Hidden prey

Chapter 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 was 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…"

Somebody had deleted the last word or series of words, which made Lucas smile. Probably something like supersecret undercover computer analysis facility, he thought. He was about to shut down the computer when he noticed the Inspiration icon on the left side of his screen. Inspiration was an outlining program made up of circles, ovals, triangles, squares, lines, and other symbols. Give it a chance, he thought, and clicked on it.

When the program was open, he called up the file on the disk, and it instantly blossomed into a series of triangles, circles, squares, and lines, just as the file note said.

"Excellent," he muttered. The FBI didn't know about Inspiration, of which there were only about a zillion copies floating around.

One problem was instantly evident: none of the triangles, circles, squares, or lines had any text attached to them. Lucas looked at them for a moment. There were four groups of symbols, each with a square at the top, falling into a more elaborate group of boxes below, attached vertically and occasionally horizontally by lines. An organizational chart, he thought. Maybe something on the ship?

He thought about it for a while longer, then called Nadya. Her room, they'd discovered, was one floor straight above his, give or take a room. She picked up the phone and he could hear music in the background, canned jazz. He said, "I got the CD from the FBI. There's not much on it, but there's a weird diagram. Do you have a list of the ship's crew? With their ranks?"

"Yes, in my laptop."

"Then come on down; or I can come up."

"I come down right away, I brush my teeth," she said.

He gave her the room number, left the laptop on, sprawled on the bed, and paged through the channels on the cable TV. Not much going on. There never seemed to be much when he was stuck in a hotel.

Reasons: he should call Reasons about arresting Spivak. He got his calendar, found Reasons's cell phone, and punched in the number.

"Reasons."

Lucas identified himself and said, "I meant to call earlier, but it slipped my mind. We busted Spivak this morning. We think Nadya's shadow might have been killed…" He filled him in quickly and was about to get deeper into it when Reasons interrupted: "Listen, uh, I got most of this from Nadya. I bumped into her at the hotel right after you dropped her off, I guess. I came over to see if you guys were still in town when I didn't hear from you yesterday… Anyway, she filled me in on the whole thing."

"Okay. Just didn't want you to feel neglected."

There was a knock at the door, and Lucas walked over to it, popped it open, found Nadya with her laptop, waved her in, and said, "I gotta go."

"Okay. Talk to you."

Lucas said, "You oughta come over for a beer this evening. We can bullshit through the whole thing again."

"Five o'clock?"

"See you then…" Just before he hung up, Lucas could hear the canned jazz playing behind him, the same music that had been playing behind Nadya. Then the phone clicked out and he said, "Ah, man…"

"What?" Nadya asked. She looked freshly showered and wideawake.

"Nothing," he said.

He showed her the diagram, and she brought up a file of names and ranks. "Okay, here is trouble," she said. "We have more people on the ship than we have boxes."

"How about officers?"

"We have more boxes than we have officers." She tapped the screen. "Besides, this chart, there are four leaders. On a ship, just one."

"What if they were watches, or shifts, or whatever they call them on a boat?"

She peered at the screen, then said, "This is possible. I would check, but I thought ships had only three shifts, not four. But I don't know this for sure."

"Hmm."

The ship didn't fit, at least not all at once. Lucas went back and sprawled on the bed while Nadya looked at the files in the original Russian. When she finished, she said, "There is nothing, unless this is some kind of code. But I think it is what it seems to be. An organizational chart."

Lucas said, "How about a genealogy?"

"What?"

"You think the chart is a genealogy? A list of ancestors?"

"Of Oleshevs?"

"Or maybe the people that Oleshev was trying to contact?" He rolled off the bed and padded over to the desk, bent over her shoulder, and said, "We know Spivak's family. Do they fit anywhere? Move over."

She stood up and Lucas sat in front of the laptop. "Spivak is married and has two children, so…"

Lucas tapped a chart: "If these were his parents, and this is Spivak and this is his wife, and these would be the two kids…"

"And this line…" She touched the screen over his shoulder. He could smell the warm water and hormones rolling off her. "This line leads from his wife, if this is the Spivak family, to another family. So who is his wife's family?"

"That's what the FBI is for," Lucas said. He was interested now: the diagram felt right. If Oleshev had been feeling his way around a group of spies, and he knew only one or two of them… he might have something like this as a mnemonic. "And I've got a phone number."

Harmon came up instantly, as always.

"Those files were really interesting," Lucas said. "We're running them down now. But we need some information. We need to know Spivak's wife's maiden name, and we need to know who the members of her family are. All of them."

"And how they relate," Nadya said from over his shoulder.

"Yeah. And how they relate."

"Who's there with you?"

"Nadya."

"What'd you get?" Harmon asked. "Did you get something out of the files? What?"

Lucas told him, and Harmon said he could have the information on Spivak's wife's family in an hour.

So they sat and waited; and Lucas found that he was a little pissed. He was ninety-seven percent sure that Nadya and Reasons had been rolling around in her bed, and though it was none of his business, it seemed to push the investigation off balance. On the other hand, he'd not only slept with witnesses in the past; he'd on occasion been in bed with the principal of an investigation…

He had, he thought reasonably, no stance from which to complain; but it still pissed him off. Maybe because he was married now, and the opportunities were suddenly out of reach? Would he have been sniffing after Nadya if he'd been free?

He considered her, sitting on the single easy chair, reading a copy of Golf amp; Travel. She was attractive, she was his age, she smelled good, she was safe and from out of town…

"Silly fuckers," he mumbled at the ceiling over the bed.

"What?" Nadya asked.

"Nothing. Thinking."

"I am surprised you have such a small room," she said, tossing the magazine back on the coffee table. "They didn't have a suite when you arrived?"

"Didn't ask. Never thought about it," Lucas said.

"You never heard of the Internet hotel sites?"

She started rambling on about Price.com and the deal she got while she was still in Moscow, and for a few seconds Lucas thought he was losing his mind. Then the phone rang, and Harmon said, "I've got news." For the first time, he sounded as if he might be interested in what was going on.

"Give."

"Marsha Spivak is the daughter of Benjamin and Maud Svoboda. Her brother, Rick Svoboda, runs a bakery in Hibbing. And there's another brother named David. Are you getting this?"

"Yeah, I'm putting it on a scratch pad," Lucas said. "So that's the family?"

"Not quite. Janet and Rick have three daughters, Cheryl, Karen, and Julie. David, we haven't been able to locate. And then in the Spivak line, Marsha had Bob and Carol, and Bob has two children, Robert Jr. and Heather."

"All right, all right. I'll see if we can fit this-"

"That's not all. Your man from Virginia called and asked us to check that telephone call that Bob Spivak made from Wal-Mart. The phone call lasted seven seconds-seven-and there's not a single fuckin' thing you can say in seven seconds that isn't some sort of callback code. The call went to Svoboda's Bakery in Hibbing."

"You gotta be shitting me."

"That's still not all. At this point, we were getting seriously interested, so we went into the vital records to see where everybody was born. Benjamin and Maud Svoboda were both born in Mahnomen County, Benjamin in nineteen sixteen and Maud in nineteen twenty." Harmon was talking so fast now that he was spitting into the phone. "Their birth certificates came from Mercy Hospital, which burned down in nineteen twenty-eight, so there's no independent confirmation…"

"Wait a minute…"

"That's right, dude," Harmon said, a little overebullient for a fed. "Same hospital where Spivak's parents were supposedly born. Dutch and Sarah Spivak, nineteen twelve and nineteen fourteen. Dutch and Sarah went abroad twice, once in nineteen sixty-two and again in nineteen sixty-seven, both times to visit Germany and Czechoslovakia, supposedly where their parents came from. But we can't find any record of their parents."

"So it's all bullshit," Lucas said. "The birth records. The parents-"

"Were probably born in Russia. That hospital probably existed, and probably burned down, and there are probably people around whose records were destroyed. You'd never see the connection here, unless you saw these four families involved in some other way," Harmon said. "We're bustin' a Soviet-era spy ring right here in River City. They can't believe it back in Washington. Uh, is Nadya still around?"

"Yeah."

"Don't tell her all of this. We don't want anybody breaking for the door."

"I'll lead her on," Lucas said. Across the room, Nadya's eyebrows went up.

"Do that. And listen, we're out trying to find a copy of that Inspiration program. Where'd you get yours?"

"Apple store. But it was a while ago."

"Okay. We're gonna start putting this thing together here, too."

"We need to meet. I need to see you and your FBI guys. And I want to bring Nadya. And probably Jerry Reasons, because the Duluth cops have got a piece of this thing, and they're gonna be around. Reasons is coming here at five o'clock."

"We can be there. At least me and one other guy."

When Lucas got off, Nadya said, "What did he say?"

"He said we're busting a Soviet-era spy ring." He told her the rest of it, and added, "If we meet with Harmon, don't tell him I told you all this shit."

"Good. Now, does this new family fit in the chart?"

The new family fit, but only through three generations. Both the Spivaks and the Svobodas had fourth-generation children, but if the charts represented the families-and Lucas was now convinced that they did-the youngest generation wasn't on it.

"That makes sense if they are Communist-era leftovers," Nadya pointed out. "The last contact may have been in the nineteen eighties, when these children were not yet born."

"Huh."

"Which still leaves us stranded. What do we do now? Go see these Svobodas?"

"I think we've got to wait until we talk to the feds, and get Duluth up to speed. There are a couple of different ways to go…"

They talked it over for a while, then Nadya went back to her room and Lucas started going through every piece of paper he had.

In ten minutes, he gave it up as pointless. He didn't think he was missing anything in the material-he just didn't have enough material. With time to kill, he tried the TV came up dry, looked at his collection of newspapers and magazines, gave up on them, and finally went shopping. He bought a pair of walking shoes and a $400 Barbour oilcloth jacket that the salesman said was an excellent counterpoint to his blue eyes and his stonewashed Levi's. Lucas couldn't help but agree.

"When you're right, you're right," he told the salesman, looking at himself in the triple mirror.

Harmon called at four forty-five and said that he had rented a conference room on the first floor; he didn't want to meet in the FBI offices, which were across the street from the hotel, because he didn't ever want to have to explain Nadya.

Lucas called Nadya and Reasons, gave them the location, and at five o'clock, met Nadya in the elevator on the way down. Reasons was already there, with Harmon and a local Duluth FBI man named Amery. Harmon shook hands with Nadya, said, "I hope everything's okay with Piotr Nikitin."

"It does not look so good," she said.

"We need to put more pressure on Spivak," Lucas said, when they were settled around the conference table. "Is there anything in the antiterrorism stuff that you could use to lean on him with?"

Harmon glanced at Amery, then looked back at Lucas and nodded. "There are some provisions under the Patriot Act that would allow us to hold him for a while, without charging him, and without access to the outside, except for an attorney. Or, we could simply bust him under federal statutes on suspicion of espionage. We can also offer him a deal: give us the rest of the ring, and the killer, and he walks. His family walks. So we have some weapons."

"I don't think we should isolate him so much," Nadya said. "Threaten, threaten, threaten, but always allow him to talk to the outside. Always with surveillance on his family and this new family, the Svobodas."

"Is everybody tapped?" Reasons asked.

"We have warrants in the process of being issued," Harmon said. "We will have taps on the whole damn group of them by tonight-and we're looking at ways to tap the Wal-Mart there in Virginia, since that seems to be their regular outside call spot. The problem there is, we'd pick up more than the target, but our lawyers are figuring a way to work it out with the court."

"We could put one of the phones out of service, so they'd always be forced to use the tapped phone," Amery said. "Technically, it's not hard, if the court says okay."

"Do they suspect yet that we're watching?" Nadya asked.

"The Spivaks are probably looking around," Harmon said.

"Here's a risk we could take," Lucas said. "You bring in some guys, and watch all of the Spivaks full-time. Then you go over, bust Spivak for espionage, and mention the genealogy that Oleshev had, about the hospital that burned down, the four families, and so on. Then arrange for Marsha Spivak or one of their kids to see Anton, in private. And track what happens. If they make phone calls, if they warn somebody… They'd have to do something, wouldn't they?"

Amery shrugged, and Harmon looked at Nadya, and Harmon said, "Unless they've buttoned down the whole organization."

"This they might have done," Nadya said.

"Then there wouldn't be any harm in doing it, if they feel that they can't warn anyone," Reasons said.

Harmon said, "It's a plan. What else?"

"We'll need some kind of timetable for you to put your people on, and for me to get my guy out of your way," Lucas said. "We don't want them running over each other…"

At the end of the meeting, Lucas said, "What we don't have is a rationale for the killings of Oleshev, Mary Wheaton, and Piotr Nikitin. Wheaton was probably done to eliminate a witness, but the other two don't connect."

Harmon picked it up: "We have two Russian groups trying to contact the same spy ring, and the reaction is to kill people on both sides. I don't have a tight grip on that, either."

They all looked at Nadya, who smiled and shook her head. "There are three groups represented. The Russian government is the first; then, what we believe is a criminal group or perhaps some runaway business group, is the second; and the Communists here in Minnesota is the third. Perhaps the Communists don't want to deal with anything Russian."

"So it's our Commies against your businessmen," Amery said. He squinted sideways and did a Maxwell Smart imitation. "Whatta we do next, Chief?"

Harmon was offended, cleared his throat, and said, "Anything else?"

More drift time; time not even spent thinking about the case. What could be done was being done. Reasons had walked out through the front door of the hotel when the meeting ended, never looking back; and Lucas wondered if he was wrong about Nadya and Reasons. He talked to Weather about it that night and she said, "Who cares? They're adults."