Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [76]
“Of course. They’re on your desk.”
“Tell me you discovered why Annika Dementieva and her friends were in the VIP terminal.”
“I have the information right here.” There came the sound of shuffling papers. “They boarded a private jet that’s on its way to, as I said, Simferopol.”
Kirilenko scowled. Something was not adding up here. “Since when does a fugitive have access to a private jet?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, dammit, bloody well find out!”
“I already tried,” his assistant said. “But the jet is American, under full diplomatic protection. I can’t find out a thing about it, except its next destination, which, if you have the right contacts, is public knowledge.”
His assistant was of course trying to recoup points he’d lost with his boss, but Kirilenko scarcely noticed. He’d broken out into a cold sweat. This must be Harry Martin’s doing, he thought, panic-stricken. That sonuvabitch has been playing me, he’s known all along about Annika’s ties to Karl Rochev, or at least suspected them. As soon as I brought him to Rochev’s dacha he must have known. That was why he sent me to that absurd town, Brovary, while he returned at once to Kiev. It was a ruse to keep me occupied while he reeled Annika in like a fish. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes. Christ, he thought, what are the Americans up to?
Such was the turmoil of his mind that he almost missed what his assistant said next: “As I said, Simferopol North Airport is in the Crimea, approximately midway between Balaklava and Alushta.”
His initial panic turned to outrage at being manipulated by the Americans—of all people!—and then to rage at Henry Martin in particular. In so doing he managed to gather himself. If that was how Martin was going to play it, he told himself grimly, then that’s how it would be played all around.
“I’m only twenty minutes away from Kiev,” Kirilenko said, heading directly for the airport. “I want to be on the next flight out from Zhulyany to Simferopol North.”
“Two seats, I assume, one for you and one for Harry Martin,” his assistant said.
“One seat.” Kirilenko put on speed. “If Martin asks, I’m still in Brovary, my nose to the grindstone. And if word of where I’ve gone should leak to the Americans I will personally shoot you in the back of the head.”
SEVENTEEN
HARRY MARTIN, hanging on the phone in the middle of a bustling Kiev street, didn’t like his job—in point of fact he loathed it with a seething, poisonous intent. The truth was he was sick to death of all the double-dealing, disinformation, obfuscation, and outright lies that came so easily to him. And that, of course, was what he despised most of all—that all the artifice was second nature to him now, ingrained like the whorls of his fingerprints or the pattern of his DNA. He simply did not know any other way to live, if this was living at all, which he’d begun to seriously doubt. And therein lay the rub, as the good Bard wrote, he thought, because the only thing to fear was doubt. He knew from his mentors that the moment you allowed doubt to creep into your thinking—doubt about your ability, about the people around you, about the dark and gravelike profession you were in—you were as good as dead. It was time to get out while you were still on your own two legs, rather than lying in a coffin stiff as a log. Doubt made you hesitate, doubt clouded your judgement and, worse, dulled your instincts, because, really, when you came down to it, your instincts were all that kept you alive. Instincts and, to an extent, experience.
Feeling as apart from those around him as the shadows on the building facades, he listened while the electronic connections were made, one by one, like the tumblers of a lock or a safe falling into place. He knew his call