The residential streets near the mall had no on-street parking, and she wound up leaving the QX-60 in one of the mall’s satellite parking lots, judging herself far enough from any cameras that they wouldn’t see her clearly enough to identify her.
She followed a looping route out of the mall—the area wasn’t made for joggers—until she was on one of the residential streets and began running harder.
Two miles later, she walked back into the motel room. Nikitin was watching a news show. He turned to her and asked, “Yes? Are we good?”
“Yes. For now. Until Melor returns.”
9
Lucas got up with Weather to eat breakfast and to make his phone calls to Rose Marie Roux, the head of the Department of Public Safety. After giving her the details of the previous day’s shooting, she agreed to press the Twin Cities television stations to emphasize the importance of an FBI press release. Most of the time, newsrooms threw FBI news releases into the nearest wastebasket.
With that job done, Lucas went back to sleep and got another half-hour before Sherwood called: “We should talk about the meeting.”
“Which meeting?”
“The one at FBI headquarters at ten o’clock, or ten-thirty, depending on when the plane gets here. An FBI counter-intel team is flying in from Washington.”
“Where do you want to hook up?”
“I’m in my car, sitting in your driveway.”
• • •
Lucas Invited Sherwoodto wait in the den with the morning’sNew YorkTimes, which Sherwood had already picked up from the driveway. When Lucas had cleaned up, he’d come down in suit and tie. Sherwood nodded and asked, “How many suits you got?”
“Don’t know. An adequate number.”
“That’s a good number,” Sherwood said. “This one has a nice Italian vibe.”
They got breakfast at Cecil’s, a diner not far from Lucas’s house, corned beef hash and coffee for Sherwood, French toast and Diet Coke for Lucas.
“If the FBI is taking over, why are you still hanging around?” Lucas asked. “Reporting back to Frank?”
“That’s part of it. I hate being a spectator and I figure hanging around with you might actually get me somewhere,” Sherwood said. “The feds don’t want me involved—I’ve been told that, and my side pushed back, because of my special knowledge of the Sokolovs, so I’m in, but not exactly embraced.”
“What about me?”
“The Marshals Service wants you in, so you’re invited to meetings, but I don’t believe you’ll be kept up-to-date,” Sherwood said. “For one thing, this is a chance for the feds to one-up the Marshals Service and the CIA. For another, you’re still not cleared of involvement. The FBI’s counter-intel guys will want to talk to you. See what you think about Russians.”
“Not much. My daughter killed some Russians out in California.”
“What?”
He explained about Letty’s investigation of Russian-involvedmurders and espionage, and Sherwood said, “Jesus, I heard rumors about that. I was in Syria…overseas…when it happened. Your daughter gets around.”
“Check her out,” Lucas said. “But yeah. She gets around.”
Sherwood scooped up corned beef hash and chewed, looking around the diner at the other customers, a cross section of winter Minnesotans in sweatshirts and toques, with red noses and watery eyes; no obvious threats.
“If you had to, what would you investigate next? What would you do?” he asked. “Understand, I’m not a cop. I don’t know what to do here.”
Lucas said, “I had a couple ideas. Not sure that either of them would pay off. I assume the feds have the hospitals covered…”
“I assume that, too…”
“Okay. From what Juarez said last night, one of the Russians was hurt bad and needed a hospital right away. One was wounded, but she patched him up, about as well as what he would have gotten at a hospital emergency room. The third one, the woman, was barely wounded at all, and the fourth one wasn’t even involved. The question is, if one of them rushed the badly wounded guy to a hospital, in the Wrangler, would the other two have another backup car? A fourth car?”
Sherwood considered the question, and then said, “No. Basically, in an op like this, you’d want two cars, at a minimum. One action car, plus a backup. A driver and a gun in each car. In this case, they had a driver and a shooter, plus a spotter in the action car, and one guy in the first backup. The third car, the Jeep, was a running-balls-to-the-wall disaster backup. I see where you’re going here. They might need a fourth car now. In case the disaster backup was spotted,in case they were seen along the way, or Juarez understood what the vehicle was.”
