Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [142]
Limonev licked his lips, opened his mouth, and spat into Batchuk’s face. With a sound of disgust Batchuk pushed the face away and, raising the MSP, fired the second round point-blank between Limonev’s eyes.
“I never give the same order more than once,” he continued, as if his companion were still alive. Pocketing the MSP, he threw the other man’s gun into the lake, retrieved the photo from Limonev’s grasp, and then, bending over, dragged him into the water and left him there.
“IF IT’S true that Gourdjiev and I don’t always see eye to eye,” Kharkishvili said, “it’s also true that we also have nothing but respect for one another.”
“Tell me something,” Jack said. “Who is AURA’s leader, you, Magnussen, who?”
“There is no leader,” Kharkishvili said. “We reach agreement by consensus.”
“That sounds both unwieldy and impractical,” Annika said with an obvious measure of skepticism. “Just look at the United Nations, which eats up so much time and money without ever managing to get much of anything accomplished.”
Kharkishvili brushed his fingertips across his forehead, as a sign either of impatience or of annoyance. “We’re not the United Nations—and I assure you I’m not set on a road to character assassination. AURA would never have been possible without your dyadya. I and the other oligarchs would not be here, in all likelihood we wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for him taking on the dangerous task of informing us in advance that the FSB was coming for us.”
His eyes seemed to have retreated into the depths of their sockets, where they lay hooded and troubled. “I know he found out about the government’s move against us from Batchuk, and I must tell you that I cannot for the life of me fathom how he is so successful at playing both sides of the fence.”
“That’s only a part of his genius,” Annika said with more than a trace of pride. “But it seems both odd and counterproductive for you to have a problem with a relationship that provides you with such vital information.”
“If you don’t mind my saying it,” Kharkishvili said, “it’s the other side of the relationship that I find disturbing.”
“I do mind you saying it,” Annika said. “You certainly had no problem when the information he got from Batchuk saved your life and the lives of the other AURA oligarchs. He would have been summarily executed had Batchuk found out.” Her ire aroused, she took a step toward Kharkishvili. “In addition, I wonder what AURA would have done if he hadn’t engaged Magnussen and his multinational task force of engineers and surveyors to test and report on the feasibility of mining the uranium strike?”
Jack’s eyes went out of focus as his brain began to give him another view of the puzzle that had been resolving itself piece by piece from the moment Edward had informed him of Lloyd Berns’s death on Capri when he should have been here in Ukraine. For the first time he understood that there was the possibility or probability of a double agent inside AURA, and if there was, he suspected who it might be, though something about the setup didn’t track, and he knew there was more information needed before he made any accusations that could backfire on him and Alli.
“DO YOU think he was convinced?” Miles Benson said, one hand on the quivering flank of the British Labrador.
Morgan Thomson blew on his chilled hands. “I know Dennis Paull. He loves Edward Carson, he’d throw himself under a bus before he’d let anything untoward happen to him.” He shifted the shotgun from one shoulder to the other. “Whether or not he believed us I really can’t say. It doesn’t matter, anyway, because as far as he’s concerned, by calling Carson he did the right thing.”
The two men crouched in a thatch blind