Benson said, “your president is going to end up with egg on his face—egg that won’t be easy to scrape off, I can assure you—when the deal Brandt has made with Yukin comes to light.”

“After which, he can kiss a second term good-bye.” Thomson was still in professorial mode. “You and Edward Carson have a personal relationship, don’t you? I mean to say you’re friends.”

“ ‘Friends don’t let friends drive drunk,’ ” Benson said, quoting the oft-heard TV ad. “Bottom line, General Brandt is driving the president’s car and he’s very, very drunk.”

Paull ran a hand through his hair, but he kept his expression neutral. He felt as if he were walking on eggshells around these two. Right now he needed to take a step back in order to assess the rapidly shifting situation with a clear eye and a calm mind. It was apparent that these two men made their living feeding off other people’s weaknesses and mistakes, but now they themselves had made a mistake or a miscalculation. Or they had seriously underestimated Brandt. From the evidence they had put forward so far this was a possibility that they had overlooked, and Paull was not about to bring their attention to it. The two choices as outlined were, one, General Brandt had gone Kurtz, as Benson so colorfully put it, or, two, he had cleverly outmaneuvered them, using their resources to forge his relationship with Yukin only to abandon them as the metaphorical clock ticked close to midnight. Yukin and Carson were about to sign the historic accord that, if Thomson and Benson were telling the truth, would give the world the picture of a high-level American military man, one of the president’s closest advisors, in league with the president of Russia.

There was, of course, the other possibility, standing out as surely as a black swan: that the two of them were working a con on a massive scale in order to get him to stop Carson from signing an accord that would do the very thing the president and everyone in his administration was praying for it to do: pull the plug on Iran’s nuclear program. Without Russia’s imported parts, fuel, and expertise the Iranians would have no choice but to drastically scale back the program, or shut it down entirely.

This was the enigma presented to Dennis Paull, the web from which he needed to extricate both himself and the president without damaging the president’s reputation or jeopardizing the security accord. It reminded him of the classic conundrum of an explorer traveling through a country inhabited by two tribes. The members of one tribe always tell the truth, the members of the other tribe always lie. The tribe that always lies are headhunters and cannibals. The explorer comes across a tribal hunting party, which quickly surrounds him. However, he is unable to distinguish which tribe they represent, and now he understands his dreadful predicament. He needs to ask two questions: the first is, Which tribe are you from? The second is, Will you eat me? But whichever tribe the men belong to they are going to give the same answer: We’re from the tribe that never lies, and we’re not going to eat you. And yet the outcome will be polar opposites, either the explorer will be safe or he will die a horrible death.

Paull was now facing a similar situation, lethal in the political sense with no room to be wrong. Were Thomson and Benson members of the tribe that tells the truth or the tribe that lies? If he acted on their information and they were in fact lying, he would jeopardize not only Edward Carson’s presidency but the future security of America. But if they were telling the truth and he didn’t act, out of a belief that they were lying, the same terrible scenario would come about.

“Why did General Brandt order a sanction on Jack McClure?” Paull asked.

“We don’t know,” Thomson said, “except to say that Brandt must feel that McClure presents an immediate danger to his private deal with Yukin.”

Now Paull knew he had to tell the president, get the sanction rescinded before Jack was killed. He wished with very fiber of his being that Jack McClure were with him. Jack would unravel this seemingly no-win situation, because he’d be able to see the sides of it Paull could not. But Jack wasn’t here, and Paull knew he’d have to make the crucial decision as to what to tell Carson himself. He racked his brain to find a way out, or at least to swing the odds from fifty-fifty to a percentage that was more favorable to him and the president.

What was clear, what he had hard evidence proving, was that General Brandt had seriously—terminally—overstepped his authority. This fact—the only one Paull had—argued that Thomson and Benson were telling the truth. That conclusion was far from certain, but what in this life, he asked himself, was ever certain? He had to trust these two, but only as far as he could throw them.

“All right,” he said, breaking the lengthy silence, “I’ll call the president.”