Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [148]
“Sure, stupid of me. You and Aaron have your own lives.”
“But we don’t have much family, do we?”
Both father and daughter looked at the little miracle of Aaron who, standing in the doorway, his pajamas emblazoned with the phrase TO INFINITY AND BEYOND! was apparently far too excited by the events of the long day to sleep or even to lie in bed. And now Paull wondered whether Claire’s self-imposed exile to a city she did not like was punishment not only for him, but for herself.
He thought she was about to respond, he wanted her to respond, but at that moment his cell phone vibrated. He wanted to ignore it, did his best to ignore it, in fact, but a moment after it stopped, the vibration returned, this time in a different pattern, and he knew that he had no choice. Excusing himself he padded across the carpet to the bathroom, but even before he got there he had his phone out and was reading the text message.
It was one of three that he had prewritten in the event of new information being picked up by any one of the three programs he was running on his laptop. This one was from the proprietary search engine he had a part in developing. Unlike others available to the general public, this one had the ability to dig through corporate filings and other ephemera to come up with answers to questions such as the one Paull had given it this evening: Who owns Alizarin Group?
It seemed the program had the devil’s own time plowing through a mountain of labyrinthine document filings, shell companies that led nowhere, phantom bank accounts, and the like. Nevertheless, it persevered, as he had designed it to do, but now he knew the privately held company was owned by seven partners. He had no idea what to make of that; he knew of only one man who could.
ORIEL BATCHUK, driving along an unfamiliar highway in the Crimea, would have been shocked if Gourdjiev wasn’t aware that he was being followed. He did not appear to care, which did shock Batchuk. He had no idea what his old friend and foe was up to, just as he couldn’t fathom what had motivated Gourdjiev to shoot Boronyov, a man whom Limonev had assured him was already dead. Gourdjiev had told Batchuk’s men that finding the fugitive oligarch was why Annika was in Ukraine, but Batchuk hadn’t believed that tale for a moment. Gourdjiev had a plan, that much was certain—not knowing what it was worried him.
Gourdjiev, always so mysterious, so circumspect, was nothing of the sort now. It was when people started acting out of character that the real problems started, Batchuk knew from cold, hard experience, the first instance of which appeared with Nikki. Through his twenty-minute talk with Gourdjiev he had become increasingly enraged first that Gourdjiev had deliberately blocked any possible meeting with her, and second that when it did happen, he made certain to push her impending wedding in his face. The cruelty of Gourdjiev’s actions was not lost on him, and the reverberations from that affront had never ceased.
That day Gourdjiev had acted out of character, he had indicated through deeds rather than words that Nikki was off-limits, that she was better than Batchuk and so deserved better than him, a man named Alexsei Dementiev.
Ahead of him the filthy Zil Gourdjiev was driving turned off the highway onto a secondary road that appeared to lead to the coast. Batchuk made certain that he never lost sight of the car; he was on the lookout for a quick switch, where a second car and driver waiting by the side of the road would allow the drivers to switch vehicles, thus throwing off any pursuit, but no such vehicle was in evidence.
Batchuk returned to his contemplation of the past. He was powerful enough even at that time to start an investigation into Dementiev’s life and, if necessary, manufacture evidence that would disgrace him or put him behind bars. But Batchuk quickly determined that neither of those outcomes would do him any good because Gourdjiev would know what he had