Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [13]
Silence again, and Jack found that his muscles were tensed as if anticipating a blow.
“Fuck!” Milan said. “It’s an ID.”
“She’s FSB.” Ivan’s voice held a note of incredulity.
Jack knew that the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the Federal Security Service or FSB for short, was the successor to the Soviet Union’s KGB.
Milan was laughing. “You poor dope—you’ve been fucking an undercover FSB officer.”
“Shut up!”
“You’d better not let Arsov get wind of this.”
“I said shut the fuck up!”
Jack knew from his pretrip briefings that Kaolin Arsov was the head of the Izmaylovskaya grupperovka in Moscow.
“He’ll have your nuts over an open flame.”
Jack heard the sound of a brief scuffle, and he imagined the two thugs going at it. Why was he listening, this had nothing to do with him. But at once an image of Annika, blond hair and carnelian eyes, long legs crossed one over the other, flashed across his mind. He heard the silvery peal of her laughter, which morphed into Emma’s last appeal: “Dad, help me!”
“Calm the fuck down.” Milan was panting hard. “You can be sure I’m not going to tell anyone. It’s the bitch you have to worry about, not me.”
“I know that.”
Silence again, then a length of unintelligible whispering. What was Ivan dreaming up, Jack wondered.
“Annika? It’s Milan. . . . No, for God’s sake, don’t hang up. Ivan’s been shot. . . . That’s right, shot. He’s alive, but . . . We’re at Bushfire . . . on Tverskaya . . . That’s right, near Red Square, just down the block from Nightflight. No, I haven’t called anyone else. Ivan said to call . . . You’ll come, then? All right, we’re around back in the alley.”
“Let’s go!” Ivan said. “We’ll only have a couple of minutes to beat her there.”
THREE
THE SNOW had left a moon of dubious value, but the wind had picked up, turning the flakes that had settled into the gutters or at the base of stony walls shooting upward, striking Jack’s face like grains of sand. With his hands deep in the pockets of his overcoat and his shoulders hunched against the near-arctic chill, he crossed Red Square on the diagonal, on his way to Bushfire, whose address he got from the leering concierge on his way out.
“Hold onto your wallet, gospadin,” the concierge had said as he wrote on a slip of paper.
“Just tell me the address,” Jack had told him, ignoring the useless paper.
As he’d crossed to the elevator on the top floor, his eyes had met those of Alli, who was leaning against the door to her room, smoking one of the clove cigarettes that were among her new passions.
“Go to bed,” he said.
She exhaled a cloud of aromatic smoke. “I will when you do.”
He glanced down to where she was looking, jammed the Sig Sauer P250 further down in his waistband.
The elevator door opened. “I won’t be long.”
“I’ll wait up,” she said as he stepped in. “You can tell me all about where you went.”
The doors closed on her enigmatic smile. Jack shook his head, wondering what it would take to get the murk of her incarceration out of her system. Perhaps she’d never fully overcome what had been done to her; who knows what psychic damage the brilliantly deranged Morgan Herr had inflicted on her? Who knows how deep it went? Not her phalanx of shrinks, who had finally released her into her parents’ custody because she either derided or ignored the therapists who had tried to get her to open up about her nightmare experience at Herr’s hands. The only thing known for certain was that he hadn’t raped her, which was a blessing. But what, exactly, had he done to her? That was the billion-dollar question.
The buildings, flood-lit from below, seemed even more monumental limned against the milk-and-ink sky. The darkness lent the onion domes a fairy-tale aspect that belied the structures’ lugubrious history. But, then, as Alli had so rightly pointed out, history was being rewritten here every day. He walked quickly, but not with his head down as most people tend to do in such unpleasant weather. Instead, he was on the lookout for Ivan and Milan, though he was certain they had made it out of the hotel