This thing about cars was getting serious. She had to think.
She did that on the drive back to Minnetrista. Instead of going straight back to the farmhouse, she detoured to a Walgreens drugstore. Inside, she bought an auburn hair dye, along with an eyebrow pencil, Band-Aids, Tums, a notebook, six bottles of Pepsi Cola, and a pack of cinnamon-flavored chewing gum, all the extra items bought to obscure the purchase of the hair dye and eyebrow pencil.
At the farmhouse, Nikitin was asleep. The three pills she’d left for him were gone, and the glass of water had been drunk. She had no idea of how much time she might have, but the hair was a necessity, and she let him sleep while she changed her appearance.
That took an hour; her first time as a brunette, with the eyebrow pencil matching the new hair color. While she waited for the hair dye to set, she called Titov, who was already in his Jeep. He answered, seemed disoriented for a moment, then said, “Please repeat.”
Abramova told him everything she’d done. “I’m afraid they will trace the new car. We need yours as soon as we can get it.”
“I’m coming as fast as I can without attracting the highway patrol.”
“I think…I will find a motel where I can check in without the new car being seen. I will bring Lev and the equipment in from the back and leave the car somewhere. That’s the best I can do, but we need a clean car, your car.”
“I can’t think of anything better,” Titov said. “I can’t think of anything right now.”
“Don’t go off the highway.”
• • •
Feeling the passingtime weighing on her, Abramova took ten minutes to research motel possibilities on the west side of the Twin Cities and spotted a La Quinta Inn with two separate wings and multiple entrances. Even better, it was within jogging distance of the Mall of America.
The team had visited the mall the day after they arrived in the Twin Cities, to shop for outdoor wear. She wouldn’t leave the car at the mall itself—too many cameras—but she could leave it close, and the conclusion might be that they’d dumped the car and gone to the mall to catch other transportation—Uber or a cab.
Nikitin was not easily roused, but she got him started, made him swallow an amp to wake him further, and began packing bags and equipment in the QX-60. By the time she was done, he was awake.
“Can you walk?”
“I can try.” He tried and managed to hobble across the room. “I’ll need more painkillers if it’s more than ten meters.”
“We have those. Now, we need to get you to the car.”
• • •
On the wayto the La Quinta, she took a call from an unknown number, but she knew the voice on the other end: a man who called himself Kuznetsov, which was a good Russian name, but one that she suspected was not his. His voice sounded like someone shovelinggravel. Titov told her that Kuznetsov had been on the front lines in Ukraine as an SVR observer. He’d breathed in flames trying to escape a house that had been attacked and set afire by Ukrainian special forces. “No more choirs for him,” Titov said.
He asked for a briefing, and Abramova told him everything that had happened, from the time she dropped Nikitin and Orlov at the target house, through the wounding of Orlov, Nikitin, and herself, the subsequent flight, the kidnapping of the doctor, Titov’s overnight trip to Milwaukee, and now her rental of the new car. When asked, she said she thought Nikitin should be well enough to shoot again, if they had the necessary intelligence and the opportunity.
“Leonid Sokolov is still alive, his wife, Masha, was killed,” Kuznetsov said. “We understand the circumstances, and these things happen. However, we need you to be prepared to make another attempt and soon. We will get you the necessary intelligence.”
“We need another car, a cold car, an older one that wouldn’t be a rental car,” Abramova said.
“We can arrange that, we have…friends in Minneapolis,” Kuznetsov said.
“OPG?”
“Not so organized, not so much group, but some crime,” Kuznetsov said. “An old car should not be a problem.”
• • •
By the timeKuznetsov rang off, Abramova was halfway to the La Quinta. At the motel, still in the dress, heels, and overcoat, her scalp itching from the dye job, she told the desk clerk that yes, she would pay for the full day, including the previous night, because she was onbusiness and had an extended meeting and later, a reception that she had to go to. She’d be late getting back, she said, but it was all on expenses, so…
The clerk was polite but not interested in her plans.
Checked in, for a full week, to a first-floor room, she hauled all the gear to the room. Nikitin was ambulatory, but wobbly, and despite the pills, in pain.
The motel was mostly empty, with the previous night’s occupants checked out. They got to the room without being seen, and Abramova took fifteen minutes to help Nikitin out of his jeans, checked the bullet wound in his butt and neck, repatched the butt wound with fresh disinfectant and a tight, heavy bandage. She left him with pills and the remote for the television, changed into clothing that might credibly work with a jogger, hung a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door, and headed back out.
Almost done.
