“They’re coming, they’ll be here this evening,” Beard said. “We got slowed down at the DMV.”
• • •
The ten ofthem took fifteen minutes to poke around the house. A marshal told Lucas that all the furniture had come from a singlehome furnishings dealer in one big truckload, “so not a lot of people have been in and out of here.”
Lucas reflexively checked the sight lines from the windows and noticed White doing the same thing.
“The only thing I don’t like is that you could get close to the house and not be seen,” White said.
“Balanced by the fact that it’s hard to know what’s back here. Invisibility is their friend,” Lucas said. He looked out the window toward a towering cottonwood tree two hundred yards away, an easy shot for a hunting rifle. “But you have a point. Especially at night, you could sneak right up to the windows. High-rise condo might be better.”
The thin man in the camel coat said, “They didn’t want a condo. They wanted a dacha, like back in Russia. Isn’t that right, Martha?”
“Too many apartments, all our lives,” Martha said. “We wanted more space, and we wanted to hide wherenobodycould see us. But, maybe something bigger than this? Maybe with a dock to fish from?”
“If somebody came after you here, they’d have to take chances, doing reconnaissance and snooping around the neighborhood,” said the camel-coated man. He spoke quietly, but with a military articulation; people stopped talking to listen. “If Leonard were sitting on a dock with a fishing pole, a sniper could hit him from six hundred yards out. From a fishing boat. In town, on the street, a killer could come from anywhere and look like anything. This house has alarms everywhere, and Leonard and Bernard both know how to use a gun.”
White: “I’m assuming you’re CIA?”
“Yes. John Sherwood.” He shook hands with White, then with Lucas. Sherwood had what, at first glance, appeared to be delicate-looking, pale facial skin with a touch of rose on his cheekbones, as iffinished with a fine French lotion. On second glance, his face looked as though it had been sanded down, like he was missing a couple layers of skin. He’d taken off the sunglasses and Lucas caught cold green eyes, which had the frigidclinkof a fighter pilot’s; eyes that might have been chipped from an old, weather-worn Coke bottle.
• • •
Leonard went tolook at his potential office, while Sherwood, Lucas, White, and Martha eventually congregated in the kitchen, where a window over the kitchen sink looked across a semicircular flower garden, now a bristling clump of cut-down plants poking up through the shallow snow.
“That’s a spy hat you’re wearing,” White said to Sherwood. “European. Viennese, like in the movies. Don’t see those much in Minnesota.”
Sherwood started to smile at White as Leonard wandered into the kitchen, carrying an unlit cigar. He stepped past his wife, opened his mouth to say something to Sherwood, dropped the cigar, quickly bent to pick it up…
• • •
WHACK/BANG!
The two sounds were not simultaneous, though nearly so, as the bullet was traveling at three thousand feet per second, and the sound of the shot itself at only eleven hundred. The high-velocity slug punched through the kitchen window glass two inches above Leonard’s bowed head and hit Martha in the cheek below her right eye, splattering blood and bone around the kitchen.
“Jesus! Jesus!” somebody screamed, a gravelly masculine shriek ofeither alarm or fear, and Sherwood reeled away from the falling woman. Lucas, who had been looking down the hall toward the living room, jerked away and saw White, her face covered with blood, dropping toward the floor.
Sherwood snagged Leonard by his jacket and yanked him to the floor and Lucas shouted at him, “Refrigerator,” and another slug punched through, lower, and missed everything, and Sherwood dragged Leonard behind the refrigerator and Lucas grabbed White, who he thought had been hit, to drag her out of the kitchen, but she slapped his hand away and said, “I’m okay, got some spatter,” and crawled with him into the living room.
Lucas said, “They gotta have come in from the circle, they gotta be running…” and White, already fumbling for her pistol, shouted, “Go, go, go…”
They scrambled toward the front door, hands and knees, heard Bernie screaming, “Mama, mama…” and another marshal shouting at somebody, “Stay down, get in here…roll in here…” and somebody else shouted, “Watch the back door, watch the back…”
Lucas and White had been low-crawling across the entry space. At the front door, Lucas got to his knees and looked out through the small security window in the door, couldn’t see anything but trees and parked cars.
Beard shouted, “Stay here! Stay here! Cover Leonard and Bernard, shape up, guys…”
He wasn’t shouting at Lucas and White, but at his own men. White had gone sideways, peeked out a window that looked toward the woods where the shot had come from, and snapped at Lucas: “Nothing moving! Don’t see anyone! Are they waiting to take another shot, or…”
Lucas: “They’re running, they gotta be. They can’t wait, not with the muzzle blast from the rifle. You could hear it a mile away. People will be looking at them already. They gotta know there are a bunch of guns in here.”
He yanked the front door open, looked out and sideways, ran down the front steps, his Walther in his hand, watching the woods as he went, stumbling a couple of times, the heavy Sorel boots awkward at speed. White was a step behind him, gun up, peering into the woods.
A blue Jeep Wagoneer flashed by the driveway entrance as they ran past the parked SUVs. When they reached the end of the driveway, they saw it stop at the next driveway as two men burst out of the woods, both in parkas, one carrying a rifle, one carrying a spotting scope on a folded tripod.
They popped doors on opposite sides of the Wagoneer and climbed in and Lucas started firing at the truck, felt White line up next to him, as though they were on a shooting range, or a firing squad, and together they put thirty-four rounds into and around the truck, which accelerated out of the cul-de-sac and onto the main street.
Lucas reloaded, jammed the Walther back in his holster, took out his iPhone and called 9-1-1. When it was answered, he shouted, “U.S. Marshal: we’ve got a woman shot and the shooter is running in a blue Jeep Wagoneer north on Willow Drive in Orono toward Highway 12, it’ll be full of bullet holes, shattered back window, at least three guys inside, they’re armed and professionals, stop them but don’t approach them, they have a rifle and probably other weapons, we need an ambulance right now, right now!”
