He’d then pulled the battery out of the phone, opened his apartment window, and dropped the phone and battery in a privet hedge directly below. He had to get out, he thought: an autopsy might show both the nature of the poison and the method of application, and that would point directly at him.
He talked his FBI escorts—he thought of them as his captors, and they thought of themselves the same way—into a trudge through the Minneapolis skyways, as a break from the relentless afternoon television at the apartment complex. They were happy enough to take him, because they’d been equally trapped. He looked at leather jackets and jeans and ate bagels and eyed the young women, who looked a lot like the young women back in Moscow.
Then it was back to the television, and late in the evening, he got dressed for his night out. Unlike other nights, he started with long underwear; covered it with Italian-made wide-leg wool slacks, a black silk shirt covered with a V-necked green cashmere sweater, which was clunky, but necessary. On other nights, he’d worn his black Italian boots, but this night he chose high-top Converse Chuck Taylor All-Star sneaks.
Checking himself in the mirror, he thought he looked seriously good, except maybe for the sweater. The sneaks would definitely work in St. Petersburg. He used his phone to check the weather: five degrees and falling.
He picked up his leather jacket and stepped into the living room, where one of his escorts was watching CNN and the other was poking at a laptop.
As he zipped up the coat, Bernie asked, “Ready to rock?”
• • •
Bernie’s escorts werenamed Dave Droll and Olaf Haskins, FBI agents with seven and eight years’ experience, respectively, both married, Droll with two children, Haskins with one, neither happy to be on late-night duty with a man who they dismissed as both a simpleton and a prick, more interested in leather jackets and pants, cashmere and death metal bands than in the important things in life, like wives and children.
As they walked out to the Suburban that they’d drive to White Ducks, Droll said, “I’ve never seen you with that coat zipped up. You finally get cold?”
“I’m tough, but I’m not crazy,” Bernie said.
Behind Bernie’s back, Droll looked at Haskins and shook his head.
26
Lucas, riding shotgun with Sherwood, called Capslock and told him that Bernie was on his way to the club. Capslock, sitting in his piece-of-crap car with the heater on high, checked his weather app: two below zero, cold enough that he really didn’t want to get out, but he had to. He had brought along a hunter’s foam tree-stand seat that strapped around his waist and dangled below his butt, under the parka, so he had that going for him.
He climbed out of the car and stumbled down the block, the tree-stand seat banging on his butt. He found a doorway a half block from the White Ducks club and wedged himself into it. He pulled his arms out of the parka sleeves, and sank down into the parka, like a tent, so nothing froze but his face. He had his iPhone in one hand with the neck of the parka unzipped just enough that he could stickhis phone up in front of his face if he needed to answer it or make a call.
He made one call, to Lucas: “I got a spot across the street from the club and down a bit, maybe twenty-five or thirty yards. Shelly should be on the back door by now.”
Lucas: “She’s calling me now. I’m going to take her call.”
Capslock tucked his phone back in the tent; Lucas took White’s call, which was the same as Capslock’s, reporting that she’d found a doorway to sit in, in an alley behind the club, and she was close, no more than ten yards from the club’s back door. She was warm for the time being. “I’m wearing electric socks. They must not allow weed inside the club, because there are three people outside the door passing a joint, and a couple more just went back inside.”
“All right. Sherwood and I are doing stop-and-go’s, we’ll be moving a lot, but we won’t be more than a block or two away. If you see anything, yell.”
“Where are the feds? The surveillance guys?”
“I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Two of them are with Bernie, but the four guys in the box, I think they’re parked. I haven’t seen them.”
“This cold, you should see some engine exhaust,” White said.
“Yeah, but we haven’t. I dunno, maybe they’re cruising.”
They all settled in to wait. Lucas and Sherwood were on a side street, and Sherwood asked Lucas, “You ever been to Moscow?”
“No.”
Sherwood looked out the window: “This is what it’s like in winter, except Moscow has snow.”
“We usually have snow, just not this year,” Lucas said.
“You got the cold, though. Like Moscow.”
“Yeah, we got the cold.”
• • •
Bernie arrived atthe club. It was his third visit in a week, so he was somewhat known, and known for buying drinks for friendly women, and since the drinks were not cheap, the women tended to be friendly. There was a coat check just inside the door, and he peeled off his leather jacket and handed it to the woman behind the counter and took the claim chit. His two escorts kept their coats on.
