Departures

“An interesting point you bring up, lass.” Cavendish had the minutiae at his fingertips. “As a matter of fact, there is a precedent. In the Summer Games of 2104 a woman from the United States defected to Indonesia after the first two events of the modern pentathlon. She won a silver, and took it under Indonesian colors.”

“Ah.” Marge Olbert hesitated, then went on. “I only hope they have arrested the right man. This Second Irgun, it is supposed to be very bad, no? If somehow there is a mistake, that would not be good.”

“There’s confidence Itzhak Zalman had naught to do with the killings,” Cavendish said. “Even if there weren’t, he’s been too closely guarded for his own protection to let him go off doing mischief.”

“I hope you are right,” the Anzac jumper replied. She left, and Cavendish interviewed several other athletes. They were all of them polite, but none said a great deal.

“That’s one of the abiding problems of sports journalism,” Ra

“Perhaps we can get a fresher perspective from a competitor with a different background,” Be

The Siberian dipped his head in a courtly gesture of acknowledgment. “Not at all,” he said, his French excellent as usual.

“Would you care to give us your reaction to the arrest of Jozef Jablonski?”

“I was, to be frank, surprised: he seemed a very decent fellow, though I did not know him well.” Yezhov paused, considering his next words.”But if he is truly the one who perpetrated these abominable deeds, then I am glad to see him in custody. I look forward to the recommencement of the games.”

Be

“I shall ignore that,” the Siberian said politely.

“No need,” Be

“A capital idea. I shall do as you suggest.”

Yezhov reached out for the volume toggle, then turned his back on the phone camera and glided toward the door. Instead of going to a commercial or a taped segment, though, the director kept the Siberian’s image in the big screen behind Be

“Welcome to those watching all over Earth,” Ra

At that moment, the Siberian touched the door control switch. The door slid open. A security guard thrust a pistol in Yezhov’s face. Half a dozen more, including Major Katayama, rocketed past him into his suite. One doubled back to wrench the Siberian’s hands behind him and clap manacles on him; the rest began tearing the place apart. Somehow the impact of everything was greater because on the screen it all took place in silence.

“-at this moment you are watching the capture of Nikolai Semyonovich Yezhov, the assassin whose crime has marred these Winter Games.” Ra

“Let’s wait a moment before going on with the details, Ra

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.” Ra

“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,” Ra

“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,” Ra

“Unh-hunh,” Be

“Why should it have?” Ra

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 a

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.