Chapter 16
The previous night, Lucas, Weather, and Sherwood again had dinner together, Weather having recovered from a mild snit about the wrecked Porsche: the snit had been partially neutralized by the fact that neither Lucas nor Sherwood had been injured.
They met at an Italian restaurant on Saint Paul’s Grand Avenue, where Sherwood denied leading Lucas into trouble, claiming that they’d had little idea of what they were doing when they were attacked.
Then Weather interrogated Sherwood about specific spy techniques that she’d read about in thriller novels or seen on television, and about lapses in security that had made it to national news stories.
“Most of what you read is a lot of bull. Most spies are clerks. Most of them do it for the money. There aren’t very many serious secrets.
The military needs to keep tactical plans secret until they’re executed, but everybody understands everybody else’s strategy, even in the smallest details,” Sherwood told her.
“You need to keep the names of your spies secret…but, there’s not much else.
Most of what we need to know we can either get from satellites or by watching Russian and Chinese and Iranian TV and reading their newspapers. ”
He added some stories, and between the primi (lobster risotto) and the secondi (Colorado lamb chops with black truffle demi-glace), Weather asked if he should be telling her all these things, and he said, “Everybody in Washington knows this stuff. You can keep a lot of secrets about one thing or another, but there’s no keeping down a good spy story, especially when there’s blatant stupidity involved. ”
At one point, Sherwood asked Lucas, “How much have you told Weather about what we’ve been doing?”
“Pretty much everything,” Lucas admitted.
Weather pointed a truffle-glace-streaked fork at Sherwood and asked, “Why aren’t you all over that Chevrolet? The one Lucas shot at? The Russians must have gotten it from somewhere.”
The car had been found by Minneapolis police, abandoned in a narrow street not far from the shooting site. It had two bullet holes in the back fender, but no blood inside.
“BCA and the feds are all over it,” Lucas told Weather. “There’s gotta be some kind of Russian connection, but I don’t know where it would come from. Not my area.”
“I bet Del would know,” Weather said to Lucas.
Sherwood: “Who’s that?”
“Old friend, BCA guy,” Lucas said. He said, “Del. Huh.”
“He pretends to be the scum of the earth,” Weather said.
Lucas: “Be nice. He’s a good friend.”
“I said pretends. He’s a good friend, but he’s convincing scum. That’s why he’s so useful,” Weather said.
Sherwood: “Do you have Russians here? I mean, bratva guys? Like mafia?”
“Maybe,” Lucas said. “I haven’t heard much myself, but a couple of Minneapolis vice cops went on television and claimed that Russian women were turning up as high-end escorts. So there’s that. That’s about all I know about it.”
“Where there’s escorts, there’s fire,” Sherwood said.
Lucas leaned back in his chair, held up a finger to a passing waiter who had not yet mastered the passing waiter’s skill of not seeing fingers, and when he stopped, Lucas said, “We’re gonna need dessert menus.”
When the waiter had gone to get them, he explained to Sherwood that Capslock’s job was to hang out. In that capacity, he knew and was friendly with much of the Minnesota lowlife. “If there are Russian criminals here, he would probably know about it. He might even know them.”
“The bratva can be an extension of the Russian intelligence services,” Sherwood said. “They take the money back home, or to Eastern Europe, and they need connections to do that. They do favors. Like round up cars.”
“All right,” Lucas said, looking around. “Where’s that waiter?”
“Could you give Del a call?” Sherwood asked. “I mean, before dessert?”
“I guess.”
“Go do that. I’ll get you a crème br?lée,” Weather said. “Say hello to Del for me.”
· · ·
Lucas called Del Capslock, who was sitting in a shithole bar called the Territorial. “Do you know anything about Russians?”
“Well, they’re having a war with the Ukrainians,” Capslock said.
“I mean here in the Cities.”
“I heard one got shot, or shot at, or something like that. You know I don’t do TV.”
“I’m thinking of the guys who might be involved in running hookers, or dope, or doing extortion, that kind of thing. Crooks. Criminals. Assholes. Bratwursts.”
“We don’t allow extortion, but, yeah, there are some Russians involved in the escort business. We’ve talked to some of the escorts and they haven’t been trafficked. They’re here to make some money.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Pretty sure, yeah. These are high-end girls. They’re not locked up in whorehouses.
We, I mean, you know, the Minneapolis vice guys, talked to some of the girls privately, told them that there wouldn’t be any come-backs,” Capslock said.
“They’ve all got their own bank accounts and they gave up names of former escorts who left the game and moved out to LA or Miami.
The vice guys checked with the California CBI, and they took a look.
Said the girls were clean. Some of them had straight jobs in the industry. Fairly straight.”
“If we put a pipe wrench on the neck of one of these Russians, you’re saying they wouldn’t have much to give up.”
“Oh…there are some stories about loan-sharking. They might have a finger in that—banking, not street sales. You need to put some pressure?”
“Yeah. The guy who got shot at, that you didn’t see on TV. He’s being hunted by a Russian hit team. They’ve already killed a woman, and we think the local Russians have been cooperating.”
“Let me get a name or two. I’ll call you before you go to bed, if you’re still staying up late.”
“I am.”
· · ·
When Lucas got back to the table, Weather had eaten a slice of his crème br?lée and she and Sherwood were talking about Letty.
“I was telling John that Letty doesn’t want to be in the CIA,” Weather said. She pushed the crème br?lée dish toward him. “I ate one third of your dessert. Maybe a little more than a third. You didn’t need the extra calories anyway.”
Lucas asked Sherwood, “When you got your last divorce, was it because your wife ate your desserts?”
“No, no. She was sleeping with a defensive end for the Washington Redskins,” Sherwood said. “Started when I was in Afghanistan. Guy was a brute. Six-seven, two-thirty. Did the forty in four-six. He could pull the arms off the Statue of Liberty.”
“Eat the dessert,” Weather said to Lucas. “What did Del say?”
“He was at the Territorial,” Lucas said. To Sherwood: “A dive bar. He’ll get me a name or two of the connected Russkis, call me tonight.”
“Excellent,” Sherwood said, taking the napkin off his lap and dropping it on the table. “Why don’t I stop by your place in the morning, say seven-thirty?”
“How about ten-thirty? Del will probably be out until one o’clock tonight, maybe two. He won’t be up before nine.”
“All right. But ten’s almost lunchtime back at my office…”
“One thing I oughta say,” Weather said. “Since I work in hospitals and this Russian person is in a hospital. Big ones, like Hennepin, have hundreds of people coming and going all day and all night, and hundreds of rooms. Are you sure these Russians can’t get to what’s his name, Solokov, in the hospital? ”
“Sokolov,” Sherwood said. “Honestly, they’ve got FBI agents, their SWAT guys, stacked up around him. I don’t know about their competence…”
“They’re pretty good. Their SWAT does tough stuff,” Lucas said.
Weather: “But, they’re not cops.”
“Yeah, there’s that,” Lucas said.
“Why aren’t they cops? They got badges,” Sherwood said.
“They don’t think like cops. Even the former cops, after they spend some time in the FBI, they stop thinking like cops,” Lucas said.
“They don’t hang out. They don’t notice things.
They go someplace, they do something…and they go back to the office and sit at the computer and enter their data.
I don’t know if Del even has a computer. Or a necktie.”
“The point being…”
“If somebody looked good walking around a hospital, you know, scrubs, shoe covers, I’m not sure the FBI would smell the bullshit. A street cop might,” Weather said.
“How does a plastic surgeon know this?” Sherwood asked.
“Because ever since I got involved with Lucas, my house has been full of street cops. You just don’t know…” She looked at Lucas: “You should introduce him to Jenkins and Shrake. Or Virgil.”
“He’s not ready for that,” Lucas said.
Sherwood said, “Whatever. Maybe…we should take a look around the hospital?”
Lucas: “You think St. Vincent would let us?”
“Oh, probably, if I asked. I don’t know what we’d get, though, if we were just there for half an hour,” Sherwood said. “I don’t see us staking the place out.”
“Neither do I,” Lucas said. “Be nice to know the territory, though.”
“I’ll call St. Vincent. Tell him we’ll be dropping by in the morning. Let’s do nine-thirty.”
· · ·
Lucas rolled out of bed at nine o’clock, did a hurried clean-up, got dressed, and ate a bowl of some kind of brown flakes that claimed to be organic, and had just gone to the front door when Sherwood pulled into the driveway.
“Let’s take the new Porsche,” Sherwood said. “We’re cleared to walk around the hospital. I got a name.”
On the way to Minneapolis, Sherwood said, “My researchers say you were a jock in college. Hockey.”
“I was. I still put the skates on occasionally,” Lucas said. “Senior men’s league.”
“I ran track,” Sherwood said. “Have you been reading about this NCAA name, image, and likeness? About paying jocks, football and basketball? The NIL deals? And the nonrevenue sports get screwed? The Olympic sports?”
“Of course they do,” Lucas said. “The NCAA has never been about anything but money, and that’s football and basketball.”
“Fuckers,” Sherwood said. “I get pissed reading about it, and I haven’t run in twenty years.”
“Were you any good?”