Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

“ Strangers on a Train , yes, I’m familiar with it.” Kirilenko stopped his massage to gratefully put another cigarette between his lips. He leaned forward as Annika lit it. “But I’m not joking.”

“Aren’t you the great detective who relentlessly runs down murderers?” Annika said with understandable skepticism.

“Yes, yes, of course you would say that. I would, too, in your position.” Kirilenko expelled smoke in a deep sigh. “In the last half hour it’s occurred to me that you and I have been cleverly set up. I may not know what’s going on, but I’m convinced that you didn’t kill Ilenya Makova.”

“We’ve been trying to find out who did,” Jack said. “The trail has led us here.”

“I believe that, as well.”

Annika was obviously still a skeptic. “What could possibly have changed your mind so quickly? You’re known as the great crusader against murder and rape; your convictions, your sense of right and wrong must be immutable.”

“It’s true I hate criminals and that my outrage at the taking of a life is absolute, but my hatred of mistakes trumps them all. This is why in my twenty-two years as a manhunter I’ve never brought down the wrong perpetrator. When it comes to my employers I may be deaf and dumb, but I’m not blind. I’m aware that a percentage of their activities is criminal. Head down, nose clean, that’s what’s needed to survive in their system.” He peeled a bit of tobacco off his lip, eyed it for a moment before flicking it away. “But I suppose that’s true of any system, the larger the system the greater the need to ignore the illegalities going on around you, the more vital it is to keep your mouth shut.”

“Illegalities!” He’d clearly hit a nerve, and Annika was outraged.

“Look, I’m not in the directorate that spends its days and nights trumping up charges against the officers of legitimate companies and the oligarch owners on Yukin’s and Batchuk’s orders. I’m not throwing innocent people in prison to rot for the rest of their lives. I’m not terrorizing their wives and mistresses, I’m not putting my gun to the back of their heads and pulling the trigger.”

“But you won’t do anything to stop it.”

“My God, be realistic, what could I do?”

“Then explain to me why they do it.”

“Like everyone else you want answers, you want to know why people do evil things. But evil can’t be parsed, because, in fact, it’s too simple, too stupid. And, anyway, why would you want to understand it, why the desire to dissect it? Don’t you understand that devoting your energies to the subject gives it a power, a rationale, a legitimacy it doesn’t warrant?” He smoked for some time, seemingly deep in thought, then he looked up. “As for me, self-interest is the best rationalizer, isn’t it, and, let’s face it, these days you can’t live your life without employing some form of rationalization.” He looked at them all in turn. “So the long and the short of it is I’m different from my coworkers because I’ve learned to adapt when I discover that I’ve been wrong. Considering the sewer in which I work, I couldn’t live with myself otherwise.”

Now, having explained himself, he looked at Annika. “My proposal?”

Jack said to her, “You’re not seriously considering—”

“The idea has a logic,” Annika said. “A symmetry I find immensely appealing.”

“Annika, really—”

“Can you think of another way we’re going to stay alive long enough to find out who killed Rochev?”

“Wait.” Now Kirilenko stood, but there was nothing threatening in his body language. “Karl Rochev is dead?”

Jack explained how they had been led to Magnussen’s estate by the odd murder weapon, how they had found Rochev, who bore the clear signs of torture before he’d been killed by the two sister sulitsa .

Kirilenko was about to reply when they heard a sharp scraping from the corridor. Then the door opened inward.

HARRY MARTIN arrived at Simferopol North Airport one pissed-off human being. During the flight from Kiev he’d done nothing but seethe inwardly, feeding a rage that felt overwhelming by the time he emerged in the Arrivals hall. All he could think of was putting a bullet into the back of Kirilenko’s head. It had been Kirilenko who had misdirected him, ditched him, humiliated him with General Brandt. Now he understood why Kirilenko had so easily agreed to separate when he himself had suggested it, thinking that by heading back to Kiev while sending the Russian off on a wild-goose chase he’d be able to find Annika Dementieva on his own.

He scrutinized the passengers milling around the Arrivals hall as he would examine his past, looking for the one person on which his laserlike attention was currently fixated, so he could expunge the memory of what had happened.

So many things in Martin’s past needed extermination or exorcism, depending on whether your bent was practical or metaphysical; he’d concluded long ago that it all amounted to the same thing. The past was a vast swamp, reeking of mistakes, betrayals, lies, and delusions. If he’d had any say in it he’d obliterate his past and everyone in it. Wouldn’t that be sweet, he thought as his eyes swept the concourse, searching for Kirilenko.

Perhaps they’d both disappeared—Kirilenko and Annika Dementieva—and he’d never be able to find either of them. Then he could walk away and never come back. But he doubted that would happen because he knew all there was to know about disappearing. Harry Martin was a legend—in spook terminology, a fiction, like a short story or a novella. And what an exacting effort it took to maintain him! Creating him had been a snap, a conjuror’s trick backed up by documents the Legends Department had manufactured like the air in a plane or a refrigerator, canned, artificial, recirculated, hermetically sealed. He was a ghost built up like a Frankenstein’s monster from the pasts of people long dead. That’s where the legends wonks got their ideas, God knows they had none of their own. But with every lie he told Harry Martin became more difficult to sustain. The short story became a novella with a crisscrossing of fabrications that took immense care to keep from contradicting each other.

By this time he had circumnavigated the Arrivals hall, cataloguing each person, but without seeing Kirilenko. He took another visual sweep of the hall. As he glanced down the corridor leading to Airport Services he saw a security guard stepping across the threshold of a doorway on the left perhaps two-thirds of the way down the corridor. Something in the man’s expression—surprise, shock, even—warned Martin even before the man collapsed. As he was dragged inside, Martin was sprinting down the corridor. He pulled his ceramic pistol from its hard leather holster at the small of his back, thumbing the safety off. He reached the door just as it was being shut. Throwing the bulk of his leading shoulder between the door and its frame he kicked the door backward, so that it slammed wide open.

He just had time to register Kirilenko’s presence, other people on the periphery of his vision, when he fired blindly. He was fixated on Kirilenko, who had thrown himself behind a table. He aimed and was in the process of pulling the trigger when he heard a deafening noise.

Blown violently backward by the bullet that entered his skull, Harry Martin was dead before he hit the floor.

TWENTY

“I HOPE you rot in hell,” Kirilenko said, spitting on Harry Martin’s corpse.

Jack wasted no time riffling through Martin’s suit. He found his cell phone, a wad of cash, passport, two credit cards, an international driver’s license, and little else.

“There’s nothing here to indicate this man was anyone other than Harry Martin,” he said.