Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

“Hold onto your wallet, gospadin ,” the concierge had said as he wrote on a slip of paper.

“Just tell me the address,” Jack had told him, ignoring the useless paper.

As he’d crossed to the elevator on the top floor, his eyes had met those of Alli, who was leaning against the door to her room, smoking one of the clove cigarettes that were among her new passions.

“Go to bed,” he said.

She exhaled a cloud of aromatic smoke. “I will when you do.”

He glanced down to where she was looking, jammed the Sig Sauer P250 further down in his waistband.

The elevator door opened. “I won’t be long.”

“I’ll wait up,” she said as he stepped in. “You can tell me all about where you went.”

The doors closed on her enigmatic smile. Jack shook his head, wondering what it would take to get the murk of her incarceration out of her system. Perhaps she’d never fully overcome what had been done to her; who knows what psychic damage the brilliantly deranged Morgan Herr had inflicted on her? Who knows how deep it went? Not her phalanx of shrinks, who had finally released her into her parents’ custody because she either derided or ignored the therapists who had tried to get her to open up about her nightmare experience at Herr’s hands. The only thing known for certain was that he hadn’t raped her, which was a blessing. But what, exactly, had he done to her? That was the billion-dollar question.

The buildings, flood-lit from below, seemed even more monumental limned against the milk-and-ink sky. The darkness lent the onion domes a fairy-tale aspect that belied the structures’ lugubrious history. But, then, as Alli had so rightly pointed out, history was being rewritten here every day. He walked quickly, but not with his head down as most people tend to do in such unpleasant weather. Instead, he was on the lookout for Ivan and Milan, though he was certain they had made it out of the hotel before he’d even had time to dress. More pressingly though, he was looking for Annika, because if he saw her he could cut her off, tell her what he’d overheard, and drag her away from heading into the ambush. But apart from an old babushka, thin and arched as a black alley cat, he saw no one.

Briefly, he asked himself what the hell he was doing. He was here on presidential business, he had a charter flight waiting to take him to Ukraine at Carson’s request. It seemed the height of madness to be striding across Red Square in the dead of night toward an ambush between two Russian mafia hit men and an FSB agent. Part of him said that Annika could take care of herself, but another, deeper part—the part that had been permanently scarred by his daughter’s death—said that unless he intervened she’d be found dead tomorrow morning with a bullet in the back of her head. If this were America he could phone the police, but as Annika herself had pointed out, this was Russia, and Russia had a very different set of rules that had little or nothing to do with the law. He’d have to get used to this new reality for as long as he remained here.

But, at the moment, there was a deeper issue at work. For him, the present was always infused with the past. What if he hadn’t been too busy with a drug bust to listen to Emma when she’d called for his help? Would she still have lost control of her car? Would she have veered off the road and careened into the tree? He would never know, of course, but he could ensure nothing like that happened again. He knew it wasn’t his job to save Annika; he scarcely knew her. He knew it was potentially a stupid thing he was trying to do, and yet he couldn’t help himself. He knew she was going to die; he could never live with himself if he allowed that to happen.

On the far side of Red Square Jack found the street named Tverskaya, and at once spotted the club’s entrance due to the knot of young people and the lineup of panting bombila , the gypsy taxis that cruised Moscow’s streets, tying up traffic. They either crawled along, nose to taillight, trolling for fares or, once they had one, hurtling at gut-wrenching speed to their destination. At those times, they were like living bombs, hence their name.

Bypassing this morass, he went around the block, cautiously approaching the alley where Ivan and Milan lay in wait for Annika. He supposed she had been lured here at the thought of finding out more about the workings of the Izmaylovskaya from Ivan as he lay dying. Clearly, she had given up on him otherwise. Perhaps he was too far down in the hierarchy to be of continuing use to her. Having milked him of whatever he had whispered in her ear in the afterglow of sex she was prepared to move on—or, more accurately, upward.

At the head of the alley he drew his Sig and paused, both to allow his eyes to adjust to the gloom and to remain hidden from Ivan and Milan. He needed to pick them out of the murk or, failing that, to figure out where they might have secreted themselves. As his eyes adjusted, his brain began to compose a three-dimensional construct of the alley, complete with doorways, windows, two scarred metal Dumpsters backed against a building wall, piles of trash tied up in plastic bags, and the heavily stained ground itself, strewn with random bits of garbage, used condoms, and wads of dirty tissues in among the small drifts of snow, yellow where it wasn’t already crusted with soot.

He’d tuned his ears not only for any sound of the two criminals, but also for the crunch of Annika’s high heels, which, he realized now, would do her no good in the slippery alleyway. In fact, they would be a hindrance. He had mapped the entire scene now, had determined that the best and most likely place for Ivan and Milan to strike was the gap between the two Dumpsters. While it was cramped, especially for a man of Ivan’s bulk, it had the twin advantages of being in heavy shadow and of being concealed from either end of the alley.

And that was the problem, because now a shadow fell tentatively across the far end of the alley, only to remove itself almost immediately. Jack knew it had to be Annika. For a moment, he considered running around the block in order to get to her before she entered the alley, but then he saw her moving in the uncertain light. She entered the mouth, and for a moment the blaze of light from the street behind her made it impossible to see even her outline, which winked in and out of existence like a ghost.

Jack had no choice now but to enter from his end and hope he got her attention before Ivan and Milan attacked her and he was forced to fire his pistol. As he moved toward the Dumpsters and Annika, his eyes picked out a length of PVC pipe. It wasn’t metal, but it would have to do. He scooped it up, then picked up his pace, waving the white pipe in the air to get Annika’s attention. This he did, but it proved the wrong strategy because it both startled her and diverted her attention from Ivan and Milan who, hearing the sound her high heels made as they struck the ground, jumped out from the gap between the Dumpsters.

Jack saw the dull flash of Ivan’s 9mm and threw the length of pipe at him. It struck him on the shoulder, and he turned his back on Annika, then squeezed off a shot at his attacker. Jack ducked down and fired off an answering shot. From his position, he saw Annika had one shoe in her hand. She slammed the end of the heel into Milan’s head just above his hairline, and with a grunt he reeled back against the brick wall.

Hearing his compatriot’s outcry, Ivan squeezed off another shot, possibly to keep Jack in place, then turned back to Annika. He was just leveling the 9mm at her when Jack leapt onto him. When the two men crashed heavily to the pavement, both the Sig and the 9mm clattered into the alley. Annika made a grab for the Sig, but with a herculean effort, Ivan kicked it away from her. The 9mm lay somewhere, hidden in shadow.