They did that, out the door and down the stairs.
• • •
“We’ve got todecide what to do with all this,” Sherwood said as they walked out of the building and into the cold. “It’s settled my primary interest: finding the leak, and it wasn’t one of ours. The focus now goes to the hit team, rather than the leak.”
“The hit team wasalwaysmy primary focus,” Lucas said. “I figured the leak was your problem, not mine.”
“Well, you solved the leak. Maybe I can help settle the hit team question.”
“I would appreciate it. The DNA stuff, I’ll leave with you,” Lucas said. “Ship it overnight to Washington, get your folks to compare samples. We really don’t need to do it, but it would be interesting to know if Sokolov is really Bernie’s father. You know, the motive thing.”
“I can do that. Then we figure out how to use Bernie to pull the hit team into a trap,” Sherwood said. “Another question is, how much do we tell St. Vincent? He’ll want to know how we figured out that it’s Bernie, and we can’t tell him we bagged the condo…”
Lucas shrugged: “Somebody has to find the phone. Why not the FBI? You could tell them that you’re really curious about the leak, and Bernie’s name popped into your head. Since two FBI agents live in the apartment with him…they wouldn’t even need a search warrant to find it. They’d ask, how did he contact them, you tell them, maybe he had a burner hidden on his body—or in his clothes.”
“That’d be pretty sneaky. Basically, I don’t like it. Who gets the credit? St. Vincent will jump in front of that train. I’ve run out of patience with him.”
“So what are you going to do?”
Sherwood thought about it, then: “We don’t tell St. Vincent anything, not a fuckin’ word. You called him a cheese-eater. That might not do much for your career with the federal government, but you are correct. Wedotell the counterintelligence team and warn them not to ask too many questions. Those guys…they’ll buy that. They’re like their own little piece of the FBI. They’re used to working with weird situations, and they won’t worry about not talking to St. Vincent.”
“Will they help us trap the shooters?” Lucas asked.
They were coming up to Sherwood’s car. “I’ll call them, set up an off-campus meeting for this afternoon,” Sherwood said. “They’ll bite. There are some interesting ramifications here…possibilities.”
“Are you going to tell your own people ahead of time?”
“I have to. They’ll watch, keep their mouths shut. They’ll be…amused.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Lucas said. “I stream theSlow HorsesTV series. You’re all a bunch of treacherous motherfuckers.”
Sherwood smiled and said, “Yeah, it’s fun. I’ll set up a meet.”
“We need to emphasize that we want to pull in the hit team. I don’t find them amusing at all,” Lucas said. “They goddamn near killed both of us.”
“You never got a scratch and goddamn near killed three of them. I’m not seeing you as the victim here.”
“Killed my car.”
“You got a new, better one,” Sherwood said. “I’ll admit killing or capturing the hit team would be a major plus. Good fodder for prisoner exchanges, if nothing else. As far as Bernie’s concerned, if the counter-intel people handle him right, he could even be useful. Might be able to find out who he’s hooked up to. Could lead us to more illegal Russians.”
“So they’ll owe us. The counter-intel guys.”
“That’s one way to look at it.”
“Yeah, your way,” Lucas said.
20
Lucas didn’t ask how he managed it, but Sherwood set up a meeting in a little-used room in the basement of the main post office in Minneapolis, an old Depression-era building on the Mississippi that Lucas suspected was considered an architectural treasure. The room they were in wasn’t obviously a treasure, being dusty, and possibly visited by a water leak in the not-to-distant past, leaving behind a fishy odor.
Lucas was the second to arrive, guided to the room by an intimidated postal employee who wanted nothing to do with either him or Sherwood; Sherwood was checking the room for bugs, and had found none.
“You’re here,” he said, when Lucas walked in. “The feds should be here in the next five minutes. No bugs. By the way, if you sit on these chairs, you’ll get your suit all dirty, so just wait a minute.”
There were six metal folding chairs arranged around an eight-foot-long collapsing table with a scarred chipboard top. The postalservice, Lucas thought, was not doing well. “How the hell did you find this place?”
“My researcher did,” Sherwood said. “I got somebody coming with paper towels…ah, here he is.”
