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?"