AllFreeNovel
Share Us
William smiled and said, “Not quite yet. Soon.”
Behind him, the television showed Russian trucks on the highway to Kyiv, and a voice-over suggested the Ukrainian capital would probably fall within a day or two.
“Better hurry, or there won’t be any point,” Letty said.
Twenty-Seven
When Letty finished the burrito, Cartwright came by and said, “Time to gun up.”
“I want to look at the Net for one minute,” Letty said.
“No woman on earth ever looked at the Net for one minute,” Cartwright said.
“I need to see if there’s anything from Delores,” Letty said, as they walked toward their room. “I’m starting to feel like we’re out on a limb, and there might be a bureaucrat behind us with a saw.”
“Yeah? I always feel like that,” Cartwright said. “I thought that was what people felt like.”
Cartwright changed into jeans with a black long-sleeved shirt as Letty brought her laptop up, found nothing new from Delores Nowak. She detoured to theWashington Postto see what they had to say about the war. They had a lot to say, but not much more than what Letty had known two days earlier.
Cartwright said to Letty, “C’mon, reading the papers won’t help us. Let’s go.”
After checking out with Kaiser, Letty and Cartwright hustled to their spots in the trees. Bunker told Letty that she was sure they’d been cruised. “They weren’t great at it. They’d slow down when they got close and speed up when they were past. Of course, they didn’t know I was up here watching them.”
Letty got the radio from her, wiped the earbud on her blouse, plugged it into her ear and checked in with Cartwright, who was back in her spot. When Bunker had gone up the driveway, Letty settled back into her hole and looked at her phone. A little after eight: and Kaiser and Cartwright both thought the Russians would come in after midnight, if they came at all.
Letty forced herself to relax. She’d found, as a hunter, that if she relaxed, she was not only physically quieter, but also eliminated a psychological buzz. Almost all nonhunters, including smart ones, scientists, thought the buzz was purely mythical; or bullshit.
Letty disagreed. She believed in it, as did her father. People trained in stakeouts, cops who were friends of her father, had told her that they’d not look directly at a target, either a person or a location, because the people being stalked could pick up on it. An empty mind was worth cultivating, and she had done that.
Letty was watching the road and Cartwright was quiet in the woods behind the motel when Kaiser called at nine o’clock. “Wanted to let you know. Sovern pushed the button on all of it—they tell me the Russian military stuff will start to scatter. Might be too late to do any good, the Russians are pushing hard toward Kyiv, but... they tell me we’ve done everything we can. Ain’t no more, according to the big brains.”
Letty: “John, could you come down and take my spot? I have to phone... home. Like E.T.”
“Give me five minutes: you haven’t heard anything?”
“Not a thing. There’s nobody out here but me.”
Kaiser came down, moving silently along the edge of the driveway; he was almost on top of her before she saw him. Ten minutes later, closed in her room by herself, Letty called Delores Nowak.
Letty said, “It’s done. The hacks substituted some operating systems in the Russian rail’s central sorting computers and we’re scattering military priority boxcars all over Russia. There are some that will probably turn up in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, so the security people in those countries should check all the incoming boxcars from Russia. Some of them may contain military material that they’ll want to impound.”
“Wonderful! I will pass that along,” Nowak said. “We’re all still at work here—we’ve brought in cots. There’s also some concern about a couple of dead bodies at the SkyPort.”
“Who’s concerned?”
“LAPD and the FBI. We’re talking to them. One of the dead men has been identified as a consular officer at the Russian embassy in Washington and is suspected of being GRU. The state department is talking to the embassy. The other man hasn’t been identified. He could be, probably is, a Russian NOC... an operator with nonofficial cover. The FBI is backtracking him now. They were both armed...”
“Does the FBI understand the reason that they’re dead?” Letty asked.
“They know some of it—they’ve been grilling the hotel employees. Digging bullets out of the hallway’s walls, and their crime scenepeople are pulling prints out of the rooms you guys were in. You know the FBI: they want the I’s dotted and the T’s crossed.”
“I’m a little worried about our legal liability...”
“Stop worrying. You are thoroughly covered, even if the FBI doesn’t know it yet,” Nowak said. “We’re about to have an intense interagency discussion of the situation.”
“A clusterfuck.”
“That’s an unkind characterization,” Nowak said. “So what’s next, now that you’re done out there?”
