Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

Alli caught up with Jack as he waited for the two agents who were closest to swing the cable off the limo. The moment it was safely aside, he wrenched on one of the rear doors. The limo was resting on its roof, there was a welter of security personnel, both American and Russians. Because the Russians were being turned back, their commander decided his men should form the perimeter, keeping back the howling press corps.

By this time Jack had wrenched the door open. He took one look inside and handed Alli to one of her detail.

“What’s going on?” she cried. “Jack, tell me what you saw!”

Putting his head back inside Jack saw Lyn Carson cradling her husband’s bloody head. All the personnel in the front were mangled, clearly dead. Defib Man checked on the president, shook his head, and started to cry.

“Mrs. Carson,” Jack said, “Lyn, we’ve got to get you out of there now.”

She did not move, did not respond, and Jack climbed in over the body of his good friend. When he began to pull her away, Lyn screamed. Her eyes were wide and staring, she was clearly in shock. Then there were other hands helping him, and slowly the Carsons were separated. That’s when he saw that the front of Lyn’s coat was soaked through. At first he thought it was Edward’s blood and, indeed, some of it undoubtedly was, but when she passed out as they tried to extricate her he knew that something was very wrong.

THEY TOOK the president and First Lady—Edward and Lyn—straight to Air Force One, where the president’s trauma surgeon was standing by in the plane’s operating room for Lyn Carson, who had sustained abdominal damage. The American medical team worked on her for six hours, and even then the team leader could not give a definitive long-term prognosis. She was, however, stable enough for Air Force One to take off. By that time the snow had ceased, and a silver sun briefly showed its face through a crease in the thick cloud cover.

During those six hours Jack stood holding Alli, who, after asking him what he had seen, had said not a word. She stared down at her father, gray as ash, shiny as a melted candle, without an outward sign of emotion. This continued for so long that Jack grew worried. He spoke to her several times in halting phrases; his tongue felt as if it were swollen. He himself needed time to grieve over the loss of Edward Carson, but it had not yet become a reality, it was too immense, too unthinkable to take in so quickly. How could Edward Carson, the President of the United States, die in a car crash, how could he be dead? He couldn’t be, no one believed it except the Secret Service detail, because they had been trained for this moment, hoping it would never come, but prepared for it mentally and physically nonetheless. Dick Bridges, the detail’s leader, was dry-eyed and stoic, there was never a moment when he wasn’t in command, when everyone wondered whether they could count on him. After he had supervised the loading of the agents who had been in the lead limo into the belly of the aircraft he returned to the president’s body as a member of the Praetorian guard stands by his Caesar, even in death.

Jack had not heard from Annika and he did not now expect to. It was just as well; he wouldn’t know what to say to her, how to respond, his mind was here by the side of his fallen friend, his leader, and Alli.

Just before the doors closed Jack left Alli’s side and stepped out onto the moving stairs. He was surrounded by grim-faced Secret Service agents, silent in their sober grieving. Their regret was so palpable he felt buffeted by it. There was nothing special to look at, Sheremetyevo was much like other airports in other countries, and yet to him it was utterly unique.

Everything comes to an end, he thought. Love, hate, even betrayal. The accumulation of wealth, the scheming for power, the barbarity, the cruelty, the endless lies that capture what we think we want. In the final moment, everyone falls, even the would-be kings of empires like Yukin, even the princes of darkness like Dyadya Gourdjiev. In the silence of the tomb, we all get what we deserve.

While he was thinking these thoughts, while he was taking his last breaths of the chill Moscow air, his phone vibrated. He almost didn’t take it out of his pocket, almost didn’t look at who was attempting to contact him at this inopportune moment. He both wanted and didn’t want it to be Annika. Compelled to look down at the screen he saw that she had replied to his call via an e-mail. He opened it up and read:

Dearest Jack,

My grandfather warned me not to tell you, but I’m breaking protocol because there’s something you have to know; it’s the reason I haven’t come, why I won’t come no matter how long you wait, why I’m not being melodramatic when I say that we must never see each other again.

I killed Lloyd Berns. I sought him out in Kiev and then in Capri, where, free of his official escorts, it was easy to do what I wanted with him. I ran him down. He had made a deal with Karl Rochev—two stubborn birds of identical corrupt feathers—that threatened AURA’s plans. My grandfather knew the president would open an investigation into Berns’s death and suspected that he’d assign you because Carson trusted you, and only you, and you were already with him in Moscow.

I know you must hate me, I’ve been preparing for that since the moment I built up the file on you. There is little point in reiterating how desperately my grandfather and I needed your unique expertise, no one else could have unraveled the Gordian knot that had stymied and bedeviled us. So you hate me now, which is understandable and inevitable, but you know me; what I can’t stand is indifference, and now, no matter what, you’ll never be indifferent to me. So, in that regard, I’m content, though certainly not happy. But, then, it seems to me that I’m not destined to find happiness, or even, perhaps, to fathom its nature, which is as mysterious to me, or maybe alien is the correct word, as prayer.

Whether or not you choose to believe it, we all run afoul of forces we cannot see, let alone understand. This is not to excuse, or even to mitigate what I did. I don’t seek absolution; I don’t know its meaning and I don’t need to. I neither regret what I did nor feel pride in it. In peace as in war sacrifices must be made, soldiers must fall in order for battles to be won—even, or perhaps especially, those that are waged sub-rosa, in the shadows of a daylight only people like us notice.

Dyadya Gourdjiev and I won our battle over Oriel Batchuk and America got what it wanted from Yukin and the Kremlin. That’s all that matters, because you, me, all the pieces on the chessboard have no meaning without it.

Annika

“Mr. McClure.” Dick Bridges tapped him on the shoulder. “Everyone is waiting. I must ask you to go inside now and take a seat, the captain has received clearance for immediate takeoff.”

Jack took another look at the e-mail, as if on a second reading the words, the meaning would change, as if this time he would not find out how terribly, how deeply, how completely Annika had betrayed him, how she and her grandfather had spun lies and deception in concentric circles, layer upon layer, each one inside another, protecting each other, like Russian nesting dolls.

He gazed out at the last snow of April. Alli had said, “ Maybe she’ll come to Washington, maybe you’ll come back here .”

It was possible that one or the other of those futures would come to pass, but today as he ducked back inside the sad, lonely, silent plane, he very much doubted it.

LAST SNOW

Copyright © 2010 by Eric Van Lustbader

All rights reserved.

A Forge Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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