Chapter 27
If the truck hadn’t been so heavy, it would have been on two wheels when Abramova took it around the corner. Sokolov was thrown against the back seat door. The front passenger side door was still rattling loose, and Sokolov stretched over the back seat to grab the door handle and drag it shut.
Sokolov: “Where are we going?”
“Another five hundred meters,” Abramova said. Her face was twisted, but her voice was controlled, sharp. “There’s nobody behind us but we have to leave this truck.”
“The man we left…”
“Lev Nikitin. He’s dead, or will be.”
Sokolov shut up as Abramova took two more corners and then pushed the truck down a dimly lit lane where Titov waited in the van. Abramova pulled up behind it, and ten seconds later, she and Sokolov were in the back of the van, out of sight.
Titov: “Where’s Lev?”
Abramova, her voice as tight as a guitar string: “Dead. Go. Go now.”
“Dead! How…”
“Go now! Go!”
Titov went, pulling down the block to Eighth Street as planned, a left turn, a block later and right onto Hennepin Avenue.
Then they were free in the night, merging into the traffic, no flashing lights anywhere.
They passed the golf course parking lot where they’d initially staged while waiting to pick up Sokolov, driving slowly and carefully across town to I-35, then south to I-94.
Twelve minutes after they got on I-94, driving east, they crossed the St. Croix River and into Wisconsin.
They hadn’t spoken much as Titov drove them across town, until they got on I-94, where Titov said, “Tell me.”
Abramova told him: “You were right. It was a trap. They had undercover vehicles monitoring…” She turned a thumb toward the man in the back, who said, “Bernard. Sokolov.”
Abramova was speechless for a moment, turning in her seat to look at him, then: “Sokolov? You are the son? You are the asset?”
“Yes.”
“How did this happen?”
Sokolov said, “I didn’t know we were going to defect.
I’m a Russian. I want to be a Russian again.
Fuck this place. I thought we were on holiday in Istanbul, I was planning to buy some clothes.
My mother thought the same—we were kidnapped, is what it was.
They took us to Washington, to a CIA compound.
A fort. I stole a phone, called the embassy and after a lot of talking, got the FSB representative.
It took a while, but the CIA finally let me out on some nights to go to clubs.
I stole another phone, gave my contact a club we were going to, and a date, and I got dropped a permanent phone.
They call them ‘burners’ here in the States. ”
“Who is your contact there? At the embassy?”
“A man named Kuznetsov, but I don’t think that’s his real name,” Sokolov said.
“That’s what we call him,” Abramova said. “How did you know how to arrange a drop…”
“My father arranged FSB training on Michurinsky Prospekt, the IOT.”
The IOT was the Institute for Operational Training; Michurinsky Prospekt was the location of the FSB Academy in Moscow.
Titov, disbelief in his voice: “You’re an operator?”
“No. I left after basic training,” Sokolov said. “I thought someday I would go back. Before my mother was killed, I even thought I might stay here as an asset. Find a job, stay on.”
Abramova: “You killed your father.”
“He wasn’t dead yet this afternoon. They are certain he will die.”
“But your father.”
“I’ve hated him since I was a child,” Sokolov said.
“Until I was twelve or thirteen, I thought beatings were the way life was lived. He would beat me two or three times a week. Not child whippings with a belt: he beat me with his fists. Sometimes, I couldn’t walk.
My mother…you killed my mother…my mother never interfered.
She was bad as my father, or worse. She loved the idea that people feared her, feared what word she’d put in my father’s ear. ”
A long silence, as they digested that, then Titov said, “Tell me about Lev.”
Abramova said, “The FBI agents from the club ran faster than we thought, than Bernard thought they could, and were too close to the place we were waiting. They would have shot us to pieces, just like at the safe house. Lev dropped them but before he could get back in the truck another FBI vehicle came around the corner and Lev shot at them, but one of the FBIs shot Lev. Lev told me to go; he was dying.”
“Ah, God, a disaster,” Titov said. “A disaster.”
“They will happen,” Abramova said. “Now we are done. We go back to the motel, pack, go south tomorrow morning. We will take the van, twenty-two hours to Matamoros. Take turns driving, stop for gas and food, nothing else.”
Titov said, “I don’t think so. Not now. Not with dead FBI agents…”
“We don’t know that they’re dead,” Abramova said.
“Lev was shooting at them. They’re dead,” Titov said. “That’s what he did: an angel of death. They will be looking at every face trying to get across the border. Every face.”
Sokolov: “What do you think? We have to get across…”
“I have a contact on the Canadian border, at Thunder Bay. Almost straight north from here. He can get us across a river into Canada, across the ice, pick us up. We have done that twice, in the past. There’ll be less attention to the killings in Canada than here in the U.S.
Canada is not as good for getting back home, because their counter-intel people are better than Mexico’s, and Canada’s more hostile to us.
But. The embassy in Toronto has a safe house.
We stay there for a week, a month, and then we go. Private flight out of a small airport.”
“This sounds better,” Abramova admitted. “How many hours to this Thunder Bay?”
“Maybe six or seven, depending on the road conditions and the route we take. But, one big thing: that’s all on back roads.
No stops at all, one full tank of gas in each vehicle, which I can get tomorrow.
I will call my contact tomorrow morning, probably won’t be able to cross tomorrow night.
Maybe, the day after tomorrow. We’d stay out of sight in the motel for one more day. ”
“Call your contact when we get back,” Abramova said. “We will hide Bernard in Lev’s room.”
She explained to Sokolov that they were spread across three motels in Menomonie, Wisconsin.
Titov held the key cards for all three rooms, because if there was trouble, they didn’t want a card found on a team member who was captured or killed.
Titov wasn’t an operator: he was the team’s concierge, driving and making arrangements for travel and equipment.
“I thought there were more of you,” Sokolov said.
“There were,” Abramova said. “There were three members of the team, and Titov is a sleeper here, activated for this assignment. One of us was badly wounded, but we managed to get him evacuated. He should be home by now. Lev Nikitin…You saw Lev, down in the street.”
Sokolov said, “You should never have come after me. This was a bad call by Kuznetsov. Even if I were arrested, they would have traded for me. They knew I didn’t kill my mother, and they couldn’t prove I attacked my father.”
“You are correct, but too late,” Titov said. “Now we run.”
Abramova: “We have been attacked three times by one man…”
“Davenport, U.S. Marshal,” Sokolov spat.
“Look at him on the Internet. He’s a killer.
If he was there tonight, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s the one who shot your friend.
He’s with a woman named Shelly White. All I know about her was that she was once shot by a fugitive up in the northern area here.
Also from the Internet. Look on Gemini, it’s all there. ”
“I would like to meet this Davenport in an alley,” Abramova said.
“I believe he would like to meet you, as well,” Sokolov said. “As I said, he’s a killer.”
Titov: “Do you think this woman talking to you is a helpless cabbage?”
“I don’t know the woman I’m talking to, but I know about Davenport,” Sokolov said.
· · ·
Abramova and Titov had known that they’d get back to the motels very late, so they’d stocked the three rooms with food and soft drinks.
They agreed to stay in their rooms, in touch with their burners, the next day.
Titov would go out for more food in the evening, then they’d all meet in Sokolov’s room to make final plans for the trip north on the following day.
“We need discipline,” Abramova warned Sokolov. “Stay inside tomorrow. If you have room service, decline it. You’ll have a TV and Internet. Your face will be known, and probably on TV, so you must hide it.”
“Yes, I can do that,” Sokolov said. “I will.”
· · ·
Titov stopped first at his own room, where the red Ford was still parked outside. Abramova would take the van, dropping Sokolov at his motel, then go on to her own.
In his room, Titov opened the small cooler he’d bought that afternoon at a gas station and took out a Coke and a bag of beef jerky, sat on his bed, and tried to think.
Abramova had said they’d shot and probably killed two or more FBI agents.
By morning, the hunt would be intense, and all over Minnesota and the surrounding states.
The cops would be putting Sokolov’s face on everything but milk cartons.
He wasn’t sure, but he thought the odds of getting across the ice to Canada were probably seventy percent.
The other thirty percent, they’d be caught.
And, he thought, killed. The American cops were not going to let some Russians gun down FBI agents and get away with it: if the cops spotted them, they’d be murdered.
He sat on his bed, chewing on the jerky, then got his laptop out and went online to ChatGPT.
The marshal Sokolov had mentioned, Davenport, had an extensive online history, and the kid had been right: the man was a killer.
He did a search for the shootings that night in Minneapolis, but nothing came up.
Too soon. There were certainly cops still on the scene.
He dropped the sack of jerky on the floor, shut down the laptop, turned off the overhead lights. In the dim light coming through an open bathroom door, he fell back on a pillow, closed his eyes, and let his thoughts come to the surface.
Matvey Orlov, he hadn’t really gotten to know; they’d only been together for a week before the first assassination attempt, and the team didn’t talk much to him.
Lev Nikitin he hadn’t liked, because Nikitin was a serial murderer and that quality sat right on the surface of his personality.
He’d tried to generate a couple of erotic fantasies about Abramova, but she really wasn’t fantasy material.
Sokolov he didn’t know at all, except as a kid who’d murdered his father.
What did he owe them, that was worth getting killed for?
Lying on his pillow, he thought, nothing. He’d done everything they’d asked, and they’d put him in this predicament, a thirty percent chance of murder by cop.
He would not sleep well.
Davenport.