Sherwood, on the other hand, had his feet dangling off the side of a bed in the emergency department. He had been cleaned up, bandaged, given pain medication, and would be released as soon as his CIA insurance status was confirmed, which was taking a while.
“You never saw the car they’re in,” Sherwood said, when Lucas stepped inside the drape around his bed.
“Never did, and we got nothing on a camera. They’re gone,” Lucas said. “You good?”
“The doctors say I’m fine, I’m thinking more like mediocre,” Sherwood said. “Ten years in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, and I heard all kinds of shooting and shit blowing up, but the worst I got it was in Beirut. I went to the American University Medical Center to get a sliver taken out of my hand. I got the sliver from a hotel railing after I had too many Long Island iced teas at the bar with an Arab dude named Lanny. I come to fuckin’ Minneapolis, Minnesota, and someRussiandurakshoots me. In Minneapolis fuckin’ Minnesota. A fuckin’ Russian assassin.”
After a moment, he added, “It was a big splinter. But here in fuckin’ Minneapolis…”
He might have gone on, but Lucas said, “We like to think of ourselves as cosmopolitan.” He didn’t know what adurakwas, but he recognized the tone. “St. Vincent tells me the FBI is taking over the entire case and we are no longer invited to participate.”
Sherwood said, “Yeah, well, we’ll see. I’m not coordinating with the FBI, I’m coordinating with the Marshals Service. If the FBI doesn’t like it, they can go suck on it. Hey—where’s my car?”
“Still back at the motel,” Lucas said. “Listen, when they finish fixing your hangnail, or whatever it is…”
“Gunshot wound, suffered in the service of my country. If I play this right, I could get a month off. Maybe two.”
“Like I said, a hangnail. When we get you out of here, why don’t you come over to my place for dinner? I’ll do us a couple of steaks, martinis, you’d like my wife. She’s a doctor, she can probably slip you some extra drugs. We’ll call Washington to clarify our status here.”
“You had me at martinis,” Sherwood said. “I gotta wait for the goddamned insurance to clear me out. You apparently need to be pre-approved for a gunshot wound.”
The insurance came through, after a while. Lucas supposed that there was a conference still going on at the FBI offices, but there wasn’t much that the FBI knew that he and Sherwood didn’t. They went back to the motel and picked up Sherwood’s car, and to Lucas’s house, made phone calls, and eventually ate steaks and drank martinis.
Because that’s what you do when you can’t think of what else to do.
13
After fleeing the motel, Titov took the Ford west on one interstate highway, then south on another. Abramova sat backwards, watching for followers, until they were on I-35, and she turned around, buckled in, and asked, “Where are we going?”
“Iowa,” Titov said.
Abramova frowned. “Iowa. That’s a different state. How far is that?”
“Two hours. For now, we can do nothing, because we know nothing,” Titov said. “We need to make phone calls, make consultations. Iowa is close, across a state line, which changes all of the police jurisdictions, so we’re less likely to be noticed by cops. We will still be close enough to get back here in two hours if we need to.”
“I like that,” Nikitin said from the back seat.
Titov checked the other man in the rearview mirror, and asked, “How are you, Lev?”
“I don’t hurt too much. Some.”
“Have you taken pills?”
“Not in the past hour, I needed to be able to move if I had to.”
“So now, we will be driving for two hours to this place, Clear Lake. In Iowa,” Titov said. “I suggest, Kat, that you climb in the back and lower the back seats so you both can sleep. Also, that makes this car appear to have only a driver, not two men and a woman.”
“This, I can do,” Abramova said. “This has been the longest two days of my life.”
• • •
According to Google Maps,the run to the motel in Clear Lake, from where they were, would take two hours. Nikitin and Abramova quickly fell asleep; Titov went to a classical music station on satellite radio and played Tchaikovsky for a while, got hooked into the jazz waltzes by Shostakovich, then looked around for some classic soft rock.
Forty miles from the Iowa line, he took a phone call, listened, said, “We can do it, but we need everything you can find out about the site and where we might go. We need another car, not a rental, if one can be procured.”
He listened some more, and then said, “Text me the address. Leave the keys on top of the back tire, on the street side.”
They talked details for two minutes, and then he hung up. The phone call had wakened Abramova, who asked, “What was that?”
