The Moscow Sleepers

7

At the University of Vermont, Boyd parked in a half-empty lot. They walked slowly through the afternoon heat towards a gothic sandstone building that loomed over the university green below it.

‘The students are all away and a lot of the academic staff as well,’ said Boyd. ‘We’re seeing the deputy head of Computer Sciences – that’s the department Petersen worked in. Her name’s Emerson.’

Angie Emerson looked about seventeen. She was small and slim and wore a faded red T-shirt, jeans, flip-flops and large horn-rimmed spectacles pushed on to the top of her head. Her hair was dyed a dayglo blonde and pinned up in a loose bun from which strands were escaping. As they came into her office she leaped up from her chair and held out a thin brown hand, smiling broadly and talking quickly.

‘Do come in,’ she said, pushing some journals on to the floor to clear a couple of chairs. ‘It’s not every day I get to meet the FBI. I understand you want to talk about Lars Petersen. I was so sorry to hear that he’d died; not that I knew him very well. I knew he was ill but I didn’t know it was terminal.’

She paused briefly while Fitzpatrick and Boyd sat down, then continued: ‘I’m sorry the chairman of the department isn’t here. He’s on vacation with his family – giving his kids a cultural tour of Europe.’ She smiled. ‘My partner and I haven’t got kids, so I look after things here during the summer. We go away in winter – skiing, not culture, for us.’

‘It’s good of you to see us,’ Fitzpatrick said, thinking he’d better try and get to the point or they’d be there all day. ‘I’m eager to hear anything you can tell us about Petersen. We think he may not have been quite who he said he was.’

‘Oh,’ said Angie Emerson in surprise. She scratched her head with the end of her glasses. ‘Who do you think he was then?’

For a moment Fitzpatrick wondered whether she was being sarcastic. He said mildly, ‘We think he may have been working for a foreign intelligence service.’

Angie Emerson seemed genuinely taken aback. Fitzpatrick went on, ‘I’d like you to tell me whatever you can about his work here. What was his academic specialty, for example? Did he have a social life? Who was close to him? And we’d like access to his office. My colleague Tom Boyd here will send someone to take away any papers he’s left behind.’

‘I’m not going to be an awful lot of help,’ she said, ‘but I’ll tell you what I know. His own work was on statistical pattern recognition, algorithms and image analysis. It’s not my area at all, but he was well regarded – I do know that. As for his private life, I don’t know much about it. I can’t think of anyone who would. You see, he kept himself to himself. He wasn’t one to frequent the bars – not that I am either – and we don’t do a lot of socialising in this department; we’re quite geeky. If he had a partner I never met her – or him.’

She paused, thinking. Then she continued, ‘One thing about him was that he seemed to be around all the time. If he had family back in Sweden he can’t have seen much of them; he didn’t go away for the summer vacation. I know that because he used to teach the students at the summer school. It’s a big thing here – we run summer schools in lots of disciplines, arts and sciences. They’re for high school kids – teenagers, mainly juniors and seniors, though in our department we often get them younger: fifteen or even fourteen sometimes. Kids with a real flair for computers develop it young. There’s a class going on at the moment. I’ll walk you along to Lars’s office and we’ll pass the lecture room.’

As they left her office, Emerson carried on: ‘We’re very proud of what we do. These are not kids from privileged backgrounds. We give bursaries for poor kids and for kids from developing countries and war zones, if we can reach them. It’s amazing how talented some of them are, even though they’ve had very little formal teaching. And they’re so keen.’

By now they had reached the lecture room door and she stopped to let Fitzpatrick look in through a large glass panel. He saw a room full of children, boys and girls of all races and nationalities it seemed, sitting at computer benches. At the front a young man was writing out lines of code on a white board.

‘How long do they stay?’ he asked.

‘About a month usually,’ she replied, opening the door of a small office. ‘This was Lars’s place.’

‘Thank you for all your help,’ said Fitzpatrick, stepping into the room with Boyd.

There was a note of dismissal in his voice, and Emerson took the hint. ‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ she said, looking slightly disappointed. What had her late colleague been up to?

Fitzpatrick had intended to hire a car and drive up to Montreal to see how the Canadians were getting on with their inquiries into the mysterious Ohlson. However, when they returned to Boyd’s office to arrange the car hire there was a message waiting for him. The Canadians had established that Ohlson had flown into Montreal from Helsinki on a Swedish passport the day before he turned up in Burlington. He had stayed the night at the Marriott hotel at Montreal International airport and had hired the blue Volkswagen Passat there the following day. The car was recorded crossing into the United States at 15.30. It returned across the border at 21.40 and was photographed parking at the Marriott at 23:37.

Ohlson returned the car to the rental agency at 10.30 the following morning, checked out of the hotel at midday and flew out of Montreal airport on a flight to Copenhagen that left at 15.35. Photographs, a copy of the passport, copy of the credit card used at the hotel and driving licence were all on their way to FBI HQ in Washington.

‘Well,’ said Fitzpatrick when he’d finished reading, ‘it seems there’s no point my going to Montreal. Ohlson’s flown the coop.’ He looked at Boyd and shook his head. ‘This case is weird and getting weirder. One man’s dead and his supposed “childhood friend” has disappeared. Call me old-fashioned, but it would be nice to meet someone involved with this in the flesh.’