Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

“Mon habituelle.” My usual.

“ Toujours la même fille ,” she said with a heartfelt sigh. Always the same girl.

“ Mais une tellement belle fille ,” he replied. But such a beautiful girl.

She led him through a door she unlocked with both an eight-digit combination and a key that hung around her neck.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” she said, switching to English because it was an idiom with no analog in either French or Russian. They stopped in front of one of the many closed doors lining both sides of a wide, imaginatively lit hallway. “Just remember,” she whispered, rolling one impressive breast against his arm, “if at any time you change your mind, you’ve only to ask.”

He thanked her in his charming, rather formal old-school manner. Waiting until she had disappeared behind the locked door at the end of the hallway, he knocked on the door twice, waited five seconds, then knocked three times.

Without waiting for a reply he opened the door, stepped through, shut and locked the door behind him. He found himself in a square, dimly lighted room with furniture covered in yellow and pink chintz. The one window overlooked a steep green bank down to the somnambulant Dnieper River. Young children, overseen by their mothers, rolled down the embankment, laughing and shrieking, while two lovers lost in themselves stood arm in arm staring out across the gunmetal water.

“Did she try to get you into bed?” Riet Boronyov said.

Gourdjiev nodded. “Again.”

“She wouldn’t charge you, you know.” Boronyov jackknifed his small but very fit frame off the bed on which he’d been reclining, almost as if he had been daydreaming. “She’s hot for you.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev thought of the widow Tanova, her tea and fresh-baked stollen, and laughed. “She’s just rising to a challenge.”

“Don’t tell me you think you’re too old,” Boronyov clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, “because I wouldn’t believe it.”

“I’m not here to speak about Ekaterina or my sex life.”

“No, of course not.” Boronyov gripped the older man’s hand in friendship. “But it would make her happy, and a happy employee is a productive employee.”

“I don’t see how Ekaterina could be more productive than she already is. You take a great deal of money out of this business.”

“Indeed.”

Boronyov looked more like a bug-eyed wizard than an oligarch. When you were a billionaire, Gourdjiev thought, you could afford to be strange-looking without fear of anyone commenting on it. Everyone wanted to be your friend, unless they were too terrified to approach you, and those people were of no use to you anyway. “But because of that shitbag Yukin this is the only one of my businesses that’s currently making money. He and that cocksucker Batchuk are appropriating every last vestige of capitalism I acquired in the nineties. It’s all illegal, of course, but the judges have their heads stuck so far up Yukin’s ass they can’t hear the complaints.”

Gourdjiev had heard this rant many times before, of course, but like Batchuk, Boronyov needed to find some temporary release from his resentment and outrage. He was a capitalist, after all, and anyone who interfered with the free market system was anathema. Besides, his companies and much of his fortune had been stolen by a rigged system, rife with legal nihilism. Had he not fled Moscow just ahead of the armed commandos Batchuk had sent to take him into custody, he would be in a Siberian prison now, stripped of both freedom and money.

It had been Gourdjiev who had warned him of his imminent arrest, not because he held any particular love for the oligarch, but his business model was sadly preferable to that of Yukin and Batchuk, whose level of corruption was staggering both in its scope and its abuses. He had needed Boronyov’s brains and contacts.

Unlike Yukin and, no doubt, Batchuk, Gourdjiev viewed the reign of the oligarchs as a necessary evil, a bridge between Soviet Communism, which had proved to be an abject failure, and a free-market economy. But the oligarchs’ hubris had sealed their own doom. High on the enormous wealth they had amassed in just a few years, they began to shoulder their way into the political arena. Yukin, whose instincts for self-preservation were acute, moved against them as soon as he detected a threat to his absolute power. He brought down the monarch of the oligarchs, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then the head of Yukos, the largest oil company in Russia. With Khodor-kovsky’s fall the other oligarchs turned into Yukin’s fawning toadies. All save a precious few. To Gourdjiev’s way of thinking Yukin’s steps to renationalize the largest companies in Russia smacked not of socialism, but of a twenty-first-century fascism that was far more pernicious.

“I need to know who gave the FSB orders to assist an American spy who went by the legend ‘Harry Martin,’” Dyadya Gourdjiev said. “And I need to know the name of Harry Martin’s handler.”

Boronyov sat down in one of the chintz chairs and crossed his legs. Surrounded by yellow and pink he looked healthy and robust. Perhaps he was, perhaps life outside Russia agreed with him, or maybe it was his new clandestine life in which he was reveling, his life as a dissident.

Steepling his fingers he said with a Mona Lisa smile, “These are strange days, indeed. I sometimes feel as if I’ve become a seer.” His smile deepened. “Odd to say, but exile can sometimes do that. Wrenched away from the nexus, you become an Outsider, and in order to not merely survive but to be resurrected you’re forced to change your point of view, forced from the subjective to the objective. It’s like putting on a pair of contact lenses, or recovering from cataract surgery, everything becomes clear, sharply delineated. Motives reach the surface at last, and all becomes transparent.”

“So you know the aim of Trinadtsat. ”

“I know it as well as I know the aim of AURA.” He rose, and with that the color seemed to drain from his face. “But far more importantly, I know your role in both.”

_____

AFTER THE first shot, Jack put himself between Alli and the gunman, but they had already made significant progress through the field and the bullets lacked the range, falling harmless behind them. Still, there were two cops running full tilt at them, steel truncheons gripped in their hands like batons in a relay race. Unlike their compatriot, they hadn’t bothered to draw their sidearms, having decided to concentrate on closing the gap between them and their quarry.

“We’re never going to make it,” Annika said. “They’ll be in pistol range any minute now.”

“What do you suggest?” Jack said.

Before he had a chance to react, she slowed and, turning, drew her gun. “Keep going!” she shouted. “Don’t slow down!”

Jack had to drag Alli along with him as she started to drop back. “Come on!” he said urgently. “She’s right.”

“We can’t just leave her,” Alli cried.

“If we stop we’ll all be killed.” He nodded at the figure sprinting ahead of them. “In this instance Kirilenko has the right idea.”

Behind them, Annika knelt and, cupping one hand beneath the butt to steady the gun, aimed at the leading cop. Her left arm felt as if it were on fire. She took long, deep, slow breaths to manage the pain. The cops saw that she’d stopped and began a peppering fire in order to distract her, but she ignored the bullets whistling by her, squeezed off one shot, missed. The second shot caught the lead cop in the right side of his chest, spinning him around before he collapsed. The second cop started to zigzag, stutter-stepping in order to make himself a more difficult target. He fired as he came, forcing Annika to roll, come up on one knee, squeeze off a shot, then roll again.