Chapter 24
They had to drive south across downtown Minneapolis, got clogged up in traffic a couple of times, and arrived at Bell’s house just before noon.
Sherwood brought his iPad and showed them a series of still photos of the woman, which CIA photo experts had pulled from the video, enhanced for detail and colorized.
The CIA thought the woman’s dress was a shimmery light green; or the CIA’s AI did.
“Better than I’d hoped,” Lucas said. “She pretty, but she’s tough.”
“Gotta get that gear for the BCA,” Capslock said. He flipped through the photos, back and forward, and said, “I don’t know her. She’s not part of the regular club scene, I don’t think.”
They spent another minute looking at the photos, then walked up to Bell’s door and pushed the doorbell. The same woman who answered the door on their first visit, answered on the second, and said, “Mr. Bell…I find him. You wait.”
She shut the door and Capslock said, “Maybe I should run around back.”
Lucas: “Nah. He won’t run. He’s in too deep with us.”
Lucas was correct. Bell came to the door, looked past the three of them to the street, then said, “Come in, come in, come in, quickly.” He made a brushing movement behind them, as if with a broom.
Standing just inside the door, he asked, “What is it? What happened?”
“I appreciate your phone call this morning. I might send you a certificate of commendation,” Lucas said.
“You know, you think you’re funny, but you’re not,” Bell said. “I can’t have people see you with me. If you need to talk to me, call on the telephone. Now, what do you want?”
Sherwood: “Look at these pictures. Tell us who the woman is.”
Bell took the iPad and expertly flicked through the photos, then said, “I don’t know. I’ve never seen her before. She’s not part of the local community, I know most of those people, or I’ve seen them, at least.”
Capslock: “You’re sure?”
“I’m positive. There’s something about her…”
“What?”
“She doesn’t look American to me. She looks, I dunno. Pinched?”
Sherwood took the iPad, contemplated the photos for a moment, then said, “You’re right. She looks…Russian.”
· · ·
They said good-bye to Capslock, and back in the Porsche, Sherwood said, “I need to send these photos to a completely different unit…Let’s sit here for a minute while I do that.”
He did it, and said, “This won’t take long, except the guy I need is probably at lunch.”
Lucas filled the time with a story:
“Back a few years…well, quite a few years…I was trying to figure out who a serial killer was. We had some information, the kind of car he drove, the color of his hair. At a really critical moment, I was on the street with another guy, and we needed some fast information from the DMV. We didn’t have cell phones, but we found a phone booth—remember those?
—and it turned out neither one of us had any change to put in the phone.
Didn’t have a quarter,” Lucas said. “A month or so before that, I’d been fishing up in Canada, and to make a call back to the States, I had to use a pay phone, but it was like five bucks, and who has five bucks in quarters?
Then somebody told me I could talk to an operator, and she’d take my Amex card.
So then we were in this phone booth, looking for this serial killer, no quarters to make the call, and I pulled out my credit card and made the call, which amazed the guy with me.
We thought back then, it was like magic.
You could use your credit card in a phone booth!
Now…you’re a thousand miles from your office, out in the woods, and you pull out your iPad and talk to the CIA.
It’s just…it freaks me out. My kids wouldn’t think anything of it. I’m getting old.”
Sherwood yawned.
“Fuck you,” Lucas said. “I’m not that much older than you.”
“There’s before the year 2000, and after the year 2000,” Sherwood said. “If you got your first real job after 2000, you grew up in a different world than the people who started working before that.”
“That’s probably true, and I’ll probably even think seriously about that, someday, if I don’t have anything less boring to do,” Lucas said.
Sherwood’s cell phone rang, and he took it out, answered, said, “Barry,” and listened, and said, “Thanks. Listen, write that up, everything I told you, and walk it up to Helsmith ASAP.”
He rang off and said to Lucas, “I’m not allowed to tell you this, but given the circumstances….”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell me.”
“There are around two hundred and fifty Russian employees in their embassy in Washington who carry diplomatic passports. That’s from the ambassador on down.
The young woman we’re looking at is Alina Zaitseva.
We’ve never had any interest in her, because she does seem to be a clerk in the visa department.
We know people who have gotten visas from her.
There’s no way the FBI can watch all of their employees, and they don’t watch her.
But: the way she handed that phone off to Bernie, if it was a phone… she’s had some serious training.”
“She’s not just a clerk.”
“No. She’s a courier of some sort. We’ve turned over a very interesting rock, here, Lucas,” Sherwood said. “We’ve got to talk to the FBI and not talk anymore about this woman, or about the videos from the club. She could take an FBI surveillance team to some serious Russian intelligence assets.”
“Which doesn’t get us any closer to the hit team.”
“You know, you and I do have slightly different objectives here,” Sherwood said.
“I would love to get the hit team, but honestly, identifying a Russian courier is more important than finding that team. Best outcome, we capture them alive. They’d give us absolutely zilch, they’d do a couple years in prison, and we’d wind up trading them.
But Alina Zaitseva, she could be the gift that keeps on giving. ”
“Ah, God.” Lucas took his phone out, punched a number.
“Calling St. Vincent?” Sherwood asked.
“No. Louis Mallard,” Lucas said.
Mallard picked up and said, “Davenport. Is your nose still in this?”
“I wasn’t looking for it. It started when an informant called out of the blue, I swear to God, and gave me some information you need.”
“What is it?” Mallard asked.
“Did St. Vincent tell you I called this morning and told him that Bernie took a mystery delivery at the Nightshade club last night?”
“Yes. You think it was a phone, some of the agents here think it might have been drugs. If it happened at all.”
“It happened, and it was almost certainly a phone. We got video of the delivery, and Sherwood sent it off to the CIA photo department, whatever that is, and got still photos made. Then he sent those off somewhere else, and it turns out that the delivery woman is a clerk at the Russian embassy. You can get the details from the CIA or from Sherwood, but your counter-intel people need to know about the woman, and everybody has to stop talking about her. This could be a big score for the FBI, a Russian courier.”
“Give me the details. What’s her name?”
Lucas gave him the name—Sherwood spelled it out—and said, “We know that Bernie almost certainly has a new burner, and is talking to the hit team, or maybe to people at the embassy or in Moscow, for all we know. We don’t know the phone number.”
“I will pass this along,” Mallard said.
“Tell me this, Louis,” Lucas said. “Is the hit team still in town? As far as you guys know?”
“Until you called me just now, I’d have no idea.
But think about it, Lucas: who would Bernie be calling, if they’re not still in town?
The burner is a serious danger to him, if we found it.
He wouldn’t be chatting with some guy in Moscow about the weather.
It’d only be of use to talk to somebody on the hit team, or somebody who can talk to the hit team, and how they might cooperate. ”
“Cooperate to do what?” Lucas asked.
“I don’t know. Pick him up? Make another run at Sokolov? Hire a lawyer?”
“Okay.”
“Lucas, we got this,” Mallard said. “Bernie’s in the middle of two bodyguards and four very competent agents that he doesn’t even know about…”
“As far as you know, he doesn’t know about them,” Lucas interrupted. “If the hit team doesn’t have a good countersurveillance guy, who’s already spotted them.”
After a lingering silence, Mallard said, “Look, Lucas. If you want to hang around the edges of this, I’ll clear you with St. Vincent. But don’t butt in. Stay out on the edges. I’ll tell St. Vincent not to mess with you.”
“I’ll think about it,” Lucas said. “We’d need some minimal information, like where Bernie goes at night.”
“Keep your phone in your pocket,” Mallard said.
· · ·
Off the phone, Sherwood said, “What do you mean, you’ll think about it? We’re in.”
“Not really. Bernie knows both of us,” Lucas said. “If he spots us hanging around, he’ll figure something’s up.”
“We’ll stay back. What we need is a good, well-connected surveillance guy who can talk to us in real time.”
His words hung in the air for a moment, then both Lucas and Sherwood said, simultaneously, “Del.”
· · ·
They drove back to Lucas’s house and found Sam, Ellen—the girlfriend candidate—and Weather in the heated garage, the Porsche 911 backed into the driveway, while the three of them practiced slapping balls into a net with hockey sticks.
They left Sam and Ellen and went inside to tell Weather what they were doing.
“I needed to tell you that I’ll probably bag out in the guest room instead of waking you up,” Lucas said.
“We’ll be out late. Like three o’clock. Maybe four. ”
“It’d bother me more if you don’t come to bed than if you do,” Weather said. “I’d wake up to see if there was a text from an emergency room.”
Capslock pulled into the driveway, and when they told him what they wanted, he said, “Sure. I stay out late anyway, but I’m thinking it’d be nice if there was somebody to help out on the surveillance.”
Lucas held up a finger, took out his phone and called Shelly White. “What are you up to, sweetie?”
“I was planning to sit slack-jawed in front of my TV and watch the fourth season of Elementary. You got anything better?”
“We do. It’s related to Sokolov,” Lucas said. “My old lady’s gonna make some mac ’n’ cheese for dinner and we can talk it over. Basically, we’ll want you to sit in a doorway like a street person, shivering in the cold, maybe with a wine bottle between your feet. Do you have moon boots?”
“Yeah, I do, as a matter of fact. You want down-market wino?”
“That should work,” Lucas said.
“I got it covered.”
“See you here in an hour.”
· · ·
White arrived at six o’clock, bundled in jeans, an enormous black parka that hung almost to her knees, and regular boots, though she had red moon boots in her car.
They made an evening out of it, eating mac ’n’ cheese with a decent, but not great, Italian red, talking surgery and cops and spies and surveillance and hockey.
Sam went off with Ellen, who already had her driver’s license, while Lucas and Weather’s daughter, Gabrielle, went to practice her cello, which was Gabrielle-speak for talking endlessly on her telephone to girlfriends.
White told Weather that she still had muscle pain from the repair work done on her leg, from when she was shot two years earlier. Weather had no advice except physical therapy.
At nine o’clock, Mallard called.
“I am told,” he said, “that Bernie is going out to a club called White Ducks, which is up in the northeast part of town, wherever that is. He wants to get out of the apartment by ten o’clock, and he told his bodyguards that he might bring a woman back.
They’re still arguing about that, but we’re going to say okay, hoping that the woman is the blond shooter.
We have no idea about a phone, if there is one.
We’ll bag his room tonight while he’s gone. ”
“So he’s already made whatever arrangements he was hoping to make, and the hit team is on its way back to Russia, or they’re getting wound up for another run at old man Sokolov.”
“That would be my guess,” Mallard said. “One or the other.”
“All right. We’ll hang around the edges, except we’ll have a couple of informants on the street. Tell your FBI people not to shoot anyone who looks suspicious, because it’s probably my guys.”
“I will tell them,” Mallard said. “Good hunting, Lucas.”
· · ·
“We oughta get going,” Lucas said, when he was off the phone.
To Sherwood: “You sure you don’t want a weapon of some kind?
In case the hit team shows up? I’ve got a cold revolver that, you know, is purely simple.
Point and shoot. If you kill somebody, you could always throw it away, so you don’t have to fill out reports. ”
“Tempting,” Sherwood said. “I sometimes carried an M16 in Syria and Iraq, and a Smith six-shooter in Lebanon, so I’ve had some revolver work. But…I better not. I don’t have your kind of training. We never cared if there was somebody behind the target.”
“If you say so.”
Sherwood scratched his nose, and said, “All right, give me a revolver.”
Lucas went out to the garage, got the revolver, a five-shot .
357 magnum Ruger with a two-and-a-quarter-inch barrel, along with a speed loader with five more rounds.
Lucas took a minute to download the gun and speed loader with .
38 Specials, carried it back to the dining room, handed it to Sherwood and said, “Extreme last resort only.”
“Make sure I’m not standing behind the target,” White said.
Capslock said, “Remember, this is against everybody’s better judgment.”
“Got it,” Sherwood said. He took the gun, popped the cylinder out to the side without looking for the release, checked that it was loaded, popped it back, and said, “This is almost the exact gun I carried, but mine had a shrouded hammer. This is fine.”
“Sights are a little hard to pick up,” Capslock said.
“Wouldn’t use them anyway,” Sherwood said. “If I’m more than six feet from the guy I’d be shooting at, I’d just run away instead.”
“Excellent plan,” Capslock said.
Sherwood picked up his coat and dropped the revolver in a pocket.
White would follow Capslock to his house, where they’d stop for another enormous parka and a battered rolling suitcase. They’d hang in doorways close to the club, staying as warm as they could.
Lucas and Sherwood would cruise, as they did before the shooting at the apartment house, looking for cars that might also be cruising.
“If you get the car shot to pieces again, that’d be the end of our insurance for all time,” Weather told Lucas.
“I’ll drive,” Sherwood said. “I got a Hertz.”
“Good, I appreciate that,” Weather said.
“Nothing’s going to happen anyway,” Lucas said, and they all went out the door into another brutally cold night.