• • •
White knew anearby Best Buy store that they could hit for burner phones. Lucas, White, and Sherwood went to get them, and since Sherwood offered to pay for them, they bought the best phones and the most minutes, exchanged numbers, and started making calls before they got to the parking lot.
Lucas said to White, “We should go look at that Subaru.”
“Probably nothing to look at.”
“We should go anyway,” Lucas said.
“Then, if anyone asks, you can say you did, and you won’t have some little weasel rolling his eyes because you didn’t,” Sherwood said.
“You are wise in the ways of bureaucracy,” White said. To Lucas: “Let’s go get your car, and I’ll follow you over.”
Sherwood said, “Stay in touch.”
“What are you gonna do?” Lucas asked.
“Probably piss off Beard some more,” Sherwood said.
4
Abramova was working on Nikitin’s neck wound; Nikitin sat without a sound and without flinching. He’d been hurt before, and whining and flinching didn’t help anything, so he didn’t.
Titov had gone back out to the Jeep to get his laptop: “I have to go online. Research.”
“You won’t become a doctor fast enough,” Nikitin said.
“I don’t need to be a doctor. I need to find the right one,” Titov said. He asked, and Nikitin and Orlov said their blood types were O-positive and A-positive.
Orlov was nearly as pale as the sheet he was lying on, and said, “For me, you need this doctor soon. God damn those American shooters.”
“We need some pills,” Abramova said to Titov. They had ten opiate tabs. She gave Orlov three, with a bit of water; and asked Nikitin what he needed: “I’ll try one. We should save them for Mat.”
Abramova patted him on the shoulder: “Good man.”
“Let me search for a hospital,” Titov said.
• • •
Titov was lookingfor a nearby but out-of-the-way hospital with an emergency room. He found it in the small city of Bison, twenty miles to the north, explaining what he was doing as he reviewed Google photos of the emergency room exterior. He’d never done what he was about to recommend, but he’d talked through the possibility with his Russian trainers, in case one of his on-the-run clients needed help.
Abramova had cleaned the wound in her ear as best she could, washing it with alcohol and wrapping a piece of QuikClot around it. As she pulled her hair down to cover the bandage, she noticed that she actually had a kind of hole in her hair, where the slug had gone through. Four inches to the left, and she’d have been dead.
When she’d done as much as she could, she went into the bedroom to the gear bag and removed two Beretta 93R machine pistols. They were older weapons, but effective. They didn’t look much like ordinary pistols—there were two thirty-round extended magazines for each pistol, with a foregrip under the muzzle. The accessories added to their apparent threat, as anyone who’d seen a John Wick movie would know.
Along with the Berettas, she picked up the roll of gaffer tape and carried it all out to the living room. Titov said, “Look at these pictures…”
She bent over him to look at Google satellite images of a lakeside hospital with its parking lots and entrance to the emergency room,and more images taken from the ground, and two taken from inside the room.
“I don’t see cameras,” she said.
“They will be there, they always are,” he said. “Not as bad as London, yet, but it’s getting there. They will get pictures of you, but we can’t have pictures of the Jeep. Both Minneapolis and the local sheriffs use license-plate readers, both fixed and mobile, and the sheriff’s department has facial recognition tech. We need to keep our faces covered.”
“You are correct.”
By the time they were ready, Orlov was sleeping, snoring, or perhaps was simply unconscious, and Titov said, “Good. We go thirty-two kilometers north, to a place called Bison. We should be back in an hour and a half.” He was poking an address into his iPhone. “We are programmed.”
“Luck,” muttered a sleepy-eyed Nikitin, as he sank back on the sheet and tried to get comfortable. And, “Good speed.”
