The Eighth Sister

by Robert Dugoni

  He hurried to the front entrance, holding the coat closed to hide his torn shirt. Most of the men exiting wore long wool coats over tuxedos or expensive suits. Jenkins looked like a homeless vagrant. He dodged and weaved his way through the crowd to one of the doors. A middle-aged man in a black vest and matching bow tie stood just inside the doorway, thanking patrons for coming and wishing them a good night.

  “Izvinite,” Jenkins said. “Ya ostavil svoi veshchi s proverkoy pal’to.” Excuse me. I left my belongings with coat check.

  The man considered Jenkins from head to foot and quickly dismissed him. “Nyet,” he said.

  “I left my hat and gloves at the coat check,” Jenkins said again in Russian. “I need to retrieve them.”

  The man looked repulsed. “Where is your ticket for your belongings?” he said.

  “I’ve misplaced it,” Jenkins said.

  “Then show me your ticket for tonight’s performance.”

  “Please. It will only take a moment.”

  The man shook his head. “Very convenient, but no.”

  “Then let me describe my belongings and you can get them for me.” He needed to get the man away from the door.

  “I am not your valet. Go away or I will summon the police.”

  Jenkins stepped back, hoping to find another door either unattended or with a less diligent doorman. If he had to, he’d go around the building and see if he could find the alley. He glanced at the crowd in the plaza, the Bolshoi patrons streaming away from the front of the building—everyone except one man, who was charging forward.

  Federov.

  Federov looked above the heads in the crowd. At six foot five, Charles Jenkins was seven inches taller than the average Russian male. As he surveyed the crowd, Federov heard people shouting and turned toward the noise. A commotion appeared to have broken out at one of the doors to the building. He rushed toward it. Several people lay on the ground. He pushed and shoved and stepped over the bodies, drawing protests and some resistance.

  “Police business!” Federov shouted. He held up his credentials to get people to back away. “Police business!”

  He helped a man in a black vest and tie to his feet. The man looked flustered but unharmed. “He ran into the building,” the man said. “He said he left his hat and gloves. A vagrant.”

  “What did he look like?” Federov rushed, fumbling in his pocket for the photograph.

  “Black,” the man said. “He was black and very big.”

  Federov didn’t bother with the picture. “Which way?” he said.

  “That way.” The man pointed. “He said he was going to the coat check.”

  Federov entered the building and hurried down the hall, avoiding those people he could, knocking others to the side. Farther down the hall, he saw people being similarly knocked aside, like bowling pins in an alley. Then he saw a head above the others. Charles Jenkins turned and looked over his shoulder. The two men made eye contact. Jenkins took off.

  Federov stepped over and around the people Jenkins had strewn on the floor, following signs for the coat check. A crowd had gathered around the desk, clerks taking tickets and retrieving coats, fur hats, and gloves. Federov leapt up and down, like a man on a pogo stick, trying to see above the crowd. To the far left he saw a door open and shut.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Step aside. Police business. Police business. Move.”

  With effort, he reached the door but paused before pushing it open, uncertain whether Jenkins waited to ambush him on the other side or to shoot him with Volkov’s gun. He pushed the handle and slowly opened the door. No shots rang out. Instead he heard the piercing wail of an alarm and saw the metal door at the far end swing shut. He ran toward it, reached for the metal bar, and slammed into the door. It did not budge.

  He stepped back and barreled his shoulder into the door. It moved, but only an inch. He stepped back again, raised his shoe, and kicked at the handle near the latch. The door shook but did not open. Jenkins had blocked it, somehow, from the other side.

  Bolshoi security ran into the hallway, shouting at him.

  “Help me!” Federov held up his credentials. “Help me to get the door open.”

  The three men pressed their shoulders against the door, grunting and groaning. The door opened another inch. They stepped back, counted to three, and rushed forward. The door opened a foot. Federov looked out the opening. On the other side, a large blue garbage bin had been shoved against the door. “Again,” he said.

  They pushed again. The door opened enough for Federov to squeeze through, and he stepped into an alley. He looked left. A dead end. He rushed to his right, to a street, and looked in both directions. People leaving the Bolshoi hurried to get out of the cold. He did not see Jenkins. He pulled out his phone as he jogged back down the alley, issuing orders and instructions. As he spoke, he heard voices filtering down from above, and he looked up at a strand of lights crisscrossing a restaurant. He reached for a door in the alley. It opened. He took the steps two at a time, coming to a landing at the back of a café. Inside, neatly dressed people from the Bolshoi ate pastries and drank coffee, with no indication of a commotion or disturbance having recently passed through. Jenkins had not come this way.

  Federov turned, about to climb the stairs to the next landing, when he noticed a gate blocking a descending staircase. He pushed on the gate. It, too, swung open. Going up would make no sense. Jenkins would be trapped.

  Federov removed his gun from its holster and slid down the stairs with his back pressed to the wall. He swung his body around the landing, taking aim. No one. He continued down the final set of stairs to ground level, crossed a darkened hall, pushed on the handle of another door, and stepped out into a second alley. He heard a car engine, turned, but saw no lights. The car emerged from darkness. Federov leapt to his right. The car clipped his leg and spun him. He hit the ground hard, rolled, and sat up, firing several shots as the car reached the end of the alley and turned left. Federov got to his feet and stumbled to the street, gun raised, but the car had turned again, and was gone.

  16

  As they drove out of Moscow, Charles Jenkins again asked the woman her name. Again, she declined to tell him, but not for the reason he thought. “It would not be good for either of us if you were to know my name,” she said. “In fact, I would suggest that you close your eyes and not pay attention to any of the details of where we are going.”

  Jenkins believed her, though he was far from convinced he could trust her. Still, she had been true to her word. She could have left the hotel and not looked back, left Jenkins to fend for himself, but she had not. Regardless of whether he could fully trust her or not, at present he had two goals: to keep moving forward and to determine what she knew.

  The woman tossed her glasses out the window. Ten minutes later, she pulled to a stop and discarded the wig in a drainage ditch. Without her wig and glasses, she looked to Jenkins to be mid-to-late forties, though heavy smoking might have prematurely aged her. She had crow’s feet around her eyes and her lips, and she’d lit up a cigarette the moment they’d left Moscow’s city limits. The interior of her car smelled like an ashtray. He cracked the window to get fresh air.

  “It’s a bad habit,” she said. “Especially when stressed.”

  After a thirty-minute drive and three cigarettes, she exited the expressway and weaved along suburban streets, eventually parking outside a multistory apartment building, one of several in a cluster. “We must be quiet when we go in,” she said. “Communist doctrine remains prevalent in the elderly, and it was not so long ago that neighbors spied on neighbors to gain favor with the state. People here do not mind their own business.”

  They stepped from the car into the cold. The moon peeked out from behind the haze, painting the tableau a charcoal gray. The trees, stripped of leaves, stood silent in the planters. As Jenkins approached the woman’s apartment building he heard a dog bark, a mournful, far-off wail. They stepped inside the lobby undetected and m
oved to the elevator. It arrived empty. They rode it to the fourth floor. The woman stepped off first. Jenkins followed. At her apartment door she used a key to open several locks and hurried inside, Jenkins behind her. He set his backpack on the floor as the woman closed the door, reapplied the locks and slid a chain into the slot. Only then did Jenkins let out a sigh of relief and allow himself a moment to relax.

  “Vodka?” the woman said.

  “Yes,” Jenkins said.

  The apartment was typical of what Jenkins had read about Soviet-era housing, when personal space was considered to be antirevolutionary. It consisted of the small entry with a coat stand and a narrow closet. The kitchen was to the left; a sitting room to the right doubled as a bedroom, partitioned with a four-panel divider. The kitchen was just large enough for one person to stand between a two-burner stove on one side and a sink beneath two cabinets on the other. As with the car, the apartment smelled of cigarette smoke, despite a cold breeze from the kitchen window opened a fraction of an inch.

  The woman turned on a radio and lowered the volume. She opened a freezer and removed a bag of vegetables, pressing it to her eye, before she retrieved a bottle of Stolichnaya.

  “Sorry about that,” Jenkins said, keeping his voice soft.

  “I would have done the same.” She retrieved two glasses from the cabinet and poured two shots. She lifted her glass. Jenkins reciprocated.

  “Here’s to luck,” she said.

  The vodka burned the back of his throat but tasted good just the same.

  “Do you wish for some tea?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “I have pastries.” She opened the refrigerator. “They are not fresh but—”

  “No, thank you,” he said, continuing to evaluate her.

  She kept the kitchen light off, but ambient light from the moon seeped through the sheer curtains covering the windows, painting the kitchen in black-and-white. She grabbed the kettle with her free hand and set it on the counter. The lid pinged when she removed it, and she filled the kettle from the faucet. Jenkins pushed aside the curtains and looked down on an interior courtyard crisscrossed by clotheslines, some bearing articles of clothing.

  He removed the weapon he’d taken from Volkov and placed it on a half-round table beneath that window. The woman turned at the sound of the gun hitting the table.

  “Where did you get that?” She set the kettle on the front burner.

  “I ran into one of the FSB agents who knew me in the hotel bathroom.”

  “Did you kill him?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Possibly.”

  She struck a match and turned a knob. The burner emitted the faint odor of gas before igniting in flaming blue fingers. She adjusted the knob and dropped the spent match into the sink. Still holding the bag of frozen vegetables to her face, she moved toward the table.

  “It is a PSS,” she said.

  “What is a PSS?”

  “Pistolet Spetsialnyj Samozaryadniy. Semiautomatic. Accurate up to twenty-five meters. The sealing cartridge neck prevents the escape of a flash or smoke and virtually no noise.”

  “No suppressor needed?”

  “No. It makes the weapon easier to conceal and is favored by FSB special forces.” She pulled out the chair across from him, the legs scraping against the linoleum, and sat, looking as emotionally and physically spent as Jenkins felt. He’d been running, literally, on adrenaline.

  “We can expect that Federov will have much at his disposal to find you,” she said.

  “Can he track you somehow? What about your car?”

  She gave this some thought. “The disguise will make that unlikely, and the car has plates for another since destroyed. Still, we should not stay long. Tell me why you are here.”

  In for a penny, in for a pound, Jenkins decided. Talking might also be the only way to learn the woman’s involvement. “The first visit, I was to provide discreet knowledge of a Russian double agent, information the FSB presumably already possessed, but that would make me look as though I was capable of obtaining highly classified information. On the second visit I was to provide Federov information on a woman who worked in the Russian nuclear energy department.”

  “Uliana Artemyeva,” she said.

  “You know of her?” Jenkins asked.

  “I know she was suspected to have been the confidential source providing the information. However, that was never confirmed. Russia does not like to broadcast each time it has its nose rubbed in the mud.”

  “How did she die?”

  She shrugged. “Natural causes, but many in Russia suspected of betrayal die of natural causes . . . or suicide.”

  The kettle on the stove whistled. She left the frozen vegetable bag on the table and moved to retrieve the kettle. “You told your FSB contacts that Uliana Artemyeva was one of the seven sisters, yes?” She pulled two mugs and two saucers from a sparsely furnished cabinet, and a box of tea from a drawer below it. She set the box on the table and filled the two mugs with hot water.

  “Since she was dead,” Jenkins said, “the information could not be confirmed nor denied.”

  “It was information meant to impress your contact.” She set Jenkins’s mug on the table. “Cream or sugar?”

  “No,” Jenkins said. “And in answer to your question, yes, the information was intended to impress that I could obtain classified information.” He pulled a packet of tea from the box, opened it, and dunked the tea bag in his mug.

  “Who sent you here?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “What did this person tell you?”

  Jenkins sipped at his tea and felt the water burn his upper lip. He blew on the liquid and set the cup down. “He said Vladimir Putin knew of the seven sisters during his time working for the KGB.”

  “This is true,” she said.

  “He said Putin commissioned an eighth sister to hunt down the other seven and that she had already identified and assassinated three of the seven.”

  “This I do not know,” she said, “though I would doubt its accuracy.”

  “My job was to determine the name of the eighth sister.”

  “And what?”

  “Then I was done.”

  “Zarina Kazakova and Irena Lavrova,” the woman said. “Who is the third sister?”

  “Olga Artamonova.”

  She sat back, seeming to ponder this.

  “Who do you work for at the CIA?” Jenkins asked.

  “If you are a case officer then you know I cannot tell you that,” she said. “If you are not, then, Mr. Jenkins, it is better for all concerned if I do not tell you about myself or my handler. But let me ask, how well do you know this contact of yours?”

  Jenkins blew on the surface of his tea before sipping again. “I worked for him years ago when I was a new agent. But I haven’t worked as a case officer for many years.”

  She looked to be considering this, then asked, “Why then did he choose you?”

  Jenkins gave her question some thought. “I speak Russian. And I had a built-in cover for coming to Russia. My business provides security for an investment company with a branch office in Moscow. And I’ve had experience with the KGB. I was tactically trained and could start immediately.”

  “If you have not been a case officer for many years, why did you agree to do this?”

  Soft music, the strings of a violin, came from the radio on the counter. Jenkins thought of Alex and CJ and his unborn child and explained his situation. “Ordinarily I’m not a man motivated by money. Never have been. But things have changed.”

  “You had a pressing need.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

  She looked to a clock on the wall. “If we are going to do anything, we need to move now. By this time tomorrow I suspect your face and name will be all over Moscow television and newspapers. And you are not exactly hard to miss.”

  Jenkins shook his head. “Federov won’t do that. He won’t want to be embarra
ssed that I’ve gotten away. He was very concerned that I was trying to make him look like a fool to his superiors. I suspect the FSB will keep this quiet and try to find me some other way.”

  “Even so, the FSB oversees border security, so you can expect that your picture will be sent to all border guards and customs officials by morning, if not already. Getting you out of Russia will not be easy.”

  Another thought chilled him. If he had been set up, and that now seemed likely, whoever was responsible would learn he had gotten away and possibly go after the people Jenkins loved the most. “My wife and son,” he said, standing.

  She stood. “Wherever they are, it would be best if they left quickly.”

  17

  Viktor Federov was in no mood for half answers or ambiguities. His best suit was torn in the knees and soiled from the snow and dirty water in the alley. His left knee had swollen and was painful to the touch where the car had clipped him. He had an assortment of other aches and bruises—the largest was to his ego. Charles Jenkins was gone, very likely with the help of the woman who had come to his hotel room. The pressing question at the moment was, Who was she? Federov’s contact in the United States said Jenkins had been sent to Russia not to disclose names, but to determine the name of the woman hunting for the leak that was providing the FSB with the identities of the seven sisters. Had that been the woman who came to Jenkins’s hotel? But if so, why would the woman have helped Jenkins to escape? Wouldn’t she have believed Jenkins was the leak? Wouldn’t she have killed him?

  Something had not gone according to script, and Federov’s contact within the CIA was more than upset it had not. Federov was told, quite adamantly, that neither Jenkins nor the woman was to leave Russia, otherwise Federov’s contact would “disappear” without providing the names of the remaining four sisters, leaving Federov to explain to his superiors how that had happened. As much as Federov’s reputation had risen in the past two years, his fall would be significantly farther.