Departures (46 page)

“Perhaps we can get a fresher perspective from a competitor with a different background,” Bennett said. He made the call he had set up the night before. “Thank you for joining us again, Monsieur Yezhov.”

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.”

Bennett’s heart was pounding in the effort to stay natural. “Are you—” he began, then broke off at the sound of a knock on the outer door of Yezhov’s suite.

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

“No need,” Bennett assured him. “We don’t want to inconvenience you when you are kind enough to talk with us; we’ll cut away and then come back to you when you’re finished. If your visitor’s business isn’t too personal, though, perhaps you might leave the vision link open with us while you turn down the sound so we can tell when you’re coming back.”

“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 Bennett and Rannveig.

“Welcome to those watching all over Earth,” Rannveig said quickly. “We apologize for starting our coverage late, but—”

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.” Rannveig went on, “I’m proud to say that my colleague here at the IBC sports desk, Bill Bennett, played a key role in Yezhov’s arrest. How did that happen, Bill?”

“Let’s wait a moment before going on with the details, Rannveig,” he said. Modesty was not what held him back; far from it. He felt full to bursting with triumph. But the story came first. “Here’s our camera crew arriving at Yezhov’s door. Let’s watch as the security patrol searches the suite.”

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 per
haps 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 CO
₂
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.

He turned to the Security people who held the Siberian, snapping, “Get him out of here.”

The camera crew followed them down the corridor and almost ran into the coach of the Siberian team, who came swinging from one ceiling handhold to the next like a desperate ape. When he spotted the camera, he almost threw himself in front of it. He started speaking in Russian, a true measure of how upset he was.

He checked himself after half a sentence and began again in French: “I must say, on behalf of Siberia and the czar, that what Nikolai Yezhov has done is the act of a solitary madman. I condemn him as strongly as any man alive; my heart goes out to the dear ones of the men—all the men—whose deaths he caused. Our Russian brothers of the People’s Republic of Moscow must know the firmness of the treaty of Sverdlovsk—”

He went on for some time. After a while he began repeating himself, but the director did not cut him off. The chance that his apology might be heading off a war was too real to disregard, and the urgency behind that apology made for incomparably dramatic stereovision.

The Siberian coach finally finished and departed to give his condolences to his Muscovite opposite number, his head still hanging in shame. The director’s finger stabbed toward Rannveig; the camera in the studio swung her way.

She said, “Once again the specter of nationalism has wounded the Olympic Games, the games that should be the chief symbol of cooperation between nations. Nation-states have existed for more than six hundred years now. If they haven’t yet learned to live together in that time, will they ever?”

“I think that may be too dim a view, Rannveig,” Bennett said. “Your own United Europe is a case in point, and Eastern Europe, and the Arab World. Step by step, we make progress.”

“But will it be enough?”

He shrugged. “The only answer is that we’re here. We haven’t managed to blow ourselves up, quite. And tomorrow, in spite of everything, the Games begin again. That’s worth remembering, you know.”

“Cut,” the director said.

This one is a thought experiment. If you put people or animals in an environment where cold can kill them, they’ll adapt by becoming short and stocky, with small appendages less vulnerable to frostbite. Look at arctic foxes and Eskimos, for instance. If you put people or animals in an environment where heat can kill them, they’ll also adapt, becoming long and lanky, sometimes with large appendages to help radiate heat. Look at big-eared fennec foxes and the Tutsi people, for instance. What I wondered was, what happens if you put people—it has to be people this time—in an environment where stupidity can kill them?

JEROME CARVER GLANCED AT THE
ENRICO
Dandolo’s
west-facing view panel. It seemed awash with flame. “Spectacular sunset,” the big black man remarked.

“What else is new?” Patrice Boileau was the only other person in the tradeship’s control room. She did not bother looking up from the screen where she was checking a computer subroutine.

“You’re spoiled,” Carver said in mild reproof.

Patrice shrugged. “There’ll be another one along tomorrow. Maybe I won’t be busy then.”

She was likely right, Carver thought. With an oranger sun and thicker air than Earth’s, the whole world of Ephar ran to glorious nightfalls and early mornings. The towers and spires of the city of Shkenaz, silhouetted blackly against the glowing sky, added a touch almost of Arabian Nights fantasy to the scene.

As the trader watched, Ephar’s sun slid below the horizon. Full darkness, though, was still some time away. Carver had no trouble spying the figure dashing from Shkenaz’s walls toward the greenskin town outside or the mob at the fugitive’s heels. He groaned. “Oh, God, they’ve caught a late one.”

This time Patrice did join him in front of the view panel. Of themselves, her hands knotted into fists. “Maybe he’ll make it,” she said. “If he gets back to his own kind before they catch
him, they’ll let him go—it’s not the gods’ will that he die this time.”

“If,” Carver said grimly. Greenskin towns, by law, had to be more than three
gibyats
from the walls of a city. Say, a kilometer and a half, the trader thought. He wondered what misfortune had stranded the luckless runner inside Shkenaz so late. He must have known the risk he was taking.

Patrice stepped up the gain on the panel. The distance between the fleeing green centauroid and his blue-skinned pursuers seemed to swell, but that was only electronic illusion. “Run, damn you, run,” Carver muttered.

It was no good. A thrown stone made the greenskin stagger. That was all the fastest members of the mob needed to catch him and drag him down. Bodies thrashed, one of them not for long. After a while, realizing there was no sport left to be had, the troop began walking back to Shkenaz. Every so often a blue would spring into the air, in sheer high spirits.

Carver swung the west-facing camera to look at the greenskin village. Sure enough, two or three males stood near the boundary stone. They must have seen everything. They made no move to retrieve what little was left of their fellow, though. They would not till morning. If a blue patrol caught them coming out at night, the whole village might die to expiate their sin.

With a wordless sound, half fury and half frustration, Carver stabbed a finger at a button under the view panel. The panel went dark. “Three thousand years,” the trader said.

Patrice had never been on Ephar before. “Three thousand years of what?”

“That.” Carver waved to the blank view panel. “Maybe even longer, but three thousand years the locals have records for. The separate villages, the night ban … the murders.” In the six months since the
Enrico Dandolo
had landed, he had seen three now. That accorded fairly well with the data other ships visiting the Araite Empire had gathered.

“I don’t—want to believe that,” Patrice said.

“Believe it,” he told her. “The best part is, under the Code we can’t do a damn thing about it, either.”

Now she stared at him. “What? Why not?”

“No complainants.” Traders rarely meddled in the affairs of worlds without spaceflight. When they did, they needed ironclad documentation that a local group not only seemed oppressed but felt itself to be. Judging from a purely offplanet perspective was, sensibly in most cases, against the rules.

“I don’t believe it!” Patrice exclaimed.

Carver shook his head helplessly. “Believe it. It’s true. Never one, in the two hundred years since tradeships have been coming here. Not the blues, of course—why should they complain? But not the greenskins, either. They just shrug and say they are all guilty by inheritance and deserve whatever the blues hand out to them. They believe it. As long as they believe it, officially there’s nothing we can do.”