Chapter 19 #3
The door opened onto a small interior lobby, with a stairwell behind a door to the right and an elevator to the left.
They ran up the stairs, looked both ways down the empty hall on the second floor, and hurried to a green door that read “240” and had an empty plate that might have held the name of the apartment owner, but didn’t.
They hadn’t yet seen a single person in the building.
Lucas knocked on the apartment door and waited, knocked again and waited, used the rake and they were in.
Sherwood walked inside as Lucas closed the door behind them, sniffed—the place smelled of nicotine and something alcoholic—and they both listened for a moment, then Sherwood took a cell phone-sized gizmo from his jacket pocket and turned it on.
“A bug detector?” Lucas asked.
“Yeah, but it’ll pick up cameras and a burner if there’s one hidden in the room. I’m not seeing anything yet.”
“You ever bagged a place before?” Lucas asked.
“Not really. I’ve gone into places after the Delta guys blew the door and killed everybody inside, but we weren’t all that quiet about it. I was never the first through the door.”
“This is sort of like that, without Delta and the blown door and the noise, and the fact that if we’re caught, we could get arrested and prosecuted and lose our jobs,” Lucas said.
“Then we shouldn’t stand around bullshitting, should we?”
The apartment was tidy enough, but not high-end: more designed for singles in nine-to-five clerical jobs. The carpet felt thin and cheesy underfoot, like walking across slices of pepperjack from a Subway store.
While Sherwood waited by the door with his gizmo, Lucas did a walk-through of the apartment, looking for alarms and tell-tales.
He found none. There was a compact kitchen minimally equipped with dishes and silverware, along with a pot, a blender, and a microwave.
Most of the cabinets were empty. Three bottles of Canadian Club whiskey sat on one countertop with a half-dozen dirty glasses.
That done, Lucas said, “Here,” and handed Sherwood a pair of surgeon’s gloves that he’d stolen from Weather, and pulled on a pair of his own. “You scan, however you do it, and I’ll do my thing.”
“Gotta make the call first,” Sherwood said. Lucas waited until he’d taken out his phone and punched in the number for the burner responsible for the blips isolated by the woman at the NSA: nothing buzzed, beeped, or rang.
“Damnit all. That’s not helpful,” Lucas said. “On the other hand, Letty said they probably pulled the battery…”
· · ·
Then they went back for a closer look, beginning in the living room with its home-furniture-outlet couches, coffee tables, and chairs.
A chipboard bookcase held a couple of novels and a history of World War II in the Pacific, plus some board games and a pack of Bicycle playing cards.
A television was mounted on a wall facing the couch and a coffee table; there was nothing behind it but dust and wires.
There were two ashtrays on the coffee table with a half-dozen butts in one of them.
They moved through to two bedrooms, one showing two packed suitcases, the other two unpacked suitcases, with clothes strewn around a double bed.
“Bernie’s room,” Sherwood said, moving around the room with the bug detector. He shook his head and moved into the other bedroom with the packed suitcases. “Got something here,” he said.
Lucas went to look, and Sherwood dug into a heavy winter coat hung in the bedroom closet. He pulled out a long box that might once have held a pearl necklace but no longer did. Instead, it held a stack of hundred-dollar bills.
“That’s not very interesting,” he said, He took the stack of money out of the box, riffled it with a thumb. “Must be…ten grand?”
“More like ninety-four hundred,” Lucas said. Sherwood glanced up at him and Lucas said, “That was a joke.”
“Oh. Ha ha.” Sherwood put the box back in the coat. “I’ll keep looking.”
· · ·
Lucas went back to the other bedroom, obviously Bernie’s, saw an ashtray, picked up a couple of cigarette butts and put them in a Ziploc bag.
Bernie left half of his clothes in an open suitcase and Lucas squeezed through them, found nothing of interest. The suitcase was an ordinary Samsonite, with no hidden compartments.
A twenty-liter carry-on duffel bag held sound-cancelling headphones, a deflated neck cushion for air travel, a personals sack with a toothbrush, a travel-sized toothpaste, and a bottle of Aleve—Lucas opened the bottle and the pills looked legitimate.
Sherwood was still picking through Leonid Sokolov’s bedroom, and Lucas called, “See if you can find something that’d give us some DNA. Does he smoke? Cigarette butts?”
“Gotta be something in his suitcases,” Sherwood said.
“Be neat,” Lucas said.
The other half of Bernie’s clothes were either on the floor, bed, or bedside chair, or hung haphazardly in the bedroom closet.
Lucas frisked the hung clothes and found a lump in the bottom hem of a ski jacket.
When he checked, he found that the bottom of the jacket pocket had been ripped out, so anything put in the pocket would slide all the way down to the bottom hem.
He fished out the lump, thinking, drugs, but found himself holding a small stiff metallic sack. “Got the burner, I think,” Lucas called.
Sherwood came in and Lucas showed him the sack: “Faraday bag.”
“Yeah. Open it.”
Lucas unrolled the top of the bag, which was held by a fingernail-sized steel clasp, and pulled the phone out, with a separate battery, and handed it all to Sherwood.
Sherwood popped the back, took a photo with his phone, checked the number.
“We got him,” he said. “Let’s see who he’s been talking to… ”
He pushed some more buttons and said, “Exactly one contact.” He took another photo, then handed the phone back to Lucas. “Put it back where you found it.”
Lucas resealed the Faraday bag, dropped it into the bottom of the ski jacket, and asked, “You find anything in Leonard’s, uh, Leonid’s bag?”
“We’re stealing his toothbrush.”
“That’ll do it,” Lucas said. “So: Bernie. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
They did that, out the door and down the stairs.
· · ·
“We’ve got to decide what to do with all this,” Sherwood said as they walked out of the building and into the cold. “It’s settled my primary interest: finding the leak, and it wasn’t one of ours. The focus now goes to the hit team, rather than the leak.”
“The hit team was always my primary focus,” Lucas said. “I figured the leak was your problem, not mine.”
“Well, you solved the leak. Maybe I can help settle the hit team question.”
“I would appreciate it. The DNA stuff, I’ll leave with you,” Lucas said. “Ship it overnight to Washington, get your folks to compare samples. We really don’t need to do it, but it would be interesting to know if Sokolov is really Bernie’s father. You know, the motive thing.”
“I can do that. Then we figure out how to use Bernie to pull the hit team into a trap,” Sherwood said. “Another question is, how much do we tell St. Vincent? He’ll want to know how we figured out that it’s Bernie, and we can’t tell him we bagged the condo…”
Lucas shrugged: “Somebody has to find the phone. Why not the FBI? You could tell them that you’re really curious about the leak, and Bernie’s name popped into your head.
Since two FBI agents live in the apartment with him…
they wouldn’t even need a search warrant to find it.
They’d ask, how did he contact them, you tell them, maybe he had a burner hidden on his body—or in his clothes. ”
“That’d be pretty sneaky. Basically, I don’t like it. Who gets the credit? St. Vincent will jump in front of that train. I’ve run out of patience with him.”
“So what are you going to do?”
Sherwood thought about it, then: “We don’t tell St. Vincent anything, not a fuckin’ word.
You called him a cheese-eater. That might not do much for your career with the federal government, but you are correct.
We do tell the counterintelligence team and warn them not to ask too many questions.
Those guys…they’ll buy that. They’re like their own little piece of the FBI.
They’re used to working with weird situations, and they won’t worry about not talking to St. Vincent. ”
“Will they help us trap the shooters?” Lucas asked.
They were coming up to Sherwood’s car. “I’ll call them, set up an off-campus meeting for this afternoon,” Sherwood said. “They’ll bite. There are some interesting ramifications here…possibilities.”
“Are you going to tell your own people ahead of time?”
“I have to. They’ll watch, keep their mouths shut. They’ll be…amused.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Lucas said. “I stream the Slow Horses TV series. You’re all a bunch of treacherous motherfuckers.”
Sherwood smiled and said, “Yeah, it’s fun. I’ll set up a meet.”
“We need to emphasize that we want to pull in the hit team. I don’t find them amusing at all,” Lucas said. “They goddamn near killed both of us.”
“You never got a scratch and goddamn near killed three of them. I’m not seeing you as the victim here.”
“Killed my car.”
“You got a new, better one,” Sherwood said.
“I’ll admit killing or capturing the hit team would be a major plus.
Good fodder for prisoner exchanges, if nothing else.
As far as Bernie’s concerned, if the counter-intel people handle him right, he could even be useful.
Might be able to find out who he’s hooked up to.
Could lead us to more illegal Russians.”
“So they’ll owe us. The counter-intel guys.”
“That’s one way to look at it.”
“Yeah, your way,” Lucas said.