Last Snow

on two things: discipline and revenge.”

He took her proffered hand, began to stumble down the alley away from the body.

“Drop the gun!” she said. “For God’s sake, drop the gun and let’s get as far away from here as fast as we can!”

Jack, in awkward turns running and shambling, let go of the handgun, as he’d seen Michael Corleone do so many times in The Godfather. He stumbled over a leg, and noticed Milan sprawled facedown, as unmoving as Ivan. Were they both dead, he wondered briefly. Then they were back on the brightly lit street and Annika was hailing a bombila, wrenching open the back door, shoving Jack into the interior, and climbing in after him.

“We’ll hole up in Jelena’s apartment until I can make some calls,” she said as she gave the driver an address.

“Emma?”

“Emma?” Annika echoed. “Who is Emma?”

Jack, tears in his eyes, averted his face. He’d almost said “my daughter,” but instead replied, “No one.”

He cranked down the window and pushed his face out into the night. Emma, Emma, how I wish I could have saved you.

“Hey, I’m already freezing my ass off,” the driver protested.

But the bracingly cold wind was precisely what Jack needed to clear his head. The adrenalin was still pulsing through him, and he knew it would be some while before the pain Ivan inflicted on him would manifest itself. Meanwhile, there was the current situation to contend with. His brain, coming around, began to work at its usual lightning speed.

He hunched forward. “Forget that address,” he shouted to the driver over the harsh whistle of the wind. “Take us to Sheremetyevo.”

“The airport?” Annika said. “Why would we want to go there?”

Jack sat back as the bombila changed direction, heading for Ring Road. “Like you said, we need to get as far away from that alley as quickly as we can, and that’s just what we’re going to do.”

FOUR

EVERYTHING IS in the process of being lost. That’s what Emma’s death had taught him. His marriage, too, for that matter. Even at the beginning, in the first ecstatic blossoming, the seeds of loss had been sown, predestined even, looked at in a clear-eyed manner.

These thoughts rolled once again through Jack’s mind as he and Annika jounced along in the bombila. Once they were outside Ring Road and on their way to Sheremetyevo, Annika dug out her cell phone and made a call, he assumed to her superior at the FSB. However, it quite rapidly became clear that she wasn’t getting the response she had expected. After she had accurately described in detail what had happened in the alley behind Bushfire, she was silent, listening intently, her face screwed up in a frown of concentration and, then, frustration. Finally, her voice rose and she began to speak Russian in quick-fire bursts that lost Jack near the beginning. All at once, she cut the conversation short and threw her cell phone onto the floor of the bombila.

“What’s up?” Jack asked. Annika had said nothing to him after she’d queried him about their destination, not a thank-you for saving her life, nothing. Until the phone call, she had appeared sunk in contemplation without any sign of animation whatsoever, as if she were in the bombila by herself. Jack supposed her withdrawal was a reaction to the violence she had endured, the imminent threat to her life, the struggle to survive that required every ounce of energy. It wouldn’t be at all out of place for her to be in shock. Assuming so, he had preferred to give her a chance to calm down before he started querying her. Now a new, ominous element had been added to the mix.

“I’ll tell you what’s up,” she said. “We’re screwed, totally and indelibly screwed.”

“I don’t see why. Ivan was a low-echelon thug and you’re with the FSB.”

She turned her head so sharply he could hear the crack of the vertebrae in her neck. “Where did you hear that?”

“The same place I learned about the ambush. Ivan and Milan were in your room, looking for revenge. They found the cameo you’d hidden in the drain.”

“Fuck me!”

“Hiding your ID in a cameo was a mistake. A cameo is not your style at all.”

“That cameo was my mother’s.” She stared out the window for a moment, her expression opaque. When she turned back to him, she said, “The problem isn’t Ivan, it’s Milan. Ivan knew nothing, which is why I broke it off with him, but he, you know, didn’t want to let go.”

“You’re apparently very accomplished in bed.”

She stared at him for a moment with her lambent eyes. This close to her, even in the dim light, he could see silver flecks flare in their mineral color as the bombila passed streetlamp after streetlamp.

Apparently deciding not to comment, she said, “It’s Milan I was after, and once he discovered who I really was, he set the trap. Of course I took the bait, because it was he who called, because I knew he would be there, that with Ivan out of the way I could start on him.”

“They fucked you six ways from Sunday.”

She tilted her head. “I don’t know that curious idiom, but I’m sure I catch your meaning.”

They were on the final approach to the airport, and she bent down and retrieved her cell. “The real problem isn’t even Milan, though that’s bad enough. Milan was tied to a man named Batchuk. Oriel Jovovich Batchuk is a deputy prime minister, a close confidant of President Yukin’s, they go back all the way to St. Petersburg, where they served together in the municipal government. Even in those days, Batchuk did all of Yukin’s dirty work. The two developed a remarkably effective modus operandi. Yukin targeted successful businesses in the St. Petersburg area and sent Batchuk out, armed with paperwork that accused the company—its principal owner or its board—of malfeasance, of not being in compliance of arcane laws, whatever. Basically, it didn’t matter because the charges were all phony, but the resulting shit storm landed the company or the individuals themselves in court, where judges owned by Yukin handed down decisions favorable to him. Unlike in America, here you can’t lodge an appeal, or, more accurately, you can, but there isn’t a judge who pays it the slightest attention.”

The interior of the bombila was lit up in the sodium glare of Sheremetyevo’s arc lights. Jack, leaning forward, told the driver where to drop them off.

“Yukin and Batchuk got rich as very young men,” Annika continued. “Now both have risen to the ultimate level, and the same MO is being repeated, only on a national scale. Yukin is using Batchuk and the power of the federal courts to retrieve the largest, most lucrative privatized companies by finding arcane accounting discrepancies or fabricating multiple charges of fiduciary malfeasance against the officers and the oligarchs behind them, many of whom had skimmed off profits to pay him and his people. It started with the takeover of Gazprom and has only escalated from there.”

“But what is a deputy prime minister doing with a high-level member of the Izmaylovskaya grupperovka? He must have every government agency on his payroll.”

“Batchuk is far more than a simple deputy prime minister,” Annika said. “He’s at the head of a shadowy secret service agency that flies so far under anyone’s radar it doesn’t even have a name, or, at least so far as anyone can ascertain, anything other than a designation: Trinadtsat.”

“The number thirteen, possibly Directorate Thirteen?”

“Trinadtsat is not a part of the FSB, it’s over and above FSB and every other secret service agency controlled by the Kremlin.” She made a face. “This is why my directorate cannot help me in this situation—and I cannot help you. Everyone above me is paralyzed with fear now that Milan Spiakov is dead. I am, as they say, radioactive. I cannot return to my job or to my normal life, from which I have been summarily expelled.”

“I’m sorry, Annika, but I’m in somewhat of the same situation.”

She shook her head. “No, no, you are American. Americans always have more options.”