Chapter 19 #2
They left the diner and went back to Lucas’s house, where he picked up the new Porsche, and they drove separately to the FBI building for the morning briefing. They learned nothing during the briefing except that St. Vincent was still pissed off at them.
St. Vincent did throw a little mystery out: “We’re meeting again at five o’clock. We have a developing situation.”
Sherwood: “Do you want to share?”
“No.”
· · ·
Letty called back as the PowerPoint presentation continued in endless minutiae. Lucas and Sherwood excused themselves, left the room and walked to an empty stretch of hallway to take the call.
“I could get in deep trouble for talking to you guys,” Letty said. “If you tell the FBI…”
“We won’t tell anyone,” Sherwood told her.
“They went back through some dailies, that’s recordings, and there was a call the night before Sokolov was shot, one minute and five seconds, and a suspicious blip the next morning at 9:07 coming out of the condo.
That matched up with another suspicious blip coming out of the airport area right when Mr. Sherwood said they were leaving for Minnetonka.
By a blip, I mean, somebody pushed a button and immediately hung up.
Same phone, all three times, but it’s a burner.
It was bought at a Walmart, but it’s almost impossible to pin down which Walmart because their distribution tracks quantities but not specific phones.
It could have come from anywhere. My friend is a suspicious kind of person and she thinks it was probably left in a dead drop and that your leaker didn’t buy it himself. ”
“So you got a couple of blips,” Lucas said. “Do you have the phone they were coming out of?”
“Yes, getting to that. It wasn’t from any of the phone numbers you have. We have a phone number, which I can give you, and my contact said she would put up a tracker for it, but it has been off the air since that nine o’clock blip. Not turned off, they pulled the battery.”
“Can your contact call me directly?” Sherwood asked.
“She could call Dad, if you really need to speak to her. She didn’t want to talk directly with you, Mr. Sherwood. Something about how it’s illegal. It’s probably illegal to talk to Dad, too, but she’s worked with us before and knows we can keep our mouths shut.”
“I can keep my mouth shut.”
“Yeah, well…”
“I asked Lucas for your phone number, but he won’t give it to me unless you say okay,” Sherwood said. “I’d like to take you out for a walk when I get back to Washington. And call me John.”
“Give it to him, Dad. Always happy to make a connection.”
· · ·
Standing in the hallway, Lucas and Sherwood talked about what to do next: didn’t argue, talked.
Sherwood said, “It’s probably Bernie, but not necessarily.
I’ve been thinking that they might have had some intelligence about where we were going from Washington, and when we were leaving.
They could have had a watcher pick us up at the airport, and he signaled the shooters when we left.
Figuring out a watcher would know about the condo…
that’s harder. Could have seen the handover from the Marshals Service to the feds, but… yeah, it’s Bernie.”
“If you’re wondering why he’d kill his old man…I’ve started to wonder if Sokolov is really his father. Could be, but the kid looked a lot like Martha—Masha?—but not at all like his father. If he isn’t, and he knows that…”
“Sokolov believes he’s the kid’s father,” Sherwood said. “I’ve been around them or reaching out to them for most of two years. I’ve never had a hint of anything different.”
“If it’s Bernie, I wonder about motive,” Lucas said. “We know he had the opportunity.”
“Money. Sokolov didn’t come to the States to be poor,” Sherwood said.
“He brought a lot of things with him, documents and photos, or Masha did, on a thumb drive that he sold us. He’s got five million in the bank.
His will leaves half to Martha, half to the kid, but if Martha predeceases him… is that right, predeceases?”
“Yeah, dies first.”
“If Martha predeceases him, the kid gets it all. Invested, that’d be a quarter million a year, after you take out a kilo of cocaine and a Ferrari.”
“All right. Motive and opportunity. Do we tell St. Vincent?” Lucas asked.
“I’d prefer to work with the Marshals Service,” Sherwood said. “We don’t need an investigation and arrests, we need a location and a takedown.” He added, “What we need is, we need to get Bernie to visit Sokolov, so while he’s gone, we can get into his room and luggage and see about a burner.”
“Search warrant or black bag?”
“Let me call home. If a black bag were needed, would there be a local resource who might provide us the necessary tools?”
“Possibly,” Lucas said.
· · ·
Bernie was still at the apartment building where his father was shot.
Lucas and Sherwood went back to the briefing room and made separate, careful inquiries about security arrangements around him.
As it happened, Sokolov himself was being guarded at the hospital around the clock by six agents, and Bernie was being guarded by two more—and the two traveled with him.
At the end of the PowerPoint presentation, Lucas asked a casual question on Sokolov’s condition, how soon he’d be able to move on to Washington, this time with better security, and whether he was able to talk. Sherwood, sitting on the other side of the room, asked if Bernie had seen his father yet.
St. Vincent said, impatiently, “He can talk, but that’s not important—I mean, what’s he going to say?
He doesn’t know as much as we do. Bernie’s being annoying.
He’ll visit the hospital if we take him, but he seems to be more interested in hitting a couple of downtown clubs.
We’ll swing him by the hospital this afternoon.
We’re discouraging him about the clubs…”
“That’s good,” Lucas said. “Put a couple of FBI suits in most clubs and it’d clear them out in a hurry.”
Another FBI man said, “We’re discouraging him, but he’s pretty intent. It’s all he’s interested in…”
St. Vincent was looking at Lucas, visibly fuming: “Do you have anything serious to contribute?”
“Maybe later,” Lucas said.
“How about you?” St. Vincent snapped at Sherwood.
Sherwood raised both hands overhead, in a surrender. “Just watching the professionals do their stuff.”
“Keep hanging out with Davenport, you might get the wrong impression.”
After a moment of restrained silence, working up a burn, Lucas said, “David, you’re a fuckin’ cheese-eating bureaucrat. You couldn’t find your own ass with both hands and a searchlight. Ah, fuck it, I’m out of here.”
“You’re out of here,” St. Vincent shouted, and Lucas was out of there.
· · ·
A half hour later, Sherwood wandered over to Lucas’s Porsche, where Lucas was reading the operating manual, and knocked on the window. Lucas looked up from the manual, dropped the window, and said, “I’ve got a Wi-Fi hotspot. Right here in the car.”
“They’re taking Bernie out of the condo after lunch, for a visit and maybe a little shopping. I don’t know exactly what that means, but it’s not long from now. We can’t actually kick the door…”
“Do you know which door?”
“I do,” Sherwood said. “There won’t be anybody watching it, because nobody thinks the Russians want to kill Bernie.”
“Good. I wanted to talk to you before I left, but I have to see a friend about a tool, and you can’t come. Go get a coffee or something, I won’t be long.”
“Meet here?” Sherwood asked.
“No. I don’t want any feds to stumble over us,” Lucas said. “Why don’t we hook up at Bernie’s condo. We can watch the door from your rental, which is the next thing to invisible.”
“Unlike, say, a Porsche. Does Minneapolis have Starbucks?” Sherwood asked.
“Yeah, but I’d recommend a Caribou Coffee. Lots of them around.”
· · ·
Lucas didn’t have a friend that he wanted to see about a tool.
He had a hidden drawer on the underside of a stairway in his garage; he’d designed and contracted the house himself, and the hidden drawer was part of it.
He drove home, made himself a cheese-and-bologna sandwich on sourdough bread—calling St. Vincent a cheese-eater had left him peckish—went into the garage, opened the drawer and took out a cylindrical electronic lock rake about the size of an electric toothbrush.
The drawer also contained two cold revolvers, a Taser, generic handcuffs, a burner phone, two hand-held walkie-talkies like hunters used—they left no cell phone trace—and five thousand dollars cash in random denominations.
He pushed the drawer back in place, finished the sandwich on the way back out to the driveway. Twenty minutes later, he’d left the Porsche and walked down the street to Sherwood’s rental car.
“Got what we need?” Sherwood asked.
“Yeah.”
Another five minutes and they were parked by the same bus stop where Titov had waited for Leonid Sokolov to walk out to an FBI truck.
· · ·
They waited for more than an hour. Lucas was reading a Paul Krugman economics blog on his phone when Sherwood said, “SUV at the front door. I can see bumper flashers, but they’re not flashing.”
“That’s them. Here’s Bernie.”
Bernie, escorted by a single agent, walked out of the building and they both got in the SUV.
“How far away is the hospital?” Sherwood asked.
“Hennepin General? Maybe, I dunno, a mile? Lots of traffic lights.”
“Let’s move.”
· · ·
They were at the front door in two minutes. The door was not locked, because it led into a ten-by-ten lobby space with a call box and a wall of mailboxes. The inner door had a decent lock, but Lucas had a decent rake, and though it made a loud chattering noise, they were through in five seconds.
“Goddamn thing sounded like you dropped a spoon in a garbage disposal,” Sherwood grumbled. “You need better gear.”
“Hey, we’re in. If you’ve got better gear, send it to me.”
“Look for an unexpected FedEx box,” Sherwood said.
· · ·