Chapter 21 #2
They all nodded at once, like crows on a fence.
To Sherwood, Mallard said, “You need to script your act.”
And to Lucas: “Time to step back.”
· · ·
Sherwood said to Mallard, “When I brace Bernie, I want Davenport with me. Bernie knows Davenport shot up the hit team, and he’s probably a little afraid of him.
We’ll cut him away from the FBI, gang up on him.
Lucas can do that; he can play the crazy violent one, I’ll play the CIA snake.
If anything gets Bernie moving, that should do it. ”
Mallard nodded: “Okay, go that way. Then Lucas can step back.”
Chase said to Sherwood, “But you probably ought to turn your act around. Lucas can be the snake. He’s very good at that. You could be the violent one.”
Mallard, “Jane…go easy. Lucas gets things done.”
Chase said, “Fuck him.”
St. Vincent: “I second the motion.”
Mallard laughed, while the other agents looked like they didn’t want to get involved.
· · ·
St. Vincent said that Bernie slept late, and that the agents would be taking him to the hospital at noon, and that he usually only stayed for fifteen minutes or so. “He likes to go shopping. He likes a big lunch. He likes restaurants with lots of women, preferably teenagers.”
“We’ll show up right at noon,” Sherwood said. “Make sure your agents get out of our way.”
There was no milling around when the meeting broke up.
Mallard and Chase went off to confer with St. Vincent and the two senior agents, the four counter-intel agents returned to their hotel to get ready to fly back to Washington, and Lucas and Sherwood went out to a Caribou Coffee to discuss the play they’d put on for Bernie.
“We want hard-nosed but not ugly, suspicious but not quite certain,” Sherwood suggested over coffee and hot chocolate. “What you really need to do is loom. Let him see your gun.”
“Yeah, I get it. I do this,” Lucas said.
“Loom!”
· · ·
They were waiting inside the hospital’s main entrance, already bathed in the soup of hospital stinks, when the agents with Bernie showed up. They watched from behind a screen of hospital visitors as Bernie and the agents turned toward an elevator, gave them five minutes, and followed.
Outside Leonid Sokolov’s room, they caught a doctor coming out. Sherwood, who’d met her earlier, put up a hand to stop her and asked, “What’s the prognosis now?”
The doctor, whose name was Cantor, looked back into the room as the door was swinging shut, and when it was fully closed, shook her head and said, “It’s only an opinion, which is all I have at the moment, but I’d say he’s in serious trouble.
Whatever he has in his system is eating him up.
We can’t even identify the components, chemical, biological.
Not radiation of any kind. He already had some physical problems, his liver, his kidneys.
I’m not optimistic. We’re dumping him full of medication, but… ”
She turned her hands up, a gesture of helplessness.
They talked for another minute, Novichok was mentioned, then she headed back to her office and Lucas and Sherwood pushed through the door.
Three of Leonid Sokolov’s bodyguard agents were there with him, sitting in easy chairs, each with an open laptop; Bernie and his two escort agents were standing next to Sokolov’s hospital bed, talking to another doctor.
Everyone stopped what they were doing to look at Lucas and Sherwood, and Sherwood asked, “How’s he doing? ”
Bernie said, “He’s out of it. They don’t know if he’ll make it. How could this happen? He was supposed to be watched every minute of every day…”
He reached out and gripped his father’s bare arm, and Lucas thought, That’s how you did it.
Bernie simply stood there, holding his father’s arm, then sighed and said to his escorts, “Let’s go. He doesn’t even know I’m here.”
Sherwood said to one of the escort agents, “We need to talk to Bernie privately. Like, out in the hall. Away from the crowd.”
One of the escorts nodded, and said, “We can give you some room, if it’s really necessary. We’d want to be in the hall with you.”
“That’s fine.”
Bernie asked, “What’s going on?”
“We need to see where you’re at, Bernie,” Sherwood said. “I’ve spent a year and a half worrying about you.”
“Maybe you should worry about my father…”
“We do that, too.”
Bernie looked like he was about to blurt “Bullshit,” had his lips already puffed to do that, but Lucas leaned into him and grunted, “Hallway. Now.”
· · ·
In the hall, they stood in a doorway to a stairwell, while the two escort agents stood twenty feet away, one on either side of them, looking away. Sherwood started: “Bernie, I’m kind of worried about you. You haven’t been in touch with friends in Russia, have you?”
“What? Fuck no! What are you talking about? The Russians killed my mother! I don’t have any friends in Russia!”
“They killed your mother by accident,” Sherwood said.
“They were trying for your father. Then they tried again, and now they might have tried a third time. The only way I can think of how they could do that, three attempts, would be if somebody close to the situation was talking to them. Doing something.”
Lucas, standing six inches too close: “Somebody like you, Bernard.”
“You guys are crazy,” Bernie said, edging away from Lucas, focusing on Sherwood. “I loved Mama. How many people are around Papa? Two dozen, three? People coming and going all the time now, doctors, nurses, so many I can’t even remember them all.”
“How about Papa?” Lucas asked. “You love him, too?”
“Yes! I love Papa, too! He’s my papa!” Bernie protested. He was sweating, a shine on his forehead and beside his nose, and maybe tearing up. If it was an act, it was good. “He’s the only one left in my family. Except for Papa, I am alone.”
“Just you and Papa’s money,” Lucas said. “That’d keep you warm during those long Moscow winters.”
“Back off, Davenport,” Sherwood snapped. “I’ve worked with this man for a long time now. I can’t imagine that he could have anything to do with what’s happening…”
“C’mon, Sherwood. The guy’s a weasel,” Lucas said. “I know a weasel when I see one.”
“You are the man who was supposed to protect my mother and my father, and did you do this?” Bernie’s language was beginning to fall back into Russian rhythms. “You did not do this. You failed. You are looking for somebody to blame for your failures.” He turned to Sherwood: “You, too.”
“I believe you’re okay. We had to talk. Take it easy,” Sherwood said.
“I don’t think he’s okay. I think he’s lying through his fuckin’ teeth,” Lucas said. “If it turns out his father’s been poisoned, who else could have gotten to him?”
“Fuck you. I don’t talk anymore,” Bernie said. He called to his escorts: “Come on, guys, I go back to the apartment.”
· · ·
As they watched the three of them walk toward the elevators, Sherwood asked Lucas, “What do you think?”
“He might have been about to take me on. You see him set his feet? He’s had some training.”
“Yeah, and I didn’t know that,” Sherwood said. “He’s always come across as a weenie, and that’s what I thought he was.”
“If he gets on that phone, and does anything, even a couple little clicks, some prearranged signal, we’ll know that the trap might snap. If he doesn’t…I don’t know what that would mean.”
“Might not be the phone. I’ll ask the FBI to get one of their tech geniuses to put a keystroke logger on his laptop, see if he’s going out to anyone. We should have done it before now. All I’ve ever seen him do on his laptop is play games and watch videos.”
“Do it,” Lucas said.
“So you gonna step back? I know Mallard’s got some clout, as a deputy director.”
“He does, but the Marshals Service doesn’t necessarily pay attention to what Louis wants,” Lucas said.
“I’ll go with you guys—if you can think of anything to do.”
· · ·
Lucas went home and made pasta with his secret ingredient pasta sauce, which was basically regular tomato sauce with a shot of Heinz 57, and after they’d loaded the dishwasher and the kids were off to do whatever they did, which was mostly talking on her phone (Gabrielle) and studying a driver’s license exam booklet (Sam), Weather cross-examined him on his status in the investigation, and why he’d been disinvited from participation.
That took a while to explain, and then she asked, “Didn’t John tell us that Bernie liked to go clubbing?”
“Yeah. Being a deejay, playing video games, and clubbing, those supposedly are his things. Maybe driving fast cars, if he gets an inheritance.”
“I know you don’t like my commentaries on your investigations…” she began.
“You’re wrong about that, but go ahead.”
“If I were a spy, and I do read a lot of spy novels, I might have a burner phone for emergencies, but everybody knows phones can be tracked. And probably monitored. I can see him using a phone to set off an alarm when nothing better is available, like letting the assassination team know when they were leaving the airport or arriving at the hideout…”
“C’mon, spit it out,” Lucas said.
“I can’t think of a better place for serious, secret discussion than a club. Especially with people dancing and sneaking off together to snort cocaine or whatever they do now.”
“How would you know that?” Lucas asked. “You’ve never been in a dance club in your life.”
“I used to go to First Avenue…”
“Sure, thirty years ago…”
“Just like a man,” Weather said. “You’re not being responsive to my insight.”
“I…Well, you’re right. I gotta call Sherwood. They need to focus on the clubs. Maybe get some FBI chicks to dress up. If the FBI has chicks.”
“It’s at least an outside possibility,” Weather said. “The chicks, I mean. Dressing up.”
Lucas called Sherwood with a suggestion that the FBI heavily cover any clubs that Bernie might go to.
Sherwood said, “We’ve already talked about that—me and the FBI troops.
It’s gonna be weird because it’s impossible for FBI guys not to look like FBI guys.
I mean, they’re all carrying guns and everybody in a club knows what a guy carrying a gun looks like. ”
“Then you could scare off anyone trying to meet him.”
“I think you could,” Sherwood said. “But, they’re going out tonight.”
“Call me if anything happens.”
“I won’t be there, but I’ll wait up for the feds to report back, and let you know.”
Lucas got an email from Sherwood at 2 a.m., which he read the next morning. It said, “Nothing happened.”