Stone Barrington 27 - Doing Hard Time

time?”
    Sanders fished a document out of the case file. “Here’s a list of people who checked out the morning Smolensky was shot. That’s all we got from the hotel.”
    Harry glanced at the list and immediately saw a W. J. Burnett, but he said nothing. This was his case for the moment, and he didn’t want the two cops in his way.
    “What’s your interest in these homicides, Harry?” Sanders asked.
    “I may be looking for the same guy your two victims were looking for.”
    “What’s his name?”
    “Doesn’t matter—it changes often,” Harry said.
    “What does your casino want with the guy? He steal from them?”
    “Nope. It’s a confidential matter.”
    “If it’s connected to our two homicides, it’s not confidential.”
    “If I find out anything along those lines, I’ll let you know,” Harry said. He thanked them and left.
    •   •   •
    Teddy checked his computer for messages and found flags he had placed on various websites, indicating to him that somebody was doing a background check on William J. Burnett. It had to be the casino again, since he had never given that name to anybody else.
    So, there was somebody else on his tail again.

Teddy had begun to think that the only way to put a stop to this relentless hunt for him would be to take Majorov out of the picture entirely. Apparently, nothing less would discourage him.
    He logged on to the CIA mainframe, routing his path through half a dozen other computers around the country. Anyone who stumbled onto his presence there would find that the computer being used was in a real estate office in Boise, Idaho.
    He did a search for Majorov, and the man not only had a file, but a large one. He was the son of a colonel in the KGB who had been in charge of a Spetsnaz, or special forces, unit that had been tied to a misbegotten plan to invade Sweden back in the 1980s. The father had begun his rise in the KGB when he was chosen as the English instructor to the former Soviet premier, Andropov.
    Yuri Majorov, the son, had been trained as a KBG officer right out of Moscow University, but his career had been rocked by the Glasnost movement, which changed nearly everything in the former Soviet Union, even to some extent the KGB. After that, he had made large sums of money by putting together syndicates of investors to buy former state enterprises that were being privatized. His investors were largely criminal organizations.
    Majorov was believed to have combined and reorganized these Russian Mafia groups into a kind of criminal conglomerate, which had many investments in legitimate businesses. They were very big in hotels.
    Then came the interesting part: Majorov had been involved in an attempt to take over The Arrington, a new hotel built in Bel-Air, Los Angeles, by a group formed by Stone Barrington, who had inherited a large piece of land in that community from his murdered wife, Arrington, who had been the widow of the movie star Vance Calder, who had assembled the land over decades.
    Majorov was believed to have been in New York when a friend of Barrington’s had been kidnapped by a Russian Mafia group, and to have been in a helicopter shot down in the ensuing battle between the Russians and a combination of NYPD and CIA units. He was thought to have perished in the crash.
    Teddy thought of adding an addendum to the file, pointing out that Majorov was alive and well in Las Vegas and still trying to get The Arrington, but he thought better of it. Such a note would simply start a search for whoever had put it there, and he didn’t need the attention. Instead, he closed the file and did a search for Michael Freeman. In reading the file he confirmed the story that Freeman had told him at their meeting. He logged off the mainframe and considered his options.
    It was clear that Teddy would be doing a favor to just about everybody—Barrington, the CIA, the NYPD, and the group that owned The Arrington—by simply eliminating Majorov. This, though, was not as easy as he would have liked it to be. First of all, his face was now known at the New Desert Inn, as was the Burnett alias, and Majorov would surely have heavy personal security.
    Teddy had come to a point where he had been offered a way out of his fugitive existence and into an interesting and safe environment, and to risk that over a revenge killing, however satisfying, would be foolish.
    There was a better way. He dug out Michael Freeman’s card and called the cell phone number written