Last Snow

TWENTY-SIX

ORIEL BATCHUK sat in the ultrabright, candy-colored confines of the Baskin-Robbins in the Globus shopping center on Maidan Neza-lezhnosti, which rose on one side of Kiev’s Independence Square. He was surrounded by bubbling Ukrainians dressed in Tommy Hilfiger or Pierre Cardin, trying their hardest to be American.

His mind, drifting, returned to the past, to his confrontation with Dyadya Gourdjiev, an encounter he had hoped never to have, but that he saw now, with the perfect clarity of hindsight, was inevitable. Their relationship was bound to end in tears, as the British were wont to say, because it was all artifice, meticulously constructed by the two of them out of lies, fabrications, disavowals, and obfuscation. The truth was they had both made compromises and, yes, sacrifices—not so very difficult for men who lacked a moral compass—in order to live in the world with one another, in order not to tear the other limb from limb. The emotions that ran between them, that bound them together in a private arena, were both lava hot and ice cold, how could it be otherwise, considering the hideous stroke of fate that had befallen them?

But of course now that he looked around the Technicolor store with blind eyes he realized that it was no coincidence that he had ordered the rendezvous here at this particular place, because it was on this very spot, long before Globus was even an idea in the mind of its developer, that he had first seen Nikki. She had been walking with Gourdjiev, he remembered the moment as if it had been transferred from his retinas, seared into his brain, an image that could neither fade nor crumble. That first sight of Nikki transcended time, existed outside it, as if he had caught a glimpse of a creature beyond human ken. For Batchuk, who had never before allowed himself an emotional connection with another human being, the response to Nikki was galvanizing. In fact, he was forced to sit down, though it was not yet time for his meeting with Gourdjiev. He watched, transfixed, as Nikki, arm in arm with Gourdjiev, floated at his side. Then she detached herself and, running past startled shoppers, flew into the arms of a tall, regal-looking man with black hair and hazel eyes. The man, laughing, lifted her up, whirling her around while Gourdjiev stood by, a fatuous grin on his face.

When Nikki planted a kiss on the man’s lips a tiny, involuntary noise escaped Batchuk’s mouth, terrifying him. It was as if an ice pick had been shoved into his belly. He felt sick and dizzy, and was thus at a disadvantage when Gourdjiev left the blissful couple and came to where Batchuk was slumped over in his chair.

“Are you ill?” Gourdjiev said as he slid onto a chair opposite Batchuk. “You’re sweating like a pig.”

“An excess of vodka last night,” Batchuk improvised, “or I should say this morning.”

Gourdjiev laughed as if he didn’t have a care in the world. “Your partying will be the death of you, Oriel Jovovich, of that there can be no doubt.”

This was in the days before Batchuk had been named deputy prime minister, before Yukin has ascended to his self-styled throne, but the two were already close, stars rising in tandem through the perilous firmament of the Russian political chop shop. In fact, it was Batchuk who had introduced Yukin to Gourdjiev, who was then already the éminence grise in the power politics of Ukraine, in all of Eastern Europe, in fact. At that time it was essential to have Gourdjiev’s backing and influence in order to rise to the first tier of power. Batchuk, who loved Roman history, thought of his friend as Claudius, a man who had decided to step away from the bloody turbulence at the center of Eastern European politics, but not from the corridors of power, where he manipulated people and events from deep within its shadowed recesses. Like Claudius he was an unprepossessing man, a man you assumed to be in the twilight of his life, who, like the generals of antiquity, was content to gaze out over the Palatine hill to the magnificent centurion cypresses, dreaming of past glories. Until you came in contact, or perhaps conflict was the correct word, with his astonishing intellect.

For many years Batchuk had stood in awe of Gourdjiev, dealing with Yukin and others as the older man did, with discretion, shrewdness, and diabolical foresight, but try as he might Gourdjiev’s mind was always six or seven steps ahead of him, and in denying the lack in himself he began to envy Gourdjiev, and this malice slowly and inexorably curdled their friendship.

“Who is that man with Nikki?” he said almost as soon as Gourdjiev sat down. He had not meant to, but to his dismay—or, more accurately, horror—he couldn’t help himself.

“That’s Alexsei Mandanovich Dementiev,” Gourdjiev said.

It disgusted Batchuk that he could not take his eyes off her. He’d heard about her, of course, but until this moment Gourdjiev had kept her away from him. Was it by design, he wondered. He watched Nikki and Alexsei, absurdly jealous that they seemed to fit together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, as if their births were also the birth of a shared destiny. They cleaved to one another, so blissful only a cataclysm, he was certain, could separate them. He said naively, stupidly, “They’re seeing one another?” and immediately despised himself for it.

“You could say that.” Gourdjiev laughed again. “He and Nikki are getting married next month.”

With a start, Batchuk returned to the unpleasant present. The candy-colored world of the Baskin-Robbins, with its yammering kids and harried-looking parents, turned his stomach. Sick to his soul, he rose and stalked out, only to return and glare at them all.

“I’LL CALL the president,” Jack said, “and tell him what’s going on. He’ll take the appropriate actions as far as General Brandt is concerned.”

“He may, indeed, do that,” Magnussen said, “but do you really think he will hold up the signing of this historic accord based on your say-so?” He shook his head. “We have no hard evidence of Brandt’s personal involvement.”

“But I know he ordered a sanction on Annika,” Jack said. “That, surely, is overstepping his authority.”

“It may or it may not, we have no way of knowing,” Kharkishvili said. “But the thornier issue, the conundrum that we cannot even begin to solve, is if someone is behind General Brandt and, if so, who it is. This is why we need you. Because getting rid of Brandt, even stopping the signing may not be enough to keep Yukin and Batchuk from ordering their troops across the border. You have no idea how desperate Russia is for new energy sources, how far Yukin is prepared to go in order to obtain them.”

“Either way,” Jack said, “I’m going to have to inform the president.”

Magnussen nodded. “We understand that, but before you do we needed to let you know the immense stakes. If Russia moves across the border into Ukraine without that treaty being signed it will trigger a regional war that will quite rapidly escalate, dragging your country into it.”

Jack looked from Magnussen to Kharkishvili. “In other words we’re all damned if the accord is signed and doubly damned if it’s not.”

Kharkishvili nodded. “Unless you can come up with a solution. Annika was right from the beginning: I think you’re the only one who can.”

“What if there is no answer?” Jack said.

“In that event I fear we’re all doomed.” Kharkishvili looked around the room at each of the faces, each one grimmer than the last. “Then everything will come to an end, the greed of wealth, the lust for power. In that final moment, everyone will fall, even the kingpins of empires.”

PRESIDENT EDWARD Carson had just returned from the Kremlin, having received Yukin’s full agreement to the accord. To Carson’s mild surprise the Russian president did not object to the time of the signing tomorrow evening at eight o’clock, local time, noon back home—more than enough time, after the Internet sites and the blogosphere had their say, for all the major news feeds to have developed think pieces that would be popping up on TV just in time for the six and seven o’clock newscasts.

He was sitting down to the first decent meal he’d had in days when his cell phone rang. His entire entourage, including the press secretary, jumped to attention because he was sitting across the table from the senior political correspondent from Time, who was about to engage him in a major interview that would be the magazine’s cover story next week.

The president took the call because it was from Jack. Excusing himself, he stood and whispered into the press secretary’s ear, then hurried out of the hotel dining room, accompanied as always by his Praetorian guard who, in this instance, was loaded down with equipment designed to jam any attempt at electronic eavesdropping.

“Jack, what progress?” Carson said. “And is Alli okay?”

“Alli’s fine, better than fine, in fact.”

“Well, then, it seems that being with you is the best medicine for her.” Carson was immensely grateful. Whatever flicker of jealousy he might have felt was extinguished by Jack’s revelations. His voice seemed to bore through Carson’s head like a power drill.

“Let me get this straight,” Carson said, as he stared through one of the hotel’s plate-glass windows at the snow piling up in Red Square, “you’re telling me that General Brandt has some kind of private deal with Yukin regarding a uranium strike in northeast Ukraine?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“But what about Alizarin Global?”

There was a pause before Jack’s voice buzzed in his ear. “I never heard of Alizarin Global.”

“Neither did I until ten minutes ago when Dennis Paull called.” A young woman was struggling across the vast expanse of Red Square, bent forward into the wind. Carson was happy he wasn’t outside, but at this moment that was about all he was happy about. “It’s some kind of multitentacled conglomerate that has employed both Benson and Thomson. They, in turn, hired Brandt to help them make a deal with Gazprom. According to what they told Dennis, Brandt has made this side deal with Yukin. They fired him the moment they found out, but he’s ignored their communications. He’s acting in his own interest, not theirs. They’re convinced he’s gone insane.”

“Edward, I suppose I don’t have to point out that we’re talking about your political enemies here. What makes Paull think he can trust them?”

“He doesn’t, not really. But, concerned about intelligence leaks, he’s been immersed in a sub-rosa investigation of everyone in my inner circle, during the course of which he found evidence that Alizarin did, indeed, fund Brandt’s winter trips to Moscow. Now Brandt is so out of control he authorized a sanction on you. Naturally, I canceled it the moment I got off the phone with Dennis.”

“Is anyone left in the field?”

“No,” Carson assured him, “all the agents have been successfully recalled.”

There was a short silence while, Carson supposed, Jack absorbed the shocking news. At length, he said, “I can see how I’d be a threat to him, but what I can’t understand is how he’d know it. How would Brandt have knowledge of where you sent me and what I’ve been doing?”

“A good question,” Carson said. “I think you’d better find the answer.”

“I’m trying to do just that,” Jack assured him. “What about the accord?”

“From what you’ve just told me there doesn’t seem to be an easy way out of signing it, Jack,” Carson said bleakly. “If I refuse to sign it, or even move to postpone the ceremony after Yukin has bent over backward to meet all our demands, I’ll not only look foolish, but I’ll destroy whatever political capital I’ve gained during the run-up to the signing.

“No, unless you can come up with another solution, the signing will commence at eight tomorrow evening.”

JACK, PUTTING away his cell phone, was running the multiple vectors of the information the president had given him. Much of the information seemed contradictory or an outright lie. He didn’t for a moment think that Benson and Thomson had anyone’s best interest in mind except theirs. According to the president they didn’t want the accord with Yukin signed. It was their contention that both the accord and its chief architect, General Brandt, were a danger to the country, but were they telling the truth? From the damning evidence that Paull had discovered it seemed they were telling the truth about Brandt. Were they then lying about the danger inherent in the accord? He already knew from Kharkishvili the likelihood of events if it was signed tomorrow. If he was to find a way out of this damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t conundrum he had less than twenty-four hours to do it.

His musings were interrupted by Kharkishvili striding purposefully toward him.

“Mr. McClure, I’m glad I caught you. I’ve received some alarming news.”

At once Jack’s mind sprang backward to the aide bending over Kharkishvili, whispering in his ear, and that strange, circumspect look Kharkishvili had given Annika.

“Annika’s uncle Gourdjiev has shot one of AURA’s members, a dissident oligarch and a friend of mine by the name of Riet Medanovich Boronyov.”

“I find that difficult to believe,” Jack said. “What on earth would cause him to murder one of your people?”

“I have no idea,” Kharkishvili confessed. “Nevertheless, he shot Boronyov in front of two of Batchuk’s men and gave the body over to them, this was confirmed by an eyewitness.” Kharkishvili appeared genuinely distraught. “This is a disaster, because Boronyov was one of the dissidents who, as far as Batchuk and Trinadtsat were concerned, were dead. We made certain of that. Now Batchuk knows better, and it’s a fair bet he’ll check on the others who were supposed to be dead, all of us here, me included.”

Now Jack gleaned another piece of the puzzle: Like Annika, Dyadya Gourdjiev was a part of AURA, but if so why had he killed a man who their enemies already thought was dead?

“Perhaps Boronyov was a double agent,” Jack said, “secretly working for Batchuk.”

Kharkishvili shook his head emphatically. “Impossible. We met as young strivers, I ate Sunday dinner with him and his family, we shared business deals.”

“All of which proves nothing,” Jack pointed out, “except that he was a perfect candidate for a double.” He’d already thought of the reason this could not be true, but before he had a chance to speak, Kharkishvili shook his head even more vigorously.

“No, I fear it’s Gourdjiev who’s the traitor. He and Batchuk have a long history together, longer, closer even than the one I had with Boronyov. For years, he has pretended to be Batchuk’s friend, but what if that was also a ruse, what if they’re actual allies, working hand in hand?”

“There is, or was, no double inside AURA,” Jack said with authority. “If Batchuk knew you were alive all the time you’d all be dead by now, there would be no AURA to oppose him and Yukin.”

“And yet Gourdjiev must be in league with Batchuk now,” Kharkishvili said. “There is no other explanation for his action.”

“You don’t like Dyadya Gourdjiev, do you?”

“What?”

Jack could see that Kharkishvili’s annoyance was masking both shock and consternation, and he knew that he had hit on something vital. “You don’t like Gourdjiev and I’d like to know why.”

“So would I.”

The two men turned to see Annika, who had come up silently behind them and was now standing with her feet slightly apart, arms crossed over her breasts, between Kharkishvili and the relative sanctuary of the dining room.

GENERAL BRANDT, sitting in an arcade off Red Square that had an unobstructed view of the brooding walls and towers of the Kremlin, wondered what it would be like to be all energy. Watching the snow falling in endless curtains he tried to imagine the world from a snow-flake’s point of view: the pure cold, the clean symmetrical design, the absolute quiet. Who wouldn’t want that time to think undisturbed by civilization’s anxieties, tensions, and clumsy attempts at manipulation. The urge to maintain control was unknown in a snowflake’s world, and it was better off for it.

Every hour of every day control was slipping away from him. He could no longer bench press twice his weight, his arthritic left knee made it impossible for him to run a mile a day as he had for decades since he was thirteen, his hair was becoming fine as well as thin, he could no longer eat chili dogs or Tabasco without suffering the consequences, and there were nights when he gazed at young girls with the detached wistfulness of an old man. There was no doubt about it, his body was deteriorating at an alarming rate, coming apart at the seams, as it were, and more and more he found that he no longer wanted to be a part of it or, more accurately, in it. How much easier it would be to be pure energy, not to have to worry about his rotting flesh, which continued to betray him at every turn.

He was at a loss to say when this nihilistic worldview had come over him, perhaps he’d always had the seed of it deep inside his pragmatic, highly regimented mind. With a paranoid’s unmatched cunning he suspected the seed had started to take root the moment he retired from the military, which had been his stern father and his comforting mother for over forty years. The world outside the military seemed a strange and unpleasant place for him, until he learned to back away from it just enough so that it lapped at the fringe of his reality and nothing more. Being a talking head on TV was an excellent way to insulate himself, to remain unapproachable, solitary, hidden in plain sight. The more he appeared on TV, the more the idiot anchorpersons asked their fatuous questions, the further he receded into himself. All glory is fleeting, to paraphrase George Patton, one of Brandt’s patron saints, but that was fine because he had had enough of glory, TV had made him sick of it, or more accurately, what passed for glory in this postmodern age. Now all he craved was security, which his pension did not assure, especially because his Down’s syndrome son needed care far above and beyond what his health insurance was willing to pay. It seemed odd, not to mention unfair, that after spending his entire adult life in the service of his country he had become obsessed with money, something that in his younger days he didn’t think about at all because his housing, food, and travel expenses were all paid for by the United States Army.

He looked at his watch now as the waiter brought him a double espresso with a shot of vodka, which he drank quickly with a sharp tilt of his head like the old, grizzled Italian fisherman he’d met in Key West. He liked the Keys; it was his long-cherished dream to move to Marathon or Islamorada and fish, bask in the sun, and get stone drunk at ten in the morning whenever the hell he felt like it.

As soon as he finished his heavily fortified coffee he checked his watch again and frowned. It was past time for Yukin to call him via his encrypted line. He signaled the waiter for another double, and sat brooding, his head sunk between his bony shoulders, glowering at the spotlit facade of the Kremlin as if he could will Yukin to call him. The silence was deafening, mystifying, which required drowning in alcohol and caffeine. He downed his second drink as fast as he had the first, so fast, in fact, that the waiter hadn’t yet left the table.

“One more,” Brandt said in excellent Russian. “And bring the bottle.”

The waiter nodded and departed without comment.

And that was another thing, Brandt thought gloomily, Moscow was too fucking cold, even in April—I mean, snow, for chrissakes! This furtive spring might as well be January. Unconsciously he rubbed his palms down his thighs in an attempt to bring more circulation into them. At least the drinks had warmed his belly.

The waiter arrived at approximately the same time as his cell phone buzzed. He let it ring, his heart heavy in his chest, until the waiter had set the coffee and the bottle of vodka on the table and left.

“Yes,” he said, the cell clamped to his ear.

“Everything is sealed and delivered, it’s just wanting signing,” Yukin’s familiar voice said in his ear. “He loved that I caved on all those provisions I never wanted. You were quite correct; causing him to focus on the minutia of the accord was the way to get it done.”

The General drained half the cup in one swallow, then unscrewed the top of the bottle and poured an imprudent amount of vodka into his espresso. And right then and there he felt the intense hatred for the Russians—not just Yukin and Batchuk—he’d always felt but had suppressed for so many years, that had caused him unnumbered ulcerous bouts and sleepless nights as soon as he had been taken out of the field in order to deal with them face-to-face. A faceless enemy, he’d been taught, is the best enemy because he’s the easiest to hate, but the Russians put the lie to that lesson with a big, emphatic exclamation point. They were children, really, inasmuch as children haven’t learned how to act in civilized society, but who act out all the naked and embarrassing whims and desires of their ids without thought of either propriety or consequence.

“The accord is everything we could have hoped for,” Yukin said, sounding jollier and jollier. “Thanks to you, I’ve got everything I want, everything I need, and so will you, we’re in the home stretch, be sure of it, and I’ll tell you why. Do you remember the man you met here in December, Kamyrov?”

Indeed the General did, a hairy, slope-shouldered ape of a man with the manners to match. Brandt had a vivid memory of a dinner with the two men on a gelid, snowy night, Kamyrov expounding on methods of bringing antagonistic men to heel, his face gleaming with grease, unchewed bits of red meat lodged between his teeth. “The man you installed as president of Chechnya.”

“Homicidal maniac is more like it,” Yukin said. “I sent him in there because of his reputation as a strongman, because I needed to get control of the terrorist insurgency there. Since he’s been in power he’s ordered the murder of a dozen former military men, political challengers and their bodyguards—bodies are turning up all over the place: Budapest, Vienna, Dubai—it’s becoming embarrassing, the local police chiefs are understandably pissed off at having to scrape our offal off their streets, but Kamyrov is doing such a terrific job of neutering the insurgents I have no choice but to keep him there. But what the hell, it seems that these people have an appetite for destruction. Me, I just feed that appetite.

“I bring this up because eastern Ukraine has fallen into a severe economic depression, there have already been riots there as there have been in Moldavia and parts of Germany. This expanding civilian unrest is just the excuse we need to move our troops into north-eastern Ukraine and keep them there, and after the accord with the United States is signed no nation will dare rise up against us. Thank you, General. As requested by President Carson’s press secretary, I have scheduled the formal signing for eight o’clock tomorrow night in order to get the maximum exposure on American television. When we sign the accord in front of a thousand news cameras your part in our little play will come to an end and your account in Liechtenstein will be filled to overflowing with gold bullion.

“Tell me, General Brandt, how does it feel to be a wealthy man?”

“ORIEL JOVOVICH.”

The sound of Limonev’s raspy voice brought Batchuk back to the present, back to the eyeball-searing interior of Baskin-Robbins.

“A strange place to meet.”

“Let’s go.” Batchuk rose to his feet. “I have a job for you.” As usual, remembrance of things past had turned his mood sour; he felt no inclination toward small talk.

“You could have texted me the way you always do,” Limonev said as they rode the escalator to the underground garage. “I sent you the number the minute my new cell was activated.”

“This one’s different,” Batchuk said without looking at him. “It demands a different level of security.”

Limonev said nothing more until they had walked between the ranks of parked cars and were comfortably settled in the deputy prime minister’s luxurious Mercedes sedan.

“We’re going together?”

“It’s a two-man job.” Batchuk guided the Mercedes up the ramp and out onto the busy street. Twenty minutes of battling traffic at either a dead crawl or flying along at insane speeds brought them to the Ring Road, which Batchuk took around to the northeast, where he swung off the exit to the slums and Skol’niki Park. He pulled over at the park’s outskirts and they went into it, heading down a gentle slope to the lake known as Pulyaevskiye prudy. It was too cold and snowy for the homicidal gangs and addicts to be out; in fact, this particular area of the park was all but deserted. Snow continued drifting out of the hard, porcelain sky, swirled and blown sideways by gusts of damp wind that seemed to make the snowflakes expand, grow heavier, as if they had turned from frozen water into silver or glass tiles.

At the edge of the lake Batchuk glanced at his watch. “He’ll be coming soon. He has an appointment on the other side of the park.”

Limonev squinted through the snow. “Perhaps in this weather he won’t come.”

“He doesn’t give a shit about the weather.”

“I’ll need to be able to recognize the target.” Limonev glanced in every direction to ensure that there was no one close to them. “As usual a photo of him would be best.”

“Of course.” Batchuk slipped a snapshot out of the breast pocket of his black leather trench coat. “This is the man I want you to kill.”

Limonev looked down at the photo of Riet Medanovich Boronyov, his eyes closed, his face waxen and gray. There were flecks of blood on his lids and along one cheekbone.

Batchuk had already produced an MSP internally silenced, blunt-barreled pistol. Now he shoved it against Limonev’s chest and fired a round.

Limonev lost his balance and fell to his knees in front of Batchuk. One hand, shaking as if palsied, fumbled for his gun, but with an almost negligent wave Batchuk knocked it away.

“Unfortunately I gave you the same order fourteen months ago.” Batchuk took the assassin’s chin in his hand. “How many?” he said. “How many of the oligarchs are still alive?” He raised Limonev’s head and stared into his bloodshot eyes. “Kharkishvili, Malenko, Konarev, Glazkov, Andreyev—you claimed you had killed them all. Did you, or are they as alive as Boronyov was until a few hours ago?”

Limonev licked his lips, opened his mouth, and spat into Batchuk’s face. With a sound of disgust Batchuk pushed the face away and, raising the MSP, fired the second round point-blank between Limonev’s eyes.

“I never give the same order more than once,” he continued, as if his companion were still alive. Pocketing the MSP, he threw the other man’s gun into the lake, retrieved the photo from Limonev’s grasp, and then, bending over, dragged him into the water and left him there.

“IF IT’S true that Gourdjiev and I don’t always see eye to eye,” Kharkishvili said, “it’s also true that we also have nothing but respect for one another.”

“Tell me something,” Jack said. “Who is AURA’s leader, you, Magnussen, who?”

“There is no leader,” Kharkishvili said. “We reach agreement by consensus.”

“That sounds both unwieldy and impractical,” Annika said with an obvious measure of skepticism. “Just look at the United Nations, which eats up so much time and money without ever managing to get much of anything accomplished.”

Kharkishvili brushed his fingertips across his forehead, as a sign either of impatience or of annoyance. “We’re not the United Nations—and I assure you I’m not set on a road to character assassination. AURA would never have been possible without your dyadya. I and the other oligarchs would not be here, in all likelihood we wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for him taking on the dangerous task of informing us in advance that the FSB was coming for us.”

His eyes seemed to have retreated into the depths of their sockets, where they lay hooded and troubled. “I know he found out about the government’s move against us from Batchuk, and I must tell you that I cannot for the life of me fathom how he is so successful at playing both sides of the fence.”

“That’s only a part of his genius,” Annika said with more than a trace of pride. “But it seems both odd and counterproductive for you to have a problem with a relationship that provides you with such vital information.”

“If you don’t mind my saying it,” Kharkishvili said, “it’s the other side of the relationship that I find disturbing.”

“I do mind you saying it,” Annika said. “You certainly had no problem when the information he got from Batchuk saved your life and the lives of the other AURA oligarchs. He would have been summarily executed had Batchuk found out.” Her ire aroused, she took a step toward Kharkishvili. “In addition, I wonder what AURA would have done if he hadn’t engaged Magnussen and his multinational task force of engineers and surveyors to test and report on the feasibility of mining the uranium strike?”

Jack’s eyes went out of focus as his brain began to give him another view of the puzzle that had been resolving itself piece by piece from the moment Edward had informed him of Lloyd Berns’s death on Capri when he should have been here in Ukraine. For the first time he understood that there was the possibility or probability of a double agent inside AURA, and if there was, he suspected who it might be, though something about the setup didn’t track, and he knew there was more information needed before he made any accusations that could backfire on him and Alli.

“DO YOU think he was convinced?” Miles Benson said, one hand on the quivering flank of the British Labrador.

Morgan Thomson blew on his chilled hands. “I know Dennis Paull. He loves Edward Carson, he’d throw himself under a bus before he’d let anything untoward happen to him.” He shifted the shotgun from one shoulder to the other. “Whether or not he believed us I really can’t say. It doesn’t matter, anyway, because as far as he’s concerned, by calling Carson he did the right thing.”

The two men crouched in a thatch blind they had built themselves at the eastern edge of the Alizarin Global property, waiting patiently for dawn and the flights of ducks that would come with it. For them duck hunting was more than a pleasant pastime, it was a way to blow off steam, to release themselves from the pressure-cooker of their professional lives. Other men might have availed themselves of the services of an upscale brothel, or even something more exotic, but these men had extensive experience with entrapment. How much graphic, even obscene, incriminating evidence they had gathered on their enemies over the years was a subject for statisticians.

“The General has outlived his usefulness.” Benson’s gaze was fixed on the tenuous band of pink that wavered on the eastern horizon.

“Not quite. He was the mark from the beginning,” Thomson said as he put his shotgun to his shoulder and aimed it. “Now he’ll become our scapegoat.” He pulled the trigger, the bird fell through the sky, and the Lab took off like a shot. “Our dead duck.”

“I’d feel a whole helluva lot better,” Benson said, squinting like Clint Eastwood, “if we had heard from our man in the field.”

“He had instructions to maintain communication silence when he was in place.”

“Yes, but I want these last obstacles to be taken care of.”

Thomson watched with pleasure as the Lab returned with the duck in its mouth. There was blood on the dog’s dark muzzle and its eyes were alight with the ecstasy of doing what it was born to do, what it had been trained to do.

As it set the duck gently down at Thomson’s feet, he said, “You worry too much.”

“I’m paid to worry too much,” Benson said sourly.

WHILE ANNIKA met with Magnussen and Kharkishvili, Jack and Alli walked through the manor house. It was some hours after the AURA session had broken up. Since his conversation with Edward Carson, Jack had been trying to fit all the disparate pieces together to form a coherent whole—he knew it was out there, he could feel it forming, coalescing, the problem was it kept changing shape and scope as it was appearing to him.

Over the years he’d discovered that his mind was often at its best when he walked or ate, mechanical functions that allowed his brain to digest and reorder the seemingly random bits of information it had picked up. There was a great deal of pressure on him both from Edward and AURA to find a way out of the escalating crisis, but he’d made Kharkishvili and Magnussen promise to leave him alone until he had need of them.

“Jack,” Alli said, “I’m hungry.”

He nodded. “Me, too. Let’s find the kitchen.”

Was it his imagination or had she grown up in the last couple of days, did her features seem more set, had the last vestiges of her girlhood been swept away by the intense events compressed into the short time they’d been together? It was as if she had unlocked an invisible door and, having stepped out into the light of day, or in this case, the ample lamplight of the manor house, was at last allowing herself to be seen, instead of cowering in the shadows of her misery and anguish.

Like everything else in the manor house the kitchen was vast. Bubbling with activity just before and at mealtimes, it was manned now by a sous-chef and a couple of servers who doubled as kitchen assistants. They were going over the recipes for tomorrow, and paid Jack and Alli scant attention, but when they approached the enormous double refrigerator the sous-chef broke off his discussion and came over to them, asking what they’d like to eat, there were plenty of leftovers from dinner. Neither of them wanted the rich food they had already rejected so they both settled on vegetable omelets.

There was a plain wooden table where, Jack suspected, the kitchen staff ate at odd times. He and Alli pulled out chairs and sat while the sous-chef broke eggs into a stainless steel bowl and began to whip them with a bit of water and heavy cream.

“How did you manage at the meeting?” Jack asked.

“That sleazeball Russian I was sitting next to, Andreyev, wanted me to come to his room tonight because I owed my life to Ivan Gurov,” Alli said.

Vasily Andreyev, with skin the color of putty or suet, and the black button eyes of an evil doll that, having been shunted aside for newer playthings, harbored the need for revenge.

“Don’t give me that look, I can take care of myself.” She tossed her head. “I tuned him out by thinking about what you said before, and I know you’re right. I’ve been so intent looking over my shoulder for death to steal up behind me, I was already half dead. When I was taken . . . that week might have been a month or a year, I didn’t know, I became unmoored from the present, or maybe from time itself. Nothing felt right, there were periods when time passed at a glacial pace and at other times it seemed as if hours were compressed into seconds.”

Jack put his elbows on the table, leaning forward, listening to every word she said. With the crackle of the frying eggs no one could overhear what she was saying.

“When I went to Milla Tamirova’s apartment, when I went into her dungeon, sat in the restraint chair, I began to realize that the feeling of being unmoored, of being outside time never left me during the months after you rescued me. Now I think it has, now I want to look ahead, to experience the new, and even the old, which will feel like new to me, just like I’ve been doing since we got here.”

The eggs arrived, sided by thick slices of the dense Ukranian brown bread. The sous-chef placed the plates in front of them, along with silverware, and went to pour tea out of a large, ornate samovar standing on a corner of the work counter.

Alli took up her fork and dug into the glistening eggs. “In the middle of hearing about what flawless skin I had,” she continued, “it dawned on me that the only time I’ve been happy—really happy—since Emma’s death is when I’ve been with you and Annika. The adrenaline rush of the present annihilated the past, at least for a short time, but it also began to resurrect my sense of time and place.”

Jack chewed on a slice of bread, which was intensely flavorful, slightly sour, and slathered with salted butter. “You feel more yourself now.”

“I don’t know about that, because I was only beginning to learn about myself when Emma died.” Alli looked thoughtful. “What I feel is different, as if I’ve just thrown all the sandbags off an air balloon and now I’m rising up toward. . . .”

“Toward what?”

“I don’t know, exactly, but I think now that I have a kind of gift. When I listen to you talking to other people, or when I listen to them talking among themselves, if the conversation goes on long enough, I have a sense of what they mean, not what they’re saying necessarily, but what they’re trying to get across or, more often, what they’re trying to hide. And, it seems to me, that the longer the conversation goes on the clearer their real purpose becomes, or maybe I mean how important their lies are to them.” She cocked her head. “Do you see what I mean?”

“I think so.” Jack was wolfing down the omelet. “But give me an example, anyway.”

“All right, let’s see . . .” She screwed up her face in thought. “Okay, here’s one, that Russian sitting next to me—”

“Andreyev, the lecher.”

She laughed softly. “That’s right. Well, when I mentioned that we had met Dyadya Gourdjiev he started talking about him, and though there was nothing negative in what he said—quite the opposite, in fact—I began to sense that he was lying, that he didn’t like him at all, and when he mentioned Kharkishvili—and only in passing—I just knew that Andreyev had aligned himself with him.”

Jack was thinking of his recent conversation with Kharkishvili, who had denied any kind of rivalry between him and Gourdjiev. If Alli was right in her observations then Kharkishvili deliberately lied to him and the situation within AURA was more complex than he had been led to believe, which in all likelihood might lead to difficulties in his dealing with these people even if he did come up with a solution to the problem of how to defuse Yukin’s plan. He resolved to test her belief at the earliest opportunity.

At that moment Kharkishvili came into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and took out a bottle of beer. He nodded at Jack in a stiff, almost formal manner.

“I need to ask this guy some questions,” Jack said, rising. “I’ll be right back.”

He was halfway to where Kharkishvili was standing, working an opener under the crenelated cap of the bottle, when the floor began to tilt under his feet. He took a step to correct it and felt as if his knees had turned to jelly. He began to pitch over, but before he hit the floor he heard Alli screaming. Then he plunged headlong into oblivion.