“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 theoffice 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.”
30
Abramova and Bernie Sokolov were ready to go at seven o’clock, but Titov was dragging his feet. He would be ready to leave at nine, he told them. Before then, he was doing research and trying to track down his Canadian contact who would get them across the ice.
“I talked to his wife, and he’s driving back to Thunder Bay from up north, a place called Nipigon. He’s been on the road for a while. She says the drive normally takes an hour and a half, but they had a dump of snow a couple days ago,” Titov said. “The roads are passable, but a little slow. She says he’ll be home before eight. I need to talk to him while we’re both looking at the same maps, and I can’t do that when I’m driving.”
“How much will that slow us down?” Abramova asked.
“Not at all,” Titov said. “We’re about six hours from the place weusually cross, and we can’t cross until it’s dark. Better we stay here for a little while, than get up to an uninhabited place in Canada and stand around trying not to look suspicious. Especially with Bernard’s face out there everywhere.”
