Last Snow

Which is why we’re at this part of Sheremetyevo now, Jack thought. It will be far easier for Edward to get me out of Ukraine than it will be from here. Besides, I still have my assignment.

He could see the private plane Carson had set aside for him. Its cabin lights were on. As Edward promised, the crew was waiting for him. As he directed her to walk with him toward the plane, he said, “I want to get this straight. Thirteen is under Yukin’s command alone.”

She nodded. “Yukin and Batchuk’s, yes. But perhaps Trinadtsat is not its name at all. What little is known is speculation, anecdotal, often contradictory, but one thing seems clear: Batchuk stands at the previously unthinkable nexus between an unknown arm of the federal secret service and the grupperovka.”

“It’s as if Yukin is covering all his bases.”

Annika shook her head. “Again, I don’t understand this idiom.”

“I mean he’s marshaling all the forces, even those who have traditionally been enemies.”

“Yes, that’s it exactly. He’s presiding over an unholy alliance.”

“But why? What purpose does Thirteen have?”

They’d arrived at their destination. Jack, having failed to agree on a price beforehand, was presented with an outrageously inflated fare. That was before Annika spent the next minute and a half berating the driver with a string of colloquial curses, the meanings of which were too obscure for Jack to fathom. However, the driver understood well enough, because Annika came back with a figure one-tenth of the one the driver had first presented. Jack paid and they climbed out of the huffing bombila.

“Who knows what Yukin and Batchuk are planning?” she said. “Something sinister, surely.”

The night had turned mild. Whatever was left of the snow was either melting or being swept away by a moist southerly wind. A diadem of lights had constructed another sky—low, metallic, artificial, without the stitching of stars in the soft sky high above it.

“Now,” she said, looking around, “please tell me why we are here.”

He pointed. “You see that plane ahead of us? It’s going to get us out of here.”

She pulled up short. “Who are you, Mr. McClure?”

“We passed ‘Mr. McClure’ back in the hotel bar.”

Her eyes were full of doubt. “You are someone with his own plane. An American oligarch.”

“No, I’m not a businessman,” Jack said, urging her to continue on toward the jet and its welcoming mobile stairs. He found it curious that an FSB agent didn’t know who he was, that he worked for the President of the United States. “And the plane isn’t mine. It belongs to a friend.”

“A very rich and powerful friend. So you are his, what—vice president?”

Jack thought that was funny, though in truth there wasn’t much to laugh about in their situation. “Let’s just say that like Oriel Jovovich Batchuk, I’m a deputy prime minister.”

She eyed him even more suspiciously. “America has no prime ministers.”

“Well, not yet, anyway.”

“YOU REALLY have no idea who I am or who I work for?” Jack said.

“Should I? If you’re someone from the international pages of the newspaper you’re beyond my field of expertise or even interest.”

Having taken turns in the small restroom cleaning up as best they could, Jack and Annika were seated in the private jet as the cockpit crew went through their final checks. The captain had told Jack that he had his instructions, had submitted the flight plan to the airport personnel, and was otherwise ready to take off.

“I was wondering why you were at that hotel at the same time I was.”

“Perhaps we’re meant to have a passionate affair.”

She said this with such an acid tongue Jack could think of no possible response.

“Yes, that’s it,” she said in the same knife-edged tone of voice. “I’ve followed you all the way from—where in America are you from, Jack McClure?”

“Washington—the city, not the state.”

Annika, having made her point and clearly uninterested in his answer, turned away, stared out the small Perspex window at the airport. There seemed to be an odd tension between them now, as if in the last several moments they had become antagonists. Jack was an unusually astute judge of character, but he found this woman unreadable, as if she had multiple personalities cycling around her brain clamoring to be heard. In this respect she reminded him of Alli.

At length, she said in a more modulated voice, “My focus is, or at least has been, on infiltrating the Izmaylovskaya grupperovka, with an eye toward gathering evidence against Arsov. Now I’m beginning to believe that someone felt threatened by the investigation, that I was set up to be taken out of the picture.”

“They could have sent you to Siberia.”

She turned back to him. The flecks in her eyes had turned the color of gunmetal. “The sudden outside pressure would have set off alarm bells inside the FSB and thus brought unwanted attention on Thirteen. No, this was a better way to handle me, making me a pariah.” Her face was set in a grim mask. “Now I will be hunted, very possibly killed, by my own people.”

“At the cost of Milan’s death?”

She shrugged. “I’m quite certain there’s already another ready to take his place. That’s how these things work. Surely, you understand that people like Milan—people like me—get thrown under the wheels from one minute to the next.”

Jack nodded. “It happens in my country, too.” Then, without waiting to think about it, he said: “You haven’t said anything about what happened in the alley.” The moment he said it, however, he knew he’d made a mistake.

Annika turned to him, her full lips compressed into a line as thin and distant as the horizon. “What is there to say? Two men died and we’re alive. What would you have me do, Jack McClure, break down and sob on your shoulder? Do you feel a need to comfort me? Do I look like I need comfort?”

“You look like you aren’t used to comfort.” With her friend Jelena in the hotel bar she had seemed so flirty, “We were about to go clubbing. Why don’t you join us?” But now she was all titanium and steel. “In fact, you were friendlier when we first met.”

He could see that with this comment she had retracted her claws and was now plunged deep in thought. “It’s just—” Her voice seemed to fail her and she cleared her throat, unsure for a moment whether to continue. “I’m sorry, but I get my back up when I’m frightened.”

She had said this last with her face averted, as if ashamed of any emotion deep enough to crack her outer shell, even if only temporarily. “It’s an ugly trait, I know, but I get frightened so infrequently, you see . . .” She had turned back, was laughing softly and much too briefly. She waved a hand as if her words were written on a blackboard, erasable. “I keep asking myself why you came after me. Why would you do that? After all, we’re strangers, between us there is no obligation or, rather, there wasn’t. Anyway, every time I asked myself this question I came up with the same answer. To you, I’m not a stranger because you must work for an American secret service agency.” She glanced around. “Is this a CIA plane?”

“No, it isn’t,” he said, “and I’m not a Secret Service agent.”

Annika regarded him levelly, trying to gauge the truthfulness of his words. “Would you tell me if you were?”

“I would now, yes.”

She reached out a hand and he saw how pale it was, how long and tapered the fingers were. Was it a kind of benediction she was giving him or was he the recipient of a mysterious divination? “I believe you,” she said, as if she had been able to read something that couldn’t be seen, but which she nevertheless had conjured up with her white hand. She sighed then. “There’s something else, something underneath, if you know what I mean.” Her hands arranged themselves in her lap, crossed one over the other, as if tired from their recent work. “I suppose my prickliness is the result of spending too much time alone. Jelena is right. Damn her, she’s almost always right, and isn’t shy about bringing up her stellar record as often as possible. Anyway, I’m no good with people, at least not in my private life.”