Nikitin had the sandbag on the window edge and the rifle on top of it, and he’d stopped breathing. He looked and waited and waited and waited and when the group opened that little bit, so Sokolov could turn and get into the back seat of the SUV, he squeezed off the shot.
“Go! Go! He’s down,” Nikitin shouted. “He went down…”
Abramova was looking in the rearview mirror where a blue-gray SUV had come around a corner a block away and was closing on them, in a hurry, and she said, “We have trouble, we have, maybe, a scout car, coming up behind.”
She accelerated straight down Eighth Avenue, and the other vehicle came after them. She lost sight of the other car, then it fishtailed around the corner and she said, “Fuck me, we can’t have it follow.”
Abramova swerved to the side of the street and stepped on thebrakes, hard as she could, and the right-side wheels climbed a curb and Nikitin shouted, “What are you—?”
And she was in the street, the gray SUV only sixty or seventy feet away, and coming on, and she raised the Beretta and began squeezing the trigger as fast as she could, sending rapid three-shot bursts at the other car, aiming low, at tires, and at the engine and at the windshield and back to the tires and the SUV went sideways and she emptied the Beretta at the tires and jumped back in the Chevrolet and they were gone—three minutes, which seemed like it would last forever, to Titov.
The three minutes passed, no sign of pursuit, and they were out of the Chevrolet with the rifle and sandbag and into the Ford and Titov said to Nikitin, “You hit him, he went down hard!”
“We had to stop a pursuing car,” Abramova blurted. “We did that, we have no followers so far, unless there are drones, we need to get on the interstate.”
“Slow down,” Titov said. “Tell me about it when we are on the highway. In the meantime, reload.”
14
Lucas was still asleep when Sherwood called.
“They’re going to move him at nine o’clock and he’ll be out of your jurisdiction,” Sherwood said. “You want to go watch?”
“How do we know where they’re at?” Lucas asked.
“There was some clarification done in Washington, and both the Marshals Service and the Agency want a man on the scene. That’s us.”
Lucas: “They don’t think we’re traitors anymore?”
“They don’t think I am. The feds are still a little suspicious of you.”
Lucas looked at the bedside clock: 7:10. “All right. Are you ready to go?”
“I will be in fifteen or twenty. Why don’t I come over and pick you up?”
“I’ll drive—I know the Cities,” Lucas said. “Yeah, come get me. You like scrambled eggs?”
“No, but I could do some toast.”
“I got toast and raisin bagels.”
“Great.”
“See you when you get here.”
• • •
So Lucas atescrambled eggs and caraway rye toast with French butter, and Sherwood a toasted bagel with cream cheese and another with strawberry jam. The night before, at dinner, Sherwood had proven a congenial guest with a dry sense of humor that tended toward cynicism, and he and Weather had gotten along well. At the end of the evening, Weather had him take off his shirt so she could look at his gunshot wound, and when that was done, told him he’d hurt more the next day. “It didn’t hit a rib, but it impacted one,” she said. “You’ve got a bruise the size of a saucer. Like somebody hit you in the side with a big stick.”
• • •
“If I’d hadan old lady like Weather, I might still be married,” Sherwood said the next morning, as he slapped strawberry jam on a bagel. “But they weren’t like Weather.”
“They?”
“Yeah, there were two of them. They both still work for the Agency. Both remarried. I say hi from time to time, when I’m in-country, and see them in a hallway, and can’t avoid it.”
“I could talk with my daughter. See if she could set up a date with Barb, the sniper chick. She’s pretty damn interesting. Physically fit, smart. Reasonably good-looking. A little younger than you. Of course, she does have that violent streak.”
