Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

“ ‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,’ ” Alli said, quoting Yeats, one of the poets she’d learned to love from Emma. “Emma always said everything that’s born holds the seeds of its own destruction.”

And Jack thought again of dissolution, of how being an Outsider, of hiding in the shadows, observing without yourself being observed, was its own form of dissolution long before the advent of death.

“Did Emma say that or did Morgan Herr?”

“I know you don’t want to hear this,” Alli said, pulling away, “but they both did.”

Jack felt a shiver run through him, as if Herr had somehow managed to walk over his grave. “Did Emma get her philosophy from him?”

Alli shook her head. “No, but on some level they were both nihilists. I don’t think Emma ever saw the point in life, and I know he didn’t.”

“He said that to you?”

“Not in so many words.” Her eyes could not meet his. “He didn’t have to.”

“I’ll make us more tea,” he said gently.

“No. Stay here, don’t leave me.”

He settled back into the sofa cushions. It was getting toward nine; he knew they needed to get moving because the longer they stayed in Kiev the colder Magnussen’s trail would become. On the other hand, he was reluctant to make a move that would break the tenuous strand to Alli’s past she had begun to spin. Besides, with her wounded arm, Annika could use all the sleep she could get.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, as much to himself as to her.

She smiled at him, but it was thin and brittle enough to put him on edge. What could be coming? he wondered. What had she been bottling up inside her since her abduction?

“Emma knew him way before I did.”

Jack knew this, just as he knew she was speaking of Morgan Herr, whose name she couldn’t bear to say.

“Emma saw something in him—she never told me what—but I imagine they sat around and talked about how things were falling apart, how the center couldn’t hold, how chaos ruled everyone and everything.”

Jack wanted to interject a comment, but he bit his lip instead, trying to warm his abruptly chilled extremities.

“He was charismatic, girls especially were drawn to him—as you know. But with Emma it was different. She wasn’t sucked into his orbit, she never adored him or was fooled by his charming exterior. She knew what he was; in fact, I’m convinced now that was why she spent time with him. He was an Outsider on a level it would never occur to her to go. Emma would never harm another human being, but I think she wanted to know why he would.”

Jack was listening very carefully, even though Alli was talking about his daughter and not about herself. Or was she? He knew that whatever had happened to her during the week she had been under Morgan Herr’s control had had a profound effect on her, possibly even changed her, perhaps forever. Whatever this thing was she had been struggling with it for months, trying to understand it, or to see it for what it really was.

“I . . . I never told you the truth, during that time before the inauguration.” Alli stared at her hands. “He told me not to.”

Jack couldn’t help himself now. “Of course he told you not to, that was part of the brainwashing.”

She shook her head, slowly but firmly. “It wasn’t only the brainwashing—I mean I don’t remember that part. I wanted to do what he told me to do. I wanted to carry the anthrax, I wanted to hurt all those people. I hated my parents so much for all the years they didn’t—”

She broke down abruptly and Jack took her to him again, feeling her body wracked with sobs.

“I was weak. Emma would never have been so stupid to do what he wanted—she knew that beneath the charismatic exterior he was the worst kind of monster. I knew nothing, he hooked me when he got inside my head, he knew all the strings to pull, all the buttons to push. He knew where I was weak, which was easy, because, unlike Emma, I had no strength anywhere inside me, and he knew that, too.” Her sobbing had taken on epic proportions. “How do you fight someone who knows you better than you know yourself?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said gently. “I don’t think anyone—”

“Oh, but Emma could, and that’s the point. I’m a product of privilege, there isn’t anything I wanted that my parents didn’t get me—every piece of crap, no matter how expensive. And what did that do? It made me soft—that’s what he said to me, ‘You’re soft as the underbelly of a sow, you wallow in money, prestige, privilege, and what have you to show for it? You make me sick to my stomach, but you can change that, you can become tough as nails, hard as a rock if you set your mind to it. Like your best friend, like Emma.’ ”

She clutched at him as if he were a lifeline, as if he were the only resource she had to keep her from drowning in the deep sea of her emotions. “And I wanted to be like Emma so, so much. He knew that, just like he knew everything else about me. He knew how much I envied Emma, he knew that even though I loved her I was jealous of what she had—not money, not prestige, not privilege, those were all as phony, as ineffectual as I was. She was tough, she was hard, she could be anything she wanted to be, and it all came from inside herself. She was everything I ever dreamed of being, and I was nothing, nothing at all.”

“What’s going on here?”

Jack held Alli tighter as if needing to protect her from Annika’s question. “Nothing,” he said. “She’s out here in the back of beyond, she’s just homesick, that’s all.”

“That’s all?”

He heard the skepticism in her voice and he said more harshly than he had perhaps intended, “That’s enough—more than enough.”

“Of course it is.”

Annika turned and went down the hall into the bathroom. Through the closed door he could just barely hear the sound of running water over Alli’s slowly weakening sobs.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Everything is going to be all right.”

“That’s what I want. You don’t know . . .”

But he did know, because it was what he wanted, too. Emma’s death had been a nightmare, and then Alli’s abduction, a nightmare for everyone. Where was it going to end, when was it going to end? If everything was moving toward dissolution why wasn’t it ending, why were both he and Alli still suffering so?

With a conscious effort, he pushed her away from him, held her at arm’s length until he willed her to look at him. “You’ve got to stop torturing yourself, that’s only your guilt talking. You’re brave and smart and resourceful. Maybe Emma was the catalyst, but those things came from inside you, they’re nobody else’s, they’re yours.”

Alli’s eyes, still enlarged with tears, locked onto his, and a wan smile crossed her face. “Guilt isn’t all that binds us, is it, Jack? I’d hate to think—”

“It’s not,” he said. “Of course it’s not.”

“That’s what Annika thinks, I’m sure of it.”

“Does that bother you?”

She tried to laugh, wiping away the tracks of her tears. “I wish it didn’t.”

“She’s the psycho-bitch, remember?”

Now Alli did laugh. “She isn’t, you know she isn’t.”

Jack was somewhat surprised. “What changed your mind?”

“I don’t know, I—”

“Enough crying, for pity’s sake!” For the second time, Annika interrupted them. She had emerged from the bathroom, her head to one side, drying her hair with a towel. “With that flood of misery anyone would think you’re Russian. Come on, what are we waiting for?”

Both Jack and Alli jumped up as if they were stung. As Alli passed Annika on the way to the bathroom, Jack said, “We need to get to Alushta. Driving will be the safest way.”