Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,68
write it down in your diary.”
Working with Chase and the Manhattan agent in charge, Weaver had put together a working group of carefully chosen surveillance specialists who were told the assignment required the deepest secrecy: they were to be ghosts.
Sansone was not to know that he’d come under any special scrutiny. Stalking them with extreme care through November and December, the group identified more Sansone operators in the Newark area and on Staten Island, with associates as far north as Boston and Bangor, Maine. The South Florida group was believed to be coordinating narcotics purchases for distribution in the Northeast.
By the third week of November, Lucas had returned to Minnesota and a day later drove to Virgil Flowers’s girlfriend’s farm, where Virgil lived, to recruit him for the working group. Frankie, Virgil’s girlfriend, had sat in on the talk, sleeping twins on her lap.
“I’m not complaining, Lucas, but every time I see you, you’re pulling poor Virgil in over his head,” Frankie said. She was a striking woman, as blond as Virgil, short, busty, wickedly intelligent. She and Lucas tended to knock sparks off each other; Lucas liked her a lot.
“You should look a little closer. Virgil doesn’t tend to get pulled unless he wants to go,” Lucas said.
“What are we talking about this time?” Frankie asked.
“Can I talk?” Virgil asked.
Frankie turned her head to him and said, “No. Think of me as your agent.”
“Virgil would technically be part of an interagency federal task force working out of Fort Lauderdale,” Lucas said. “Nobody would know about him except me and Rae and one other marshal and a couple of FBI agents.”
“Man, I’m not a diver,” Virgil interjected. “I only took lessons because I couldn’t afford to fish all day. Since I was off the boat in the afternoons, I got certified. In a week. In a swimming pool, mostly, with two open water dives. I dove a few more times, rental equipment, but I’m not competent. I’m a tourist.”
“We can fix that,” Lucas said. “You’re almost as athletic and smart as I am . . .”
“That’s what everybody says,” Virgil agreed.
“. . . Best of all, you’ve got that hair and that natural, built-in stoner look,” Lucas continued. “By the time we send you down there, in a month or two, you’ll be the best diver in the United States. Thirty, maybe forty days of training.”
“Seriously, no way that could happen, that I’d get that good.”
“Okay, I exaggerate,” Lucas said. “But you’ll be very, very good.”
“But . . .”
Lucas turned and gazed out the living room window, over the November fields at the back of the house. They showed a bit of snow from an early storm, a hint of the coming Minnesota winter. He turned back to Virgil and said, “I talked to the people at the Marshals Service and they understand that you’ve got a family and kids. You could take Frankie and the kids with you. You’ll get an Airbnb house, I don’t know about the view. You’d leave here around the first of December . . .”
“But . . .”
“. . . and fly to the Big Island. Of Hawaii.”
Frankie said, “Wait! The Big Island? With the kids? Instead of December and January in Minnesota? Can Virgil’s mom come to help with the babies and Sam?”
Sam was her youngest child by another father. He hopped in front of Lucas with wide eyes. “I wanna surf!”
Lucas smiled. “We’re talking about a four-bedroom house. Should be room for everybody.”
* * *
It hadn’t all gone as smoothly as Lucas had suggested it might, but Virgil had never believed that it would. He spent parts of thirty-five days and twenty-four nights in the water, trained by two ex-SEALs who did contract work for the Marshals Service. When Virgil asked why they didn’t send the SEALs on the Florida deal, Lucas said, “Look at them.”
They looked more like cops than cops: they looked like cops in movies. Virgil said, “Okay.”
When he was finished with the dive training, Virgil flew back to Minnesota, and a day later, made a trip to the Iowa State Prison at Fort Dodge for a late-night visit. He wore a ski mask as he toured the cells, the cafeteria, the workshops, making photos and movies with his cell phone. The Hawaii house had been rented for two months, and Frankie, Virgil’s mother, and the kids would stay on until the rent ran out at the end of January.