Chapter 7
Lucas was thinking about going home.
Cops all over the Orono area were looking for and stopping black Jeep Wranglers, but there had been several of them, and none of them were full of wounded Russians.
The FBI had gotten video recordings of the renters of the Jeep Cherokee and the Subaru and found that both renters were the same man being careful about cameras—he wore a long-billed fishing hat, and only flashes of his face were visible.
None of the Twin Cities agencies had rented a black Jeep Wrangler, and the FBI had begun running a nationwide net. One of the feds told Lucas that if any of the major agencies had rented the Wrangler, the LoJack should show up in the Cities. So far, nothing had.
“Don’t really know where we go from here,” Lucas told Sherwood, “Or what I could do.”
“If I don’t get to go to bed, I don’t see why you should,” Sherwood said.
“I’ll stay for one more cup of coffee…”
Lucas’s phone rang.
He’d left his new burner numbers with the 9-1-1 operators, and one of them was calling.
He answered, listened, rang off and said to Sherwood, “The doctor, Juarez, was found alive, unhurt, down in a place called Apple Valley, south of the Cities. A few blocks off I-35. She’s being taken to Fairview Ridges Hospital in Burnsville as a precaution. ”
“The feds can lead us to wherever that is—they’ve got lights on their vehicles. How far is it?”
“I don’t know…maybe forty, fifty miles,” Lucas said.
“We’re outa here.”
· · ·
Under other conditions, a fast run south to the hospital might have been entertaining: Lucas’s Porsche was warm, comfortable, with hard-rock driving music coming through on Apple CarPlay.
Lucas liked driving fast and often did. The feds, however, restricted themselves to the speed limit, and Lucas felt he had to go along with it, so the trip took nearly an hour, even with flashers.
The caravan looked, Lucas thought, like the circus had come to town.
At the hospital, they all parked and went inside, talked to a couple of uniformed cops who were waiting for them. The cops led them to a room where Juarez was sitting on the bed, looking impatient.
One of the escort cops told her, as they entered the room, “They’re here.”
“Thank God,” she said. “If it’d been any longer, I would have started smoking again.”
Sherwood: “Dr. Juarez! We’re very happy to see you alive.”
“I’m happy to be alive,” Juarez said. “It’s so much nicer than the alternative.”
Sherwood continued: “These two gentlemen are with the FBI, this guy is a federal marshal, and I was part of the escort for a man these Russians tried to kill…”
“There were four of them, three men and a woman. One man had not been injured, the other three were. I think the man who drove me was Eastern European, and I’m tempted to say Russian.
The woman who was the first one in the door at the emergency room had an accent, too,” Juarez said.
“The man with the lesser gunshot wound had a heavy accent, the other man, who was seriously wounded, didn’t talk much, so I couldn’t tell.
The woman was very blond, all the men had dark hair.
They were all physically fit, average height or a little taller.
The man with the lesser wound had several scars on his body that might have come from shrapnel or industrial accidents—they were like cuts, rather than penetrating wounds that bullets would make. Are you FBI?”
“He’s CIA,” Lucas said. “You got the whole federal government talking to you.”
“Yeah, thanks for bringing that up,” Sherwood said to Lucas. He was only mildly annoyed. “Anyway, Dr. Juarez, Carolyn, we’ve been looking for you…”
“Let me say a couple things before you start asking questions. I’ve got a lot of stuff in my head, numbers, and I don’t want to get confused,” Juarez said.
“They took my phone but not my watch. I looked at my watch while we were gathering medical equipment and supplies at Bison. When we were ready to leave, they put a black ski mask over my head, backwards, so I couldn’t see where I was going.
Probably about 9:15 when we left the hospital, give or take a minute or two.
I tried to keep track. They took me to a house in a rural area, I think.
It looked and smelled like an old farmhouse, that grainy, raw-potato smell.
I got another chance to check the time when we got there.
When they took the mask off, so I could look at their wounded men, it was 9:56.
I’ve been sitting here doing the math: that’s forty-one minutes, more or less.
There were maybe three or four minutes from the time they pulled a mask over my face and put me in their car at the hospital, and another six or seven from the time they took me out of the car into the house.
So, the trip was between thirty-two and thirty-four minutes. I believe that’s very close.”
“That’s great,” Sherwood said. “We—”
“Let her talk,” Lucas said.
Sherwood shut up and Juarez went on. “At the house, I treated two wounded men, one of whom urgently needs a hospital. The woman had a small wound on her ear, nothing serious, she’d already treated it herself.
I told them the badly injured man would die without surgery, which I couldn’t do.
I told them that he urgently needed to get to a hospital, that he’d die if he didn’t. ”
“We think—”
“Let her go,” Lucas said.
She nodded at Lucas and rolled on. “After I treated their wounds, they put me in a closet while they decided what to do next. The closet had old peeling wallpaper inside, and a board floor that look crumbly. Old. Like an old house. They decided to try to take the worst-wounded man to a hospital, and that’s where they were going when they dropped me off.
I managed to look at my watch before they taped me and blindfolded me at the house.
It was 10:40 when they did that, and another five minutes before I was in the car.
When they dropped me, I managed to get the tape off my thumbs, and pull off the ski mask, and it was 11:32 when I looked at my watch.
It took me several minutes to get the tape off.
Maybe five. So very close to forty minutes to drive where they took me.
On the way to Apple Valley, I didn’t sense any effort to try to fool me about turns or directions: once we were on the highway, we stayed there.
So, thirty minutes from the hospital to the farmhouse—they had to be driving south, from the hospital, because they drove thirty or thirty-five minutes to where they dropped me off, and now we’re way south.
From the hospital to here would be at least an hour. ”
“Do you think the car might have been a Jeep?” Lucas asked.
Juarez cocked her head, thought, then said, “Yes. It rode rough, like it had heavy tread. I never saw it, though.”
“That’s all great,” Sherwood said. “We—”
“They may be on their way to Kansas City,” Juarez said. “Maybe. Maybe. I’m not sure.”
She explained why Kansas City was a possibility.
One of the feds had produced a notebook and was taking down the interview in what appeared, to Lucas, to be fluent shorthand.
She said that she’d suggested Kansas City as a place where a gut-shot man could be dropped and treated, and probably released, without strings attached, as long as he kept his mouth shut.
When she learned where she’d been dropped off, she realized that I-35 would take a vehicle straight south to Kansas City.
“They were so careful around me, it seems odd that they would simply adopt my suggestion,” she said. “Then, when I was in the car, waiting, I heard them mention Research Medical, which is in Kansas City. That all ties together, but…I wondered why I overheard that.”
Lucas: “You’re thinking that they laid a false trail?”
“It’s possible,” she said.
Fed: “We need to know the details of the wounds and the treatment—”
Lucas: “Why don’t we take this chronologically from the time they showed up in Bison…every detail you can think of. Nothing’s too small. How were they dressed? Did you see their coats? Do you think you saw all of them?”
The four of them, Lucas, Sherwood, the two feds, worked her for an hour for every detail she had.
The shorthand fed excused himself twice to make calls to his agent in charge, Sherwood left once to call an unspecified person, and Lucas called Weather to tell her that the doctor was safe and he’d be home in an hour or so and would need a cup of cocoa.
When Sherwood came back, he said, “The FBI will get in touch with every reasonable hospital that they might hit, including all of them here in the Twin Cities. You got hospitals up the ass. The main thing is, if you work the doc’s numbers…
they were somewhere within a ten-mile circle of Orono. You were right about that.”
“Now it’s a snake hunt,” Lucas said. He looked at his own watch: getting late.
“That’s not us. We can keep the cops jacked up, but not much will be done before tomorrow daylight.
You’ll want somebody with authority to contact the media, get the news programs to put out word on the hunt.
If Juarez was right, and they were in a farmhouse in the Orono area, somebody will have seen them. ”
“What authority would you suggest? To talk to the media?” Sherwood asked. “How about you?”
Lucas shook his head and said, “Not me. A friend of mine is the head of the state Department of Public Safety. I’ll call her tomorrow morning and ask her to call the TV stations and push. If the FBI won’t comment, I will.”
“I can’t, but we’d be in your debt,” Sherwood said.
Lucas and Sherwood left Juarez with the two feds and headed into the night: “Maybe see you tomorrow,” Sherwood said. “I would love to seriously fuck up a Russian hit team.”
Thinking about that on the way home, Lucas realized that he actually liked the CIA guy, and Lucas was not somebody who liked people easily.
· · ·
Lucas’s wife, Weather Karkinnen, was a plastic surgeon. She had operations on most days, often two or three of them, starting early. She always tried to be asleep by ten o’clock at the latest, was in bed but awake when Lucas got home.
He gave her a summary of what Juarez had told them, and Weather said, “That all sounds right to me, but depending on what hit this Russian guy, the bullet might not have gotten to the bowel.”
“She said she thought she could feel it, through his belly skin, but wasn’t sure about that,” Lucas said. “She was knowledgeable about gunshot wounds. She wasn’t a medical debutante. You think she was wrong about any of it?”
“No, but given the conditions she was working under, you can’t tell. If the bowel was punctured, everything she told you sounds right. I don’t really know what I’m talking about. But it sounds right.”
“Good,” Lucas said. “Are you still planning to get up at six?”
“No, I’ve set my clock for seven, I’ve already made a call that I’ll be late for my first op. I wanted to hear what happened.”
“Wake me up when you get up—I’ve got calls to make,” Lucas said. He bent forward and kissed her on the forehead. “I’m going to make myself a cup of hot chocolate, I’ll sleep in after I make the calls. Tomorrow’s gonna be a bureaucratic hassle.”