Chapter 1 #2
“If we had a key…” White looked wistfully up at the locked and alarmed house, furnace steam puffing from a rooftop chimney.
The place had what were once called “grounds.” Nothing rural about it, a four-acre fenced lot heavy with white-trunked birches and brooding blue conifers and maples, a few red leaves still attached to the maples.
A line of bare-naked bridal wreath bushes were strung along the driveway, while leafless lilacs waited in the dooryard for spring.
“We could sit in the truck, but I’d like to take a look around,” Lucas said. “You know, in case we ever had to come back out here.”
“Not a bad idea. We can at least see through the woods right now,” White said. “Gotta be pretty dense in the summer.”
“Let me change my shoes…”
Lucas popped the back of his truck and took out a pair of Sorel Caribous, pulled them on, tucked in the bottom of his suit pants, and carefully placed his John Lobbs on the truck’s floor.
Together, they marched around the lot, past a frozen picnic table that sat next to a frozen firepit made with frozen stones with frozen logs next to it, through the maples and pines and birches and around the withered shrubs.
They found a hard-frozen coiled hose that somebody had forgotten under a dwarf mugo pine, two wickets from a croquet set that somebody had forgotten to pull, and, at the back of the yard, a shovel with a rusted blade and a broken handle.
Having crisscrossed the yard, they went out a gate at the back.
They discovered that the hideout was on one of four circles, which they hadn’t known, with a narrow, frozen creek winding through the common area between the circles. They stumbled across whitetail deer beds tucked under balsams and racoon and coyote tracks along the iced-over creek.
There were three houses on each of the four circles. All of the houses were showing furnace exhaust, and two had older cars in the driveways, which White thought must belong to housekeepers. Nobody with common sense would park outside in this cold, if they had a heated garage.
“If the guy’s a bowhunter, he could put up some venison,” White said, checking out a line of deer tracks. She scuffed at one of the bigger prints and said, “Nice buck.”
They were puffing out clouds of steam, and tiny icicles were forming on the tips of White’s hair.
“Given his reputation, I’m pretty sure he ain’t a vegetarian,” Lucas said.
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They’d just gotten back to the house when two SUVs pulled into the driveway, both Ford Explorers, both with the tired look of rental cars. A bulky marshal, head like a half-gallon milk jug, climbed out of the first vehicle, saw them: “Davenport and White?”
“Davenport and White,” Lucas answered. “Are you Derrick?”
“Yeah. You look like your pictures. You guys check out the site?”
“We did,” White said. “There are four cul-de-sacs back-to-back, three houses on each circle, a common area in between them. Looks like all the lots are about the same size, three or four acres each, all fenced. Nothing but animal tracks in the snow.”
“Excellent.” Derrick Beard turned back toward the SUVs and waved. Seven more doors popped open, and seven more people got out. Three were marshals, all in tactical winter wear, all from Washington, as was Beard.
Another of the arrivals, an American, but not a marshal, was thinner, taller, quicker, wearing a wool knee-length camel coat with matching wool-and-leather gloves.
He sported black rectangular sunglasses and a brown Borsalino hat.
The clothes were well cut and subtly aristocratic.
Looking at them, Lucas, the fashion plate, was stroked by the feather of jealousy.
He liked browns, admired them, but given his coloring, couldn’t wear them.
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The final three to get out of the trucks were a short sixty-year-old gray-haired man with broad shoulders, a stub nose, and ruddy face, in a blue L.L.Bean parka.
He was followed by a scowling fortysomething woman with tight-cut blond hair, small gold earrings, and narrow shoulders; she was several inches taller than the man Lucas presumed was her husband. She was also wearing a blue Bean parka.
The third was a tall youngish man, midtwenties, whose face resembled the woman’s.
His dishwater-blond hair fell to his shoulders and his face was covered with dishwater blond fuzz, like a holy card Jesus.
Despite the cold, the son was wearing tight fashion jeans and a hip-length black leather jacket worn open.
“Hope to God somebody has a key,” Lucas said.
“We’re good,” Beard said. “Let’s get inside. I’m already numb.”
The older man said to the woman, “Look at the birches, Martha, like home. I told you.” His face looked carved, rather than grown, with snarl lines starting beside his nose and extending to the corners of his mouth. The quarried look of his face was matched by that of his wife.
“Not home, Leonard,” the woman grumbled. After a moment, “It’s less than I hoped for. Less than they told us.”
“Better than home,” the son said. “I’m not fighting any fuckin’ Ukrainian assholes in the middle of a fuckin’ Ukrainian asshole winter.”
As they walked up to the house, Beard introduced the three as Leonard Summers; his wife, Martha; and son, Bernard.
All three sounded American: in a briefing the day before, Lucas and White had been told that all three had spoken some English before they fled Russia.
They’d spent the past year and a half holed up in a CIA facility near Washington.
English lessons had been a daily event, including work on their accents and slang.
If they added oodala-oodala-oodala vowel sounds, they might even pass as Minnesotan.
Beard opened the front door’s heavy lock with a key, then handed a key ring with several keys to the older Russian.
As they trooped inside, Lucas noticed that the door was three inches thick and appeared to have a quarter-inch steel plate laminated inside.
Not a door you could kick, or shoot through, for that matter.
Beard disarmed an alarm, and Martha said, “Small living room, Leonard.” She touched the back of a beige couch in the living room.
The walls were bare, awaiting a personal touch. “Where are the bedrooms?”
“I think it is comfortable,” Leonard said, with a defensive note. “We should bring in the suitcases.”
“Our guys will get those,” Beard said. “Leonard, you and Martha should pick a bedroom—the master is here on the first floor, with one more at the back. We thought that second one would be a nice office for you, Leonard. Martha, there’s a family room in back.
It’s three times the size of the living room and has an eighty-inch TV hanging on the wall, just like you ordered. That’s where you party.”
“What about the billiards table?” Leonard Summers asked.
“Yeah, there’s a full-sized billiards table,” Beard said. “There are two bedrooms upstairs, and a sitting room. Bernie can pick one, and Jack can take the other. All the bedrooms have attached bathrooms. Even the office.”
“How long will Jack be here?” Lucas asked. Jack was a marshal with the Witness Protection Program.
“A couple weeks. We want to have one of our regular guys checking around, to make sure everything looks copacetic,” Beard said. “Jack has done this fifteen times, so if there’s a problem, he’ll spot it. You two are the cavalry, if he screams for help.”
“Where are the cars?” Bernard asked.
“They’re coming, they’ll be here this evening,” Beard said. “We got slowed down at the DMV.”
· · ·
The ten of them took fifteen minutes to poke around the house. A marshal told Lucas that all the furniture had come from a single home furnishings dealer in one big truckload, “so not a lot of people have been in and out of here.”
Lucas reflexively checked the sight lines from the windows and noticed White doing the same thing.
“The only thing I don’t like is that you could get close to the house and not be seen,” White said.
“Balanced by the fact that it’s hard to know what’s back here.
Invisibility is their friend,” Lucas said.
He looked out the window toward a towering cottonwood tree two hundred yards away, an easy shot for a hunting rifle.
“But you have a point. Especially at night, you could sneak right up to the windows. High-rise condo might be better.”
The thin man in the camel coat said, “They didn’t want a condo. They wanted a dacha, like back in Russia. Isn’t that right, Martha?”
“Too many apartments, all our lives,” Martha said. “We wanted more space, and we wanted to hide where nobody could see us. But, maybe something bigger than this? Maybe with a dock to fish from?”
“If somebody came after you here, they’d have to take chances, doing reconnaissance and snooping around the neighborhood,” said the camel-coated man.
He spoke quietly, but with a military articulation; people stopped talking to listen.
“If Leonard were sitting on a dock with a fishing pole, a sniper could hit him from six hundred yards out. From a fishing boat. In town, on the street, a killer could come from anywhere and look like anything. This house has alarms everywhere, and Leonard and Bernard both know how to use a gun.”
White: “I’m assuming you’re CIA?”
“Yes. John Sherwood.” He shook hands with White, then with Lucas.
Sherwood had what, at first glance, appeared to be delicate-looking, pale facial skin with a touch of rose on his cheekbones, as if finished with a fine French lotion.
On second glance, his face looked as though it had been sanded down, like he was missing a couple layers of skin.
He’d taken off the sunglasses and Lucas caught cold green eyes, which had the frigid clink of a fighter pilot’s; eyes that might have been chipped from an old, weather-worn Coke bottle.
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