Lucas: “Nah. He won’t run. He’s in too deep with us.”
Lucas was correct. Bell came to the door, looked past the three of them to the street, then said, “Come in, come in, come in, quickly.” He made a brushing movement behind them, as if with a broom.
Standing just inside the door, he asked, “What is it? What happened?”
“I appreciate your phone call this morning. I might send you a certificate of commendation,” Lucas said.
“You know, you think you’re funny, but you’re not,” Bell said. “I can’t have people see you with me. If you need to talk to me, call on the telephone. Now, what do you want?”
Sherwood: “Look at these pictures. Tell us who the woman is.”
Bell took the iPad and expertly flicked through the photos, then said, “I don’t know. I’ve never seen her before. She’s not part of the local community, I know most of those people, or I’ve seen them, at least.”
Capslock: “You’re sure?”
“I’m positive. There’s something about her…”
“What?”
“She doesn’t look American to me. She looks, I dunno. Pinched?”
Sherwood took the iPad, contemplated the photos for a moment, then said, “You’re right. She looks…Russian.”
• • •
They said good-byeto Capslock, and back in the Porsche, Sherwood said, “I need to send these photos to a completely different unit…Let’s sit here for a minute while I do that.”
He did it, and said, “This won’t take long, except the guy I need is probably at lunch.”
Lucas filled the time with a story:
“Back a few years…well, quite a few years…I was trying to figure out who a serial killer was. We had some information, the kind of car he drove, the color of his hair. At a really critical moment, I was on the street with another guy, and we needed some fast information from the DMV. We didn’t have cell phones, but we found a phone booth—remember those?—and it turned out neither one of us had any change to put in the phone. Didn’t have a quarter,” Lucas said. “A month or so before that, I’d been fishing up in Canada, and to make a call back to the States, I had to use a pay phone, but it was like five bucks, and who has five bucks in quarters? Then somebody told me I could talk to an operator, and she’d take my Amex card. So then we were in this phone booth, looking for this serial killer, no quarters to make the call, and I pulled out my credit card and made the call, which amazed the guy with me. We thought back then, it was like magic. You could use your credit card in a phone booth! Now…you’re a thousand miles from your office, out in the woods, and you pull out your iPad and talk to the CIA. It’s just…it freaks me out. My kids wouldn’t think anything of it. I’m getting old.”
Sherwood yawned.
“Fuck you,” Lucas said. “I’m not that much older than you.”
“There’s before the year 2000, and after the year 2000,” Sherwood said. “If you got your first real job after 2000, you grew up in a different world than the people who started working before that.”
“That’s probably true, and I’ll probably even think seriously about that, someday, if I don’t have anything less boring to do,” Lucas said.
Sherwood’s cell phone rang, and he took it out, answered, said,“Barry,” and listened, and said, “Thanks. Listen, write that up, everything I told you, and walk it up to Helsmith ASAP.”
He rang off and said to Lucas, “I’m not allowed to tell you this, but given the circumstances….”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell me.”
“There are around two hundred and fifty Russian employees in their embassy in Washington who carry diplomatic passports. That’s from the ambassador on down. The young woman we’re looking at is Alina Zaitseva. We’ve never had any interest in her, because she does seem to be a clerk in the visa department. We know people who have gotten visas from her. There’s no way the FBI can watch all of their employees, and they don’t watch her. But: the way she handed that phone off to Bernie, if it was a phone…she’s had some serious training.”
“She’s not just a clerk.”
“No. She’s a courier of some sort. We’ve turned over a very interesting rock, here, Lucas,” Sherwood said. “We’ve got to talk to the FBI and not talk anymore about this woman, or about the videos from the club. She could take an FBI surveillance team to some serious Russian intelligence assets.”
“Which doesn’t get us any closer to the hit team.”
“You know, you and I do have slightly different objectives here,” Sherwood said. “I would love to get the hit team, but honestly, identifying a Russian courier is more important than finding that team. Best outcome, we capture them alive. They’d give us absolutely zilch, they’d do a couple years in prison, and we’d wind up trading them. But Alina Zaitseva, she could be the gift that keeps on giving.”
“Ah, God.” Lucas took his phone out, punched a number.
