Chapter 3 #3
“If one of you is hard enough to be running this op, maybe that’s what you would have been told to do.
” He held up his hands, to fend off objections: “I don’t really believe that, because you guys didn’t have to run out there as quick as you did.
A little slower and they’d have been gone.
But I have to ask for your phones as part of the routine.
If I didn’t, how would I explain that to everybody else? I need all the phones.”
“Including yours,” Lucas said. “You should call a neutral agency like the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension over in Saint Paul. They can take the phones apart as fast as you guys or the FBI and start an hour from now. Beard or one of the other marshals can help you take the phones over to Saint Paul, so they’ll never be alone with one guy. ”
Sherwood nodded: “Let’s get it done.”
White asked, “What am I going to do without my phone? My life’s in there. My kids might call.”
“Burners,” Lucas and Sherwood said together, and Sherwood continued: “We’ll pay for them. Get you good ones.”
“I’ll need to open my contact list so I can copy down phone numbers,” White said. “I don’t know the phone number of a single person, except my husband’s.”
“We can do that,” Sherwood said. “We’ll all do it together. Watching each other.”
“You’re a suspicious sonofabitch,” White said.
“My mother would agree,” Sherwood said. “The woman you just referenced.”
· · ·
At the house, Beard told Sherwood that the surviving Sokolovs had been temporarily moved to the second floor, with a marshal at the top of the stairs, and others covering the doors.
Sherwood told Beard that he wanted all the phones. “I’m not giving up my phone. I need to stay in touch with my office,” Beard argued. “This is a disaster, and you want—”
“I don’t just want, I’m demanding. If you need the head of the Marshals Service to tell you so, he will,” Sherwood said.
“You go ahead and do that, John,” Beard said, moving closer to Sherwood. He was still reacting to the murder and wanted to punch somebody. Anybody.
Lucas said, “Easy there, Derrick.”
Sherwood didn’t back up. “I don’t want to see anyone on a phone.
You need to think about this, Derrick: everybody here is a suspect in a major security breach.
Anyone who doesn’t give up his phone voluntarily and right now will have his life stripped down to his grade-school days.
Oh, and the phones will include mine. Lucas, you come with me, I want you to witness me making a call. ”
Lucas and Sherwood stepped aside, and Sherwood made the call: “Yes, we’re still on the scene but I’ve got a problem…”
He talked for two minutes, said “yes” a couple of times.
· · ·
Ten minutes later, Beard took a call, listened, and said, at the end, “I understand. I’ll do it, but I’m not happy about it.” He clicked off—or the person on the other end of the call did—and Beard said to Sherwood, “I didn’t really think you would do that, John.”
Sherwood: “Finding the leak is more important than Leonid or his kid or his dead wife. Somebody, who is very well placed, is talking to the Russians. We need to know who.”
Beard waved his arm to take in the house and said, “All these men are longtime marshals. The newest one has ten years in. They’re not talking to any Russians.”
“Derrick, I believe you,” Sherwood said.
“But the possibility has to be looked at. Now. Lucas suggests that we turn the phones over to state investigators because they can start pulling calls immediately. My boss said he will arrange for the FBI office here to pick them up, and then either fly the phones to Washington, or, in consultation with Washington, turn them over to the local people who, I’m told, are competent.
The government will buy you all burner phones.
In the meantime, no calls. We’ll get some notepaper together and you can start taking down the phone numbers of your important contacts, if you haven’t memorized them… ”
Sherwood collected phones from all the pissed-off marshals, then made them more unhappy by having the marshals pat down each other for hidden phones.
No one had one, and none were found in a search of the four vehicles—the two brought by the Marshal’s Service, plus those belonging to Lucas and White.
“You know what?” White said. “If one of us…any of us…made a call, it would have been done on a burner just before you guys left the airport, and that phone was ditched one minute later.”
“I’ll talk to the FBI about searching the area where we came in, along with all the trash cans along the way,” Sherwood said. “I assume nobody saw anyone throw anything out a car window?”
Nobody had.
· · ·
Two FBI agents showed up, collected the phones but said that they didn’t know what would be done with them.
Sherwood: “I don’t care who looks at the outgoing calls, the locals or your Washington people, but it has to be fast. As fast as possible. If you need somebody to emphasize that to your AIC, I can have somebody in Washington call him. Or her.”
“Got it,” one of the feds said.
When it was all sorted, Beard said, “It’s unlikely that the Russians would have two separate hit teams, but I want my guys to bundle up the Sokolovs in a secure place, a different place.
One that we can defend, if necessary, until we get a plane here.
Then I want them back in Washington, to wherever you’ve had them stashed for the last year. ”
“That we can agree on,” Sherwood said. “It won’t happen as quickly as you hope.
I need to make some further arrangements.
I suspect the Sokolovs will be here for another day or two, at least. We have a body to deal with, for one thing.
And Derrick—it won’t be your guys providing the security.
My boss is already talking to the FBI about a full SWAT squad.
You guys protect them here, and the feds will pick them up in an armored vehicle.
They’ll have arranged a place to hide them. ”
“My guys stand around with their dicks in their hands?”
“If they find that amusing or comforting,” Sherwood said. “Yes.”
· · ·
White knew a nearby Best Buy store that they could hit for burner phones. Lucas, White, and Sherwood went to get them, and since Sherwood offered to pay for them, they bought the best phones and the most minutes, exchanged numbers, and started making calls before they got to the parking lot.
Lucas said to White, “We should go look at that Subaru.”
“Probably nothing to look at.”
“We should go anyway,” Lucas said.
“Then, if anyone asks, you can say you did, and you won’t have some little weasel rolling his eyes because you didn’t,” Sherwood said.
“You are wise in the ways of bureaucracy,” White said. To Lucas: “Let’s go get your car, and I’ll follow you over.”
Sherwood said, “Stay in touch.”
“What are you gonna do?” Lucas asked.
“Probably piss off Beard some more,” Sherwood said.