double agent inside AURA, and if there was, he suspected who it might be, though something about the setup didn’t track, and he knew there was more information needed before he made any accusations that could backfire on him and Alli.
“DO YOU think he was convinced?” Miles Benson said, one hand on the quivering flank of the British Labrador.
Morgan Thomson blew on his chilled hands. “I know Dennis Paull. He loves Edward Carson, he’d throw himself under a bus before he’d let anything untoward happen to him.” He shifted the shotgun from one shoulder to the other. “Whether or not he believed us I really can’t say. It doesn’t matter, anyway, because as far as he’s concerned, by calling Carson he did the right thing.”
The two men crouched in a thatch blind they had built themselves at the eastern edge of the Alizarin Global property, waiting patiently for dawn and the flights of ducks that would come with it. For them duck hunting was more than a pleasant pastime, it was a way to blow off steam, to release themselves from the pressure-cooker of their professional lives. Other men might have availed themselves of the services of an upscale brothel, or even something more exotic, but these men had extensive experience with entrapment. How much graphic, even obscene, incriminating evidence they had gathered on their enemies over the years was a subject for statisticians.
“The General has outlived his usefulness.” Benson’s gaze was fixed on the tenuous band of pink that wavered on the eastern horizon.
“Not quite. He was the mark from the beginning,” Thomson said as he put his shotgun to his shoulder and aimed it. “Now he’ll become our scapegoat.” He pulled the trigger, the bird fell through the sky, and the Lab took off like a shot. “Our dead duck.”
“I’d feel a whole helluva lot better,” Benson said, squinting like Clint Eastwood, “if we had heard from our man in the field.”
“He had instructions to maintain communication silence when he was in place.”
“Yes, but I want these last obstacles to be taken care of.”
Thomson watched with pleasure as the Lab returned with the duck in its mouth. There was blood on the dog’s dark muzzle and its eyes were alight with the ecstasy of doing what it was born to do, what it had been trained to do.
As it set the duck gently down at Thomson’s feet, he said, “You worry too much.”
“I’m paid to worry too much,” Benson said sourly.
WHILE ANNIKA met with Magnussen and Kharkishvili, Jack and Alli walked through the manor house. It was some hours after the AURA session had broken up. Since his conversation with Edward Carson, Jack had been trying to fit all the disparate pieces together to form a coherent whole—he knew it was out there, he could feel it forming, coalescing, the problem was it kept changing shape and scope as it was appearing to him.
Over the years he’d discovered that his mind was often at its best when he walked or ate, mechanical functions that allowed his brain to digest and reorder the seemingly random bits of information it had picked up. There was a great deal of pressure on him both from Edward and AURA to find a way out of the escalating crisis, but he’d made Kharkishvili and Magnussen promise to leave him alone until he had need of them.
“Jack,” Alli said, “I’m hungry.”
He nodded. “Me, too. Let’s find the kitchen.”
Was it his imagination or had she grown up in the last couple of days, did her features seem more set, had the last vestiges of her girlhood been swept away by the intense events compressed into the short time they’d been together? It was as if she had unlocked an invisible door and, having stepped out into the light of day, or in this case, the ample lamplight of the manor house, was at last allowing herself to be seen, instead of cowering in the shadows of her misery and anguish.
Like everything else in the manor house the kitchen was vast. Bubbling with activity just before and at mealtimes, it was manned now by a sous-chef and a couple of servers who doubled as kitchen assistants. They were going over the recipes for tomorrow, and paid Jack and Alli scant attention, but when they approached the enormous double refrigerator the sous-chef broke off his discussion and came over to them, asking what they’d like to eat, there were plenty of leftovers from dinner. Neither of them wanted the rich food they had already rejected so they both settled on vegetable omelets.
There was a plain wooden table where, Jack suspected, the kitchen staff ate at odd times. He and Alli pulled out chairs and sat while the sous-chef broke eggs into a stainless steel bowl and began to whip them with a bit of water and heavy cream.
“How did you manage at the meeting?” Jack asked.
“That sleazeball Russian I was sitting next to, Andreyev, wanted me to come to his room tonight because I owed my life to Ivan Gurov,” Alli said.
Vasily Andreyev, with skin the color of putty or suet, and the black button eyes of an evil doll that, having been shunted aside for newer playthings, harbored the need for revenge.
“Don’t give me that look, I can take care of myself.” She tossed her head. “I tuned him out by thinking about what you said before, and I know you’re right. I’ve been so intent looking over my shoulder for death to steal up behind me, I was already half dead. When I was taken . . . that week might have been a month or a year, I didn’t know, I became unmoored from the present, or maybe from time itself. Nothing felt right, there were periods when time passed at a glacial pace and at other times it seemed as if hours were compressed into seconds.”
Jack put his elbows on the table, leaning forward, listening to every word she said. With the crackle of the frying eggs no one could overhear what she was saying.
“When I went to Milla Tamirova’s apartment, when I went into her dungeon, sat in the restraint chair, I began to realize that the feeling of being unmoored, of being outside time never left me during the months after you rescued me. Now I think it has, now I want to look ahead, to experience the new, and even the old, which will feel like new to me, just like I’ve been doing since we got here.”
The eggs arrived, sided by thick slices of the dense Ukranian brown bread. The sous-chef placed the plates in front of them, along with silverware, and went to pour tea out of a large, ornate samovar standing on a corner of the work counter.
Alli took up her fork and dug into the glistening eggs. “In the middle of hearing about what flawless skin I had,” she continued, “it dawned on me that the only time I’ve been happy—really happy—since Emma’s death is when I’ve been with you and Annika. The adrenaline rush of the present annihilated the past, at least for a short time, but it also began to resurrect my sense of time and place.”
Jack chewed on a slice of bread, which was intensely flavorful, slightly sour, and slathered with salted butter. “You feel more yourself now.”
“I don’t know about that, because I was only beginning to learn about myself when Emma died.” Alli looked thoughtful. “What I feel is
“Toward what?”
“I don’t know, exactly, but I think now that I have a kind of gift. When I listen to you talking to other people, or when I listen to them talking among themselves, if the conversation goes on long enough, I have a sense of what they mean, not what they’re saying necessarily, but what they’re trying to get across or, more often, what they’re trying to hide. And, it seems to me, that the longer the conversation goes on the clearer their real purpose becomes, or maybe I mean how important their lies are to them.” She cocked her head. “Do you see what I mean?”
“I think so.” Jack was wolfing down the omelet. “But give me an example, anyway.”
“All right, let’s see . . .” She screwed up her face in thought. “Okay, here’s one, that Russian sitting next to me—”
“Andreyev, the lecher.”
She laughed softly. “That’s right. Well, when I mentioned that we had met Dyadya Gourdjiev he started talking about him, and though there was nothing negative in what he said—quite the opposite, in fact—I began to sense that he was lying, that he didn’t like him at all, and when he mentioned Kharkishvili—and only in passing—I just knew that Andreyev had aligned himself with him.”
