Last Snow by Eric Van Lustbader Read Free Book Online Page A

running and shambling, let go of the handgun, as he’d seen Michael Corleone do so many times in
The Godfather
. He stumbled over a leg, and noticed Milan sprawled facedown, as unmoving as Ivan. Were they both dead, he wondered briefly. Then they were back on the brightly lit street and Annika was hailing a
bombila
, wrenching open the back door, shoving Jack into the interior, and climbing in after him.
    “We’ll hole up in Jelena’s apartment until I can make some calls,” she said as she gave the driver an address.
    “Emma?”
    “Emma?” Annika echoed. “Who is Emma?”
    Jack, tears in his eyes, averted his face. He’d almost said “my daughter,” but instead replied, “No one.”
    He cranked down the window and pushed his face out into the night.
Emma, Emma, how I wish I could have saved you.
    “Hey, I’m already freezing my ass off,” the driver protested.
    But the bracingly cold wind was precisely what Jack needed to clear his head. The adrenalin was still pulsing through him, and he knew it would be some while before the pain Ivan inflicted on him would manifest itself. Meanwhile, there was the current situation to contend with. His brain, coming around, began to work at its usual lightning speed.
    He hunched forward. “Forget that address,” he shouted to the driver over the harsh whistle of the wind. “Take us to Sheremetyevo.”
    “The airport?” Annika said. “Why would we want to go there?”
    Jack sat back as the
bombila
changed direction, heading for Ring Road. “Like you said, we need to get as far away from that alley as quickly as we can, and that’s just what we’re going to do.”

F OUR
     
     
     
     
    E VERYTHING IS in the process of being lost. That’s what Emma’s death had taught him. His marriage, too, for that matter. Even at the beginning, in the first ecstatic blossoming, the seeds of loss had been sown, predestined even, looked at in a clear-eyed manner.
    These thoughts rolled once again through Jack’s mind as he and Annika jounced along in the
bombila
. Once they were outside Ring Road and on their way to Sheremetyevo, Annika dug out her cell phone and made a call, he assumed to her superior at the FSB. However, it quite rapidly became clear that she wasn’t getting the response she had expected. After she had accurately described in detail what had happened in the alley behind Bushfire, she was silent, listening intently, her face screwed up in a frown of concentration and, then, frustration. Finally, her voice rose and she began to speak Russian in quick-fire bursts that lost Jack near the beginning. All at once, she cut the conversation short and threw her cell phone onto the floor of the
bombila
.
    “What’s up?” Jack asked. Annika had said nothing to him after she’d queried him about their destination, not a thank-you for saving her life, nothing. Until the phone call, she had appeared sunk in contemplation without any sign of animation whatsoever, as if she were in the
bombila
by herself. Jack supposed her withdrawal was a reaction to the violence she had endured, the imminent threat to her life, the struggle to survive that required every ounce of energy. It wouldn’t be at all out of place for her to be in shock. Assuming so, he had preferred to give her a chance to calm down before he started querying her. Now a new, ominous element had been added to the mix.
    “I’ll tell you what’s up,” she said. “We’re screwed, totally and indelibly screwed.”
    “I don’t see why. Ivan was a low-echelon thug and you’re with the FSB.”
    She turned her head so sharply he could hear the crack of the vertebrae in her neck. “Where did you hear that?”
    “The same place I learned about the ambush. Ivan and Milan were in your room, looking for revenge. They found the cameo you’d hidden in the drain.”
    “Fuck me!”
    “Hiding your ID in a cameo was a mistake. A cameo is not your style at all.”
    “That cameo was my mother’s.” She stared out