Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [156]
Andreyev accompanied Jack and Alli out of the library, down the rear hallway, and into the more private drawing room, where Annika and Dyadya Gourdjiev greeted them. Jack saw in Annika’s face a sense of great expectation, of a mystery about to be solved. As for Gourdjiev, he had his usual sphinxlike expression, calm and unruffled, despite the tension of the moment.
“You should have told me you were part of AURA,” Jack said as he clasped the old man’s hand. His grip was still firm and sure.
“No need to burden you with something you didn’t then need to know.” He gave Jack a grandfatherly smile. “Annika tells me that you will solve the dilemma of the uranium field, of Yukin’s land grab, the specter of a spreading conflagration.”
Jack’s eyes flicked to her and back. “Annika puts great faith in me.”
“She does,” Gourdjiev acknowledged. “She has from the very beginning; she is an unerring judge of character and, just as importantly, of potential.” He paused, waiting expectantly.
“May I ask,” Andreyev said in his furtive manner, “why you have brought me here, Mr. McClure?”
“Certainly.” Jack put him firmly under his gaze. “I am extremely unhappy with the unwanted attention and inappropriate advances you have made on my daughter.”
“You must be mistak—”
The beginning of Andreyev’s transparent denial was cut off by two short bursts of semiautomatic fire. Jack, racing to the double doors, was about to thrust them open when they opened from the outside. Oriel Batchuk stood in the doorway, an OTS-33 Pernach machine pistol in his hand. Reacting immediately, Jack chopped down on his wrist, knocking the Pernach to the floor, but Batchuk shoved past him, raised his left arm at Andreyev as if he were accusing him of being alive. The lethal dart struck the oligarch in the neck. Clawing at it, he fell to his knees, the terrible clicking sound of massed insects coming from his throat before he pitched over, dead.
“Step back.” Batchuk swiveled his arm. “Step back or Annika dies next.”
Jack did as he said, and Batchuk, crouching down, plucked the Pernach off the floor. “All right,” he said, standing and pointing the machine pistol at them. “Time to disarm yourselves.”
“TIME TO disarm yourself,” Batchuk said.
“I will kill you now.” Alexsei Dementiev was silhouetted in the doorway of his apartment, in which Batchuk was already standing, a Makarov pistol in his hand.
During one of his earliest evenings there before his affair with Nikki began, Batchuk had made a wax impression of her key, had a copy made so that he could gain entrance any time he chose. Though he was not given to introspection, he nevertheless understood that the complete domination of her privacy was essential to his conquest. At work, at court, inside the Kremlin, or elsewhere in Moscow, it pleased him to know that he was always, in one way or another, intimate with her.
“I’m not joking or bluffing,” Alexsei said.
His face was drawn, deeply etched with tension and misery. To Batchuk he looked ten years older than when they had first met at court, only eighteen months ago.
“I’m quite certain you’re not, I assure you that I take the threat quite seriously.” But by the way Alexsei held the pistol Batchuk knew he was no expert in firearms. In fact he wondered whether Alexsei had ever fired a Makarov, or any pistol for that matter.
“You deserve to die.” Alexsei was growing tenser, more anxious. “For what you have done to my wife I will be justified in taking you out with the rest of the garbage.”
“Tell me, Alexsei,” Batchuk said, “have you ever killed a human being?” He cocked his head. “No? As someone who has killed many men, let me assure you it’s no easy thing, no, not at all. You never forget the face of the first person you kill, the look in his eyes as the light goes out.”
“I’ll welcome that look in your eyes.”
“That expression haunts you, Alexsei, follows you down into dreams, into