Departures

by Harry Turtledove

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “So am I.I still think he’s innocent, but there’s evidence that points at him and none leading anywhere else, so what choice does Katayama have? I don’t blame you for finding the charge cubes, or anything childish like that. And that reminds me-you really are turning into a first-class troublemaker, aren’t you?”

  “Am I? How?”

  “Itzhak Zalman’s asked for political asylum.”

  “He has? My God, with whom? Why?”

  “With the Chinese, of all people; I think the Chinese coach must have been the first person he saw after he decided his cover was no good anymore.”

  “His cover?” Bennett floundered.

  Rannveig gave him an incredulous look.”You mean you don’t even know? He panicked when you told him there was a rumor about him being a member of the Second Irgun-because it happens he is a member of the Second Irgun.”

  “I will be damned,” Bennett said. That had never occurred to him. “I suppose Katayama’s grilling him, too.”

  “He’d like to, but the Chinese coach hasn’t let Zalman out of her suite; she’s up on her hind legs over diplomatic immunity.”

  “That won’t last, not in the face of murder,” Bennett predicted. He could understand the Chinese coach’s worry, though; no quarter was given on either side in the clandestine war between the Arab World and the exiled Israeli nationalists.

  Bennett dressed, then called Katayama. The security chief came on the line after a delay of a few minutes. His face was impassive, but there was something like warmth in his voice, and the fact that he was talking to Bennett in person showed how the broadcaster’s stock had risen. “Well, Mr. Bennett, you’ve helped me twice now. What can I do for you?”

  “What’s the story with Itzhak Zalman?”

  Katayama’s smile touched only his lips. “News travels quickly, I see. We have a recording in which he states he planned no violence, only a loss of face for the Arab World upon the disclosure of its slipshod security procedures. The value of this statement, of course, remains problematical. We would like to interrogate him in greater detail, but, ah-”

  “I’ve heard.” Bennett nodded. “What about Jablonski?”

  “About what you would expect. He denies any knowledge of the killings, says he was alone, asleep, and that if he were guilty he would have a better alibi.” A slight lift of one eyebrow showed how often Katayama had ran into that sort of infinitely regressing logic.

  Bennett thanked him and let him go; no point in using up his store of goodwill by keeping the Security chief away from his job for half an hour. There had been something else the broadcaster had been thinking of doing when Rannveig’s call drove it out of his head. He snapped his fingers in annoyance, trying to remember.

  He was on the point of giving up when it came back to him. He punched the chief maintenance engineer’s number.

  He did not get the head of the engineering department; that worthy had no reason to drop what she was doing on account of his call. The assistant he talked to was a blond young man whose Anzac-flavored English was amusingly different from Cavendish’s. He described the frost he and the Scotsman had seen.

  “We’ll check it out, mate, never fear. Don’t get browned off,” the engineer said cheerily.

  “What was that?” Bennett snapped, sensitive to anything that sounded like a racial slur. Then he recognized the idiom. “Nevermind,” he said lamely. “Would you call me back when you find out what it was?”

  “Will do, mate. G’day to you.” The screen went dead.

  Having done everything he could think of, Bennett settled down to wait for the return call. He checked the computer for a listing of entertainment programs and found on one of the stereovision channels a docudrama he hadn’t seen.

  The show was based on the works of a great twentieth-century author, and harrowingly realistic. Characters got killed off one after another; even the hero ended up in a cancer ward. The blizzards made Bennett feel colder than anything on Mimas had.

  He jumped at the chime of the phone. Switching off the stereovision was something of a relief. The Anzac engineer looked out of the screen at him. “Thanks for the call, mate. Bloody funny thing, that,” he said, unconsciously echoing Cavendish.

  “Is it dangerous?” Bennett asked. “That’s what I was worried about.”

  “Shouldn’t be. Can’t cipher out how the hell it got there, though-it would’ve taken enough outgassing to suck all the air from a set of rooms, but we’ve had no exploding guests, for which I’m bloody grateful, I can tell you.”

  “Whose rooms would it have been?”

  “I’ll have to check, mate. Let me feed the outside wall coordinates into the computer…”He turned away and fiddled with a keyboard for a minute or two. “Here we go,” he said, and gave Bennett the name.

  “Thanks,” said the broadcaster, he had to stop himself from adding the Anzac’s infectious “mate.” He broke the connection and went back to the stereovision docudrama with the nagging feeling he was missing something, maybe something important.

  “There!” He could have kissed the ugly, unshaven zek on the stereovision screen. He broke a fingernail punching Katayama’s phone code. The woman he talked to had been one of the Security people closest to him when he found the expended charge cube; she smiled and went to fetch her chief without any argument.

  This time Katayama took longer to come to the phone. When he finally did, he growled, “No matter what you think, Mr. Bennett, I am not at your beck and call. I am trying to do an important job, and your interference does not help. Now, and quickly, what is it?”

  “I beg your pardon,” Bennett said sincerely, “but I wonder if you might answer me one question.”

  The Security chief heard him out. “Yes, of course that’s still true,” he said, as if surprised anyone needed to ask. “I suspect it will be true two hundred fifty years from now, too; some things don’t change. Now, I wonder if you’d tell me what possible importance there is to that.” He framed the last sentence as a request, but it came out a command.

  Bennett explained. As he did, he half expected his jerry-built structure of logic and wild guesses to come crashing down on his head and leave him looking like an idiot. Katayama listened in silence, not showing what he was thinking.

  When Bennett had finished, the security chief ran a hand through his hair. “I take it you write thriller plots?” he said at last.

  “No.” Below the camera’s angle of vision, Bennett clenched his fists. This was what he had set himself up for, trying to help…

  But Katayama was saying, “I can find out quickly whether or not you are right-no small virtue, in my line of work.”

  “Will you call me back?” the broadcaster asked tensely. He knew he had had to do as he did, but he hated the idea of being excluded as soon as things came to a head. He still had too much of the old American reporter’s itch to be in on the action instead of just talking about it.

  Katayama, on the other hand, had no use for reporters unless they served his own purposes. “I make no promises, Mr. Bennett,” he said, and hung up.

  In.008g it was impossible to pace, but bouncing off the walls, floor, and ceiling, as Rannveig had in the studio, was not the worst way to get rid of tension. Bennett had worked up a good sweat by the time the phone chimed again. “Hello?” he panted.

  His disheveled appearance managed to wring a blink out of Katayama. “What have you been doing?” the Security chief asked, then said at once, “Never mind; I am not interested in knowing. I have called to tell you what you are going to do. Listen carefully.”

  Bennett and Rannveig took their places in the IBC studio. When the red light on the camera flashed on, Bennett began, “A very pleasant good day to you out there, wherever you may be. There have been a number of important developments since we spoke with you last.”

  “That’s right, Bill,” Rannveig said. “We expect this to be the last day of shortened coverage of the games. Th
e jumping should resume tomorrow.”

  “The arrest of Jozef Jablonski has lifted a great burden of fear from everyone’s shoulders,” Bennett agreed. Rannveig nodded, a little glumly; Bennett went on, ”The evidence against Jablonski is overwhelming. The site from which the killer fired from ambush has been discovered, and the discarded charge cubes found there were manufactured in Eastern Europe. It is most unlikely that anyone from another country would have had such an obscure brand in his or her possession.”

  “Moreover, Jablonski cannot account for his whereabouts at the time of the murders,” Rannveig said.”He is currently being subjected to intensive interrogation, and his confession is expected shortly by Major Katayama.”

  Bennett said, “As you can imagine, ladies and gentlemen, the people most relieved are the athletes themselves. For some of their reaction, let’s go to Angus Cavendish.”

  “Thank you, Bill,” the Scotsman said. As before, he was sitting at the bar-getting to be quite a fixture there, Bennett thought. Almost everybody there was watching the stereovision set in a corner of the room, and thus at the moment watching themselves watching themselves. For any news more reliable than rumor, they depended on the IBC broadcasts as much as Earth did.

  Cavendish alluded to that point: “I’d think almost all the athletes on Mimas are tuned to us now. Along with the set here, there’s another in the weight room, and of course in all the suites.”

  “Who’s that with you, Angus?” Rannveig said.

  “Marge Olbert, the first-round women’s leader. Tell me, Mademoiselle Olbert, what are your feelings now that an arrest has been made?”

  “I am, how does one say it, full of relief,” she replied in halting French.

  “Eager to jump again, are you?”

  “But yes, naturally, and I hope to do well, it could be to win a medal.” Her sudden and unexpected smile transformed a rather plain face into a pretty one. “And if I do, at the least they will know what flag to fly for me when I am on the platform of the winners. For Monsieur Zalman this is not true, is it not so?”

  “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,” Rannveig said when the show came back to the IBC studio. “The clich?s were invented in the twentieth century, and they’ve been repeated ever since.”

  “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 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 e
xclamation: “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.”