“Why do you do this?”
Titov thought up an appropriate reply: “We are patriots. Russian patriots. The man we are here to kill is a torturer and a murderer.” A moment later, he added, “The money is good.”
“Okay. I wondered if that came into it.”
“It does, of course. We get danger pay,” Titov said. “Not so much by American standards, but good by ours. Mostly, we are patriots.”
They drove into the night, around the west side of the Twin Cities,then south on I-35. At an Apple Valley exit, he turned west, and a hundred feet later pulled to the side of the road. Not much traffic.
He hurried around the truck, helped Juarez out onto the shoulder of the road and said, “There is a bank. You’re going down a bank. Don’t try to walk from here before you turn the mask around. Free your thumbs and then the mask. You are above a pond, there’s ice, I don’t know how thick, but you don’t want to fall. There are some cars above you. Not many, but it would be sad if you were run over now.”
Juarez said, “Got it. I can’t wish you good luck. You’re assholes.”
Made Titov smile: “You are a brave woman,” he said.
He got back in the truck, made a U-turn, and Juarez began struggling to free her thumbs.
• • •
As the highwaypatrolman at the Bison hospital set off to talk to people who might have seen a black Jeep Wrangler, Titov had already dropped Juarez on the roadside, masked and taped, had turned back north on I-35, had gotten on I-94 east. Had crossed the St. Croix River and was thirty miles deep into Wisconsin, on his way to Milwaukee, when the highway patrolman confirmed the sighting of a black Jeep, and the first BOLOs went out in Minnesota.
7
Lucas was thinking about going home.
Cops all over the Orono area were looking for and stopping black Jeep Wranglers, but there had been several of them, and none of them were full of wounded Russians. The FBI had gotten video recordings of the renters of the Jeep Cherokee and the Subaru and found that both renters were the same man being careful about cameras—he wore a long-billed fishing hat, and only flashes of his face were visible.
None of the Twin Cities agencies had rented a black Jeep Wrangler, and the FBI had begun running a nationwide net. One of the feds told Lucas that if any of the major agencies had rented the Wrangler, the LoJack should show up in the Cities. So far, nothing had.
“Don’t really know where we go from here,” Lucas told Sherwood, “Or what I could do.”
“If I don’t get to go to bed, I don’t see why you should,” Sherwood said.
“I’ll stay for one more cup of coffee…”
Lucas’s phone rang.
He’d left his new burner numbers with the 9-1-1 operators, and one of them was calling. He answered, listened, rang off and said to Sherwood, “The doctor, Juarez, was found alive, unhurt, down in a place called Apple Valley, south of the Cities. A few blocks off I-35. She’s being taken to Fairview Ridges Hospital in Burnsville as a precaution.”
“The feds can lead us to wherever that is—they’ve got lights on their vehicles. How far is it?”
“I don’t know…maybe forty, fifty miles,” Lucas said.
“We’re outa here.”
• • •
Under other conditions,a fast run south to the hospital might have been entertaining: Lucas’s Porsche was warm, comfortable, with hard-rock driving music coming through on Apple CarPlay. Lucas liked driving fast and often did. The feds, however, restricted themselves to the speed limit, and Lucas felt he had to go along with it, so the trip took nearly an hour, even with flashers. The caravan looked, Lucas thought, like the circus had come to town.
At the hospital, they all parked and went inside, talked to a couple of uniformed cops who were waiting for them. The cops led them to a room where Juarez was sitting on the bed, looking impatient.
One of the escort cops told her, as they entered the room, “They’re here.”
“Thank God,” she said. “If it’d been any longer, I would have started smoking again.”
Sherwood: “Dr. Juarez! We’re very happy to see you alive.”
“I’m happy to be alive,” Juarez said. “It’s so much nicer than the alternative.”
