“How did he actually get out with his family?” Lucas asked.
“Mmm. It’s a little complicated. Before the Syrian revolution, both Russia and the U.S. had armed forces in Syria, not exactly friends, but not exactly enemies. We occasionally cooperated—what were called deconfliction channels. Usually, just phone calls or radio calls,” Sherwood said. “Sometimes, when things really got messed up, we’d all go to a neutral site and try to hash things out. It was a mess over there.”
“And you were…?”
“Anobserver…” Sherwood put oral italics on the word, “…at a deconfliction conference. I was sent to monitor the discussion. As was Sokolov, from the Russian side. He knew who I was, and I knew who he was. When we had a moment alone, he suggested that we have a chat. I told him that I wasn’t interested in moving to MotherRussia, and he said that he didn’t think I would be. But a chat could be profitable for both of us, me in my job, he in his bank account. When I realized what he was suggesting, I asked if he ever vacationed in Istanbul, and he said that he could. Later that day, I gave him a darknet address on a piece of paper the size of a postage stamp that could be easily swallowed if he had to. A couple of months later, we set up a meet in Istanbul. A week after that, he and his family were in Washington.”
White: “Yowza.”
“You get anything good from him?” Lucas asked.
“Yes. We got the names of four Russian spies in sensitive positions with the Pentagon. They’ve all been taken out, they’re now in prison. We got a lot of intel stuff confirmed, things that we suspected but weren’t sure about, and leads to several other Russians that he thought might be amenable to an approach. That was very interesting, because one of them was already working for us. When we found out that the Russian counter-intel people were aware that he might be vulnerable, we managed to get him out.”
Lucas: “So the Russians are pissed.”
“Yes. This hit team—they’ll be very good, one of their best. Able to improvise, to cope with changing circumstances. Smart. Tough.”
“One thing I still don’t understand,” Lucas said. “Why did they go after Sokolov now? I mean, this minute? Why didn’t they wait a week or two, or a month or two, until things were settled down and maybe the Sokolovs would have relaxed a little? When they weren’t surrounded by marshals?”
Sherwood shook his head: “Don’t know. Maybe they were afraid this was a temporary stop…But…that doesn’t seem right. I dunno.”
“A deliberate slap in the face, was what it was,” White said. “A slapin our face. The Russians want us to know, without being absolutely sure.”
Sherwood nodded: “That could be it. A deniable hit. But to get away with a slap, you can’t get caught. Get caught, you’re risking an embarrassing show trial.”
• • •
The rest oftheir conversation was jumbled, confused, bits and pieces, with a lot of silence. They’d all seen death, and Lucas and White had been shot themselves, but to see it close up, widescreen with surround sound, as they had with Masha Sokolov, left them shocked; left them with things to think about on their own. When they got back to the hideout, two local cop cars were parked in the street next to the driveway, the cops standing beside their vehicles, apparently to keep any traffic moving through.
“Let’s go see where the shots came from,” Sherwood said.
A Hennepin County ambulance was at the top of the drive, engine turning over, a paramedic sitting inside the open back doors, reading his phone. He glanced up and nodded as they passed and went back to his phone.
Beard had arrived a minute earlier. Inside the hideout, he’d peeled off to talk to his men, who were posted around the interior, looking out. Lucas, White, and Sherwood headed for the kitchen. They passed Bernie, who was lying on the living room couch, forearm across his eyes. He sobbed once, and then they were in the kitchen. Leonid was nowhere to be seen.
Masha was still on the blood-soaked floor, a tall woman gone small in death, curled up in a fetal position; she looked crumpled, likea paper wad. A butcher-shop odor hung in the kitchen. Sherwood stepped past her, apparently unaffected by the body and blood, looked at a cabinet hit by the slug after it went through Masha’s head, and lined it up with a bullet hole in the kitchen window.
“Right in the direction of that big black tree?” he asked.
“Cottonwood, yeah.” Lucas wouldn’t look directly at Masha, a life gone to waste. He kept his neck bent away as he looked out the window and said, “That’s about right. Let’s go check it out. We saw where they came out of the woods, there’s enough snow that we should be able to follow their tracks back to where they were set up. Don’t think there’ll be much to see.”
“We gotta look,” White said. “Maybe somebody dropped a matchbook from the bar they hang out at.”
Sherwood frowned at her, then shrugged: “Marshals are weird,” he said.
“We get that way,” Lucas agreed. “Let’s go.”
They walked out the driveway and Lucas saw pencil-thin rims of Masha’s blood coming off Sherwood’s left shoe. They turned left up the street and White said to Sherwood, “You didn’t seem all that upset by the shooting.”
“If I’d been hit, I would have been,” Sherwood said.
White persisted: “But you’ve seen shot-up people before.”
“Oh, yeah. You know. It was a war.”
“Iraq?”
“Some, earlier on. Then some in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then later, some more time in Syria.”
