The woman, middle-sized, olive-complected, and dark-haired,with a unibrow and sharp eyes, led him down the hall to another conference room. On the way, Lucas said, “I didn’t think I was important enough to go third.”
“You’re not,” the woman said. “Mr. Sherwood wants you on the street.”
“Nice guy,” Lucas said.
“No, not really,” she said, as if she knew; and it made Lucas wonder what she knew.
A male interviewer was waiting for them, and the interview took twenty minutes: Lucas’s background, his past jobs, and how he’d gotten the Sokolov assignment.
“I didn’t get it, I was told I was on it by the U.S. Marshal for Minnesota,” Lucas said.
“When was that?” the woman asked. She hadn’t mentioned her name.
“Two days ago. I think that’s whenshewas given it, by some suit in Washington.”
The male interviewer nodded: “That checks.”
The woman said, “As I understand it then, you deny any involvement with any Russian intelligence service, or anyone who might be working with any Russian intelligence service…”
“Of course, I do,” Lucas said. “I haven’t…Oh.”
The woman, who’d looked down at her notes, looked up. “Oh?”
Lucas shook his head. “I never even thought of it. Years ago, a Russian intelligence officer came here to Minnesota. We were investigating a murder case in Duluth, a Russian sailor whose father was big in the Russian oil industry. That turned out to involve an old spy ring that had been embedded there to help Russian agents get in and out of the country. Nobody on our side—you guys—cared much aboutthe spy ring, they’d been inactive for decades. Most of them had died of old age.”
He continued: “But the Russians were upset about the guy who’d been killed—his father was one of these oligarch guys, and they sent a woman here to observe our investigation. She turned out to be a member of one of their investigative services. I forget which one, it was all initials.”
The man: “GRU? SVR? FSB?”
“I think it might have been the ‘s’ one,” Lucas said.
The woman said, “This is something. When was the last time she was in touch with you?”
“Like, a couple weeks after the investigation ended. She sent me and my wife a letter thanking us. When she was on her way back to Russia, we let her stay in our guest room over in Saint Paul.”
The woman: “So you were close?”
“No…just an overnight thing, on the way to the airport.”
“What was her name?”
“Nadya Kalin. Uh, Nadezhda Kalin. When I said her first name, she said it sounds like I sneezed.”
Neither of them smiled, and the man asked, “When was this, exactly?”
“Let me see,” Lucas said. He tipped his head back and thought about it. “Okay, my son was a baby, and Weather wasn’t pregnant yet with our second kid, our daughter, so…mmm…fourteen years ago?”
“You haven’t been in touch since the letter?”
“Nope. Not a word. We did bust the spy ring. Not that anyone seemed to care.”
The woman said, “I’m sure somebody cared.”
“The FBI was involved, probably you guys, actually, your specificoffice,” Lucas said. “Like I said, nobody seemed to care. I was talking to a guy, let me see…”
“What?”
“I’m trying to remember his name…Andy something. Lemon? No. That’s not it.”
