Kate and I went to the car, and she said to me, “Do you see how nice and trusting people are here?”
“I seem to be missing my wallet.”
She ignored that and continued, “This is like where I was raised in Minnesota.”
“Well, they did a good job there. Let’s discuss relocation later.”
I followed my nose for a hundred yards, and we came to a little shingled cottage on a pond.
Kate took her briefcase, and we entered. It was a decent enough place, with a combination sitting room, bedroom, and kitchen decorated in what looked like eclectic eBay. Out back was an enclosed porch that overlooked the pond. Hopefully, there was an indoor bathroom somewhere.
Kate was inspecting the kitchen, and I asked her, “What’s in the fridge?”
She opened the door. “A lightbulb.”
“Call room service.”
She again ignored me and found the bathroom.
I picked up the phone on the writing desk and called Dick Kearns, collect.
He accepted the charges and asked me, “Why am I paying for this call?”
“I’m in jail, and I already used my free phone call to call my bookie.”
“Where are you? Who’s Wilma on my caller ID?”
“Ned’s wife. How’d you make out?”
“With what? Oh, Pushkin. Russian writer. Dead. No further information.”
Dick apparently felt the need to jerk me around in lieu of billing me. I said, “Come on, Dick. This is important.”
“First, I’m required to ask you, What is your clearance?”
“Five feet, eleven inches.”
“Unfortunately, Detective Corey, most of this stuff is not available to people under six feet, but I’ll just write here that you’ve applied for a six-foot clearance.”
The old joke out of the way, Dick said, “Okay. Ready to copy?”
“Hold on.” Kate had come out of the bathroom and pulled up a kitchen chair near the desk. I said to Dick, “I’m putting us on speaker.” I hit the Speaker button, hung up, and said, “Say hello to Kate.”
“Hi, Kate.”
“Hi, Dick.”
“I’m glad you’re there to keep this guy out of trouble.”
“I’m trying.”
“Did I ever tell you about the time-?”
“Dick,” I interrupted, “we’re on a tight schedule.”
“Yeah, me, too. Okay, ready?”
Kate got her notebook, and I took the pad and pencil from the desk and said, “Shoot.”
“All right. Putyov, Mikhail. Born in Kursk, Russia, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 18 May 1941. Father deceased 1943, Red Army captain, killed in action. Mother deceased, no further info. Subject attended… I can’t pronounce these fucking Russian words-”
“Spell them.”
“Right.” He filled us in on Mikhail Putyov’s education, and my eyes were glazing over until he said, “He graduated from Leningrad Polytechnic Institute with an advanced degree in nuclear physics. And later, he was associated with the… what the hell…? Kurchatov? Yeah, Kurchatov Institute in Moscow… This says it’s a major Soviet nuclear facility, and this guy did research there.”
I didn’t comment, but Kate and I exchanged glances.
Dick asked, “Is that what you’re looking for?”
“What else?”
“Well, then he worked in a borscht factory, dropping little potatoes in the soup.”
“Dick-”
“He worked on the Soviet nuclear weapons program someplace in Siberia…” He spelled the name of some town or installation. “This stuff seems to be classified, and from 1979 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there’s not much info.”
“Okay… how reliable is this information?”
“Some of it I got directly from the FBI. Putyov is on their watch list. Most of it I got from Putyov’s own C.V., which is posted on the website where he works.”
“Where is that?”
“Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He’s a full professor there.”
“What’s he teach?”
“Not Russian history.”
“Right-”
“I also got some stuff on him online from academic journals. He’s well respected.”
“For what?”
“Nuclear shit. I don’t know. You want me to read this stuff?”
“I’ll check it out later. What else?”
“Well, I lucked out with the FBI field office in Boston. I found a guy there who I knew and he was willing to talk off-the-record. He told me that Putyov was brought here in 1995 as part of our post-Soviet resettling program to neutralize some of this free-floating nuke talent before these guys sold out to the highest bidder. He was set up in this teaching job at MIT as part of the resettling program.”
“They should have just shot him.”
Dick chuckled and said, “That would have been cheaper. They bought him an apartment in Cambridge, and he still draws a couple of bucks from Uncle Sam. In fact, I did a quick credit check on him, and he comes up triple A. No money or credit problems, which, as we know, eliminates half the motives for half the illegal shit that goes on in the world.”
“Right.” It was the other half that worried me; the kind of motive for unlawful activities that an oil billionaire might find irresistible. Like power. Glory. Revenge.
Kate asked, “Why is he on the FBI watch list?”
“This guy in Boston told me it was standard procedure for a person like that. The Bureau doesn’t have any negatives on him. But they require him to notify them when he leaves the area because, as the guy I spoke to said, Putyov is a walking brain full of things that he shouldn’t be sharing with any country that’s got an illegal nuke program in the works.”
I inquired, “Did Putyov notify the Boston office that he was leaving town?”
“I don’t know, and I didn’t ask. I was lucky enough to get this guy to talk to me off-the-record. But my questions were confined to background stuff.”
Kate asked, “Wife? Kids?”
“Two grown sons, also brought here as part of the resettling package. Nothing on them. Wife, Svetlana, doesn’t speak much English.”
Kate asked, “You spoke to her?”
“Yeah. I called the apartment. But before that, I called his office at MIT. His secretary, a Ms. Crabtree, said he e-mailed her over the weekend-Saturday-and wrote that he wouldn’t be back until Tuesday-today. But he’s not there yet, and no one has heard from him.” He added, “I guess he’s up there where you are. Right?”
“We don’t know.” Odd, I thought, that he’d canceled his 12:45 flight to Boston sometime last night, but hadn’t yet contacted his office or the airline to rebook on the next flight to Boston, which I recalled would be 9:55 tomorrow morning, and he wasn’t driving back to Boston in his rental car because it had been returned.
Kate asked, “Did his secretary sound concerned?”
“I couldn’t tell. She was professional, and I had no reason to push her. So I call Svetlana, and she says to me, ‘He not home.’ So I ask, ‘When he be home?’ and she says, ‘Tooosday,’ and I say, ‘Today is Tooosday,’ and she says, ‘Cool beak,’ and hangs up.”
“Cool beak?”
“Yeah, that’s Russian for call back. So I called back about twenty minutes ago and said, ‘I need to reach Mikhail. He won a million dollars in the Reader’s Digest sweepstakes, and he needs to claim his prize money,’ and
