Nick Carter - The Istanbul Decision

The fireman." Carter said to Cynthia who had turned away. "Must have been a small bore. I'd say he's been out here about an hour, maybe less. It's hard to tell in this cold."

"Nick," she said weakly, "I don't know if I can go on."

"Don t flake out on me now, sugar. Come on, they've run out of people to kill." He grabbed her by the hand, and soon they were tramping through the snow at twice the rate they had before.

It was a remarkable feat for the two of them: the man who had had little or no sleep the previous night and who had sustained serious injuries only recently; and the woman who herself had been through an extended ordeal. Yet they ran like two people possessed, as though they were being chased rather than chasing, as though the wooded hills themselves had suddenly become haunted. Carter, for one, sensed he was running from rather than to, and that his pursuer was as intangible as an idea that nagged at the back of his mind. Two murders for no clear motive suggested something wrong, terribly wrong, but he did not want to stop to consider what that something might be. Better to run and keep on running until at last, after thirty minutes and covering almost two miles, most of it uphill, he fell into the snow exhausted, panting like a winded dog.

Cynthia stood over him, blowing out huge clouds of vapor into the night air. "You all right?" she breathed.

"We're almost to the top. I've got a feeling we'll be able to see them from there."

Cynthia looked up. "Stay and rest. I'll go up for a look." She turned and plodded up the hill. He had just unstrapped his snowshoes when she shouted something and frantically gestured for him. He grabbed the snowshoes and scrambled up to her.

When he reached the top, he saw what she was screaming about. A hundred yards down the trail another body sat in the snow leaning against a rock. In the shadow it might have been mistaken for just another part of the rock except for the reflection of moonlight off the pure whiteness of its shaved head.

"Oh, my God," he muttered as he limped closer, for he sensed the nagging realization that what he'd just spent the last half hour eluding was about to thrust itself upon him, the implications of which were going to be very painful when sorted out.

"Nick! Nick!" Cynthia shouted. She covered her face with her mittens.

He took her in his arms and held her close for several moments. "It's all right, Cynthia," he said soothingly.

She stopped calling his name but continued to cry quietly into her mittens.

There was something definitely very wrong here. He could feel it thick in the chill air. He began to pace furiously, finally pulling up short, and it was a measure of his agitation that it had taken him this long to notice the obvious. "He committed suicide!"

It was true. The corpse still held the means of its destruction in its hand, a.22-caliber handgun that had put a small hole in the right temple and a slightly larger hole in the left side near the crown, creating two continents of blood on a globe of otherwise perfectly blank sea.

"What does it mean?" Cynthia asked weakly.

"I'm not sure," said Carter, slumping onto the rock opposite the corpse. "Hold it!" he shouted suddenly. He jumped up and began running up and down in the snow. "Where are they? I don't see them."

"What? What are you looking for?"

"The footprints! Tatiana's and Kobelev's! I don't see them! I haven't seen them since… since that first body. We veered off the trail there, and when we came back, they were gone. A diversion! Leading us on from corpse to corpse while he makes his escape. The train!"

He came wearily back to the rock and sat down. Cynthia plopped down into the snow. She'd stopped crying. She merely looked at him now with a strange steadfastness.

Moments passed while Carter stared into the snow at his feet and sighed. But Cynthia never moved. She leveled her gaze on his face with an absorbing interest.

Finally she began to get on his nerves. "What are you staring at?" he asked shortly. "My defeat? Is that what fascinates you so much? Did you think I was above that sort of thing? Well, I'm not. I can't beat him! I've tried and I can't do it."

"I've waited a long time to hear you say that," said Cynthia, only it wasn't Cynthia's voice. It was a good deal deeper, throatier, with a hard edge to it that told the listener its owner could just as easily kill a man as love him.

"Tatiana!" he said, scarcely daring to breathe the word.

"Correct." She smiled a little, producing a pearl-handled revolver from her mitten. The handle glinted in the moonlight.

"You and your father must have planned this little surprise right from the beginning," said Carter with a forced laugh. A chill sweat glistened on his forehead in spite of the cold. He had to think, to assess the situation. Kobelev had an hour's head start on a two-hour trip back to the train. Carter would have to make an all-out push to beat him there, but first he was going to have to get the gun away from Tatiana.

"Actually, it was my idea," she said. "Papa wanted to take the train back by force, but when I saw that that girl looked just like me, had my exact face, same eyes, teeth, hair — everything the same — I persuaded him to help me create this little ruse to get you out here alone."

"Vengeance means a great deal to you, doesn't it?"

"I've wanted you dead for a long time, Carter. Ever since…"

"Ever since that night we slept together in your father's dacha?" Carter said, finishing her thought. "Don't give yourself away any too easily, do you, Tatiana? See a man you like, feel some attraction for, and you're threatened down to the soles of your shoes, isn't that so?"

"I never really liked you, Carter. I hated you on sight."

"Really? As I remember, I didn't come to you that night, you came to me. And don't try to tell me your father put you up to it, because you almost bollixed his plans by doing it. No, you wanted me all right, and you still want me, and because you think you can never have me, you want to kill me. Isn't that true?"

"No," she said firmly. "I hate you."

"A dying man has a right to find out the truth before he meets his end, doesn't he? If I'm to be killed by an insanely jealous woman, I have a right to know it, haven't I?"

"I am not jealous!" she shouted, rising to her feet. "You… you are trying to provoke me, to get me to make a mistake. You see? I know all your tricks."

"I'm not tricking you," Carter said calmly. "If there's no truth to what I'm saying, why are you so angry?"

"I am not angry!" she snapped.

"Let's face it, Tatiana, you've been in love with me right from the start. You haven't been able to think of anything else. And you hate me because you think I could never return those feelings. You think I laugh at you behind your back."

She stopped pacing and scrutinized him closely. "You do laugh at me. I know it. But very soon you will not laugh anymore."

"You are wrong, Tatiana. I don't laugh. Not at all. I rather enjoyed that night we spent together. I've thought about it often."

"You are lying!" she shouted.

"What reason would I have to lie now? I'm a dead man, remember? You misjudge yourself. You are far more beautiful than you imagine. Although I can understand how you might not know it. With a father as powerful as yours, how could you be sure any man would tell you the truth?"

This last sentence had an almost physical effect. Her head rose slightly, and her expression sobered. "At least there are some things you understand," she said.

Carter sensed she'd taken the bait. The trick now was to keep the line taut and let her reel herself in. "Where is Cynthia now?" he asked, changing the subject. "Still with your father?"