Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

Annika threw the Zil into neutral and turned off the ignition. The car continued to spin, coming perilously close to the edge before she was able to regain a semblance of control. Not that it mattered, Jack thought, because the Toyota would hit them again, the driver finishing what he had started. But as he caught a second glimpse behind them, something slammed so violently into the Toyota it rose into the air. An instant later, it exploded, hurtling down the cliff face, and the choking smell of burning gasoline engulfed them.

By this time, Annika had brought the Zil to a shuddering stop on the right verge of the road.

“Alli,” Jack said, scrambling across the backseat, “are you all right?”

She came slowly out of her defensive position and, slightly dazed, nodded. It was then that Jack saw the movement out of the corner of his eye and, turning, watched a figure walking down off the high embankment on the landward side of the road. In one hand he carried an M72 LAW, an antitank weapon, the lightweight successor to the World War II bazooka, but he held it loosely, pointed at the ground. His size made it look like a child’s toy. The man continued to walk heavily across the road toward the Zil. Jack’s mind was working on the appearance of this man in the same way it had calculated the vectors of their run toward the oncoming jet, trying to find explanations in the extraordinary, working backward from the moment the Toyota exploded to the filthy back alley in Moscow. He came up with various explanations, possibilities, conflicting judgments, and fantastic speculation, but, unfortunately, no definitive conclusions. He had come to one of those moments when assumptions are derailed by a reality you could not have imagined, like turning a Rubik’s Cube and finding a fourth dimension you hadn’t calculated into your reasoning. In fact, for the moment the rational had been obliterated, logic was of no use whatsoever. Death and life had merged, or changed places, and everything else had come to a standstill.

“Stay inside the car,” he told Alli.

She turned and, peering out the driver’s side window, saw the man coming across the road. “Who is he? Jack, what’s going on?”

“Please, Alli, just do as I say.”

As if in a trance he opened the door and got out. The large, bearlike man came on, his slicked-back hair shining in the sunlight, and Jack experienced an eerie chill that went clear through him. The fourth dimension of the far side of the Rubik’s Cube was almost upon him. In an attempt to make sense of the present his mind flashed back to the hotel bar in Moscow, where the man facing him had been arguing with Annika and her friend; the back alley where the bearlike man and his partner had lain in wait to kill Annika; the pitched battle that had followed, at the end of which the bearlike man lay in a pool of his own blood.

In self-protective reflex Jack pointed the gun at him, but Annika, having emerged from the collapsing automobile, strode quickly up to him and pushed down the barrel.

“This isn’t possible,” Jack said as the hulking figure stopped in front of him. “I shot you dead in the alley behind the Bushfire club.”

“Aren’t you going to thank me? No?” Ivan Gurov waggled the M72 slightly. “Don’t be rude. Without me you would have gone over the cliff instead of the American agent sent to kill you.”

PART THREE

Portia:

“Think you I am no stronger than my sex,

Being so father’d and so husbanded?”

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

Julius Caesar

TWENTY-TWO

“ DAD, EVERYONE is lying to you .”

With the echo of Emma’s voice in his head Jack turned on Annika. “What the hell is going on?” He was so filled with fury his voice had turned guttural. “What are you playing at?”

“There’s an explanation—,” Annika began.

“Of course there’s a fucking explanation.” His voice rose even more. “You and Gurov were in on this from the beginning. Do you think I need an explanation from either of you now? I used Gurov’s gun to shoot him, but it couldn’t have been loaded with live ammo. That scene in the alley was a con.” He turned on Gurov. “The other man, your pal . . .”

“Spiakov.”

“Yes, Spiakov, where is he?”

Gurov shrugged. “Six feet under, I imagine. We required verisimilitude.”

“ Verisimilitude .” Jack turned back to Annika. “You murdered a man for verisimilitude?”

“It had to be real,” Annika said. “At least part of it.”

Jack was only dimly aware of Alli getting out of the car and approaching them, precisely what he told her not to do. “What I want to know is why you lied to me. Why are you offering an explanation now, at this late date?”

“Because now we’ve gotten you here,” Annika said simply. “Because, dammit, it’s time.”

“You told me you hated Gurov, that he was an assignment.”

“He is part of my assignment.” Annika was getting worked up herself. “I only lied to you when it was absolutely necessary.”

“And that makes it okay? That’s a forgivable offense?”

“Don’t confuse me with your ex-wife, who lied to you constantly,” Annika said hotly. “Believe me, I haven’t confused you with anyone else. You’ve made that quite impossible.”

“What is that, your idea of a fucking compliment?”

Jack took a threatening step toward her, and the confrontation might have degenerated into physical violence if Alli hadn’t stepped between them before Gurov could make a move.

“Stop it, the two of you!” she cried.

“If you’ll only give me a chance to explain,” Annika said, taking her cue from Alli.

“Jack, don’t you want an explanation?” Alli chimed in.

“I already have an explanation.” It was clear he was furious. “She’s been lying to me from the moment I met her.”

“Maybe she had a good reason.”

“There’s no good reason for lying,” he said.

“You know that’s not true.”

“Why are you taking her side?”

“I’m not taking anyone’s side,” Alli said. “Anyway, even if you don’t want to know what’s really going on, I do.”

That slowed him down a bit, at least enough for Annika to say, “I’m sorry, Jack, really and truly sorry.”

He saw a change in her, perhaps because she was asking for forgiveness, but, probing beneath the surface, more possibly because of her proximity to Alli, or Alli’s palliative words, as if being near Alli or even hearing her voice changed her subtly, brought her back to herself, whatever lay under her mask, in her unknown and unknowable heart Jack had talked about last night.

“If this could have been done another way,” Annika continued, “I promise you it would have been. But we had no choice.”

“We?” he said, more calmly in response to his probing. “Who is ‘we’?”

“AURA,” Annika said.

But immediately his anger fired up. “The entity or business or whatever you claimed to know nothing about.”

Alli put a hand on his arm. “Let’s not go there again,” she said.

“It may be necessary.” Jack’s eyes were on Annika.

“We’ll deal with that then,” Alli said as if she were the smartest person in the group. Certainly she was the calmest.

He looked over at her, and taking in her tentative smile, nodded his assent. “All right,” he said to Annika, “who or what is Aura?”

She said, “It’s an acronym for the Association of Uranium Refining Allies. It’s made up of—”