Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

Jack had had about enough Halloween stories for one evening. He had zero interest in seeing Ivan Gurov again, but he didn’t have any expectation that he would, especially since by tomorrow morning he’d be in the air, on his way to Ukraine.

He finished his drink and stood up. “Ladies, it’s been interesting, but all things considered it’s time for me to leave.”

“You see what you did, Jelena,” Annika pouted, “you’ve driven away another man.” She rose and threw some money on the bar. “I promised to make sure you got to your room.”

“That’s right,” Jelena said with a sardonic edge. “That disgusting pig of yours might be hiding in the elevator.”

Jack held up his hands. “Ladies, I like women fighting over me as much as the next guy, but, really, I can find my way upstairs by myself.”

ALONE IN the elevator, he still felt Annika’s cat’s eyes following him, and he wondered whether she or Jelena had been seriously coming on to him. Maybe that was just male ego talking. Then again, it could be that both of them had been flirting with him, which had long been a fantasy of his, one he shared with about a billion other men. One thing was for certain, his brain and theirs had been vibrating on two distinct frequencies. Between the assignment in Ukraine, secret from even the president’s staff, and the escalating friction with Sharon, his mind had no room for flirtatious Russian women, especially when one had a mobster for a boyfriend, ex- or otherwise.

He got off at the top floor, nodded to the Secret Service personnel on duty, and entered his room. Something about his talk with Carson in the stairwell bothered him. Why had he dismissed his bodyguards before he brought up the subject of Jack’s assignment? When Jack had queried him, the president had said: “ I trust you, Jack. That’s the beginning and the end of it .”

Did Dennis Paull suspect a mole inside Edward’s staff—in the president’s own Secret Service detail? If true, it would be a devastating blow to Edward’s work guiding the administration. What if his political enemies—who, as he said, were still powerful—knew his every move before he made it? Carson hadn’t spoken their names, but Paull had: Miles Benson, the former director of the CIA, a hardheaded, take-no-prisoners war veteran; and Morgan Thomson, the former national security advisor, the last of the credible neocons, bellicose, nervy, with recently revealed ties to several companies manufacturing war materiel. Between them, the two men had almost sixty years of service and networking inside the Beltway, formidable opponents indeed. They could not only stymie the president’s agenda, but also undermine his standing in the country. These days, polls were everything. The appearance of failure was all that was needed to send Carson’s popularity skidding.

He thought about calling Sharon, but he needed something to calm him. Maybe a hot shower. As he stripped off his clothes and padded into the bathroom, he made a mental note to follow up on his line of reasoning, either with or without Carson’s approval.

He turned on the shower, and had to wait for the hot water to come up, but a man’s voice arrived before the heat did.

“Toss the entire fucking room.”

Jack, listening closely, turned off the water and put his head near the pipe.

“I want to find her secrets, something I can use against her.”

Ivan was speaking in Russian, a language Jack had learned while at the ATF because of his work with terrorists. He’d used Rosetta Stone to learn Russian, Arabic, and Farsi, all within an eight-month period. He already had been fluent in Spanish. As long as the foreign language was delivered aurally, his dyslexia allowed him to be an astonishingly quick learner. He was able to see the words, phrases, tenses, and colloquialisms in three dimensions as he heard them, and thus remember them instantly and without need for repetition.

He sat on the edge of the claw-foot tub, bent over, straining now to pick up every word. Clearly, Ivan hadn’t been handed over to the police. So much for law and order in Russia.

“I thought you knew this bitch inside and out,” another male voice said now.

“Do you know your bitches inside and out?” Ivan said irritably.

“My bitches are tyolkas . Young girls in heat are unknowable and, anyway, who the fuck cares? There’s tons of new tyolkas at Bushfire every night—Hey, what’s this?”

“What’ve you found?”

“Hmm, just a pair of sweaty panties. This bitch is a pig.”

“If I know her, she left them there on purpose, just for prying eyes like yours,” Ivan said. “Which means we’ve been looking in the wrong places.”

“I already checked under the drawers and behind the toilet tank.”

“Too obvious.”

“Ah,” said the second voice, “let’s try the shower drain.”

There was an answering grunt, then, a moment later: “Found something—look, a monofilament line tied to the drain, almost invisible in this light.”

“What’s on the other end of it, Milan Oskovich?” Ivan said in a hushed voice, made slurry by its journey up the pipe.

Jack leaned forward, the better to hear.

There was no sound from below, and for a moment, Jack was afraid the two men had left the bathroom. Then: “It’s a necklace,” Ivan said.

“A cameo,” Milan corrected.

“No wonder she hid it, it must be worth a lot of money, especially on the black market.”

From what Jack had seen of Annika’s attitude and style, she did not seem the type to wear a cameo.

Apparently, Milan didn’t think so either, because he said, “I’m not sure she hid it for its monetary value. Could the cameo be hiding something inside?”

Silence again, and Jack found that his muscles were tensed as if anticipating a blow.

“Fuck!” Milan said. “It’s an ID.”

“She’s FSB.” Ivan’s voice held a note of incredulity.

Jack knew that the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the Federal Security Service or FSB for short, was the successor to the Soviet Union’s KGB.

Milan was laughing. “You poor dope—you’ve been fucking an undercover FSB officer.”

“Shut up!”

“You’d better not let Arsov get wind of this.”

“I said shut the fuck up!”

Jack knew from his pretrip briefings that Kaolin Arsov was the head of the Izmaylovskaya grupperovka in Moscow.

“He’ll have your nuts over an open flame.”

Jack heard the sound of a brief scuffle, and he imagined the two thugs going at it. Why was he listening, this had nothing to do with him. But at once an image of Annika, blond hair and carnelian eyes, long legs crossed one over the other, flashed across his mind. He heard the silvery peal of her laughter, which morphed into Emma’s last appeal: “ Dad, help me! ”

“Calm the fuck down.” Milan was panting hard. “You can be sure I’m not going to tell anyone. It’s the bitch you have to worry about, not me.”

“I know that.”

Silence again, then a length of unintelligible whispering. What was Ivan dreaming up, Jack wondered.

“Annika? It’s Milan. . . . No, for God’s sake, don’t hang up. Ivan’s been shot. . . . That’s right, shot. He’s alive, but . . . We’re at Bushfire . . . on Tverskaya . . . That’s right, near Red Square, just down the block from Nightflight. No, I haven’t called anyone else. Ivan said to call . . . You’ll come, then? All right, we’re around back in the alley.”

“Let’s go!” Ivan said. “We’ll only have a couple of minutes to beat her there.”

THREE

THE SNOW had left a moon of dubious value, but the wind had picked up, turning the flakes that had settled into the gutters or at the base of stony walls shooting upward, striking Jack’s face like grains of sand. With his hands deep in the pockets of his overcoat and his shoulders hunched against the near-arctic chill, he crossed Red Square on the diagonal, on his way to Bushfire, whose address he got from the leering concierge on his way out.