Departures

The picture on the screen behind the broadcaster shifted from the view out of Yezhov’s phone to one from the IBC crew. One of the Security women tore down a rug on the far wall of the suite to reveal a circular scar, two meters wide, cut in the metal and ceramic and inelegantly patched.

“There you see how the killer avoided being spotted or perhaps even being captured at an airlock when he returned to the Olympic village after he had committed his three murders. He did not use the locks either to leave or enter the village complex. Instead, he cut his way out of the building with a laser torch, undoubtedly the same one he used to kill Shukri al-Kuwatly, Dmitri Shepilov, and Louis-Philippe Guizot. Once he had the opening cut out, he simply jumped to the ice below and went to his ambush point.”

“Of course.” Rannveig nodded. “A fall of forty meters here is nothing, the same as less than a half a meter on Earth.”

“That’s right, and the return jump is the same-easy for anyone in Yezhov’s excellent condition. To go without being noticed, all he had to do was close the door to his suite; like all doors here, it’s gastight, so there would have been no pressure drop outside his rooms to give him away. Afterward, sealing compound let him repair the damage he’d done, as we can see now.”

“Where did he go wrong, then?”

“Over something he had no way to hide. Some of the water vapor and C02 that escaped from his suite condensed against the side of the building. The slab he’d cut out was free of the crystals-once replaced, it looked like a bull’s-eye. But it was on the side of the village away from the jumping, where hardly anyone ever goes. And even it they did, they’d think the deposit of ice had been there forever. Angus Cavendish knew better, though.”

“I suppose he was also aided by Siberia’s national colors,” Rannveig said, thinking fast on her feet. “His white spacesuit would have made him hard to spot both on the ground and from the observation satellite.”

“Yes.”

While they talked in the studio, the Security team was examining the case of the stereovision set in Yezhov’s room. The IBC camera crew caught a technician’s exclamation: “There’s tampering here, no doubt about it.”

“Take it to the lab,” someone else said. “If there’s more inside, we’ll have nailed down where he got his laser tube.”

“Yezhov said he installed stereovisions in, where was it, Kolyma,” Rannveig remembered.

“Unh-hunh,” Bennett said. “That was something else that should have made us take a hard look at him, but didn’t.”

“Why should it have?” Rannveig asked. The question was not just for the audience but for herself. Bennett simply had not had time to explain everything to her, although she was coming through like a trouper.

He said, “Kolyma was one of the biggest slave-labor camps in the days of the old Soviet Union. From what I’ve been able to learn, that’s still true in czarist Siberia-and slaves need guards.” Both Siberia and Moscow, he felt sure, would censor this part of the broadcast, but the rest of the world needed to know. He would never have found out himself if he had not seen the show about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn the day before.

On the screen behind the broadcasters, Nikolai Yezhov directed an ironic bow toward Major Katayama, his head being the only part of him still free to move. “My compliments,” he said with as much aplomb as if they had met at a banquet rather than as killer and captor. “I take it the announcement of Jablonski’s arrest was for my benefit and not sent on to Earth?”

Katayama nodded brusquely. “You admit this, then?”

“My dear sir, at this stage of affairs, what good would it do me to deny it?”

The security chief grunted. “Not much. Do you have anything to say before we deal with you?”

“May I request a lawyer?” Both Yezhov and Katayama smiled at that; the world was a harder place than it had been a couple of hundred years before. Having been caught, the Siberian could not expect to live long.

“Get on with it,” Katayama told him.

“Yes. How should I put it? Perhaps that I chose to strike a blow for Holy Mother Russia against the godless Marxists who still disgrace us all by holding Moscow. We in Siberia have cast them down; even China and Eastern Europe overthrew their ilk years ago. I do not care if peace was sworn; between us and them there can be no peace.”

That led inevitably to Katayama’s next question: “If your fight was with Moscow, why did you also kill the other two, and why cover your tracks?”

Now Yezhov looked at the Security chief as at any fool. “To avoid embarrassing my country, of course. Too many people in the world would not understand how honor compelled me to act as I did.”

At last something angered Katayama. When he answered, Bennett could hear in his words the revived tradition of bushido that had gone with Japan’s emergence as a military as well as an economic power in the late twenty-first century. “There is no honor in shooting men from ambush,” he said implacably.