Caster nodded. “Got some good pictures. Sent them to Mack.”
The woman had some excellent facial recognition experts she could call on.
The man pulled out his phone. He read from the text: “ ‘Sergei Lemerov. Former GRU.’ ”
Russian military intelligence.
“In the country on a B-1 temporary. Kicked out of Germany for dirty tricks ops. Believed to have been involved in the assassination of an oligarch in London and an activist in Belarus.”
He looked up. “Couldn’t find his travel particulars. Maybe private, maybe government.”
Shaw said, “His best was two hundred K.”
“Peanuts,” said Caster.
Government shenanigans came with shoestring budgets. With any commercial competitor wishing to buy the stolen S.I.T., $200K would have been a starting point.
“Mack said she’ll try to keep track of him. Anything she finds she’ll send directly to you and Marty.”
“I’ll brief him. Our trio?” A nod back to the factory.
He called up an app on his phone. “The Saudis’re going north on Fifty-five. Probably to Granton Exec airport. They’ll have a G7 or something overseas fueled up. LeClaire started for home, then turned south. He’s on the beltway now.” Caster had put GPS trackers in the wheel wells of the men’s cars.
The men shook hands. “Good working with you, Lenny. You ever get out of town? Could use some help from time to time.”
Caster said, “I stay close to home. Born and bred here. Coach my son’s basketball and daughter’s soccer. But, for a day or two? I could swing it. And I have a feeling whatever you’d have going on, it’d be... interesting. Keep me in mind.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Oh, and by the by? Mack said the oligarch and the activist that Lemerov killed? They were poisoned with polonium. That’s not a fun way to go. Until you’re well out of town, Colter, I wouldn’t drink anything that doesn’t come in a bottle that you don’t open yourself.”
7
Jon Merritt was leaving the Trevor County Medical Services building, following his appointment.
A nondescript place in a nondescript part of Ferrington.
The building needed a peel and scrub. It could have been a slightly better-off cousin of the prison, only ringed by chain-link, not razor wire.
The building was home to maybe forty physicians of many different specialties. You could get treated for every ailment under the sun, from cloudy eyes to painful guts to broken bones to wrinkles, if you considered wrinkles an ailment.
He glanced at the list of offices and he noted one of the larger signs.
He was thinking of a particular physician he’d been seeing recently. Recalling their first session.
The frumpy doctor, about forty, is in a brown suit. No tie. That must be in a manual somewhere. Strangulation risk. His shoes are laceless slip-ons. His hair is similar to his patient’s — that is, blondish and not abundant, to put it kindly.
There is a smell about him. Merritt can’t quite place it. In his chair, across from Merritt’s, Dr. Evans sits forward. He has explained that he will always remain outside Merritt’s “sphere of personness.”
This is a psychological thing, it seems, intended to demonstrate that the physician is attentive to the patient but doesn’t make him uncomfortable.
Sphere of personness...
Merritt would simply say “his space.” But then, he doesn’t have the medical degree.
The distance between the two is also a security measure, considering what many of Dr. Evans’s patients are here for.
Murder.
Attempted murder.
Grievous bodily harm...
The room bears little resemblance to a traditional therapist’s digs. No couch, no armchair, no box of Kleenex, no diplomas, no framed pictures or posters carefully picked to cause the patients no offense.
The doctor is jotting notes on a tablet, not with a pen or pencil. Apparently there was an incident a few years ago — though, luckily, the ER doc up the hall managed to save one of the psychiatrist’s eyes.
A wireless panic button sits on the table next to Dr. Evans’s chair. It’s not red. Merritt has wondered how many demons descend if the doc pushes it.
Has he ever?
“Let’s just chat, shall we, Jon?” The man is only half here. Distracted.
And what is that smell?
Merritt is all smiles and cooperation. “Sure, I guess. About what?”
“Anything that comes to mind. How you’re feeling about being here.”
Did he really ask that?
But again the smile.
“Your childhood.”
“Oh, sure.”
Just wanting the minutes to go by quickly, he begins to ramble about growing up in Ferrington. Telling stories good and stories bad and stories traumatic and stories affirming. Some are even true.
He’s careful about what he says, though. Dr. Evans, of the curious scent, may be sharper than he seems and is looking for tells, like a carny mind reader, that will lead him to a secret about Jon Merritt that Jon Merritt does not want him to know.
Merritt thinks of the secret simply as the “Truth” about him. With a capital T.
As he talks, staying far, far from the Truth, he notices that the doctor’s gaze strays around the room, often ending up on the window. The thick glass opens onto the yard. But it’s a prison; there is no view.
Merritt wonders if the doctor’s inattention is due to the fact that he is wrestling obsessively with diagnoses and treatment plans in order to cure his prisoner-patients.
Or if the man doesn’t give a shit about them and is daydreaming of hearing out housewives from the Garden District, who might be depressed or tightly wound, but never sociopathic and homicidal.
Jon Merritt now left the medical center behind and moved through the parking lot in a taut lope. He was six foot two inches but tended to walk stooped over, which made him appear to be a predatory animal. He climbed into his big Ford and in twenty minutes he was slicing through a commercial row south of downtown.
This was a neighborhood familiar to him. He’d spent plenty of hours on these streets. Here you could get the nails tipping your fingers and toes polished to gems, your car repaired, your hair extended, your baldness covered. You could buy electronics, toys, sundries, pay-as-you-go phones, used furniture, appliances big and appliances small, all off-brand and cheap and with short life spans.
You could also rent a girl or boy or combination of both for an hour or two, transactions that Merritt was also familiar with.
He cruised up the street toward the Kenoah until he came to the River View Motel. Ferrington spawned lodgings like this — one-story structures of pastel shades, well overdue for new paint, some bulbs of the neon signage dark, the parking lots weedy. The vending machines were bulletproof.
The motel did have what the name promised — a few rooms at least and the lobby looked onto a patchy city park that descended to the water. The appeal, though, was another matter and depended largely on whether or not you had a sense of smell.
Merritt checked in, left his belongings in the dim box of a room, closed the curtains and turned on the TV, suggesting occupancy. He stepped outside, hung the do not disturb sign on the knob and walked to a convenience store he’d passed on the drive here. He picked up some toiletries, two Italian subs, some soda, some barbecue chips.