“Kuznetsov. It’s as we thought. Sokolov and his son are now protected by FBI agents,” Titov said. “Tomorrow, about ten o’clock, the FBI will remove them from the apartment house where they are hiding and take them to an airport in Saint Paul to fly to Washington ina government jet. His wife has already been cremated and now resides in a cardboard box that will go with them. Another car will be left for us in Saint Paul.”
“What do they want of us?”
“They want us to try again. I told them they would have to create a site plan for us. It has to be something we can do with a wounded sniper who can’t move fast or far. They said they are looking at all possibilities. They asked after the Berettas and the capacities of the magazines we have with us.”
“Thirty rounds each, two magazines for each pistol,” Abramova said. “If they’re asking after the Berettas, they might not be thinking of a sniper attack, they might be thinking of an assault on the transport vehicles. Killing FBI agents.”
“The man”—he was speaking of Vladimir Putin—“wants Sokolov above all. He will accept dead FBI agents.”
“Sokolov above all. Above us.”
“I do not think the man worries about us. If we die, there are more where we come from. If we don’t die, we get medals. Medals cost nothing.”
“I’d like a medal. Also, a bigger salary. I’d prefer not to die,” Abramova said.
• • •
Titov would alsoprefer not to die, and as Abramova lay back down and soon was asleep again, he thought about an assault on the FBI vehicles. If it wasn’t outright suicide, it’d be the next thing to it. The cars might be armored, there’d be two or three of them, full of armed men. Even if they got Sokolov, they wouldn’t walk away from the fight.
If, somehow, he managed to survive, he’d be looking at a lifesentence in an American prison. There’d be no trades for the murderer of FBI agents. And he thought about the big man Abramova said was in the motel hallway, and that she believed she’d seen at the Sokolov hideout. He was almost certainly a U.S. Marshal. He, Titov, would have to think about him.
• • •
At the Iowamotel, as a security measure Titov and Abramova got separate rooms, Nikitin rooming with Titov. After waiting an hour to see if any alarms were generated, and to take a shower, Abramova walked down to Titov’s room.
“These hotel rooms, they are…functional, but boring,” she said. “The walls look like they were designed to be washed.”
“I was once sent to a hotel in Kovrov,” Nikitin said. “When I got up in the morning, I was speckled red with bug bites, like smallpox. I had six on my?????. I prefer functional.”
Titov snickered and Abramova said, “I prefer not to hear about such things.”
• • •
They all operatedout of laptops with encrypted Proton Mail. The apartment house where Sokolov was sequestered had been spotted on satellite views of Minneapolis, and in the next three hours they got a half-dozen email deliveries: maps, angles, and propositions, generated by a planning group in Moscow.
There would be at least two vehicles picking up Sokolov, they had been told by their intelligence source, driven by FBI agents. The Marshals Service was no longer involved after the shooting that killed Masha Sokolov, and the shooting at the motel.
“That’s better—from their reputations, I’d rather fight the FBI than the marshals,” Abramova said. “If we have to fight. If they leave the apartment at ten, we have to be there by eight o’clock. We can’t observe it too often. I prefer to snipe, if Lev can do it.”
“I can do it if I can sit on my ass,” Nikitin said. He was sitting on his ass as he said it, peering at his laptop. “The street view…the apartments are set higher than the street, and it doesn’t look like they have underground parking. That means the pickup will have to be out in the open, at least for a few meters.”
“They could drive the pickup vehicles on the lawn…” Abramova ventured.
“I don’t think so. If you look closely, here and here…” She bent over his shoulder to look; he smelled like disinfectant. “These are steps. The building is set higher than the street. If they come out this door, and there’s really no alternative, I could shoot straight down the street. That looks like…two hundred meters? There are some trees, but no leaves at this time of year. Mel could be down here, at the other end of the street. We park in this side street, he watches the door, and when they start to move Sokolov, you pull out into the street, my back window down, sandbag on the window sill…”
As they worked through the possibilities, it became clear that they would have to plan for a single sniper shot. If that became impossible, the only alternative would be a full-on assault on the FBI vehicles with the Berettas, Nikitin possibly backing them from their car with the rifle.
“An assault would be possible if they have two vehicles to move him, but three would be difficult,” Abramova said. “They would have the numbers, the guns, the cars might be armored.”
“We should think of ourselves as valuable assets,” Titov said,who’d already worked through the obvious possibilities during the drive down to Iowa. “Even if those above…” He pointed at the ceiling, meaning their superiors. “…want to commit us, I am not interested in pointless suicide. This is not disloyal. This is practical.”
Nikitin: “You’re correct.”
“We should think about this,” Abramova said. “If we see which vehicle Sokolov is in, and which seat he is in, and we’ve positioned ourselves to be traveling in the opposite direction of the FBI vehicles, we could empty both Berettas into the seat and run…”
“And be pursued?” Titov asked.
Abramova frowned. Titov was not part of the hit team. She tried to groom him with compliments, but…On a scale of one to ten, she trusted the other members of the team at about a seven; Titov she trusted at about a three, although he’d done good work in the emergency pickup after the failed assassination attempt, and in getting Orlov to Milwaukee (though she had no proof he’d actually done that), and more good work in the escape from the motel after the firefight.
