Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

He turned the ignition, put the car in gear, and sped out onto the road without turning on his headlights. In the rearview mirror he could see figures rapidly receding as he floored the accelerator. Several shots rang out but they either went wide or the car was already out of the range of their guns. He wondered briefly why the sharpshooter who had shot Annika wasn’t firing his rifle. Surely, they were still in his range.

“Alli,” he said as he drove over a rise, “see how badly Annika is hurt.”

Without a word, she climbed over the seat back into the rear, crouching beside Annika, who was lying on the seat.

“It’s her arm,” Alli said.

Jack risked a glance in the mirror. She hadn’t flinched or needed to turn away. Over the rise, he turned on his headlights, looking for a turnoff or a crossroads. The road reared up ahead, devoid of traffic. That wouldn’t last long, he knew. At this moment, the SBU was probably radioing their coordinates. Therefore, it was imperative they get off this road and change directions as soon as possible.

“Annika,” Jack said, “how are you doing?”

“Nothing broken, I think.” Her voice sounded faint or thin, as if she were far from him. “Just a flesh wound.”

“Nevertheless, we’ve got to get the bleeding to stop.”

“I know a doctor,” she said, “back in Kiev.” She gave him the address and the area of the city.

Jack signaled Alli and she scrambled back to the front seat. “The map I got from the rental office is in the glove compartment,” he said.

It took her a few minutes to locate the street Annika had named, then she traced a route in reverse to where they were now. Since she’d been the navigator on the way out of the city, she had no difficulty planning out a route.

“There should be a turnoff somewhere in the next quarter mile,” she said. “A left turn, then straight for three miles. At the light make a left again and we’ll be headed back to the city.”

THE KHARKIVSKYI neighborhood of Kiev lay on the south end of the left bank of the Dnieper River. It was a fairly new neighborhood, harking back only to the 1980s. It was filled with lakes and beaches; because of its sandy soil few trees lined the blocks of modern high-rise buildings. Dr. Sosymenko lived in one of these Western-style apartment complexes, virtually indistinguishable from the neighbors with which it stood shoulder to shoulder.

Sosymenko had a ground-floor apartment, which was lucky since Annika was as bloody as a stuck pig. Alli had ripped a sleeve from her shirt to tie off the arm just above the wound, so now it was barely oozing blood, but the left side of Annika’s clothes was soaked through.

The doctor opened the door to the sound of the bell. His eyes opened wide at the sight of Annika leaning on Jack’s arm. He must have seen her like this before, because after his initial reaction he nodded them in, not wasting time with introductions or asking her what had happened—actually, it was obvious that he was looking at a gunshot wound.

“Let me get her into the surgery,” he said in Russian. He was a small, round man, dapperly dressed in a suit and tie despite the late hour. He had a knot of a nose, ruddy cheeks, and a small mouth almost as red. Apart from a fringe of ginger-colored hair above his ears he was bald. He took Annika across a carpeted living room and into a hallway leading to the rear of the apartment. “Make yourselves comfortable,” he said over his shoulder. “You understand?”

“I speak Russian,” Jack said.

“Good. There’s food and drink in the kitchen. Please feel free to help yourselves.”

With that, he disappeared with Annika through the door to the surgery, which he closed behind them.

Jack turned to Alli. “Are you okay?”

“I could use a drink.”

“What, exactly?” Jack said, heading for the kitchen, which was through an arched doorway off the living room.

“I don’t care, vodka, anything,” Alli said.

She went off to the bathroom to clean herself up, and when she returned, he had two glasses of iced vodka on the coffee table beside the worn brown tweed sofa in the living room. Shelves on two walls were filled with groups of thick textbooks interspersed with a wide variety of antique clocks, porcelain vases, and copper teakettles. There were paintings on the wall, portraits of an imperious-looking woman who might have been the doctor’s late wife, and a young man who was either his son or possibly himself at an earlier age. The heavy curtains were closed against the night and the heat was at sauna level. Jack took off his coat, already sweating, and Alli plopped herself down on the sofa.

“Aren’t you hungry?” he asked as he watched her sip the liquor.

“First things first,” she said in her best hard-boiled voice.

He came across the carpet, crouched down in front of her, and set her glass on the table. “How are you?”

Her eyes searched his face.

“Doesn’t matter, really.”

“Why do you say that?”

She shrugged, took a long pull of her vodka, made a face. “God, this is awful, why do they drink this stuff?”

“To take away the pain.”

She turned her head for a moment, as if remembering something important. “ ‘I must create my own system, or be enslaved by another man’s.’ ” She recited the lines from a William Blake poem that was Emma’s favorite. “ ‘I will not reason and compare; my business is to create.’ When I say that, I know she’s still here with us, that for some reason she hasn’t left both of us. Why is that, Jack? Is it because we still have something to learn from her or that she has something to learn from us?”

“Maybe it’s both,” he said.

“Have you seen or heard her? You promised you’d tell me if you had.”

Jack bit his lip, recalling the sound of his daughter’s voice in his head when he was falling into unconsciousness.

Alli, growing anxious at his hesitation, said, “You have, haven’t you? Why don’t you want to tell me?”

Jack took a long swig of the vodka, feeling the liquid fire all the way down to his stomach, where it began to burn like a furnace. “It’s part of the reason Annika’s here with us. Two people were trying to kill her. I intervened and was almost knocked out.” He wasn’t going to tell her that he’d shot Ivan to death. “I heard Emma then, she was calling to me. I felt so close to her, closer than I’d ever been.” He took a ragged breath. “I think I was close to dying. Her voice led me back.” To that blood-spattered alley behind Bushfire, but he didn’t finish the thought.

“Oh, Jack! So she is here with us.”

“Yes, but in some way I can’t pretend to understand.”

She let out a long sigh. “She’s looking out for us, protecting us.”

The vodka fumes were rising up into his esophagus. “I don’t think it’s wise to count on that.”

Alli shook her head as if shaking off his words. “I told you once that growing up I felt like I was in a cage—so many rules and regulations, so many things I, as a fast-rising politician’s daughter, was forbidden to do. All I could do was look longingly through the bars and try to imagine what the real world might be like. And then you came along and I began to see what it was, I began to understand that quote from Blake and why it was Emma’s favorite.”

The door at the end of the hall was opening. Annika emerged with Dr. Sosymenko.

“Jack,” Alli said with some urgency because their time alone was coming to an end, “I like it here, outside the cage.”

“Even when you’re puking your guts up?”

She nodded. “Or when I’m crouched in a forest or tying a tourniquet around what’s-her-name’s arm. Especially then, because I can breathe without feeling a pain in my chest. I know I’m alive.”