Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

“So what’s the problem? The police—”

“This is Russia, Alli. The police aren’t to be trusted. They’re in the pocket of either the Russian mafia or elements of the federal government, both of which are as corrupt as they come.” He looked at her. “In any case, one of the criminals was so highly connected that Annika’s bosses have turned their backs on her. They may even send people after her.”

“To bring her back?”

“To kill her.”

“You’re kidding, right? Tell me this is a joke—I don’t care how sick it is, maybe I deserve it, but just tell me—”

“It’s no joke, Alli.” He sighed heavily. “Now you know why I didn’t want you coming with me.”

She was silent for some time. The plane hit an air pocket and dipped unexpectedly, obliging them to hold on for a moment. Jack reached for one of the overhead bins, Alli grabbed on to him, pressing closer.

She bit her lip. “The only reason I fought to come on this boring trip was so I could be near you.”

“Alli—”

“Listen to me. I feel safe only when I’m with you. It doesn’t matter where you go, Jack. I can’t be on my own now—I can’t be with my parents or their handlers or the doctors. When I am, I’m filled with a nameless dread, or maybe it isn’t so nameless, right? We know him—you and me and Emma.”

“Morgan Herr is dead, Alli. You know that.”

“And yet I feel him close to me, breathing against my neck, whispering horrible things in my ear.”

Jack put his arms around her. “What kind of things?”

“Things from my past—people and places, things that only Emma and I knew, and sometimes not even Emma; things I’m deeply ashamed of, things I’d rather not remember, but he won’t let me forget. It’s like he crawled inside my head and somehow, I don’t know how, he’s still there, living and breathing, whispering to me, whispering . . .”

Her last words dissolved into racking sobs. She pushed her face into his chest and he rubbed her neck in order to soothe her and, in another sense, soothe himself because he felt her pain almost as if it was his own, a twin, two melancholy trains running along the same track, which led to Emma, perhaps only a memory of her, perhaps not; best friend to one, daughter to the other. But part of him wasn’t sympathetic at all. He sensed that a good deal of her persistent anxiety stemmed from pushing down those very incidents in her past, because the more she turned away from them the more they tore at her, exacerbating her anxiety, stoking her fear. For the moment, at least, it was easier for her to believe that Morgan Herr was instigating those thoughts, rather than admit to herself that it was her own mind struggling to work through the most emotionally devastating days and nights of her past.

“I wish Emma were here,” she said in her soft little girl’s voice.

Jack stroked her hair absently. “Me, too.”

“Sometimes I can’t believe how much I miss her.”

Alli said it, but it might just as well have been Jack. “She’s in our memory, Alli, which is what makes memory so precious.” He detached himself from her so that he could look her in the eye, to confirm to her, if she didn’t already know, that they were traveling along the same track. “It’s this same memory that holds your dark days—Emma’s, too, for that matter, as well as mine—and I think you can figure out for yourself that it’s all one, the dark days and the bright, shining ones. Of course we both want to remember Emma, and we do, but for you the cost of holding your dark days at bay has become too great. If you push them away then you risk losing Emma as well.”

“It can’t work that way—”

“But it does, Alli. Whatever’s happened to you is a part of you; you can wish it hadn’t happened, but you can’t deny that it did.”

“But every time I think about the dark days I break out into a cold sweat, I start to shake, and I hear a screaming inside myself I can’t silence, and then I’m sure I’m losing my mind, and the fear starts to build until I can’t stand it anymore, and I think . . .”

True to her word, she had started shaking, tiny beads of sweat appearing at her hairline. Jack held her close again. “I know what you think, honey, but you’re never going to act on that thought. You understand that, don’t you? You’re not going to kill yourself, there’s far too much life inside you.”

He waited until he felt her nod wordlessly against him before going on. “Whatever happened to you, you’re still who you always were. Morgan Herr didn’t have the power to take that away from you. In fact, it was in those dark days that you found your own courage, you found out who you are.”

“But he programmed me. I did what he wanted me to do.”

She looked up at him, a little girl again, stripped of her tough young woman’s armor, her smart mouth, her arrow-swift rejoinders learned in a culture that grew its children into adults before their time, a culture that moved far too swiftly, becoming fixated on the glossy surface of things. He saw her as her father never would, an unspeakable tragedy that Jack, a man who had lost his only child, was struck by more deeply than most.

“No one knows the future,” he said, “we all accept that, but we don’t really know the past very well, either. We know only what happened to us, not what happened to those around us. We have no idea, for instance, how what they did or didn’t do aff ected us. Once you accept that we’re aware of only a sliver of what happened, you can see how nothing is simply how we remember it. We create our own past, our own history, it’s all fractured, pieced together, and yet this is who we become, imperfect but human.”

“WE’LL BE landing inside of twenty minutes.” Annika smiled into Jack’s face. “I’ve made this flight before, a number of times.”

“Then you know Ukraine.”

“Intimately.” She turned, looked back at Alli’s sleeping form. “For a young girl—”

“She’s twenty-two.”

“She can’t be just seven years younger than I am,” Annika said. “She looks sixteen.”

“Alli has Graves’ disease. It screws around with the pituitary gland.” He pointed to the side of his neck. “Her growth process was compromised when she was a teenager.”

Annika showed some surprise, or perhaps it was pity, it was difficult to say with her, a woman trained to be guarded even when she didn’t have to be.

Then she shrugged. “Well, no matter. I will be leaving you as soon as we set down.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Jack said.

She raised an eyebrow. “No? Why not?”

“You said yourself that the FSB might be sending people after you.”

“I can take care of myself,” she said stiffly.

“Of that I have no doubt.” Jack pursed his lips in thought. “On the other hand, you’ll be easier to track down if you’re on your own.”

Annika tossed her head, dismissing his words. “I have many friends in Ukraine.”

“Friends or colleagues?” His pause was deliberate. “Ex-colleagues now. And if Batchuk is as powerful as you say, if he’s even half as vengeful as most Russians in high places, he’ll have compromised some, if not all, of your contacts.”

In the ensuing silence, both became aware that the aircraft was slowly losing altitude. Annika had been right on the money as to the length of the flight.

A range of emotions passed across her face like clouds brushed by a freshening wind. She seemed to be digesting his words, or possibly considering the range of her next moves. “Do you have an alternative to suggest,” she said slowly, “or are you simply stating a fact?”

“I’m doing both.” Jack led her to glance at Alli again. “Look, maybe her coming aboard is a godsend for us.”