Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

At the edge of the lake Batchuk glanced at his watch. “He’ll be coming soon. He has an appointment on the other side of the park.”

Limonev squinted through the snow. “Perhaps in this weather he won’t come.”

“He doesn’t give a shit about the weather.”

“I’ll need to be able to recognize the target.” Limonev glanced in every direction to ensure that there was no one close to them. “As usual a photo of him would be best.”

“Of course.” Batchuk slipped a snapshot out of the breast pocket of his black leather trench coat. “This is the man I want you to kill.”

Limonev looked down at the photo of Riet Medanovich Boronyov, his eyes closed, his face waxen and gray. There were flecks of blood on his lids and along one cheekbone.

Batchuk had already produced an MSP internally silenced, blunt-barreled pistol. Now he shoved it against Limonev’s chest and fired a round.

Limonev lost his balance and fell to his knees in front of Batchuk. One hand, shaking as if palsied, fumbled for his gun, but with an almost negligent wave Batchuk knocked it away.

“Unfortunately I gave you the same order fourteen months ago.” Batchuk took the assassin’s chin in his hand. “How many?” he said. “How many of the oligarchs are still alive?” He raised Limonev’s head and stared into his bloodshot eyes. “Kharkishvili, Malenko, Konarev, Glazkov, Andreyev—you claimed you had killed them all. Did you, or are they as alive as Boronyov was until a few hours ago?”

Limonev licked his lips, opened his mouth, and spat into Batchuk’s face. With a sound of disgust Batchuk pushed the face away and, raising the MSP, fired the second round point-blank between Limonev’s eyes.

“I never give the same order more than once,” he continued, as if his companion were still alive. Pocketing the MSP, he threw the other man’s gun into the lake, retrieved the photo from Limonev’s grasp, and then, bending over, dragged him into the water and left him there.

“IF IT’S true that Gourdjiev and I don’t always see eye to eye,” Kharkishvili said, “it’s also true that we also have nothing but respect for one another.”

“Tell me something,” Jack said. “Who is AURA’s leader, you, Magnussen, who?”

“There is no leader,” Kharkishvili said. “We reach agreement by consensus.”

“That sounds both unwieldy and impractical,” Annika said with an obvious measure of skepticism. “Just look at the United Nations, which eats up so much time and money without ever managing to get much of anything accomplished.”

Kharkishvili brushed his fingertips across his forehead, as a sign either of impatience or of annoyance. “We’re not the United Nations—and I assure you I’m not set on a road to character assassination. AURA would never have been possible without your dyadya . I and the other oligarchs would not be here, in all likelihood we wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for him taking on the dangerous task of informing us in advance that the FSB was coming for us.”

His eyes seemed to have retreated into the depths of their sockets, where they lay hooded and troubled. “I know he found out about the government’s move against us from Batchuk, and I must tell you that I cannot for the life of me fathom how he is so successful at playing both sides of the fence.”

“That’s only a part of his genius,” Annika said with more than a trace of pride. “But it seems both odd and counterproductive for you to have a problem with a relationship that provides you with such vital information.”

“If you don’t mind my saying it,” Kharkishvili said, “it’s the other side of the relationship that I find disturbing.”

“I do mind you saying it,” Annika said. “You certainly had no problem when the information he got from Batchuk saved your life and the lives of the other AURA oligarchs. He would have been summarily executed had Batchuk found out.” Her ire aroused, she took a step toward Kharkishvili. “In addition, I wonder what AURA would have done if he hadn’t engaged Magnussen and his multinational task force of engineers and surveyors to test and report on the feasibility of mining the uranium strike?”

Jack’s eyes went out of focus as his brain began to give him another view of the puzzle that had been resolving itself piece by piece from the moment Edward had informed him of Lloyd Berns’s death on Capri when he should have been here in Ukraine. For the first time he understood that there was the possibility or probability of a double agent inside AURA, and if there was, he suspected who it might be, though something about the setup didn’t track, and he knew there was more information needed before he made any accusations that could backfire on him and Alli.

“DO YOU think he was convinced?” Miles Benson said, one hand on the quivering flank of the British Labrador.

Morgan Thomson blew on his chilled hands. “I know Dennis Paull. He loves Edward Carson, he’d throw himself under a bus before he’d let anything untoward happen to him.” He shifted the shotgun from one shoulder to the other. “Whether or not he believed us I really can’t say. It doesn’t matter, anyway, because as far as he’s concerned, by calling Carson he did the right thing.”

The two men crouched in a thatch blind they had built themselves at the eastern edge of the Alizarin Global property, waiting patiently for dawn and the flights of ducks that would come with it. For them duck hunting was more than a pleasant pastime, it was a way to blow off steam, to release themselves from the pressure-cooker of their professional lives. Other men might have availed themselves of the services of an upscale brothel, or even something more exotic, but these men had extensive experience with entrapment. How much graphic, even obscene, incriminating evidence they had gathered on their enemies over the years was a subject for statisticians.

“The General has outlived his usefulness.” Benson’s gaze was fixed on the tenuous band of pink that wavered on the eastern horizon.

“Not quite. He was the mark from the beginning,” Thomson said as he put his shotgun to his shoulder and aimed it. “Now he’ll become our scapegoat.” He pulled the trigger, the bird fell through the sky, and the Lab took off like a shot. “Our dead duck.”

“I’d feel a whole helluva lot better,” Benson said, squinting like Clint Eastwood, “if we had heard from our man in the field.”

“He had instructions to maintain communication silence when he was in place.”

“Yes, but I want these last obstacles to be taken care of.”

Thomson watched with pleasure as the Lab returned with the duck in its mouth. There was blood on the dog’s dark muzzle and its eyes were alight with the ecstasy of doing what it was born to do, what it had been trained to do.

As it set the duck gently down at Thomson’s feet, he said, “You worry too much.”

“I’m paid to worry too much,” Benson said sourly.

WHILE ANNIKA met with Magnussen and Kharkishvili, Jack and Alli walked through the manor house. It was some hours after the AURA session had broken up. Since his conversation with Edward Carson, Jack had been trying to fit all the disparate pieces together to form a coherent whole—he knew it was out there, he could feel it forming, coalescing, the problem was it kept changing shape and scope as it was appearing to him.

Over the years he’d discovered that his mind was often at its best when he walked or ate, mechanical functions that allowed his brain to digest and reorder the seemingly random bits of information it had picked up. There was a great deal of pressure on him both from Edward and AURA to find a way out of the escalating crisis, but he’d made Kharkishvili and Magnussen promise to leave him alone until he had need of them.