The Disposable Man (24 page)

“But that was fine with him. He even asked me once, ‘What did you expect?’ Knowing everything that was going to happen to him, at least theoretically, he still went ahead. And the kicker is, he was right. After it was all over and I’d gotten him into Middlebury, it was like he’d arrived in Shangri-la. I used to kid him about campus politics—all those academics trying to nail each other’s hide to the wall. He’d just laugh. It meant nothing to him.”

“What about his family?” I asked.

“His wife didn’t suffer much. She was a survivor and remarried well. His son was old enough when he left to take it in stride. He’s in Russia still and apparently doing fine.”

“Sounds like you became his family, in a way.”

“Well, I guess there’s always a bonding between defector and case officer. They even warn you about it. But when they treated him so badly and he bore them no grudge, something snapped inside me. Besides Olivia Kidder, I’d say Lew’s the best friend I ever had.”

I let a long reflective silence follow before rephrasing my original question, “So if it is Padzhev who’s after him now, what’s the motivation?”

“I said it
might
be Padzhev. And I don’t know why. Padzhev took the defection hard. It was a personal failure, and it stopped his climb within the organization. I sometimes thought one aspect of the Yuri kidnapping was that since I’d been Yuri’s case officer, snatching him would give me a black eye in return. In the long run, though, my career ended because I finally pulled the plug, not because of Georgi Padzhev.”

“But it was connected, wasn’t it?”

He frowned dismissively. “Vaguely. Things had been building to a head. The deal with Lew had left a bad taste, which didn’t improve with time, but I wasn’t as close with Yuri. His disappearance hurt mostly because of the stupidity leading up to and following it. It revealed how out of sync I’d become with the people I was working with. It took me years before I actually retired.”

“Must’ve been weird finding Antonov under that tree—all those memories flooding back,” I said, trying to take advantage of the conversation’s confessional tone.

But he saw me coming. “I never said I found him.”

His cautious reaction hit me with unexpected force. I slammed on the brakes, put the car into a skid, and pulled over to the edge of the road. “You’re something else, you know that?” I yelled at him, feeling days of repressed anger finally exploding. “You go blabbing on about your walk-on-water buddy ’cause of his high moral tone, and then you cover your ass just like Snowden would. You’re the one guy out of all of us who’s risking nothing so far. My people have stuck their necks out on your say-so; I’m looking at jail time ’cause I decided to trust you; even Olivia, I bet, has put her job on the line for you. And you sit there playing hide-’n’-seek.”

I grabbed the door and threw it open, almost losing it to a passing car, whose windy vortex blew around inside the passenger compartment. “Well,
fuck
you,” I said, getting out and shouting back across the seat at him. “I’ve been dicked around by every bastard I’ve met so far, and I’m goddamned sick and tired of it. All that crap you fed us about turning the inn into a place for people to unload and to share. What a crock. You’re as self-serving as all the jerks you’ve just been dumping on for the last half hour.”

I slammed the door and walked to the back of the car, staring off at the distant hills, fighting to control my breathing. Never before had I lost it so completely—not even when Gail had been raped. I prided myself on keeping cool, keeping my emotional cards out of sight, maintaining a professional stance so that progress could take place, unimpeded by any histrionics from me.

And now I was standing by the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere, a warrant about to be issued for my arrest, having thrown the temper tantrum of a lifetime.

And I’d been worried about Rarig at the wheel.

He got out tentatively and took a couple of steps in my direction. “You okay?” he asked, his voice barely audible over the slight breeze.

I turned toward him, much calmer, actually feeling pretty good. “I’m in better shape than you are.”

He nodded. “That’s probably true. It was right, what you said.”

“That you’re a self-serving jerk?”

He looked slightly confused. “I guess. I meant about finding Antonov.”

“And you’re the one who dumped him in the quarry?”

He nodded. “I wanted to see what would happen—who might show himself next. I hadn’t intended that the body be found. Just that someone might come looking. That’s why I took such pains—wrapping him up in a tarp I later burned, ditching him in the boondocks. Lucky he was so small and light. I would’ve buried him if I’d had the time.”

“So you put the finger on Snowden just to stir us up.”

“No. He may’ve been Antonov’s killer. I don’t know why, but I don’t know why not, either.” He spread his hands to both sides. “I honestly can’t tell you what’s going on here, Lieutenant, but my friend is in danger. I’ve been out of things a long time. Alliances shift. I don’t know who the players are anymore—who to trust. I’m sorry I upset you. I guess old habits are hard to break, especially when you’re under pressure.”

Mollified, knowing I really didn’t have any choice but to follow the course I’d set, I returned to the car and got back behind the wheel. Rarig slid in beside me.

I didn’t immediately start driving, however. I faced him instead and asked him point-blank, “You said you had the evidence to clear me. That was baloney, too, wasn’t it?”

“I think the brooch was planted in your coat the night before the jewelry store window was broken—by a black bag crew who entered your home without your knowing it.”

I just stared at him. He stared at his hands. “But I don’t know that for a fact, and I don’t know who might’ve done it.”

I let that sink in, grateful my motivation for being here hadn’t hinged on that detail alone. Then I put the car into gear and pulled out. “Well,” I finally said, “at least that’s a start.”

MIDDLEBURY IS AMONG THE MOST PICTURESQUE,
active, well-situated small towns in Vermont. Located halfway between Rutland and Burlington, on the state’s western slope, it benefits from the twin charms of the rocky, tree-choked, looming Green Mountains on one side, and the gently rolling, fertile farmland of the Champlain Valley on the other.

With a quick glance at a map, one is hard put to even find Middlebury, dominated as it is by its urban neighbors, not to mention Montpelier beyond the peaks to the northeast. But closer scrutiny reveals something of its past importance. Not only does almost every longitudinal road converge for a moment in Middlebury, but the valley’s sole railroad also cuts right through it. In odd contrast to today, Middlebury in 1820 was one of the largest towns in Vermont, a center of education, industry, transportation, and architecture.

It remains in many ways reminiscent of its heyday, filled with mansions, church steeples, and elegant greens. It also suffers for those same reasons. As a crossroads, it is pure bedlam, like an antique spring at the heart of a computer. Buses, trucks, trains, cars, recreational vehicles, and the thousands of people using them converge in a tangle of narrow, poorly designed, curvilinear roads contrary enough to drive a lab rat nuts. The irony is that around World War One, Joseph Battell, a major local benefactor, and the state’s single largest landowner, declared the newfangled automobile such a menace that he tried to ban it from his road—the Middlebury Gap—which is now one of Vermont’s chief tourist attractions during leaf-peeping season.

Today, as Rarig had earlier implied, the town owes its fame—and much of its commercial success—to the college named after it, created in 1800 as an alternative to the “ungodly” University of Vermont established by Ira Allen—brother of the often-drunk leader of the Green Mountain Boys.

Typical of most academic towns, however, this relationship is a distinct mixed blessing. The college is wealthy, tax-exempt, and archly proprietary. Owner of vast amounts of real estate, it pays little cash to the town while freely using its tax-fed infrastructure. Like a land-rich lord of yore, it sits atop a pristine hill, crowned with an assortment of architectural monuments—both stately and absurd—issuing statements either arrogant or beleaguered, and providing enough heated debate to keep the town in a perpetual lather.

None of this is evident to anyone passing through, of course, except perhaps the traffic problems. As Rarig and I entered the village’s vehicular Gordian knot from the south, I was impressed as always by Middlebury’s sheer sense of vigor. If internecine squabbling played a part in that, it was nevertheless a vital sign and, in this case, a healthy one.

I wended our way through the various curves opposite the stately Middlebury Inn, down into the crowded, bustling village proper, across the meandering Otter Creek, and up the opposite slope onto the broader, more open, carefully manicured campus. To the gritty, low-built, red brick of downtown, the college was a striking contrast, marked largely by broad swaths of color—green grass, broad, black avenues, and an imposing number of fortress-sized, light-gray stone buildings. If the traditional vision of academe was one of isolated hilltop serenity, this school fit the bill.

The image was enhanced, in addition, by there being very few people within sight.

I pulled up opposite one of the large buildings and looked around.

“What’s wrong?” Rarig asked.

“This town just had a drive-by shooting, which means the local PD must be bristling right now. Why haven’t we seen any sign of that, and why’s the campus look so empty?”

“I don’t know about the cops, but the administration probably issued an advisory to keep under cover. Lew says they’ve done that in the past when there’s been some controversy. They tend to be a little hysterical sometimes.”

“Can’t say I blame ’em this time—people getting shot on the street. Where’s the Geonomics Center?”

He pointed straight ahead. I noticed his hand was trembling slightly. “That’s the Russian/U.S. think tank I told you about. It’s a block or two down and to the left—Hillcrest Avenue. Why?”

“So we can avoid it. That’s where most of the police’ll be right now, collecting evidence. Where’s that priest hole you told me about?”

“Seymour Street, near the railroad tracks. Turn around, go back across the river, take the first left and go up about a quarter mile.”

I followed his directions, ending up in a distinctly poorer section of town, nevertheless lined by a row of tidy houses, however worn and in need of paint. Rarig guided me to the driveway of one of them, where we ended up facing an attached garage with an apartment perched on top of it.

He thrust his chin straight ahead. “Up there.”

I glanced at the house beside us. “The owners know about it?”

“I’m the owners. I rent it out through a cover. They only know the apartment is used once in a blue moon by a guy who likes his privacy.”

Rarig got out of the car, looked around nervously, and headed for the back of the garage. I followed him to where a narrow outside staircase led up to the second floor. The tension I’d noticed on the drive up was still fueling him like shoveled coal. I began to wonder about some of the ulterior reasons he might’ve had for wanting me along.

“It wouldn’t matter anyway,” he explained. “Even if someone did start nosing around. The stairs are wired to a silent alarm, and the door is armored. Lew would know somebody was coming. There’s also an escape route, like a laundry chute, that he can use in an emergency. It ends up in the basement of the house, near the bulkhead on the far side.”

We reached the top, where Rarig extracted an exotic magnetic key from his pocket. He fitted it not into the keyhole mounted under the knob of the peeling wooden door, but into what looked like a knothole near the hinges. The door swung open the wrong way, and we stepped into a small antechamber equipped with a second door. Rarig closed the one to our backs. There was a loud mechanical click from in front of us. “Shutting the first frees up one of the locks of this one,” Rarig told me. He pounded on the door with his fist. “Lew? It’s John Rarig.”

There was dead silence from the other side. Rarig’s shoulders slumped. “I was afraid of this.”

He fitted another, conventional key to the lock and led us into the apartment. I noticed as I passed the edge of the second door that it was equipped with some sort of electronic sensor.

The place was small, dark, tidy, and airless. It was also as empty and as still as a tomb. Rarig stood in its middle, his hands slack by his sides, looking around him like a homeowner whose house had just burned to the ground.

He shook his head. “God damn it,” he said. “I knew he was in trouble.”

I checked the rest of the place quickly, looking into the bathroom and glancing under the twin bed. It all looked as ready for occupancy as a fresh motel room, except for the fine layer of dust over everything.

“Show me where he lives,” I told Rarig.

“That’s the last place he’d be.”

“It’s all we got.”

Reluctantly, he pulled himself away, closing both doors neatly, as if for future use.

I led the way back to the car, speaking over my shoulder. “He might be okay,” I tried to sound upbeat. “He could’ve lost his keys and had to hole up somewhere else. Didn’t you two have a plan for getting in touch in case something went wrong?”

Rarig glanced up from watching the ground before him. “He’s supposed to leave a coded message on my phone ma—”

His voice trailed off. I followed his blank stare to the end of the driveway, where a car had just slowed to a stop. My whole body tensed, recognizing the universal blandness of an unmarked police vehicle.

The driver, surprisingly casual, swung out and approached us. He was wearing dark glasses, but I recognized him immediately as Jimmy Zarrillo, Middlebury’s sole detective. As luck would have it, outside of the chief, Zarrillo was the only man in the entire department I knew.

“Hey, Jimmy,” I spoke first, hoping against probability that this was purely a coincidence. “How’re you doin’?”