Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [128]
Gourdjiev stood his ground, trying his best to appear unperturbed. “Meaning?”
“This time Annika has gotten in the shit too deep, beyond even my ability to cover for her.”
Gourdjiev let go of a sudden spurt of anger, deep-seated and long-simmering. “Is that what you’ve done? I wasn’t aware that you’ve ever done anything for her—”
“Contrary to your peculiar delusion of omniscience you don’t know everything.”
“Please. You’ve been too busy doing things to her.”
The two men stood staring at each other with such malevolent intensity that it was possible to entertain the incredible notion that they were trying to destroy one another with their minds.
“I understand and sympathize with your frustration,” Batchuk said at length. “Only Annika and I know what happened. She won’t tell you and I certainly won’t.”
“She was only five, only a child!”
“She certainly didn’t act like a child.” Batchuk’s smile was both smug and contemptuous. “You see, you never really knew her, you never suspected what she was capable of, you missed the point of her entirely.”
“I’m the one she calls dyadya.”
“Indeed you are.” Batchuk’s tone made it clear this statement was anything but a concession. “And you’re the ignorant one, the scales have not yet dropped from your eyes. Unlike Saul of Tarsus you haven’t yet had your road to Damascus moment, but then it seems you were untimely born.”
“Untimely born?”
“ ‘Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me,’ ” Batchuk quoted. “Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.”
“For a devout atheist you’re quite the biblical scholar.”
“I like to probe the weaknesses of my enemies,” Batchuk said, with a meaning directed at Gourdjiev. The tenuous cord was broken, they were no longer frenemies. “In any event I came to warn you, or more accurately, to give you the opportunity to warn Annika. I’m coming for her—me, myself, not someone I’ve hired or ordered to do a piece of work. This I do personally, with my own hands.”
Dyadya Gourdjiev fairly trembled in barely suppressed rage. “How can . . . This is monstrous. How can you do this?”
“Given the decisions she has made how can I not?”
“You know what this means.”
Batchuk nodded. “I do.”
“Nothing will ever be the same between us.”
“My dear Dyadya Gourdjiev,” Batchuk said, using Annika’s nickname for him in a mocking manner, “nothing was ever the same between us from the moment I first saw Annika.”
“I DID what I thought was right,” Annika said, “but I know I don’t always make the right choice.”
Jack studied her at some length. They were standing in the entry-way to the Magnussen mansion, just outside the bathroom where Alli had gone. Neither of them wanted to leave her alone at the moment, and as for Jack, the feeling of having been boxed in by both Alli’s impetuosity and her mother’s inability to control her had reasserted itself with a vengeance. And yet he knew quite well that there was no use in railing against this situation; as he had since he’d taken off from Sheremetyevo he resigned himself to the responsibility of keeping her safe, both from others who might want to kidnap her and do her harm, and from herself.
“In that you and Alli are alike,” he said. “She seems to lack the ability to know what’s good for her, or maybe it’s her own self-hatred that pushes her to seek out dangerous situations.”
Annika smiled what might best be described as a secret smile, or at least an ironic one, as if his words had triggered hidden memories.
“You see her in such a clear and perfect light, Jack, I admire that, I really do. I mean, she’s such a complex person, not that most people aren’t complex, but there’s something about her that—”
She stopped abruptly, as if changing her mind, and her eyes seemed to drift away to another time, another place. It wasn’t the first time Jack had observed this phenomenon in her, and he was struck by its similarity to what he sometimes observed in Alli. And now, as this particular Rubik’s Cube shifted perspective in his mind, he