"Yes, several times."
"And did you notice she looked like me?"
"The thought crossed my mind."
"And did it stimulate you?"
"You mean, did I find it erotic that she reminded me of you? I don't think you have any right to ask that."
"No right? I have the gun, you forget. I have all the right in the world. Now answer the question."
"All right," said Carter after a short pause, "it was stimulating. I remembered the night we were together, the things you liked to do, the way you are…" He gestured vaguely, implying this was too vast to describe.
"And what way is that?"
"Oh," he said, looking off down the mountain as though written there somewhere were a way to describe her wondrousness but noticing, as he did so, that she'd come several steps closer, "one has the feeling that there is much untapped in you, Tatiana. A volcano just below the surface. One wonders what might happen if that fire were ever unleashed."
"And did it drive you to new heights of passion?" she asked, staring down at him, breathing heavily.
"Yes." He said the word softly as though she had torn it from his heart, so softly, in fact, she couldn't hear it.
"What?" she asked, leaning closer.
He saw his chance and he took it. Grabbing his snowshoe by its edge, he swung hard, aiming for her head. She pulled back, but he made contact with the pistol and knocked it aside. It went off, burying a bullet in the trunk of a nearby tree.
She fell back and he fell on top of her, desperately trying to grab the gun before she could point it at him again. Unfortunately, she was right-handed, and his right was the only hand Carter had. He was forced to reach across her, which left her left hand open to scratch and pull and hit.
He managed to finally get a hold of her wrist, but she was a good deal stronger than he supposed. Although he could prevent her from twisting it toward him, he couldn't get her to drop it, no matter how much pressure he applied. She suddenly wrenched her leg away and brought it back sharply.
A flood of nauseating pain welled up from his bowels, the world spun, and his stomach turned inside out. The strength drained from his arms, and he felt the gun slip from his grasp.
In desperation he realized he had only one option. He settled on top of her, praying she was more interested in killing him with the gun than trying to kick his balls off again.
She made muffled shouts against his parka. He still fumbled for the gun even though he'd lost track of it. Then he found it, pressed against his chest, just as it discharged with a muted pop between them.
He lay there wondering if he were hit and if so, how bad. How would he know with waves of agony coursing up his spine and out to every finger and toe? Then he realized Tatiana wasn't moving, hadn't moved, and wasn't breathing either.
He roiled off her. The pearl-handled gun lay across her chest, and a growing stain of blood seeped from her coat. He guessed the bullet had gone straight into her heart, she'd died so fast.
He pulled himself unsteadily to his feet, leaned back on the stone where he'd been sitting, and put his head between his knees to try to keep from being sick.
Kobelev was an hour from the train. He had no snowshoes and was probably dragging Cynthia, who would be doing her best to slow him down. Still, it would be impossible for Carter to overtake him. Only a miracle would get him back there in time.
A spasm twisted in his gut, and his worries about Kobelev, the tension he'd felt in front of Tatiana's gunsight, and the rolls he'd eaten with Roberta back at the train all ended up in a steaming puddle in front of him. When it passed, he wiped his mouth and washed his face with snow and told himself he felt better, even if he wasn't sure it was true.
He went over and took the pistol from Tatiana's hand and stuffed it in his coat pocket. Then he stood for a moment, staring down at the monk who had given his life to bring this little rendezvous about. What had Kobelev promised him that was worth killing himself for? Carter wondered.
He passed it off with a shrug, located his wayward snowshoe, and stooped down to strap it on. Then he looked down the long line of snowshoe prints that started at the top of the hill and extended better than ten miles back to the railroad and the Orient Express. There was no way he'd be able to trudge all that distance in less than an hour.
Then he wondered what would have happened if Tatiana had killed him as planned? She certainly wasn't going to walk all the way back to meet her father. And he wasn't going to pick her up with the train. There was no sign of a railroad track anywhere.
On a hunch he circled the area around the big rock that now served as a headstone. On the western side of the trail about a hundred feet out he came across a line of partially brushed-out footprints. He followed them to a pair of cross-country skis behind a tree. The monk had apparently stashed them here for Tatiana before blowing his brains out.
They were a woman's size. Consequently, the boots accompanying them were hopelessly small. But the bindings could be adjusted around his own snow boots and in a few minutes, he was poling his way one-handed to the top of the hill.
He stood at the crest for a moment, surveying the expanse of snow that stretched out before him, then with a thrust, he pushed himself out onto the mountain, kicking at first to gain speed, then curling into the aerodynamically efficient «egg» position for minimum wind resistance. It was a good thing, he thought, one never forgot how to ski.
For Lieutenant Commander j.g. Roberta Stewart, waiting had always been an anathema. As a child of five she remembered the long hours of delay while bureaucratic wranglings kept her father in the Hungarian State Prison long after his sentence as an insurgent during the revolution of 1956 had been put down. She remembered the long plane ride and the hours of questioning by immigration authorities before they finally let her father and herself out of the terminal at Idlewild. And later on, she'd waited three days longer than any OCS candidate to get her commission — only to discover to her joy and trepidation that she'd been assigned back to the country of her birth. There had been many anxious moments of waiting since then, waiting for messages to be picked up in letter drops around the American consulate, waiting in alleys to talk to contacts, the disgruntled dock worker, the Soviet official cheating on his wife who thought she would make a fetching sexual trophy (and who never succeeded but, in trying, always spilled his guts of everything he knew). Waiting had become her life, and yet of all the nervous hours she had spent in anticipation of things both good and bad, none of them held a candle to the hours she spent waiting for Nick Carter to return to the Orient Express.
Outside the train the wind whistled up from the valley below with a low, mournful moan that set her teeth on edge. The old wooden cars creaked and settled on the track, and every stray noise made her jump and clutch her machine gun.
She sat on the floor of the engine room, her back to the fire doors, the machine gun resting across her knees. From time to time she would crawl the few feet to the coal supply, retrieve an armful, and toss them into the furnace. Then she would slam the doors and resume the same tense, watchful pose as before.
The boiler became more than just a source of warmth. It was her ticket out of here, she told herself, and if she took care of it, it would take care of her. She believed this, and the hot metal became a benign, almost friendly, sensation at her back, like the warm lap of a parent when all the world around has turned hostile and cold.
Her thoughts centered mostly on Nick, on how he was doing, if he would ever come back to her, and what she would do if he didn't. She told herself she definitely didn't love him, although even before the words had fully formed in her mind, she knew it was a lie. And yet she knew, too, that love between them was impossible. They were two professionals, each with his job to do. They would love briefly, and they would say good-bye, and their love would be sweeter and more poignant because of it. These were her thoughts, but in the cold darkness of the engine cabin, her heart spun out fantasies of the two of them running, laughing into a pounding tropical surf as though they hadn't a care in the world.