Another postal employee hustled in with a spray bottle and a roll of paper towels. He spent three or four minutes spraying and wiping down the chairs and table, and then hustled back out. As he left, the four counterintelligence feds filed in, looked around, and the woman asked, “What’s up? Why are we in this hole?”
“We’re very off the record,” Sherwood said. “Very. Have a seat.”
“Something smells like an old dead fish,” one of the men said, as they all found chairs.
“Wouldn’t be from the Mississippi,” Lucas said. “That’s about fifty feet lower than this place.”
“Where’s the Mississippi?” another of the men asked.
“About fifty yards that way,” Lucas said, pointing toward the back of the building.
“Really? I’d like to see it,” the man said. “I’ve never seen it, except from the air.”
• • •
Sherwood, “Okay, solet’s get into it. I will provide a short introduction to the conversation. Lucas and I found the leak.”
The woman: “What!”
Lucas, representing the American Midwest, said, “Yup.”
One of the men: “Who is it?”
“Bernie Sokolov,” Sherwood said. “He communicates with the hit team, or maybe a telephone cutout, with a burner that I’m told he has hidden in a ski jacket. It may be inside a Faraday bag, so the feds can’tsee it. He used the phone to signal departure times from the airport and from the apartment building where Sokolov was shot.”
The counter-intel feds all looked at each other—they didn’t seem especially surprised by Sherwood’s disclosure—and the woman asked, “How’d you find this out?”
“Through nonstandard investigative techniques that we are not at liberty to reveal,” Sherwood said.
“So you bagged the place,” the woman said.
Sherwood shook his head. “Not at all,” he said piously. “I will say that the NSA has a phone record of Bernie’s signals. You could talk to their phone department about how they got those. The local FBI folks have no clue.”
“The NSA can be pretty tight-lipped,” another of the male agents said.
“I know,” Sherwood said. “But you can probably find some cheese-eating bureaucrat to talk to you about it.”
All four of the agents laughed, and one said to Lucas, “You should be ashamed of yourself. I heard a woman over at headquarters referring to him as Old Cheddar.”
Lucas: “Somebody had to say it. Now. Here’s what John and I have been discussing. Is there a way to use the information that we uncovered to pull this hit team into another attempt on Sokolov, assuming that they’re still around, that we could use to trap them?”
The woman said, “Interesting. We like the concept.”
“As opposed to a concept, I’d like to have a plan,” Lucas said.
“We’d have to think about it—there’re lots of moving parts here and I’m sure Mr. Sherwood has probably broken a lot of laws to tell you about them,” the woman said. “Which is why we’re sitting in this hole.”
“Just looking for a quiet, interruption-free place to talk,” Sherwood said.
“How about if you guys pulled something out of your collective asses that would suggest that Bernie is the guilty one, that you could take to St. Vincent,” Lucas suggested. “Say thatyoutalked to the NSA, and they spotted the signals. When you looked into Bernie’s background, you found he was close to, you know, whatever Russian intelligence service you might think appropriate. Tell him to search all of Bernie’s clothes. They’ll find the burner. They tell Bernie that he’s going to disappear into the American court and prison system, and nobody will know. We’ll never acknowledge having him, so he’ll never get traded back to Russia.”
“I like the idea, but that wouldn’t happen,” one of the agents said. “I don’t even knowhowit could happen. He’ll lawyer up…”
Sherwood exhaled in exasperation, and said, “Guys, you’d belyingto him. All you have to do is tell a couple of little fibs. Get him to feel like his back is against the wall, get him to cooperate…He’s a Russian. He won’t know anything about the American justice system.”
“Thereisthat,” the woman said.
“If we can get St. Vincent to cooperate,” another of the agents said.
