Chapter 29 #2
“I did. One minute ago,” the man said. “It looks okay. I was beginning to think you were going to turn me down.”
“No. Tell me where you want to meet,” Lucas said.
“At the Musky Hunter’s bar in Hayward, Wisconsin. I’ll be wearing a red ski mask with the bottom pulled up over my chin. Blue parka, blue jeans, Nike shoes.”
“What time?”
“Eleven o’clock.”
Lucas glanced at his watch: they had time, but with the stop at the marshals office, they’d have to move right along.
“I’ve talked to our CIA contact about this, and he doesn’t want you to, uh, I don’t know how to put this…
He doesn’t want the other members of the team to know you’ve given them up.
I don’t have a tight grip on that myself, but you need to be alone at the Musky Hunter. ”
“I can do that. Do you know this bar? You sound like…”
“I have a cabin twenty miles east of Hayward,” Lucas said. “So yes, I know the place. You guys, you’re headed for the Canadian border?”
“Yes, but I won’t say where on the Canadian border. This whole thing might still fall through.”
“Don’t let it,” Lucas said. “C’mon. Don’t let it.”
“I’ll see you at the bar,” the man said.
· · ·
Capslock was waiting outside the entrance to the federal building when Lucas arrived. “I had to stick my car in a parking garage. I assume I’ll be reimbursed for the charge?”
“Maybe,” Lucas said. “I’m sure you’ll have the sincere thanks of a grateful nation.”
“I’d rather have the money,” Capslock said, as he followed Lucas inside.
White and Sherwood were sitting at White’s desk when Lucas and Capslock arrived, but Lamb had not yet arrived. Lucas called her and she said, “I’m just getting out of my car, I’m right outside.”
While they waited, Lucas told the others about the second phone call from the hit team member, and about the eleven o’clock appointment at the Musky Hunter.
“The four of us have to talk to my boss in Washington when we get out of here,” Sherwood said. “We don’t need to mention that to Miz Lamb.”
Lamb was in the office two minutes later, wearing wooly tights and a ski jacket.
She said, “I’ve got to do some paper on this sooner or later, or maybe I can skip it altogether if you don’t find these people and we can all pretend this didn’t happen…
But I need Mr. Sherwood to write his name on a piece of paper so I can fill it in later, and I already know Del, so…
Anyway, I need to be able to say that I talked to you individually and you agreed to serve as temporary deputy marshals. Is that correct?”
Sherwood said, “Yes,” and Capslock said, “I never aspired to anything more,” and Lamb said, “I understand that perfectly, Del, but I’m afraid you’re too dumb for a permanent position. Anyway, yabba-dabba-do, you’re deputized.” She started back toward her office. “Hang on here a minute.”
“We’re in a hurry,” Lucas said.
“Yes. One minute.” She disappeared into her office, came back in less than a minute with two badges, which she handed to Capslock and Sherwood. “In case you need them,” she said. “If you don’t, I want them back.”
“No chance of that,” Sherwood said. “I’m gonna arrest my neighbor in D.C. for using his leaf blower.”
“Let’s go,” Lucas said. “We need to be in Hayward by eleven, and as much earlier as we can.”
“You’re going to Hayward?” Lamb asked.
“Yeah…”
“Hayward’s where I’m going,” Lamb said. “Today’s the Birkebeiner.”
Lucas looked at her, flabbergasted, and said, “Today? Today’s the Birkie?”
“What’s that?” Sherwood asked.
“A big goddamn cross-country ski race,” Lucas said. “Fifty-five kilometers. Twelve thousand racers, probably twenty or thirty thousand spectators. The whole town has less than three thousand people in it, so it gets completely overrun.”
“Maybe that’s why the contact chose the place—he can get lost in the crowd if he needs to,” Sherwood said.
“Maybe, but I think he would have mentioned something when he called. Maybe he doesn’t even know about it,” Lucas said.
“Whatever,” Lamb said. “If you’re gonna meet him at eleven, you better motivate. You could get clogged up going into town.”
· · ·
They left the office in a hurry, but Sherwood told White and Capslock that they needed to rendezvous in Lucas’s car before they left Minneapolis. “From here, it’s three hours up there on a good day, and it’s coming up on seven now,” Lucas said. “You’re sure we gotta talk?”
“We gotta.”
They crowded into Lucas’s car and Sherwood made the call, put the phone on speaker. The woman on the other end said, “Yes, John.”
“We’re all here. Four of us,” Sherwood said. He seemed to be vibrating. “We gotta go in a hurry, if we want to get this done. The meet is set at a bar in Hayward, Wisconsin, four hours from now, and it takes three hours to get there. The town is having some kind of big fuckin’ ski race.”
“I’ll make it short, and I don’t have any real authority to make this arrangement, so we appreciate any help we can get from the Marshals Service,” the CIA woman said.
“What we would like, the best case, the best possible outcome, is for you to kill or capture the woman in the team, but let the defector escape with Sokolov. Let them go wherever they want. Again, best case would be for the sleeper to come out of this as a hero, for the Russians, and go back to his regular job here in the U.S.”
“Letting them go could create an unprecedented stink with the FBI and the Justice Department,” Lucas said.
“That’s not really my problem,” the woman said. “My problem is how do we identify and then preserve the sleeper in his job.”
Sherwood said, “Tara, we’ll do the best we can. We’re trying to keep the FBI out of this because they’ll want to rain all over these people, and not with little water droplets.”
“I understand,” she said.
“Do you?”
“Yes. Their dead agents. Now you better hurry if you’re going to make the meet. Talk about it on the way. You know what we want, and it will be difficult, to say the least, but it would be a great benefit if you could pull it off.”