Last Snow

TWENTY-SEVEN

IT WASN’T often that Dyadya Gourdjiev thought about Nikki, in fact there were entire months when she never entered his mind. She was, however, never far from his heart. The essence of her filled his mind now as he stepped off the plane into Simferopol North Airport. He’d made no secret of his plans, booking the seat and traveling under his own name. He thought this would make it easier for Oriel Batchuk to follow him; he didn’t want anything to impede his enemy’s progress.

Gourdjiev took his time even after he picked up his weekend bag from the luggage carousel and walked outside to the long-term lot and got into the car he always left there when he was on his way back to Kiev or, every once in a while, Moscow. It was an ancient Zil that wheezed every time he stepped on the brakes, but he loved it anyway. It smelled like home.

He could not get Nikki out of his mind, perhaps he didn’t want to because thoughts of her brought him back to Batchuk. He recalled with startling detail the moment Batchuk had first seen Nikki because that was the moment death had attached itself to him, and from that moment forward a shadow followed in Batchuk’s wake. Other people would experience it as intimidation, but Gourdjiev was not so easily fooled, because when he looked into Batchuk’s eyes all he saw was catastrophe and death.

From time to time he had mentioned Nikki to Batchuk—after all, there were occasions when it was impossible not to—but he had bent over backward to make certain the two never met. He made dates for Batchuk to come over to the house for dinner only when he knew that Nikki would be busy with her girlfriends or, latterly, with Alexsei Mandanovich Dementiev, to whom he had introduced Nikki at a gala at the State Opera House. He had no notion as to whether they would take to one another, but he was immensely relieved when they did, and it was only when Alexsei asked for her hand in marriage that Gourdjiev contemplated allowing Batchuk to catch a glimpse of her.

In fact he had orchestrated their meeting so that Batchuk would see Nikki and Alexsei together, see how much in love they were, and no matter what he thought of Nikki would understand that that path was closed to him forever.

Now, driving away from the airport in the Crimea, Gourdjiev could scarcely believe the lengths to which he had gone to keep Nikki and Batchuk from meeting. Had it been a dream, a premonition, or simply intuition, he could no longer remember. But it seemed to him that he had awoken in the middle of the night with a vision of Nikki and Batchuk together, Nikki weeping bitterly, inconsolably, and it was as if he had been afforded a glimpse of a tragic future so that he could ensure that it would never happen. He knew Batchuk’s taste in women, knew just what he liked most to look at and to feel, and there was no doubt in his mind that Nikki fell right into that category. What she might have felt about him he couldn’t say, but over and over again he had seen Batchuk pursue what he wanted, persistent, implacable until he got it. It might be an exaggeration but Gourdjiev had come to believe that there was scarcely a woman Batchuk wanted who would not eventually accede to him. Long experience had taught him that the only way to view Batchuk was through a cynic’s eyes because Batchuk was at his most dangerous, his most disingenuous when it appeared that he was being sincere.

He swung onto the highway without it fully registering. His mind was back at that meeting when he’d seen the dreadful expression on Batchuk’s face as he watched Alexsei swing Nikki around outside the mall jewelry store. Good Christ, that was very nearly the worst moment of my life, Gourdjiev thought. He wished to whatever god existed that it had been, everything might have ended differently.

Watching Nikki, Batchuk had the look of an angel, as if an ethereal glow were illuminating him from the inside. Gourdjiev knew that meant trouble on whatever level, but he pushed the thought aside as people will terrifying nightmares or worst possible outcomes because the human brain won’t allow it. It was like contemplating your own death—the incomprehensible end of all things known and comforting—the level of fear was simply too great to maintain. Some benign circuit breaker in the brain turned off that possibility, or shoved it so far back into the realm of unreality or fable that it faded from consciousness. This is precisely what happened to Gourdjiev when he saw Nikki’s image fill Batchuk’s eyes to overflowing. Some part of his brain switched off, saying: No, no, no, let’s get on with the real, the present, the pressing now, and for the next twenty minutes the two men talked about their plans as if nothing untoward had happened.

And yet it had, Gourdjiev thought, as he accelerated toward the coastline and, beyond, the violent and turbid Black Sea. The malevolent seed had been sown despite his best efforts, and immediately began to germinate, cracking open and springing to life in the black soil of Batchuk’s mind.

Gourdjiev neared the coast with its high, dark, bruised-looking clouds, trembling with thunder and rain. He did not have to glance in the rearview mirror to know that he was being followed, he had felt it the moment he had arrived at the airport, the sense that someone was watching his every move. There was a vehicle behind him, of this he was certain, he was being followed, either by Batchuk or by someone Batchuk owned.

One glance in the mirror would tell him. He knew Batchuk so intimately that he could pick out his outline even through the rain-spattered windshield. And yet he kept his gaze on the road ahead as it wound through the landward incline of the brooding cliff face. The truth was he preferred not to look, preferred to be unsure of the identity of his pursuer, of one thing at least, because everything else was laid out before him as if it had already occurred, as if he were locked into a trajectory that, no matter how he tried to twist away or fight against it, would lead him to some final place filled with tragedy.

FIFTEEN MINUTES after Dennis Paull drove out of the Alizarin Global compound with Claire beside him and Aaron heavy-lidded and drowsing in the backseat, he found a spot by the side of the road where, this late at night or early in the morning, he was certain he could not be observed. He got out of the car, went around, and opened the trunk. He fired up the laptop and within minutes found that it had been hacked. Because of the safeguards he had installed the hacker’s electronic fingerprints were all over the file system; Paull knew that he had made a complete copy of the information on the hard drive.

That was fine by Paull, he’d expected no less. Despite what he’d told the president he had used insecure servers to gather information. He needed stone-cold proof as to the identity of the man in Carson’s inner circle who was passing on classified information to Benson and Thomson, and if he didn’t have the time to do it himself he was determined to let the culprit do it for him. When he had exited the Residence Inn that morning he had known that sooner rather than later someone would be coming for him. That’s why he’d planted this dummy laptop in his trunk days ago. His real laptop, the one with all the hacked information, was stowed in a secret compartment below the spare wheel well that he opened now by the light of the small, recessed bulb on the inside of the trunk lid.

He turned it on, and plugged in a 3G Wi-Fi card. Almost at once his private, shielded network was activated. He had a good signal, even out here. He inputted information and set up the parameters of the various Internet searches he wanted the automated software to perform, then closed the trunk and got back behind the wheel.

“Tomorrow I promise we’ll be off to do some celebrating.” He was looking at sleepy Aaron, but he knew Claire understood he meant it for both of them. “Would you like that, kiddo?” He used to call Claire kiddo when she was Aaron’s age.

“I sure would, Grandpa.” His grandson looked around and yawned. “Where are we gonna celebrate?”

Paull grinned at Aaron’s image in the rearview mirror as he put the car in gear. “It’s a surprise.”

“BEFORE I saw you and Aaron this afternoon,” Dennis Paull said, “I thought it was all slipping away from me, everything I had ever wanted out of life, that even before I died there would be nothing left, nothing to live for. Everyone had left me prematurely: your mother, you, and Aaron, who I’d never seen before today.”

The three of them were in the spacious room at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Maryland Avenue where he was putting Claire and Aaron up for as long as they wanted to stay after the funeral. His first instinct had been to invite them back to the house, but on second thought he decided it was presumptuous. The house where he and Louise—mostly Louise—had raised Claire was crammed with too many memories, good and bad, for both of them. Better, he felt, to take it slow.

“But you had your work,” Claire said without rancor, as she closed the door to the bedroom where she had put Aaron to bed, “and it seemed to us—Mom and me—that was all you cared about or needed.”

Paull felt as if he had been set on fire by his own guilt. “Yes, I can see how I must have given that impression so many times.” He took her hand. “I’m so very sorry, Claire.”

“Don’t be sorry, Grandpa.” Aaron stood in the doorway, speaking with the meticulous seriousness only a seven-year-old could display. He was wearing Buzz Lightyear pajamas. “Mom and I will take care of you.”

This elicited a burst of laughter from Claire. “Oh, Aaron.” She went over and kissed him on the cheek. “Now go on back to bed, honey.”

Paull bit his tongue so that he wouldn’t say what he was thinking: No, I’ll take care of you and your mother, because he knew Claire would hate that. He had to get used to her being grown up, an adult who could take care of herself.

“We’ll make the arrangements for your mother’s funeral tomorrow and do the service early,” he said. “I promised Aaron a celebration.”

“You’ve changed.” Claire could not keep a touch of wonder out of her voice.

“Surprised?”

“Frankly, yes, Dad. I didn’t think you could, or rather that you might want to.” She sat in a plush, upholstered chair. “What happened?”

“I got older and wiser.” He perched on the corner of the coffee table as if to reassure her that this was her room, her space. “That may sound facile or a cliché, but in my case it’s true. I guess I had to get to be a certain age to understand what I was missing, to understand what I’d done wrong, but until today I didn’t know what to do about it.”

“You mean the president doesn’t need you twenty-four-seven?”

“No, he’s got Jack McClure for that.” Paull took a quick glance at the bedroom door, which was still slightly ajar. “Besides, even if he did I’m with my family now.”

This was absolutely true as far as it went; however, and most unfortunately, at the moment catching up with Claire and his grandson weren’t the only things on his mind.

“I think it’s time for you to get some sleep.”

“I’m not tired.”

“All right,” he said, “then tell me what your life has been like these last seven years.”

She sighed and put her head back against the cushion. “We’re living in Baltimore, which I don’t particularly like.”

“Then why are you there?” Paull asked.

“I have a good job—great, really—that pays really well. I create greeting cards that are sold over the Internet.”

“Surely you can do that anywhere,” Paull said. “You could move back here.”

The instant the words were out of his mouth he regretted it. Claire’s face clouded over and her gaze went to the closed drapes through which, at any moment, the first light of dawn would seep. “I’m not sure that would be a good idea, Dad.”

“Sure, stupid of me. You and Aaron have your own lives.”

“But we don’t have much family, do we?”

Both father and daughter looked at the little miracle of Aaron who, standing in the doorway, his pajamas emblazoned with the phrase TO INFINITY AND BEYOND! was apparently far too excited by the events of the long day to sleep or even to lie in bed. And now Paull wondered whether Claire’s self-imposed exile to a city she did not like was punishment not only for him, but for herself.

He thought she was about to respond, he wanted her to respond, but at that moment his cell phone vibrated. He wanted to ignore it, did his best to ignore it, in fact, but a moment after it stopped, the vibration returned, this time in a different pattern, and he knew that he had no choice. Excusing himself he padded across the carpet to the bathroom, but even before he got there he had his phone out and was reading the text message.

It was one of three that he had prewritten in the event of new information being picked up by any one of the three programs he was running on his laptop. This one was from the proprietary search engine he had a part in developing. Unlike others available to the general public, this one had the ability to dig through corporate filings and other ephemera to come up with answers to questions such as the one Paull had given it this evening: Who owns Alizarin Group?

It seemed the program had the devil’s own time plowing through a mountain of labyrinthine document filings, shell companies that led nowhere, phantom bank accounts, and the like. Nevertheless, it persevered, as he had designed it to do, but now he knew the privately held company was owned by seven partners. He had no idea what to make of that; he knew of only one man who could.

ORIEL BATCHUK, driving along an unfamiliar highway in the Crimea, would have been shocked if Gourdjiev wasn’t aware that he was being followed. He did not appear to care, which did shock Batchuk. He had no idea what his old friend and foe was up to, just as he couldn’t fathom what had motivated Gourdjiev to shoot Boronyov, a man whom Limonev had assured him was already dead. Gourdjiev had told Batchuk’s men that finding the fugitive oligarch was why Annika was in Ukraine, but Batchuk hadn’t believed that tale for a moment. Gourdjiev had a plan, that much was certain—not knowing what it was worried him.

Gourdjiev, always so mysterious, so circumspect, was nothing of the sort now. It was when people started acting out of character that the real problems started, Batchuk knew from cold, hard experience, the first instance of which appeared with Nikki. Through his twenty-minute talk with Gourdjiev he had become increasingly enraged first that Gourdjiev had deliberately blocked any possible meeting with her, and second that when it did happen, he made certain to push her impending wedding in his face. The cruelty of Gourdjiev’s actions was not lost on him, and the reverberations from that affront had never ceased.

That day Gourdjiev had acted out of character, he had indicated through deeds rather than words that Nikki was off-limits, that she was better than Batchuk and so deserved better than him, a man named Alexsei Dementiev.

Ahead of him the filthy Zil Gourdjiev was driving turned off the highway onto a secondary road that appeared to lead to the coast. Batchuk made certain that he never lost sight of the car; he was on the lookout for a quick switch, where a second car and driver waiting by the side of the road would allow the drivers to switch vehicles, thus throwing off any pursuit, but no such vehicle was in evidence.

Batchuk returned to his contemplation of the past. He was powerful enough even at that time to start an investigation into Dementiev’s life and, if necessary, manufacture evidence that would disgrace him or put him behind bars. But Batchuk quickly determined that neither of those outcomes would do him any good because Gourdjiev would know what he had done and would not only come after him but also put Nikki out of his reach forever. He would not have that. In his confused state he didn’t know what he felt for Nikki beyond a potent erotic attraction, but he did know that getting to her, fucking her until she couldn’t walk, was all he wanted, all he could think of now. How strong a component revenge was even he couldn’t say.

He could see the Black Sea through a sudden squall of rain, ominous clouds hanging low on the horizon. Not for the first time he considered the possibility that Gourdjiev was leading him into a trap, that either the shooting of Boronyov or Gourdjiev’s loaded remark to his men was the bait. This thought caused him to recall their most recent confrontation, when he had stepped out of the shadows of Gourdjiev’s building, confident that he had the upper hand, when their escalating emotions had driven him to lay down his ultimatum: “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.”

And now, for the first time, it occurred to him that the trap might have already been sprung, that possibly it had clamped him in its teeth the moment he had gone to tell Gourdjiev that his—what had he called it?—his burnt offering would not save Annika this time. What if, he asked himself now, that entire heated conversation had been choreographed by Gourdjiev? He was more than capable of such a Machiavellian stratagem.

It was a stratagem that he had used himself with Nikki and Alexsei Dementiev years ago, in another, simpler world, driven only by emotion, pure or impure. He had been invited to the wedding and he had gone, taking one of his many women, he could no longer remember which one. He kept away from the couple of honor. Not surprisingly Gourdjiev’s eyes were upon him the entire night, but even if he hadn’t been under scrutiny, he had resolved to keep his distance as a first step in his stratagem. Patience was his ally when it came to Nikki, he knew this in his bones, though his flesh felt like it was on fire every time he caught sight of her. And when she danced, in the center of the ballroom floor, his heart nearly stopped.

In the weeks that followed he did nothing at all but go about the business of following in Yukin’s shadow and, like his mentor, amassing more and more power as he rose in prominence and influence. It was just over two months from the wedding date that he contrived to cross paths with Alexsei Dementiev in a perfectly natural way so as not to arouse Gourdjiev’s suspicions. It was hardly difficult; Dementiev worked as a state prosecutor, his whereabouts known and documented by any number of ministries with which Batchuk had powerful contacts. Batchuk made it vital that Dementiev depose him for an important case he was prosecuting for Yukin. Afterward, they went to lunch. Having committed to memory every fact aggregated in Dementiev’s government file, Batchuk invited him to play tennis, a sport the young man adored, at the indoor facility owned and operated by his club. Dementiev wasted no time in accepting, and in this way, among others cleverly devised by Batchuk, the two men became friends. And so it came about that Alexsei Dementiev himself introduced Batchuk to Nikki when he brought him home for dinner, the first of many nights that the three of them—and sometimes four because Batchuk was careful to bring a date now and again—spent together, eating, talking, and drinking the excellent vodka Batchuk was sure to bring.

Early on in his relationship with Dementiev, when they had gone out drinking after a tennis match, Batchuk had determined that the prosecutor did not have the capacity for alcohol he himself did. One night, eight months later, when the three of them were alone, they drank so much that near midnight Dementiev passed out, obliging Batchuk to help Nikki carry him to bed, after which the two of them returned to the living room, where a welter of dirty plates and servers awaited them. Batchuk obligingly helped her clean up. Space in the kitchen was at a premium, and more than once their bodies brushed against each other.

Nikki was not the kind of woman to fuck a friend while her husband lay insensate in the next room so Batchuk didn’t try, though he had to summon up all his willpower not to take her forcibly and relieve the demonic itch that afflicted him like an allergy or a response to poison. When it came to Nikki’s effect on him poison was not too extreme a word. When he was in her presence—and, eventually, even when he wasn’t—he felt ill, disoriented, dizzy as he lost track of who and where he was. It was only when he was alone with her, so drunk he could taste, or thought he tasted, his heart in his mouth, that he was comfortably numb. But then the gray morning would come and his mind would be beset by the thought of what Alexsei Dementiev had, what he didn’t have, and it was all he could do not to tear his hair out.

Patience, he counseled the raging part of him. Patience.

And then one day his patience was rewarded.

Batchuk’s mind snapped back into focus as he saw Gourdjiev’s Zil turn off the secondary road, down a gravel driveway that led to a high wall into which was set an electronic gate that opened for the car, then immediately closed behind it.

Beyond the wall, set on a rocky promontory, he spied a large and imposing manor house that he knew he must penetrate. He pulled over his car, doused the lights, and began to formulate a plan.