“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 ShellyWhite. 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 Titovhad 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 firstat 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.
28
Lucas and Sherwood sat morosely in the rental car, looking at the cops and crime scene people pacing off distances between bodies and marking brass ejected from guns and photographing and bagging the guns themselves and Sherwood said, “So different.”
“Than?”
“Anything I’ve ever seen,” Sherwood said, “Iraq, Syria, people get killed and you pick up yours, if any of yours got dinged up, and then you’d get the fuck out. Medivac them to a hospital with trauma surgeons on call. Everybody else, fuck ’em. Let them take care of their own. None of this…bureaucracy. I mean, really, why are they measuring all of this? It’s like surveying school. Could you really use it in court?”
“Can’t tell,” Lucas said. “Get in court, and if the defense attorneys can’t make a deal for their clients, and don’t have a decent defense, they’ll attack procedure. Try to show that things were done wrong,and that their clients have somehow been cheated. Doesn’t usually work, but if we don’t do the procedure, they’ll attack it, and sometimes, not often, they’ll get away with it.”
“Really.”
