Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [146]
Watching Nikki, Batchuk had the look of an angel, as if an ethereal glow were illuminating him from the inside. Gourdjiev knew that meant trouble on whatever level, but he pushed the thought aside as people will terrifying nightmares or worst possible outcomes because the human brain won’t allow it. It was like contemplating your own death—the incomprehensible end of all things known and comforting—the level of fear was simply too great to maintain. Some benign circuit breaker in the brain turned off that possibility, or shoved it so far back into the realm of unreality or fable that it faded from consciousness. This is precisely what happened to Gourdjiev when he saw Nikki’s image fill Batchuk’s eyes to overflowing. Some part of his brain switched off, saying: No, no, no, let’s get on with the real, the present, the pressing now, and for the next twenty minutes the two men talked about their plans as if nothing untoward had happened.
And yet it had, Gourdjiev thought, as he accelerated toward the coastline and, beyond, the violent and turbid Black Sea. The malevolent seed had been sown despite his best efforts, and immediately began to germinate, cracking open and springing to life in the black soil of Batchuk’s mind.
Gourdjiev neared the coast with its high, dark, bruised-looking clouds, trembling with thunder and rain. He did not have to glance in the rearview mirror to know that he was being followed, he had felt it the moment he had arrived at the airport, the sense that someone was watching his every move. There was a vehicle behind him, of this he was certain, he was being followed, either by Batchuk or by someone Batchuk owned.
One glance in the mirror would tell him. He knew Batchuk so intimately that he could pick out his outline even through the rain-spattered windshield. And yet he kept his gaze on the road ahead as it wound through the landward incline of the brooding cliff face. The truth was he preferred not to look, preferred to be unsure of the identity of his pursuer, of one thing at least, because everything else was laid out before him as if it had already occurred, as if he were locked into a trajectory that, no matter how he tried to twist away or fight against it, would lead him to some final place filled with tragedy.
FIFTEEN MINUTES after Dennis Paull drove out of the Alizarin Global compound with Claire beside him and Aaron heavy-lidded and drowsing in the backseat, he found a spot by the side of the road where, this late at night or early in the morning, he was certain he could not be observed. He got out of the car, went around, and opened the trunk. He fired up the laptop and within minutes found that it had been hacked. Because of the safeguards he had installed the hacker’s electronic fingerprints were all over the file system; Paull knew that he had made a complete copy of the information on the hard drive.
That was fine by Paull, he’d expected no less. Despite what he’d told the president he had used insecure servers to gather information. He needed stone-cold proof as to the identity of the man in Carson’s inner circle who was passing on classified information to Benson and Thomson, and if he didn’t have the time to do it himself he was determined to let the culprit do it for him. When he had exited the Residence Inn that morning he had known that sooner rather than later someone would be coming for him. That’s why he’d planted this dummy laptop in his trunk days ago. His real laptop, the one with all the hacked information, was stowed in a secret compartment below the spare wheel well that he opened now by the light of the small, recessed bulb on the inside of the trunk lid.
He turned it on, and plugged in a 3G Wi-Fi card. Almost at once his private, shielded network was activated. He had a good signal, even out here. He inputted