The Eighth Sister

by Robert Dugoni

  They’d been found.

  The officer peered through the driver’s-side window, then tried the door handle, which Jenkins had locked. He looked to the convenience store and started toward the front entrance. Jenkins moved back into the restroom but kept the door partially open so he could hear what was being said.

  “Dobroye Utro,” the officer said to the attendant. “Vy znayete, ch’ya mashina nakhoditsya snaruzhi?” Do you know whose car that is outside?

  The store clerk nodded to the bathroom. “Chelovek prosto voshel. On v vannoy.” The man just came in. He’s in the bathroom.

  The officer turned and pointed. “He’s in there now?” he asked.

  “Da.”

  The officer walked toward the bathroom. Jenkins let the door close and retreated to the stall. He shut the door but did not latch it, sat on the toilet seat, and braced the door with one hand. He heard the outer bathroom door open and swing shut. Beneath the stall door two black shoes came to a stop. The officer rapped on the door, a metallic ping—a key perhaps. Then he stepped back.

  “On ispol’zuyetsya,” Jenkins said. It’s in use.

  “U vas yest’ avtomobil’ snaruzhi, Hyundai?” Do you own the car outside, the Hyundai?

  “Da. Chto iz etogo?” Yes, what of it?

  “I need you to come out now,” the officer said, continuing to speak Russian.

  “Who the hell are you?” Jenkins said, also speaking Russian.

  “Politsiya.”

  “Is it illegal to take a shit?”

  “Come out,” the officer said.

  “Well, you’re going to have to wait until I’m finished.”

  “Come out now,” the officer said more forcefully.

  “Okay, okay,” Jenkins said, not wanting the officer to get any more suspicious and call for backup, if he hadn’t already done so. “Can a man not take a shit in peace?”

  Another rap on the door. “Now. Come out now. And keep your hands where I can see them.”

  “Can I at least use my hands to pull up my pants?”

  “Pull up your pants. Then come out.”

  “What is this about?” Jenkins asked, hoping the officer would step closer to the door.

  “Come out.”

  Jenkins stood but paused, as if to pull up and belt his pants.

  When the officer stepped toward the door, Jenkins lifted and unfurled his leg, striking the door with his heel. The door sprang open, both surprising and striking the young officer. He stumbled backward, off balance. Jenkins advanced quickly and delivered two blows to the face, knocking him out.

  He flexed the fingers of his hand and felt a sharp pain. “Really have to stop getting into fights in bathrooms,” he said.

  He didn’t have a lot of time. If the officer had called for backup, they were in serious trouble. He hoped, in a small town, off-season, that backup was not readily available. He half carried, half dragged the man into the stall and propped him on the toilet. Then he removed the officer’s handcuffs and quickly cuffed the man’s hands above his head to a pipe extending down the wall. He took the officer’s keys and tossed them outside of the stall, then removed the officer’s shoes and his socks. He shoved one sock in the officer’s mouth, slipped the second sock between the man’s teeth, and tied the ends around the back of his head. That was the best he could do. He shut the stall door and deposited the shoes and the keys in the trash bin before walking back into the store.

  The attendant sat at the counter. Jenkins thumbed through rubles and paid for his coffee and gas.

  “Spasibo,” the man said, speaking Russian. “What happened to the police officer?”

  Jenkins looked to the door at the back of the room. “I don’t know. I guess he has to go.”

  “He asked who owned the Hyundai.” The attendant pointed to the pump.

  “Da. His wife wants to buy one, but he is against it. He asked me how I liked mine.”

  The man made a face as if he understood. “How do you like it?”

  Jenkins frowned. “I’d like a Mercedes, but that’s not in the budget.” He smiled, as if sharing a joke. “The Hyundai doesn’t have much power, but it gets good gas mileage, and today that is more important.”

  “Da,” the man said, making another face. “They say the price is going to go up another eight to ten percent because of the sanctions by the Americans.”

  “Good for you. Not so good for me.” Jenkins pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. “Too bad they can’t bottle what he’s putting out in there. They could run a city on his natural gas.”

  The attendant laughed.

  “I would let it air out before you go in there. You’re liable to suffocate,” Jenkins said, moving to the front door.

  “Da. Thanks for the warning.”

  Jenkins departed the store, walking casually to the car, resisting the urge to look back to see if the attendant had moved to the bathroom. His right hand ached from punching the young officer, and he wondered if he had broken a knuckle. He removed the nozzle from the car’s gas tank and returned it into the pump, using the opportunity to look inside the convenience store. The attendant remained seated, watching the television mounted above the counter. Jenkins got behind the wheel and drove across the street to the market with the red tile roof, arriving as Anna walked out the door. She carried plastic bags in each hand. Jenkins pushed open her car door.

  “Hurry,” he said. “We have a problem.”

  23

  Alex sat at the round table in Sloane’s office going through Charlie’s laptop. Jake sat beside her, working on his own laptop, searching the Internet. Sloane moved back and forth from his desk, going over documents Alex printed out for him. They’d left CJ and Max in the lunchroom with pizza they’d ordered for dinner, a soft drink, and cable television. The boy was in heaven.

  Outside the office windows, night had fallen. Streetlamps illuminated rain tapping on the warehouse roof. A loud whistle signaled the approach of another train. Alex pored through CJ Security’s credit card records and their personal credit card records, as well as Charlie’s e-mails and text messages. She’d made a list of the charges Charlie incurred while in Russia, places where he had dined, and plotted those locations on a map of Moscow she’d printed out. The charges confirmed Charlie’s second trip, but not his second stay at the Metropol Hotel.

  She’d called LSR&C’s Moscow office. Uri, the head of security in that office, confirmed Charlie had visited the office twice in the past month, and that he had stayed at the Metropol on both occasions—at least that was where Uri had dropped him off and picked him up.

  Someone was lying.

  “How far behind in payments was LSR&C?” Sloane asked, setting down another document on his desk.

  “In November it approached fifty thousand dollars.”

  “Why didn’t Charlie tell me? I could have written the company a letter.”

  “The CFO kept telling Charlie he’d bring us current, and he did eventually make two ten-thousand-dollar payments, but the bills and vendor invoices kept mounting.” Alex stood and walked to where Sloane sat, showing him a timeline she’d created. “Look at this. Just before Christmas, after Charlie made his first trip to Russia, we received a check for fifty thousand dollars, enough to pay our security contractors and bring our vendors current. I’m having trouble finding that check, though the increased balance appears in CJ Security’s checking account.”

  Sloane studied the timeline for a moment, then asked, “And you can’t think of any business reason for Charlie to be in Russia?”

  “That office has been set up for some time. It wasn’t like he was going over to get it up and running. Uri said Charlie came to discuss security measures. I think that was just an excuse.”

  “Excuse for what?”

  “If Charlie has been reactivated, he’d need a cover to get into the country, a legitimate reason for being there.”

  “Okay, but I’m assuming that, cover or not, the Russians would have a means to d
etect a former CIA operative’s entrance into their country,” Sloane said.

  “No doubt,” she said. “The company gave him a reason to be there, and he got in, but it didn’t mean the Russians would trust him, or accept his presence as legitimate.”

  Jake lifted his head from the computer. “Locke, Spellman, Rosellini and Cooper,” he said. “That’s what LSR&C stands for?”

  Alex nodded.

  Jake lowered his head and continued to type, studying his computer screen.

  “If Charlie’s in trouble do you have any other way to get in touch with him?” Sloane asked.

  “No. And I wouldn’t. Our agreed-upon procedure was he would call you or this office. I ditched my cell phone because that would be the first thing someone would trace, if they were trying to track my location.”

  “I thought so,” Jake said, sitting back. He turned his computer screen toward them. “Locke, Spellman, and Rosellini are the names of former Washington State governors.”

  “Are you sure?” Sloane stepped closer to the screen. Neither he nor Alex had been raised in Seattle or knew much about its history. Jake had been raised in Seattle, at least until high school.

  “Gary Locke was governor from 1997 to 2005.”

  “That I remember,” Sloane said.

  “John Spellman was governor from 1981 to 1985. He passed away in January of 2018. Albert Rosellini served as governor from 1957 to 1965. He died in 2011.”

  “So it’s not very likely they were investors or officers of the company,” Sloane said, reading Jake’s laptop. He turned to Alex. “Could they be relatives?”

  “I don’t know,” Alex said. “I’ve never met anyone except Randy Traeger, the CFO.”

  “One name is possible,” Jake said. “Two is an unlikely coincidence. Three is deliberate. Isn’t it?”

  “If it’s an investment and wealth management company, those names would give the company prestige,” Sloane said. “If the company is trying to entice people to invest, those are names that could go a long way toward convincing people to do so.”

  Jake turned his laptop around and his fingers danced across the keyboard. After a moment he said, “The company was incorporated in Delaware in 2015.”

  “Delaware?” Alex said. “The home office is in Seattle.”

  “A lot of companies incorporate in Delaware,” Sloane said. “The business laws are more favorable, and there is no state corporate income tax so long as the company does not transact business within Delaware.” He turned to Jake. “Where does LSR&C have offices?”

  Jake pecked at the keyboard as Alex spoke.

  “Seattle and New York, Los Angeles, London, and Moscow.”

  “New Delhi, Taiwan, and Paris,” Jake added. “According to the company website anyway.”

  “I’ve never heard of an office in New Delhi or Taiwan. And I understood Paris was only under consideration,” Alex said.

  Sloane picked up his desk phone. “Do you have Randy Traeger’s number?”

  “His cell number was in the phone I got rid of.”

  “I got the office number,” Jake said. He rattled off the number to Sloane, who punched it in, leaving the call on speakerphone. They got an after-hours recording.

  Sloane checked his watch, hung up the phone, and spoke to Jake. “I want you to do some digging. Find out who is really running the business, and anything else you can about the company. Something doesn’t smell right.”

  24

  As they fled the gas station and convenience store, Jenkins told Anna the details of what had happened with the police officer.

  “If they found the car, we have to assume that means they found you. We’re out of time. We need to hide the car and do whatever it is we’re going to do,” Jenkins said.

  Anna directed him along a narrow dirt-and-gravel road with significant potholes that caused the car to pitch and bounce. The road followed the contour of the land, the Black Sea to their right, though shrubbery obscured most of their view. Jenkins drove past piles of scrap wood, and gravel and cinder blocks for the construction of new homes on vacant lots. He looked through the windshield at the overcast sky. “If Federov knows we’re here, he’ll have satellite cameras pinpoint this area to search for the car. The marine fog will keep him from seeing much of anything while it lasts, but we can’t take the chance of the fog lifting. We need to get rid of the car, someplace undercover, to make him think we’ve moved on.”

  To his right, Jenkins saw a yellow flame burning atop a rusted metal tower—the flare stack to a natural-gas refinery. Red tanker ships anchored offshore. The road turned to the left, away from the coast. He drove inland, finding fewer homes and more vacant lots.

  “Here.” Anna pointed to a two-story concrete-block home behind a fence that looked to be made from pieces of scavenged metal. Across the street, and to their immediate right, were barren lots with spindly trees and unkempt shrubs.

  Jenkins stopped at the wrought-iron gate. Anna got out of the car and unlocked a link of chain. It rattled as she pulled the links through the metal bars, and the gate emitted a squeal of protest when she pushed it open. Jenkins drove the car forward. Anna came around to the driver’s side as Jenkins stepped from the car. “Take the supplies to the back of the house and wait for me there,” she said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To ditch the car,” she said, making the word sound like “deetch.” “A neighbor down the street has a shed. They will not be here for months. If I can fit the car inside, I’ll hide it there. If not, I shall do my best. Shut the gate behind me and replace the lock. There is an easement behind the houses I will use to return.”

  Anna backed out of the driveway and Jenkins shut the gate with another squeal and relocked the chain. He carried the bags around to the back of the two-story cinder-block house. White paint peeled from the blocks, revealing that the home had once been a bright pink. At the back of the house, Jenkins encountered an overgrown yard. Two rusted poles protruded from the ground, with line strung between them. Stacked rocks and chunks of concrete overgrown by vines and shrubbery delineated a backyard. Behind the crumbling wall was more open land. They wouldn’t have to worry about nosy neighbors.

  A strong breeze blew in from the water, bringing a stinging cold and a briny smell. Jenkins set down the bags on a step and shoved his hands into the pockets of Volkov’s jacket, moving around the corner so the house blocked the wind while he waited.

  Ten minutes after Anna had departed, he saw her coming down an easement behind the houses. She hopped the fence and approached. “Any problems?” Jenkins asked.

  “No,” she said. “It was tight, but it will work.”

  “The question is for how long. Federov will go house to house if he thinks we’re here, and he’ll check every hiding place for your car. From what I can see, there aren’t a lot of either.”

  “Then we will not be here long.”

  She moved past him and lifted a rock in a patch of overgrown weeds, revealing a key, stepped up three wooden steps, and unlocked the back door. The glass pane rattled when she pushed the door open.

  They entered what looked to be a mudroom off the kitchen, which had lime-green countertops and dark-brown cabinets. The house smelled musty and the air stale. “Keep the lights off,” Anna said. “And the drapes and blinds closed. I’ll open a back window to get some fresh air.”

  Jenkins put the plastic bags on the counter and opened the refrigerator. The light did not go on. He heard Anna go upstairs, footsteps on the floor. He shut the door and flipped the switch on the wall quickly to test for power.

  “The power is turned off,” he said when Anna returned.

  “Good,” she said, taking two plastic bottles of water and tossing one to Jenkins. She led him from the kitchen to a sitting room with a couch and two recliner chairs. When Jenkins sat, the chair emitted a puff of dust. Anna collapsed on the couch.

  “When’s the last time anyone was here?” Jenkins asked.

  “I do
n’t know,” she said.

  “If the power is off, I’m assuming there is also no heat.”

  “I’m sure everything was shut off for the winter, including the water.”

  Jenkins was worried about possible connections that could lead Federov to the house. “Who owns the property? Does the person have any connection to you? Any ties of any kind?”

  “No,” she said. “None.”

  “We can’t drive out of here. Not unless we can find another car.”

  “We must also assume Federov will have boats at his command, since the Russian Coast Guard patrols the Black Sea,” she said. “That will complicate things.”

  “Your contact will come by boat?”

  “Yes,” she said. “The second-story window faces the sea. I put a red card in the window. At night, I flash a beam of light and look for a beam in return. One flash and we go. Two and we wait another day.”

  “How does he get to us?”

  “He does not,” she said. “It is too risky to come to shore, especially if the coast guard is patrolling the coast line. We must go to him.”

  “You have a boat?” Jenkins asked.

  Anna stood from the couch. “Come.”

  Jenkins followed her into a room at the back of the kitchen and saw two large storage boxes. Anna bent and opened one of the boxes, revealing diving equipment.

  25

  The helicopter touched down in a red circle in the center of a high school’s green Astroturf soccer field. Federov and Simon Alekseyov ducked as they departed the bird, the wind from the spinning blades causing Federov’s suit jacket and coat to flap as they crossed the turf to an awaiting police officer. Students stood outside the school buildings, watching with their hands raised against the wind, observing this unusual break in their routine.