Chapter 34
White took a step back. “Erase us?”
Sherwood handed her the rifle and said, “Not literally, you dunce. Your presence here needs to be minimized. We should leave the body and walk down to that farmhouse and get all the local cops we can find up here. We need to talk to the sheriff and…what do you call it when you marshals work with other law enforcement agencies?”
“Task force,” Lucas said.
“Yes. We need to create an after-the-fact task force and give as much credit as we can to the locals,” Sherwood said. “I mean, how do we explain your being here, except that somebody gave her up? And who gave her up? Titov. The only possibility. Can’t have that.”
“Won’t work,” White said. “The locals will leak like crazy. I think we claim that the Menomonie cops caught the van’s plate on a license plate reader, called us, and we responded. A motel clerk saw them headed north out of town.”
Sherwood: “That could work. But: motel clerk heard them talking about Hayward.”
“She gave herself away when she, for some reason, shot somebody in Hayward.”
“The motel clerk’s name isn’t being released for her own safety,” Lucas said.
Sherwood: “That’s all good—we need to fuzz up the circumstances as much as we can. We should walk down to the farmhouse, find out what the address is, and call the sheriff, get a bunch of cops out here. The more the better.”
On the way down the hill, Lucas said, “I have a spy-like suggestion.”
“That would be?” Sherwood asked.
“The first couple Russians that Titov handles, you ignore. Let them go. No surveillance at all. You’re gonna have him for four or five years, so back off the first few Russians. As far as you know, they might set up surveillance on Titov, just to make sure he’s not turned on them.”
“We’ll talk about that. I mean, we the CIA. And the FBI. There’s gonna be some nasty deal-making.”
“Keep us out of it,” White said.
“I can promise you, we’ll do that,” Sherwood said.
· · ·
Seventy-five miles farther north, Titov and Sokolov went through Duluth, Minnesota, three hours after they left Hayward. They’d stopped at a roadside rest, to wait for Abramova. They waited for an hour and a half. She never showed up.
“What happened to her?” Sokolov wondered.
“I don’t know, but it can’t be good,” Titov said grimly. “We need to go on. Keep trying to call her. There’s more burners in the gear bag, get another one, she’ll know it’s you.”
They went on for half an hour, and Sokolov called every ten minutes, and on the third call, got an answer. A baritone voice, rather than Abramova’s soprano, said, “Hello?”
Titov, quietly, urgently, “Hang up. Hang up.”
Sokolov hung up, and Titov told him to pull the SIM card. Sokolov did that, and the battery as well, and he threw the parts out the window, one at a time, hundreds of yards apart.
“Who do you think that was?” Sokolov asked.
“Sure as hell wasn’t Kat. Something happened to her,” Titov said.
· · ·
Once through Duluth, they took Highway 61 north along Lake Superior, stopping at Two Harbors for gas.
“I thought we had enough,” Sokolov said.
“We probably do, but if it turns out we don’t, I’d be stuck in about ten thousand square miles of frozen wilderness,” Titov said. “I’d rather not do that. You want anything to eat or drink? Last chance.”
Inside the station, Titov called Sherwood.
“Where are you?” Sherwood asked.
“Gas station, way north, I don’t know this town,” Titov lied. “How is our plan?”
Sherwood was blunt: “The woman is dead. Our plan is working.”
“Ah, well. I hope she gave a good account of herself,” Titov said.
“She shot an innocent woman,” Sherwood said. “Other than that, she didn’t do much.”
“But our plan is working.”
“Yes, it is, from this end. How about your end?”
“My end is good. I will return to Minneapolis after I deliver Bernard, and I will call you.”
“I need to know…” Sherwood began, but Titov had hung up. When Sherwood called him back, Titov’s phone was dead.
In Two Harbors, Titov handed Sokolov a sack of jerky and two Cokes. “Try not to fart. It’s too cold to open a window.”
From Two Harbors, they went north along the lake until they turned off on Old Highway 61, which they took all the way to the border, and from there, they turned a quarter mile east on Joe’s Road.
No traffic, and they were moving slowly.
“It’s right around here somewhere,” Titov said, peering into the roadside ditches.
Sokolov: “Somewhere? I thought you knew where the fuck you were going…”
“I do. It’s right around here…There!” A light flashed in the ditch on the north side of the road.
When they got there, they found a two-up snowmobile in the ditch.
They stopped, Titov got out, and introduced Sokolov to Edouard Gagnon.
Gagnon was a tall, bearded man, thin as a rope, wearing a snowmobile suit, boots, and a helmet.
He handed another helmet to Sokolov and said, “You might get a little cool dressed like that. We’re half an hour from the car. ”
“Cool, or frozen?” Sokolov asked.
“Nah, just cool,” Gagnon said. To Titov: “You said something about money?”
Titov nodded, went to the gear bag and came back with ten thousand dollars. “Try not to ditch Bernard and run off with the money. The Russians would find you and kill you and all your family and probably anybody who knows you.”
“I will be careful about that,” Gagnon said, with a smile. They’d done business twice before, and he’d now heard the warning for the third time.
Sokolov turned to Titov and said, “You will find out what happened to Kat?”
“Might be on her way to Mexico,” Titov said.
“Or she might be dead,” Sokolov said. “Let us know.”
Titov said, “You can count on it. Hey, it just occurred to me, Bernard…You’re skinnier than I am. Let me get…”
He went to the van and opened up a suitcase, took out a pair of jeans and said, “Put these on over your pants. You’ll be less cool.”
Sokolov did that. Edouard said, “We should go,” and Titov and Sokolov shook hands and Sokolov said, “I will see you at home, I hope.”
“I will find you when I get there,” Titov said. And he thought, Когда рак на горесвистнет, which literally meant, “when a crawfish whistles on a mountain” or, not so literally, “in a pig’s eye.”
A minute later, the sled had disappeared into the trees, headed for the frozen-over Pigeon River, and Canada.
Titov was looking at a long drive. He sat in the van, looking out in the now empty darkness, then sighed, and turned it around.