Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

“I was an operator,” Grandpa said.

  Leon said, with exasperation, “Grandpa, that was seventy years ago, for Christ’s sake. Things have changed.”

  Carol Spivak said, “Why should they hurt us? Seventy years of good service for the motherland, and now things change, so we retire. So what? They can always set up another ring.”

  “But we’re in place, and we’re good at this, and they never lost a single person who they sent here,” Wanda Witold said, a note of despair in her voice. “We have the shelters, we can move people in and out, we can get them down the St. Lawrence and out through the Maritimes . . . That’s what they want. They’ll never let go.”

  More silence, finally broken by the old man.

  “So we talk, talk, talk, delay, delay,” Grandpa said. “That’s all we can do, if they come back.”

  THEY ARGUED SOME MORE, and came to only one conclusion: they would resume the old emergency routines. They decided they would not meet again except in the most extreme circumstances.

  “I don’t think they could have surveillance in place this quickly,” Grandpa said, and they all looked up at the ceiling, as if for bugs. “But from now on, especially with the Spivaks, and with me, no face-to-face contact. Somebody knows us, but we don’t know if they know the Witolds or the Svobodas. If the Witolds or the Svobodas need to get in touch, or we need to get in touch with them, we use cold phones and code.”

  Marsha Spivak dabbed at her eyes: “What’s going to happen to us?” she asked Grandpa Walther.

  Grandpa shook his head: “If we’re careful, we should be okay. Back in the forties, and the fifties, there were some close calls, but we came through. Compared to those times, this is nothing. We stay calm, we deal with one fact at a time.”

  THEY LEFT IN ones and twos, carrying white paper bags full of doughnuts. Carl drove the Taurus station wagon. After the meeting, he felt more and more like a spy, and he watched the street with narrowed, careful eyes. Grandma rode in the passenger seat, while Grandpa sat in the back with her wheelchair. Grandma watched the street go by, and suddenly asked Grandpa, “Do you remember when we came down here to dance?”

  Carl looked at her: her head was up. This was the first intelligible thing she’d said in a week.

  “Every day,” Grandpa said, looking out the window at storefronts. “Every day I remember: I liked the snowy nights, when we’d come down, and see the lights all along the street with the big flakes coming down. Remember that wet-wool-on-the-heating-register smell? When you’d cook your mittens to dry them out. You don’t smell that anymore, everything is synthetic.”

  Grandma nodded, smiled, and dozed, gone again.

  “WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN?” Carl asked after a minute.

  “That’s what we need to talk about,” Grandpa said. “You learned something valuable today—you saw it, anyway. Groups of people have trouble deciding anything. They also have a tendency to panic. Sometimes, for the safety of the group, you must act in secrecy, on your own, to protect the group. You have to do it even if the group is against it, because they are too frightened or too divided. You must act! That is the thing. To act!”

  “I can act,” Carl said. “But I don’t know what to do.”

  “Think,” Grandpa commanded. His eyes were sparkling.

  Carl thought, then said, “The only thing I can think of, is we have to . . . cauterize the wound.”

  Grandpa recognized the phrase—he’d used it himself, before the killings of Oleshev and Wheaton. Carl had picked it up. He was pleased.

  “How do we do that?”

  Carl thought again for a moment: “We could get rid of the Spivaks, all of them. Couple of problems—it’d be hard to kill four people. You’d have to do it all at once. Then, the others might figure it out. Or maybe just freak out and go to the cops. Some of them are not so . . . emotionally tough as we are.”

  “Good. Do you think you could do it? I mean, anyway? Handle it, technically?”

  He was asking whether Carl could go through with it. “Sure. Not a problem. But I’m not sure we could control what happened afterwards.”

  “I’m not sure, either. Because that’s so cloudy, we put it aside. The other problem is, we still don’t know what’s going on. I can make a phone call tonight—I might be able to find something out.”

  “Call who?”

  “A man in Moscow. If he’s still alive. He should be, he’d only be, let’s see . . .” He did some quick calculation, moving his lips. “ . . . about seventy. He might be able to tell us something.”

  “What if he can’t?”

  “The other possibility is that we simply sow confusion. We deliberately confuse everything, so that nobody knows what is coming from where. Except us. My Russian is still good; if we make the right phone calls, make the right threats, we could perhaps create a charade, an illusion, that this is all gang warfare.”

  “Boy.” Carl was impressed, both by the analysis, and the fact that Grandpa could call a man in Moscow. “When would you make the call?”

  Grandpa looked at his watch. “Right now. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon in Moscow.”

  “I’ve got to be at school in an hour.”

  “That’s enough time. If my friend’s number doesn’t work, I don’t know how I’d find him.”

  THEY WENT OUT to a Wal-Mart, left Grandma in the car. Grandpa used a phone card from a public phone, looked at a piece of paper as he punched in a long phone number, then the card number. There was a wait, and then he blurted something in Russian, smiled at Carl, gave him a thumbs up, and then turned his back, hunched over the phone for privacy, and started talking. Carl knew no Russian; he stood with his hands in his pockets, waiting.

  Grandpa was on the phone for fifteen minutes, doing a little talking, but mostly listening. When he was done, he hung up, looked at the phone for a few seconds, then turned to Carl and said, “Let’s go.”

  On the way out, when they were clear of other customers, he said, “I love to hear the old language. You should learn to speak Russian. It’s much more musical than English. A beautiful language.”

  “Maybe when I go to college,” Carl said. “What’d the man say?”

  “Bad news, I’m afraid. He says the department would do anything to find Oleshev’s killer. Nobody cares about Oleshev exept Maksim Oleshev, but many people care about Maksim. There is a struggle going on in Moscow, a fight over the oil, and Maksim is a big man in the fight. Putin wants him; and Maksim wants the killer.”

  “That puts me in a tough spot,” Carl said, grinning and wrinkling his nose.

  “It’s not funny,” Grandpa said. “It puts all of us in a tough spot. My friend says that they would throw all of us overboard if it would make Maksim happy. Except . . . he says that they don’t know exactly who we are. That is why Nadya Kalin is here.”

  “And we can trust him? Your friend.”

  Grandpa smiled and tipped his head. “Not exactly . . . trust. But. He is with the party. He is like me, he is a believer. I think he was as happy to hear from me as I was to talk to him—for him to know that there are still people out here, working.”

  Carl looked at his watch. “I’ve got to get going, get you home and get to school.”

  “And I’ve got to think,” Grandpa said. “It’s like a chess problem, with so many pieces. But you should be ready, because one way or another, we have to act. Don’t doubt it.”

  “I’m ready,” Carl said. “Should I come over this afternoon?”

  “Yes . . . Maybe I’ll have figured out something. This Kalin, and her shadow . . . they are a problem.”

  ON THE WAY back to Grandpa’s, Grandpa said, “We need some way to communicate. Everything can be tapped, now. Cell phones, everything. We could work out a routine where you come over four or five times a day. Before school, at lunch, after school . . . but in an emergency . . .”

  “Walkie-talkies,” Carl said.

  “What?” Grandpa focused on him.

  “When I went hun
ting with the Wolfes last year, old man Wolfe gave us walkie-talkies,” Carl said. “Everybody had one—he uses them with his construction company. You couldn’t call me if I was down in Duluth . . . but around town here, you could. He said they’ve got a range of six or seven miles, lots of privacy channels, everything, so they’d cover the town. But they’re expensive.”

  “How much?”

  “Maybe six hundred dollars for two—I think that’s what Jimmy Wolfe said. You can get them at Radio Shack.”

  “Get two,” Grandpa said.

  “Where’m I gonna . . .”

  “I’ve got funds,” Grandpa said.

  “You got six hundred . . .”

  “More than that. Official funds. I’ll get the money, you get the radios. You’ll have to show me how to work them . . .”

  “Easy. Easier than a cell phone,” Carl said.

  “I can work a cell phone,” Grandpa said. “I don’t have all of it figured out, the damn thing has that terrible ring now, I pushed something wrong.”

  “I’ll show you,” Carl said.

  AND JUST BEFORE Carl got out of the car, Grandpa said, “We will have to get some ammunition for the pistol.”

  “I know how to get it,” Carl said. “I was over at Jerkin’s, looking. All the pistol ammo is right behind the counter. I’ve got the nine millimeter spotted. If we wait ’til Jerkin’s wife goes to dinner, and then we go in, and you ask him for some tire inflator, and he comes around to get it for you—I spotted that, too, it’s way down at the end of automotive—I can lift it right off the shelf.”

  “Cameras?”

  “I looked real close, didn’t see any. There’s a big round mirror, but it’s set to show somebody at the counter what’s going on in the appliance aisle. If you’re over there in automotive, he won’t be able to see back.”

  “Got it all figured out,” Grandpa said.

  “Figured we were gonna need some ammo, sooner or later,” Carl said.

  11

  LUCAS HAD ARRANGED to meet Reasons and Nadya at nine o’clock; Harmon called back at eight o’clock, waking him out of a restless sleep.

  “On Spivak, specifically, we’re drawing a blank,” Harmon said. “We pulled every record we could find from his army records to the credit reports and his checking account. It doesn’t look like he’s ever been out of the U.S. except when he was in the army. And his army record . . . he was a truck driver and sort of a fuck-up. He had almost no clearance for anything, so whatever he was doing, it wasn’t espionage.”

  “Damnit,” Lucas said. “If you could get me just one thing.”

  “I know. We’re still looking.”

  “So: Should I brace Nadya, or what?”

  “Your call,” Harmon said. “We talked it over last night and couldn’t see any reason to be subtle.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Us guys,” Harmon said.

  “You said you were drawing a blank on Spivak specifically. Does that mean you’re not drawing a blank on something else?”

  “Yeah. We talked to some old guys, you know, from back in the fifties and sixties. There were quite a few Soviets doing hard-core espionage. Height of the Cold War, and all that. When we’d get a line on a guy, sometimes they’d figure it out and run for it. They’d fly to Chicago or Omaha and rent a car or catch a bus and then they’d disappear. The cars were usually found in Iowa, around Des Moines, or in Wisconsin, around Milwaukee. The point is, there was a big-time cell operating someplace in the upper Midwest, specifically tasked with getting their agents out of the country. We never found the cell. Now we see there’s this longtime residential network showing up on the Iron Range, where there’s this long history of radicalism, lots of eastern European immigrants, ore ships and grain ships going in and out . . . and the Canadian border’s right there. It’d be a perfect spot for an exfiltration cell. Maybe that’s what we’ve got.”

  “Huh. But they’d be sort of the lay-low type, right? They wouldn’t get involved in murdering people.”

  “Depends on what the problem was. If it was a question of getting caught, I don’t think murder would be off the table.”

  WHEN HE GOT off the phone, Lucas called BCA headquarters in St. Paul and checked with a secretary in technical services about the phone trace he’d requested the night before.

  “The call came from a pay phone at Snelling and University in St. Paul,” said the secretary.

  “The supermarket?”

  “No, it’s out on the street. Outside, anyway. That’s what the note says.”

  “Damnit.” If the woman had used the supermarket phones, they might possibly get a description from a cashier or a bag boy. If the phone was on the street, finding a witness would be next to impossible. “Okay. Thanks for the check.”

  He called Marcy Sherrill, but her cell phone was in message mode: “Get anything on that fence? Call me—I’m on the cell phone.”

  REASONS WAS RUNNING LATE, and Lucas was sitting alone with Nadya in a breakfast booth. After ordering, Lucas asked her what she’d done the night before, and she said, “Shopping. There are excellent shops at this mall. Everything is cheap compared to Russia.”

  “You didn’t talk to your shadow?”

  She looked at him over her coffee cup. “Shadow?”

  “You know, your shadow operative. Our FBI people said you’d have one.”

  She was shaking her head. “They misunderstand what is going on.”

  “Then why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

  Now she put her coffee cup down. “You are angry, and you weren’t angry last night. What has happened?”

  “First, tell me what’s going on. What you know. Why the feds are wrong.”

  “The . . . feds.” She worked it out. “The federals. The FBI . . . Okay. Here is what they don’t understand.” She leaned forward, intent now. “We don’t care for two shits who killed Oleshev. We care nothing about this. Nothing. We care for one thing, that somebody take his father and Vladimir Putin and all of their friends off our backs. You have that phrase, off our backs?”

  “Yes.”

  “So—we don’t care if this murder is solved. We can’t do anything, one way or the other. We have not the power. We have not the resources. We want only to get ourselves clear of the trouble. If Maksim Oleshev wants to blame your president, your FBI, your Lucas Davenport, or your Jerry Reasons for this problem . . .” She shrugged. “What is it you teach me yesterday? Tough shit? We don’t care, as long as they go away and leave us to work. Do you understand that?”

  She sounded exactly like Rose Marie Roux, Lucas thought: Just make us look good. He nodded, and said, “I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t think I believe you.”

  “Why is this?”

  He told her what happened with Spivak. She listened, her eyes narrowing as he got into the story. He finished with, “There are only three people, Nadya, who knew that Spivak wasn’t telling us what he knew—me, you, and Reasons. I didn’t pull this stunt and I doubt that Reasons would have the resources, unless he’s some kind of spy, too.”

  She thought for a moment and then said, “Well, there are some others . . .”

  “Who?”

  “Anyone Spivak talked to. If Oleshev told one of his associates that he was meeting Spivak, if Oleshev is then killed, his associates might want to know what happened. If Oleshev’s killer came from Spivak.”

  “And he just happens to show up a few hours after we talked to him,” Lucas said skeptically.

  “I don’t know what happened. If there is a shadow, I don’t know it. But there are other possibilities, than a shadow for me.” She stood up. “I will call now, with the e-mail. I will find out now if there is a shadow.”

  “And you’d tell me.”

  “Probably,” she said. “As I say to you, I . . . we . . . don’t give two shits for Oleshev. All we want to do is get clear.”

  As she stepped away, Lucas said, “Did you ask about the laptop?”


  She stopped and turned: “I did. The captain of the Potemkin said Oleshev definitely had a laptop, a small silver Sony and very expensive. The man who interviewed the crew in Toronto said that some accessories . . . this is correct? Accessories?” Lucas nodded. “ . . . that some accessories remain in his cabin. A CD drive with some games that plugged in with a PCMCIA card and also one of the small disk drives.”

  “All right. Go make your call, and then I’ve got another thing to talk about.”

  “What? Tell me now.”

  She came back to the booth, leaned a hip against the table, and crossed her arms as Lucas told her about the call from the woman the evening before. He concluded by saying, “She was the real witness. I’m sure of it. She put the laptop on the street.”

  “You can find it?”

  “We’re trying.”

  NADYA WENT TO check with the embassy. When Reasons showed up, Lucas told him about the hassle at Spivak’s, again leaving Andreno out of the equation, and about the call from the anonymous woman.

  “Well, shit,” Reasons said. “We’ve got to get more pressure out on the street. You find the laptop, we’ll get a name for her. Somebody’s got to know who she is.”

  “There’s another problem for your guys,” Lucas said. “There’s almost no point in chasing after the Wheaton murder, if it was a mistake. You won’t find any connections. There aren’t any.”

  “Yeah.” Reasons thought for a minute. Then, “I gotta talk to the boss. He’s not gonna be happy.”

  REASONS ORDERED PANCAKES and Lucas got a Diet Coke and a waffle, and they talked about the case and the view out toward the lake and about Nadya’s ass. Nadya came back and slipped into the booth next to Lucas. She wore a very light fragrance, like apple blossoms.

  She exhaled and said, “Well: they say to me that there is no shadow. But.”

  “But,” Lucas said.

  “Yes. But. But somebody else called to the embassy this morning and asked for the intelligence officer. When he got the duty officer, he asked for the shadow to be put in touch with him. This call came in twenty minutes ago.” She looked from Reasons to Lucas. “This was not you?”