Chapter 21
Lucas and Sherwood got off the elevator at the FBI building and stepped toward the meeting room and a man called from behind them, “Davenport!”
Lucas turned, shook his head and said, “Butter my butt and call me a biscuit, as Virgil Flowers would say. What are you doing here, Louis?”
Louis Mallard was walking down the hall toward them; a bulky man, mid-sixties, frowning, in an FBI-blue suit and rep tie, shoes that were possibly spit-shined.
He was empty-handed, but trailed by a tall fortysomething woman who was carrying a leather briefcase that looked, from the slump in her shoulder, like it might be filled with rocks, or maybe anvil irons.
Lucas said, “Hello, Jane.”
“Go fuck yourself, Lucas,” the woman said.
“I thought you’d be over it by now,” Lucas said.
“I’ll never be over it,” she said.
Lucas said to Mallard, “She’s such a fussbudget.”
“Yes, but it works for me,” Mallard said. “I spent the last hour talking with the cheese eater. I wish you hadn’t run your mouth like that. It’s not helpful.”
“He is, and you know it.”
“He’s not, most of the time,” Mallard said. “Sometimes, with a difficult problem, and with unfortunate results, he can come across that way, purely out of disappointment. Administratively, he’s quite effective.”
“He eats cheese,” Lucas said.
Sherwood had been looking back and forth between Lucas, Mallard, and Chase, and now asked Lucas, “Who are these people?”
Lucas said, “Louis Mallard, deputy director of the FBI, and Jane Chase, Louis’s personal fussbudget, also a lawyer and FBI agent. Guys, meet John Sherwood, a spy.”
Sherwood shook hands with Mallard and Chase, and said to Chase, “I entirely agree with your apparent assessment of Marshal Davenport. He can be absolutely disgusting in his lack of regard for well-established rules of law. We could compare notes over steaks and red wine tonight, if you’re free.”
“I don’t drink with spies, unless you want to tell me about the ones you’ve stuck in the Justice Department,” Chase said.
“I’ll never get over the cynicism of Washington insiders. It makes me sad,” Sherwood said to Mallard.
Mallard smiled and went back to Lucas: “Where’s this hit team?”
“We’re working on that,” Lucas said.
“In case you haven’t been informed, there’s been a major break: the FBI has identified your leak, the one feeding information to the hitters,” Mallard said.
“That’s terrific!” Lucas said, overenthusiastically.
Mallard didn’t react to Lucas’s reaction, but Chase did. She said, “Oh, shit, Louis. He’s got a finger in this pie, sir. He already knows what happened. Who it is. It might even be his pie.”
“David St. Vincent isn’t aware of that,” Mallard said, peering at Lucas. “Interesting. And how’s Virgil Flowers, Lucas?”
“Working on his fifth novel,” Lucas said.
“I’ve seen him on the Times bestseller list. Amazing, really. He projects a certain rural je ne sais quoi.”
“Yeah. That’s because he lives in a fuckin’ haystack,” Lucas said. “Let’s get this meeting over with.”
As they continued down the hall, Sherwood, keeping pace with Chase, asked, “What’s your problem with Lucas? Am I sensing a romantic thing, or…”
“No. He’s a killer,” Chase said. “I joined the FBI to put killers in prison.”
“Oh.”
“What? Working with a killer doesn’t bother you?” Chase asked.
“Well, once in western Iraq, I targeted a big ISIS meet-up and the Navy stuck a Tomahawk missile in their window. Killed twenty people, more or less,” Sherwood said, affably enough.
“We couldn’t tell exactly how many. I flew in to assess the damage and see if we could salvage any hard drives.
There were heads and feet everywhere. To answer your question, I guess I’d say no. It doesn’t bother me.”
“Bothers me. We’re not in a war.”
“Well. That’s one opinion.”
Lucas, who was walking along with Mallard, chatting about nothing, overheard the last of the conversation, turned his head to Sherwood and said, “You really are a charmer, dickweed. No steaks and wine for you.”
St. Vincent, Mallard said, had gone ahead to the briefing room to make sure the PowerPoint was ready, and to make sure that everybody who needed to be there was, and anybody who didn’t need to be there wasn’t. “Treating this as top secret, limited access,” he said.
“I’m surprised John and I were invited,” Lucas said.
“I suggested that including the Marshals Service and the CIA might be politic,” Mallard said.
“Ah. Being the deputy director, you get listened to.”
“Yes, I suppose. I’d attributed it to my personal charm.”
· · ·
Lucas and Mallard had worked cases going back years, to a time when Lucas was a Minneapolis homicide detective, and later, when he was with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and still later, as a marshal. Mallard was often considered the top real cop in the nation.
“Give me a minute before you come in,” Mallard said. He went into the meeting room, trailed by Chase, with Sherwood and Lucas waiting in the hall for thirty seconds.
“Doesn’t want to be associated with us,” Lucas said. “Although, really, St. Vincent knows.”
“I’d like to associate with Jane for a while,” Sherwood said.
“I’d say you have a chance,” Lucas said. “She likes your type.”
“Yeah? You think?”
“I do,” Lucas said. “Keep playing the hard-nosed outsider spy-hero. Mention Delta. She’ll get curious.”
“You know this, how?”
“We sort of had a little buzz between us, one time—nothing serious, nothing that might lead to anything, at least not on my part. Unfortunately, I’m in love with Weather.”
“I could see that,” Sherwood said quietly. “Fortunately, I’m not, and I sense a need for affection in this woman.”
· · ·
They went into the meeting room together.
Mallard and Chase were already seated, and Chase was taking paper out of the overloaded briefcase.
St. Vincent was at the head of the table, the four counter-intel agents sat in a line across from Mallard and Chase, and two other local agents were next to them.
Lucas muttered to Sherwood, “Go,” and Sherwood led the way, sat down next to Chase and tactically ignored her.
St. Vincent: “We’re all here. I want to warn everyone…” He looked at Lucas. “…what is said here is not to go anywhere, under very serious penalty of law.”
There were glances and nods up and down the table, and St. Vincent said, “We’ve determined that the person who has been leaking intelligence to the Russian hit team is almost certainly his son, Bernie Sokolov.”
There were no gasps or exclamations from the table, since almost everybody there carried the gene for sneakiness.
St. Vincent told them about the discovery of the burner phone in Bernie’s ski jacket, and confirmation by the NSA that he’d sent signals from the airport and before the apartment ambush.
“We’re going to use him to trap the hit team,” St. Vincent said. “There were two objectives in this investigation, after the killing of Masha Sokolov: one, find the leak, and two, capture or kill the hit team. We’ve accomplished the first objective, now we work on the second.”
Mallard: “How are you going to do that, David?”
St. Vincent nodded at him. “The agents acting as Bernie’s bodyguards know that he’s the leak, so they’re not so much guarding him as sequestering him and steering him…
although he doesn’t know that. After discussions with my other senior agents”—he nodded at the two local agents—“I spoke to Frank Potts, the CIA’s deputy director of operations, about John Sherwood, sitting here next to Ms. Chase. ”
Sherwood raised a hand.
“Potts said that John is a capable agent with good abilities of dissimulation…”
One of the counter-intel agents said, “You mean he lies well.”
“I mean he can play roles. We’re going to ask John to accidentally bump into Bernie in Leonid Sokolov’s hospital room, take him aside, and grill him about where he’s been and what he’s been doing,” St. Vincent said.
“Play the role of a suspicious CIA agent. We’re hoping Bernie’ll panic and try to get the hit team to pull him out.
The agents who’ve been escorting him have assessed him as a bit na?ve and quite…
stupid, is the word. He may want his father’s money, but he certainly doesn’t want to wind up charged with accessory to first-degree murder, espionage, and so on. ”
Sherwood: “I can do that. Play the role.”
Mallard: “From the reports I’ve read…” He patted a stack of paper. “Bernie seemed distressed when his parents were shot.”
“He was prepared to act as the shocked son,” St. Vincent said. “That doesn’t take a genius.”
Lucas: “I believe you when you say you’ve identified him as the leak, David, but doesn’t effective play-acting suggest he might not be entirely na?ve and stupid? That he might actually be tough and clever?”
“We have the assessments of the people closest to him, including John Sherwood’s associates who handled him over the past year,” St. Vincent said. “They lean heavily toward the na?ve and stupid.”
“That was my assessment, too,” Sherwood said. “I’m no longer sure about that—I could go either way, but we’ve got to be careful in how your people handle him. Two guards won’t keep the hit team away from him…”
“That’s the trap. That will be the obvious coverage,” St. Vincent said. “We’ll have a half-dozen of our most capable agents around him at all times, four of them out of sight, that Bernie won’t know about.”
· · ·
They spent another half hour talking about possibilities and dangers.
St. Vincent said that Bernie would be moved to a different apartment in the same building, ostensibly for security reasons, but actually to take advantage of a group of vacant apartments that could house the backup agents.
Bernie’s new apartment would be wired for sound and video, so the watchers would see everything going on inside.
“Sounds like you’ve got a plan,” Mallard said. He waved a finger at the line of counter-intel agents and said, “You folks should head back to Washington, and we’ll leak that to Bernie.”