Because she wasn't one.

Despite the cold, she was lying on her parka, instead of wearing it, the better to anchor the rifle against her shoulder. She put the crosshairs on the target, took up the trigger slack and squeezed. The recoil was sharp, but manageable.

The man lying in the dirt next to her, looking through a spotting scope, said "Two centimeters high, a centimeter right. Once more."

She took her time and squeezed again. The spotter said, "Same hole."

She said, "I'm so fucking cold, I feel like a goddamned фруктовый лёд." In English, literally, a "fruit ice," or not so literally, a "popsicle."

"Forget the cold," the man said. He had a hard, narrow face and black hair over black eyes. "Three rounds, fast."

The three rounds went out in less than three seconds, and he said, "All over the place, left right and high, all within six centimeters of the ten-ring."

"So it's good."

"Better than good. I've seen what it does to gelatin. If you hit the target anywhere above the waist, he's dead," the man said, rolling on his side to look at her. "These copper bullets won't defeat Level 4, but armor-piercing will. Shoots so flat... I want to take one home with me."

"If I could shoot as well as you do, I would find a way to do that," the woman said, handing him the rifle. "Maybe a custom barrel with handloads. The perfect weapon."

They were lying in a ditch ten miles west of the small town of Owatonna, Minnesota, an informal shooting range, located by their concierge, who was waiting nervously by the car.

"I wish it was suppressed," the woman added.

"You know the English proverb, 'If wishes were horses, beggars would ride?'"

Some wrinkles appeared in her forehead: "I'm not sure what that means..."

The proverb didn't quite translate, because they were speaking in Russian.

Because they were Russian.

The marshals arrived in separate vehicles, Lucas Davenport pushing his Porsche Cayenne up the driveway, while Shelly White left her 4Runner in the street and walked up to meet Lucas.

"The guy gets this place for free? They just gave it to him?" White asked, peering wide-eyed at the house of her dreams, which were unlikely to be realized.

The afternoon light was draining away, a sullen, tangible gathering of gloom, as happens in Minnesota, on overcast February days. "The way of the world, sweetheart. You get big enough, you get bad enough, they hand you the fat stax."

The hideout was one of twelve houses nestled on four back-to-back cul-de-sacs. Seen from a satellite, the cul-de-sacs resembled a four-leaf clover, set down in a winter landscape of barren broad-leafed trees and evergreens that appeared black in the murky afternoon light.

White had never been in Oklahoma, wasn't starving, and she drove a Toyota SUV much too fast for the crappy suspension. She was a deputy U.S. Marshal who'd grown up in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, looking across the Red River at North Dakota. Four years as an Air Force cop and a degree in criminology got her a job with the U.S. Marshal's Service.

She and Lucas, another deputy marshal, hadn't particularly liked each other when they first met, but they got along, and after a couple of years, had warmed up. Lucas had three natural children with two different women, plus an adoptive daughter; White had three children, with two different men, so they had blended families to talk about. Along with guns, fugitives, and mandatory overtime.

White was on the short side, thin and tough as a razor strop. A Glock 9mm hung on her right hip. Below that hip, out of sight beneath her winter cover-ups, she had a massive scar on her thigh, where she'd been shot with a fast-expanding jacketed hollow-point bullet from a deer rifle.

Just... life in the Marshals Service.

As they stood side-by-side, Lucas loomed over her, a substantial opposite, with expensively cut dark hair threaded with gray, and crystalline blue eyes. He was tall, wide across the shoulders. A hairline scar tracked across his left eye from his forehead to his cheek, a relic of a fishing trip. Another puckered scar sat on his throat, where a teen-aged girl had shot him with a piece-of-crap .22 that he hadn't seen coming. He had a non-standard Walther 9mm on his left hip, in a cross-draw holster, for easier access under a suitcoat.

Lucas had a tendency toward depression, exacerbated by the gloom of winter, and by the sporadic violence of the job. White shared the depressive gene, and they sometimes compared notes. When Lucas was younger, he didn't worry about it. Now, in his later fifties, he had a tendency to think he'd been shot too often and to brood about the near-death experiences. About what he'd miss, if he were dead; about not seeing his younger children grow into adults.

White had thoughts that ran down in the same trench.

Still, they both were hunters, trackers. They liked the intensity of the work, if not always the consequences, because the intensity went some way toward offsetting the blues.

The ground, hard as pig iron, was covered with half an inch of crunchy snow. There'd been almost no snow over the winter months, but they'd gotten all the usual cold weather. The temperature, according to Lucas's weather app, was six degrees and falling, and a persistent breeze whipped the steam away from their mouths. "I'm not a baby-sitter," she added.

"This guy is no baby," Lucas said. He coughed once, covering his mouth with a gloved fist. He wasn't sick; the bitter cold set him off. He could feel his lips cracking, and he'd left his Chapstick sitting on his dresser. "He was in some kind of enforcement branch of the Russian spy agency. He's probably killed more people than the Marshal's Service."

"Yeah, but why us in particular?" White asked. "Why not Remy, or that asshole Clark? They'd jump at it, hanging out with headquarters guys."

"Because I'm the smartest guy in the office, and you're a close second? They thought the job might take some brains."

"You're almost smart enough to get that almost right," White said, shivering again. She'd been a National Merit Scholar in high school and Lucas hadn't been; but then, he'd been a hockey jock, and what could you expect from somebody who'd been hit in the head with a puck, and more than once? "But really?"

"Because Witness Protection doesn't babysit, either," Lucas said. "They plug a guy into a hideout and that's it. This guy... the Russians would like to get at him. They need somebody with guns close by, or think they do. That's not usually Witness Protection."

At the moment, White was in the Minnesota winter stance, shoulders squeezed tight, elbows to rib cage, fingers pulled out of the fingers of her gloves, hands clenched in fists. "Why aren't you cold? You're standing there in your plutonium suit and tie... and that coat. What's that coat made of? Pubic hair from virgins? What?"

"Wool, from goats, but highly refined, college-educated, Italian goats," Lucas said. He was a hopeless fashion plate. He leaned toward White: "Don't tell anyone, but I'm also wearing long underwear. Smartwool. Of course, if I have to pee, I'm in trouble."

"Well, that's it: you are smarter than me. I'm wearing cotton bikini briefs." White looked her watch: "They're late. Jerks left us standing out here freezing your balls off."

"Not mine. They're like two chestnuts roasting on an open fire."

White: "Hey: You don't have to top me every time, okay?"

He answered, listened for a moment, and when the person on the other side stopped talking, he said, "Okay. We'll take a look around here," and rang off.

White: "What?"

Lucas said, "They're still half an hour out. They had to find a suitcase. Knowing the Marshals Service, they probably flew last-class on Trans-New Jersey Airways."

"If we had a key..." White looked wistfully up at the locked and alarmed house, furnace steam puffing from a roof-top chimney. The place had what were once called "grounds." Nothing rural about it, a four-acre fenced lot heavy with white-trunked birches and brooding blue conifers and maples, a few red leaves still attached to the maples. A line of bare-naked bridal wreath bushes were strung along the driveway, while leafless lilacs waited in the dooryard for spring.

"We could sit in the truck, but I'd like to take a look around," Lucas said. "You know, in case we ever had to come back out here."

"Not a bad idea. We can at least see through the woods right now," White said. "Gotta be pretty dense in the summer."

"Let me change my shoes..."

Lucas popped the back of his truck and took out a pair of Sorel Caribous, pulled them on, tucked in the bottom of his suit pants and carefully placed his John Lobbs on the truck's floor.

Together, they marched around the lot, past a frozen picnic table that sat next to a frozen firepit made with frozen stones with a frozen logs next to it, through the maples and pines and birches and around the withered shrubs. They found a hard-frozen coiled hose that somebody had forgotten under a dwarf Mugo pine, two wickets from a croquet set that somebody had forgotten to pull, and, at the back of the yard, a shovel with a rusted blade and a broken handle. Having crisscrossed the yard, they went out a gate at the back.

They discovered that the hideout was on one of four circles, which they hadn't known, with a narrow, frozen creek winding through the common area between the circles. They stumbled across whitetail deer beds tucked under balsams and racoon and coyote tracks along the iced-over creek.

There were three houses on each of the four circles. All of the houses were showing furnace exhaust, and two had older cars in the driveways, which White thought must belong to housekeepers. Nobody with common sense would park outside in this cold, if they had a heated garage.

"If the guy's a bow-hunter, he could put up some venison," White said, checking out a line of deer tracks. She scuffed at one of the bigger prints, and said, "Nice buck."

They were puffing out clouds of steam, and tiny icicles were forming on the tips of White's hair.

"Given his reputation, I'm pretty sure he ain't a vegetarian," Lucas said.

"Davenport and White," Lucas answered. "Are you Derrick?"

"Yeah. You look like your pictures. You guys check out the site?"

"We did," White said. "There are four cul-de-sacs back-to-back, three houses on each circle, a common area in between them. Looks like all the lots are about the same size, three or four acres each, all fenced. Nothing but animal tracks in the snow."

"Excellent." Derrick Beard turned back toward the SUVs and waved. Seven more doors popped open, and seven more people got out. Three were marshals, all in tactical winter wear, all from Washington, as was Beard.

Another of the arrivals, an American, but not a marshal, was thinner, taller, quicker, wearing a wool knee-length camel coat with matching wool-and-leather gloves. He sported black rectangular sunglasses and a brown Borsalino hat. The clothes were well cut and subtly aristocratic. Looking at them, Lucas, the fashion plate, was stroked by the feather of jealousy. He liked browns, admired them, but given his coloring, couldn't wear them.

The third was a tall youngish man, mid-twenties, whose face resembled the woman's. His dishwater-blond hair fell to his shoulders and his face was covered with dishwater blond fuzz, like a holy-card Jesus. Despite the cold, the son was wearing tight fashion jeans and a hip-length black leather jacket worn open.

"Hope to God somebody has a key," Lucas said.

"We're good," Beard said. "Let's get inside. I'm already numb."

The older man said to the woman, "Look at the birches, Martha, like home. I told you." His face looked carved, rather than grown, with snarl lines starting beside his nose and extending to the corners of his mouth. The quarried look of his face was matched by that of his wife.

"Not home, Leonard," the woman grumbled. After a moment, "It's less than I hoped for. Less than they told us."

"Better than home," the son said. "I'm not fighting any fuckin' Ukrainian assholes in the middle of a fuckin' Ukrainian asshole winter."

As they walked up to the house, Beard introduced the three as Leonard Summers, his wife Martha, and son Bernard.

All three sounded American: In a briefing the day before, Lucas and White had been told that all three had spoken some English before they fled Russia. They'd spent the past year and a half holed up in a CIA facility near Washington. English lessons had been a daily event, including work on their accents and slang. If they added a oodala-oodala-oodala vowel sounds, they might even pass as Minnesotan.

Beard opened the front door's heavy lock with a key, then handed a key ring with several keys to the older Russian. As they trooped inside, Lucas noticed that the door was three inches thick and appeared to have a quarter-inch steel plate laminated inside. Not a door you could kick, or shoot through, for that matter. Beard disarmed an alarm, and Martha said, "Small living room, Leonard." She touched the back of a beige couch in the living room. The walls were bare, awaiting a personal touch. "Where are the bedrooms?"

"I think it is comfortable," Leonard said, with a defensive note. "We should bring in the suitcases."

"Our guys will get those," Beard said. "Leonard, you and Martha should pick a bedroom — the master is here on the first floor, with one more, at the back. We thought that second one would be a nice office for you, Leonard. Martha, there's a family room in back. It's three times the size of the living room and has an eighty-inch TV hanging on the wall, just like you ordered. That's where you party."

"What about the billiards table?" Leonard Summers asked.

"Yeah, there's a full-sized billiards table," Beard said. "There are two bedrooms upstairs, and a sitting room. Bernie can pick one, and Jack can take the other. All the bedrooms have attached bathrooms. Even the office."

"How long will Jack be here?" Lucas asked. Jack was a marshal with the Witness Protection Program.

"A couple weeks. We want to have one of our regular guys checking around, to make sure everything looks copacetic," Beard said. "Jack has done this fifteen times, so if there's a problem, he'll spot it. You two are the cavalry, if he screams for help."

"Where are the cars?" Bernard asked.

"They're coming, they'll be here this evening," Beard said. "We got slowed down at the DMV."

Lucas reflexively checked the sightlines from the windows and noticed White doing the same thing.

"The only thing I don't like is that you could get close to the house and not be seen," White said.

"Balanced by the fact that it's hard to know what's back here. Invisibility is their friend," Lucas said. He looked out the window toward a towering cottonwood tree two hundred yards away, an easy shot for a hunting rifle. "But you have a point. Especially at night, you could sneak right up to the windows. High rise condo might be better."

The thin man in the camel coat said, "They didn't want a condo. They wanted a dacha, like back in Russia. Isn't that right, Martha?"

"Too many apartments, all our lives," Martha said. "We wanted more space, and we wanted to hide where nobody could see us. But, maybe something bigger than this? Maybe with a dock to fish from?"

"If somebody came after you here, they'd have to take chances, doing reconnaissance and snooping around the neighborhood," said the camel-coated man. He spoke quietly, but with a military articulation; people stopped talking to listen. "If Leonard were sitting on a dock with a fishing pole, a sniper could hit him from six hundred yards out. From a fishing boat. In town, on the street, a killer could come from anywhere and look like anything. This house has alarms everywhere, and Leonard and Bernard both know how to use a gun."

White: "I'm assuming you're CIA?"

"Yes. John Sherwood." He shook hands with White, then with Lucas. Sherwood had what, at first glance, appeared to be delicate-looking, pale facial skin with a touch of rose on his cheekbones, as if finished with a fine French lotion. On second glance, his face looked as though it had been sanded down, like he was missing a couple layers of skin. He'd taken off the sunglasses and Lucas caught cold green eyes, which had the frigid clink of a fighter pilot's; eyes that might have been chipped from an old weather-worn Coke bottle.

"That's a spy hat you're wearing," White said to Sherwood. "European. Viennese, like in the movies. Don't see those much in Minnesota."

Sherwood started to smile at White as Leonard wandered into the kitchen, carrying an unlit cigar. He stepped past his wife, opened his mouth to say something to Sherwood, dropped the cigar, quickly bent to pick it up...

The two sounds were not simultaneous, though nearly so, as the bullet was traveling at three thousand feet per second, and the sound of the shot itself at only eleven hundred. The high-velocity slug punched through the kitchen window glass two inches above Leonard's bowed head and hit Martha in the cheek below her right eye, splattering blood and bone around the kitchen.

"Jesus! Jesus!" Somebody screamed, a gravelly masculine shriek of either alarm or fear, and Sherwood reeled away from the falling woman. Lucas, who had been looking down the hall toward the living room, jerked away and saw White, her face covered with blood, dropping toward the floor.

Sherwood snagged Leonard by his jacket and yanked him to the floor and Lucas shouted at him, "refrigerator," and another slug punched through, lower, and missed everything, and Sherwood dragged Leonard behind the refrigerator and Lucas grabbed White, who he thought had been hit, to drag her out of the kitchen, but she slapped his hand away and said, "I'm okay, got some spatter," and crawled with him into the living room.

Lucas said, "They gotta have come in from the circle, they gotta be running..." and White, already fumbling for her pistol, shouted, "Go, go, go...."

They scrambled toward the front door, hands and knees, heard Bernie screaming "Mama, mama..." and another marshal shouting at somebody, "Stay down, get in here... roll in here..." and somebody else shouted, "Watch the back door, watch the back..."

Lucas and White had been low-crawling across the entry space. At the front door, Lucas got to his knees and looked out through the small security window in the door, couldn't see anything but trees and parked cars.

Beard shouted, "Stay here! Stay here! Cover Leonard and Bernard, shape up, guys..."

He wasn't shouting at Lucas and White, but at his own men. White had gone sideways, peeked out a window that looked toward the woods where the shot had come from, and snapped at Lucas: "Nothing moving! Don't see anyone! Are they waiting to take another shot, or..."

Lucas: "They're running, they gotta be. They can't wait, not with the muzzle blast from the rifle. You could hear it a mile away. People will be looking at them already. They gotta know there are a bunch of guns in here."

He yanked the front door open, looked out and sideways, ran down the front steps, his Walther in his hand, watching the woods as he went, stumbling a couple of times, the heavy Sorel boots awkward at speed. White was a step behind him, gun up, peering into the woods.

A blue Jeep Wagoneer flashed by the driveway entrance as they ran past the parked SUVs. When they reached the end of the driveway, they saw it stop at the next driveway and two men burst out of the woods, both in parkas, one carrying a rifle, one carrying a spotting scope on a folded tripod.

They popped doors on opposite sides of the Wagoneer and climbed in and Lucas started firing at the truck, felt White line up next to him, as though they were on a shooting range, or a firing squad, and together they put thirty-four rounds into and around the truck which accelerated out of the cul-de-sac and onto the main street.

Lucas reloaded, jammed the Walther back in his holster, took out his iPhone and called 911. When it was answered he shouted, "U.S. Marshal: we've got a woman shot and the shooter is running in a blue Jeep Wagoneer north on Willow Drive in Orono toward Highway 12, it'll be full of bullet holes, shattered back window, at least three guys inside, they're armed and professionals, stop them but don't approach them, they have a rifle and probably other weapons, we need an ambulance right now, right now!"

It all came out in one long sentence, and he could hear the 911 operator shouting at someone else and he gave her the address for the ambulance and turned and saw White running toward her 4-Runner which she'd left parked in the circle so the Witness Protection people could have the driveway. She was in the truck in a minute and accelerated toward Lucas as he stepped into the street and he was repeating everything to a new voice on the 911 call and White skidded to a stop and he climbed in the passenger side and shouted, "Go," and she went.

The new 911 operator was talking to him and he again repeated most of what he'd already said, but more slowly, with road directions as best he knew them, told the operator that they were in pursuit and the operator said everything was coming, but there wasn't much around, so it would be a few minutes before anything got there.

There was no traffic at all. White accelerated across strips of black ice, the tires got loose and she nearly took out a spruce tree, but she got it back and punched the truck onto Willow. Looking down the long straight road, they saw no sign of the Jeep.

There were narrow side roads coming off Willow and Lucas checked them as best he could as White said, "I don't think they'd go in there, lots of dead ends and all tangled up, can't move fast, bet they went to the highway..."

"Probably, but they must've scouted the area, maybe they knew a better way out..."

They were coming up to a cluster of buildings and a U.S. Inn motel and Lucas saw the huge blue Wagoneer in the motel's parking lot, oddly angled in a parking space and he pointed and said "Shelly! Shelly! There! There!"

White took the truck that way, bouncing across a curb past a fire hydrant and between two parked cars and a minute later they were blocking the Wagoneer and were out of the 4-Runner, fresh mags in their pistols.

Lucas called, "Wait it out, wait it out," and they waited behind the 4-Runner, looking for life, as a family gawked at them, trailing roller-suitcases toward the motel's front door and White screamed, "Don't go there, go back to your car. U.S. Marshals. Go back, go back, run!"

The family ran back toward their pickup still trailing the suitcases as Lucas yelled at White, "Don't see anyone, I think they ditched it..."

Lucas got back on his phone, still open to the 911 operator, and said, "The Wagoneer is at the U.S. Inn off whatever the fuck it is, Willow and Highway 12. We're covering it, they're either inside the truck or they're inside the motel or they got picked up here..."

Nothing moved in the Jeep. The back window was mostly shot out and they could see what looked like a dozen bullet holes in the tail gate. White said, "Watch it. I'm gonna go low and peek."

"I gotcha," Lucas said.

He braced his arm on the side of the truck, pistol pointed at the Wagoneer as White scrambled toward the truck in a half-duckwalk, half-run. She sheltered behind the back right fender, got a two-handed grip on her pistol, then peeked in the back window, quickly up-and-down, hopped a couple of feet, then peeked again, more slowly, then stood up a third time for a good look from a different spot.

She turned to Lucas: "Empty..."

Lucas's phone rang, but he rejected it and went back to 911 and told the operator that the truck was empty and that the shooters were either inside the motel or gone.

The operator said, "One minute, two cars. We got more coming. Are you going in?"

"We gotta check the truck," Lucas said, "Then we're going inside."

"Wait for backup, marshal! Wait for backup! It's close!" the operator said.

White had already pulled open the driver's side door and Lucas went that way and his phone rang again: Beard, the lead marshal.

"Where are you?"

Lucas told him and told him that an ambulance was on the way to the house.

White reached out for his phone and Lucas gave it to her and she said, "Looks like there were three of them. We shot up the getaway vehicle, we've got blood in the backseat and the passenger seat, quite a bit of it, and a little blood on the windshield but none on the driver's seat. They've got at least two wounded and one, probably one, still okay, but the driver might have been hit high and that's the windshield blood. They've still got a rifle unless they threw it out the window on the way over here."

Then she listened and said, "Okay, there'll be some cops here in a minute and we're going into the motel to check it out, but I don't see any blood trails on the ground here. I think they're gone."

Lucas held out his hand for the phone and White handed it to him and he said, "I can see three video cameras in this parking lot so if they're running, we've probably got their vehicle on video. As soon as the cops get here..." A cop car pulled into the parking lot as he spoke. "... and there's one here right now. We're going in, we'll try to get the video, you've got to start talking to everybody about tracking them."

"Got it. We'll be there in a couple of minutes, me and Sherwood," Beard said.

"Martha?"

"Martha's dead," Beard said. "Half of her head is gone.""Ah, man. We'll be inside the motel."

We need a uniform," she said.

One of the cops said, "I'll come. I've been here before. More guys are on the way." He stepped back from White and added, "Uh, you've got blood all over your face. You okay?"

"I'm good. Just haven't had time to visit the spa."

Lucas, checking the floor, said, "No blood.""They're gone," White said. To the clerks: "Did some people..."

"Nobody came in here."

The cop was at the desk: "You've got recorders on your cameras. We need to see the video."

The slightly taller of the two short clerks said, "Uh. Yeah. Back here," thumb over her shoulder toward a back room. There was not a security station, as such, but a video panel divided into four sections, one for each of the three cameras focused on the parking lot and one on the front desk. The clerk dialed up the section that showed the Wagoneer bouncing into the parking lot and jamming itself halfway into a parking spot.

Seconds later, another SUV, this one cream-colored, and smaller, pulled into the lot and two people, a man and a woman, got out of the Wagoneer, one from the driver's seat and the other from the front passenger seat.

Both of them were average height or a bit taller for their sex, strong-looking. They wore dark blue wool-and-nylon ski masks, covering their hair, obscuring their faces. The man from the passenger seat was hunched, staggering, hopping on one leg, apparently wounded. The woman, the little they could see of her, showed a steak of what appeared to be blood around the rim of her eye socket.

"Window blood was from her, we scalped her," White said; the comment was technical, rather than satisfied.

The staggering man got in the back of the new SUV while the driver of that vehicle and the female driver of the Wagoneer opened the back door of the Jeep and carried the man from the back seat to the cream-colored vehicle and pushed him in beside the staggering man. As they did that, a pistol fell out of the wounded man's belt; the woman stooped and picked it up, and seconds later, thrust the sniper rifle and the spotting scope onto the floor of the back seat along with the pistol.

White said, "Subaru, I think."

The two drivers got into the small SUV which pulled straight through the parking lot and out of sight of the video camera.

"O-M-G, that was..." the clerk began, and then, "There's another camera further back that'll catch them going out. Let me freeze this one and see if I can get some plates..."

She rolled the video back and got the plates from the second vehicle, which was a Subaru, as White had said.

Lucas went back to 911 and read the license plate numbers and a description of the two vehicles to the operator and waited. She was back in a minute: "They're from Hertz and National. We're putting out a bolo on the Subaru and we'll get photos of the renters from car rental companies... Got that started."

"Call me back when you get anything. We've got a murdered woman and these guys are professional shooters, so warn everyone."

"That's already done, we've got Orono and Wayzata and everybody else swarming the highways, looking for the Subaru," the operator said. "I'll call you..."

White and Lucas filled them in and Beard said, "Got that much, anyway, at least a couple guys down." He was red-faced, frantic, trembling with energy that had nowhere to go. Sherwood stood behind him, hands in his coat pocket, icy calm. He smiled at Lucas and White and said, "Not bad, the shooting. We've got a big problem, though. I've got to make a call. Don't go anywhere."

"We've got everything available looking for the Subaru," White said. "Tell that to whoever you're calling."

"That's not my problem, that's yours," Sherwood said. "My problem is, somebody gave up the Sokolovs: identity, location and time. We've got a leak and a bad one. That's a much more serious problem than three wounded Russian scuzzballs on the loose."

Beard looked at him for a moment, ran a hand through his hair, then asked, "A leak? My side or your side?"

"A good question," Sherwood said. He stepped away toward the hall: "Good luck with the chase. If you catch up with them, try to keep somebody alive long enough that we can have a chat. I'll go make my call."

"Hey," White called after him. "Summers or Sokolovs?"

"Used to be Summers, until fifteen minutes ago. We'll have to find a new name for them now. Sokolov is the original — Masha, Leonid and Bernard."

"I'll keep it in mind," White said. "I need to find a restroom and wash off my face."

The desk clerk offered to show her where it was, and White followed her out. Beard turned to Lucas and said, in a stricken voice, "On the Derrick Beard one-to-five shitstorm scale, this is a Category Five. Martha, my god, her head blew up, like, like..."

He didn't know what it was like.

Then the family came back with their rolling suitcases. They all turned to look, and the man asked, "Can we still check in?"

Nikitin: "What! What!"

She was looking in the rear-view mirror: "In the street behind us..."

She was leaning on the gas pedal as the bullets started popping through the back of the truck. Orlov cried out and said, "Hit!" and then, the impacts coming like hail on a tin roof, "Hit again..."

Nikitin was hit next, then Abramova was hit in the rim of her left ear, blood spattering the windshield, but she ignored it and put a phone to her other ear and shouted into it, "Crash pickup, three wounded, three minutes."

The incoming bullets had all been fired in four or five seconds and they ran away from them and Nikitin turned in his seat, groaned and asked Orlov, "Matvey... how bad?"

Orlov groaned and Nikitin said, "Matvey..."

"One above my belt in my back... no exit. One in my butt and down my leg. Bleeding is bad. Bleeding is bad." He groaned again. He was slumped over in the back, but held up a hand, saturated with scarlet streaks of blood.

Nikitin: "Katya. How bad?"

"I have a new hole in my ear," Abramova said. "I will not bleed out. And you?"

Nikitin had pulled down the sun visor, then pushed up the cover on the mirror on the back of the visor, and was peering at his neck. "In my butt and the side of my neck. I don't think it hit the carotid, it's not pumping but it's bleeding, small hole in, bigger out, but it might have been a fragment. I think it hit the headrest first..."

"Two minutes or less," Abramova said.

Orlov: "I can't walk."

"We'll carry," she said.

The truck ricochetted off a pothole and Orlov screamed, groaned, said, "Don't do that..."

She did it again, because she couldn't slow enough to miss the potholes, and Orlov screamed each time and began farting, and he screamed with the farts and Nikitin half-groaned and half-laughed and said, "Mat, you dirty piece of shit..."

Abramova glanced over the seat at Orlov in the back and asked, "Mat, can you put on your mask? Can you get your mask out?"

"Yes..." Another groan.

Nikitin had taken a black ski mask out of his pocket and was pulling it over his head, and when it was on, reached across to Abramova and pulled a mask out of her parka pocket and dropped it in her lap. She waited until she was clear of traffic and then quickly pulled it over her face.

Three miles away, Melor Titov was sitting in a cream-colored Subaru and when the call came in — "Crash pickup" — he smothered a groan, blurted, "On the way," and put the little SUV in gear. He'd had some training, in avoidance and escape driving, but much more in computer systems and language, and he wanted nothing to do with this hit team.

His job was acquiring papers, not doing crash pickups for killers. If he didn't do it, he might be next on the kill list; surely would be, if he didn't show up at the motel parking lot, and it wouldn't be a gentle death. Some display of bravery and resolution was critical, but the quicker he could get back to his regular job in Chicago, the happier he'd be.

He pulled a black ski mask over his head and took off.

Abramova: "I don't see... Yes! He's here!"

The small SUV was right there, behind them, and Nikitin opened his door and Abramova shouted, "Lev, don't wait, get in if you can! Melor and I will take Mat!"

Nikitin nearly fell but managed to stagger and hop to the open back door of the Subaru and crawl inside, his injured leg numb with the impact of the bullet, the neck wound burning like fire. Behind him, he could see a bystander staring at them as Abramova shouted, "Move, move," and he dragged himself further across the back seat and Abramova and the burly driver of the Subaru shoved Orlov almost on top of him. Orlov looked at them with glassy eyes and his lips moved but nothing came out of his mouth, then a rifle, pistol and spotting scope hit the floor at his feet and the backdoor slammed and then the Subaru driver and Abramova were in the front seats and the car was moving.

He slowed to the speed limit as he approached a cross highway, took them onto the highway, accelerated to speed again, for half a mile, then took them into a residential neighborhood, watching the mirrors, accelerating when he safely could, and three or four minutes later, pulled into a narrow, heavily wooded lane that led back to a little-used boat launching ramp.

Another Jeep, this one black, a Wrangler, Titov's personal car and positioned as the disaster pickup vehicle, was waiting for them. The wounded trio were in the new car in a minute, and the Jeep rolled out of the lane, through the neighborhood, and out on the highway again.

"Fifteen minutes to the house," Titov grunted. "This is fucked. This is so fucked."

"They were very fast, too fast," Abramova said. "Two shooters, a tall one and a short one."

"Sokolov?" Titov asked.

"I missed him, I might have hit his wife," Nikitin said. "It was like he knew it was coming. He ducked down just as I squeezed the trigger. I fired a second time but couldn't see what happened and then we were running."

Titov looked at Abramova: "How much damage?"

"Not much, hit in the ear," she said, brushing back her blond hair to show him the sticky blood still leaking out of the rim of her ear. She was Circassian, with the pale white complexion and long blond hair of her particular tribe, and the pallor vibrated with the crimson blood. "Lev and Mat are bleeding badly, we need to stop it."

"Thirteen minutes, maybe twelve," Titov said. He slowed as a police car, light bar flashing at them, sped past in the opposite direction, headed for the hideout.

Abramova, sitting in the passenger seat, unlocked her safety belt and got to her knees to look at the men in the back.

"Drive straight and easy," she told Titov, got her feet underneath her, and climbed over the seat into the back, between the two men.

Orlov groaned when she tumbled onto one of his legs and Nikitin asked, "What are you doing?"

"I'm going to plug Matvey, if I can find his wounds... and you, too."

The three members of the team had gotten Russian Army combat medical training, which was barely adequate under the best circumstances, before they moved on, individually, and several years apart, to GRU Unit 29155. Members of the Unit were not expected to encounter full-on combat. Titov had different training, as an expert in exfiltration and life as an American.

So, knowing not much, Abramova dug into a pants pocket and pulled out a five-inch switch blade, flicked out the blade. She stripped off her parka and pulled off her flannel shirt and cut it into patches. Orlov was lying on his side, with the wounds up, and Abramova pulled up his coat and Orlov groaned again. He had a pistol in a clip on his belt, and she set it aside.

Using the knife, Abramova cut away his shirt and undershirt, found a bullet wound in his back, with no exit wound. Blood was squeezing out onto his sodden clothing, and she pushed a wad of flannel into the wound, saw blood on Orlov's leg, cut his jeans away, and put another wad of flannel into the bullet hole in his butt. Again, there was no exit wound.

As Titov said, "Six minutes," she turned to Nikitin and said, "Show me."

He showed her, and she plugged the wound in his leg as best she could, although she didn't think it was very good. The neck wound was more superficial, and no longer bleeding heavily. "We need the medical kit, the bleed stop," she said. "Lev could be okay long enough to find a plane ride, but Mat... Mat needs a doctor, and soon. And, I think, he might need blood."

Titov said, "One minute."

He'd been activated when the Russian SVR learned that Orono, Minnesota, had been chosen by Sokolov and the Marshals Service as the place where Sokolov would live under the name Leonard Summers.

The house Titov rented was in an area of mixed newer, suburban-style homes and older farmhouses; it was one of the old farmhouses, on six acres of land. The landlord told him, when he rented it, if he stayed there long-term, he was welcome to revive the vegetable garden in back, and to harvest the Concord grapes off a long arbor that ran along the side of the house.

Titov had no interest in growing vegetables, or making wine, but was interested in the isolation provided by the large plot of land, and the cover created by the yard's mature bushes and trees.

He'd met only two neighbors, a man and wife, had mentioned that he was looking for a permanent place, closer to the big lake, Minnetonka, and that he hoped to be in the new place before summer. Until then, he was scouting. He'd said he was in corporate sales with General Mills, transferring in from the Cleveland office, and when asked about a wife and family, said that he was "alone" for the time being.

The neighbors sympathized, and the husband said, "You want my best advice... Go Vikes."

The American football fan Leon Jackson, who laughed easily, did that, and said, "It's not that hard, giving up on the Browns." Melor Titov, the sleeper agent, was actually a Bears fanatic.

"Got that, brother. Did you see the game where the Browns were up by thirty-three, and the Vikes came all the way back and won?"

Jackson groaned: "What a disaster." They talked about that for a moment, then the neighbors waved, went on their way, and they hadn't spoken since.

Now, moving fast out of the shooting scene, Titov pulled into the long gravel driveway and Abramova said, "No bounce! No bounce, slow is better."

With no one around to see them, they first moved Orlov into the house and put him on a clean sheet on the living room carpet. They helped Nikitin in next, placed him on another sheet, on the far side of the carpet.

Abramova said, "We need to see the wounds, see what we're dealing with. Put some of the bleed-stop on them."

"I'll cut," Titov said. "You get the medical."

All three were familiar with western personal computer systems, and were trained for work in Germany, Netherlands and England. All spoke some level of German, Dutch, and English. Nikitin spoke German at a native level, Orlov had perfect Dutch and Abramova's English was excellent, but accented. They hadn't been trained to operate in the U.S., but the European countries were similar enough that they could manage, and they'd had a ten-day crash course in American travel, clothing and shopping procedures.

Guns were difficult to come by in the continental countries and England, and to obfuscate the actual origin of their assassinations, Nikitin primary deployed knives and clubs acquired locally and abandoned after the hit. He was also an exceptional rifle shot, and expert with handguns. In America, with a professionally protected target, and easy access to all kinds of firearms, they expected to rely on guns.

Titov was an outsider, not yet entirely trusted by the other three; he was with the team, but not yet of it. He spoke flawless, unaccented Midwestern English, and specialized in getting Russian NOC's in and out of the country. He could provide Russian intelligence operators with money, weapons, and good IDs, including real American passports, excellent Green Cards, Illinois driver's licenses and functioning credit cards. He knew doctors who would treat patients without asking questions, for good hard American dollars. He was an adequate shots with both rifles and pistols and an excellent driver.

He'd acquired all the necessary IDs and passports for the team and had drop-kicked it all to Berlin, Germany in a Russian diplomatic bag, where it was picked up by the team. When they'd arrived in Chicago, he had provided them with a gear bag that included weapons, a medical kit, a dozen burner phones, ski masks, and an always-useful roll of black gaffer tape.

The Russian embassy had also dropped him two silenced Beretta machine pistols. He was a member of a rough-and-ready country shooting range west of Chicago. He couldn't test the machine pistols, but he had taken Nikitin to the range as a guest, to get the Russian sniper comfortable with the chosen rifle, a Sig Spear in .277 Fury, mounted with a variable-power Leopold scope.

Nikitin, after sending twenty rounds downrange at two hundred yards, had pronounced the rifle "the best thing I've ever shot."

Titov: "It should be. It cost more than four thousand dollars and the ammunition is more than a dollar and a half a round."

The three-team had begun jokingly referring to Titov as the консьерж, or concierge.

Aside from the weapons bought by Titov, the team had smuggled in a Chapstick which was carefully isolated, swathed in cotton, in a plastic soap box. It was tucked inside a Dopp kit with shaving cream, throw-away razors, toothpaste, a toothbrush, deodorant and a small bottle of ibuprophen.

The medical kit Titov had put together, mostly from a Walgreens drugstore, included two boxes of QuikClot, bandages soaked with kaolin, a kind of clay, over-the-counter pain killers and a single tube of illegal opiates for bigger problems.

Abramov and Titov jammed the QuikClot bandages into the wounds suffered by Nikitin and Orlov, and the external bleeding stopped, but Abramova looked at Titov across Orlov's body, shook her head and said, "The blood stays in the body, but inside, he still bleeds. We need something better."

White came back, her face washed, and Sherwood asked, "I know you guys were a bit preoccupied when you went after them, but can you remember... did you hear a buzzing sound, or a flapping sound? A drone?"

Lucas looked at White and shrugged, and she said, "I didn't."

Sherwood: "You two wandered around that area where the shooter would have been, and you saw no tracks?"

"Nothing but small animals and some deer," Lucas said. "From where that shot came from, we would have crossed the tracks if they were there. They had to have come in after we went past."

Beard: "Unless they were further back, you said one guy had a rifle and another had a spotting scope... ."

Lucas shook his head: "Too much brush. They couldn't have been more than a hundred yards out, unless they were up in that big cottonwood, but they weren't. It would have taken them longer to get out to the street after the shots. We looped through that whole area and would have crossed their tracks. There was nothing out there."

"Nothing but deer, coons and rabbits," White added.

"Then why bother with the spotting scope?"

"Maybe they didn't know how thick it was, or how far back they would be, until they got there," Lucas said.

"The snow's been on the ground for what, two weeks?" White said. "If it wasn't a drone, maybe they checked the spot from a satellite, even a Google satellite photo, so they knew the layout but not the specifics."

Sherwood: "We need to go back to the house and see where they shot from. I want to look at the overhead." He turned to Beard. "Unless the marshals have already located it?"

"No. My guys are clustered around Leonard and Bernie," Beard said. He scratched his forehead, rubbed his nose. "Nobody — nobody — is going to see them or get close to them. When we get some authorities on the scene to lock it down, we'll leave and keep moving until we have a secure spot to put them. Get them back to Washington. Minneapolis is burned to the ground. Gotta sell that house."

"If there's a drone, they could track your people as they move," Lucas said.

"Not as far and fast as we'll be moving," Beard said.

"You have to understand that the Sokolovs are a major prize for us, and a major problem for the Russians," Sherwood interjected. "It's possible that the Russians have detailed a satellite to watch over the operation, like Miz White suggested. It would be better to put the two of them in a bunker somewhere."

White: "You got bunkers?"

Sherwood nodded at her: "You know what I mean. An obscure concrete-block third-floor condo with marshals in the lobby and every hallway and on the roof with automatic weapons. Maybe a place without an outside-facing window."

"We'll find something," Beard said. "Let's get back."

The cop who'd come in with Lucas and White had been on his radio and he came over to say, "We've got six guys here and crime scene from the BCA is on the way. We'll lock everything down. Who do I talk to when we're done?"

"That'd be me," Beard said. "I'll give you a card."

"Should have had the third-row seats up," Sherwood said. "That's a miss."

There was more blood on the windshield in front of the driver, but from what they'd seen in the video, the woman hadn't seemed seriously wounded.

"Not bad," Beard said. "Of course, it was a big target."

"But eighty, ninety yards away and moving," Sherwood said. "I'm somewhat impressed."

"You should be," White said. "Me'n Lucas shot them full of holes."

She put up a gloved hand and Lucas slapped it.

"Revenge," Sherwood said. "To make a point to anyone else who might think about defecting. He was one of Vladimir Putin's appointments, so it's personal."

"Can you tell us anything more about him, Leonid, or about the shooters?" White asked.

Sherwood thought for a moment, then said, "I don't see why not. Quite a bit of it has been in one magazine or substack or another. Including some Russian newspapers."

Leonid Sokolov, he said, had been a colonel in the FSB, the Federal Security Service, focusing on counter-intelligence. He was an investigator, interrogator, judge and executioner, all rolled into one. If he found Russians working for western intelligence services, he was brutal in his work, which sometimes, if not always, involved the torture of innocent witnesses.

"He would torture family members, friends, associates. He didn't send the work out. Most of the time, he'd do it himself, along with a couple of his buddies. He would usually do the executions himself, as we heard it. He would have the accused person restrained in a chair and would shoot him or her in the head. Not in the back of the head, but in the forehead. He wanted the accused to see the bullet coming. He wanted to be looking into their eyes when they died. He apparently took a great deal of pleasure in the whole process."

Lucas: "Christ. And we're dealing with him?"

"We are. Anyway, he probably carried out a couple of dozen executions over the years and was widely hated, but appreciated by his superiors, including Putin. He was not being considered for elimination or even demotion, as far as we know. He was comfortable there in Moscow, but a long way from rich, with retirement not too far off. As it turns out, he'd been watching all those moguls and what a mogul's lifestyle could get you. He decided he wanted that: the money. A retirement medal wasn't good enough."

"How did he actually get out with his family?" Lucas asked.

"Mmm. It's a little complicated. Before the Syrian revolution, both Russia and the U.S. had armed forces in Syria, not exactly friends, but not exactly enemies. We occasionally cooperated — what were called deconfliction channels. Usually, just phone calls or radio calls," Sherwood said. "Sometimes, when things really got messed up, we'd all go to a neutral site and try to hash things out. It was a mess over there."

"And you were... ?"

"An observer..." Sherwood put oral italics on the word, "... at a deconfliction conference. I was sent to monitor the discussion. As was Sokolov, from the Russian side. He knew who I was, and I knew who he was. When we had a moment alone, he suggested that we have a chat. I told him that I wasn't interested in moving to Mother Russia, and he said that he didn't think I would be. But a chat could be profitable for both of us, me in my job, he in his bank account. When I realized what he was suggesting, I asked if he ever vacationed in Istanbul, and he said that he could. Later that day, I gave him a darknet address on a piece of paper the size of a postage stamp, that could be easily swallowed if he had to. A couple of months later, we set up a meet in Istanbul. A week after that, he and his family were in Washington."

White: "Yowza."

"You get anything good from him?" Lucas asked.

"Yes. We got the names of four Russian spies in sensitive positions with the Pentagon. They've all been taken out, they're now in prison. We got a lot of intel stuff confirmed, things that we suspected but weren't sure about, and leads to several other Russians that he thought might be amenable to an approach. That was very interesting, because one of them was already working for us. When we found out that the Russian counter-intel people were aware that he might be vulnerable, we managed to get him out."

Lucas: "So the Russians are pissed."

"Yes. This hit team — they'll be very good, one of their best. Able to improvise, to cope with changing circumstances. Smart. Tough."

"One thing I still don't understand," Lucas said. "Why did they go after Sokolov now? I mean, this minute? Why didn't they wait a week or two, or a month or two, until things were settled down and maybe the Sokolovs would have relaxed a little? When they weren't surrounded by marshals?"

Sherwood shook his head: "Don't know. Maybe they were afraid this was a temporary stop... But... that doesn't seem right. I dunno."

"A deliberate slap in the face, was what it was," White said. "A slap in our face. The Russians want us to know, without being absolutely sure."

Sherwood nodded: "That could be it. A deniable hit. But to get away with a slap, you can't get caught. Get caught, you're risking an embarrassing show trial."

"Let's go see where the shots came from," Sherwood said.

A Hennepin County ambulance was at the top of the drive, engine turning over, a paramedic sitting inside the open back doors, reading his phone. He glanced up and nodded as they passed and went back to his phone.

Beard had arrived a minute earlier. Inside the hideout, he'd peeled off to talk to his men, who were posted around the interior, looking out. Lucas, White and Sherwood headed for the kitchen. They passed Bernie, who was lying on the living room couch, forearm across his eyes. He sobbed once, and then they were in the kitchen. Leonid was nowhere to be seen.

Masha was still on the blood-soaked floor, a tall woman gone small in death, curled up in a fetal position; she looked crumbled, like a paper wad. A butcher-shop odor hung in the kitchen. Sherwood stepped past her, apparently unaffected by the body and blood, looked at a cabinet hit by the slug after it went through Martha's head, and lined it up with a bullet hole in the kitchen window.

"Right in the direction of that big black tree?" he asked.

"Cottonwood, yeah." Lucas wouldn't look directly at Masha, a life gone to waste. He kept his neck bent away and as he looked out the window and said, "That's about right. Let's go check it out. We saw where they came out of the woods, there's enough snow that we should be able to follow their tracks back to where they were set up. Don't think there'll be much to see."

"We gotta look," White said. "Maybe somebody dropped a matchbook from the bar they hang out at."

Sherwood frowned at her, then shrugged: "Marshals are weird," he said.

"We get that way," Lucas agreed. "Let's go."

They walked out the driveway and Lucas saw pencil-thin rims of Masha's blood coming off Sherwood's left shoe. They turned left up the street and White said to Sherwood, "You didn't seem all that upset by the shooting."

"If I'd been hit, I would have been," Sherwood said.

White persisted: "But you've seen shot-up people before."

"Oh, yeah. You know. It was a war."

"Iraq?"

"Some, earlier on. Then some in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then later, some more time in Syria."

"I know a CIA sniper who used to go through there," Lucas said.

"What's his name?" Sherwood asked, curious.

"It's a 'her,' though she won't admit to being with the CIA. She works with an Unspecified Agency. Barbara Cartwright."

"Wow. I know Barb, a bit." Sherwood laughed, shook his head. "She's a piece of work. She's got a legend going. How did you hook up with her?"

"Met her out in Taos, New Mexico, during that virus hassle," Lucas said.

"You're not the guy... there was a marshal who had a daughter..."

"Yeah, that's me," Lucas said. "Me and my daughter Letty."

"Didn't know that, and I should have," Sherwood said. "Wasn't in my backgrounder package. You guys did a nice job out there."

"Lucas certainly thinks so," White said. "His head was the size of a fuckin' watermelon, until he had to start doing regular marshal stuff again."

"Barb about burned down the Albuquerque airport, as I hear it," Sherwood said. "We were all pretty proud of her, the amount of damage she did."

"Two million bucks worth of cars and trucks, up in smoke," Lucas said. "Didn't do the parking garage any good, either. I understand they've been working on the third floor ever since."

"No."

"Why not?"

"I don't allow it." He didn't smile.

White had no response to that, and kept her mouth shut.

They were close to one of the other houses, and a man shouted at them, "Hey! What are you guys doing?"

White shouted back, "U.S.Marshals. Go back inside."

"Did you shoot someone?"

"No."

"We heard a gunshot. A bunch of gunshots."

"All done now. Go back inside. Don't come out here, a crime scene crew is on its way. If you mess up a crime scene, you go to jail."

The man retreated, muttering.

The gunman had set up behind a fallen tree and had used a hand-sized black sandbag on the trunk to steady the rifle. The sandbag was still in place. Three holes in the snow, and elbow and knee prints, marked the spot where the spotting scope had been mounted on a tripod.

"He's a good shot," Sherwood said, looking down toward the hideout. "Threaded that slug over and under quite a bit of brush."

"They were in and out in a hurry," White said, looking at the setup. "No snow melt where the shooter's legs were, or the spotter's knees. They came, they saw, they shot, they ran."

"Which makes me think about a drone again," Sherwood said, looking up at the sky. "Overhead's pretty thin. Maybe it'd be too high to be heard. It spots our SUVs coming in and that triggers the shooters. They were here in what, fifteen minutes? They knew where they were going and exactly how long it would take to get here, where they would go in the woods. They did all that even though they couldn't know that we'd be late arriving."

Lucas nodded and said, "Brass," and pointed. "Don't touch anything."

Sherwood and White looked at the end of a rifle shell protruding from the snow near the log. Lucas bent over it, close enough to see the stamp on the case head, stood up and said, "Huh. Says .277, never heard of it. There's another shell over there, so it's a semi-auto, at least."

"That's the new Army rifle," Sherwood said. "Rare gun, at this point. I guess some of them are getting out to the public, a civilian version. If it'd been a stolen Army rifle, they could have hosed down the whole kitchen and we'd all be dead."

"The American Army, you mean, not Russian," Lucas said.

"Yeah. You can touch the shell, if you want to look at it. This won't be a basic police investigation, looking at a trial," Sherwood said. "These people are not the kind to surrender. It'll come to a bloody end, or if they manage to exfiltrate, nothing at all. We're locking down private jets, by the way. Nothing moves in or out of the local airports without a compete inspection. Wherever they are, they're going by car. They'll have to do something about their wounded."

"I'll leave the shells for the crime scene people — you can never tell what's going to happen. By the way, you also ought to lock down some U.S. Marshal cell phones," Lucas said. "If they were tipped by one of the marshals here, it would have had to have been by a cell phone."

"Yes, I thought of that, and we will do that," Sherwood said. He looked through the woods to the house and said, "This was a nice op, up to the point where you two ran down the driveway and shot them up. That shouldn't have happened. The driver should have been covering them with an automatic weapon, just in case. She didn't."

"You sound disappointed," White said.

"You learn from the mistakes of the dead and wounded," Sherwood said, like a classroom professor. "Somebody didn't think this through, not quite well enough. They didn't think about the Marshal's Service and all the guns you people carry. I'd be more impressed by the hitters if you two were dead at the end of the driveway."

"Thanks," White said.

"Didn't say I'd be happy; just impressed," Sherwood said.

It wasn't a coincidence, because White was feeling the same finger: she asked: "You okay?"

"Yeah. Sorta getting on some hate."

"Where is it?"

"I understand it's in a little lane up by Barret's Pond. Abandoned. No cameras nearby. No way to walk out of there, I'm told, so it looks like there was a third car picking them up. More blood in the Subaru."

"Gimme the address. We'll head up there." Lucas took down the address, and after a last look around, they started walking back to the house. The sky was turning darker, and the cold was getting stronger.

White: "Aw, man, we're the ones who lit them up."

"If one of you is hard enough to be running this op, maybe that's what you would have been told to do." He held up his hands, to fend off objections: "I don't really believe that, because you guys didn't have to run out there as quick as you did. A little slower and they'd have been gone. But I have to ask for your phones as part of the routine. If I didn't, how would I explain that to everybody else? I need all the phones."

"Including yours," Lucas said. "You should call a neutral agency like the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension over in St. Paul. They can take the phones apart as fast as you guys or the FBI and start an hour from now. Beard or one of the other marshals can help you take the phones over to St. Paul, so they'll never be alone with one guy."

Sherwood nodded: "Let's get it done."

White asked, "What am I going to do without my phone? My life's in there. My kids might call."

"Burners," Lucas and Sherwood said together, and Sherwood continued: "We'll pay for them. Get you good ones."

"I'll need to open my contact list so I can copy down phone numbers," White said. "I don't know the phone number of a single person, except my husband's."

"We can do that," Sherwood said. "We'll all do it together. Watching each other."

"You're a suspicious sonofabitch," White said.

"My mother would agree," Sherwood said. "The woman you just referenced."

Sherwood told Beard that he wanted all the phones. "I'm not giving up my phone. I need to stay in touch with my office," Beard argued. "This is a disaster, and you want..."

"I don't just want, I'm demanding. If you need the head of the Marshal's service to tell you so, he will," Sherwood said.

"You go ahead and do that, John," Beard said, moving closer to Sherwood. He was still reacting to the murder and wanted to punch somebody. Anybody.

Lucas said, "Easy there, Derrick."

Sherwood didn't back up. "I don't want to see anyone on a phone. You need to think about this, Derrick: everybody here is a suspect in a major security breach. Anyone who doesn't give up his phone voluntarily and right now, will have his life stripped down to his grade-school days. Oh, and the phones will include mine. Lucas, you come with me, I want you to witness me making a call."

Lucas and Sherwood stepped aside, and Sherwood made the call: "Yes, we're still on the scene but I've got a problem..."

He talked for two minutes, said 'yes' a couple of times.

Sherwood: "Finding the leak is more important than Leonid or his kid or his dead wife. Somebody, who is very well-placed, is talking to the Russians. We need to know who."

Beard waved his arm to take in the house and said, "All these men are longtime marshals. The newest one has ten years in. They're not talking to any Russians."

"Derrick, I believe you," Sherwood said. "But the possibility has to be looked at. Now. Lucas suggests that we turn the phones over to state investigators because they can start pulling calls immediately. My boss said he will arrange for the FBI office here to pick them up, and then either fly the phones to Washington, or, in consultation with Washington, turn them over to the local people who, I'm told, are competent. The government will buy you all burner phones. In the meantime, no calls. We'll get some note paper together and you can start taking down the phone numbers of your important contacts, if you haven't memorized them..."

Sherwood collected phones from all the pissed-off marshals, then made them more unhappy by having the marshals pat down each other for hidden phones. No one had one, and none were found in a search of the four vehicles — the two brought by the marshal's service, plus those belonging to Lucas and White.

"You know what?" White said. "If one of us... any of us... made a call, it would have been done on a burner just before you guys left the airport, and that phone was ditched one minute later."

"I'll will talk to the FBI about searching the area where we came in, along with all the trash cans along the way," Sherwood said "I assume nobody saw anyone throw anything out a car window?"

Nobody had.

Sherwood: "I don't care who looks at the outgoing calls, the locals or your Washington people, but it has to be fast. As fast as possible. If you need somebody to emphasize that to your AIC, I can have somebody in Washington call him. Or her."

"Got it," one of the feds said.

When it was all sorted, Beard said, "It's unlikely that the Russians would have two separate hit teams, but I want my guys to bundle up the Sokolovs in a secure place, a different place. One that we can defend, if necessary, until we get a plane here. Then I want them back in Washington, to wherever you've had them stashed for the last year."

"That we can agree on," Sherwood said. "It won't happen as quickly as you hope. I need to make some further arrangements. I suspect the Sokolovs will be here for another day or two, at least. We have a body to deal with, for one thing. And Derrick — it won't be your guys providing the security. My boss is already talking to the FBI about a full SWAT squad. You guys protect them here, and the feds will pick them up in an armored vehicle. They'll have arranged a place to hide them."

"My guys stand around with their dicks in their hands?"

"If they find that amusing or comforting," Sherwood said. "Yes."

Lucas said to White, "We should go look at that Subaru."

"Probably nothing to look at."

"We should go anyway," Lucas said.

"Then, if anyone asks, you can say you did, and you won't have some little weasel rolling his eyes because you didn't," Sherwood said."You are wise in the ways of bureaucracy," White said. To Lucas: "Let's go get your car, and I'll follow you over."

Sherwood said, "Stay in touch."

"What are you gonna do?" Lucas asked.

"Probably piss off Beard some more," Sherwood said.