The neighbors sympathized, and the husband said, “You want my best advice…Go Vikes.”
The American football fan Leon Jackson, who laughed easily, did that, and said, “It’s not that hard, giving up on the Browns.” Melor Titov, the sleeper agent, was actually a Bears fanatic.
“Got that, brother. Did you see the game where the Browns were up by thirty-three, and the Vikes came all the way back and won?”
Jackson groaned: “What a disaster.” They talked about that for a moment, then the neighbors waved, went on their way, and they hadn’t spoken since.
Now, moving fast out of the shooting scene, Titov pulled into the long gravel driveway and Abramova said, “No bounce! No bounce, slow is better.”
With no one around to see them, they first moved Orlov into the house and put him on a clean sheet on the living room carpet. They helped Nikitin in next, placed him on another sheet, on the far side of the carpet.
Abramova said, “We need to see the wounds, see what we’re dealing with. Put some of the bleed-stop on them.”
“I’ll cut,” Titov said. “You get the medical.”
• • •
Abramova, Nikitin, andOrlov were a three-team specializing in assassinations in hostile territory. The planning was done at GRUheadquarters, mostly in a long room overlooking the Institute of Cosmic Biology. Abramova was the on-site director and designated driver, with superb skills behind a steering wheel. Orlov specialized in reconnaissance, street work, and backup, while Nikitin was the designated hitter.
All three were familiar with Western personal computer systems, and were trained for work in Germany, the Netherlands, and Britain. All spoke some level of German, Dutch, and English. Nikitin spoke German at a native level, Orlov had perfect Dutch, and Abramova’s English was excellent, but accented. They hadn’t been trained to operate in the U.S., but the European countries were similar enough that they could manage, and they’d had a ten-day crash course in American travel, clothing, and shopping procedures.
Guns were difficult to come by in the continental countries and Britain, and to obfuscate the actual origin of their assassinations, Nikitin primarily deployed knives and clubs acquired locally and abandoned after the hit. He was also an exceptional rifle shot, and an expert with handguns. In America, with a professionally protected target, and easy access to all kinds of firearms, they expected to rely on guns.
Titov was an outsider, not yet entirely trusted by the other three; he was with the team, but not yet of it. He spoke flawless, unaccented Midwestern English, and specialized in getting Russian operatives with non-official cover, or NOCs, in and out of the country. He could provide Russian intelligence operators with money, weapons, and good IDs, including real American passports, excellent green cards, Illinois driver’s licenses, and functioning credit cards. He knew doctors who would treat patients without asking questions, for goodhard American dollars. He was an adequate shot with both rifles and pistols and an excellent driver.
He’d acquired all the necessary IDs and passports for the team and had drop-kicked it all to Berlin, Germany, in a Russian diplomatic bag, where it was picked up by the team. When they’d arrived in Chicago, he had provided them with a gear bag that included weapons, a medical kit, a dozen burner phones, ski masks, and an always-useful roll of black gaffer tape.
The Russian embassy had also dropped him two silenced Beretta machine pistols. He was a member of a rough-and-ready country shooting range west of Chicago. He couldn’t test the machine pistols, but he had taken Nikitin to the range as a guest, to get the Russian sniper comfortable with the chosen rifle, a Sig Spear in .277 Fury, mounted with a variable-power Leupold scope.
Nikitin, after sending twenty rounds downrange at two hundred yards, had pronounced the rifle “the best thing I’ve ever shot.”
Titov: “It should be. It cost more than four thousand dollars and the ammunition is more than a dollar and a half a round.”
The three-team had begun jokingly referring to Titov as the????????, or concierge.
Aside from the weapons bought by Titov, the team had smuggled in a ChapStick, which was carefully isolated, swathed in cotton, in a plastic soap box. It was tucked inside a Dopp kit with shaving cream, throwaway razors, toothpaste, a toothbrush, deodorant, and a small bottle of ibuprofen.
The medical kit Titov had put together, mostly from a Walgreens drugstore, included two boxes of QuikClot, bandages soaked with a kind of clay called kaolin, over-the-counter painkillers, and a single tube of illegal opiates for bigger problems.
Abramova and Titov jammed the QuikClot bandages into the wounds suffered by Nikitin and Orlov, and the external bleeding stopped, but Abramova looked at Titov across Orlov’s body, shook her head and said, “The blood stays in the body, but inside, he still bleeds. We need something better.”
3
Still at the motel, Lucas and Beard watched the videos again, looking for anything they might have missed, and they made sure the desk clerks wouldn’t touch the video recordings before a crime scene crew could get to them. A moment later, Sherwood came back in and said, “Made my call. Things are moving. Both with us and with the Marshals Service. And the feds—the FBI.”
White came back, her face washed, and Sherwood asked, “I know you guys were a bit preoccupied when you went after them, but can you remember…did you hear a buzzing sound, or a flapping sound? A drone?”
Lucas looked at White and shrugged, and she said, “I didn’t.”
Sherwood: “You two wandered around that area where the shooter would have been, and you saw no tracks?”
“Nothing but small animals and some deer,” Lucas said. “Fromwhere that shot came from, we would have crossed the tracks if they were there. They had to have come in after we went past.”
Beard: “Unless they were further back, you said one guy had a rifle and another had a spotting scope….”
Lucas shook his head: “Too much brush. They couldn’t have been more than a hundred yards out, unless they were up in that big cottonwood, but they weren’t. It would have taken them longer to get out to the street after the shots. We looped through that whole area and would have crossed their tracks. There was nothing out there.”
“Nothing but deer, coons, and rabbits,” White added.
