The third man in, p.26
The Third Man In, page 26
I knew not to say anything until we saw the light of day, which couldn’t be soon enough for my liking. When we made it to street level at the station, I asked him what had been said behind the closed door.
“He wanted to make sure that I am not FSB…that it is not trick…we cannot leave unless he knows this…you see?”
“I see,” I said. “We have one more stop to make. This address.”
“Yes, first now is three hundred.”
Fuckin’ grifter, I thought “It’s $250,” I said.
“It’s three hundred,” Prokorov said. “I have to give him fifty.”
23
If it had been only me, I could have walked away a dozen times in four days. I had skin in the game and I could have tried to cut my losses and get my skin out of Russia. But then the threats on Lanny didn’t cross a line so much as every line. I had no choice. I had to hang around at considerable risk until the job was done. That risk had been upgraded from considerable to mortal. The job was looking uglier and uglier.
Dubinin would have wanted to see me as dead as Belov and Arzhanov. He’d have wanted revenge for the beat-down, a blow to his pride. He’d even be more hell-bent on the idea if he got wind of Beck’s bit of disinformation about his actions and intentions, knowing that I was corrupting his FSB file. Getting me out of the way would have been his best hope for moving ahead smoothly with his best-laid plans. Whether it was cold and calculated or hot-blooded and personal, the objective would have been the same, me out of the way.
I took a thin grain of comfort in the fact that the fatwa was both his concept and his to deliver. If it had been a directive from on high at Lubyanka, My Surprise Roomie at the Marriott would have taken me out and not taken me into his confidence.
No, this was just the two of us, D and me. I was in deep on the road and he had home advantage, local knowledge.
I wondered if I could make a not-so-graceful exit. If I could take My Uninvited Guest at his word, I was free to leave. In the meantime, I could have holed up in the Canadian Embassy or, better, the British, where Dubinin and allies would never suspect I’d take refuge. But this wasn’t just a matter of being able to go. No, it was being able to go in good conscience.
Some things were never going to be made right. I just wanted to salvage all that I could. My job was just part of that. I couldn’t align the stars alone. I needed someone who could be the third man into the frame. I needed someone who could do the job. I needed someone I could talk into doing it, someone I could trust. I needed someone who could put his life on the line and not ask questions.
That wasn’t Prokorov. He was a lot more than a slacker but a lot less than a killer. He had given me $300 worth of service. I didn’t want him to quote me a price on the bigger piece of work. I shook his hand and sent him home.
“The assignment’s complete,” I told him, shaking his hand back at the station by Red Square. “Thanks. Go home. Make a movie.”
“For this I need more money.”
“Make a short then.”
24
I couldn’t explain it to him. It would have to be explained to the one who’d have the last word.
He sat there and listened in blankly while I explained everything, the blow by blow. How Dubinin had killed the kid and staged his own death. How Dubinin was connected with the FSB through his father, through Dynamo. How the kid had been sacrificed so that Dubinin could deliver Dmitrov to Dynamo and scare off other teenage stars from going to teams in Canada and the States. I was working for my team, working for the league, yeah, but it couldn’t be business or at least not just business. I knew what my message had to be: I wanted the slate wiped clean, but they had to know that wasn’t all. They had to know I was clearing my conscience, too.
It passed through the filter. The translator went through it word by emphatic word without apparent emotion and he took it all in without nods, without even a blink. I was expecting pushback but once the facts were laid out, once he was convinced, his expression didn’t change.
I thought my willingness to take my life in my hands two or three times at the minimum so far was going to impress him. Evidently not.
I told him that Dubinin would be there for the taking at Lubyanka Station when he would be picking up his papers, as the Uninvited Guest in My Room had laid out. I told him that the risks were…well, miss and you’re dead or hit him and you’re arrested and as good as dead. A clean getaway after taking him out was a long shot unless it was a clean sniper-fire situation—in the centre of Moscow, in the A.M., even before the sunrise, almost any situation you’re going to be seen and pinched. I didn’t tell him that some of the boys might not be inclined to track down and punish anyone who took out Dubinin—I didn’t want to overpromise and minimize the ridiculous risks. And I told him that it might all go for naught. There was every chance that Dubinin might be moving around in a car with blacked-out bulletproof windows, that he’d move from one secure location and into an underground parking lot at Lubyanka, that we might not even get a glimpse of Dubinin.
No reaction other than a bottom lip thrust out. He looked for official approval. A nod in the affirmative.
“Igor,” he said.
“Nyet,” I said. I figured that something had been lost in the translation. I didn’t want any outsiders brought in.
“Igor, da,” he said.
He opened a creaking drawer and pulled out Igor, a 9mm Stechkin, Pistolet Stetchkina. It held a twenty-round magazine and it was good up to six hundred rounds in a minute. He called his piece Igor because Igor Stechkin designed the original model sixty years ago. The name fit. Igor was all straight lines and sharp angles, its features like a Slavic face. I couldn’t tell what vintage it was. The modifications over the years had been minute. With a bit of wear, scuffs on the stock, I could tell it wasn’t new. If it was in good working order, it would have been a more reliable sidearm than the Makarovs that the Moscow police packed. So the translator assured me.
My man didn’t have a shoulder stock. He would need one if he was planning to fire off a bunch of clips and keep control. Then again, he would only have to fire off an entire clip if he ended up in a jam and there was really no jam I could imagine that he’d be able to shoot himself out of.
He went to hand me Igor. The thought came into my head: something has been lost in the translation. I shook my head no and said that I wasn’t up for it. I said it was his to do. “Not me,” I said. “You.”
He looked to the translator and it was explained. It turned out that he knew that but just thought I might enjoy holding Igor. Before I handed it back to him I untucked my shirt and wiped off my prints.
“Tell him I’m not in this now,” I said. “Tell him that I have other things to do that are risky enough without this.”
This was not translated for him. No, it was explained to me that I would just have to show him where and take him when. He knew how and why.
“No,” I said.
“It must be,” I was told. “It is for him.”
“Ok,” I said. “I’ll take him to Dubinin but then I’m leaving. What happens happens.”
I pointed at him and he sensed the negotiations were at a close. He didn’t need a translation. He just looked to the translator for official approval.
Granted.
25
“I got a call from your friend Kelly. He said you were in trouble. He said that he hadn’t seen or heard from you in a while.”
“What else did he tell you?”
I played nonchalant. I plugged in my beat-up old iPhone to charge it full. I checked to see if I had any email. Nothing. I went to the browser to check on scores from the league. I made a point of not cringing. I had told Marks to make calls if I was off the radar too long. I had also told him that Dubinin’s staged death and continued existence were off limits, but I was worried that he might have panicked. Couldn’t let her know that.
“That’s all he told me.”
Thank God, Marks hadn’t spilled the beans.
“Kelly jumped the gun. He was rattled.”
“I didn’t know if I should take him seriously,” Lee Siddon said, turning up the volume on her television, parking herself close to me on the couch, whispering the Not Exactly Sweet Not Exactly Nothings in my ear for fear of being bugged in her own apartment.
“Oh it was serious,” I said.
“What happened?”
I didn’t tell her the whole story. I didn’t tell her about Igor and Igor’s owner and their upcoming appointment. I didn’t tell her about the visit that I had paid Markov. She couldn’t know his role in this. She couldn’t know she had pointed me in his direction. I didn’t tell her that I spotted Dubinin in the subway or scrapped with him outside his love nest.
I didn’t lie to her, though.
“Dubinin killed Belov,” I said. “He had the two of them, Belov and Dmitrov, on a steroid program.”
She gave me a disapproving look. I shut it down as quickly as I could.
“I didn’t know anything about it. No way. No, Dubinin wasn’t working for us when he did it. He was working for Dynamo and the national program. Belov…he didn’t care about him. It was all about Dmitrov. Dubinin wanted Dmitrov to stay in Russia and Dynamo had targeted the kid. Dmitrov was supposed to sign a long-term contract with Magnitogorsk and get traded to Dynamo. Better for the national program to keep an eye on him. Better for the Dynamo executives who have close ties to Lubyanka.”
“So why’d he kill Belov?”
“Dmitrov was pushing back. Dubinin killed Belov because he wanted the other kid to fall in line. Dubinin wanted to scare him enough that he went along with program…not the steroids but staying in Russia. For a while I thought Dmitrov was ready to stay. That’s what the stories online said, but the one guy who covers the KHL for Yahoo was just taking notes that Dubinin or Dubinin’s buddies dictated. The kid wanted to go to L.A. all along and didn’t take Dubinin seriously. At least until Dubinin phoned him after the game and told him what he he’d done to his friend. Then it hit home and Dmitrov bolted.”
“How do you know all this?”
“The kid told me. Dmitrov.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“No, I found him online.”
She had asked tens of thousands of questions over her career but couldn’t find the words to follow this up. She just looked at me with an uncomprehending if not disbelieving expression.
“Long story short. My friend back in Toronto found him on vk.com…”
I didn’t have to explain that one to her at all. The site had been all over the news in the last two months, Putin chasing down its founder, Putin thinking social media without the filter of state censorship might not be in his best interests.
“…and the messages were all about his dream to play in the KHL. Y’know, again, that just didn’t sound like the kid I met at the draft. It didn’t wash. There was no telling if his page had been hacked into, if someone had taken it over. I didn’t trust it.”
“So where did you find him?”
“On Facebook.”
“Seriously, you didn’t look there first?”
“There are a dozen Dmitrovs on there,” I said. “Fans set up gag accounts. This one, the legit one, was set up in English, set up as in ‘Los Angeles, California.’ You couldn’t read any of the posts on it without getting friended…”
I felt so stupid and old saying “friended” but I didn’t let it stop me.
“Nothing in the profile, a headshot pulled off the internet, a shot from the draft. But then it shows up that this Dmitrov sent a friend request to me…and it was someone my daughter already friended.”
Lee Siddon seemed lost. I asked her to follow me.
“My daughter is my only friend on Facebook. You know, you want to check on your kids. So I set it up when she was twelve or thirteen. Told her that she had to be my friend or else she couldn’t use it. Anyway, she met the kid at the draft the year before. That night we took him to dinner. I had to look. I looked at this Facebook page with his name—like I’d poke around my daughter’s just to make sure there were no unsavoury acquaintances. But only friends could check out the page. I was about to blow it off as just one of the fan pages but then I realized this had to be the kid.”
“And what sold it?” Lee Siddon asked.
“His profile pic. Japanese steak. He had an iPhone picture of his plate at dinner at the draft. They’re not having Wagyu beef in Magnitogorsk. I remember the kid loved it. Stuck in my mind. That and the fact the kid had his shirt open practically down to his navel. There was no media there. No team photographer. I’m pretty sure Lanny took the pic and sent it to him.”
Lee looked semi-convinced. Professional skepticism.
“So I messaged him and he was back to me in a flash. The kid’s English was good. He’d been taking English tutoring for a few months. I doubted that the FSB was monitoring his account—like I said, there are all these fan pages set up with his name, they wouldn’t know what the legitimate one is. And I don’t think that Dubinin would have thought he needed to keep monitoring the kid. He figured he had him locked up. Still I told the kid to delete our conversation as soon as he read an entry. Burn the notes, you know. The FSB would have to be monitoring it in real time to put anything together. The kid, he gave me the rundown. What Dubinin was trying to do to him. That afterward Dubinin told him it could happen to him if he didn’t sign long-term with Dynamo.”
“And so your scout admitted to the boy that he killed his friend. I thought he died in the middle of a game. Sudden death. A heart attack or cardiac arrest. It’s hard to do that with poison. In the middle of the game. It wasn’t like he had an injection on the bench.”
“It wasn’t that night or the day off. It was two or three days before.”
“And it killed him during the game?”
“It was going to kill him sometime. It just happened to be in the middle of the game. A couple of days before, he shot up what was supposed to be human growth hormone, but it was spiked with potassium chloride.”
“A nineteen-year-old boy told you this…”
“No, an FSB agent who I talked to at the Marriott…”
I wasn’t about to get into the fact that he had a gun pointing at me while he laid it out for me.
“…and from what I can tell, he’s pretty well versed in the occupational use of poisons. From what I can tell, there’s no love lost between him and Dubinin. He and some of his co-workers were wondering if Dubinin was double-crossing the FSB. That was why he sounded me out and that was why he was telling me tales out of school.”
Lee Siddon had her doubts about the chemistry section of the story, but those doubts disappeared after she pulled out her laptop and Googled “potassium chloride injection.” Hundreds of hits came up. As she and I found out, death by lethal injection is a three-course meal. The appetizer is a barbiturate. Dinner, a paralytic, is then served. An unhealthy dose of potassium chloride is the just dessert, just enough to throw the heart into arrest. Other hits that came up on Google included “sustained release potassium” and solutions that produce an arrhythmia and a death that comes to pass an inch at a time.
“His heart would go out of rhythm during the game, probably when it hit above 180 beats a minute,” I said. “Could have been out of rhythm in the warm-up, in the first, second, or third period. No way of knowing. Out of rhythm, rapid heart rate, then palpitations and then arrest.”
“He could plan the death to happen during the game?”
“It just happened that he died that night,” I said. “Just turned out that way. Dubinin might have been loading Belov with a potassium-chloride Mickey Finn, small doses getting bigger. He might have been doing it for a while and he was going to keep doing it until it killed the kid.”
Lee drew a deep breath. “It’s all so sad,” she said. “What I don’t understand…who would want your scout killed? If he was working with the national program…”
I drew a breath and organized my thoughts. Motive was going to be the cover for The Third Man In. So many people had reasons to plug Dubinin, me included. It seemed like he’d have no motive at all. And opportunity, well, anyone asking questions would assume he had no knowledge of Dubinin’s continued existence and his whereabouts.
“Look at it this way,” I said. “Dubinin was bilking agents. He was drawing a salary from our team. God knows what else. He was parking money offshore, who knows how much and how he got it. No matter how, he didn’t have a shortage of enemies, disgruntled customers, disgruntled partners, disgruntled employers. He had a lot of confidences and probably betrayed nine out of every ten. Most likely, someone inside the FSB, maybe orders from a superior, maybe a rival going rogue. Let’s say he pissed off the wrong guy or was suspected of going outside the official playbook. I can completely see it. And if he had to go down, no one inside was going to ask questions about it too loud. So many layers of secrecy—one hand not knowing what the other is doing, whether it’s loading a syringe, lighting a fuse, or holding a gun.”
This would have been a plausible scenario for the bombing if it had been legit. It would be just as plausible, maybe more so, for Dubinin being taken out for real in the next twenty-four hours. If the FSB boys were going to investigate Dubinin’s Real Extermination, the volunteer I had lined up wouldn’t make a list of suspects numbering one hundred. And any investigation would be like the one after the bombing, strictly for show. Those who’d draw the assignment would work on the assumption that someone high up had signed off on the hit. They’d look the other way. The old Soviet way: Nothing Happened. And Nothing Happened was your best chance of Nothing Happening To You.
Lee got up and she poured me a drink, just mineral water for herself. As far as CNN was concerned, Dubinin’s was a small story, accepted at face value, already forgotten. Like the rest of the world, she was ready to move on. “And so you go home now with one player dead and the other one staying in Russia,” she said. “And your scout is dead.”
“He wanted to make sure that I am not FSB…that it is not trick…we cannot leave unless he knows this…you see?”
“I see,” I said. “We have one more stop to make. This address.”
“Yes, first now is three hundred.”
Fuckin’ grifter, I thought “It’s $250,” I said.
“It’s three hundred,” Prokorov said. “I have to give him fifty.”
23
If it had been only me, I could have walked away a dozen times in four days. I had skin in the game and I could have tried to cut my losses and get my skin out of Russia. But then the threats on Lanny didn’t cross a line so much as every line. I had no choice. I had to hang around at considerable risk until the job was done. That risk had been upgraded from considerable to mortal. The job was looking uglier and uglier.
Dubinin would have wanted to see me as dead as Belov and Arzhanov. He’d have wanted revenge for the beat-down, a blow to his pride. He’d even be more hell-bent on the idea if he got wind of Beck’s bit of disinformation about his actions and intentions, knowing that I was corrupting his FSB file. Getting me out of the way would have been his best hope for moving ahead smoothly with his best-laid plans. Whether it was cold and calculated or hot-blooded and personal, the objective would have been the same, me out of the way.
I took a thin grain of comfort in the fact that the fatwa was both his concept and his to deliver. If it had been a directive from on high at Lubyanka, My Surprise Roomie at the Marriott would have taken me out and not taken me into his confidence.
No, this was just the two of us, D and me. I was in deep on the road and he had home advantage, local knowledge.
I wondered if I could make a not-so-graceful exit. If I could take My Uninvited Guest at his word, I was free to leave. In the meantime, I could have holed up in the Canadian Embassy or, better, the British, where Dubinin and allies would never suspect I’d take refuge. But this wasn’t just a matter of being able to go. No, it was being able to go in good conscience.
Some things were never going to be made right. I just wanted to salvage all that I could. My job was just part of that. I couldn’t align the stars alone. I needed someone who could be the third man into the frame. I needed someone who could do the job. I needed someone I could talk into doing it, someone I could trust. I needed someone who could put his life on the line and not ask questions.
That wasn’t Prokorov. He was a lot more than a slacker but a lot less than a killer. He had given me $300 worth of service. I didn’t want him to quote me a price on the bigger piece of work. I shook his hand and sent him home.
“The assignment’s complete,” I told him, shaking his hand back at the station by Red Square. “Thanks. Go home. Make a movie.”
“For this I need more money.”
“Make a short then.”
24
I couldn’t explain it to him. It would have to be explained to the one who’d have the last word.
He sat there and listened in blankly while I explained everything, the blow by blow. How Dubinin had killed the kid and staged his own death. How Dubinin was connected with the FSB through his father, through Dynamo. How the kid had been sacrificed so that Dubinin could deliver Dmitrov to Dynamo and scare off other teenage stars from going to teams in Canada and the States. I was working for my team, working for the league, yeah, but it couldn’t be business or at least not just business. I knew what my message had to be: I wanted the slate wiped clean, but they had to know that wasn’t all. They had to know I was clearing my conscience, too.
It passed through the filter. The translator went through it word by emphatic word without apparent emotion and he took it all in without nods, without even a blink. I was expecting pushback but once the facts were laid out, once he was convinced, his expression didn’t change.
I thought my willingness to take my life in my hands two or three times at the minimum so far was going to impress him. Evidently not.
I told him that Dubinin would be there for the taking at Lubyanka Station when he would be picking up his papers, as the Uninvited Guest in My Room had laid out. I told him that the risks were…well, miss and you’re dead or hit him and you’re arrested and as good as dead. A clean getaway after taking him out was a long shot unless it was a clean sniper-fire situation—in the centre of Moscow, in the A.M., even before the sunrise, almost any situation you’re going to be seen and pinched. I didn’t tell him that some of the boys might not be inclined to track down and punish anyone who took out Dubinin—I didn’t want to overpromise and minimize the ridiculous risks. And I told him that it might all go for naught. There was every chance that Dubinin might be moving around in a car with blacked-out bulletproof windows, that he’d move from one secure location and into an underground parking lot at Lubyanka, that we might not even get a glimpse of Dubinin.
No reaction other than a bottom lip thrust out. He looked for official approval. A nod in the affirmative.
“Igor,” he said.
“Nyet,” I said. I figured that something had been lost in the translation. I didn’t want any outsiders brought in.
“Igor, da,” he said.
He opened a creaking drawer and pulled out Igor, a 9mm Stechkin, Pistolet Stetchkina. It held a twenty-round magazine and it was good up to six hundred rounds in a minute. He called his piece Igor because Igor Stechkin designed the original model sixty years ago. The name fit. Igor was all straight lines and sharp angles, its features like a Slavic face. I couldn’t tell what vintage it was. The modifications over the years had been minute. With a bit of wear, scuffs on the stock, I could tell it wasn’t new. If it was in good working order, it would have been a more reliable sidearm than the Makarovs that the Moscow police packed. So the translator assured me.
My man didn’t have a shoulder stock. He would need one if he was planning to fire off a bunch of clips and keep control. Then again, he would only have to fire off an entire clip if he ended up in a jam and there was really no jam I could imagine that he’d be able to shoot himself out of.
He went to hand me Igor. The thought came into my head: something has been lost in the translation. I shook my head no and said that I wasn’t up for it. I said it was his to do. “Not me,” I said. “You.”
He looked to the translator and it was explained. It turned out that he knew that but just thought I might enjoy holding Igor. Before I handed it back to him I untucked my shirt and wiped off my prints.
“Tell him I’m not in this now,” I said. “Tell him that I have other things to do that are risky enough without this.”
This was not translated for him. No, it was explained to me that I would just have to show him where and take him when. He knew how and why.
“No,” I said.
“It must be,” I was told. “It is for him.”
“Ok,” I said. “I’ll take him to Dubinin but then I’m leaving. What happens happens.”
I pointed at him and he sensed the negotiations were at a close. He didn’t need a translation. He just looked to the translator for official approval.
Granted.
25
“I got a call from your friend Kelly. He said you were in trouble. He said that he hadn’t seen or heard from you in a while.”
“What else did he tell you?”
I played nonchalant. I plugged in my beat-up old iPhone to charge it full. I checked to see if I had any email. Nothing. I went to the browser to check on scores from the league. I made a point of not cringing. I had told Marks to make calls if I was off the radar too long. I had also told him that Dubinin’s staged death and continued existence were off limits, but I was worried that he might have panicked. Couldn’t let her know that.
“That’s all he told me.”
Thank God, Marks hadn’t spilled the beans.
“Kelly jumped the gun. He was rattled.”
“I didn’t know if I should take him seriously,” Lee Siddon said, turning up the volume on her television, parking herself close to me on the couch, whispering the Not Exactly Sweet Not Exactly Nothings in my ear for fear of being bugged in her own apartment.
“Oh it was serious,” I said.
“What happened?”
I didn’t tell her the whole story. I didn’t tell her about Igor and Igor’s owner and their upcoming appointment. I didn’t tell her about the visit that I had paid Markov. She couldn’t know his role in this. She couldn’t know she had pointed me in his direction. I didn’t tell her that I spotted Dubinin in the subway or scrapped with him outside his love nest.
I didn’t lie to her, though.
“Dubinin killed Belov,” I said. “He had the two of them, Belov and Dmitrov, on a steroid program.”
She gave me a disapproving look. I shut it down as quickly as I could.
“I didn’t know anything about it. No way. No, Dubinin wasn’t working for us when he did it. He was working for Dynamo and the national program. Belov…he didn’t care about him. It was all about Dmitrov. Dubinin wanted Dmitrov to stay in Russia and Dynamo had targeted the kid. Dmitrov was supposed to sign a long-term contract with Magnitogorsk and get traded to Dynamo. Better for the national program to keep an eye on him. Better for the Dynamo executives who have close ties to Lubyanka.”
“So why’d he kill Belov?”
“Dmitrov was pushing back. Dubinin killed Belov because he wanted the other kid to fall in line. Dubinin wanted to scare him enough that he went along with program…not the steroids but staying in Russia. For a while I thought Dmitrov was ready to stay. That’s what the stories online said, but the one guy who covers the KHL for Yahoo was just taking notes that Dubinin or Dubinin’s buddies dictated. The kid wanted to go to L.A. all along and didn’t take Dubinin seriously. At least until Dubinin phoned him after the game and told him what he he’d done to his friend. Then it hit home and Dmitrov bolted.”
“How do you know all this?”
“The kid told me. Dmitrov.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“No, I found him online.”
She had asked tens of thousands of questions over her career but couldn’t find the words to follow this up. She just looked at me with an uncomprehending if not disbelieving expression.
“Long story short. My friend back in Toronto found him on vk.com…”
I didn’t have to explain that one to her at all. The site had been all over the news in the last two months, Putin chasing down its founder, Putin thinking social media without the filter of state censorship might not be in his best interests.
“…and the messages were all about his dream to play in the KHL. Y’know, again, that just didn’t sound like the kid I met at the draft. It didn’t wash. There was no telling if his page had been hacked into, if someone had taken it over. I didn’t trust it.”
“So where did you find him?”
“On Facebook.”
“Seriously, you didn’t look there first?”
“There are a dozen Dmitrovs on there,” I said. “Fans set up gag accounts. This one, the legit one, was set up in English, set up as in ‘Los Angeles, California.’ You couldn’t read any of the posts on it without getting friended…”
I felt so stupid and old saying “friended” but I didn’t let it stop me.
“Nothing in the profile, a headshot pulled off the internet, a shot from the draft. But then it shows up that this Dmitrov sent a friend request to me…and it was someone my daughter already friended.”
Lee Siddon seemed lost. I asked her to follow me.
“My daughter is my only friend on Facebook. You know, you want to check on your kids. So I set it up when she was twelve or thirteen. Told her that she had to be my friend or else she couldn’t use it. Anyway, she met the kid at the draft the year before. That night we took him to dinner. I had to look. I looked at this Facebook page with his name—like I’d poke around my daughter’s just to make sure there were no unsavoury acquaintances. But only friends could check out the page. I was about to blow it off as just one of the fan pages but then I realized this had to be the kid.”
“And what sold it?” Lee Siddon asked.
“His profile pic. Japanese steak. He had an iPhone picture of his plate at dinner at the draft. They’re not having Wagyu beef in Magnitogorsk. I remember the kid loved it. Stuck in my mind. That and the fact the kid had his shirt open practically down to his navel. There was no media there. No team photographer. I’m pretty sure Lanny took the pic and sent it to him.”
Lee looked semi-convinced. Professional skepticism.
“So I messaged him and he was back to me in a flash. The kid’s English was good. He’d been taking English tutoring for a few months. I doubted that the FSB was monitoring his account—like I said, there are all these fan pages set up with his name, they wouldn’t know what the legitimate one is. And I don’t think that Dubinin would have thought he needed to keep monitoring the kid. He figured he had him locked up. Still I told the kid to delete our conversation as soon as he read an entry. Burn the notes, you know. The FSB would have to be monitoring it in real time to put anything together. The kid, he gave me the rundown. What Dubinin was trying to do to him. That afterward Dubinin told him it could happen to him if he didn’t sign long-term with Dynamo.”
“And so your scout admitted to the boy that he killed his friend. I thought he died in the middle of a game. Sudden death. A heart attack or cardiac arrest. It’s hard to do that with poison. In the middle of the game. It wasn’t like he had an injection on the bench.”
“It wasn’t that night or the day off. It was two or three days before.”
“And it killed him during the game?”
“It was going to kill him sometime. It just happened to be in the middle of the game. A couple of days before, he shot up what was supposed to be human growth hormone, but it was spiked with potassium chloride.”
“A nineteen-year-old boy told you this…”
“No, an FSB agent who I talked to at the Marriott…”
I wasn’t about to get into the fact that he had a gun pointing at me while he laid it out for me.
“…and from what I can tell, he’s pretty well versed in the occupational use of poisons. From what I can tell, there’s no love lost between him and Dubinin. He and some of his co-workers were wondering if Dubinin was double-crossing the FSB. That was why he sounded me out and that was why he was telling me tales out of school.”
Lee Siddon had her doubts about the chemistry section of the story, but those doubts disappeared after she pulled out her laptop and Googled “potassium chloride injection.” Hundreds of hits came up. As she and I found out, death by lethal injection is a three-course meal. The appetizer is a barbiturate. Dinner, a paralytic, is then served. An unhealthy dose of potassium chloride is the just dessert, just enough to throw the heart into arrest. Other hits that came up on Google included “sustained release potassium” and solutions that produce an arrhythmia and a death that comes to pass an inch at a time.
“His heart would go out of rhythm during the game, probably when it hit above 180 beats a minute,” I said. “Could have been out of rhythm in the warm-up, in the first, second, or third period. No way of knowing. Out of rhythm, rapid heart rate, then palpitations and then arrest.”
“He could plan the death to happen during the game?”
“It just happened that he died that night,” I said. “Just turned out that way. Dubinin might have been loading Belov with a potassium-chloride Mickey Finn, small doses getting bigger. He might have been doing it for a while and he was going to keep doing it until it killed the kid.”
Lee drew a deep breath. “It’s all so sad,” she said. “What I don’t understand…who would want your scout killed? If he was working with the national program…”
I drew a breath and organized my thoughts. Motive was going to be the cover for The Third Man In. So many people had reasons to plug Dubinin, me included. It seemed like he’d have no motive at all. And opportunity, well, anyone asking questions would assume he had no knowledge of Dubinin’s continued existence and his whereabouts.
“Look at it this way,” I said. “Dubinin was bilking agents. He was drawing a salary from our team. God knows what else. He was parking money offshore, who knows how much and how he got it. No matter how, he didn’t have a shortage of enemies, disgruntled customers, disgruntled partners, disgruntled employers. He had a lot of confidences and probably betrayed nine out of every ten. Most likely, someone inside the FSB, maybe orders from a superior, maybe a rival going rogue. Let’s say he pissed off the wrong guy or was suspected of going outside the official playbook. I can completely see it. And if he had to go down, no one inside was going to ask questions about it too loud. So many layers of secrecy—one hand not knowing what the other is doing, whether it’s loading a syringe, lighting a fuse, or holding a gun.”
This would have been a plausible scenario for the bombing if it had been legit. It would be just as plausible, maybe more so, for Dubinin being taken out for real in the next twenty-four hours. If the FSB boys were going to investigate Dubinin’s Real Extermination, the volunteer I had lined up wouldn’t make a list of suspects numbering one hundred. And any investigation would be like the one after the bombing, strictly for show. Those who’d draw the assignment would work on the assumption that someone high up had signed off on the hit. They’d look the other way. The old Soviet way: Nothing Happened. And Nothing Happened was your best chance of Nothing Happening To You.
Lee got up and she poured me a drink, just mineral water for herself. As far as CNN was concerned, Dubinin’s was a small story, accepted at face value, already forgotten. Like the rest of the world, she was ready to move on. “And so you go home now with one player dead and the other one staying in Russia,” she said. “And your scout is dead.”
