Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

“Also the slowest.” She threw her damp towel onto the sofa cushion where Alli had been sitting and, before her, Emma. She watched to see if he would protest, or even comment. When he didn’t, she continued. “It will take us too long to get to the coast by car. Besides, there are regular roadblocks between here and the Crimean peninsula to catch contraband. Thankfully we have your private jet.”

“It’s not my private jet,” Jack said, “but I take your point.”

While Alli padded by him to get dressed he pulled out his cell phone and punched in the pilot’s number.

“Give me forty minutes and we’ll be ready to go,” the pilot said, “but I need to log a flight plan. Where are we going?”

“To the airport nearest Alushta,” Jack told him, “in the Crimea, on the Black Sea coast.”

“I’ll get right on it,” the pilot said, and disconnected.

Forty minutes later the three of them arrived at Zhulyany Airport.

“SIMFEROPOL NORTH Airport.”

“Where?” Kirilenko pressed the cell phone to his ear so hard the cartilage ached. “Where the hell is that?”

“Crimea.” His assistant’s voice came through the ether hard, abrupt, and ominous, like a nail punched through a tin can. “She showed up on the Zhulyany Airport CCTV as she passed through into the VIP terminal.”

“The VIP terminal?” Kirilenko, driving back to Kiev from the wild-goose chase in Brovary, was trying to process information that was coming at him too quickly. “First, tell me, was Annika Dementieva alone?”

“She was with a man and girl,” his assistant said.

Kirilenko pulled out Limonev’s cell phone and looked again at the low-resolution photo of the people caught emerging from Rochev’s dacha. In his mind’s eye he saw again the three sets of footprints in the woods: the man’s, the woman’s—and the girl’s. Yes, yes, he thought excitedly, he was onto something here. “Did you get photos of them from the CCTV images?”

“Of course. They’re on your desk.”

“Tell me you discovered why Annika Dementieva and her friends were in the VIP terminal.”

“I have the information right here.” There came the sound of shuffling papers. “They boarded a private jet that’s on its way to, as I said, Simferopol.”

Kirilenko scowled. Something was not adding up here. “Since when does a fugitive have access to a private jet?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, dammit, bloody well find out!”

“I already tried,” his assistant said. “But the jet is American, under full diplomatic protection. I can’t find out a thing about it, except its next destination, which, if you have the right contacts, is public knowledge.”

His assistant was of course trying to recoup points he’d lost with his boss, but Kirilenko scarcely noticed. He’d broken out into a cold sweat. This must be Harry Martin’s doing , he thought, panic-stricken. That sonuvabitch has been playing me, he’s known all along about Annika’s ties to Karl Rochev, or at least suspected them. As soon as I brought him to Rochev’s dacha he must have known. That was why he sent me to that absurd town, Brovary, while he returned at once to Kiev. It was a ruse to keep me occupied while he reeled Annika in like a fish. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes. Christ , he thought, what are the Americans up to?

Such was the turmoil of his mind that he almost missed what his assistant said next: “As I said, Simferopol North Airport is in the Crimea, approximately midway between Balaklava and Alushta.”

His initial panic turned to outrage at being manipulated by the Americans—of all people!—and then to rage at Henry Martin in particular. In so doing he managed to gather himself. If that was how Martin was going to play it, he told himself grimly, then that’s how it would be played all around.

“I’m only twenty minutes away from Kiev,” Kirilenko said, heading directly for the airport. “I want to be on the next flight out from Zhulyany to Simferopol North.”

“Two seats, I assume, one for you and one for Harry Martin,” his assistant said.

“One seat.” Kirilenko put on speed. “If Martin asks, I’m still in Brovary, my nose to the grindstone. And if word of where I’ve gone should leak to the Americans I will personally shoot you in the back of the head.”

SEVENTEEN

HARRY MARTIN, hanging on the phone in the middle of a bustling Kiev street, didn’t like his job—in point of fact he loathed it with a seething, poisonous intent. The truth was he was sick to death of all the double-dealing, disinformation, obfuscation, and outright lies that came so easily to him. And that, of course, was what he despised most of all—that all the artifice was second nature to him now, ingrained like the whorls of his fingerprints or the pattern of his DNA. He simply did not know any other way to live, if this was living at all, which he’d begun to seriously doubt. And therein lay the rub, as the good Bard wrote, he thought, because the only thing to fear was doubt. He knew from his mentors that the moment you allowed doubt to creep into your thinking—doubt about your ability, about the people around you, about the dark and gravelike profession you were in—you were as good as dead. It was time to get out while you were still on your own two legs, rather than lying in a coffin stiff as a log. Doubt made you hesitate, doubt clouded your judgement and, worse, dulled your instincts, because, really, when you came down to it, your instincts were all that kept you alive. Instincts and, to an extent, experience.

Feeling as apart from those around him as the shadows on the building facades, he listened while the electronic connections were made, one by one, like the tumblers of a lock or a safe falling into place. He knew his call was being routed and rerouted through a complex network. This was how his boss liked his security; this was how it was done, no questions were ever asked by anyone within the system, least of all Martin himself.

Doubt felled few of his kind, however. More often, if it wasn’t a bullet or old age, years of stress delivered the knockout blow via a dyspeptic stomach, ulcers, or worst of all, irritable bowel syndrome. Nothing, he thought, would take you out of the field faster than having to hug the porcelain horse unexpectedly and in debilitating succession. Martin had developed none of these symptoms. Not that he didn’t feel the stress; it worked its corrosive magic on even the most inhuman of agents. But he relieved the stress by being angry; the more stress he felt the angrier he got. Anger kept him sharp, kept him close to his instincts. Even more important, it kept doubt at bay.

“Yes?”

At last his master’s voice entered his ear via his cell phone. “Can you talk?”

“What do you have for me?” General Atcheson Brandt, said.

“There’s another faction in the field,” Martin said.

“What, precisely, do you mean?”

Martin could feel in those words the General coming to full attention, as if he were a pointer who’d smelled blood. “Someone else was at Rochev’s dacha—someone who belongs neither to Kirilenko nor to the SBU.”

“I trust you can be more specific,” Brandt said with all the considerable asperity at his disposal.

Martin began walking, more to dispel nervous energy than toward any specific destination. His lack of success in finding Annika Dementieva was going to be last on his discussion list with the General.

“There was a sharpshooter hidden in the woods,” Martin said. “He took a shot at one of the people who were in the dacha—” He stopped right there, knowing he’d made a mistake.

“You let them get away?” Brandt’s voice was like a rumble of thunder heading Martin’s way at tremendous speed. “How did that happen?”