Last Snow (51 page)

“Don’t,” she said, moving away from him.

Jack gingerly unwound Annika’s fingers from the machine pistol. When he took it from her she made no protest, instead she took Alli’s hand and held it tight.

“I knew you were right, I wanted to . . . but I couldn’t.”

“It’s all right,” Alli assured her, “it’s all right.”

Annika stood staring down at her grandfather’s nemesis—her father—with a kind of terrified disbelief. She was holding Alli’s hand so tightly their fingers were white. Jack knew it wasn’t healthy for any of them to remain in this abattoir.

“We need to clean up,” he said.

Annika nodded, but she didn’t move. There were bits of bone stuck to her cheeks and nose, oblique smears of blood elsewhere on her chest and face, including her lips. Gourdjiev stepped agilely over the body and stood in the hallway waiting for them, silent, wrapped in his own enigmatic thoughts. He did not look at his bloody hands.

“How are you?” Jack asked Annika.

Her carnelian eyes were pale and bleak, as if all the mineral quality had leached out of them. “I haven’t the faintest notion, my mind is numb, I feel lost and alone.”

“You’re not alone,” Jack said. “Come on, you and Alli need to clean up.”

He nodded to Alli, and she guided Annika out of the drawing
room, past Gourdjiev, stoop-shouldered and gray, and into the bathroom. Jack led the way into the kitchen, where he and Gourdjiev cleaned up as best they could, using the kitchen sink.

Jack watched warm water sluice the muck off his hands. “It’s true, isn’t it, everything Batchuk said.”

Gourdjiev stared out the window over the sink. “Most of it, anyway.”

“So for years you knew he was her father.”

“Yes.”

“But she didn’t.”

“Not until a few minutes ago when you heard about it yourself.”

“It’s no wonder she killed him.”

“To be shot to death by your own child.” Gourdjiev turned back into the kitchen, slowly washed his hands as if reluctant to part with the tangible evidence of Batchuk’s death. “I wish I could say that I felt satisfied, but I fear that revenge is not all it’s cracked up to be; in fact I’m finding it’s rather meaningless. His death won’t bring my Nikki back, it can’t mitigate her pain, and now I think it’s very possible that Annika is lost to me as well. If that happens I’ll have nothing.”

Jack, aware that Annika and Alli had come into the kitchen, their faces and hands clean if not their clothes, said, “Not to worry, you still have Alizarin Group.”

“What, I didn’t hear you.”

“You heard me well enough,” Jack said. “I know you own Alizarin Group. There are six other partners, but you’re Alizarin’s guiding hand.”

“I’m afraid you’re sadly mistaken, young man.”

Jack hefted Batchuk’s machine pistol. “The only thing you should be afraid of is me.”

“I don’t understand.”

During this exchange Gourdjiev was gradually transformed from
an old beaten-down grandfather to a stern, ramrod-backed businessman with the keen, knowing eyes of an expert poker player. No wonder he had outsmarted Batchuk, Jack thought. And he knew that he had to guard against succumbing to the same fate.

“The man who poisoned me was employed by Alizarin Group, your company.”

Annika stared at him. “Dyadya, is this true?”

“What nonsense, of course it isn’t.”

“He’s lying,” Alli said. “I was with Jack when he interrogated Vlad. He works for Alizarin Group.” She and Annika stood close together, as if they were sisters standing up to their parents. “Anyway, when Ivan Gurov delivers him to the FSB the truth will come out.”

“That’s not going to happen.” Gourdjiev sighed. “Ivan Gurov’s vehicle was intercepted on the way to the airport and Vlad was rescued. Unfortunately, Gurov chose to put up a fight and was killed.”

“What are you saying?” Annika looked as if she had about hit her breaking point. “Your people murdered Ivan?”

“He gave them no choice, Annika. He wouldn’t let Vlad go.”

She stared at him, dumbfounded. “Then it was you who ordered Jack killed?”

“Not killed,” Gourdjiev corrected, “poisoned by arsenic, debilitated, perhaps hospitalized, not dead, never dead.”

“But why?”

Dyadya Gourdjiev turned to Jack and said just as if he were asking for the time, “Do you want to tell her, I’m certain you have figured it out by now.”

Jack hesitated, not because he didn’t know the answer but because he wasn’t sure he wanted to play Gourdjiev’s game. Then he shrugged mentally. “It was Alli, she really threw a wrench into your plan. It’s a joke, funny when you think about it, but that’s how life is, Gourdjiev, a spur-of-the-moment decision, something from out of left field you couldn’t possibly have anticipated. Given her real identity you couldn’t
afford the scrutiny from the American government that would be the inevitable result of my bringing her here, so you thought up a way to take the spotlight off her and put it on me. My government would be so busy trying to find out who had tried to poison me they’d forget all about Alli and what happened to her here, that was why you risked exposure to rescue Vlad, why your people killed Gurov. He recognized them, didn’t he, or at least one of them. You couldn’t allow either Gurov or Vlad to talk, now neither of them will.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev nodded as if immensely pleased with a prized pupil. “And of course you figured out my plan.”

“It seems that you’ve been playing both ends against the middle. You were never going to share the astronomical profits from the uranium strike, either with Yukin or with AURA. You wanted it for yourself.”

“Not at first.” Gourdjiev kept one eye on the muzzle of the machine pistol. “I put AURA together to go after the uranium strike, but rather quickly I saw that AURA was going to fail, principally because Kharkishvili turned against me, he split the AURA members, it was becoming ineffective.” He shrugged. “So I decided to have Alizarin step into the breach.”

“But there was a problem,” Jack said, “a seemingly insurmountable one, which is where I come in.”

Now Gourdjiev laughed. “I very much regret that I ordered Vlad to dose you, you have a remarkable mind. Unique.” He nodded admiringly. “I’ve known the president of Ukraine, Ingan Ulishenko, since he was a young man. I went to him with our proposal, but all he saw was sovereign land, potential profits being taken away from him. He refused to believe that there was an imminent threat from
Trinadtsat
, from Yukin and Batchuk. He would not allow us to buy the land.”

Jack had not raised the weapon, had made no threatening move against Gourdjiev. “What you needed was an outside source to confirm
what you’d told him, someone unimpeachable, someone Ulishenko could neither ignore nor refuse.”

“An American in government, close to the president, but who was totally apolitical.”

“Someone Ulishenko would be sure to trust.”

“No one else fit the bill, Mr. McClure.”

“Which is why your grandfather would never kill me,” Jack said to Annika. “He needs me and, as it happens, I need him. I’m going to make sure Alizarin Group gets the uranium field.”

The solution had come to him sometime when he was washing Batchuk’s grisly debris off his face. He had tried to come up with an alternative, but it was no use, his brain told him that he’d found the only one, even though it wasn’t perfect—wasn’t even, to his way of thinking, good—but there was no other path to take, and now he wondered whether Gourdjiev had hit upon it before him.

“The accord with Yukin must be signed, President Carson made that perfectly clear. But if he does sign it Yukin will move into Ukraine and use the accord to stay there. That isn’t acceptable, either. I talk to Ulishenko, tell him what Yukin is planning. He’ll have no choice but to sell the uranium field to Alizarin Group. Alizarin is a multinational corporation that Yukin can neither touch nor attack, so as to his energy ambitions in Ukraine he’s stymied. Plus, he now must abide by the accord he will sign tonight with the United States.”

Jack turned back to Gourdjiev. “In addition to the purchase price, Alizarin Group will pledge fifty percent of all profits from the field to the Ukrainian government.”

“Ten percent,” Gourdjiev said.

“Don’t make me laugh. Forty-five percent or I tell my government what you’ve done. They’ll shut Alizarin Group down like a toxic waste dump.”

“Twenty-five percent or I walk away and let Yukin have his way.”

“Without me to confirm to Ulishenko the imminent threat posed
to his country by Yukin you and Alizarin are dead in the water,” Jack said. “Thirty-five, that’s my final offer.”

“Done.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev held out his hand.

“Jack, you’re not really making a deal with him,” Alli said.

“I have no choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” she said, “you taught me that.”

“Not this time.” Jack grasped Gourdjiev’s hand, and at that moment they all heard the clatter of rotor blades descending.

“What’s happening?” Gourdjiev said.

“The cavalry,” Jack said, “has arrived.” Just as Dennis Paull promised.

F
ROM THE
back of the immense, ornate salon in the Kremlin, Jack watched as Alli stood on one side of the First Lady, Lyn Carson, Mrs. Yukin on the other, as President Edward Carson and President Yukin used pens specifically designed for the historic signing of the U.S.-Russian security accord. Alli was wearing a long sapphire blue dress that made her look very grown-up. While video and still cameras dutifully recorded the momentous occasion Jack’s gaze fell on Yukin’s face, alight with pleasure and a certain amount of secret triumph, the origin of which only he, Carson, Annika, and Alli knew. An hour from now, when Ukrainian national television broadcast Dyadya Gourdjiev and President Ulishenko jointly announcing that the tract of land in the country’s economically ravaged northeastern section was sold to Alizarin Group, Yukin’s demeanor would change markedly. Alizarin would pledge thirty-five percent of the profits to Ukraine and immediately begin hiring thousands of unemployed citizens to work the largest uranium strike in Asia.

After the signing, the seemingly endless photo ops and interviews began, neither of which Jack chose to be a part of, despite Carson’s requests to the contrary.

“I can serve you best,” Jack told the president, “by remaining in the shadows.”

Uncharacteristically Alli had agreed to stay by her parents’ side during this tiring and dreary process, or rather, Jack reflected, it was a new characteristic, one that spoke to her recent adventures, insights, and sense of herself. As he watched her move about the room with the Carsons and the Yukins he felt a great surge of pride for who she was and what she might now become.

He spent the time with Annika, who had flown back with him and Alli from Kiev, where the helicopter manned by Paull’s people had let them off.

“I don’t think I’ll ever speak to him again,” Annika said.

Jack knew she meant Gourdjiev, a man whose name she no longer spoke, much less called
dyadya
.

“He was trying to protect you.”

“Really, is that what you think?” She looked at him skeptically. “Or are you just trying to make me feel better?” She held up a hand to forestall an answer she did not care to hear. “The truth is he was trying to protect himself. As long as I remained ignorant of the facts of my conception he didn’t have to answer awkward or embarrassing questions.”

“It seems odd that Batchuk didn’t tell you he was your father when you were with him.”

They were standing by a window that must have been fifteen feet high. She looked away from him, out onto Red Square, where it had begun to snow again, according to the weather forecasters the last snow of winter.

“The truth is as simple as it is ugly: He didn’t want me to know I was his daughter, not then, anyway. He was too busy mourning my mother’s death and staring into my eyes—studying my face brought
her back to him as nothing else could. And, of course, there was the other thing.” Tears glittered beneath her lashes. “To tell me that he was my father would have destroyed the sexual bond he tried to establish between us.”

Jack felt a sudden chill render him all but speechless. “When you were five?”

She continued to stare out at the snow, she neither answered nor moved her head, there was no need.

She wiped her eyes with her forefinger and turned to him suddenly with a thin smile. “I’m sorry, Jack, sorry for lying to you, deceiving you, putting you through the wringer with Gurov’s supposed death, but it was necessary.”

Was it, he wondered. He supposed that depended on your point of view. He could begrudge her her elaborate deception, but to what end? He had seen firsthand how Sharon’s rage at him had destroyed not only their marriage but Sharon herself. As long as she held on to that anger she would never be able to trust anyone, she’d be alone and in anguish for the rest of her life. That was a path he had turned away from some time ago.

“There’s one other thing I can’t fathom,” he said now. “How did you know I’d follow you to the alley that night?”