Last Snow (Jack McClure/Alli Carson Novels) - Softcover

ONEMoscow | April 5  JACK MCCLURE, cell phone to his ear, stood in his hotel suite, staring out at the arc-lit onion domes of Red Square. It was snowing. The last snow, it was predicted, of a protracted and, even for Russia, frigid winter. Red Square was nearly deserted. The swirling black wind swept the last of the tourists, shoulders hunched, digital cameras stuffed inside their long coats to protect them, back to their hotels where steaming cups of coffee waited, spiked with vodka or slivovitz. Jack had arrived here a week ago with the presidential entourage on a trip that was both politically necessary and culturally important, which was why the First Lady and the First Daughter had been invited along. The trip had been arranged—brokered might be a more accurate term—by General Atcheson Brandt, who had commanded a wing in the Gulf War. He was both a decorated veteran and, now that he’d retired, a revered military analyst for both CNN and ABC. He knew everyone in Washington who mattered. When he spoke, senior politicians of both parties listened. Though the former administration’s mini cold war with Russia, and President Yukin in particular, had raged for eight years, General Brandt had made it his business to keep the private lines of communication with Yukin open. His public criticism of the former administration’s hard line against Russia had led to a brief summit between Yukin and the former president. Though nothing of substance had come of it, General Brandt had been praised on both sides of the Senate aisles for his efforts.However, at the moment General Brandt was far from Jack’s mind. Jack hadn’t said a word for the past three minutes and neither had Sharon. Rather, they were listening to each other breathe, as they often did when they lay in bed together in Jack’s house in D.C. While Jack listened through the phone, he thought of her coming home after work, shedding her clothes layer by layer, until she was in her bra and the bikini underpants she always wore. He imagined her sliding into bed, pushing backward, feeling with her buttocks for that shallow indentation his absent body had left behind like a memory. He imagined her eyes closing as she drifted off to sleep. And then imagined she descended further. What did she dream of when all the artifice and layers demanded by civilization melted away, when she reverted to who she had been as a child, when she was certain no one was watching or, at least, able to pierce the veil of her sleep? He liked to imagine that she dreamed of him, but he had no way of knowing, just as he had no way of knowing who she really was, even though he knew her body almost as well as he knew his own, even though he’d observed over and over her every tiny motion, day and night.He knew these questions assailed him because he was so far from home—traveling with the newly elected president of the United States, his longtime friend, Edward Harrison Carson, as Carson’s strategic advisor.“What does that title mean exactly?” he’d asked Carson, when the two had met the week following the inauguration.The president had laughed. “Just like you, Jack, cutting to the quick of everything. I pulled you out of the ATF to find my daughter. You brought Alli back to me when no one else could. I and my family feel safest with you close.”“With all due respect, Edward, you have a platoon of perfectly competent Secret Service operatives better suited than I am to guard you and your family.”“You misunderstand me, Jack. I have far too much respect for you to offer you a babysitting job, even though nothing would please Alli more. Besides, on a practical level, your special abilities would be wasted in that capacity. I have no illusions about how difficult and perilous the next four years are going to be. As you can imagine, there are already no end of people who are clamoring to whisper advice in my ear. Part of my job is to allow them this access, but you’re one person I’m inclined to listen to, because you’re the one I trust absolutely.“That’s what ‘strategic advisor’ means.” SHARON HAD begun whispering, which meant, according to the routine their calls had fallen into over the week Jack had been in Moscow, it was time for them to talk. Jack turned and padded in bare feet past the table with the photos of her and Emma he took everywhere he went, across the carpet to the bathroom. He was about to turn on the water, in order to defeat the listening devices planted in every room. No fewer than four representatives of the Russian government swore there were no such listening devices. But ever since the first night when Secret Service personnel had discovered one, he and everyone in the president’s service were warned to take precautions when speaking to anyone while in the rooms, even if the conversation seemed innocuous.He heard voices rising up from the hot water pipes behind the toilet. Over the course of the week, he’d occasionally heard a drift of voices from the room on the floor below, but had never before been able to make out a single word. This time, a man’s and a woman’s voice were raised in altercation.“I hate you!” the woman said, her raw emotion vibrating through the pipe. “I’ve always hated you.”“You told me you loved me,” the man said, not plaintively, which might be expected, but with the guttural growl of a stalking male.“Even then I hated you, I always hated you.”“When I was pinning you to the mattress?”“Especially then.”“When I made you come?”“And what was I screaming in my own language, do you think? ‘I hate you, I’ll see you in hell, I’ll kill you!’ ”“Jack?”Sharon’s voice in his ear caused him to twist on the water full force. He wasn’t one to eavesdrop, but there was a vengeful, knife-edged sharpness to both voices that not only compelled listening, but made it almost impossible to stop.“Jack, are you at a party?”“In my room,” he said. “The people downstairs are going at it tooth and nail. How are you?” An innocuous enough question, but not when you were forty-six hundred miles apart. When so much distance separated you, there was always a question in your mind: What is she doing, or, its more far-reaching corollary, what has she been doing? It was possible to tell himself that her day proceeded precisely as it did when he was there: She got up in the morning, showered, ate a quick breakfast standing at the kitchen counter, stacked the dishes in the sink because there was time to either wash them or put on her makeup but not do both, went to work, shopped for food, came home, put on Muddy Waters or Steve Earle while she prepared dinner and ate it, read an Anne Tyler or Richard Price novel or watched 30 Rock if it was on, and went to bed.But he couldn’t help wondering if her day differed in some significant way, that it had been added to, that someone else might have inserted himself into her day or, far worse, her night, someone handsome, understanding, and available. Now he couldn’t help wondering whether this fantasy was jealousy or wish fulfillment. When, three months ago, Sharon had moved back into his house, he was certain they had reconciled the differences that had driven them apart in the first place. The intense physical desire for her that had first drawn him to her had never truly been entirely extinguished. But the fact was, they were still the same people. Jack was dedicated to his work, which Sharon resented, because she had no such dedication. She’d tried several different careers, all without feeling the slightest attachment to them. At first, she’d set herself up as a painter, but though technically accomplished she lacked passion—and nothing good, or at least worthwhile, can be created without it. Typical of her, she’d then drifted into dealing art, figuring to make easy money, but again her lack of conviction, or even interest, predetermined her failure. Finally, she was hired by a friend who worked at the Corcoran but was let go after less than a year. As a result, she now toiled joylessly in real estate, work that was tied to the vagaries of the economy, which, he imagined, could only further stir the pot of her simmering anger—at him, at the world, at her life without their daughter. He couldn’t help but think that she wanted him home for dinner every evening as a kind of revenge, for enjoying his job when she clearly didn’t. This was a desire that made him feel as if he were being strangled. He had always been an outsider—from his dyslexia to his unorthodox upbringing he’d never fit in and, as he’d finally been able to admit to himself if not to anyone else besides Alli Carson, he didn’t want to. One of the things that had bonded him with Alli was that they were both Outsiders. Sharon was conventional in most things; in all the others she was regressive. In the beginning, he’d loved her despite their differences, loved the smell of her, the sight of her both naked and clothed, the intense way she made love. Now Emma, or, more accurately, Emma’s memory, stood between them like an immense, immovable shadow that limned their differences with a cutting edge that was painful.“Who’s that I hear whistling?” he said now.“My mom. She arrived yesterday.”Sharon’s mother had never liked him. She hadn’t approved of the marriage, telling her daughter that it would end in tears, which of course it had. That triumph of hers was in no way mitigated by Sharon having ...