Last Snow (31 page)

Now, having explained himself, he looked at Annika. “My proposal?”

Jack said to her, “You’re not seriously considering—”

“The idea has a logic,” Annika said. “A symmetry I find immensely appealing.”

“Annika, really—”

“Can you think of another way we’re going to stay alive long enough to find out who killed Rochev?”

“Wait.” Now Kirilenko stood, but there was nothing threatening in his body language. “Karl Rochev is dead?”

Jack explained how they had been led to Magnussen’s estate by the odd murder weapon, how they had found Rochev, who bore the clear signs of torture before he’d been killed by the two sister
sulitsa
.

Kirilenko was about to reply when they heard a sharp scraping from the corridor. Then the door opened inward.

H
ARRY
M
ARTIN
arrived at Simferopol North Airport one pissed-off human being. During the flight from Kiev he’d done nothing but seethe inwardly, feeding a rage that felt overwhelming by the time he
emerged in the Arrivals hall. All he could think of was putting a bullet into the back of Kirilenko’s head. It had been Kirilenko who had misdirected him, ditched him, humiliated him with General Brandt. Now he understood why Kirilenko had so easily agreed to separate when he himself had suggested it, thinking that by heading back to Kiev while sending the Russian off on a wild-goose chase he’d be able to find Annika Dementieva on his own.

He scrutinized the passengers milling around the Arrivals hall as he would examine his past, looking for the one person on which his laserlike attention was currently fixated, so he could expunge the memory of what had happened.

So many things in Martin’s past needed extermination or exorcism, depending on whether your bent was practical or metaphysical; he’d concluded long ago that it all amounted to the same thing. The past was a vast swamp, reeking of mistakes, betrayals, lies, and delusions. If he’d had any say in it he’d obliterate his past and everyone in it. Wouldn’t that be sweet, he thought as his eyes swept the concourse, searching for Kirilenko.

Perhaps they’d both disappeared—Kirilenko and Annika Dementieva—and he’d never be able to find either of them. Then he could walk away and never come back. But he doubted that would happen because he knew all there was to know about disappearing. Harry Martin was a legend—in spook terminology, a fiction, like a short story or a novella. And what an exacting effort it took to maintain him! Creating him had been a snap, a conjuror’s trick backed up by documents the Legends Department had manufactured like the air in a plane or a refrigerator, canned, artificial, recirculated, hermetically sealed. He was a ghost built up like a Frankenstein’s monster from the pasts of people long dead. That’s where the legends wonks got their ideas, God knows they had none of their own. But with every lie he told Harry Martin became more difficult to sustain. The short story became a novella with a crisscrossing of fabrications
that took immense care to keep from contradicting each other.

By this time he had circumnavigated the Arrivals hall, cataloguing each person, but without seeing Kirilenko. He took another visual sweep of the hall. As he glanced down the corridor leading to Airport Services he saw a security guard stepping across the threshold of a doorway on the left perhaps two-thirds of the way down the corridor. Something in the man’s expression—surprise, shock, even—warned Martin even before the man collapsed. As he was dragged inside, Martin was sprinting down the corridor. He pulled his ceramic pistol from its hard leather holster at the small of his back, thumbing the safety off. He reached the door just as it was being shut. Throwing the bulk of his leading shoulder between the door and its frame he kicked the door backward, so that it slammed wide open.

He just had time to register Kirilenko’s presence, other people on the periphery of his vision, when he fired blindly. He was fixated on Kirilenko, who had thrown himself behind a table. He aimed and was in the process of pulling the trigger when he heard a deafening noise.

Blown violently backward by the bullet that entered his skull, Harry Martin was dead before he hit the floor.

“I
HOPE
you rot in hell,” Kirilenko said, spitting on Harry Martin’s corpse.

Jack wasted no time riffling through Martin’s suit. He found his cell phone, a wad of cash, passport, two credit cards, an international driver’s license, and little else.

“There’s nothing here to indicate this man was anyone other than Harry Martin,” he said.

“No surprise there.” Annika was busy going through the security guard’s uniform. “Ah, but look what I found,” she said, holding up a set of car keys.

At that moment there came a hammering on the door, along with querulous voices raised in mounting fear. Jack grabbed the chair on which Kirilenko had been sitting, wedged the back under the doorknob at an angle so the back legs were braced against the floor. At the same time Annika raised the blinds on the window, only to find that the glass was reinforced with wire mesh. The hammering
became more insistent, they could hear someone calling for help or backup, they couldn’t distinguish which. Annika took a second chair and smashed it into the windowpane, then she repeatedly slammed it against the wall until one of the legs came loose. She gripped this, hacking away at the wire mesh to make a hole large enough for them to get through.

They heard a shot from behind them and the door lock exploded inward. Now the only thing between them and the officials in the corridor was the angled chair, which was already shuddering from the pressure being exerted on it from the other side of the door.

“Let’s go!” Annika said, helping Alli through the aperture she’d made.

Jack went next, then Kirilenko. Finally Annika herself climbed out. Without any other choice, they began to run away from the building, a route that took them directly onto one of the runways. A jet was just on the turn from the taxiway onto the head of the runway. They could hear its engine winding up to launch it along the runway and into its glide path up and away from the airport.

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.

_____

D
YADYA
G
OURDJIEV
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.”