So a three; or perhaps a two-and-a-half. “You don’t sound enthusiastic about this,” she said to Titov.
Titov shrugged. “Asyousaid, I’d prefer not to die. I would also like a medal. But mostly, not to die.”
They talked about the possibility of an assault and concluded that they might be able to pull it off, but it would be a last resort.
“We will have to leave here at five o’clock in the morning,” Abramova said. “We will have two cars that we can use for reconnaissance, but what they have sent us, this planning”—she waved at Nikitin’s laptop—“is not useless, but almost so. All satellite and road maps and street views, and some of it is years old. Not good enough.”
“Assuming that Lev takes the shot, we have to get away from the attack point, move to a second vehicle without being seen, and then get as far away as we can,” Titov said. “This car they are leaving for us—we’ll see what that is. We might want to keep this Ford, shoot from the other car. There are thousands of Fords; and red Fords.”
“Complicated,” Nikitin said. “We need to be early enough to rehearse shooting lanes and escape routes…”
“We have twelve hours before we get back on the road,” Abramova said. “We should find escape routes on the maps so we’re not thrashing around tomorrow morning, and we can drive the chosen routes before we shoot.”
“We better not fuck this up,” Titov said.
“If we do, then we’re done. There will be some unpleasant music from Moscow,” Abramova said.
Nikitin: “Oy.”
• • •
Not a goodnight. Nikitin took three opiate painkillers, which put him down early, but Titov and Abramova stayed up late, tracing routes on the maps, talking about alternatives. Titov suggested that one viable alternative would be to lie about the door they were covering, claiming the agents came out of the other.
“We are not in the best of shape with the boss, because of the missed shot the first day,” Abramova said. “If we run away, if we run tomorrow, from here, we could probably get away with it and spend the rest of our lives pushing brooms. Or maybe they have an observer there, and we wouldn’t get away with it. Honestly, Melor, I don’t want to hear this kind of talk.”
“Somebody is here. Somebody left the car for us.” Titov chewedon his lip for a moment, then conceded. “So, we go.” He looked at his watch. “In seven hours.”
• • •
They didn’t quitemake seven hours, but they made seven and a half, rolling out of the motel at 5:30, in pitch darkness. Titov drove, matching the speed of the thin traffic on the interstate. There was a pale hint of dawn on the eastern horizon as they approached the lights of the Twin Cities. Abramova had the location of the cached car on her iPhone navigation map and called the turns as they drove into Saint Paul, where they found the car parked on a downtown street.
They were not unobserved. They were in an area of redbrick buildings, but when Abramova got out of the Ford to go to the second car, she saw a street person huddled in a doorway, shaking with cold, and staring at her. An empty wine bottle lay on its side by his feet. He was bareheaded and appeared to be barefoot, although the temperature was below zero. In Russia, she would have called for help; nothing she could do here. She looked back at the man, shook her head, and stepped away.
The key was on the driver’s side back wheel, as they had asked, and she slid it off into her hand, opened the car, and got in. The car, a Chevrolet Equinox, was at least several years old, freezing cold, and the seat and mirrors were set for a large man. She took a minute to find the seat latch and move the seat up, and another to adjust the mirrors. By that time, Titov and the Ford had turned a corner, and she said into her phone, which had been on the whole time, “I’m coming.”
“Did you see the man in the doorway?” Titov asked.
“Yes. I think he will die if nobody else sees him.”
“Fuckin’ Americans,” Titov said.
She turned the corner and saw Titov rolling slowly toward the end of the block and got in behind him. “We go,” he said, and accelerated toward a ramp in the crosstown freeway.
• • •
They were fifteenminutes away from the target apartment house, on the northern edge of downtown Minneapolis. The highways between the two cities were growing crowded, but the gloom of the early winter morning was thick, oppressive, and the people they saw on the sidewalks were scuttling, heads down, arms tight to their bodies; half of them wore some kind of mask or face-covering scarf.
The three of them were all thoroughly familiar with the pattern of streets around the target, from the maps and satellite photos. The FBI agents would take Sokolov out the front of the building, because they had little choice—and no reason to think that there might be a threat.
Nikitin and Abramova decided that the best location for a sniper would be in the back seat of a car about two hundred meters to the north, shooting along North Second Street toward the apartment building that fronted on North Second. The shooting vehicle would be parked, nose in, on North Eighth Avenue, a stub street that led out of sight to several possible escape routes. They’d picked one escape route, but the others might confuse pursuit.
And they’d shoot from the Chevrolet. It was older than the Ford, the seats were worn and dirty, and the car stank of pizza and sausage, as if it had been used as a delivery vehicle; but the engine, transmission, and tires seemed solid. Nikitin would be shooting out the back window, off a sandbag propped on the open window ledge.
All the details, every one, were critical.
The eastern sky was growing lighter the first time they cruised the shooting location in their two vehicles. They both paused, one after the other, at the end of North Eighth Avenue. “There’s a tree branch in the way,” Nikitin said, from the Chevy driven by Abramova. “If we could break the tree branch, this would work.”
“Small branch, we can try,” Abramova said. “We should do it now, before it gets too light.”
