The small SUV was right there, behind them, and Nikitin opened his door and Abramova shouted, “Lev, don’t wait, get in if you can! Melor and I will take Mat!”
Nikitin nearly fell but managed to stagger and hop to the open back door of the Subaru and crawl inside, his injured leg numb with the impact of the bullet, the neck wound burning like fire. Behind him, he could see a bystander staring at them as Abramova shouted, “Move, move,” and he dragged himself farther across the back seat and Abramova and the burly driver of the Subaru shoved Orlov almost on top of him.
Orlov looked at them with glassy eyes and his lips moved but nothing came out of his mouth, then a rifle, pistol, and spotting scope hit the floor at his feet and the back door slammed and then the Subaru driver and Abramova were in the front seats and the car was moving.
• • •
Titov, the Subaru’swheelman, had them out of the motel parking lot and around a corner in ten seconds, took them down the open highway at ninety miles an hour. Abramova said, conversationally, not critically, for a bleeding woman, “Don’t want to attract traffic police,” and Titov said, “Nobody on the road coming in.”
He slowed to the speed limit as he approached a cross highway, took them onto the highway, accelerated to speed again, for half a mile, then took them into a residential neighborhood, watching themirrors, accelerating when he safely could, and three or four minutes later, pulled into a narrow, heavily wooded lane that led back to a little-used boat-launching ramp.
Another Jeep, this one black, a Wrangler, Titov’s personal car and positioned as the disaster pickup vehicle, was waiting for them. The wounded trio were in the new car in a minute, and the Jeep rolled out of the lane, through the neighborhood, and out on the highway again.
“Fifteen minutes to the house,” Titov grunted. “This is fucked. This is so fucked.”
“They were very fast, too fast,” Abramova said. “Two shooters, a tall one and a short one.”
“Sokolov?” Titov asked.
“I missed him, I might have hit his wife,” Nikitin said. “It was like he knew it was coming. He ducked down just as I squeezed the trigger. I fired a second time but couldn’t see what happened and then we were running.”
Titov looked at Abramova: “How much damage?”
“Not much, hit in the ear,” she said, brushing back her blond hair to show him the sticky blood still leaking out of the rim of her ear. She was Circassian, with the pale white complexion and long blond hair of her particular tribe, and the pallor vibrated with the crimson blood. “Lev and Mat are bleeding badly, we need to stop it.”
“Thirteen minutes, maybe twelve,” Titov said. He slowed as a police car, light bar flashing at them, sped past in the opposite direction, headed for the hideout.
Abramova, sitting in the passenger seat, unlocked her safety belt and got to her knees to look at the men in the back.
“Drive straight and easy,” she told Titov, got her feet underneath her, and climbed over the seat into the back, between the two men.
Orlov groaned when she tumbled onto one of his legs and Nikitin asked, “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to plug Matvey, if I can find his wounds…and you, too.”
The three members of the team had gotten Russian Army combat medical training, which was barely adequate under the best circumstances, before they’d moved on, individually, and several years apart, to GRU Unit 29155—GRU being the Russian Federation’s equivalent to the CIA. Members of the Unit were not expected to encounter full-on combat. Titov had different training, as an expert in exfiltration and life as an American.
So, knowing not much, Abramova dug into a pants pocket and pulled out a five-inch switchblade, flicked out the blade. She stripped off her parka and pulled off her flannel shirt and cut it into patches. Orlov was lying on his side, with the wounds up, and Abramova pulled up his coat and Orlov groaned again. He had a pistol in a clip on his belt, and she set it aside.
Using the knife, Abramova cut away his shirt and undershirt, found a bullet wound in his back, with no exit wound. Blood was squeezing out onto his sodden clothing, and she pushed a wad of flannel into the wound, saw blood on Orlov’s leg, cut his jeans away, and put another wad of flannel into the bullet hole in his butt. Again, there was no exit wound.
As Titov said, “Six minutes,” she turned to Nikitin and said, “Show me.”
He showed her, and she plugged the wound in his leg as best she could, although she didn’t think it was very good. The neck woundwas more superficial, and no longer bleeding heavily. “We need the medical kit, the bleed-stop,” she said. “Lev could be okay long enough to find a plane ride, but Mat…Mat needs a doctor, and soon. And, I think, he might need blood.”
Titov said, “One minute.”
• • •
Titov—Leon Jackson, asAmerican as borscht, a sleeper agent—had spent the last two weeks in a furnished, rented house in the town of Minnetrista. He worked in Chicago as a real estate agent for a Serbian-owned agency. The agency boss knew better than to ask questions when Titov had to take days off for what the boss referred to as his “side hustle.”
He’d been activated when the Russian SVR, one of the country’s foreign intelligence services, learned that Orono, Minnesota, had been chosen by Sokolov and the Marshals Service as the place where Sokolov would live under the name Leonard Summers.
The house Titov rented was in an area of mixed newer, suburban-style homes and older farmhouses; it was one of the old farmhouses, on six acres of land. The landlord told him, when he rented it, if he stayed there long-term, he was welcome to revive the vegetable garden in back, and to harvest the Concord grapes off a long arbor that ran along the side of the house.
Titov had no interest in growing vegetables, or making wine, but was interested in the isolation provided by the large plot of land, and the cover created by the yard’s mature bushes and trees.
He’d met only two neighbors, a man and wife, had mentioned that he was looking for a permanent place, closer to the big lake, Minnetonka, and that he hoped to be in the new place before summer.Until then, he was scouting. He’d said he was in corporate sales with General Mills, transferring in from the Cleveland office, and when asked about a wife and family, said that he was “alone” for the time being.
