Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

He was at a loss to say when this nihilistic worldview had come over him, perhaps he’d always had the seed of it deep inside his pragmatic, highly regimented mind. With a paranoid’s unmatched cunning he suspected the seed had started to take root the moment he retired from the military, which had been his stern father and his comforting mother for over forty years. The world outside the military seemed a strange and unpleasant place for him, until he learned to back away from it just enough so that it lapped at the fringe of his reality and nothing more. Being a talking head on TV was an excellent way to insulate himself, to remain unapproachable, solitary, hidden in plain sight. The more he appeared on TV, the more the idiot anchorpersons asked their fatuous questions, the further he receded into himself. All glory is fleeting, to paraphrase George Patton, one of Brandt’s patron saints, but that was fine because he had had enough of glory, TV had made him sick of it, or more accurately, what passed for glory in this postmodern age. Now all he craved was security, which his pension did not assure, especially because his Down’s syndrome son needed care far above and beyond what his health insurance was willing to pay. It seemed odd, not to mention unfair, that after spending his entire adult life in the service of his country he had become obsessed with money, something that in his younger days he didn’t think about at all because his housing, food, and travel expenses were all paid for by the United States Army.

He looked at his watch now as the waiter brought him a double espresso with a shot of vodka, which he drank quickly with a sharp tilt of his head like the old, grizzled Italian fisherman he’d met in Key West. He liked the Keys; it was his long-cherished dream to move to Marathon or Islamorada and fish, bask in the sun, and get stone drunk at ten in the morning whenever the hell he felt like it.

As soon as he finished his heavily fortified coffee he checked his watch again and frowned. It was past time for Yukin to call him via his encrypted line. He signaled the waiter for another double, and sat brooding, his head sunk between his bony shoulders, glowering at the spotlit facade of the Kremlin as if he could will Yukin to call him. The silence was deafening, mystifying, which required drowning in alcohol and caffeine. He downed his second drink as fast as he had the first, so fast, in fact, that the waiter hadn’t yet left the table.

“One more,” Brandt said in excellent Russian. “And bring the bottle.”

The waiter nodded and departed without comment.

And that was another thing, Brandt thought gloomily, Moscow was too fucking cold, even in April—I mean, snow, for chrissakes! This furtive spring might as well be January. Unconsciously he rubbed his palms down his thighs in an attempt to bring more circulation into them. At least the drinks had warmed his belly.

The waiter arrived at approximately the same time as his cell phone buzzed. He let it ring, his heart heavy in his chest, until the waiter had set the coffee and the bottle of vodka on the table and left.

“Yes,” he said, the cell clamped to his ear.

“Everything is sealed and delivered, it’s just wanting signing,” Yukin’s familiar voice said in his ear. “He loved that I caved on all those provisions I never wanted. You were quite correct; causing him to focus on the minutia of the accord was the way to get it done.”

The General drained half the cup in one swallow, then unscrewed the top of the bottle and poured an imprudent amount of vodka into his espresso. And right then and there he felt the intense hatred for the Russians—not just Yukin and Batchuk—he’d always felt but had suppressed for so many years, that had caused him unnumbered ulcerous bouts and sleepless nights as soon as he had been taken out of the field in order to deal with them face-to-face. A faceless enemy, he’d been taught, is the best enemy because he’s the easiest to hate, but the Russians put the lie to that lesson with a big, emphatic exclamation point. They were children, really, inasmuch as children haven’t learned how to act in civilized society, but who act out all the naked and embarrassing whims and desires of their ids without thought of either propriety or consequence.

“The accord is everything we could have hoped for,” Yukin said, sounding jollier and jollier. “Thanks to you, I’ve got everything I want, everything I need, and so will you, we’re in the home stretch, be sure of it, and I’ll tell you why. Do you remember the man you met here in December, Kamyrov?”

Indeed the General did, a hairy, slope-shouldered ape of a man with the manners to match. Brandt had a vivid memory of a dinner with the two men on a gelid, snowy night, Kamyrov expounding on methods of bringing antagonistic men to heel, his face gleaming with grease, unchewed bits of red meat lodged between his teeth. “The man you installed as president of Chechnya.”

“Homicidal maniac is more like it,” Yukin said. “I sent him in there because of his reputation as a strongman, because I needed to get control of the terrorist insurgency there. Since he’s been in power he’s ordered the murder of a dozen former military men, political challengers and their bodyguards—bodies are turning up all over the place: Budapest, Vienna, Dubai—it’s becoming embarrassing, the local police chiefs are understandably pissed off at having to scrape our offal off their streets, but Kamyrov is doing such a terrific job of neutering the insurgents I have no choice but to keep him there. But what the hell, it seems that these people have an appetite for destruction. Me, I just feed that appetite.

“I bring this up because eastern Ukraine has fallen into a severe economic depression, there have already been riots there as there have been in Moldavia and parts of Germany. This expanding civilian unrest is just the excuse we need to move our troops into north-eastern Ukraine and keep them there, and after the accord with the United States is signed no nation will dare rise up against us. Thank you, General. As requested by President Carson’s press secretary, I have scheduled the formal signing for eight o’clock tomorrow night in order to get the maximum exposure on American television. When we sign the accord in front of a thousand news cameras your part in our little play will come to an end and your account in Liechtenstein will be filled to overflowing with gold bullion.

“Tell me, General Brandt, how does it feel to be a wealthy man?”

“ORIEL JOVOVICH.”

The sound of Limonev’s raspy voice brought Batchuk back to the present, back to the eyeball-searing interior of Baskin-Robbins.

“A strange place to meet.”

“Let’s go.” Batchuk rose to his feet. “I have a job for you.” As usual, remembrance of things past had turned his mood sour; he felt no inclination toward small talk.

“You could have texted me the way you always do,” Limonev said as they rode the escalator to the underground garage. “I sent you the number the minute my new cell was activated.”

“This one’s different,” Batchuk said without looking at him. “It demands a different level of security.”

Limonev said nothing more until they had walked between the ranks of parked cars and were comfortably settled in the deputy prime minister’s luxurious Mercedes sedan.

“We’re going together?”

“It’s a two-man job.” Batchuk guided the Mercedes up the ramp and out onto the busy street. Twenty minutes of battling traffic at either a dead crawl or flying along at insane speeds brought them to the Ring Road, which Batchuk took around to the northeast, where he swung off the exit to the slums and Skol’niki Park. He pulled over at the park’s outskirts and they went into it, heading down a gentle slope to the lake known as Pulyaevskiye prudy. It was too cold and snowy for the homicidal gangs and addicts to be out; in fact, this particular area of the park was all but deserted. Snow continued drifting out of the hard, porcelain sky, swirled and blown sideways by gusts of damp wind that seemed to make the snowflakes expand, grow heavier, as if they had turned from frozen water into silver or glass tiles.