Around one a.m. her boss finally returned the two frantic calls she’d made to him.
“Where are you?” Jim Brody said
“E.R.,” she said. “Ray got a graze.” She told him what happened at her apartment.
“Russian caller, you say?”
“Female. The bullet parted my hair, Jim.”
“I’ll send a team to your place. Ray’s too. Get them secured and your window fixed. You two need to hole up for a bit.”
The F.B.I. maintained a pair of hotel rooms downtown for agents, witnesses, and special guests to use. The rooms were currently empty. Brody told Susan to go there.
“That treats the symptoms,” Susan said, “but doesn’t solve the problem.”
“We’ll work on the problem. Right now I need you two safe. Get some rest and don’t come in till late afternoon.”
When Ray exited the examining room with the side of his face appropriately stitched and bandaged, she drove them to the hotel. Neither had a change of clothes. They gathered other necessities at the hotel gift shop. They’d deal with the other problem later.
Susan was brushing her teeth with the too-small travel brush and not her preferred brand of toothpaste when her cell phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number. She spit and rinsed and answered.
“This is Susan.”
A heavily accented voice answered. Another Russian. This time a male.
“We spoke earlier today.”
“I talked to a lot of people today, what’s your name?”
“I am Yuri Olinov.”
Susan didn’t specifically remember the man and wished she had her notes with her. But she’d obviously given him her cell number.
“What can I do for you, Yuri?”
“I have information I want to give you. They are watching us. If they saw me hand it to you, I would have been killed. I have put it in the mail. You should receive it soon.”
“What kind of information?”
“Answers to your questions and more. I have to go.”
Susan tried to respond but the line clicked. She put the phone down and stared at her feet, still spotted with blood. She hadn’t bothered to clean up. A quick shower changed that and she dropped into bed naked. She tried to ponder the new development but sleep quickly overtook her.
THE FIRST thing Stiletto did after leaving the bank was ditch his car.
He left it on a street in downtown Manassas and walked to an Enterprise office, where they fixed up him with another vehicle under the name on his new ID. He was traveling under the name Peter Drumm. He couldn’t remain in his Chevy because there’d be an all-points bulletin out for it. Before leaving Manassas he purchased hair dye and some other miscellaneous items, and then he headed north to start his 12-hour drive to Montreal.
He followed East 66 to start, heading through Delaware for New York. He stopped at a few rest stops along the way, with a New York State Trooper making him a little nervous for a particular stretch. The officer made no move to pull him over. Stiletto had already made up his mind that should such a thing happen, he’d surrender. There was no point in putting up a fight with local authorities.
He pushed on toward Albany and started getting hungry, so he found a Denny’s and ate dinner. Then he decided to call it a night and found a Motel 6 off I-90. There would be facial recognition cameras at the border, so he went about planning his disguise before bed. Change hair color, glasses, beard. His five o’clock shadow was already showing. By the time he reached Canada, it would have grown in a little more. He’d look like an amateur compared to the men on Duck Dynasty, but his appearance would thwart the recognition software just long enough to slip through. It didn’t matter if the computer matched his face once he was over the border and he only needed a few hours’ head start.
With his plan in mind, he sat up in bed and watched the news but quickly started dozing off, so he turned off the lights and T.V.
A scream woke him.
SCOTT LAY still.
The noise sure sounded like a woman’s scream. He listened. A male voice, muffled, came through the wall. A man yelling. A woman yelled back. Then she screamed again.
Stiletto didn’t need anybody to draw him a picture. He was still dressed so he rolled out of bed. With clenched fists, he left the motel room, took three steps to the neighboring room, pounded on the door.
The door flew open and a bony man with a dark goatee glared at him. A woman sobbed out of sight. The bony man raised a pointed finger; Stiletto saw the blood on the man’s knuckles. He grabbed the wrist and twisted, pulled. The bony man let out a cry of his own as Stiletto hauled him out into the concrete walkway, kicked the man’s legs out from under him. No snide remarks escaped Stiletto’s lips. He delivered a hard punch to the bony man’s face; once, twice. Skin under the man’s left eye broke open. Stiletto lifted the man to his feet, twisted the arm back, forcing the man to face the wall, and shoved. The bony man left a smear of blood on the wallpaper. Stiletto hammered two blows into the man’s back. The man’s breath rushed out and he crumpled onto the carpet.
The woman was smaller, slighter, and pale. She stepped into the doorway. Tears streaked her face. A bloody welt grew on her cheek. She put her hands to her mouth.
“Need a doctor?” Stiletto said.
“Ohmygodohmygod,” she said. She dropped her hands. “He’s going to kill you!”
Other doors along the walkway opened, tenants poking out their heads to see the commotion. Somebody offered to call the cops. Stiletto didn’t answer. He suddenly wondered if he had done the right thing, but he didn’t see how he couldn’t have stepped in. This was the sort of incident he defined his philosophy by. Was he waiting for a thank you? He told the person offering to call the police to go ahead. They would ask Scott some questions and his ID would hold up. He’d paid a lot of money for it to hold up under such scrutiny.
The woman rose and, letting out a rush of breath, went back into the room and slammed the door. She turned the lock. Her husband remained unconscious on the walkway, his face in a small pool of blood. Stiletto, feeling a little numb, and not from the fight, returned to his room and locked the door. He sat on the edge of the bed and wondered if he had made the right decision after all.
He stood up and grabbed the tote bag, hurriedly stuffing his clothes and other items inside and pulling the zipper so fast he almost broke it. He made a quick scan to make sure nothing had been forgotten and, checking the walkway outside with a quick peek out the window, left the room. He stepped over the unconscious husband’s body and hustled down the steps to the parking lot. He drove around the back of the building to the rear exit as a squad car pulling up in front of the building.
Stiletto found the interstate on-ramp and accelerated. His jaw was clenched, his breathing quick. He needed distance. He needed to get to Montreal. He didn’t look back.
New York City
SUSAN STOOD in the bull pen watching her boss behind the glass wall of his office.
When she’d arrived three hours earlier, Brody told her and Ray to get their notes together because he wanted an update. While they gathered their reports, two muckity-mucks with government badges showed up and demanded a meeting of their own, with only Brody. After an hour behind the glass, they were still in there flapping their gums and Susan was tired of impatiently tapping her feet.
“Sit down, Susan,” Ray said.
She turned. Ray sat at his desk playing solitaire on his smartphone. The bull pen smelled of aftershave and coffee.
“Who are those guys?”
“Receptionist said they showed State Department I.D.”
“Then why aren’t we in there? If this is about the Zubarev case, we should be in there.”