I turned to face them both, paying lip service to my doubts. “If Snowden’s been so squeaky clean all these years, couldn’t the meeting between him and Padzhev have been arranged so news of it could be leaked to you-just to make Snowden look bad?”
John Rarig laughed. “That’s good, Lieutenant. That was a common ploy. The problem is only I got news of it, and since I was already known as pro-Yuri and anti-Snowden, I would’ve been a poor choice to discredit him.”
“Gil Snowden was a small fish then,” Kidder added. “Georgi Padzhev wouldn’t have known or cared about him. Logically, a meeting between Snowden and Padzhev would have originated with Snowden, and handing Yuri to the Russians would’ve been the perfect way for Snowden to show good faith.”
It was all so neat and tidy, and so conveniently unprovable. But paranoia’s catching, and I was in need of answers. Still, I struggled.
“When I went down to DC,” I said, “I was almost killed by a man with a knife the night before I was to meet Gil Snowden-a supposed mugger. But Snowden seemed to know all about it the next morning, which was unlikely unless he’d had prior knowledge. If you two are right about him, then why did he try to take me out? I’m a nobody, and everything I knew was shared by my department. Why such a high-risk move?”
“Because that was merely plan A,” Rarig explained. “Since it failed, plan B’s the mess you’re in now.”
“The CIA is framing Joe?” Sammie burst out.
“Snowden is,” Kidder answered. “Whoever else might be involved is anyone’s guess. That’s why John and I are keeping such a low profile. Otherwise, we would have gone straight to the appropriate oversight committee and blown the whistle. As it is-and given what’s happened to you-we’re going to need more than a few hunches before we can show our heads and survive.”
“The reason you’ve been targeted,” Rarig said, “is because you have a reputation for doggedness. You don’t give up. Snowden’s a corporate animal. He knows that if you knock off an organization’s primary mover-or better still, discredit him-everyone else will end up milling around in circles.” He paused and then added, “Had any pressure lately to solve the ‘Boris’ case?”
“That’s why we’re here, wise guy,” Willy said.
“But you’re acting on your own, and at some risk to your jobs.”
“He’s right,” I said. “Nobody’s interested in Boris anymore. We’re the only ones who think he’s the key to all this.”
Willy pointed at our hosts. “Then we better hitch our wagon to someone else, ’cause these two’re getting ready to give you the screwing of a lifetime.”
There was an uncomfortable pause while we all considered what he meant. He shook his head at our stupidity. “Jesus Christ. We been sitting here for God knows how long, listening to a bunch of teary-eyed war stories, totally missing the obvious. What’ve we got so far? That some CIA bureaucrat came flying out of Washington to whack a Russian on Rarig’s front step so the beans wouldn’t be spilled about some supposed conversation that took place a quarter century ago-a conversation which, of course, only Rarig ever heard about, and which never led to anything. Then, once the body’s been discovered in a quarry Snowden couldn’t have possibly known about, he shows his hand by inviting you down to DC, where he tries to get you killed one day, and then shows off that he knew all about it the next. And finally, just in case our taste for bullshit is still running strong, we’re supposed to believe that, failing to kill you, he set up the world’s fanciest frame on the assumption that without our fearless leader, the rest of us are going to act like chickens with our heads cut off.” Willy stopped long enough to give us all an incredulous look. “Get real.”
I cupped my cheek in my hand, staring at the opposite wall. My entire life was disintegrating before my eyes, and every time I tried to grab hold of it, the opportunity was pulled away. Willy had just done it again, throwing water on the hopefulness I’d been trying to ignite.
Stubbornness replacing reason, I argued the point. “Okay,” I told him, “finish it up. If their story stinks, what replaces it?”
“Plain as the nose on your face,” he said. “Rarig’s brought in on the Yuri operation. He’s supposedly Yuri’s friend, the current Austrian field man, knows the lay of the land, the identities of his Soviet counterparts. He’s perfect. But Rarig’s getting long in the tooth, pissed off at the young bucks coming up like Snowden, and he sees a chance to make everything right. He’ll sell Yuri to Padzhev for a tidy Swiss bank deposit, get out of the Company come retirement, and have a time bomb against Snowden-courtesy of Padzhev-in case he ever needs it. He farts around for a few years, dissipating any suspicions, and finally cashes in some of the loot, buys a Vermont inn, and becomes the country squire.
“Only things go wrong. Padzhev’s old right-hand man shows up. He’s Mafia now, driven by greed instead of the old red flag, and he threatens to squeal unless he’s paid off. Rarig knocks him off, dumps him in the quarry, and sets up this whole frame against you to get both us and Snowden’s people off his scent. He didn’t count on that crummy tree, though, and on our tracing it back to him, so now he cooks up this cock-and-bull story because he knows if we swallow it, there’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t go charging into the CIA to bust one of their guys, and we ain’t going to be able to persuade anyone else to do it for us.”
It was, as I’d feared, as plausible as what Kidder and Rarig had told us; more so, in fact. The hopes I’d been stacking up against all logic-regardless of the consequences-collapsed.
As a cop, it was true that I’d become like a dog with a bone, making up in labor what I might have lacked in brains, depending on the evidence to light my way. Now I was at a loss. Nothing had clarity, and my growing inner turmoil was giving every hypothesis equal weight.
I rose to my feet one last time and walked to the door. “Willy’s right,” I said, feeling the pull of my own emotional exhaustion. “This is all just a bunch of stories. There’s no reality to it anymore.”
I opened the door and stepped out, seeing Sammie rise to join me, and hearing Willy exclaim paradoxically, “Jesus. You can’t quit now.”
Sammie caught up to me halfway across the lawn. “Joe, wait. What’re you doing?”
I turned to face her. “I’m tired, Sam, and I’ve run out of ideas. I don’t know what those two are up to-they’re probably crazier than rats in a can-and I don’t think they give a damn about us. Right now, I just want to go home. Maybe I’ll come up with something in the morning.”
“Willy was right about something else,” she said as I turned away. “You can’t quit.”
I stopped again and placed my fingertip against my temple. “I know that up here,” I admitted, “but right now I’m feeling like maybe there’re some puzzles that just can’t be worked out.”
She looked into my eyes. “You gotta keep at it.”
I didn’t share her optimism, but at this point, their faith in me was quite possibly the only life raft I had left.
“All right,” I finally said, fighting every instinct. “Get Willy out of there and we’ll try hashing this out on the way back home.”
Chapter 14
Willy, of course, didn't see a retreat as making any sense at all. “You gotta be shittin’ me,” he snarled back in the car. “We just clobbered ’em in there. Right now, they’re beating their brains out trying to keep alive. Jesus, if a bunch of dumb cops have ’em pegged, how far behind can the bad guys be?”
“What bad guys?” I asked, genuinely baffled that he’d left that conversation with anything that made sense. “Who do we choose from?”
He rubbed his forehead like a frustrated tutor. “Who cares? CIA, KGB, Russian Mafia-it doesn’t matter. Those two old fossils’re the lightning rod, and we just went from being part of the rod to being part of the lightning. The first shock was Boris. Whether Rarig iced him or not, his showing up was a sure sign to Rarig that his retirement days were over. Our hitting him tonight is the second shock. They have got to do something now. ’Cept if we cut ’em any slack, chances are they’ll get away with it. We need to watch ’em like hawks.”