Sherwood, two minuteslater, said, “Do you realize…No, you probably don’t, because you’re a humble deputy marshal. I will send you this guarantee in five minutes and will sign it in ink and send you a PDF, you can print it, sign it, scan it, send it back to me, and I’ll see if I can round up more signatures while you’re doing that. We gotta get this guy! We gotta! And preferably, in a way that the Russians won’t realize what’s happened.”
“What don’t I realize? As a humble marshal?”
“This guy told you that he moves NOCs around…” Sherwood began.
“I don’t know what a NOC is.”
“A spy with no diplomatic cover. N-O-C. It stands for non-official cover. If we can keep this guy in place, as a sleeper, I mean, holy cow, Lucas, this would be a coup.”
“All right, I’m willing to believe that, but I’m not sure the feds will go along.”
“They will when they see the other signatures on the guarantee. I don’t know who I can get out of bed, but it’s after seven o’clock on the East Coast, and I bet I can get a couple of good ones.”
“All right,” Lucas said. “Send me the letter. As soon as I send it back to you, I’ll get cleaned up and head over there to pick you up. Wherever the guy wants us to go, we’ll be ready.”
“I’m good with that. Listen, this is you and me and, I don’t know, maybe Del and Shelly? I don’t want to tell the FBI about it, because they’ll go in heavy.”
“Jesus, we’d really be putting our necks on the chopping block,” Lucas said.
“True. That’s what makes it exciting. I’ve already got a major hard-on,” Sherwood said.
“I heard that,” Weather said.
• • •
Ten minutes, theletter came in to Lucas’s email. Weather got it, printed it, took it to Lucas, who was shaving, had him sign it, took it back to the home office, scanned it, and sent it back to Sherwood as a PDF.
Ten minutes after that, Sherwood called back: “I got the DDO—deputy director of operations—to sign off on it. He’s calling somebody at the Justice Department, but we’re getting short on time.”
“Get what you can,” Lucas said. “You know, we could just lie, puta bunch of fake signatures on it, and grab the guy and drop him in jail.”
“We could, which would just get us some spam in the can and do us no good at all. Lucas, this is large. You’re going to justify your entire wretched existence with this score.”
“Yours maybe, not mine,” Lucas said. “I feel my neck stretched out and the axe coming down.”
“Call Del. Call Shelly. Get over here,” Sherwood said.
“How about St. Vincent?”
“No! Not Mallard, either, or your friend Jane! There’s no way they’d want to do what we need, which is to separate this defector from the pack. If the FBI didn’t flat out kill him, they’d want a show trial. We need people who don’t have anything invested in revenge and can keep their mouths shut.”
Lucas had to think about that. He could use a little revenge himself, but had spent enough time in Washington that he understood what Sherwood was trying to do.
He wound up calling both White and Capslock, and they agreed to meet at the federal building in Minneapolis. “I’m not sure about taking Del along, because I don’t know where we’re going,” Lucas said. “If it’s not here in the state, all he could do is stand around.”
“Call Edie Lamb,” White said. “Tell her to get her ass into the office.”
“What for?”
“She can deputize Del. Perfectly legal, and not totally uncommon. In fact, I think you or I could deputize him, but I’m not sure about that.”
“You think she could deputize Sherwood?” Lucas asked.
“I think she can deputize a ham sandwich if she wants to. Anyone she likes, including a flat-out ass-scratching sidewalk citizen.”
“I’ll call her.”
Lucas looked at his watch: still early Saturday morning. Edie Lamb was the U.S. Marshal for the district of Minnesota. She liked to have a drink or eight on Friday nights.All right, he thought,an exaggeration. She was trying to dry out, but he wasn’t sure how far that project had gotten. If it hadn’t gotten far, she could be unconscious.
