Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

“Alli,” he said softly, but made no move to touch her, or even to move nearer, “you don’t want to kill yourself, I know you don’t.”

Trembling and shivering, she stared at him, red-eyed, and shouted, “I’ve had fucking enough of people climbing inside my head, telling me what to do!”

“Alli, please tell me—”

“I can’t, I can’t!” she cried. Her hands curled into fists, and then they began to beat against his chest, as if he were the physical manifestation of the terror that gripped her.

In the face of her mounting hysteria he knew he had to remain calm. He didn’t stop her attack, but he didn’t withdraw from it, either. “Why can’t you?”

“Because . . .”

She seemed to want to hurt him, and perhaps through him, herself.

“Because—” Her voice was so thin and cracked he had to pull her close to hear her. “—you’ll hate me, you’ll hate me forever.”

“Where did you get that idea? Why would I hate you?”

“Because I lied to you.” A dreadful fear seemed to come over her. “I lied, I didn’t tell you the whole truth.”

He closed his arms around her and said in her ear, “I could never hate you. I love you unconditionally.” Kissing her on her cheek, he said, “But I think you ought to tell me whatever it is that’s causing you so much pain. It isn’t healthy to sit with it.”

She snorted in tearful derision. “You say you love me, but that’ll all change the moment I tell you.”

“Do it then.” He held her at arm’s length so he could look her in the eyes. Her fists had uncurled, the fingers trembling against his chest. “Let me decide instead of you deciding for me. Trust me. Trust us. ”

The light had gone out in her eyes, she stared at him as if without recognition, and he pulled her to him again, murmuring to her: “Don’t go away, Alli. Stay here with me, you’re safe, you’re safe,” just as he had when he’d rescued her from the black place where Morgan Herr had taken her.

Her head lay heavily against his chest, she seemed to be scarcely breathing.

“Alli, please, I won’t hate you, no matter what, I promise.”

He felt her sigh against him, a long exhalation that was as much resignation as it was a surrender. Her entire body seemed limp and frail, as if she needed to give up everything, even her physical presence, in order to make the terrifying leap he asked of her.

“I . . . I lied to you about what happened the morning Emma was killed.”

“What?” He had expected some terrible revelation about what Morgan Herr had done to her, not this.

“I knew it.” She squirmed in his arms, trying to pull away. “I knew I shouldn’t’ve opened my big mouth.”

“No, no,” he said quickly. “Go on. What happened that morning?”

Her voice was muffled, as if she were talking into him rather than to him, as if she wanted to speak to something inside him with which she desperately needed to connect. “I . . . When you asked me I told you that I wasn’t around, that I didn’t know what Emma was up to.”

“You told me in retrospect you thought she was going to see Herr.”

“That was the lie. I knew where she was going because she told me.” Alli’s voice was further clouded by guilt and despair. “I was there. She asked me to drive her, she said she’d been up all night and was in no shape to drive.” She was weeping again as she clung to him. “I told her I couldn’t, I gave a totally bogus excuse because I was scared, I didn’t want to get involved. And because I was so chicken-shit, she died. If I’d been driving nothing bad would have happened, she’d be alive now.”

TWENTY-FOUR

“IRAN,” PRESIDENT Yukin said, “is a topic of the utmost strategic importance.” He shook his craggy head. He had eyes like nuggets of coal that had been burned deep into his face. The bulb of his nose was pocked and cratered, possibly from a childhood disease. “I have said this before, President Carson, but I see that I must say it again in order to underscore the weight the Kremlin reserves for such matters.”

“You needn’t bother,” Edward Carson said. “I am well aware of the special status between Russia and Iran.”

“Special status?” Yukin mashed his fleshy lips together, as if he wished to grind Carson’s words to ash. “No, no, you misunderstand us. We have certain business dealings, yes, but as for—”

“Such as sending them nuclear reactor parts and refined uranium.”

That statement hit the room, or more accurately, Yukin’s ears, like a detonation. An awkward silence ensued. Carson, Yukin, General Brandt, and Panin, a high-level Kremlin apparatchik who had not been further identified, were sitting in a palatial room inside the Kremlin. The ceilings, twenty feet in height, perhaps more, were arched as in a cathedral, a comparison whose irony wasn’t lost on Carson.

“Since the debacle in Iraq your fact-finding spies have been notoriously inaccurate,” Yukin said at length. “This lie is but another example.”

At Carson’s gesture the General removed a dossier from his briefcase and handed it to his commander in chief. Without a word the president opened the dossier and spread half a dozen photographs on the table. One by one, he turned them so they faced Yukin.

“What’s this?” Yukin said, not even bothering to look at them.

“Surveillance photos of enriched uranium being transferred from Russian transports to Iranian transports.” Carson’s forefinger tapped a photo. “Here you can clearly see the symbol indicating radioactive material.”

Yukin shrugged. “Photoshopped.” But something was caught in his eyes, a shadow mixing anger and embarrassment at being caught out.

“I have no intention of making these photos public.” Carson gathered up the photos, shoved them back in dossier, and slid it across the table to Yukin. “But I must be clear: The position of the United States on the security accord will not change from where it was an hour ago, or yesterday. You cease your dealings with Iran and we dismantle the missile shield around Russia, we become security allies. We are done making changes; it’s time for us to sign the accord that will prove to be invaluable to both of our countries.”

Yukin sat very still for some time. The breathing of the four men seemed to come in concert, inhalations and exhalations caught on the tide of tension that had sprung up in the room moments before. Then the Russian president gave a brief nod. “You’ll have my answer within the hour.”

_____

“THIS HAS become a perilous game,” General Brandt said as he and Carson strode the frigid Kremlin corridors, the president’s usual entourage strung out behind them. “If you had told me you were going to show Yukin those photos I would have cautioned you to find another way.”

“There was no other way,” Carson said shortly.

“Mr. President, may I point out that you’re on the verge of signing the most historic accord with Russia in the history of the United States, one that will ensure the safety of the American—”

“I seem to be more concerned with the American people than you are,” Carson snapped. “I won’t sign the accord with the points that Yukin has insisted on.” He didn’t care for Brandt’s admonishing tone, the inference that he, a neophyte when it came to the Russians, had acted rashly, that he should have deferred to the old Russian hand. “I get the feeling that Yukin is playing us to see how far he can push us, how many of his demands we’ll accede to. I won’t have it. I won’t be pushed around, either by him or, quite frankly, by you, General.”

“GENERAL BRANDT,” Benson said.

“Where to begin with General Brandt?” Thomson said as if he hadn’t been interrupted. He sighed, as if stymied by the enormity of the task before him.