Hidden Prey

on.
    “Give.”
    “Marsha Spivak is the daughter of Benjamin and Maud Svoboda. Her brother, Rick Svoboda, runs a bakery in Hibbing. And there’s another brother named David. Are you getting this?”
    “Yeah, I’m putting it on a scratch pad,” Lucas said. “So that’s the family?”
    “Not quite. Janet and Rick have three daughters, Cheryl, Karen, and Julie. David, we haven’t been able to locate. And then in the Spivak line, Marsha had Bob and Carol, and Bob has two children, Robert Jr. and Heather.”
    “All right, all right. I’ll see if we can fit this—”
    “That’s not all. Your man from Virginia called and asked us to check that telephone call that Bob Spivak made from Wal-Mart. The phone call lasted seven seconds—seven—and there’s not a single fuckin’ thing you can say in seven seconds that isn’t some sort of callback code. The call went to Svoboda’s Bakery in Hibbing.”
    “You gotta be shitting me.”
    “That’s still not all. At this point, we were getting seriously interested, so we went into the vital records to see where everybody was born. Benjamin and Maud Svoboda were both born in Mahnomen County, Benjamin in nineteen sixteen and Maud in nineteen twenty.” Harmon was talking so fast now that he was spitting into the phone. “Their birth certificates came from Mercy Hospital, which burned down in nineteen twenty-eight, so there’s no independent confirmation . . .”
    “Wait a minute . . .”
    “That’s right, dude,” Harmon said, a little overebullient for a fed. “Same hospital where Spivak’s parents were supposedly born. Dutch and Sarah Spivak, nineteen twelve and nineteen fourteen. Dutch and Sarah went abroad twice, once in nineteen sixty-two and again in nineteen sixty-seven, both times to visit Germany and Czechoslovakia, supposedly where their parents came from. But we can’t find any record of their parents.”
    “So it’s all bullshit,” Lucas said. “The birth records. The parents—”
    “Were probably born in Russia. That hospital probably existed, and probably burned down, and there are probably people around whose records were destroyed. You’d never see the connection here, unless you saw these four families involved in some other way,” Harmon said. “We’re bustin’ a Soviet-era spy ring right here in River City. They can’t believe it back in Washington. Uh, is Nadya still around?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Don’t tell her all of this. We don’t want anybody breaking for the door.”
    “I’ll lead her on,” Lucas said. Across the room, Nadya’s eyebrows went up.
    “Do that. And listen, we’re out trying to find a copy of that Inspiration program. Where’d you get yours?”
    “Apple store. But it was a while ago.”
    “Okay. We’re gonna start putting this thing together here, too.”
    “We need to meet. I need to see you and your FBI guys. And I want to bring Nadya. And probably Jerry Reasons, because the Duluth cops have got a piece of this thing, and they’re gonna be around. Reasons is coming here at five o’clock.”
    “We can be there. At least me and one other guy.”
     
    W HEN L UCAS GOT OFF , Nadya said, “What did he say?”
    “He said we’re busting a Soviet-era spy ring.” He told her the restof it, and added, “If we meet with Harmon, don’t tell him I told you all this shit.”
    “Good. Now, does this new family fit in the chart?”
     
    T HE NEW FAMILY FIT , but only through three generations. Both the Spivaks and the Svobodas had fourth-generation children, but if the charts represented the families—and Lucas was now convinced that they did—the youngest generation wasn’t on it.
    “That makes sense if they are Communist-era leftovers,” Nadya pointed out. “The last contact may have been in the nineteen eighties, when these children were not yet born.”
    “Huh.”
    “Which still leaves us stranded. What do we do now? Go see these Svobodas?”
    “I think we’ve got to wait until we talk to the feds, and get Duluth up to speed. There are a couple of different ways to go . . .”
     
    T HEY TALKED IT over for a while, then Nadya went back to her room and Lucas started going through every piece of paper he had.
    In ten minutes, he gave it up as pointless. He didn’t think he was missing anything in the material—he just didn’t have enough material. With time to kill, he tried the TV, came up dry, looked at his collection of newspapers and magazines, gave up on them, and finally