“Yes. That is possible. Sergei was not a henchman, as you say. He and Georgi were like brothers.”
“So John told me,” I said. “But John hiding the body confused things enough that Padzhev held back, unsure what was happening. In the meantime, we circulated Antonov’s picture in the papers, which stimulated you to call John, which is how Padzhev’s enemies located you. It’s also why they probably framed me, to give themselves some breathing room. But they didn’t kill you. They still needed bait to get Padzhev into the open, to show him that whoever killed Antonov was still in Vermont. Knowing Padzhev, might that work?”
“I think so,” Rarig agreed. “Padzhev’s a ruthless, ambitious man. One of the things Olivia told me last night was that he’s fighting for his life right now, trying to hold off competitors. It’s purely theoretical, but if he let Antonov’s murder go unavenged, it could be used as a sign of weakness that would unite the opposition against him.”
“I would agree with that,” Corbin-Teich said. “The Georgi Padzhev I knew would never allow such a transgression. It was what made him so powerful in our organization.”
“And why he went to such lengths to snatch Yuri,” Rarig finished.
“So the people behind all this,” I concluded, “are Padzhev’s competitors from Russia, choosing the time and place for a showdown far from Padzhev’s home base.”
“It fits,” Rarig said, “except for Snowden. Where’s he belong?”
“You actually believe he killed Antonov?” I asked impatiently. “I thought that was just to get me all bent out of shape.”
Rarig remained stubborn. “Then who tried to have you knocked off in Washington?”
My head was already hurting, and the thought of this extra complication pushed me away from the entire subject. “I don’t give a damn anymore, at least not right now. Let’s just get out of Middlebury so we can figure out what to do next.”
“I would like that very much,” Corbin-Teich said with obvious relief.
I took his elbow and guided him gently toward the door we’d entered. “Lead the way, then. The car’s in the lower parking lot, away from the field houses.”
We began traveling the quiet, darkened corridors and staircases like trespassers, pausing furtively to look around, keeping our voices low and our footsteps silent. In the dim light, I cast a glance at Lew Corbin-Teich, studying what I could see under what turned out to be masses of snow-white hair. The plastic surgery had obviously been of high quality, although not knowing the “before,” I was hard pressed to judge the “after.” Nevertheless, there was a stillness to his features, an absence of mobility that suggested a mask. Watching it, I couldn’t help feeling his face embodied everything that had happened to me since discovering “Boris’s” body. Nothing had turned out as it had at first appeared, and none of the subsequent explanations had been any more real than Corbin-Teich’s remodeled appearance. Given what I’d been through these last few days, I couldn’t help wondering how he’d survived half a lifetime of it.
Our silent progress stood us in good stead. Just shy of the building’s entrance, we rounded a corner and saw two men in dark clothing loitering in the lobby, one of them with his eyes glued to the scenery beyond the plate-glass door.
We backtracked quickly but not before the other one saw us.
“Stop,” he shouted, as Corbin-Teich grabbed my sleeve and pulled me back along the wall. Rarig was ahead of us, heading for a door to the left. I was about to follow when Lew yanked on me again. “No, this is better.”
We slipped through a door on the right and vanished as into an absolute vacuum. From the comparative light of the hallway, we were now in total blackness.
Lew continued pulling at me, keeping me off balance. “This way. Follow me.”
I sensed from how his voice vanished into thin air that we were in a huge room, probably another of the theaters, but this realization was of no use whatsoever as I stumbled down a sloping aisle, sightless and clumsy until falling down outright, brought low by a cluster of metal chairs that had been left in our path.
Corbin-Teich fell with me in a tangle, smacking my hand against one of the chair backs and sending the gun I’d just unholstered skittering across the carpeting.
Simultaneously, the door we’d used flew open, outlining our pursuer in silhouette, a pistol in his hand. Without thought, I reached for the front of Lew’s jacket as he squirmed on top of me, yanked out the laser pointer he’d clipped there earlier, and pointed it at our pursuer. The tiny red dot stuck to his chest like an angry insect.
“Freeze,” I yelled, disentangling myself.
I saw the man’s head duck down to look at the red dot, misinterpreting it, I hoped, for an infrared gun sight.
“That’s right,” I said. “Face down on the floor.”
I saw him following my instructions as the door slowly swung to behind him. Before the light vanished, however, I was close enough for the laser alone to supply a poor substitute.
“Slide your gun over here.”
He did as he was told. I picked it up, pocketed the pointer, put my knee into the small of his back and his gun to the nape of his neck, and frisked him for more weapons. I retrieved a dagger from a sheath strapped to his lower calf. I then dragged him over to the edge of the aisle, placed his hands between the legs of one of the bolted-down row seats, and snapped my handcuffs around his wrists.
I returned the pointer to Lew and asked him to search for my own gun.
“Where’s your buddy?” I asked my captive, twisting one of his thumbs.
His voice was understandably tight. It, too, was heavily accented. “We help you.”
“Right.” I twisted a little harder, making him wince. “Answer the question.”
He tried to wriggle away. “No English good.”
“You Russian?”
“Yes, yes. Russian.”
Lew Corbin-Teich was back, crouching by my side, my gun in his hand.
“Ask him who he is,” I told him.
Corbin-Teich shot out a short, guttural question, which the other man answered with obvious relief.
“He says he works for Padzhev,” Corbin-Teich explained. “That they were sent here to protect me from Edvard Kyrov.”
“Who’s he?”
Corbin-Teich rapidly asked a couple more questions and then translated. “He says Kyrov is an old rival of Padzhev. That he is a very bad man-a longtime criminal, even back to the old days.”
The clear sound of a gunshot reverberated out in the hallway. I quickly moved to the door, opened it a crack, and squinted into the dim light. Rarig was standing over the body of the second man, having obviously doubled back from the door he’d used, to reemerge into the corridor behind his follower. It seemed clear he’d shot him in the back.
“Drag him in here,” I told him.
He grabbed the man’s feet and pulled him toward me. There was no blood on the carpeting.
After he’d passed by, I propped the door half-open so we could see what we were doing. “You just killed him, no questions asked?”
Rarig looked at me angrily. “I’m seventy-five years old, for Christ’s sake. I’m not going to play around with some bastard like this. I just hit him in the back of the head. It was his gun that went off. Not mine.”
I checked the body and found a pulse, slow but steady. There was no saying how bad an injury he’d suffered, though. Reluctantly, I undid half of the first man’s handcuffs, and chained him to his buddy. “This one says they were sent by Padzhev to protect Lew-from someone named Edvard Kyrov. You ever hear of him?”
“Only by reputation. He’s a crook-a black marketeer.”
“He may be the one behind all this.”