Chapter 13 #2
Not a good night. Nikitin took three opiate painkillers, which put him down early, but Titov and Abramova stayed up late, tracing routes on the maps, talking about alternatives.
Titov suggested that one viable alternative would be to lie about the door they were covering, claiming the agents came out of the other.
“We are not in the best of shape with the boss, because of the missed shot the first day,” Abramova said.
“If we run away, if we run tomorrow, from here, we could probably get away with it and spend the rest of our lives pushing brooms. Or maybe they have an observer there, and we wouldn’t get away with it.
Honestly, Melor, I don’t want to hear this kind of talk. ”
“Somebody is here. Somebody left the car for us.” Titov chewed on his lip for a moment, then conceded. “So, we go.” He looked at his watch. “In seven hours.”
· · ·
They didn’t quite make seven hours, but they made seven and a half, rolling out of the motel at 5:30, in pitch darkness.
Titov drove, matching the speed of the thin traffic on the interstate.
There was a pale hint of dawn on the eastern horizon as they approached the lights of the Twin Cities.
Abramova had the location of the cached car on her iPhone navigation map and called the turns as they drove into Saint Paul, where they found the car parked on a downtown street.
They were not unobserved. They were in an area of redbrick buildings, but when Abramova got out of the Ford to go to the second car, she saw a street person huddled in a doorway, shaking with cold, and staring at her.
An empty wine bottle lay on its side by his feet.
He was bareheaded and appeared to be barefoot, although the temperature was below zero.
In Russia, she would have called for help; nothing she could do here.
She looked back at the man, shook her head, and stepped away.
The key was on the driver’s side back wheel, as they had asked, and she slid it off into her hand, opened the car, and got in.
The car, a Chevrolet Equinox, was at least several years old, freezing cold, and the seat and mirrors were set for a large man.
She took a minute to find the seat latch and move the seat up, and another to adjust the mirrors.
By that time, Titov and the Ford had turned a corner, and she said into her phone, which had been on the whole time, “I’m coming. ”
“Did you see the man in the doorway?” Titov asked.
“Yes. I think he will die if nobody else sees him.”
“Fuckin’ Americans,” Titov said.
She turned the corner and saw Titov rolling slowly toward the end of the block and got in behind him. “We go,” he said, and accelerated toward a ramp in the crosstown freeway.
· · ·
They were fifteen minutes away from the target apartment house, on the northern edge of downtown Minneapolis.
The highways between the two cities were growing crowded, but the gloom of the early winter morning was thick, oppressive, and the people they saw on the sidewalks were scuttling, heads down, arms tight to their bodies; half of them wore some kind of mask or face-covering scarf.
The three of them were all thoroughly familiar with the pattern of streets around the target, from the maps and satellite photos. The FBI agents would take Sokolov out the front of the building, because they had little choice—and no reason to think that there might be a threat.
Nikitin and Abramova decided that the best location for a sniper would be in the back seat of a car about two hundred meters to the north, shooting along North Second Street toward the apartment building that fronted on North Second.
The shooting vehicle would be parked, nose in, on North Eighth Avenue, a stub street that led out of sight to several possible escape routes.
They’d picked one escape route, but the others might confuse pursuit.
And they’d shoot from the Chevrolet. It was older than the Ford, the seats were worn and dirty, and the car stank of pizza and sausage, as if it had been used as a delivery vehicle; but the engine, transmission, and tires seemed solid.
Nikitin would be shooting out the back window, off a sandbag propped on the open window ledge.
All the details, every one, were critical.
The eastern sky was growing lighter the first time they cruised the shooting location in their two vehicles.
They both paused, one after the other, at the end of North Eighth Avenue.
“There’s a tree branch in the way,” Nikitin said, from the Chevy driven by Abramova.
“If we could break the tree branch, this would work.”
“Small branch, we can try,” Abramova said. “We should do it now, before it gets too light.”
“I’ll get it,” Titov said; their phones were both on speaker. “I see what you’re talking about. I’ll go around the block.”
He did that, pulled over as though parking, got out, looked around—the streets were empty. He walked across a sidewalk and grabbed the low-hanging branch, put his weight on it, and cracked it near the tree truck. He left it hanging and hurried back to the car.
Abramova took the Chevrolet past it. Nikitin: “That will work.”
They couldn’t stop the car on Second Street, because they were afraid they’d be spotted and checked by the FBI agents before the Sokolovs were hustled out of the apartment. Instead, Titov would wait in the Ford, parked three blocks away, near a bus shelter.
When he saw the first agents exit the apartment, he would call, and Abramova would back out of Eighth Avenue onto Second Street, just far enough that Nikitin could make the shot.
Experience suggested that the FBI agents would wait until they had the transport vehicles at the doors, then send one or two agents out first, to check the surroundings, then bundle the two Sokolovs out of the apartment and into the waiting cars.
The younger man was a foot taller than his father, so they shouldn’t be hard to tell apart.
With the shooting sequence worked through, they spent thirty minutes checking three separate spots where Titov could drive the Ford as soon as they saw the FBI agents leaving the apartment building; they selected the closest one, only a quarter mile to the north.
After the shooting, they would dump the Chevrolet, and all three of them would take the red Ford back on the interstate, head south through the Twin Cities, and return to Iowa.
From there, if there was no obvious pursuit, they were six hours by road from Chicago, and a rapid exit via a flight to Miami, Florida, then through Madrid to Frankfurt, assuming Sokolov was dead.
If there was a pursuit, a net, they’d stay away from airports, stick to the highways and back roads all the way to Mexico.
“God willing,” Abramova said.
“God has no part in this,” Titov said.
· · ·
With the shooting lanes and escape lines set, they drove out in both cars to a Starbucks for coffee and scones; Nikitin and Abramova waited in the Chevrolet as Titov went inside with their orders.
Titov was addicted to the scones and brought back five—he’d eat three—along with straight-up Grandes for Nikitin and Abramova, and a Venti for himself.
When he came back, Abramova asked, “What is this sign on that truck?”
She nodded at the truck parked in front of them. A bumper sticker read, “My flesh-eating bacteria are smarter than your honor student.”
“It’s a joke,” Titov said, and spent a minute trying to explain the evolution of things that were smarter than your honor student, until Abramova waved him off. “More stupidity,” she said.
They were all crowded into the Chevrolet, Nikitin lying in the back, sitting, drinking, eating, when Titov’s phone rang. He checked the number, answered and said, “Da?” And then, to the others, “Oh, shit! We gotta go. Now!”
“What?” Abramova asked.
“The FBIs changed up the departure and are leaving at nine o’clock. Ten minutes.”
“We have time. No panic, go to your place, we will go to ours,” Abramova said. Titov scrambled out of the car and across the parking lot to the Ford, taking his scones and coffee, and followed Abramova and Nikitin out of the Starbucks parking lot.
Nikitin said, “The FBI timing might not be precise. Good technique to be imprecise.”
“Yes, but if they’re imprecise early, we have missed them.
Imprecise late is better for us,” Abramova said, laser-focused on her driving, running a yellow light.
Titov was no longer behind them, having broken away to park the Ford near the bus stop where he’d stand watching the FBI vehicles.
She added, “The intel is amazing. Minute-by-minute alerts.”
“Yes. Maybe Sokolov is trying to commit suicide.”
When they turned down Second Street, they saw three SUVs parked in close formation outside the apartment, and the red Ford pulling into a parking space well beyond them. They were still hooked together on their cell phones, and Titov said, “In place.”
“We see you, and we were correct where they would come out. A good sign: luck is with us,” Nikitin said. “They’ll take him to the middle vehicle.”
“How is your butt?” Abramova asked.
“Not a factor, if I don’t have to run.” He began humming tunelessly, a tic he’d displayed before other hits.
Abramova turned down Eighth Avenue. There was on-street parking all along the right side, but only a few cars parked along the street. She pulled into the first parking spot, left the engine running.
Nikitin had tested the electric windows, and now he sat up, rolled down the back window, and put a hand-sized sandbag on his knee, where it would be instantly accessible. The rifle sat across his knees, an ugly, ungainly weapon, with its variable-power Leupold scope.
Nine o’clock came and passed. At 9:08, Titov called: “We have movement, we have a man walking to the second car, he’s opening the back door, not closing it, he’s looking at the apartment door…”
Abramova backed up, into Second Steet, and as they looked down its length, saw a cluster of men hurry out of the apartment. They had a heavyset man in the middle of the cluster, and a taller one trailing, and then the cluster opened a notch to let the heavyset man get in the back seat of the car.
Nikitin had the sandbag on the window edge and the rifle on top of it, and he’d stopped breathing. He looked and waited and waited and waited and when the group opened that little bit, so Sokolov could turn and get into the back seat of the SUV, he squeezed off the shot.
“Go! Go! He’s down,” Nikitin shouted. “He went down…”
Abramova was looking in the rearview mirror where a blue-gray SUV had come around a corner a block away and was closing on them, in a hurry, and she said, “We have trouble, we have, maybe, a scout car, coming up behind.”
She accelerated straight down Eighth Avenue, and the other vehicle came after them. She lost sight of the other car, then it fishtailed around the corner and she said, “Fuck me, we can’t have it follow.”
Abramova swerved to the side of the street and stepped on the brakes, hard as she could, and the right-side wheels climbed a curb and Nikitin shouted, “What are you—?”
And she was in the street, the gray SUV only sixty or seventy feet away, and coming on, and she raised the Beretta and began squeezing the trigger as fast as she could, sending rapid three-shot bursts at the other car, aiming low, at tires, and at the engine and at the windshield and back to the tires and the SUV went sideways and she emptied the Beretta at the tires and jumped back in the Chevrolet and they were gone—three minutes, which seemed like it would last forever, to Titov.
The three minutes passed, no sign of pursuit, and they were out of the Chevrolet with the rifle and sandbag and into the Ford and Titov said to Nikitin, “You hit him, he went down hard!”
“We had to stop a pursuing car,” Abramova blurted. “We did that, we have no followers so far, unless there are drones, we need to get on the interstate.”
“Slow down,” Titov said. “Tell me about it when we are on the highway. In the meantime, reload.”