Departures (43 page)

Sickened, Bennett turned away from the big monitor screen behind the broadcasters. As a result, he was the only one of them looking at the bank of screens to one side that showed what all the active cameras were picking up. He saw Dmitri Shepilov raise his right arm; it looked as if the Muscovite was starting to point. Then vapor spouted from his helmet, too. “Shepilov’s hit!” he cried.

No one had paid any attention to Louis-Philippe Guizot, the jumper who came after the Muscovite. Perhaps because he was from United Europe, Bennett’s yell made Rannveig check another of the side screens for his safety. Guizot was only a few hundred meters from the takeoff ramp when his image was also shrouded by fog. “On, no!” Rannveig cried, and covered her face with her hands.

Bennett learned to hate Mimas’ low gravity. Shepilov had been near the apex of his jump when he was hit; he flew on, a corpse, for five dreadful minutes before crashing on the landing slope as al-Kuwatly had before him. It was even worse with Louis-Philippe Guizot. Propelled by the leap he had taken before the assassin struck, he soared above Mimas as if still alive, then spun down in a hideously lazy descent.

“This is madness!” Bennett said. “Who but a madman could think to mar the Olympic Games with violence? Even in war-torn ancient Greece, the Olympic truce held good; the modern games have been the victim of attack only twice, and the last time was more than a hundred years ago.”

The director spoke in his ear. His voice went hard as he relayed the news to his distant audience: “We have just received a radio transmission claiming responsibility for the atrocity that has taken place here today. Here is a recording of that transmission.”

The tape was scratchy; the transmitter must have been a tiny one, and Saturn’s radio emission chopped up the signal. But it was perfectly understandable. “As it is the Olympic language this year, I shall speak French,” a man’s voice said. It had a faint guttural accent and was full of irony and a good humor that chilled Bennett. “Shukri al-Kuwatly was but the beginning. We of the Second Irgun vow to continue our war against Arab tyranny until the Star of David once more flies above Israel. We regret the need to harm others, but those who share pleasures
with oppressors must also share their fate. A very good day to you all.”

The voice cut off, leaving behind only the impersonal hisses and pops of background noise.

The director cued Bennett through the earphone: “Three, two, one—all right, you’re on.” The light above the camera lens turned red.

“Welcome once again to the Mimas venue of the sixty-sixth Winter Games,” he said. “Competition, of course, has been suspended after yesterday’s tragic events. When and if it will resume remains unknown; that largely depends on whether the cold-blooded killer who so callously took the lives of three athletes can be detected and apprehended. For any of you who may not have been with us yesterday, here is Rannveig Aasen with a review of what took place.”

“Thank you, Bill,” she said gravely. She summarized the previous day’s jumps. Behind her, the big monitor screen reran in quick succession the deaths of al-Kuwatly, Shepilov, and Guizot. Rannveig said, “Examination of the bodies has shown that each of the three athletes was murdered by a burst from a high-powered laser weapon. They were killed instantly; none, of course, had any chance to defend himself.”

“How could such a thing happen?” Bennett said. “As we noted before, security is supposed to have been tight. With us now is Major Katayama Hitoshi, head of Mimas security. Come join us, Major Katayama.”

Moving smoothly in the low gravity, the security chief came over and sat down by the two broadcasters, then strapped himself in. “Thank you for being with us at this difficult time. Tell, me, if you will, where did your precautions break down?”

Katayama grimaced, not caring for the blunt question. He was a stout, hard-faced man with iron-gray hair. After a moment’s thought, he said, “I am afraid this will seem self-serving, but much of the failure took place on Earth, when a killer was allowed to board a ship for Mimas. Once that happened, his or her success was probably inevitable.”

“How can you say that?” Rannveig challenged. “Surely you searched everyone’s baggage for arms of all sorts. I know mine was opened, and Bill’s, too.”

“Yes, that is so,” Katayama said. He spoke slowly; he was very tired but was still picking his words with care. “Explosive guns and missile weapons are easy to detect. With lasers, sadly,
the same is not the case. Laser tubes are too ubiquitous. They are at the heart of your stereovision equipment, of still-picture holocameras, of computers’ scanning devices, and in dozens of other everyday tools. Skilled terrorists find it all too simple to improvise deadly weapons. It is an unfortunate fact of life.”

“Even so,” Rannveig persisted, “why didn’t your force of guards keep the assassin from reaching cover, or track him down after he did his work?”

“Let me point something out, Ms. Aasen,” Katayama said coolly. Rannveig bridled, but he went on before she could interrupt: “I have twenty men here. As your colleague Mr. Angus Cavendish pointed out on an earlier broadcast, at the peak of a jump an athlete can see for thirty-five kilometers, which means he can be seen and shot at from that distance. The area of a circle with a radius of 35 kilometers is more than 3,800 square kilometers, or about 190 square kilometers per guard. I hope you see my difficulty.”

Off-camera, Bennett winced. Katayama was not an easy man to shake. The broadcaster had no intention of giving up without a fight, though. He asked, “Have you had any luck with photos from the observation satellite in synchronous orbit above Arthur?”

“A very intelligent question, sir.” The security chief nodded. “Unfortunately, the answer is no. We were in dark phase at the time of the attack, with the only light outside the area of competition coming from Saturn’s other moons. They are either small or distant or both, and in any case received only a bit more than one percent of the sunlight per unit area than Luna does. And exactly because it is in synchronous orbit, the satellite is over six hundred kilometers above us. Perhaps computer processing of its images will show more. That is our best hope, I think.”

Bennett gave up. Katayama seemed to have all the answers, and a depressing lot they were. Rannveig, however, was still smarting from the rebuff she had taken. She said, “Forgive me for one last question. Why didn’t any of your guards spot the flash of the laser when it was fired?”

The security chief’s smile was like a shark’s. “In vacuum, of course, there is no flash,” he said, as if to a foolish child. “We only see beams of light because they shine through dust and vapor floating in air. I wish it were otherwise, but it is not.”

“Thank you, Major Katayama,” Bennett said quickly. “We’ll be back with more after these messages.”

As the commercials began, Katayama departed, looking pleased with himself. Rannveig shook her head in disgust. “Well, he put me away, didn’t he? That’s what I get for forgetting my homework.”

Bennett touched her hand. “Don’t worry about it. It’s the same question almost everybody on Earth would have been asking himself.”

“Do you think so?” she said doubtfully, but she looked a little happier.

When they returned to the air, they replayed the tape claiming responsibility for the attack. “For the reaction of the Second Irgun, IBC correspondent Jorge Martinez visited the group’s headquarters in Buenos Aires,” Bennett said. “Here is his report.”

The tape filled the monitor screen. Along with a flock of other reporters, Martinez was standing in front of a gray stone building in a run-down part of the city. Out came a slight, curly-haired man with a mustache too big for his face and fierce, ever-watchful eyes. “The Second Irgun’s spokesman is known only as ‘Menachem,’ ” Martinez said quietly.

They watched “Menachem” begin to read from a card he pulled out of his hip pocket: “We applaud the blow against the Arabs who have stolen our homeland from us, but we did not strike it. That is all we have to say.”

“What proof do you have for your denial?” one of the reporters shouted.

“Menachem” fixed him with an icy glare. “I have said that is all we have to say.” Then, with the air of a man making a great concession, he went on, “Had it been us, we would have chosen Itzhak Zalman, the
apikoros
who loves his masters better than his people and joined the Arab team. His time may yet come, if not on Mimas, then when he returns.” He went back into the headquarters building, slamming the door behind him.

“Not the most convincing denial on record,” Rannveig commented.

“Hardly,” Bennett said. “The only thing to say in its behalf is that the Second Irgun is not in the habit of ducking the blame for its terrorist acts. The notorious Baghdad bombings of a few years ago are a case in point.”

“If not the Second Irgun, though, who benefits from the killings? Savage as they were, they have succeeded in embarrassing the Arab World, thanks to the disclosure of Shukri al-Kuwatly’s illegal suit.”

“There you’re right, Rannveig,” Bennett said. “Cheating is almost as old as the Olympics, I’m afraid; drug use and such things as electronically rigged fencing foils go back to the twentieth century. Al-Kuwatly’s suit is just the latest in a long line, and one of the more ingenious. It was discovered to have a gas vent opening in the small of his back—in effect, a small reaction motor to add to his speed down the runway. With a surface gravity as low as Mimas’, even a few extra centimeters per second could have been decisive.”

“Yes; al-Kuwatly would have been the leader at the end of the first day of competition,” Rannveig said.

“In the rash of speculation surrounding him, however, we shouldn’t lose sight of the other two athletes who were slain. Our sincerest condolences go to the families and friends of Dmitri Shepilov and Louis-Philippe Guizot, who also fell victim in this savage attack.”

“As happens all too often in acts of terrorism, it is the innocent who suffer,” Rannveig agreed. “That’s true not only of the men who died yesterday but also, in a lesser way, of all the athletes who came to Mimas in hopes of victory and instead find themselves encompassed by tragedy. For the competitors’ reaction to yesterday’s events, let’s go to Angus Cavendish.”

“Thank you, Rannveig.” The Scotsman was sitting at the Olympic village bar. “With me here is Itzhak Zalman, the Arab World jumper who, as you heard, has been threatened by the Second Irgun.” Also with them, unmentioned but plainly visible, was one of Major Katayama’s security guards, a sidearm on her hip. Cavendish said, “Tell me, Itzhak, what are your thoughts on the menacing statement read by Menachem?”

Zalman, ironically, looked rather like a younger version of the terrorist leader, but his face was more open, calmer. He spread his hands. “I’d sooner accept the present as it is than live in the dead past. I’ve been threatened before. You can’t let it worry you or it’ll affect your performance.”

“Spoken like a true competitor,” Cavendish said. “Let me ask this, then: how do you feel about what your teammate al-Kuwatly had done to his suit?”

“He was a fool,” Zalman said flatly. “I knew nothing about that, and I can still hardly believe it. My own jumping suit conforms to every standard. What good is a medal you’ve cheated to win?”

“Aye, that’s a poser, though there’s some who don’t care, I’m
sorry to say. Am I right in thinking you’re doing your best to stay in condition during the delay in the jumping?”

‘Oh, of course. I can’t go out on the ramp, naturally, but I’m doing both stretching and weight work. The weight rooms have been packed.”

“What’s the atmosphere there?”

“About what you’d expect—nervous. After all, none of us knows whether the person working out beside him is a killer.” Zalman thought for a moment, amended his last statement: “No—
one
of us does.”

“You’ve put your finger on the true calamity of these games,” Cavendish said. “Olympics may have been disrupted before this, but never by people connected with them. Thanks for joining us, Itzhak, and best of luck when the competition resumes.”

Zalman nodded soberly. “I will take all the luck I can find, thank you. Being who I am, I need it.” He bounced away.

Cavendish said, “We’d hoped to have a member of the team from Moscow with us, but they’ve all declined to speak on camera. Joining us instead is Nikolai Yezhov of Siberia. Welcome, and thank you for being with us today.”

“My pleasure.” Yezhov’s French had less of an accent than Cavendish’s. Short, stocky, and solid, he looked formidable in his spotless white tunic with the cross of Saint George on an embroidered patch on his left shoulder.

“Did ye know Shepilov well?” Cavendish asked.

“Not very, I’m afraid.” Aristocratic contempt showed briefly in the Siberian eyes. “The Muscovites always stick close to themselves. Not cultured.”

“Er, yes.” Cavendish changed the subject in a hurry; from a Russian-speaker, “not cultured” was the kind of insult that started fights. The Scotsman said, “What reaction have ye noticed among the athletes to word of al-Kuwatly’s suit?”

Yezhov’s smile seemed genuinely amused. “The only sin is to be found out, is it not?”

Every question Cavendish asked was getting him into trouble. Gamely, he tried again after a glance at Yezhov’s fact sheet. “This is your first time off Earth, nay?”

“Oh, certainly. I was a simple stereovision installer in Kolyma, by the Sea of Okhotsk, a weekend skier, I think the saying is, when the Little Father honored me by including me on this year’s team.”

“Aye, just as ye say, ‘a weekend skier.’ ” Cavendish finally let himself smile. The czar’s recruiting and training methods
were notoriously effective, and started at about age six. “A coincidence, then, that you took the Siberian downhill championship four years ago and have held it ever since?”

Yezhov’s expression was bland. “Yes, as a matter of fact, or at least my first win. The favored skier broke his leg in a fall, opening the door for me.”

“How lucky for you.” Cavendish sighed. Despite his best efforts, Yezhov remained opaque. He might claim greater sophistication than his Muscovite counterparts, but he was no more forthcoming. Cavendish thanked him again for appearing, then passed the show back to the studio with obvious relief.