Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  “Okay, but so what?”

  “So then the caller says, ‘Is this two two zero, six seven nine, seven six eight zero?” And Spivak said, “Nope. You misdialed.’ Then he hung up.”

  Lucas waited through the pregnant pause.

  After a few seconds, Harmon said, “That was almost certainly a call code. There is no two-two-zero area code. What Spivak does is add or subtract some unknown number, and comes up with a callback. He makes the callback from a clean phone, probably to another public phone somewhere.”

  “You said, ‘Yesterday evening,’ ” Lucas said. “What time yesterday evening?”

  “Seven twenty.”

  “Huh. I have reason to believe that Spivak went running out of his bar at seven twenty, drove to a Wal-Mart and bought nothing special, but made a phone call from a pay phone.”

  “We can check that,” Harmon said. “We can check all the calls made out of the place between seven fifteen and what, eight o’clock?”

  “More like seven fifteen and seven forty. My guy was pretty specific. Let me know. What happened with the laptop?”

  “The laptop. There were no usable fingerpints at all. Most of the files are not encrypted, but they appear to be innocent. Tour guides and maps and so on. There are a couple of dozen encrypted files and nothing that looks like a key, so that doesn’t help us. We’re still going through it. There’s a lot of stuff.”

  “All right. Check on Wal-Mart. Is there any possibility of getting a couple of FBI thugs to lean on Spivak? Maybe he isn’t scared enough, because the only people talking to him are locals.”

  “We can send somebody around. This thing about the shadow has us worried. From what Nadya told you, about the wife dying and the child, we think it’s a guy named Piotr Nikitin. He was supposed to be a middle-level guy in their Commercial Affairs Section, but everybody figured he was Intelligence.”

  “Why worried?”

  “Well, he’s a nice guy, you know? Everybody knows him. His father-in-law bought him a place out in Virginia, and he’d have a big to-do out there every May Day, you know, for the community. He called it the Dirty Rotten Commie Fest.”

  “The community?”

  “Yes. You know, the community.”

  “He tried to hang Spivak, for Christ’s sake,” Lucas said, exasperated.

  “That was just part of the job,” Harmon said. “You can understand that.”

  LUCAS COULDN’T. He got off the phone, breathing hard for a few minutes, backed off the gas. When he got pissed, the speed tended to go up, and he got speeding tickets. Nadya stirred twenty minutes after he talked with Harmon. Stirred, then twitched, moaned softly, and pushed herself up. “What time is it?”

  “Nine o’clock,” Lucas said. “We’re almost there.”

  “Really?” Her face was slack with sleep. She cranked her seat upright, said, “My mouth is terrible, I have to brush it.”

  “McDonald’s in ten minutes,” Lucas said. “You can do it there. Then we’ll go see if we can find Piotr.”

  The name didn’t faze her: “I hope to,” she said. “This would be well regarded in Moscow.”

  LUCAS TALKED TO Chief Hopper, who was at the bus museum, and got directions through town. The museum was actually out of town a bit, and looked exactly the way a bus museum should look, a triumph of function over form: a low concrete building painted red, white, and blue, with no style whatever, except perhaps existential garage.

  There were three cop cars in the parking lot, and beyond them, six men on their hands and knees, crawling up the parking lot; two more men stood chatting, watching the crawlers. Lucas rolled in next to the cars, and he and Nadya got out. One of the two standing men, a square-faced forty-year-old in a ball cap, walked over and said, “Are you Davenport?”

  “Yes, and Nadya Kalin, a police officer from Russia. She’s here as an observer.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” the chief said. “I’m Roy.” And then to Nadya: “You look just like Miz Wedig, a third-grade teacher here in town. You could be sisters.”

  “But I’m a spy,” Nadya said solemnly. “Mr. Davenport will tell you so.”

  “Well, I’m sure every big country needs spies,” Hopper said cheerfully. He turned to Lucas, his smile fading. “We may have some bad news. One of the boys was scuffing around and he found some blood over there on the other side of the car. We covered it, and the sheriff’s people came over and took some samples. I put my guys to crawling the lot, inch by inch. So far . . .” He dug in his pocket and pulled out a transparent plastic bag and handed it to Lucas. “ . . . this is what we found.”

  A nine-millimeter shell was inside the bag; it was shiny, new.

  “Nine millimeter,” Lucas said to Nadya.

  “But not from the same group of cartridges as the one that killed Oleshev,” she said. “The others were tarnished, and even had some, mmm, I don’t know the English, green coloring on the brass.”

  “That’d be your verdigris,” Hopper said.

  “We can tell by the firing-pin mark whether it was the same gun,” Lucas said. He handed the bag back to the sheriff: “If you could have that shipped right away down to the BCA crime lab, I’d appreciate it. They could get back to us overnight on the firing-pin mark.”

  “Good as done,” Hopper said. “You want to see where the blood was?”

  They walked over to look; there wasn’t much but a clean spot on the blacktop. “How much blood, you think?” Lucas asked. “Bad wound?”

  “I’d say pretty bad. I’d say the guy was down at least a quart.”

  “Shoot.” Lucas looked around. “I’ll tell you what. There’d be no reason to take the body except to delay the discovery. You might find it around pretty close. I imagine that they’d want to get rid of it.”

  “There are a few thousand square miles of woods and swamps around here, to say nothing of the pits,” Hopper said. “I wouldn’t hold your breath.”

  Nadya had been staring morosely at the clean spot on the blacktop; now she said, abruptly, “Is this all?”

  “That’s about all, ma’am,” Hopper said.

  “I will call,” she said, and she walked away from them.

  “She sure does look like Sally Wedig,” Hopper marveled, looking after her.

  NADYA CAME BACK. “They are very upset in Washington.”

  “So am I,” Lucas said. “I don’t mean to . . . get on your case when one of your countrymen has been killed, but the whole bunch of you are playing games. It’s gotta stop. It’s getting people killed. You need to tell me everything you know, everything they know in Moscow, and maybe I can stop it. And I don’t give a shit about this spy stuff . . .”

  “I don’t make that decision,” Nadya said. She stepped closer to him and looked up and said, “When Weather and I were shopping, she said you were a brilliant policeman because you made things happen. Make something happen.”

  “Like what?” Lucas asked; he was both irritated and flattered.

  “Something. I don’t know.”

  LUCAS CHECKED AGAIN with Andy Harmon. “I got the Duluth FBI guys going. They should be in Virginia by now. They’ll lean on Spivak,” Harmon said.

  “Okay. I’ve got some news about your friend Piotr Nikitin. He’s probably dead.”

  Silence, for five seconds. “You’re positive?”

  Lucas told him about the nine-millimeter shell, the blood, the car and the cell phone. “Probably too early to light a candle, but you might look around for a matchbook.”

  “Huh. I’ll pass the word on. Keep me informed.”

  Lucas decided: “Look. Have one of the FBI guys call me on this phone when they’re done with Spivak. I’m gonna give him an hour to think about it, assuming he doesn’t crack, and then I’m going to bust his ass.”

  “On what charge?”

  “Accessory to murder,” Lucas said. “I don’t know how long I can make it stick, but I can keep him inside for a couple of days and out of touch. That might stir up whoever else is involv
ed with this thing.”

  “We must have a bad connection,” Harmon said. “I missed most of what you just said. Talk to you later.” And he was gone.

  “What’d he say?” Nadya asked.

  “He said I’m on my own,” Lucas answered.

  “Ah, yes, we have this formula also in Russia,” she said. “If you fail, you are on your own. If you succeed, then you were not on your own, you were helped by the entire secretariat.”

  “Exactly,” Lucas said.

  LUCAS CALLED Rose Marie at the Department of Public Safety in St. Paul, and asked her to fix an arrest warrant with a state judge in Virginia, and to arrange to have a sheriff’s car meet them at the bar to transport Spivak after the arrest.

  “I want to take him down to Duluth, so he’ll be away from home and it’ll be harder for his family to see him. I’m trying to isolate him as much as I can . . .”

  When he was done with Rose Marie, he called Andreno and told him to hold off on changing vans. “I’m gonna bust Spivak on accessory to murder. See if anything happens.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Watch the son. He seems to do the talking for the family. Spivak’s old lady is a little too shaky for anything important. I want to know about phone calls. Exact times. The feds can figure out where they’re going.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “YOU’RE MAKING something happen?” Nadya asked.

  “I’m desperate,” Lucas said. “I’m jumping off a cliff.”

  They had time to kill, and not much to do. They toured the bus museum, which was more exciting than Lucas expected but, overall, not exciting; they did encounter a tour group that had gathered from around the Midwest to make the trip to Hibbing, and an intense young man in an American-flag T-shirt pointed at an antique blue-and-white bus and whispered to Nadya, “Nineteen thirty-six Super Coach. Perfect condition.”

  She nodded just like she knew what the fuck he was talking about.

  In the parking lot, the chief was sending his patrolmen back to work. “Nothing more,” he told Lucas. “Just the one shell.”

  ONE OF THE Duluth FBI agents called and said, “Harmon said we should call you. We’re on the way out of town. The guy has dropped into a routine: he just sits there and shakes his head and doesn’t offer a thing. Hard to move him.”

  “You think he was coached?”

  “I don’t know what to think. He’s pretty effective in resisting. He just doesn’t venture anything. He just sits there and shakes his head and acts confused and mumbles. Doesn’t wise-ass you, doesn’t argue.”

  “He’s at the bar?”

  “He was when we left.”

  HIBBING WAS ABOUT twenty-five miles southwest of Virginia, and the trip north took about half an hour. They took two more calls en route. The first came from Harmon, who said the feds had come up dry on the computer. “He might have had some good stuff in there, but it’s encrypted. Plain old over-the-counter encryption, but we’re stuck without the key, and he probably had the key in his head. There were also some travel-related files, some expenses that he didn’t bother to encrypt. Couple other things . . . I can put it on a CD if you want to see it.”

  “Yeah, do that. Drop it at the Radisson.”

  AND NADYA TOOK a call, listened for a moment, said, “Da,” hung up and turned in her seat to face Lucas.

  “In Washington they tell me to explain one of our problems.”

  “All right.”

  “The SVR is our foreign-intelligence service. This is the successor to the KGB that you know about, where Oleshev once worked. So. Inside the SVR, the rumors say, there is an informal group that goes back to the KGB and which does not share all the goals of the new SVR. This group is called the Circle or the Ring or, sometimes, the Zero, and it is not known if there is a specific leadership and direction, or only sympathies. We think that the Circle illegally shares information with, mmm, nongovernmental organizations, perhaps, or with other sympathizers in the military and the Foreign Ministry and industry. These are not traitors, you understand. They are like, mmm, a Republican administration hires people for your Defense Department or your State Department, and these people bore into the woodwork. Then when a Democratic president is elected, these people may continue to provide sensitive information to their old Republican friends. Do you see how I mean this?”

  “Yes. Goes on all the time. Some people think it’s the only thing that makes government work.”

  “Yes, I have heard that argument. Oleshev was believed to be in contact with the Circle. Whether he was an active agent, this is not known. But this is the reason we are both so anxious and so ignorant—the Circle has resources that we do not have now. Perhaps just . . . memories. Memories that are not in files anywhere. We need to know more about the Circle, we would like to know about these memories. But we can’t help, not much. Because we just don’t know.”

  “Okay.”

  She frowned at him: “You know what I was saying?”

  “Yes. Years ago, I was asked to consult on an investigation in New York City. A group of police officers had taken it upon itself to clean up the city by killing criminals. Murdering them, really. The circle of cops went very close to the top of the police department, and had a lot of sympathy. And it was working; they probably saved lives, and certainly wiped out a lot of potential misery. But it was still murder, and we had to stop it.”

  “Okay,” she said. “This is it. This is what we deal with.”

  SPIVAK WAS SITTING, head down, at the end of the bar, eating a hot dog with sauerkraut when Lucas, Nadya, and two St. Louis County deputies walked in. A bartender was behind the bar, wiping glasses, and said, “Here we go.” Spivak lifted his head, chewed twice, swallowed, and said, “Oh, boy, what now? I just talked to the FBI.”

  “We’ve probably got another dead man,” Lucas said. “This is the third killing.”

  “Who?” Spivak asked. He still had bandages around his neck.

  “The guy who tried to hang you, in fact. We have to stop this. We want to give you one last chance to tell us who was at the meeting with you. If you don’t, I’m going to arrest you for accessory to first-degree murder. The penalty is the same as for first degree: thirty years without chance of parole. You’ll never get out of Stillwater alive.”

  “But I don’t know who they were,” Spivak said, his voice rising. A piece of sauerkraut flew across the bar.

  “I think we can prove that you do,” Lucas said. “I’m not sure we can prove that you wanted the murders committed, but I think we can prove that you knew the people who were involved and refused to name them. That’s at least obstruction of justice, and probably accessory to murder.”

  Spivak put his head down and stuffed the rest of the hot dog into his mouth. He chewed and chewed and finally said, “I want a lawyer.”

  “You can certainly have one,” Lucas said. He’d gotten the arrest warrant from one of the deputies before they walked into the bar; now he took it out of his pocket and said, “Last chance.”

  “Lawyer.”

  Lucas nodded and said to one of the deputies, “Cuff him. Take the warrant with you. I want him isolated.” To Spivak: “You’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent . . .”

  Lucas recited the rest of the Miranda warning, asked Spivak if he understood, and Spivak said to one of the deputies, “Jesus Christ, Clark, this is just like a bunch of fuckin’ Nazis or something. You’ve known me all your life.”

  “Just doing what the man says,” Clark said. The other deputy said to Lucas, “We’ll take him right down . . . we’ll have him there in an hour.”

  “Can I close the bar?” Spivak asked. “Let me count the cash drawer.”

  “Have your bartender call your kid,” Lucas said. “Starting now, you don’t get any favors.”

  15

  ON THE WAY from Virginia to Duluth, Lucas got a call from Andreno. “The Spivak kid hotfooted it down to the bar right after you took his old man off. He wa
s in there for twenty minutes, then went off to Wal-Mart and got on the phone, just like his daddy did.”

  “You’ve got the time and phone number?”

  “I do.”

  “I want you to call this FBI guy and tell him to make it a priority.”

  “Maybe something begins to break,” Nadya said, when he got off the phone.

  LUCAS DROPPED NADYA at the hotel, then went on to the St. Louis County Jail, so he could watch Spivak being processed. Lucas took him all the way to the cell; left him there, alone, head down, silent, waiting for his call to his lawyer. On the way out, Lucas said, “Have a long talk with your lawyer. Long talk. Listen to him. Unless you’ve done some killing yourself, there’s about an eighty-percent chance you can be walking around free by this afternoon. We just need a little help.”

  Spivak said nothing, and on the way out, the deputy named Clark, who had ridden down to Duluth with him, said, “There’s something not quite right. I’ve taken God only knows how many people to the lockup, and they all said something. Ol’ Anton, it was like name, rank, and serial number.”

  That brought Lucas around: “You think he might have been trained? To resist?”

  The deputy shook his head. “I don’t know about that. But man—he didn’t say shit.”

  AT THE HOTEL, Lucas found a CD waiting for him at the desk. He took it to his room, got a beer, took a shower, then popped the CD into his laptop and found a dozen files. Six were in the original Russian; six more had been translated. They included a list of housekeeping tasks on the Potemkin, what looked like a soccer pool, a long shopping list, and a list of Russian names with job assignments, with a note from the translator that the men on the list were members of the Potemkin crew. There were random notes in a file marked Random Notes: “McDonald’s Duluth, $4.88; Taxicab, $9.60; remember Wal-Mart; boots (Red Wing insulated with 4,000 gms Thinsulate)?”

  The final file had a note attached from whoever examined it: “Had to use can opener on this one. Series of triangles, circles, squares, and lines, done as vector graphics. File type unknown, forwarded to . . .”