Free Hidden Prey by John Sandford Page B

hockey,” Lucas said. “All I saw was German hockey rinks and the insides of buses. I did get to see the Wall before they knocked it down.”
    “More’n me,” Reasons said.
    The elevator doors opened and they got on. Lucas pushed the button for the top floor, and Reasons pushed it again, just to make sure it was pushed. “Maybe I’ll travel when I retire. The old lady would like to see Moscow.”
    “That’s where she’s from?”
    “Naw. She’s from some one-horse town on the Polish border. Moscow, to her . . . it’d be like seeing Manhattan the first time.”
     
    A S THEY WALKED into the restaurant, a man sitting in a lounge chair with a New York Times looked over the paper, stood up, and asked, “Lucas Davenport?”
    Lucas stopped: “Yeah?”
    The man was wearing twill pants and a neat tweed jacket with a burgundy tie. He was six feet tall, military erect, sandy haired, early thirties, and pleasant, like a hopeful Xerox salesman. “I’m Andy Harmon. Barney Howard probably told you I’d look you up. I saw you going through with the lady, but couldn’t catch you. I thought you’d probably come up here . . . Could I get a word with you?”
    Lucas said to Reasons, “This guy’s a fed. Get a booth, I’ll be with you in a minute.”
     
    L UCAS AND H ARMON drifted toward the windows facing the lake, away from other patrons. Harmon looked too young for a seriousfederal job; if he was not exactly apple-cheeked, the apples had only recently departed. “She give you anything interesting?”
    “She said America has a lot more signs than Russia,” Lucas said.
    Harmon pulled at his lower lip for a couple of seconds, and then said, “That’s true.”
    “Other than that . . .” Lucas shrugged. “We went over to the medical examiner’s office and took prints off the dead guy, Oleshev. She had a fingerprint kit that makes it easy to digitize prints. She gave one of the pickup sheets to the ME and told him where he could order some more in St. Petersburg.”
    “Mmm.”
    “She’s not a cop,” Lucas said. “She’s probably from one of the intelligence agencies that doesn’t deal with bodies.”
    Now he was mildly interested. “How do you know that?”
    Lucas explained and Harmon nodded. “We never really thought she was a cop,” Harmon said. “Something happened here, and they don’t know exactly what it was. She’s supposed to figure it out before we do.”
    “Think she will?”
    “She will be smart,” Harmon said.
    “She might be smart, but if we see everything she does, how does she plan to stay ahead of us?” Lucas asked. “There’s gotta be something else.”
    “Mmm. She’s probably got a shadow operator.” He said it deferentially, as if talking to a moderately slow child.
    “What’s that, in English?”
    “She’s out here in the open, picking up everything you get. Then, even though they don’t know exactly what’s going on, they’ve probably got some ideas of their own—some conjectures, maybe some contacts who might know something. So she sends everything she gets from you back to the embassy, and her controller bounces it back to the shadow op. So he’s got everything they know and everything we know . . . and maybe he stays a few steps ahead.”
    “What does he do if he figures it out?”
    Harmon shrugged. “Takes care of it himself. Or maybe, if it doesn’t jeopardize whatever they’re doing here, Nadya feeds the information back to you and you make the bust.”
    “Well, Jesus.” Lucas had never encountered anything like it.
    “As for us . . . We’d like to know if they’ve got an organization here and what it’s been doing. It could be completely commercial—tracking grain prices, that sort of thing. Then . . . maybe not.”
    “And I just ride along,” Lucas said.
    “Don’t worry about it,” Harmon said. “This dead guy, nobody will miss him much, except maybe his old man. He was an idiot. That’s what people say . . .”
    Lucas