Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [75]
“What’s going on here?”
Jack held Alli tighter as if needing to protect her from Annika’s question. “Nothing,” he said. “She’s out here in the back of beyond, she’s just homesick, that’s all.”
“That’s all?”
He heard the skepticism in her voice and he said more harshly than he had perhaps intended, “That’s enough—more than enough.”
“Of course it is.”
Annika turned and went down the hall into the bathroom. Through the closed door he could just barely hear the sound of running water over Alli’s slowly weakening sobs.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Everything is going to be all right.”
“That’s what I want. You don’t know . . .”
But he did know, because it was what he wanted, too. Emma’s death had been a nightmare, and then Alli’s abduction, a nightmare for everyone. Where was it going to end, when was it going to end? If everything was moving toward dissolution why wasn’t it ending, why were both he and Alli still suffering so?
With a conscious effort, he pushed her away from him, held her at arm’s length until he willed her to look at him. “You’ve got to stop torturing yourself, that’s only your guilt talking. You’re brave and smart and resourceful. Maybe Emma was the catalyst, but those things came from inside you, they’re nobody else’s, they’re yours.”
Alli’s eyes, still enlarged with tears, locked onto his, and a wan smile crossed her face. “Guilt isn’t all that binds us, is it, Jack? I’d hate to think—”
“It’s not,” he said. “Of course it’s not.”
“That’s what Annika thinks, I’m sure of it.”
“Does that bother you?”
She tried to laugh, wiping away the tracks of her tears. “I wish it didn’t.”
“She’s the psycho-bitch, remember?”
Now Alli did laugh. “She isn’t, you know she isn’t.”
Jack was somewhat surprised. “What changed your mind?”
“I don’t know, I—”
“Enough crying, for pity’s sake!” For the second time, Annika interrupted them. She had emerged from the bathroom, her head to one side, drying her hair with a towel. “With that flood of misery anyone would think you’re Russian. Come on, what are we waiting for?”
Both Jack and Alli jumped up as if they were stung. As Alli passed Annika on the way to the bathroom, Jack said, “We need to get to Alushta. Driving will be the safest way.”
“Also the slowest.” She threw her damp towel onto the sofa cushion where Alli had been sitting and, before her, Emma. She watched to see if he would protest, or even comment. When he didn’t, she continued. “It will take us too long to get to the coast by car. Besides, there are regular roadblocks between here and the Crimean peninsula to catch contraband. Thankfully we have your private jet.”
“It’s not my private jet,” Jack said, “but I take your point.”
While Alli padded by him to get dressed he pulled out his cell phone and punched in the pilot’s number.
“Give me forty minutes and we’ll be ready to go,” the pilot said, “but I need to log a flight plan. Where are we going?”
“To the airport nearest Alushta,” Jack told him, “in the Crimea, on the Black Sea coast.”
“I’ll get right on it,” the pilot said, and disconnected.
Forty minutes later the three of them arrived at Zhulyany Airport.
“SIMFEROPOL NORTH Airport.”
“Where?” Kirilenko pressed the cell phone to his ear so hard the cartilage ached. “Where the hell is that?”
“Crimea.” His assistant’s voice came through the ether hard, abrupt, and ominous, like a nail punched through a tin can. “She showed up on the Zhulyany Airport CCTV as she passed through into the VIP terminal.”
“The VIP terminal?” Kirilenko, driving back to Kiev from the wild-goose chase in Brovary, was trying to process information that was coming at him too quickly. “First, tell me, was Annika Dementieva alone?”
“She was with a man and girl,” his assistant said.
Kirilenko pulled