From the back seat, Nikitin said, “If we shoot him, it might not be an official assassination. It might be anyone, even somebody who is legal in America, but who suffered from Sokolov’s actions. Revenge. If we use the ChapStick, it is a known Kremlin action. The man will be blamed.”
“Does he care?”
The ChapStick had started life as an actual ChapStick, the strawberry flavor. It had been taken apart in a laboratory outside Moscow,where the waxy lip balm had been carefully removed as a tube, and cut into two portions. The top three-quarters had been set aside, and the bottom one-quarter, thrown away. That quarter was replaced with a transparent cylinder of malleable plastic, that looked much like the ChapStick. The plastic cylinder contained a bead of a waxy nerve agent known as Novichok, developed by Russian chemical warfare researchers and used in several assassinations and assassination attempts.
A thin black-glass seal with a pull tab was placed over the poisonous portion, and then the original ChapStick compound reinserted on top. An X-ray would not detect the change. In use, an assassin would turn the ChapStick dial at the bottom of the tube, pushing up the contents, until the glass appeared.
The actual ChapStick would be discarded, the glass seal carefully peeled away and flushed down a toilet. The cap would then be replaced until the actual assassination attempt. The assassin would have to get close to the target, remove the cap, and contrive to rub the Novichok compound on the victim’s skin. The victim’s death would resemble heart failure.
The reworked tube of ChapStick currently resided in a plastic box inside a bag of medicines that none of them used, stashed in Abramova’s suitcase. They all feared it; even the smallest touch of Novichok could be a killer.
• • •
On the waynorth, they talked off and on about other possibilities but concluded that most were fantasies. “We have to talk with Kuznetsov,” Nikitin said. “I believe the man would be consulted about the ChapStick.”
“We have to ask,” Abramova said. “The only other possibility I see is a direct attack on the FBI vehicles taking Sokolov to an airport. An ambush, in which FBI agents would be killed, and we might be killed as well. Sokolov might not be.”
“Not that the man would suffer over our deaths,” Titov said.
“Maybe a little bit,” Abramova said.
Titov snorted. Then, “We must consult with Kuznetsov.”
“And see what we can see at the hospital,” Abramova said. “Test all possibilities.”
16
The previous night, Lucas, Weather, and Sherwood again had dinner together, Weather having recovered from a mild snit about the wrecked Porsche: the snit had been partially neutralized by the fact that neither Lucas nor Sherwood had been injured. They met at an Italian restaurant on Saint Paul’s Grand Avenue, where Sherwood denied leading Lucas into trouble, claiming that they’d had little idea of what they were doing when they were attacked.
Then Weather interrogated Sherwood about specific spy techniques that she’d read about in thriller novels or seen on television, and about lapses in security that had made it to national news stories.
“Most of what you read is a lot of bull. Most spies are clerks. Most of them do it for the money. There aren’t very many serious secrets. The military needs to keep tactical plans secret until they’re executed, but everybody understands everybody else’s strategy, even in the smallest details,” Sherwood told her. “You need to keep the names of your spies secret…but, there’s not much else. Most of what we needto know we can either get from satellites or by watching Russian and Chinese and Iranian TV and reading their newspapers.”
He added some stories, and between theprimi(lobster risotto) and thesecondi(Colorado lamb chops with black truffle demi-glace), Weather asked if he should be telling her all these things, and he said, “Everybody in Washington knows this stuff. You can keep a lot of secrets about one thing or another, but there’s no keeping down a good spy story, especially when there’s blatant stupidity involved.”
At one point, Sherwood asked Lucas, “How much have you told Weather about what we’ve been doing?”
“Pretty much everything,” Lucas admitted.
Weather pointed a truffle-glace-streaked fork at Sherwood and asked, “Why aren’t you all over that Chevrolet? The one Lucas shot at? The Russians must have gotten it from somewhere.”
The car had been found by Minneapolis police, abandoned in a narrow street not far from the shooting site. It had two bullet holes in the back fender, but no blood inside.
“BCA and the fedsareall over it,” Lucas told Weather. “There’s gotta be some kind of Russian connection, but I don’t know where it would come from. Not my area.”
“I bet Del would know,” Weather said to Lucas.
Sherwood: “Who’s that?”
“Old friend, BCA guy,” Lucas said. He said, “Del. Huh.”
“He pretends to be the scum of the earth,” Weather said.
Lucas: “Be nice. He’s a good friend.”
“I saidpretends. He’s a good friend, but he’s convincing scum. That’s why he’s so useful,” Weather said.
Sherwood: “Do you have Russians here? I mean,bratvaguys? Like mafia?”
