The third man in, p.24
The Third Man In, page 24
I had him onside, though he kept the gun trained on me.
A minute before I would have settled for just getting out of the country, making sure that my daughter was safe, leaving Dmitrov behind to play out his career in the KHL, and letting Dubinin go on his merry way. But I took the temperature of the room and it seemed to have dropped way down. It wasn’t that I had a sympathetic audience so much as a motivated buyer. So, as is my nature, I pressed my luck. I’m the guy who always wants it all, even though—or maybe because—I’ve often had to settle for nothing at all.
Testimony under oath ended there. I improvised a fiction, a believable one. I told the guy across the room that our team intended to give Dubinin a reward if he got Dmitrov out of Russia: a full-time job at a hockey school in California. I even acted pissed about it, tossing off that it was “not my decision.” I told him that Dubinin had raised the possibility that he might have to assume another identity, use falsified papers, to get out of Russia and our owner was sympathetic. I told him that our owner’s software company had a bunch of government contracts in the U.S. and had friends and influence with the State Department and the CIA. The fiction borrowed some facts and what wasn’t true at least had the ring of truth. All together it was plausible and I had an audience willing to buy it.
I stopped talking. I let him process it. He doubled back.
“What about the drugs he gives to the players?”
I told him that I had nothing to do with steroids that he supplied to Belov and Dmitrov, that I wouldn’t do anything to a player that I wouldn’t do to my own son.
“You know what Dubinin gave these to the players Belov and Dmitrov?” he asked.
I had to dance carefully here. I didn’t want to tip him off to the fact that I had been in contact with Dmitrov. I didn’t want to implicate Suk, not while he was still due millions, not while he still might have offers to play in Russia the next season.
“I saw Dubinin’s records…”
It was, in fact, Polo who saw the email receipts from PayPal in Dubinin’s team account.
“…Dubinin was making regular purchases, big ones, from a drug manufacturer in Holland…”
“You saw them because he gave you them as expenses and your team paid for them,” he said.
“No, the team would never sign off on something like that because of the liability. I suspect you know that L.A. didn’t pay for them because you’ve already looked at his bank account item by item.”
“Go on,” he said.
“I know that he was going to Magnitogorsk on business that had nothing to do with the team.”
“How do you know this?”
Again, I made a calculated reach not to implicate Suk. “Belov told me,” I said. “I had been in contact with him before I came to Moscow. Belov didn’t tell me about the drugs. Not directly. But he did say he was doing ‘Dubinin’s program.’ You know Dubinin was using testosterone himself, right? Yeah, you probably know that.”
My uninvited guest was unresponsive. He stuck to his protocol, at least on this count.
“Dubinin has some friends and others who do not like him,” he said. “Dubinin had plans to leave Russia. A flight out of Russia at the end of the week. Did you know this?”
Know it? I wrote the story. I didn’t claim authorship. I just nodded my head in the affirmative, seeming like a co-conspirator dragged in against my will.
“He was given state approval. He told us it was for one reason. He has done much work for our programs, yes, getting from other countries materials to support athletes…”
“Like the way he supported Belov,” I said, speaking out of turn but it was just a gut reaction. I managed to get away with it.
“This is true. This is, how you say, facts of your life. Here and everywhere, many games. There were plans for him to do this for our country in work from…”
“Vienna,” I said helpfully.
“You know this?”
“Yes, with a secretary and an assumed identity, I guess. Lucky him. Galvin has a nice reward waiting for him in an account there.”
After that, my uninvited guest effectively confirmed the details by brushing over some, ignoring others completely, and challenging not a word I had spoken.
“Perhaps he goes with another. He was a man some trust and many don’t. I know that he’s going back to Lubyanka for Tuesday in the morning. He gets his papers there. I know who is in charge of the department for papers. He does this for Dubinin, just for Dubinin. Do you understand?”
I understood. I understood he was spelling out that Dubinin had gone down back channels to get the paperwork and clearances to work out of the country. I understood that not everyone was looped in on his plan and maybe many might not have known that it wasn’t Dubinin who was incinerated and atomized in his driveway. I understood the Uninvited Guest in My Room and I were of the same mind about Dubinin. I would have bet that he wasn’t alone at the FSB. I would have bet more were coming around to our way of thinking.
I had set it up but only found out much later that my Confederate of Necessity had sold it as relentlessly as a late-night infomercial pitchman. I wasn’t surprised. He was, after all, a professional. Karl Beck gave the performance of his life. With the straightest face in his repertoire, Beck sold a bill of goods to his fixer the way he sold bills of goods to so many players and teams. Only an hour after our conversation at the Ritz-Carlton, Beck feigned a phone call to Dubinin, a long, detailed conversation that he made sure the spy in his own ranks overheard. He spelled it all out: arrangements to meet in Vienna, accounts to transfer money to, U.S. citizenship process, everything. And then Beck trashed his telephone so there’d be no number for the FSB boys to chase down. For good measure Beck used the phone in his room to place a legitimate call, this one to Ilya “The Real Deal-ya” Pushkin, and told him that the deal for Dmitrov was done thanks to Dubinin’s handiwork, although he left out the part about Dubinin’s continued existence. Following instructions that I had Ivan pass on to him, Marks whispered in the ear of Jiri Suk and soon enough arenas were humming with rumours about the departure of Dmitrov, all thanks to Dubinin. And, yeah, there had been a windfall from Galvin awaiting Dubinin in an unnumbered account, so tragic that it would have to go unclaimed.
I had scattered the seeds of doubt far and wide, and in my uninvited guest I had found a gardener who was ready to water them and allow them to sprout. Dubinin was no flower. Dubinin was a weed. He had to be yanked out by the root.
The man across the room put his gun back in his holster. I would never get his name but I have awakened in a cold sweat a few times when he has made cameo appearances in my worst nightmares.
He threw my passport on the bed. He had pulled it at the front desk in case I had any sort of getaway in mind.
“You will be able to use these. I make phone calls.”
I wasn’t in a position to ask for favours, but I figured he’d already done me one by letting me keep breathing. I didn’t see the harm in trying.
“Look, my daughter is getting threatening calls and my IT guy in Toronto is under surveillance, for no good reason,” I said. “Whatever happens here, I don’t know. If it’s me, fine, I can handle it. Call off the dogs, okay?”
“What is ‘dogs’?”
“Leave the others out of it. They have nothing to do with any of this.”
He gave a shrug.
“You have a daughter?” I said.
He smirked. He looked out through the curtains out onto the street. Then he caught me off guard.
“This is something that Dubinin has done, without us,” he said. “This is something I cannot help. Dubinin has men in America. His own…what is the word?”
“Operatives…,” I said, filling in the blank like I was at a game show where first prize was my daughter’s safety.
“This is the word. They work for him…for other agents. They are not our friends.”
“Friends” wasn’t a word I expected him to drop in the conversation but that didn’t make an impression on me until well after the fact. I was too busy thinking that Dubinin’s operatives were still out there with Lanny’s name on their to-do list.
He laid down the flashlight and reached into his pocket and pulled out a small plastic sleeve. He kept his index finger on the trigger and held the sleeve in his two end digits while breaking the seal with his left hand. If his gun had had a hair-trigger mechanism, he would have splattered me into the upholstery.
“Do as I say,” he said. “I will put this here…”
“This” was a wire. “Here” was under the underside of the desk beside the window.
“Say nothing. I will leave the room. You will stand here for five minutes and then leave. Go to lobby and sit. Do not speak to anybody. Thirty minutes. When you come to your room again, understand that you will be heard. Everything. At night, put on your television but not the lights. In the bedroom. In the bathroom. I have put poison, very strong, on these…”
He pointed to the bulb in the light at the side of the bed.
“When it is hot, it is gas and you breathe and you die. You understand?”
Easy-to-follow instructions, I didn’t have to write them down.
19
When I did finally go back into my room a half hour later, I held my breath until I opened the two windows as wide as I could. A gale-force blast of frigid air knocked me reeling. I put on my hat and gloves. Only after I turned on the TV did it occur to me that he might have set up an even more creative way of snuffing me, a gadget activated or toxin released when the flat screen powered up.
At first I thought my surprise guest had been sent to ice me. That didn’t fit, though. In a hotel fully booked with foreign business travellers, a gun would have been too messy and conspicuous, even with a silencer. No, the gun was just backup. Even if it was going to be gas rising from a hot bulb or poison lacing my toothbrush, the setting didn’t make sense. It was too public. I tried to piece it together. He had been sent to wire the room. Made sense. He used the pretext of wiring my room to get an exclusive audience with me. Made more sense. He wanted answers that he didn’t want the others to hear. Fits. He wanted to ask questions that, asked in the presence of his peers, would tip them off to his hate for Dubinin and his own agenda. Fits much better.
My loose chatter on the TV feed back to L.A., Beck’s selling a bad rumour, and Marks’s watering the grapevine probably hadn’t convinced the boys at Lubyanka that Dubinin was double-crossing them. Convince would have been an awfully high bar to clear. I had done enough to make them wonder, though, and they were getting reports from the field that had to make them curious. For my uninvited guest the chatter would have been all of the confirmation his suspicions needed. He was primed to believe the worst. He made it clear that he wouldn’t have minded sticking Dubinin with the Queen of Spades in a game of Hearts. Or anybody sticking him, for that matter. He understood payback and, what’s more, anticipated Dubinin getting a dose of it. He all but authorized it. That was all I needed.
Later I left the room and went down to the lobby to warm up. I grabbed a coffee and picked up the house phone. Marks was in his room. I told him to meet me at the bar in twenty minutes. When he came downstairs, on time, I was already set to leave. He sat opposite me and I slid him notes written on a napkin. Among other things I gave him instructions to call the Canadian Embassy and report me missing if he didn’t hear from me by eight the next morning. I also told him that he should call Parry and Martyn at the British Embassy.
“What’s up?” he asked.
He didn’t really want to know.
“I’ll catch you later,” I said. “Hopefully.”
He read the napkin before I hit the door, used it to wipe up coffee he spilled, and then balled it for the trash. His expression was All Hope Is Lost. I represented his best chance at having a job in the league next winter, and my note could only have been more chilling if I had closed it with Goodbye Cruel World.
20
I explained to him that I needed to find the scout who had worked for me. He asked the scout’s name. He recognized it as that of the scout blown up in his driveway.
“Is body you must find?” young Prokorov asked.
I told him that Dubinin’s car was blown up in his driveway but he wasn’t in it. I told him Dubinin was quite alive and I had seen him at Lubyanka Station, at dawn. I didn’t bother telling the kid about the scrap I had with Dubinin on the sidewalk. I didn’t want to scare him off.
Prokorov mulled it over. Meanwhile, a fat middle-aged woman was standing on the far side of the store, picking up frames and looking to see if she was being watched. She looked like she didn’t have two rubles to spare. Her grubby, frayed coat was open just enough that a few frames could be slid down the front in a blink. Young Prokorov didn’t take his eyes off her and didn’t blink while he opened negotiations with me.
“I can help you but it is time and time is…”
“Money, I know, we stole that saying from the Russians.”
Silence hung there. The woman picked up a frame and he sharpened the focus.
“But is difficult to find this man. Not for sure…”
“I’m not asking you to find him. I need help to find someone else who can help me find him, Mikhail Markov.”
I told him about Markov’s fifteen minutes of fame back in the ’90s and I told him about the tip that Lee Siddon had passed along. I didn’t volunteer the fact that I considered the tip either unreliable or complete fiction. Hell, I didn’t believe half of the original story, figured it was some sort of con or prank. No matter. It was the only lead I had to work with.
Prokorov took his eyes off his lone customer just for a second and I spotted her about to slip a metal 8”-by-10” frame down the front of her coat. I coughed loudly. She re-racked it with disgust. She was a rank amateur shoplifter.
“If you can find this Digger guy I can give you a hundred dollars U.S.,” I said.
He took this offer as an excuse to more closely scrutinize the woman, who beat a casual retreat out the door. He wanted to avoid eye contact with me so I couldn’t read how much a C note would have meant to him.
I thought the offer was either generous or overly generous.
“You know how much a hundred bucks is? It’s more than you make in a month, I’ll bet.”
“Three hundred,” he said. “You’re looking for these men. You work for a team that gives millions to players, yes? You have hundreds for me if you want to pay players millions. It is big city, much work to find one person.”
Checkmate.
“Fifty to start looking, $250 to find Markov. And no bullshit. Don’t try to pass off one of your friends. I have pictures to work from.”
“Why you come to me? Why not others?”
I had my reasons. I didn’t have a lot of options. Ivan had stood in a lot longer than he wanted. He was going to the sidelines for now. Other Russians? I was right out of them. I needed a Russian to handle language and to do searches online. Youth and tech savvy were definite assets. I needed someone who wasn’t beholden to authority, someone who wasn’t buying into Putin’s new century. Most of all, I needed someone who wouldn’t be thought of as threatening.
Prokorov fit the bill on every count. He was a tech nerd who dreamed about being John McClane. The assignment would fulfill that dream in spirit sans the burning skyscraper. And Muscovites would underrate Prokorov because of the piercings, tattoos, and leather. Upright Muscovites of the professional class would call him bezdel’nik, slacker, the last guy to raise suspicions. From Kerouac on, the Hipster is the one taken least seriously by serious people.
I had these reasons but I kept them to myself.
“I like you,” I said, true as far as it went.
He laughed.
“You can show me man, yes?”
“Yes.” And I did. I found the CNN piece on the Digger on YouTube. I Google-searched Markov and pulled up photos from a defunct website.
“These are old, yes?”
“Yes, more than ten years. You should make copies in case we need to show them to people.”
He complied wordlessly. In a couple of minutes he had full-colour printouts.
“These are three hundred rubles.” I didn’t hide my indignation that they weren’t included in the $300 package I had signed on for. I didn’t voice it, though. Peeling off the bills I felt less guilty about not filling him in about the potential dangers involved in the search, namely Dubinin’s ties to the FSB.
Prokorov was likewise in the dark about the Digger’s story. He barely remembered Yeltsin’s New Year’s Eve speech. His parents had sent him to bed early that night. Yeltsin’s Russia was the country that he saw in old photographs he reproduced, touched up, and framed. The Digger’s Great Underground Adventure was history airbrushed from memory. I only gave the kid the bare bones of Markov’s story and told him I had a hunch that Dubinin was hiding out down in the Metro. I played dumb. Easy to do.
So Prokorov either didn’t assume that the FSB had rattled the Digger’s cage or guessed as much but didn’t care at the price he quoted. He set straight to work. He started his search by looking through directories, like he was just looking for a plumber to fix a leaky faucet. I was on the other side of his laptop, so I had no view of the screen, no real idea of any progress or lack thereof. He dove into Russian social media sites though they must have been teeming with Markovs in Moscow.
After a half hour, I was second-guessing myself about fronting Prokorov one thin ruble. I walked around the counter and moved his laptop so I could get a good look at the screen. It didn’t help. The webpage was all text: a few phone numbers but otherwise all Cyrillic characters against a pale blue backdrop. I made out Москва, Moscow, across the top of the page, but the rest of it was just hieroglyphics done in sloppy shorthand. It was set up like a chat room and none of the posters had headshots in place beside their names, just cartoon characters and movie stars.
