Last Snow

TWO

SLEEP WAS impossible after that disturbing conversation. Jack put on earbuds and fired up Emma’s iPod, which he took with him wherever he went, and putting it on random play, listened to “I Call My Baby Pussycat” by Funkadelic and “Like Eating Glass” by Bloc Party, before he felt suddenly claustrophobic alone in his suite with his daughter’s music and a half-dozen electronic listening devices, so he put the iPod aside and took the elevator down to the immense gilt-and-marble lobby with its overstuffed velvet furniture, musty samovars, and gimlet-eyed staff. He shivered slightly as he strode through the space, his steps echoing hollowly.

The bar was to the right, the room only slightly less imposing than the lobby itself. At least the lights were lower, the half-moon banquettes giving the illusion of intimacy. To his left was a curved bar of polished metal, macabrely lit from underneath, in front of which were twelve modernist stools. Not too long ago this bar and others like it all over Moscow were filled with free-spending oligarchs, businessmen who had made hundreds of millions of dollars buying up the huge corporations privatized during glasnost. Snapping up the companies for cents on the dollar, they’d been made rich beyond their wildest dreams virtually overnight. Yukin had ended all that when he’d decided to take back the corporations. Now the oligarchs were in a panic, scrambling to find the money to pay for the debts they had amassed while leveraging their nonexistent businesses when their short-lived power was at its zenith. Now the bar and others like it all over the city were as empty as a subway car at three in the morning.

Jack went past the bar itself and saw a Secret Service agent nursing a club soda. He turned his eye from an empty banquette at the rear at which he was planning to sit to the one the agent was keeping an eye on, and saw Alli Carson. She was sitting by herself next to a window that looked out onto the snow-covered square, occupied only by architecturally florid buildings, all of which had a history steeped in blood and power. She looked so small, almost lost, vulnerable against the high-back crescent, but he knew better. This part of her physical appearance was caused by Graves’ disease, a form of hyperthyroidism that made her look sixteen rather than twenty-two. Beyond that illusion, she was tough as reinforced concrete and smarter than many people twice her years. Her skin was pale against the bloodred material. Clear green eyes below a thick fall of auburn hair dominated an oval face. A constellation of freckles danced across the bridge of her nose. She wore jeans and a T-shirt that read SEX IS DEAD across the front. She could not have looked more out of place.

“I’ll have whatever she’s having,” he told the somnolent waiter as he slid into the banquette beside her.

Alli’s slim fingers gripped the glass. “It’s not a Shirley Temple,” she said.

He grinned. “Good God, I hope not.”

She laughed, which was the point.

“Where’s your mom?”

“In bed,” Alli said. “She might be asleep, or not. She only took the Xanax ten minutes ago.”

“She still having trouble sleeping?”

“She hates it here. She says the Russian women are too piggy to be impressed with her.”

The waiter came with Jack’s drink, which turned out to be a White Russian, a bit sweet for him, but what the hell, he thought.

As he lifted his glass, she said, “You’re not leaving, too, are you?”

He had learned early on not to lie to her; he’d needed to earn her trust. Besides, she was too quick to be gulled. “I’m not going with your father, no.”

A ghost of a smile played around her generous mouth. “Which means you’re going somewhere.” Her gaze slid slyly sideways. “What are you doing for him?”

“You know I can’t tell you.”

“Whatever it is it’s got to be more interesting than sitting around this dump.”

“I thought you liked it here.”

“Talking to Dad again? Didn’t your bullshit meter go off? The Russian boys are Neanderthals and the Russian girls are sluts—what’s to like?”

“There’s a lot of history here.”

“Which no one wants to talk about because it’s been entirely rewritten,” she said dryly. “I’m begging you, take me away from all this, Jack.”

“I wish I could, Alli, really.”

“Fuck. Fuck you!”

“Don’t be like that.”

“How would you like me to be?” Her eyes flashed. “Docile, meek, girlish?”

“Now you’re confusing me with your father.”

“How can you be friends with him?”

Then again, Jack thought, she could still be startlingly immature. “He’s a good man, but that doesn’t necessarily make him a good father.”

As quickly as her anger had sparked, it winked out. “Fuck.” But now her voice had softened. “I hate this life, Jack, really, it sucks beyond belief.”

“How can I make it better?”

She kissed him tenderly on the cheek. “If only.” Then she downed the last of her White Russian with such force the ice cubes clacked against her front teeth. “One day it’ll get better, or it won’t, right?”

She began to slide out of the banquette.

Against his better judgment, he said, “So how are you doing?”

Alli paused. “About as well as you.”

It was a smart answer, Jack thought, or else it was a smart-aleck answer. Maybe, knowing Alli, it was both. “That would have made Emma laugh.” Emma, who had been Alli’s roommate, best friend, confidante, and closest ally against Alli’s parents. “Remember the time I came to watch you in a relay race? You were the anchor, remember?”

“I remember.”

“She let me sit next to her and though she didn’t say a word I could see how proud of you she was. She didn’t get to her feet, she didn’t applaud like everyone else when you pulled away and won.”

Alli was quiet for some time as if lost in the past. “That night when I came back from celebrating, the room was dark and I thought she was asleep. I went into the bathroom and undressed as quietly as I could. As I got into bed I saw there was a small box lying on the blanket. I moved it into a bar of light slanting through the window. Inside was a leaping silver cat on a chain.

“As I held it up, she said, ‘It’s a cheetah, the fastest fucking animal on four legs,’ and turned over and went to sleep.” Alli stood up. “I’ll never stop missing her and neither will you.”

He watched her walk away, but he was seeing Emma. Alli was right, he would never stop missing the daughter who he’d allowed to drift away from him, who’d called him right before she crashed her car into a tree and died on the spot. Although, improbably, there had been times afterward when she’d appeared to him, even talked to him.

Which opened up four possibilities: His extreme guilt had caused him to conjure her up from the depths of his unconscious, as the shrink he’d consulted suggested; he was insane; his dyslexic brain was playing tricks on him; or the incorporeal part of Emma had survived her physical death. Any one of those scenarios filled him with dread, but not for the same reasons. He wanted to believe that there was more to reality than life and death, which were, after all, man-made concepts. He wanted to believe that Emma still existed in some form. To him that was the definition of faith: to believe in something that science was unable to explain. When Emma had been killed he’d lost whatever faith he might have had; when she returned to him he’d regained it.

Alli and her escort had been swallowed up by the lobby, and he was alone in the bar. The hush of a mausoleum wrapped itself about the room. The lamps glimmered like shale in a riverbed. The snow tap-tap-tapped feebly against the windowpane, a starved beggar wanting in. He’d only taken a couple of sips of the cloying White Russian, and he pushed it away now. Catching the waiter between catnaps, he ordered a single-malt whisky with water on the side. Then he pulled out the slip of paper with Lloyd Berns’s itinerary in Ukraine and concentrated on reading it.

Jack’s dyslexia caused his brain to work thousands of times faster than what was considered normal. He could not understand, at least not easily, anything that wasn’t in three dimensions, which meant that he could solve a Rubik’s Cube in about ninety seconds, but writing, which was two-dimensional, was an arduous task. He had to decipher it as if it were a foreign language or a code. He’d been taught to master his disability by a minister who’d sheltered him after he’d run away from his father, who had constantly beaten him for being unable to learn at school. It was only later, as an adult, that he had discovered that his dyslexia could be a devastating asset in deconstructing crime scenes and crawling inside asocial and psychotic minds.

He was running down the list of unfamiliar city and street names when he heard someone order a vodka in a voice as sharp as it was familiar. Glancing up from his task, he saw a young blonde in a black dress and high heels, perched on one of the bar stools. Her hair was pulled back from her face in a ponytail that reached to the hollow between her shoulder blades. Though that hairstyle was most often used by women with thin hair, this was not the case with the blonde, whose hair was as thick as it was lustrous. Her large, slightly uptilted eyes were the mineral color of carnelian. She had wide lips that might have been sensual had they not been down-turned in a distinctly unattractive scowl.

She was sitting beside another woman of approximately the same age, with dark hair and eyes, dressed in a flashy dress of hunter-green, which was so short most of her thighs were pearled by the light. When the blonde spoke again, Jack racked his brain as to where he’d heard that voice before.

The blonde tossed her head. “So I said, ‘I’ll see you in hell.’ ”

And Jack knew hers was the female voice from the room below him.

“Then I threw the lamp in his face and the bulb burned his cheek.”

The brunette laughed. “Fucker got off easy.”

“You bet,” the blonde with the carnelian eyes said. “If I see him again I swear I’ll kick his balls into the other side of Red Square.”

“Well, honey, here’s your chance,” her companion snickered.

The blonde turned toward the entrance and so did Jack. He saw a large, bearlike man with dark hair, oiled like an American gangster from the thirties. There was a ruddy burn on his cheek, no doubt from the lightbulb. He wore one of those gaudy silk suits that only Russians think are fashionable, a chunky gold watch, and an even chunkier gold pinkie ring. He held himself like Tony Soprano coming in heavy to a Mafia sit-down. Even Jack, who didn’t know him from a hole in the wall, wanted to kick his balls into the other side of Red Square.

The blonde swiveled around to face her lover, or ex-lover, who, as he came toward them, was leering at her. Jack could see, if no one else in the bar could, that there was going to be serious trouble. He wished he’d left with Alli, because he had no desire to get involved in a fight that was none of his business. On the other hand, as the Soprano wannabe moved, Jack glimpsed the butt of a 9mm pistol in a chamois shoulder holster in his left armpit. He edged to the end of the banquette and turned halfway outward, giving him a clear field to get to his feet quickly if the need arose.

The man sauntered up to where the blonde and her girlfriend sat. The blonde was swinging her left leg as if in time to unheard music. Jack could see her smiling, but the smile seemed wicked, deadly even. The man, cocksure and armed to the teeth, appeared oblivious to the bloodlust in her heart, or possibly he felt invulnerable meeting with her in this public space. After all, what would she dare do to him that he—or his 9mm—couldn’t handle?

He was about to say something to her when, with an upswing, she buried the toe of her high-heeled shoe in his groin. He grimaced, making a face not that different from his leer, and bent over almost double. Because he was on the man’s left side, Jack could see what the blonde couldn’t: Her lover reached for the 9mm.

Jack was out of the banquette. He took two long strides to the bar and brought the edge of one hand down on the man’s hairy wrist. The gun clattered to the floor, the waiter jumped back, and the bartender signaled for security.

The blonde’s lover lunged clumsily past Jack, the fingers of his right hand grabbing the woman’s throat, throttling her. She gave a soft gurgle, like an infant at the breast. Jack punched the man in the throat, and that was the end of him or, more accurately, the fight in him. By that time, two of the hotel’s security team had arrived. One of them dragged the ex-lover away while the other picked up the 9mm with his bare hand. He seemed unconcerned with leaving his fingerprints. Obviously, they did things differently in Moscow, Jack thought, wondering fleetingly what the Russian crime scene unit was called. This thought took his mind off the murderous look the blonde’s ex-lover shot him as he was dragged away.

“Are you all right?” Jack said to the blonde, whose hands tentatively fingered her throat.

“Yes, thank you.”

He nodded, about to move away, when she added: “My name is Annika, and this is Jelena. We were about to go clubbing. Why don’t you join us?”

“It’s been a long day and I was just on my way up to my room.”

“Please. I’d like to repay your kindness.” She gestured at the empty stool beside her. “The least I can offer is a drink.”

Jack really wanted to get back to his room and prepare for the assignment he’d been given, but it would be rude to refuse. “One drink.”

She nodded. “One drink only. Then, if you like, I myself will escort you to the elevators. I’m staying here, too.”

“Yeah, I couldn’t help hearing the shouting match earlier this evening.”

She made a face. “Jelena said that everyone in the hotel must’ve heard Ivan and me.”

He sat on the indicated stool and nodded after the departing figures. “I guess we’ll need to give statements to the police.”

At this, both women laughed. “I see you haven’t been in Moscow long,” Jelena said. “The police are too busy shaking down businesses and taking American dollars from people like Annika’s boyfriend—”

“Ex-boyfriend,” Annika interjected. “Very ex.”

“Whatever.” Jelena shrugged. She spoke English with no foreign intonation at all, unlike Annika, whose English was freighted with a heavy Russian accent.

“I see you have no trouble talking to strangers.”

“If I did, I’d be out of a job,” Jelena said. “I handle the hotel’s overseas bookings.”

Annika signaled the bartender. “What will you have . . .”

“Jack,” he said. “Jack McClure.”

Annika nodded. “What’s your poison, Jack McClure?”

“Single malt,” Jack said to the bartender. “Oban, please.”

“Right away, sir.” The bartender went to retrieve the bottle of scotch.

“I hope you have a strong constitution, Mr. McClure.”

“Shut up, Jelena.” Annika shot her friend a daggered look before turning back to Jack. “Ignore her. She’s developed a lurid imagination from reading too many American thrillers.”

“I have no idea what the two of you are talking about.”

The bartender set his drink in front of him, then backed away as if they were all radiating plutonium.

“You might as well tell him, Annika.”

“That seems like a good idea,” he said, taking a sip of his Oban.

Annika sighed. “My ex—his name is Ivan Gurov—is a minor—and I stress minor—member of a Russian grupperovka.” Her eyes locked on his. “You know this word?”

Jack did. “He’s part of the Moscow mafia.”

“He’s a fucking criminal,” Jelena said with more emotion than she’d shown up until now.

“As you can see, Jack, Jelena didn’t approve of my involvement with Ivan.”

“He’s a bloodsucker,” Jelena said, clearly warming to the topic. “He’s trash washed up in the gutter, who’d as soon slit your throat as look twice at you. He gets more pleasure out of blood than vodka, that’s for sure.”

“My friend needs to learn to have an opinion,” Annika said with a good-natured laugh.

“And you need to watch out behind you,” Jelena said soberly. “You, too, Mr. McClure. I saw the look Ivan gave you.”

“I take it that means he won’t be thrown in jail.”

“His friends would see he got out in a heartbeat,” Annika said, “which is why the police won’t bother pursuing the matter.”

“More likely they don’t want to wind up in an alley with a bullet in the back of the head,” Jelena said. “They have a serious aversion to being taken out with the garbage.”

Jack took another sip of his scotch. “Count me in on that group.”

“Don’t worry,” Annika said. “Jelena tends to overstate the case when it comes to Ivan. He’s pretty far down the grupperovka food chain.”

Jelena made a derisive sound. “That doesn’t stop him from killing people.”

“You don’t know that for a fact.”

“I hear things, Annika, same as you.” She shook her head. “You’re so naïve sometimes.”

Jack had had about enough Halloween stories for one evening. He had zero interest in seeing Ivan Gurov again, but he didn’t have any expectation that he would, especially since by tomorrow morning he’d be in the air, on his way to Ukraine.

He finished his drink and stood up. “Ladies, it’s been interesting, but all things considered it’s time for me to leave.”

“You see what you did, Jelena,” Annika pouted, “you’ve driven away another man.” She rose and threw some money on the bar. “I promised to make sure you got to your room.”

“That’s right,” Jelena said with a sardonic edge. “That disgusting pig of yours might be hiding in the elevator.”

Jack held up his hands. “Ladies, I like women fighting over me as much as the next guy, but, really, I can find my way upstairs by myself.”

ALONE IN the elevator, he still felt Annika’s cat’s eyes following him, and he wondered whether she or Jelena had been seriously coming on to him. Maybe that was just male ego talking. Then again, it could be that both of them had been flirting with him, which had long been a fantasy of his, one he shared with about a billion other men. One thing was for certain, his brain and theirs had been vibrating on two distinct frequencies. Between the assignment in Ukraine, secret from even the president’s staff, and the escalating friction with Sharon, his mind had no room for flirtatious Russian women, especially when one had a mobster for a boyfriend, ex- or otherwise.

He got off at the top floor, nodded to the Secret Service personnel on duty, and entered his room. Something about his talk with Carson in the stairwell bothered him. Why had he dismissed his bodyguards before he brought up the subject of Jack’s assignment? When Jack had queried him, the president had said: “I trust you, Jack. That’s the beginning and the end of it.”

Did Dennis Paull suspect a mole inside Edward’s staff—in the president’s own Secret Service detail? If true, it would be a devastating blow to Edward’s work guiding the administration. What if his political enemies—who, as he said, were still powerful—knew his every move before he made it? Carson hadn’t spoken their names, but Paull had: Miles Benson, the former director of the CIA, a hardheaded, take-no-prisoners war veteran; and Morgan Thomson, the former national security advisor, the last of the credible neocons, bellicose, nervy, with recently revealed ties to several companies manufacturing war materiel. Between them, the two men had almost sixty years of service and networking inside the Beltway, formidable opponents indeed. They could not only stymie the president’s agenda, but also undermine his standing in the country. These days, polls were everything. The appearance of failure was all that was needed to send Carson’s popularity skidding.

He thought about calling Sharon, but he needed something to calm him. Maybe a hot shower. As he stripped off his clothes and padded into the bathroom, he made a mental note to follow up on his line of reasoning, either with or without Carson’s approval.

He turned on the shower, and had to wait for the hot water to come up, but a man’s voice arrived before the heat did.

“Toss the entire fucking room.”

Jack, listening closely, turned off the water and put his head near the pipe.

“I want to find her secrets, something I can use against her.”

Ivan was speaking in Russian, a language Jack had learned while at the ATF because of his work with terrorists. He’d used Rosetta Stone to learn Russian, Arabic, and Farsi, all within an eight-month period. He already had been fluent in Spanish. As long as the foreign language was delivered aurally, his dyslexia allowed him to be an astonishingly quick learner. He was able to see the words, phrases, tenses, and colloquialisms in three dimensions as he heard them, and thus remember them instantly and without need for repetition.

He sat on the edge of the claw-foot tub, bent over, straining now to pick up every word. Clearly, Ivan hadn’t been handed over to the police. So much for law and order in Russia.

“I thought you knew this bitch inside and out,” another male voice said now.

“Do you know your bitches inside and out?” Ivan said irritably.

“My bitches are tyolkas. Young girls in heat are unknowable and, anyway, who the fuck cares? There’s tons of new tyolkas at Bushfire every night—Hey, what’s this?”

“What’ve you found?”

“Hmm, just a pair of sweaty panties. This bitch is a pig.”

“If I know her, she left them there on purpose, just for prying eyes like yours,” Ivan said. “Which means we’ve been looking in the wrong places.”

“I already checked under the drawers and behind the toilet tank.”

“Too obvious.”

“Ah,” said the second voice, “let’s try the shower drain.”

There was an answering grunt, then, a moment later: “Found something—look, a monofilament line tied to the drain, almost invisible in this light.”

“What’s on the other end of it, Milan Oskovich?” Ivan said in a hushed voice, made slurry by its journey up the pipe.

Jack leaned forward, the better to hear.

There was no sound from below, and for a moment, Jack was afraid the two men had left the bathroom. Then: “It’s a necklace,” Ivan said.

“A cameo,” Milan corrected.

“No wonder she hid it, it must be worth a lot of money, especially on the black market.”

From what Jack had seen of Annika’s attitude and style, she did not seem the type to wear a cameo.

Apparently, Milan didn’t think so either, because he said, “I’m not sure she hid it for its monetary value. Could the cameo be hiding something inside?”

Silence again, and Jack found that his muscles were tensed as if anticipating a blow.

“Fuck!” Milan said. “It’s an ID.”

“She’s FSB.” Ivan’s voice held a note of incredulity.

Jack knew that the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the Federal Security Service or FSB for short, was the successor to the Soviet Union’s KGB.

Milan was laughing. “You poor dope—you’ve been fucking an undercover FSB officer.”

“Shut up!”

“You’d better not let Arsov get wind of this.”

“I said shut the fuck up!”

Jack knew from his pretrip briefings that Kaolin Arsov was the head of the Izmaylovskaya grupperovka in Moscow.

“He’ll have your nuts over an open flame.”

Jack heard the sound of a brief scuffle, and he imagined the two thugs going at it. Why was he listening, this had nothing to do with him. But at once an image of Annika, blond hair and carnelian eyes, long legs crossed one over the other, flashed across his mind. He heard the silvery peal of her laughter, which morphed into Emma’s last appeal: “Dad, help me!”

“Calm the fuck down.” Milan was panting hard. “You can be sure I’m not going to tell anyone. It’s the bitch you have to worry about, not me.”

“I know that.”

Silence again, then a length of unintelligible whispering. What was Ivan dreaming up, Jack wondered.

“Annika? It’s Milan. . . . No, for God’s sake, don’t hang up. Ivan’s been shot. . . . That’s right, shot. He’s alive, but . . . We’re at Bushfire . . . on Tverskaya . . . That’s right, near Red Square, just down the block from Nightflight. No, I haven’t called anyone else. Ivan said to call . . . You’ll come, then? All right, we’re around back in the alley.”

“Let’s go!” Ivan said. “We’ll only have a couple of minutes to beat her there.”