Last Snow

drag her away from heading into the ambush. But apart from an old babushka, thin and arched as a black alley cat, he saw no one.

Briefly, he asked himself what the hell he was doing. He was here on presidential business, he had a charter flight waiting to take him to Ukraine at Carson’s request. It seemed the height of madness to be striding across Red Square in the dead of night toward an ambush between two Russian mafia hit men and an FSB agent. Part of him said that Annika could take care of herself, but another, deeper part—the part that had been permanently scarred by his daughter’s death—said that unless he intervened she’d be found dead tomorrow morning with a bullet in the back of her head. If this were America he could phone the police, but as Annika herself had pointed out, this was Russia, and Russia had a very different set of rules that had little or nothing to do with the law. He’d have to get used to this new reality for as long as he remained here.

But, at the moment, there was a deeper issue at work. For him, the present was always infused with the past. What if he hadn’t been too busy with a drug bust to listen to Emma when she’d called for his help? Would she still have lost control of her car? Would she have veered off the road and careened into the tree? He would never know, of course, but he could ensure nothing like that happened again. He knew it wasn’t his job to save Annika; he scarcely knew her. He knew it was potentially a stupid thing he was trying to do, and yet he couldn’t help himself. He knew she was going to die; he could never live with himself if he allowed that to happen.

On the far side of Red Square Jack found the street named Tverskaya, and at once spotted the club’s entrance due to the knot of young people and the lineup of panting bombila, the gypsy taxis that cruised Moscow’s streets, tying up traffic. They either crawled along, nose to taillight, trolling for fares or, once they had one, hurtling at gut-wrenching speed to their destination. At those times, they were like living bombs, hence their name.

Bypassing this morass, he went around the block, cautiously approaching the alley where Ivan and Milan lay in wait for Annika. He supposed she had been lured here at the thought of finding out more about the workings of the Izmaylovskaya from Ivan as he lay dying. Clearly, she had given up on him otherwise. Perhaps he was too far down in the hierarchy to be of continuing use to her. Having milked him of whatever he had whispered in her ear in the afterglow of sex she was prepared to move on—or, more accurately, upward.

At the head of the alley he drew his Sig and paused, both to allow his eyes to adjust to the gloom and to remain hidden from Ivan and Milan. He needed to pick them out of the murk or, failing that, to figure out where they might have secreted themselves. As his eyes adjusted, his brain began to compose a three-dimensional construct of the alley, complete with doorways, windows, two scarred metal Dumpsters backed against a building wall, piles of trash tied up in plastic bags, and the heavily stained ground itself, strewn with random bits of garbage, used condoms, and wads of dirty tissues in among the small drifts of snow, yellow where it wasn’t already crusted with soot.

He’d tuned his ears not only for any sound of the two criminals, but also for the crunch of Annika’s high heels, which, he realized now, would do her no good in the slippery alleyway. In fact, they would be a hindrance. He had mapped the entire scene now, had determined that the best and most likely place for Ivan and Milan to strike was the gap between the two Dumpsters. While it was cramped, especially for a man of Ivan’s bulk, it had the twin advantages of being in heavy shadow and of being concealed from either end of the alley.

And that was the problem, because now a shadow fell tentatively across the far end of the alley, only to remove itself almost immediately. Jack knew it had to be Annika. For a moment, he considered running around the block in order to get to her before she entered the alley, but then he saw her moving in the uncertain light. She entered the mouth, and for a moment the blaze of light from the street behind her made it impossible to see even her outline, which winked in and out of existence like a ghost.

Jack had no choice now but to enter from his end and hope he got her attention before Ivan and Milan attacked her and he was forced to fire his pistol. As he moved toward the Dumpsters and Annika, his eyes picked out a length of PVC pipe. It wasn’t metal, but it would have to do. He scooped it up, then picked up his pace, waving the white pipe in the air to get Annika’s attention. This he did, but it proved the wrong strategy because it both startled her and diverted her attention from Ivan and Milan who, hearing the sound her high heels made as they struck the ground, jumped out from the gap between the Dumpsters.

Jack saw the dull flash of Ivan’s 9mm and threw the length of pipe at him. It struck him on the shoulder, and he turned his back on Annika, then squeezed off a shot at his attacker. Jack ducked down and fired off an answering shot. From his position, he saw Annika had one shoe in her hand. She slammed the end of the heel into Milan’s head just above his hairline, and with a grunt he reeled back against the brick wall.

Hearing his compatriot’s outcry, Ivan squeezed off another shot, possibly to keep Jack in place, then turned back to Annika. He was just leveling the 9mm at her when Jack leapt onto him. When the two men crashed heavily to the pavement, both the Sig and the 9mm clattered into the alley. Annika made a grab for the Sig, but with a herculean effort, Ivan kicked it away from her. The 9mm lay somewhere, hidden in shadow.

Jack drove his fist into Ivan’s midsection, but the big man seemed to scarcely feel it. Instead, he grabbed hold of Jack’s chin, pushed it upward, exposing his neck. Jack twisted away, and Ivan’s fist struck him on the side of his neck. A split instant later and Ivan would have punctured his throat. The man was even bigger at close range, and his rage was palpable. Jack ducked and weaved, got in a punch here and there, but was being methodically beaten to a pulp. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Annika make a run at Ivan. She hit him without visible effect. He lashed out at her with one massive arm, and she careened backward, crashed to the ground, and Jack knew there would be no more help from her.

In the moment after the swipe when Jack’s attention was momentarily diverted, Ivan turned him, had him in a choke hold. Now he was trying to bend him backward. Jack put all his energy to moving forward, crawling with agonized slowness across the width of the alleyway to the shadowed spot where he surmised the Sig had fallen. Hand-to-hand, he was no match for the huge Russian. The handgun was his only hope now.

His breath came in shallow pants, his eyes felt as if they were bulging out of their sockets as Ivan increased the pressure on his windpipe. His mind was whirling, blinding flashes of light interspersed with vast reaches of blackness that threatened to pull him down into their unimaginable depths. The alley canted over, as if about to spill him out onto his ear. He could no longer distinguish up from down, right from left, and so was nearing the end of his ability to keep going. He was drifting, as if leaving one world on his way to another, and he heard her voice, Emma’s voice, as he’d heard it several times after her death. Once, he had even seen her glimmering between the trees behind his house, the house at the end of Westmoreland Avenue, his sanctuary, where he’d once lived with Gus, the big, black pawn shop owner, after he’d run away from his abusive father.

“Dad,” his daughter called. “Dad, where are you?”

“Emma . . . ?”

“Dad, I’m looking for you and I can’t see you. Where are you?”

“I’m here, Emma. . . . Follow my voice. I feel like I’m very close to you.”

“I see you now, Dad.”

He heard her gasp of dismay.

“You have to go back . . .”

“Go back where?”

“You have to go back, Dad. . . . You’re right near the gun. . . .”

That was when he felt something metallic strike his knee. Scrabbling around with his right hand, he found not the Sig, but Ivan’s 9mm. He gripped it, his finger on the trigger. He was right up against the alley wall, and he bent over as hard as he could. Ivan’s forehead struck the wall, his grip on Jack’s windpipe loosened enough for Jack to turn the 9mm around.

He fired two shots into Ivan’s stomach.

THE NEXT thing he knew Annika was dragging him up out from under Ivan’s inert bulk.

“Come on!” she said breathlessly, “we’ve got to get out of here!”

“What?”

“You shot a member of the Izmaylovskaya grupperovka.”

“Only a minor member, you said.” Gasping to fill his burning lungs, half dead, part of him still in that gossamer nowhere he’d drifted to, he was still only half aware of what had happened.

“You think that’ll matter to Kaolin Arsov?” Annika’s expression was grim. “He can’t allow one of his men—any one—to be shot dead without immediate retribution. Like the heads of all the families, his reputation rises and falls