“You’re leading up to something you want me to do…”
Lucas introduced Sherwood, who said, “Hi, I admire your work,” and then Lucas explained in detail what had happened since the shooting at the hideout. He concluded with, “It’d help a lot if you could talk to your friend at the NSA and get her to take a peek at the phones coming out of the FBI cars and then out of the condo where the Sokolovs were stashed overnight. We can give you the phone numbers of all the cell phones involved. It probably wasn’t one of them, but would help you locate them in time and space.”
Letty: “Why doesn’t the CIA ask? They talk to the NSA.”
Sherwood leaned over the phone: “We could do that, and it’d start with me and go to my boss, and then he’d take it to his boss, and then at the NSA, it’d start the top and trickle down. We’d probably get a response in a week.”
Letty made a crunching sound, said, “I’m sorry, I’m eating carrot sticks…” and after a couple of more crunches, said, “I’ll make the call. The Marshals Service and the CIA will owe me. Owe me big.”
“We can talk,” Sherwood said.
They rang off and Sherwood said, “My, my. I like that girl. Yougottagive me her number.”
“She has a serious boyfriend. He’s a knight. You know, a British knight.”
“Yeah? Weird. Anyway, I don’t want to sleep with her,” Sherwood said. “I want to exploit her.”
• • •
They left thediner and went back to Lucas’s house, where he picked up the new Porsche, and they drove separately to the FBI building for the morning briefing. They learned nothing during the briefing except that St. Vincent was still pissed off at them.
St. Vincent did throw a little mystery out: “We’re meeting again at five o’clock. We have a developing situation.”
Sherwood: “Do you want to share?”
“No.”
• • •
Letty called backas the PowerPoint presentation continued in endless minutiae. Lucas and Sherwood excused themselves, left the room and walked to an empty stretch of hallway to take the call.
“I could get in deep trouble for talking to you guys,” Letty said. “If you tell the FBI…”
“We won’t tell anyone,” Sherwood told her.
“They went back through some dailies, that’s recordings, and there was a call the night before Sokolov was shot, one minute and five seconds, and a suspicious blip the next morning at 9:07 coming out of the condo. That matched up with another suspicious blipcoming out of the airport area right when Mr. Sherwood said they were leaving for Minnetonka. By a blip, I mean, somebody pushed a button and immediately hung up. Same phone, all three times, but it’s a burner. It was bought at a Walmart, but it’s almost impossible to pin down which Walmart because their distribution tracks quantities but not specific phones. It could have come from anywhere. My friend is a suspicious kind of person and she thinks it was probably left in a dead drop and that your leaker didn’t buy it himself.”
“So you got a couple of blips,” Lucas said. “Do you have the phone they were coming out of?”
“Yes, getting to that. It wasn’t from any of the phone numbers you have. We have a phone number, which I can give you, and my contact said she would put up a tracker for it, but it has been off the air since that nine o’clock blip. Not turned off, they pulled the battery.”
“Can your contact call me directly?” Sherwood asked.
“She could call Dad, if you really need to speak to her. She didn’t want to talk directly with you, Mr. Sherwood. Something about how it’s illegal. It’s probably illegal to talk to Dad, too, but she’s worked with us before and knows we can keep our mouths shut.”
“I can keep my mouth shut.”
“Yeah, well…”
“I asked Lucas for your phone number, but he won’t give it to me unless you say okay,” Sherwood said. “I’d like to take you out for a walk when I get back to Washington. And call me John.”
“Give it to him, Dad. Always happy to make a connection.”
• • •
Standing in thehallway, Lucas and Sherwood talked about what to do next: didn’t argue, talked.
Sherwood said, “It’s probably Bernie, but not necessarily. I’ve been thinking that they might have had some intelligence about where we were going from Washington, and when we were leaving. They could have had a watcher pick us up at the airport, and he signaled the shooters when we left. Figuring out a watcher would know about the condo…that’s harder. Could have seen the handover from the Marshals Service to the feds, but…yeah, it’s Bernie.”
