“This is sort of like that, without Delta and the blown door and the noise, and the fact that if we’re caught, we could get arrested and prosecuted and lose our jobs,” Lucas said.
“Then we shouldn’t stand around bullshitting, should we?”
The apartment was tidy enough, but not high-end: more designed for singles in nine-to-five clerical jobs. The carpet felt thin and cheesy underfoot, like walking across slices of pepperjack from a Subway store.
While Sherwood waited by the door with his gizmo, Lucas did a walk-through of the apartment, looking for alarms and tell-tales. He found none. There was a compact kitchen minimally equipped with dishes and silverware, along with a pot, a blender, and amicrowave. Most of the cabinets were empty. Three bottles of Canadian Club whiskey sat on one countertop with a half-dozen dirty glasses.
That done, Lucas said, “Here,” and handed Sherwood a pair of surgeon’s gloves that he’d stolen from Weather, and pulled on a pair of his own. “You scan, however you do it, and I’ll do my thing.”
“Gotta make the call first,” Sherwood said. Lucas waited until he’d taken out his phone and punched in the number for the burner responsible for the blips isolated by the woman at the NSA: nothing buzzed, beeped, or rang.
“Damnit all. That’s not helpful,” Lucas said. “On the other hand, Letty said they probably pulled the battery…”
• • •
Then they wentback for a closer look, beginning in the living room with its home-furniture-outlet couches, coffee tables, and chairs. A chipboard bookcase held a couple of novels and a history of World War II in the Pacific, plus some board games and a pack of Bicycle playing cards. A television was mounted on a wall facing the couch and a coffee table; there was nothing behind it but dust and wires. There were two ashtrays on the coffee table with a half-dozen butts in one of them.
They moved through to two bedrooms, one showing two packed suitcases, the other two unpacked suitcases, with clothes strewn around a double bed.
“Bernie’s room,” Sherwood said, moving around the room with the bug detector. He shook his head and moved into the other bedroom with the packed suitcases. “Got something here,” he said.
Lucas went to look, and Sherwood dug into a heavy winter coathung in the bedroom closet. He pulled out a long box that might once have held a pearl necklace but no longer did. Instead, it held a stack of hundred-dollar bills.
“That’s not very interesting,” he said, He took the stack of money out of the box, riffled it with a thumb. “Must be…ten grand?”
“More like ninety-four hundred,” Lucas said. Sherwood glanced up at him and Lucas said, “That was a joke.”
“Oh. Ha ha.” Sherwood put the box back in the coat. “I’ll keep looking.”
• • •
Lucas went backto the other bedroom, obviously Bernie’s, saw an ashtray, picked up a couple of cigarette butts and put them in a Ziploc bag. Bernie left half of his clothes in an open suitcase and Lucas squeezed through them, found nothing of interest. The suitcase was an ordinary Samsonite, with no hidden compartments.
A twenty-liter carry-on duffel bag held sound-cancelling headphones, a deflated neck cushion for air travel, a personals sack with a toothbrush, a travel-sized toothpaste, and a bottle of Aleve—Lucas opened the bottle and the pills looked legitimate.
Sherwood was still picking through Leonid Sokolov’s bedroom, and Lucas called, “See if you can find something that’d give us some DNA. Does he smoke? Cigarette butts?”
“Gotta be something in his suitcases,” Sherwood said.
“Be neat,” Lucas said.
The other half of Bernie’s clothes were either on the floor, bed, or bedside chair, or hung haphazardly in the bedroom closet. Lucas frisked the hung clothes and found a lump in the bottom hem of a ski jacket. When he checked, he found that the bottom of the jacketpocket had been ripped out, so anything put in the pocket would slide all the way down to the bottom hem.
He fished out the lump, thinking,drugs, but found himself holding a small stiff metallic sack. “Got the burner, I think,” Lucas called.
Sherwood came in and Lucas showed him the sack: “Faraday bag.”
“Yeah. Open it.”
Lucas unrolled the top of the bag, which was held by a fingernail-sized steel clasp, and pulled the phone out, with a separate battery, and handed it all to Sherwood. Sherwood popped the back, took a photo with his phone, checked the number. “We got him,” he said. “Let’s see who he’s been talking to…”
He pushed some more buttons and said, “Exactly one contact.” He took another photo, then handed the phone back to Lucas. “Put it back where you found it.”
Lucas resealed the Faraday bag, dropped it into the bottom of the ski jacket, and asked, “You find anything in Leonard’s, uh, Leonid’s bag?”
“We’re stealing his toothbrush.”
“That’ll do it,” Lucas said. “So: Bernie. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
