Chapter 20
Lucas didn’t ask how he managed it, but Sherwood set up a meeting in a little-used room in the basement of the main post office in Minneapolis, an old Depression-era building on the Mississippi that Lucas suspected was considered an architectural treasure.
The room they were in wasn’t obviously a treasure, being dusty, and possibly visited by a water leak in the not-to-distant past, leaving behind a fishy odor.
Lucas was the second to arrive, guided to the room by an intimidated postal employee who wanted nothing to do with either him or Sherwood; Sherwood was checking the room for bugs, and had found none.
“You’re here,” he said, when Lucas walked in. “The feds should be here in the next five minutes. No bugs. By the way, if you sit on these chairs, you’ll get your suit all dirty, so just wait a minute.”
There were six metal folding chairs arranged around an eight-foot-long collapsing table with a scarred chipboard top. The postal service, Lucas thought, was not doing well. “How the hell did you find this place?”
“My researcher did,” Sherwood said. “I got somebody coming with paper towels…ah, here he is.”
Another postal employee hustled in with a spray bottle and a roll of paper towels.
He spent three or four minutes spraying and wiping down the chairs and table, and then hustled back out.
As he left, the four counterintelligence feds filed in, looked around, and the woman asked, “What’s up? Why are we in this hole?”
“We’re very off the record,” Sherwood said. “Very. Have a seat.”
“Something smells like an old dead fish,” one of the men said, as they all found chairs.
“Wouldn’t be from the Mississippi,” Lucas said. “That’s about fifty feet lower than this place.”
“Where’s the Mississippi?” another of the men asked.
“About fifty yards that way,” Lucas said, pointing toward the back of the building.
“Really? I’d like to see it,” the man said. “I’ve never seen it, except from the air.”
· · ·
Sherwood, “Okay, so let’s get into it. I will provide a short introduction to the conversation. Lucas and I found the leak.”
The woman: “What!”
Lucas, representing the American Midwest, said, “Yup.”
One of the men: “Who is it?”
“Bernie Sokolov,” Sherwood said. “He communicates with the hit team, or maybe a telephone cutout, with a burner that I’m told he has hidden in a ski jacket.
It may be inside a Faraday bag, so the feds can’t see it.
He used the phone to signal departure times from the airport and from the apartment building where Sokolov was shot. ”
The counter-intel feds all looked at each other—they didn’t seem especially surprised by Sherwood’s disclosure—and the woman asked, “How’d you find this out?”
“Through nonstandard investigative techniques that we are not at liberty to reveal,” Sherwood said.
“So you bagged the place,” the woman said.
Sherwood shook his head. “Not at all,” he said piously. “I will say that the NSA has a phone record of Bernie’s signals. You could talk to their phone department about how they got those. The local FBI folks have no clue.”
“The NSA can be pretty tight-lipped,” another of the male agents said.
“I know,” Sherwood said. “But you can probably find some cheese-eating bureaucrat to talk to you about it.”
All four of the agents laughed, and one said to Lucas, “You should be ashamed of yourself. I heard a woman over at headquarters referring to him as Old Cheddar.”
Lucas: “Somebody had to say it. Now. Here’s what John and I have been discussing. Is there a way to use the information that we uncovered to pull this hit team into another attempt on Sokolov, assuming that they’re still around, that we could use to trap them?”
The woman said, “Interesting. We like the concept.”
“As opposed to a concept, I’d like to have a plan,” Lucas said.
“We’d have to think about it—there’re lots of moving parts here and I’m sure Mr. Sherwood has probably broken a lot of laws to tell you about them,” the woman said. “Which is why we’re sitting in this hole.”
“Just looking for a quiet, interruption-free place to talk,” Sherwood said.
“How about if you guys pulled something out of your collective asses that would suggest that Bernie is the guilty one, that you could take to St. Vincent,” Lucas suggested.
“Say that you talked to the NSA, and they spotted the signals. When you looked into Bernie’s background, you found he was close to, you know, whatever Russian intelligence service you might think appropriate.
Tell him to search all of Bernie’s clothes.
They’ll find the burner. They tell Bernie that he’s going to disappear into the American court and prison system, and nobody will know.
We’ll never acknowledge having him, so he’ll never get traded back to Russia. ”
“I like the idea, but that wouldn’t happen,” one of the agents said. “I don’t even know how it could happen. He’ll lawyer up…”
Sherwood exhaled in exasperation, and said, “Guys, you’d be lying to him. All you have to do is tell a couple of little fibs. Get him to feel like his back is against the wall, get him to cooperate…He’s a Russian. He won’t know anything about the American justice system.”
“There is that,” the woman said.
“If we can get St. Vincent to cooperate,” another of the agents said.
Lucas: “Guys…”
“Yeah, we know,” the woman said. “We tell St. Vincent a couple of little fibs.”
“Exactly,” Lucas said. “Oh, by the way, one of our contacts collected DNA samples from both Leonard—Leonid—and Bernie and they’ve been sent to a CIA lab to confirm that they’re related. We’re not sure Bernie is actually his son.”
After a moment of silence, the woman said, “I wish I had your contacts.”
· · ·
After the meeting broke up, Sherwood headed to his hotel room to call his bosses in Washington, to tell them that the deal with the counter-intel people had gone down as planned.
Lucas walked back to his office in the federal building, where White had her nose in a computer.
“I’m no longer on the case,” she said, when she spotted him coming in. “I’m going up north.”
“What for?”
“Guy got convicted of kidnapping his kid from his ex. He’s a winger who doesn’t recognize the court’s authority, so he didn’t turn himself in to do his time. The court, of course, does recognize him.”
“Don’t get hurt,” Lucas said.
“You don’t get hurt. You almost got your ass shot again. What is it about you?”
“I dunno. Just lucky, I guess,” Lucas said.
White: “You look a little down.”
“I need some sleep, is what I need.”
White: “Uh-oh.”
“Not that bad yet. Sherwood sort of cheers me up.”
“Good for him,” White said. “Though he didn’t really strike me as the cheerful sort.”
“He’s not cheerful. He’s phlegmatic. That’s better than cheerful, when you don’t have much to be cheerful about.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” White said. “But…pills are better than into the pit. As long as they’re the right kind. Stay away from the Ambien.” Depression seemed endemic in the Marshals Service.
“I will,” Lucas said. “In the meantime, I’ll be back in my office.”
“What, chokin’ the chicken?”
“I’ll try not to get noisy,” Lucas said.
· · ·
Lucas got his drawing pad out, which gave him a broad unmarked surface to work on.
He began drawing circles and squares around the individual Sokolov events, with cartoon balloon commentaries on the events.
Most of the cartoons’ balloons had only a word or two in them.
He was still doing that, bereft of ideas, when Sherwood called.
“What are we doing?” Lucas asked.
“I dunno. I’m in a hotel downtown,” Sherwood said. “You want to come over?”
“What’s the hotel?”
“It’s a big glassy thing…Four Seasons?”
“Jesus. The taxpayers put you up at the Four Seasons?”
“It’s not a suite or anything. Just a room,” Sherwood said. “After Masha got shot, I had to find something quick and it was the first name that came to mind. Where are you?”
“About four blocks away. There’s a Whole Foods sort of kitty-corner across the street from the hotel. They’ve got a café. It’s noisy enough that we could talk.”
“When? I’m doing nothing.”
“Ten minutes.”
· · ·
Sherwood had a café table and was eating a sesame bun when Lucas arrived. Lucas pulled out a chair and sat. “You got anything at all?”
“No. The well is dry. I was hoping we could do some plotting.” Sherwood’s phone rang. He looked at the screen and said, “I’ve got to take this.”
He walked down to the end of the café area, talking on the phone, and was back in a minute.
“The Russian that was shot bad?”
Lucas: “Yeah?”
“Probably taken to Milwaukee. Came in the night you guys shot him up, perforated bowel, bullet under his stomach skin, like Doc Juarez said. They operated on him, sewed him up, fed a bunch of antiseptics and painkillers into him. The next morning he was moved to a private surgical hospital in a private ambulance, discharged with really good paperwork. The private surgical center never heard of him, and they don’t have their own ambulance.
They did find the ambulance, with a medical service company, and the driver says they took the injured man to a private jet. ”
“Man, the FBI is gonna be pissed when they find out,” Lucas said.
“Oh, they know,” Sherwood said. “They’re just not talking about it.”
“But they called you?”
“Uh, no. That was my boss. We have our sources…”
“In the FBI?”
“Wouldn’t you? In our position?” Sherwood asked.
Lucas thought about it for one second, then said, “Of course.”
“To get back to plotting….”
· · ·
“First off, is Sokolov gonna die?” Lucas asked.
“I’ve heard that it’s a distinct possibility.
He wasn’t in great health to begin with, he’s got type 2 diabetes.
He’s still recovering from being shot, even if the slug didn’t make it to his heart, and that doesn’t help.
They’re fighting it, but they’re saying he’s less than fifty-fifty to make it. ”
“If he croaks, and Bernie tells the hit team, they’re gone. We gotta do something now. I think we leak the car and van descriptions coupled with everything else we have—the Identi-Kit image of the guy who rented their safe house, along with speculation that they may be staying in motels.”
“If they see the leak on the cars, they’ll dump them,” Sherwood said.
“And have to deal with getting new ones.”
“All right. Going back to your Daisy Jones friend?”
“Going everywhere. I had a child with a woman who’s a big deal at Channel Three here, that’s our major network station, and she’s still a good friend. She’ll get it on. I’ll go back to Daisy…With those two, everybody else will pick it up. It’s our best chance.”
“Then we should do it,” Sherwood said.
Lucas: “Any idea what the counter-intel people are doing with Bernie?”
“Not yet. Not sure they’re doing anything, directly. I expect they’ll have Bernie’s escort search his room…They’ll figure out some way to make it legal, being the FBI.”
“Without bringing us into it, I hope,” Lucas said.
“I don’t think they will. There’d be no percentage in doing that, and they’re familiar with percentages.”
· · ·
Lucas’s phone rang, and he frowned at the screen. “It appears to be St. Vincent.”
“Can I listen?”
“Why not?”
Lucas answered, put the phone on speaker and they bent over it to hear a woman’s voice: “Marshal Davenport?”
“Yes? You’re calling from St. Vincent’s phone.”
“Yes, from his office phone. I’ve been instructed to ask you back for the five o’clock meeting.”
Lucas didn’t have an immediate reaction. After a few seconds, he asked, “Are you sure?”
“I am absolutely positive.”
“We had a little…clash…this morning,” Lucas ventured.
“I’m aware of that. Should I put you down for attending?”
“He’s still a cheese-eating bureaucrat,” Lucas said.
“Is that a no?” she asked.
“Uh…no. I’ll be there.”
· · ·
He rang off and Sherwood said, “Just for the sake of a little discretion, hold off on the media until we know what the meeting is about.”
“Yeah. That’s probably a good idea.”
“And maybe you can hold off on the cheese business.”