"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 except 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 hunting 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 dose, 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.
Chapter 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?"