Chapter 14 #2
The agent went away to speak to somebody on his own cell phone as sirens were breaking out around the neighborhood.
Two or three minutes later, an ambulance arrived, with a cop car.
The paramedics lifted Sokolov off the ground, the agents circled tightly around him to block a view of the body.
Sokolov’s face was too-white and clenched with pain, and possibly frightened, his son helping with the move.
They put him on a gurney and moved him into the ambulance, his son hanging over him.
“Papa, Papa, you’ll be okay…Papa, please… ”
The ambulance took off, with Minneapolis patrol cars and FBI vehicles front and back, lights flashing all around.
The third FBI car remained at the scene.
Lucas and Sherwood walked back to the Porsche, and on the way, Lucas called 9-1-1 to tell the operator what had happened during the pursuit, and to suggest that a Minneapolis crime scene crew come pick up bullet casings from the street where the woman had stood shooting at them.
The message, he was assured, would be relayed.
At the car, they walked around it once, and then Sherwood started laughing and Lucas asked, “What’s funny?”
“Gonna need new wheels, big guy. She mangled this thing. Good God, look at that. I haven’t seen anything like this outside an infantry junkyard in Iraq.”
He was right. The windshield and back window were entirely gone, the interior roofing was shredded, every piece of sheet metal on the front and the driver’s side of the car showed irreparable bullet holes, and three of the four wheels were flat.
There were many holes going into the engine compartment, and if the engine wasn’t wrecked, it would be seriously compromised.
“My insurance agent is gonna pass a kidney stone,” Lucas said.
“It was damaged while in pursuit of the enemies of our nation,” Sherwood said, in a phony portentous tone. “The U.S. government will recognize its obligations to make you whole.”
“I don’t think so. The Service keeps trying to get me to drive a service car, and I keep driving my own.”
“Well, in that case, you’re fucked,” Sherwood said. “Look at this: my finger fits in the bullet hole.” Then, “I’m starting to get scared.”
“I started getting scared five minutes ago. They got a machine gun.”
“So now what?” Sherwood asked.
“You call your boss, I call mine, then we wait for Minneapolis to show up. We make statements and…”
“Call an Uber?”
“We’ve fallen low,” Lucas said.
· · ·
Lucas walked around the Porsche, fuming; got a gym bag out of the truck and filled it with personal stuff from the car—sunglasses, iPad, parking meter coins, garage door opener, hideout Ruger .357, four hundred dollars in small bills, like that. Thought about the hit team.
Two Minneapolis detectives showed up, and Lucas and Sherwood both made brief on-the-spot statements, and promised to email complete statements later in the day.
The detectives helped push the Porsche to the curb, where Lucas locked it.
That done, he took a last look at the car and said to Sherwood, “We gotta try to blow these people up. The hit team.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“St. Vincent doesn’t like me. I’ve got an idea of what we could do next, but it would ramp up the hate, if he ever found out.”
“I believe my reaction to that would be, fuck him,” Sherwood said. “Tell me.”
“Look at the possibilities. The hit team may be on the run. If they are, and if they have good IDs, they could be in Mexico by tomorrow night. Driving. I’ve driven from the Twin Cities to Dallas in one stretch.
They’d be moving slower, so they don’t attract highway patrolmen, but they could still make it to OKC without any trouble, tonight, three of them driving, and then… ”
“OKC?”
“Oklahoma City. From there to the Mexican border is another day or so, down through Texas, Brownsville, and from there…Back in the USSR.”
“The Beatles,” Sherwood said. “Haven’t thought about them in decades, but the song still plays in Russia. Okay, so if they’ve run, they’re gone. You’d be right about that.”
“If they haven’t run, if they find out Sokolov isn’t dead, if they set up for another shot at him, our best chance at getting to them is to make them move,” Lucas said.
“We need to shake them out where people can see them. If they’ve got a safe house here in the Cities, people would still have seen them coming and going.
It’s possible that the place out in Minnetrista was their only safe house, and they’re ditched in another motel somewhere. ”
“I’ll buy that. How do we shake them loose?”
“The news people know what’s happened, but in a sketchy way, because the FBI is so tight-assed about releasing information that hasn’t been thoroughly sterilized and is therefore uninteresting. But the media is poking around, they’re looking for angles. They’ll be looking for more after today.”
“And…”
“I would suggest that I talk quietly to a friend at the BCA, which has the video taken at the motel. I get a copy of that, under the table, completely deniable on both ends, and leak it to a media friend along with some details about Sokolov’s history.
That’d give people an idea of what the team looks like—body styles, height, and so on. ”
“Interesting concept,” Sherwood said. “That would also be…transgressive.”
“But not stupid,” Lucas said. “One of the things that has increasingly pissed me off about cops and the government in general is that they hide information from the public, but that everybody else knows. These Russians know what they look like. The FBI knows what they look like. Putting them on TV with an appeal for information is not going to reveal any big classified secrets.”
Now Sherwood smiled. “Most intelligence work is a waste of time, and this is exactly one of the problems…People get information and then they hide it, for no good reason. I’m with you on this. How fast can you set it up?”
“Got to get that video…gonna have to talk to a guy…gonna have to talk to somebody in the media…” Lucas looked at his watch. “We need to have it organized by the four o’clock news.”
· · ·
They spent another fifteen minutes talking about what Lucas should leak to the media, before the Uber arrived. They stayed quiet on the way back to Lucas’s house, where Sherwood picked up his car. He’d go back to his hotel to call his CIA supervisors and to tell them what was about to happen.
“If they have a problem with it?” Lucas asked, on the way out the door.
“They won’t,” Sherwood said. “They’ll ask, ‘How does this come back to us?’ The answer is, ‘It won’t, and it could shake the hit team loose.’ They’ll be fine with it, as long as nobody knows that they knew about it in advance.”
“All right,” Lucas said. “Stay in touch. If something comes up, and you want me to kill the release, you gotta call me in an hour or an hour and a half. After that, it’ll be too late.”
“Do it,” Sherwood said.
· · ·
With Sherwood on his way back to his hotel, Lucas called an old friend at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Jon Duncan, and said, “I need a favor. Not a big one, a medium-sized one.”
“Is that fuckin’ Flowers involved?” Flowers was a BCA agent and a friend of Lucas’s.
“No, no,” Lucas said. “I’ve been working this spy thing for the Marshals Service, and Virgil’s typing out another book.”
“I heard you’ve been shooting at people again.”
“And they’ve been shooting at me,” Lucas said. “You guys took video out of that motel, the shooters changing cars.”
“We did. Interesting stuff.”
“I need a copy of that,” Lucas said. “Just so you know, I’m gonna give it to the media. It’d be best if it was the raw video, not cleaned up or anything, so it can’t come back to you.”
“That could have some undesirable ramifications, if anyone found out,” Duncan said.
“Of course it could,” Lucas said. “That’s why it’s a medium favor, instead of a small one.”
“If I get fired, will you get me on with the Marshals Service?” Duncan asked.
“Probably not. We wouldn’t want somebody who leaks stuff to the media,” Lucas said.
“Thanks a lot, dipshit,” Duncan said.
“Listen, I might be able to blame the release on the FBI.”
A moment of contemplation. “All right. You know where I’m at, on this kind of thing. I’ll email it to you. After you pass it on, burn your laptop.”
“Thanks, Jon.”
“You owe me big,” Duncan said.
“I owe you medium.”
· · ·
The video came in twenty minutes later, as the Uber turned into Lucas’s driveway. It popped up on his iPad, anonymously, with an equally anonymous note that read “The original.”
Lucas called a woman named Daisy Jones who ran a late afternoon TV show called Jonesing for News. When she came up, she asked, “What?”
“You sound impatient with me. That makes me sad, considering our long-term friendship,” Lucas said. “Maybe I could go to Channel Three, where I have a former lover, eager to speak to me any day, any time.”
“Fuck her. I’m prepping for an interview. With a guy I don’t care about. So. What do you want?”
“I’ve got video of the Russian spies we shot up the other day,” Lucas said. “When they were trading cars at that motel. Nobody else has it. I want to get it out there, so it maybe jogs the memory of somebody who’s seen them. But, it can’t come from me.”
“Screw the guy I don’t care about. When can you get it to me?” she asked.
“I could email it to you, but then there’d be a record and you’d use it to blackmail me.”
“Yeah, I probably would,” she said. “Put it on a thumb drive and meet me at the Starbucks across from the station.”
“Thirty minutes,” Lucas said.
· · ·
Lucas got a clean thumb drive from his home office, loaded the video on it, and took his second car, a Porsche 911, across town. Jones was waiting at a table at Starbucks with a cup of coffee and a cup of hot chocolate. She pushed the chocolate at Lucas and he handed her the thumb drive.