Blood Trust - Eric van Lustbader [94]
The preliminary phase of the plan had been successfully concluded. She was pleased to know that Naomi had no idea where Jack was. That meant virtually no one else did, either. A good thing because his destination was one of the most dangerous places on earth. She had witnessed the American SKOPES unit annihilated by Arian Xhafa’s battle-hardened guerillas. She had had no interest in the guerillas themselves, but in the weaponry they employed. Watching the massacre had proved the wisdom of her being sent to Tetovo. The array of Xhafa’s cutting-edge war materiel was astonishing. No wonder warning alarms had been set off in her part of the world. The Macedonian situation was already on the verge of being out of control.
If the problem was simply Xhafa she could have handled it herself, but it stretched across borders, spanned oceans, was infused with incalculable amounts of money, fueled by a hatred and fanaticism beyond even Xhafa himself. She knew she needed help, she knew who she needed to help her. And he was the one person guaranteed not to comply.
She drank her vodka martini as if it were a beer, and ordered another, chewing thoughtfully on the liquor-soaked olive until the refill arrived. Through the thick, shatterproof glass, the world looked unnaturally dark, drained of color, unreal. She listened to the muted clatter of laptop keyboards, the clink of glasses, snatches of cell phone conversations. Within thirty seconds of entering, she had observed and catalogued every person in the lounge. She was like a jungle cat, interested only in danger and prey—everything else fell to gray ash.
But then gray was the color of her life; everything in it had turned to ash. The kidnapping and extended sexual and physical abuse by her father, Oriel Jovovich Batchuk, had set fire to her heart, reduced it to a blackened cinder of antimatter. In its place a void had opened up inside her that could never be filled. She had thought that her revenge on her father in the Ukraine last year would save her, or at least stop the void from widening, but the reverse had happened—she had fallen farther into the void, and now she suspected nothing could get her out.
This had not always been so. There was a time when she had childishly believed that Jack and Alli would be her saviors. But at the time she had met them, she had already betrayed Jack, and so their relationship was doomed before it began. As for Alli, she had been the one surprise in Annika’s life. The short time she had spent with Alli and Jack had given her a false sense of security—for those weeks she had deluded herself into thinking that the three of them were a family. How could she not? It had felt so good, so right. And she was so certain that the void inside her had started to shrink back to a manageable level. But then she’d been forced to choose between Jack and Dyadya Gourdjiev. It had been her grandfather who had finally saved her from her father, so it was no choice at all. After he’d told her she could have no more contact with Jack, she had wept bitter tears through a long and lonely night. And then, defying her grandfather, she had broken protocol and contacted Jack, confessing her sin. Why she had omitted the real reason she had murdered Senator Berns she’d never be fully able to understand. Perhaps she needed to put herself on the rack, to flay herself open for Jack to see, as no one else—not even Dyadya Gourdjiev—had before or ever would again.
The truth was she loved him, but now she had ensured that he would never love her. Agonizing as that was, it was preferable to continuing to lie to him. Enmeshed as she was in concentric webs of lies, it nevertheless felt intolerable to lie to him.
Now Dyadya Gourdjiev was in the hospital following a serious heart attack. He faded in and out of consciousness. None