Lucas and Sherwood would cruise, as they did before the shooting at the apartment house, looking for cars that might also be cruising.
“If you get the car shot to pieces again, that’d be the end of our insurance for all time,” Weather told Lucas.
“I’ll drive,” Sherwood said. “I got a Hertz.”
“Good, I appreciate that,” Weather said.
“Nothing’s going to happen anyway,” Lucas said, and they all went out the door into another brutally cold night.
25
Titov said, “This is bullshit. They’re going to have him stitched up tight. They’ll be waiting for us to make a move.”
“The genius thing is, we won’t be making the move,” Abramova said. “Bernard will. If he doesn’t make a move, we drive back here, pack up, and head for the Mexican border.”
“If Leonid dies…”
“Bernard said he’s dying. He wouldn’t lie about that and still try to get back home.”
“Ah, sweet Christ, I know this is a trap,” Titov said. He turned to Nikitin, who’d disassembled his handgun and was carefully inspecting it, and asked, “What do you think, Lev?”
“I think my ass hurts less than it did yesterday. I think I might be able to run, though I’d rather not do that.” He reassembled the handgun in five or six seconds, barely looking at it, slapped a magazine into the grip, jacked a shell into the chamber, dropped the magazine,yanked the slide back and caught the single nine-millimeter shell in midair after it was ejected. Like watching a magic act, Abramova thought. Nikitin added, “I don’t see a trap. They can’t know about the new phone.”
“Unless they built a scanner into the apartment where he’s staying,” Titov said.
“Bernie would know about that. He’s not an idiot.”
“He acts like an idiot. He’s twenty-six, and all he thinks about is going out to clubs. He’s probably a drug addict.”
Abramova shrugged.
• • •
They were inthree separate motels in Menomonie, Wisconsin, getting together only when there was nobody to see them do that. Nikitin had used his phone to make a direct call to the Sklifosovsky Institute for Emergency Medicine in Moscow for a consultation on his wound. Alerted by Kuznetsov, they’d been expecting his call, and after a twenty-minute consultation with a gunshot specialist, he rang off and told the others, “I should keep doing what I’m doing. No strenuous exercise, like running away from American cops trying to kill me.”
“Sounds like good advice to me,” Abramova said.
Kuznetsov had arranged a no-go signal with his Minneapolis contacts. Another woman, an employee of the people who supplied the cars, would be at the club. If the team spotted anything dangerous, she’d get a call and put on a red silk scarf with a black border. She’d make no attempt to touch Sokolov or talk to him; she’d only send the signal that the pickup was a no-go.
The day was long and boring, watching TV, browsing on their laptops, checking and rechecking maps of northeast Minneapolis.They would be using only two vehicles, the van and the pickup. The truck, driven by Abramova, would be abandoned within a mile or less, with the team moving to Titov’s van.
Assuming they got out clean, they’d return to the Wisconsin motels, and talk to Kuznetsov about exfiltration from the U.S.
At seven o’clock, they ate pizza in Titov’s room, then Abramova and Nikitin went to Nikitin’s room, where the pickup was parked. At eight o’clock exactly, they left their rooms and drove out to the I-95 on-ramp. They would drive five miles an hour over the speed limit, and stay a mile apart, close enough to provide support if any were needed.
None was, and at 9:30, they rendezvoused in the parking lot of the University of Minnesota’s golf course in Saint Paul. The street adjacent to the parking lot gave them a straight shot into northeast Minneapolis and the White Ducks club.
And there they sat, engines running.
• • •
Bernie Sokolov visitedhis father in the afternoon. The old man was unconscious, surrounded by frustrated doctors and nurses who didn’t know how to help him. He’d been poisoned, but they didn’t know how or when or with what, nor did they understand exactly what vehicle was used to do it.
Some thought it might have been hidden among his daily ration of pills, which was extensive—he was on blood pressure medication, a statin, a blood thinner, and, finally, on Prilosec, a treatment for gastrointestinal reflux disease. The Prilosec came in a capsule, and a capsule could be emptied and refilled with something else.
Bernie’s visit was brief, because there was nothing to be done orsaid. Outside the hospital room, the lead doctor told him that he had to be “prepared,” which Bernie correctly interpreted as meaning his father was dying.
The day before, believing that the FBI suspected he was involved with his father’s impending death, he’d used the new burner phone to call for a pickup, and to arrange the details.
