Last snow, p.23
Last Snow, page 23
Behind them the office they had vacated was swarming with people, screaming and shouting. A shot was fired at them, and they broke into a ragged zigzag as they reached the runway itself. By this time the jet was already rolling along the tarmac, picking up speed with the firing of its four massive engines.
Over the mounting roar they could just make out the high-low sound of a police car siren, and then, as Jack threw a glance behind them, the car itself careened into view. They were so close to the oncoming jet they began to choke on the fumes, and Jack pulled Alli close to him, away from the nearest engine on the outside of the jet’s left wing. They bent over double as they ran awkwardly across the vibrating tarmac, the foreshortened sight of the oncoming plane making it look as large as an apartment building.
The careening police car, putting on speed, was heading directly for them, and Jack, realizing their only hope was to maneuver so the plane was between them and their pursuers, led the way. The vectors formed their three-dimensional patterns in his mind, changing as their position changed in relation to the jet. He could see the one path that would keep them safe. Holding Alli’s hand, he continued on across the tarmac even as the jet threatened to intersect their path. It was so close now it blotted out most of the sky, like the onward rush of a hurricane or a tornado, the sky black and shiny and so close above their heads its windswept underside turned into a scythe.
Heads down, huddled on their knees like refugees, they clung to one another as the storm came upon them, the huge belly of the aircraft rushing by above them, the two sets of enormous wheels hemming them in on either side before they sped by at teeth-rattling speed. Then the four of them were freed, up and running again toward the far side of the tarmac, choking on the fumes pluming off the engines, their eyes tearing, the lining of their noses inflamed, the backs of their mouths aching and dry.
The jet had taken off from the western runway. Just beyond a wide verge, a steep slope led down to a grassy field on the far side of which was the parking lot, including the separate area for employee vehicles. They crossed over the verge and scrambled down the slope as the jet was lifting off the tarmac. The police vehicle, which had stopped to allow it to pass, had reached the runway.
The incline was too steep for the police car, which stopped on the verge to allow three uniformed cops to disembark and sprint toward the slope. They half slid, half skidded down the incline. One of them tripped, lost his gun, and had to make a detour to retrieve it. Then he was up and running, but because he was ashamed that he had lost ground to his two fellow officers, he stopped, planted his feet at shoulder width, and, cradling the butt of his Makarov in one hand, aimed at the fleeing figures and fired round after round until the pistol was empty.
_____
DYADYA GOURDJIEV was in a box. Just five minutes after receiving the call from Annika and making one of his own he discovered that he was being shadowed by two men, one behind him, the other in front of him. This was the nature of the box, a method of surveillance employed when you were sure of the target’s superior skills at countering surveillance.
He was perhaps six or seven blocks from the street outside his apartment where he’d shot to death the two Izmaylovskaya hit men. Arsov would not be pleased, but the last thing on Gourdjiev’s mind was Arsov’s displeasure. These two men who had him in a box could not be handled the same way because they weren’t grupperovka goons, they were government men, Kremlin men, Trinadtsat, and therefore under Batchuk’s direct command. He knew they must be Trinadtsat because they wore the signature black leather trench coats. The moment Batchuk had asked about Annika, having come all the way from Moscow, Dyadya Gourdjiev knew that she had gotten herself into terrible trouble. It wasn’t often Batchuk asked him about her—he knew better—it had been several years, in fact. Perhaps his interest stemmed from her two companions, but Gourdjiev doubted it. Batchuk’s interest was in her, no one else.
As he strolled along Kiev’s windswept streets, dragging his surveillance box with him, he wished he knew what she was up to, but Batchuk had been right about one thing: She was far too canny to tell him about her plans. She would never expose him to the risks she herself was taking. He wished, too, that he could talk her out of taking such risks, but he knew it would be a fool’s errand. Annika was an extremist; he’d seen it in her almost from birth. This was who she was and no one, no circumstance or experience, could change that. But there was another reason why he’d never tried to talk her out of the life she’d chosen: He was secretly proud of her, proud that she was fearless, tough, and clever. He’d taught her, true enough, but she brought a great deal to the table: You couldn’t teach someone to be clever, just how to be cleverer still, and as for being fearless, he was convinced that was a genetic trait.
As he moved at a normal gait he continued to check the box he was in, using any reflective surface he came upon: shop and car windows, the side mirrors of parked vehicles. The two shadows varied their distance, occasionally allowing people to get between them and their assignment in order to remain as inconspicuous as possible.
At this point there was no possibility of losing them; he hadn’t the time. Besides, he had no problem with them knowing where he was going, it might even give them a laugh.
The brothel was on the west bank, in the Pechersk district, in a beautifully restored postwar building with a splendid view of the river that more or less bisected the city. He could have ascended in the tiny elevator, but he preferred to take the stairs, which were wide, curving, and ornamented with a polished, hand-turned wooden railing that felt good and solid beneath his fingers. By the time he reached the third floor he was only slightly winded, but his legs felt terrific. He hadn’t been this exhilarated in years.
The young girl took his coat and scarf into her booth just inside the vestibule. Ekaterina, in one of her more provocative ensembles that showed off her long legs and her ample breasts, came bustling out, and kissed him on both cheeks. Linking her arm through his, she asked him what he was in the mood for, the usual or something a bit different. She spoke in French, because it lent her establishment a degree of upscale romance.
“Mon habituelle.” My usual.
“Toujours la même fille,” she said with a heartfelt sigh. Always the same girl.
“Mais une tellement belle fille,” he replied. But such a beautiful girl.
She led him through a door she unlocked with both an eight-digit combination and a key that hung around her neck.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” she said, switching to English because it was an idiom with no analog in either French or Russian. They stopped in front of one of the many closed doors lining both sides of a wide, imaginatively lit hallway. “Just remember,” she whispered, rolling one impressive breast against his arm, “if at any time you change your mind, you’ve only to ask.”
He thanked her in his charming, rather formal old-school manner. Waiting until she had disappeared behind the locked door at the end of the hallway, he knocked on the door twice, waited five seconds, then knocked three times.
Without waiting for a reply he opened the door, stepped through, shut and locked the door behind him. He found himself in a square, dimly lighted room with furniture covered in yellow and pink chintz. The one window overlooked a steep green bank down to the somnambulant Dnieper River. Young children, overseen by their mothers, rolled down the embankment, laughing and shrieking, while two lovers lost in themselves stood arm in arm staring out across the gunmetal water.
“Did she try to get you into bed?” Riet Boronyov said.
Gourdjiev nodded. “Again.”
“She wouldn’t charge you, you know.” Boronyov jackknifed his small but very fit frame off the bed on which he’d been reclining, almost as if he had been daydreaming. “She’s hot for you.”
Dyadya Gourdjiev thought of the widow Tanova, her tea and fresh-baked stollen, and laughed. “She’s just rising to a challenge.”
“Don’t tell me you think you’re too old,” Boronyov clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, “because I wouldn’t believe it.”
“I’m not here to speak about Ekaterina or my sex life.”
“No, of course not.” Boronyov gripped the older man’s hand in friendship. “But it would make her happy, and a happy employee is a productive employee.”
“I don’t see how Ekaterina could be more productive than she already is. You take a great deal of money out of this business.”
“Indeed.”
Boronyov looked more like a bug-eyed wizard than an oligarch. When you were a billionaire, Gourdjiev thought, you could afford to be strange-looking without fear of anyone commenting on it. Everyone wanted to be your friend, unless they were too terrified to approach you, and those people were of no use to you anyway. “But because of that shitbag Yukin this is the only one of my businesses that’s currently making money. He and that cocksucker Batchuk are appropriating every last vestige of capitalism I acquired in the nineties. It’s all illegal, of course, but the judges have their heads stuck so far up Yukin’s ass they can’t hear the complaints.”
Gourdjiev had heard this rant many times before, of course, but like Batchuk, Boronyov needed to find some temporary release from his resentment and outrage. He was a capitalist, after all, and anyone who interfered with the free market system was anathema. Besides, his companies and much of his fortune had been stolen by a rigged system, rife with legal nihilism. Had he not fled Moscow just ahead of the armed commandos Batchuk had sent to take him into custody, he would be in a Siberian prison now, stripped of both freedom and money.
It had been Gourdjiev who had warned him of his imminent arrest, not because he held any particular love for the oligarch, but his business model was sadly preferable to that of Yukin and Batchuk, whose level of corruption was staggering both in its scope and its abuses. He had needed Boronyov’s brains and contacts.
Unlike Yukin and, no doubt, Batchuk, Gourdjiev viewed the reign of the oligarchs as a necessary evil, a bridge between Soviet Communism, which had proved to be an abject failure, and a free-market economy. But the oligarchs’ hubris had sealed their own doom. High on the enormous wealth they had amassed in just a few years, they began to shoulder their way into the political arena. Yukin, whose instincts for self-preservation were acute, moved against them as soon as he detected a threat to his absolute power. He brought down the monarch of the oligarchs, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then the head of Yukos, the largest oil company in Russia. With Khodor-kovsky’s fall the other oligarchs turned into Yukin’s fawning toadies. All save a precious few. To Gourdjiev’s way of thinking Yukin’s steps to renationalize the largest companies in Russia smacked not of socialism, but of a twenty-first-century fascism that was far more pernicious.
“I need to know who gave the FSB orders to assist an American spy who went by the legend ‘Harry Martin,’” Dyadya Gourdjiev said. “And I need to know the name of Harry Martin’s handler.”
Boronyov sat down in one of the chintz chairs and crossed his legs. Surrounded by yellow and pink he looked healthy and robust. Perhaps he was, perhaps life outside Russia agreed with him, or maybe it was his new clandestine life in which he was reveling, his life as a dissident.
Steepling his fingers he said with a Mona Lisa smile, “These are strange days, indeed. I sometimes feel as if I’ve become a seer.” His smile deepened. “Odd to say, but exile can sometimes do that. Wrenched away from the nexus, you become an Outsider, and in order to not merely survive but to be resurrected you’re forced to change your point of view, forced from the subjective to the objective. It’s like putting on a pair of contact lenses, or recovering from cataract surgery, everything becomes clear, sharply delineated. Motives reach the surface at last, and all becomes transparent.”
“So you know the aim of Trinadtsat.”
“I know it as well as I know the aim of AURA.” He rose, and with that the color seemed to drain from his face. “But far more importantly, I know your role in both.”
_____
AFTER THE first shot, Jack put himself between Alli and the gunman, but they had already made significant progress through the field and the bullets lacked the range, falling harmless behind them. Still, there were two cops running full tilt at them, steel truncheons gripped in their hands like batons in a relay race. Unlike their compatriot, they hadn’t bothered to draw their sidearms, having decided to concentrate on closing the gap between them and their quarry.
“We’re never going to make it,” Annika said. “They’ll be in pistol range any minute now.”
“What do you suggest?” Jack said.
Before he had a chance to react, she slowed and, turning, drew her gun. “Keep going!” she shouted. “Don’t slow down!”
Jack had to drag Alli along with him as she started to drop back. “Come on!” he said urgently. “She’s right.”
“We can’t just leave her,” Alli cried.
“If we stop we’ll all be killed.” He nodded at the figure sprinting ahead of them. “In this instance Kirilenko has the right idea.”
Behind them, Annika knelt and, cupping one hand beneath the butt to steady the gun, aimed at the leading cop. Her left arm felt as if it were on fire. She took long, deep, slow breaths to manage the pain. The cops saw that she’d stopped and began a peppering fire in order to distract her, but she ignored the bullets whistling by her, squeezed off one shot, missed. The second shot caught the lead cop in the right side of his chest, spinning him around before he collapsed. The second cop started to zigzag, stutter-stepping in order to make himself a more difficult target. He fired as he came, forcing Annika to roll, come up on one knee, squeeze off a shot, then roll again.
Looking back, Alli broke away from Jack’s grip and ran back toward Annika. She ignored Jack’s yell, closed her ears to the pounding of his feet behind her. Neither Annika nor the cop were as yet aware of her, and she dropped her gaze to the field across which she ran. At last finding what she was searching for she slowed and scooped up a rock. Planting her feet with her left leg forward, she threw it with unerring accuracy. It struck the cop on the forehead, just a glancing blow, but it was enough to stop him in his tracks, enough time for Annika to come up on one knee, aim, and shoot him twice in the chest.
“MY GOOD Riet Medanovich,” Dyadya Gourdjiev said, “you should know there are two members of Trinadtsat downstairs even as we speak.”
“So after all this time you were playing us.” Boronyov drew a small-caliber pistol from his vest pocket. “You’ve betrayed us and everything we stand for.”
“Don’t be idiotic, I’ve done nothing of the sort,” Gourdjiev said dismissively. “Do you actually think you know what Trinadtsat is all about?”
“I know they’re after the same prize we desperately need if we’re to align ourselves with AURA and rise again as a dissident force Yukin can’t stamp out or bully.”
“Then you don’t know anything. Do us both a favor and keep your mind on what you’re meant to do. AURA needs your expertise and your contacts.” Gourdjiev put his back against the window and leaned on the broad sill. “Now please tell me what I want to know about who gave the FSB orders to assist Harry Martin and who Martin’s handler was.”
Boronyov said, “Let’s go down and talk to Batchuk’s ambassadors of pain.”
Gourdjiev was genuinely alarmed. “And announce to them that you’re still alive after all the trouble we went through to ‘kill’ you? That’s the last thing we’re going to do.” He came off the windowsill. “Where is this sudden aggression coming from?”
“Your relationship with Oriel Jovovich Batchuk. You two go way back, you grew up together, had each other’s back for years.”
A whiff of a revelation came to Gourdjiev. “This suspicion isn’t your style, Riet Medanovich.”
“No? Whose style is it?”
“Kharkishvili.”
Boronyov stared at him, silent as a sphinx.
“You understand what he’s doing.”
“He’s questioning the special relationship you have with Batchuk.”
As a gesture of frustration Gourdjiev jammed his hands into his coat pockets. “I’ve explained that.”
“No, you’ve explained nothing, or at least not to anyone’s satisfaction.”
“Be truthful, Riet Medanovich—”
“Have you been truthful with us?”
“I set you all up,” Gourdjiev said. “You, Kharkishvili, Malenko, the others. And now you think—”
“Kharkishvili says it’s all a con—a long con you cooked up with your good friend Batchuk.”
“That’s insane,” Gourdjiev said. “And furthermore don’t tell me you believe it, because I’ll laugh in your face.”
“At this delicate stage, when everything is at stake, it really doesn’t matter what I think or believe.”
“I see. All that matters is what Kharkishvili believes.”
“Think what you will.”
“Oh, I know what he’s done, Riet Medanovich, I’ve known it for some time,” Gourdjiev said. “Ever since I brought him on board he’s sowed the seeds of distrust in order to gain power, in order to displace me. It’s a ploy as old as time, but what it will do is rend us asunder, in civil war we will all fail.”
“He has a better plan.”
“That’s what all would-be tyrants and usurpers say.”
Boronyov appeared unmoved, or at least unconvinced. “We can end the speculation, distrust, and suspicion right now. All we have to do is go downstairs and talk to the ambassadors of pain.”
“Who was Harry Martin and who was his handler?”
Boronyov stared at him unblinkingly for a moment. “You know who I’m going to have to call to get the answers.”
Gourdjiev waved his hand in the air, Boronyov punched in a number on his cell phone, and spoke briefly to Kharkishvili. “All right,” he said finishing up. “Five minutes,” he said to Gourdjiev, who turned to stare out the window.
