Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

She said this with such an acid tongue Jack could think of no possible response.

“Yes, that’s it,” she said in the same knife-edged tone of voice. “I’ve followed you all the way from—where in America are you from, Jack McClure?”

“Washington—the city, not the state.”

Annika, having made her point and clearly uninterested in his answer, turned away, stared out the small Perspex window at the airport. There seemed to be an odd tension between them now, as if in the last several moments they had become antagonists. Jack was an unusually astute judge of character, but he found this woman unreadable, as if she had multiple personalities cycling around her brain clamoring to be heard. In this respect she reminded him of Alli.

At length, she said in a more modulated voice, “My focus is, or at least has been, on infiltrating the Izmaylovskaya grupperovka , with an eye toward gathering evidence against Arsov. Now I’m beginning to believe that someone felt threatened by the investigation, that I was set up to be taken out of the picture.”

“They could have sent you to Siberia.”

She turned back to him. The flecks in her eyes had turned the color of gunmetal. “The sudden outside pressure would have set off alarm bells inside the FSB and thus brought unwanted attention on Thirteen. No, this was a better way to handle me, making me a pariah.” Her face was set in a grim mask. “Now I will be hunted, very possibly killed, by my own people.”

“At the cost of Milan’s death?”

She shrugged. “I’m quite certain there’s already another ready to take his place. That’s how these things work. Surely, you understand that people like Milan—people like me—get thrown under the wheels from one minute to the next.”

Jack nodded. “It happens in my country, too.” Then, without waiting to think about it, he said: “You haven’t said anything about what happened in the alley.” The moment he said it, however, he knew he’d made a mistake.

Annika turned to him, her full lips compressed into a line as thin and distant as the horizon. “What is there to say? Two men died and we’re alive. What would you have me do, Jack McClure, break down and sob on your shoulder? Do you feel a need to comfort me? Do I look like I need comfort?”

“You look like you aren’t used to comfort.” With her friend Jelena in the hotel bar she had seemed so flirty, “ We were about to go clubbing. Why don’t you join us? ” But now she was all titanium and steel. “In fact, you were friendlier when we first met.”

He could see that with this comment she had retracted her claws and was now plunged deep in thought. “It’s just—” Her voice seemed to fail her and she cleared her throat, unsure for a moment whether to continue. “I’m sorry, but I get my back up when I’m frightened.”

She had said this last with her face averted, as if ashamed of any emotion deep enough to crack her outer shell, even if only temporarily. “It’s an ugly trait, I know, but I get frightened so infrequently, you see . . .” She had turned back, was laughing softly and much too briefly. She waved a hand as if her words were written on a blackboard, erasable. “I keep asking myself why you came after me. Why would you do that? After all, we’re strangers, between us there is no obligation or, rather, there wasn’t. Anyway, every time I asked myself this question I came up with the same answer. To you, I’m not a stranger because you must work for an American secret service agency.” She glanced around. “Is this a CIA plane?”

“No, it isn’t,” he said, “and I’m not a Secret Service agent.”

Annika regarded him levelly, trying to gauge the truthfulness of his words. “Would you tell me if you were?”

“I would now, yes.”

She reached out a hand and he saw how pale it was, how long and tapered the fingers were. Was it a kind of benediction she was giving him or was he the recipient of a mysterious divination? “I believe you,” she said, as if she had been able to read something that couldn’t be seen, but which she nevertheless had conjured up with her white hand. She sighed then. “There’s something else, something underneath, if you know what I mean.” Her hands arranged themselves in her lap, crossed one over the other, as if tired from their recent work. “I suppose my prickliness is the result of spending too much time alone. Jelena is right. Damn her, she’s almost always right, and isn’t shy about bringing up her stellar record as often as possible. Anyway, I’m no good with people, at least not in my private life.”

“What about Jelena?”

She gave him a small, wintry smile. “Jelena isn’t a friend, she’s like a sister or a priest who, despite her sharp tongue, chooses to hear my confession without judging me. And therein lies the other, better reason not to acquire friends. It’s not what you do that is your life, it’s what others think you’ve done, or not done, whatever the case. In this way, the truth becomes a lie, and eventually the lie takes on a life of its own, independent of you. Do you see how you lose control of your own life, because without quite knowing how it’s happened you’ve become what other people think you are.”

A shaft of light from the headlights of a moving vehicle outside on the tarmac briefly spotlighted Annika’s face. She was really quite a striking woman, even when she was in full-bore diesel mode, but more so now when her lips had relaxed into their natural shape and a bit of color had returned to her cheeks.

“Being in the secret service plays a role in that, don’t you think?” Jack said. “It erodes your sense of yourself. You become what your handlers want you to be, the lies you need to tell to accomplish your mission become the truth, and soon enough you lose the ability to tell the one from the other, you don’t know any other way to act or react.”

“You know about this difficulty.” Her face clouded over with renewed suspicion. “I thought you said you weren’t an agent.”

“I’m not, but I know a number of people who are, and they all say the same thing. Well, if they don’t admit to it I can see it in how they act.”

For the first time since they had met in the bar, she showed a spark of genuine interest. “But in my case, the damage had been done long before I ever came to the FSB.”

“Your father?” he guessed.

“A variation on a theme perpetrated over and over on women.” She pulled a cigarette out of the handbag she’d managed to pluck off the muck of the alley, but then remembering where she was, she dropped it back into the bag. She frowned. “My brother and I shared a bedroom, not so very uncommon in this country. From the time I was twelve, my brother raped me, night after night, with a hunting knife at my throat. When he was finished, while he was still on me, while he was still in me, he said, ‘If you tell anyone I’ll slit your throat.’ And then, to make his threat tangible, he nicked a place on my body, made me taste my own blood. ‘So that you never forget to hold your tongue,’ he said. Every night for eighteen months he cut me afterward, as if I were an imbecile who couldn’t learn.”

The turbines moved to a higher pitch, the thrumming and vibration in the cabin becoming more noticeable, but Jack could see that the movable stairs were still in place. His attention returned to Annika. There wasn’t a hint of self-pity in her voice.

“Where is he now?” Jack said.

“My brother? In hell, I trust. Not that I have the slightest interest in finding out. I’m not a victim.”

She said this last with a good deal of force, almost venom. Not that Jack could blame her, but in this he suspected she was wrong, because her brother’s words—“ If you tell anyone I’ll slit your throat ”—whispered into her ear night after night had acted like a physician’s evil tincture, poisoning her against keeping anyone close, anyone who could protect her, who could hurt him or interfere with his heinous activities. So she kept her own counsel, closed herself off from anyone who could help her—“ I’ll slit your throat ”—so in that sense she had succumbed to her brother, she was still his victim. Her strength, which was both prodigious and multifaceted, was all in the hard shell she had erected to protect the still vulnerable core.