“Give me a minute before you come in,” Mallard said. He went into the meeting room, trailed by Chase, with Sherwood and Lucas waiting in the hall for thirty seconds.
“Doesn’t want to be associated with us,” Lucas said. “Although, really, St. Vincent knows.”
“I’d like to associate with Jane for a while,” Sherwood said.
“I’d say you have a chance,” Lucas said. “She likes your type.”
“Yeah? You think?”
“I do,” Lucas said. “Keep playing the hard-nosed outsider spy-hero. Mention Delta. She’ll get curious.”
“You know this, how?”
“We sort of had a little buzz between us, one time—nothing serious, nothing that might lead to anything, at least not on my part. Unfortunately, I’m in love with Weather.”
“I could see that,” Sherwood said quietly. “Fortunately, I’m not, and I sense a need for affection in this woman.”
• • •
They went intothe meeting room together. Mallard and Chase were already seated, and Chase was taking paper out of the overloaded briefcase. St. Vincent was at the head of the table, the four counter-intel agents sat in a line across from Mallard and Chase, and two other local agents were next to them.
Lucas muttered to Sherwood, “Go,” and Sherwood led the way, sat down next to Chase and tactically ignored her.
St. Vincent: “We’re all here. I want to warneveryone…”He looked at Lucas. “…what is said here is not to go anywhere, under very serious penalty of law.”
There were glances and nods up and down the table, and St. Vincent said, “We’ve determined that the person who has been leaking intelligence to the Russian hit team is almost certainly his son, Bernie Sokolov.”
There were no gasps or exclamations from the table, since almost everybody there carried the gene for sneakiness. St. Vincent told them about the discovery of the burner phone in Bernie’s ski jacket, and confirmation by the NSA that he’d sent signals from the airport and before the apartment ambush.
“We’re going to use him to trap the hit team,” St. Vincent said. “There were two objectives in this investigation, after the killing ofMasha Sokolov: one, find the leak, and two, capture or kill the hit team. We’ve accomplished the first objective, now we work on the second.”
Mallard: “How are you going to do that, David?”
St. Vincent nodded at him. “The agents acting as Bernie’s bodyguards know that he’s the leak, so they’re not so much guarding him as sequestering him and steering him…although he doesn’t know that. After discussions with my other senior agents”—he nodded at the two local agents—“I spoke to Frank Potts, the CIA’s deputy director of operations, about John Sherwood, sitting here next to Ms. Chase.”
Sherwood raised a hand.
“Potts said that John is a capable agent with good abilities of dissimulation…”
One of the counter-intel agents said, “You mean he lies well.”
“I mean he can play roles. We’re going to ask John to accidentally bump into Bernie in Leonid Sokolov’s hospital room, take him aside, and grill him about where he’s been and what he’s been doing,” St. Vincent said. “Play the role of a suspicious CIA agent. We’re hoping Bernie’ll panic and try to get the hit team to pull him out. The agents who’ve been escorting him have assessed him as a bit naïve and quite…stupid, is the word. He may want his father’s money, but he certainly doesn’t want to wind up charged with accessory to first-degree murder, espionage, and so on.”
Sherwood: “I can do that. Play the role.”
Mallard: “From the reports I’ve read…” He patted a stack of paper. “Bernie seemed distressed when his parents were shot.”
“He was prepared to act as the shocked son,” St. Vincent said. “That doesn’t take a genius.”
Lucas: “I believe you when you say you’ve identified him as the leak, David, but doesn’t effective play-acting suggest he might not be entirely naïve and stupid? That he might actually be tough and clever?”
“We have the assessments of the people closest to him, including John Sherwood’s associates who handled him over the past year,” St. Vincent said. “They lean heavily toward the naïve and stupid.”
“That was my assessment, too,” Sherwood said. “I’m no longer sure about that—I could go either way, but we’ve got to be careful in how your people handle him. Two guards won’t keep the hit team away from him…”
“That’s the trap. That will be the obvious coverage,” St. Vincent said. “We’ll have a half-dozen of our most capable agents around him at all times, four of them out of sight, that Bernie won’t know about.”
• • •
