Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [143]
“The General has outlived his usefulness.” Benson’s gaze was fixed on the tenuous band of pink that wavered on the eastern horizon.
“Not quite. He was the mark from the beginning,” Thomson said as he put his shotgun to his shoulder and aimed it. “Now he’ll become our scapegoat.” He pulled the trigger, the bird fell through the sky, and the Lab took off like a shot. “Our dead duck.”
“I’d feel a whole helluva lot better,” Benson said, squinting like Clint Eastwood, “if we had heard from our man in the field.”
“He had instructions to maintain communication silence when he was in place.”
“Yes, but I want these last obstacles to be taken care of.”
Thomson watched with pleasure as the Lab returned with the duck in its mouth. There was blood on the dog’s dark muzzle and its eyes were alight with the ecstasy of doing what it was born to do, what it had been trained to do.
As it set the duck gently down at Thomson’s feet, he said, “You worry too much.”
“I’m paid to worry too much,” Benson said sourly.
WHILE ANNIKA met with Magnussen and Kharkishvili, Jack and Alli walked through the manor house. It was some hours after the AURA session had broken up. Since his conversation with Edward Carson, Jack had been trying to fit all the disparate pieces together to form a coherent whole—he knew it was out there, he could feel it forming, coalescing, the problem was it kept changing shape and scope as it was appearing to him.
Over the years he’d discovered that his mind was often at its best when he walked or ate, mechanical functions that allowed his brain to digest and reorder the seemingly random bits of information it had picked up. There was a great deal of pressure on him both from Edward and AURA to find a way out of the escalating crisis, but he’d made Kharkishvili and Magnussen promise to leave him alone until he had need of them.
“Jack,” Alli said, “I’m hungry.”
He nodded. “Me, too. Let’s find the kitchen.”
Was it his imagination or had she grown up in the last couple of days, did her features seem more set, had the last vestiges of her girlhood been swept away by the intense events compressed into the short time they’d been together? It was as if she had unlocked an invisible door and, having stepped out into the light of day, or in this case, the ample lamplight of the manor house, was at last allowing herself to be seen, instead of cowering in the shadows of her misery and anguish.
Like everything else in the manor house the kitchen was vast. Bubbling with activity just before and at mealtimes, it was manned now by a sous-chef and a couple of servers who doubled as kitchen assistants. They were going over the recipes for tomorrow, and paid Jack and Alli scant attention, but when they approached the enormous double refrigerator the sous-chef broke off his discussion and came over to them, asking what they’d like to eat, there were plenty of leftovers from dinner. Neither of them wanted the rich food they had already rejected so they both settled on vegetable omelets.
There was a plain wooden table where, Jack suspected, the kitchen staff ate at odd times. He and Alli pulled out chairs and sat while the sous-chef broke eggs into a stainless steel bowl and began to whip them with a bit of water and heavy cream.
“How did you manage at the meeting?” Jack asked.
“That sleazeball Russian I was sitting next to, Andreyev, wanted me to come to his room tonight because I owed my life to Ivan Gurov,” Alli said.