Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [121]
“By whom?” Paull said, wondering if they’d divulge this secret, a yardstick by which he might judge both their sincerity and their veracity.
“Dick England,” Thomson said at once. England had been the director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, a unit set up by Carson’s predecessor and now, happily, dismantled.
“England hated our guts,” Benson said with some venom. “He was a power freak, he formed an alliance with the secretary of defense, on whom the president relied for much of his foreign policy.”
“The war,” Thomson said heavily, “was the secretary’s idea and he pushed hard for it.”
“I thought the war was your idea,” Paull said, “and Benson’s.”
“Even to the point of fabricating evidence of WMDs,” Benson said, with the stoic intonation of the seasoned warrior.
“He couldn’t have done that without the connivance of the director of the CIA,” Paull said.
Benson’s smile was bleak and far from friendly. “He couldn’t and he didn’t.”
“Though we tried hard, the three of them proved too much for us,” Thomson said, “and we were shut out.”
“It was time to abandon ship,” Benson continued, picking up the thread of the original conversation, “so we decided to cast our net into the private sector. Eventually, we decided on Alizarin Global.”
“Which is where General Brandt comes in.” Thomson sighed as he poured more coffee for Paull and for himself. “We didn’t particularly like him, but because of his ties with President Yukin we needed him to help us fast-track a deal with Gazprom, crucial to Alizarin, before a competitor could sew it up. Bottom line, we thought we could trust him.”
“We were wrong.” Benson stood up and walked to the piano, stood staring at it for some time, as if hearing an oft-played melody—possibly a martial air—in his head. Or perhaps he was fantasizing the methods by which he’d murder Brandt. He turned back abruptly, his face tense and grim. “And now he’s left us hanging by the short hairs. This is something neither we nor President Carson can permit nor withstand.”
Thomson put down his cup. “This is why we brought you here, Mr. Secretary. We had neither the time nor the means to engage you in any other way.”
Paull found he had no more taste for coffee, or for any of the food, for that matter. “What is it you think I can do?”
“Wait,” Thomson said. “You haven’t heard the worst part.”
EDWARD CARSON sat alone in temporary seclusion, as much as any American president can be alone. He sat in his suite at the hotel across Red Square from the Kremlin, a generous pour of single-malt scotch at his elbow. Peering out the window he could see that it had begun to snow again this late in the season, as if he were in Wyoming or Montana. Astonishing, really. He watched with a kind of detached interest as the snowflakes swirled and spent themselves like moths against the windowpane.
Then he pulled out his cell phone and called Jack.
“Jack, where the hell are you?” Carson said. “More to the point, where the hell is my daughter? Lyn tells me that she bundled Alli off on you. I could be pissed off at her but, frankly, it’s easier to yell at you. Did you think about what a security risk this poses?”
“It’s never left my mind, Edward. I argued against taking her, but I don’t have to tell you what Mrs. Carson is like when she makes her mind up about something.”
“What was she thinking?”
“She was terrified that Alli would slip her handlers and take off for parts unknown in a city she scarcely knows, a city, I might add, that’s far more dangerous than the aircraft she and I took to Kiev.”
“I take it she’s not still in the aircraft,” the president said.
Jack’s long relationship with Carson allowed him to shrug off the sarcasm. “It’s a long story.”
“Well, spill it. How’s my daughter?”
“The Ukrainian air has done her a world of good, she’s much improved.”
This welcome news instantly deflated Carson’s anger. “Well, dammit, it’s about time. Lyn will be relieved, let me tell you.” He grunted. “She’s not getting in your way, is she?”
“On