“Meet here?” Sherwood asked.
“No. I don’t want any feds to stumble over us,” Lucas said. “Why don’t we hook up at Bernie’s condo. We can watch the door from your rental, which is the next thing to invisible.”
“Unlike, say, a Porsche. Does Minneapolis have Starbucks?” Sherwood asked.
“Yeah, but I’d recommend a Caribou Coffee. Lots of them around.”
• • •
Lucas didn’t havea friend that he wanted to see about a tool. He had a hidden drawer on the underside of a stairway in his garage; he’d designed and contracted the house himself, and the hidden drawer was part of it. He drove home, made himself a cheese-and-bologna sandwich on sourdough bread—calling St. Vincent a cheese-eater had left him peckish—went into the garage, opened the drawer and took out a cylindrical electronic lock rake about the size of an electric toothbrush. The drawer also contained two cold revolvers, a Taser, generic handcuffs, a burner phone, two hand-held walkie-talkies like hunters used—they left no cell phone trace—and five thousand dollars cash in random denominations.
He pushed the drawer back in place, finished the sandwich on the way back out to the driveway. Twenty minutes later, he’d left the Porsche and walked down the street to Sherwood’s rental car.
“Got what we need?” Sherwood asked.
“Yeah.”
Another five minutes and they were parked by the same bus stop where Titov had waited for Leonid Sokolov to walk out to an FBI truck.
• • •
They waited formore than an hour. Lucas was reading a Paul Krugman economics blog on his phone when Sherwood said, “SUV at the front door. I can see bumper flashers, but they’re not flashing.”
“That’s them. Here’s Bernie.”
Bernie, escorted by a single agent, walked out of the building and they both got in the SUV.
“How far away is the hospital?” Sherwood asked.
“Hennepin General? Maybe, I dunno, a mile? Lots of traffic lights.”
“Let’s move.”
• • •
They were atthe front door in two minutes. The door was not locked, because it led into a ten-by-ten lobby space with a call box and a wall of mailboxes. The inner door had a decent lock, but Lucas had a decent rake, and though it made a loud chattering noise, they were through in five seconds.
“Goddamn thing sounded like you dropped a spoon in a garbage disposal,” Sherwood grumbled. “You need better gear.”
“Hey, we’re in. If you’ve got better gear, send it to me.”
“Look for an unexpected FedEx box,” Sherwood said.
• • •
The door openedonto a small interior lobby, with a stairwell behind a door to the right and an elevator to the left. They ran up thestairs, looked both ways down the empty hall on the second floor, and hurried to a green door that read “240” and had an empty plate that might have held the name of the apartment owner, but didn’t. They hadn’t yet seen a single person in the building.
Lucas knocked on the apartment door and waited, knocked again and waited, used the rake and they were in.
Sherwood walked inside as Lucas closed the door behind them, sniffed—the place smelled of nicotine and something alcoholic—and they both listened for a moment, then Sherwood took a cell phone-sized gizmo from his jacket pocket and turned it on.
“A bug detector?” Lucas asked.
“Yeah, but it’ll pick up cameras and a burner if there’s one hidden in the room. I’m not seeing anything yet.”
“You ever bagged a place before?” Lucas asked.
“Not really. I’ve gone into places after the Delta guys blew the door and killed everybody inside, but we weren’t all that quiet about it. I was never the first through the door.”
