Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [161]
Dyadya Gourdjiev nodded as if immensely pleased with a prized pupil. “And of course you figured out my plan.”
“It seems that you’ve been playing both ends against the middle. You were never going to share the astronomical profits from the uranium strike, either with Yukin or with AURA. You wanted it for yourself.”
“Not at first.” Gourdjiev kept one eye on the muzzle of the machine pistol. “I put AURA together to go after the uranium strike, but rather quickly I saw that AURA was going to fail, principally because Kharkishvili turned against me, he split the AURA members, it was becoming ineffective.” He shrugged. “So I decided to have Alizarin step into the breach.”
“But there was a problem,” Jack said, “a seemingly insurmountable one, which is where I come in.”
Now Gourdjiev laughed. “I very much regret that I ordered Vlad to dose you, you have a remarkable mind. Unique.” He nodded admiringly. “I’ve known the president of Ukraine, Ingan Ulishenko, since he was a young man. I went to him with our proposal, but all he saw was sovereign land, potential profits being taken away from him. He refused to believe that there was an imminent threat from Trinadtsat, from Yukin and Batchuk. He would not allow us to buy the land.”
Jack had not raised the weapon, had made no threatening move against Gourdjiev. “What you needed was an outside source to confirm what you’d told him, someone unimpeachable, someone Ulishenko could neither ignore nor refuse.”
“An American in government, close to the president, but who was totally apolitical.”
“Someone Ulishenko would be sure to trust.”
“No one else fit the bill, Mr. McClure.”
“Which is why your grandfather would never kill me,” Jack said to Annika. “He needs me and, as it happens, I need him. I’m going to make sure Alizarin Group gets the uranium field.”
The solution had come to him sometime when he was washing Batchuk’s grisly debris off his face. He had tried to come up with an alternative, but it was no use, his brain told him that he’d found the only one, even though it wasn’t perfect—wasn’t even, to his way of thinking, good—but there was no other path to take, and now he wondered whether Gourdjiev had hit upon it before him.
“The accord with Yukin must be signed, President Carson made that perfectly clear. But if he does sign it Yukin will move into Ukraine and use the accord to stay there. That isn’t acceptable, either. I talk to Ulishenko, tell him what Yukin is planning. He’ll have no choice but to sell the uranium field to Alizarin Group. Alizarin is a multinational corporation that Yukin can neither touch nor attack, so as to his energy ambitions in Ukraine he’s stymied. Plus, he now must abide by the accord he will sign tonight with the United States.”
Jack turned back to Gourdjiev. “In addition to the purchase price, Alizarin Group will pledge fifty percent of all profits from the field to the Ukrainian government.”
“Ten percent,” Gourdjiev said.
“Don’t make me laugh. Forty-five percent or I tell my government what you’ve done. They’ll shut Alizarin Group down like a toxic waste dump.”
“Twenty-five percent or I walk away and let Yukin have his way.”
“Without me to confirm to Ulishenko