Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [111]
Having been up all night, neither wanting nor needing sleep, Paull prepared to go to his day job as Secretary of Homeland Security. He showered in very hot, then very cold water, shaved and dressed. Uncharacteristically, he spent five minutes aligning the dimple in his tie so that it was in the exact center of the knot. His fingers worked both tirelessly and unconsciously as his mind ticked off the items on his agenda today. The first was stopping off to make arrangements at the funeral home where he’d instructed Nancy Lettiere to send Louise’s body, then the office for six meetings that would take him through two o’clock, possibly three. At four, he was scheduled to hammer out interagency protocol with Bill Rogers, the national security advisor. At five thirty he had a phone appointment with Edward Carson who, he was certain, would be anxious for an update on what he had discovered about the activities of the president’s inner circle. There might be some time to wolf down a bite of food somewhere in there, but he doubted it, so he resolved to stop at a McDonald’s or a Denny’s, whichever popped up first, for a breakfast on the run.
Slipping his laptop into its case, he went out of the room, down the echoing concrete stairs, and out the side door to the parking lot. He stood for a moment, checking the immediate vicinity for anomalies, an action now habitual, so ingrained he couldn’t move from place to place without this specific scrutiny.
Having visually cleared the area he walked to his car, pressed the button on his key ring that popped the trunk. Bending slightly, he placed the laptop inside. He was just beginning to straighten up when he felt the sting in the side of his neck. His hand shot up in reflex. He just had time to register the tiny dart protruding from his flesh when he collapsed, unconscious, his head and torso inside the trunk.
A moment later a man strolled up, nonchalantly rolled Paull’s hips and legs into the trunk with the rest of him, picked up the car key, closed the trunk and, sliding in behind the wheel, drove Paull’s car sedately out of the Residence Inn parking lot.
“PLEASE. CALL me Grigor.”
“You’ll forgive me if I get right to the point,” Jack said, as Annika walked back outside to take a call on her cell phone. “Where is Mikal Magnussen, the man who murdered, or ordered the murders of, Karl Rochev and Ilenya Makova?”
Kharkishvili raised his eyebrows. “You know Ilenya’s name, you are unusually well informed.” He led Jack and Alli into a solarium at the rear of the mansion. He turned, smiling at Alli. “And this lovely young lady is . . .”
“My daughter,” Jack said.
Kharkishvili’s brows knit together. “I have a daughter more or less your age. She’s in school in Kiev, where her mother looks after her.”
“My mother is dead.” Alli stared unblinkingly up at his face. “My father is all I have.”
Kharkishvili cleared his throat, obviously taken aback. “Would you like to sit here while your father and I take a stroll? There’s a fine view of the surrounding hills and forests—”
“Hell, no.”
He glanced at Jack, who gave him no help at all. “As you wish.” He seemed to say this to both of them, his tone one of disapproval rather than of concession. He cleared his throat again, clearly uncomfortable discussing matters in front of Alli, whom he took to be a teenager. “Rochev had to be eliminated—he had ordered Lloyd Berns’s death. Why? Because Berns, having learned about us, about AURA, was going to leak the information to General Brandt, and Brandt would have told Yukin, who would have informed Batchuk, and then a Trinadtsat extermination squad would have been dispatched to kill us all.”
“And Ilenya Makova?”
“Ah, well, killing Rochev’s mistress was collateral damage. He was there with her in the dacha, but managed to escape the property.”
“Not that it mattered,” Jack said with controlled vehemence. “He was captured, brought to Magnussen’s estate outside Kiev, and tortured before he was killed.”
“That, I’m afraid, was an instance of,