The FBI would find two extremely brief outgoing calls in daytime—two seconds at the most. They would attach those to the timing of the FBI convoy leaving the airport, on its way to the initial hideout, and the departure from the apartment house where Sokolov was shot.
The FBI would also find three outgoing phone calls, all in the afternoon, that were longer—voice contacts, to different phone numbers, all burners, used once and then never again.
If they then looked at his iPhone, they’d find three very brief incoming calls from burner phones in the Washington area—one-ring calls that vibrated rather than rang, so he’d feel it in his pocket without alerting his bodyguards. Those were call-back requests from his controller. Unless the FBI investigators were very dumb, they would connect those incoming calls on the iPhone to his outgoing calls on his burner.
So he now understood what the FBI probably knew. That’s why Sherwood and Davenport had been all over him. Why hadn’t he been arrested?
The hit team. They were setting a trap.
He breathed in for three seconds, held it for three seconds, gently released it over three seconds, and did it again and again. When he was sufficiently calmed, he set his alarm for four o’clock, got back in bed. Nothing more to do until then.
Couldn’t sleep, not right away. Thought through all the possibilities, came to no conclusions.
Bernie had never wanted or intended to defect to the U.S. He lovedhis country. He liked Moscow, even in the winter. He liked the Black Sea. Hell, he even liked Tomsk, where he’d gone to Tomsk Polytechnic, despite the fact that he’d spent four winters freezing his stones off. But, the women were warm, as they had to be, given the weather.
He didn’t like the Ukraine war, but he also believed in his heart that Ukraine was part of Russia, and that it must be retrieved. He didn’t fully understand why the Americans were so opposed to it: they’d done the same thing to the American South, when the South tried to break away. The major difference was that Ukraine had been part of Russia for longer than the South had been part of the United States.
Still, if Putin had simply waited, had created his Greater Russia, without the Ukraine, had built stronger ties to Ukraine, integrated it into the Russian economy, provided aid, promoted friendship…Ukraine would have eventually been absorbed into the Greater Russia. So he didn’t like the war, but Ukraine was part of Russia.
Bernie had computer skills, and the political clout of his father, which had kept him out of the Army. He also had a life in Moscow, and girlfriends, and a part-time job as an up-and-coming deejay at the dance clubs.
Too late for that.
When his father had told him that they were going to Istanbul on a shopping expedition, he’d had no objection: since the war had started, times had been hard. Couldn’t get a decent, stylish, deejay-worthy Italian black leather coat anywhere but the black market, and there, the prices were absurd.
When the CIA snatch crew had showed up, and they were all shoved into a van, there was no way to get back. Once in the U.S., they’d been confined to a CIA facility in Virginia. For the first sixmonths, he wasn’t allowed out. He was essentially confined to a comfortable, intensely boring existence. For the year after that, he was allowed out once a week. He’d been pissing and moaning and whining from the beginning, and finally, understanding that the Russians had no interest in him, the CIA began letting him slide out to the clubs, Friday nights only, with an escort.
At a club one night, a not-beautiful girl had her cell phone sitting on top of her shoulder bag, while she danced; a girlfriend kept an eye on it, but with the booze and the guys all around, not a close eye. Bernie had noticed that the dancing girl would pick up the phone, check something, and put it back in her purse without entering a password. While she was dancing he’d crowded up to the girlfriend, and the purse, palmed the phone, and carried it into the restroom.
From one of the booths, he’d sent a message to a friend living in Poland, a reliable right-winger computer pal, asking that the message be passed to the SVR. He would be at Entropy, dancing, the following Friday. Back in the club, the not-beautiful girl was looking for her phone, and Bernie “found” it for her, lying on the floor, under a barstool. She was grateful, but notthatgrateful.
A week later, he was dancing at Entropy. He pushed it as far into the night as he could and was disappointed when nobody whispered in his ear. The disappointment faded when he put his hand in his jacket pocket and found a burner.
That contact had produced a series of calls and new burners. He hadn’t asked for anything, only to return to Russia. But the Russians had asked. They wanted his father dead, and they wanted his help. He was happy to give it and told them so. He’d hated his father for the weekly beatings he’d taken from the time he was an infant until he was twelve years old, the last one administered with fists.
If he needed to kill his father to get back home, the only problem was how to do it.
• • •
After he foundthe altered telephone in his ski jacket, and set the iPhone alarm for four o’clock, he slept, but restlessly; at four o’clock, the iPhone buzzed, and he got up, used the burner to call his regular contact, let the phone ring…twice. Maybe the NSA or the FBI could distinguish one ring from two—probably could, if anybody actually timed them—but maybe they would attribute it to an insignificant difference between that call and others made on other nights.
It wasn’t insignificant.
The second ring was a disaster call: Get me out.
The Russians wanted to hear in much greater depth what he had to say about the CIA facility where he’d been held. They’d told him that in the early conversations, and he’d become a familiar figure as he wandered around the Farm’s almost fourteen square miles, walking, jogging, working out. With help from Sherwood, he’d also been allowed to shoot on the huge rifle range.
As an engineer, he had a good memory for what and who he’d seen at the Farm; as an engineer, he’d become an excellent shot, because even a moron can become an excellent shot, given decent eyesight and competent training. Not a great shot, but excellent.
And he’d looked at a lot of faces.
He had that going for him: the possibility that the Russians really would get him out.
After his two-ring call, Bernie went back to bed.
23
Edie Lamb was Lucas’s putative boss. She’d found Lucas with his feet on his desk, reading a C. J. Box novel, and when she asked, he said, no, he wasn’t doing anything.
