“Colter. Went okay?”
“Aside from my visitor.”
Caster had been tailing Shaw from the factory in case the three men had learned of the switch and returned for him.
We’re not alone...
Shaw continued, “Could you make him?”
Caster nodded. “Got some good pictures. Sent them to Mack.”
The woman had some excellent facial recognition experts she could call on.
The man pulled out his phone. He read from the text: “ ‘Sergei Lemerov. Former GRU.’ ”
Russian military intelligence.
“In the country on a B-1 temporary. Kicked out of Germany for dirty tricks ops. Believed to have been involved in the assassination of an oligarch in London and an activist in Belarus.”
He looked up. “Couldn’t find his travel particulars. Maybe private, maybe government.”
Shaw said, “His best was two hundred K.”
“Peanuts,” said Caster.
Government shenanigans came with shoestring budgets. With any commercial competitor wishing to buy the stolen S.I.T., $200K would have been a starting point.
“Mack said she’ll try to keep track of him. Anything she finds she’ll send directly to you and Marty.”
“I’ll brief him. Our trio?” A nod back to the factory.
He called up an app on his phone. “The Saudis’re going north on Fifty-five. Probably to Granton Exec airport. They’ll have a G7 or something overseas fueled up. LeClaire started for home, then turned south. He’s on the beltway now.” Caster had put GPS trackers in the wheel wells of the men’s cars.
The men shook hands. “Good working with you, Lenny. You ever get out of town? Could use some help from time to time.”
Caster said, “I stay close to home. Born and bred here. Coach my son’s basketball and daughter’s soccer. But, for a day or two? I could swing it. And I have a feeling whatever you’d have going on, it’d be... interesting. Keep me in mind.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Oh, and by the by? Mack said the oligarch and the activist that Lemerov killed? They were poisoned with polonium. That’s not a fun way to go. Until you’re well out of town, Colter, I wouldn’t drink anything that doesn’t come in a bottle that you don’t open yourself.”
7
Jon Merritt was leaving the Trevor County Medical Services building, following his appointment.
A nondescript place in a nondescript part of Ferrington.
The building needed a peel and scrub. It could have been a slightly better-off cousin of the prison, only ringed by chain-link, not razor wire.
The building was home to maybe forty physicians of many different specialties. You could get treated for every ailment under the sun, from cloudy eyes to painful guts to broken bones to wrinkles, if you considered wrinkles an ailment.
He glanced at the list of offices and he noted one of the larger signs.
Ferrington Psychiatric Clinic
He was thinking of a particular physician he’d been seeing recently. Recalling their first session.
The frumpy doctor, about forty, is in a brown suit. No tie. That must be in a manual somewhere. Strangulation risk. His shoes are laceless slip-ons. His hair is similar to his patient’s—that is, blondish and not abundant, to put it kindly.