Last Snow

“What about Jelena?”

She gave him a small, wintry smile. “Jelena isn’t a friend, she’s like a sister or a priest who, despite her sharp tongue, chooses to hear my confession without judging me. And therein lies the other, better reason not to acquire friends. It’s not what you do that is your life, it’s what others think you’ve done, or not done, whatever the case. In this way, the truth becomes a lie, and eventually the lie takes on a life of its own, independent of you. Do you see how you lose control of your own life, because without quite knowing how it’s happened you’ve become what other people think you are.”

A shaft of light from the headlights of a moving vehicle outside on the tarmac briefly spotlighted Annika’s face. She was really quite a striking woman, even when she was in full-bore diesel mode, but more so now when her lips had relaxed into their natural shape and a bit of color had returned to her cheeks.

“Being in the secret service plays a role in that, don’t you think?” Jack said. “It erodes your sense of yourself. You become what your handlers want you to be, the lies you need to tell to accomplish your mission become the truth, and soon enough you lose the ability to tell the one from the other, you don’t know any other way to act or react.”

“You know about this difficulty.” Her face clouded over with renewed suspicion. “I thought you said you weren’t an agent.”

“I’m not, but I know a number of people who are, and they all say the same thing. Well, if they don’t admit to it I can see it in how they act.”

For the first time since they had met in the bar, she showed a spark of genuine interest. “But in my case, the damage had been done long before I ever came to the FSB.”

“Your father?” he guessed.

“A variation on a theme perpetrated over and over on women.” She pulled a cigarette out of the handbag she’d managed to pluck off the muck of the alley, but then remembering where she was, she dropped it back into the bag. She frowned. “My brother and I shared a bedroom, not so very uncommon in this country. From the time I was twelve, my brother raped me, night after night, with a hunting knife at my throat. When he was finished, while he was still on me, while he was still in me, he said, ‘If you tell anyone I’ll slit your throat.’ And then, to make his threat tangible, he nicked a place on my body, made me taste my own blood. ‘So that you never forget to hold your tongue,’ he said. Every night for eighteen months he cut me afterward, as if I were an imbecile who couldn’t learn.”

The turbines moved to a higher pitch, the thrumming and vibration in the cabin becoming more noticeable, but Jack could see that the movable stairs were still in place. His attention returned to Annika. There wasn’t a hint of self-pity in her voice.

“Where is he now?” Jack said.

“My brother? In hell, I trust. Not that I have the slightest interest in finding out. I’m not a victim.”

She said this last with a good deal of force, almost venom. Not that Jack could blame her, but in this he suspected she was wrong, because her brother’s words—“If you tell anyone I’ll slit your throat”—whispered into her ear night after night had acted like a physician’s evil tincture, poisoning her against keeping anyone close, anyone who could protect her, who could hurt him or interfere with his heinous activities. So she kept her own counsel, closed herself off from anyone who could help her—“I’ll slit your throat”—so in that sense she had succumbed to her brother, she was still his victim. Her strength, which was both prodigious and multifaceted, was all in the hard shell she had erected to protect the still vulnerable core.

In life, like often cleaves to like. He and Alli had bonded because they were both Outsiders. He wondered whether he could make a dent in Annika’s armor, and thought it worth a try. “With me, it was my father,” he said slowly and deliberately, putting equal weight on each word so that she would pay attention, so that she would understand the gravity of what he was saying. “He beat me because he said I was stupid, because he came home drunk every night, and I suppose because he hated himself and his life. One night, I’d had enough and left.”

“Yes, of course, you’re male.” Annika’s tone was resigned rather than bitter, as if she had contemplated this inequity so often it had become banal. “Males can move about at will, can’t they, while women, well, where can they go? Even when a situation is atrocious, intolerable, there are only home and family, even though both are toxic, because slavery and death wait out on the street.”

She shivered, as if from an intimate memory. Then she turned her head again, abruptly nervous once more. “Shouldn’t we have taken off by now?”

At that moment, an aide came down the aisle toward them.

“I’m sorry for the delay, Mr. McClure,” he said, “but there’s someone who requires a word with you.”

These aides of Carson’s were always so proper, so formal, Jack thought, or perhaps that was just the way things were with any presidential staff, where deference and protocol were a way of life.

Annika looked alarmed. “Who—?”

“Relax,” Jack said as he rose. “Whatever it is, I’ll take care of it.”

He was heading forward toward the door when Naomi Wilde, the head of Lyn Carson’s Secret Service detail, stepped smartly into the cabin.

Damnit, Jack thought, what the hell is she doing here? Has something happened to the First Lady?

Wilde was smiling, though in an embarrassed fashion, as if she’d screwed the pooch in some way she couldn’t mend. This was odd, because Naomi Wilde was a take-charge agent, a woman who was superbly trained. She had confidence enough for her entire team, but now she had the look of a fish on a riverbank, a woman who finds herself in a situation for which she has no answer or, rather, only one answer, which is not to her liking. She was breathing air when she should be breathing water.

“Sorry about holding you up, Mr. McClure,” she said, “but as you’ll see I had no choice.” She stepped fully into the cabin as if impelled, and someone brushed by her as if she didn’t exist or was of no further use.

At once, Jack understood Wilde’s state of extreme discomfort. He thought, Oh, Christ, no, because he was staring into the grinning face of Alli Carson, the First Daughter.

FIVE

“HI, JACK, surprised to see me?” Alli said as soon as she stepped into the cabin.

Jack was staring at Naomi Wilde, who winced at the look, then resignedly shrugged her shoulders. It was astonishing how Alli could reduce people like Wilde—professional, superbly trained, loyal, and brave—to Silly Putty. This was her particular genius; in the interval after the inauguration and its immediate aftermath, she had learned to use her fragile mental state to get whatever she wanted. Take me out of school to go to Russia? Okay. Let me hang out with Jack instead of you and Mom? All right, honey. Jack could only imagine the conversation between Lyn and her daughter this time. Had she threatened to run away, a mental fugue state, a bout of depression so serious she might spiral down into suicide? All these possible symptoms of what she had been through had been meticulously explained to her by the doctors, psychiatrists, and therapists at Bethesda, the medical facility where presidents and their families were treated. Obviously, she had absorbed the details, so that she could wield them like weapons on the field of her family battle. Edward had said that she had begun acting out again. God only knew what her real mental state was.

Regaining his composure, Jack stepped in front of Wilde so as to block her view of Annika. The last thing he needed was to answer awkward questions about who she was and why she was here and the fact that she hadn’t been vetted.

“What the hell is she doing here?”

Wilde again winced visibly as she said, “She’s going with you.”

“What? She can’t. It’s not secure.”

“You’re preaching to the choir, Mr. McClure.”

Just then, Jack’s cell phone rang.

“You’d better take the call,” Naomi Wilde said. “It’s the FLOTUS.” She meant the First Lady of the United States.

Jack put his cell to his ear with some trepidation. Alli’s expressed preference to be with Jack had caused