The Eighth Sister

by Robert Dugoni

  “There is always another way,” he said. “Don’t quit on me, Anna.”

  She smiled, but it had a sad quality to it, the smile of a woman just before the state executed her. “I’m not quitting, Mr. Jenkins. I’m doing my job.”

  “It’s Charlie, damn it. My name is Charlie.”

  Another smile. “I’m not quitting, Charlie. You have to understand that if you survive, if you get back, then I have done my job. You must get back and stop whoever is leaking the information on the seven sisters, before others die.”

  “They’ll kill you, Anna.”

  “Paulina,” she said. “My name is Paulina Ponomayova.”

  “No,” he said. “Do not tell me your damned name now. This is not the end.”

  “They will come door-to-door, Charlie. They will find us both. You yourself said so.”

  “Then we’ll fight.”

  “If we stay, we both lose our only chance. The boat will not wait, and it will not return. How long can we fight? How many?”

  Jenkins paced.

  “Please,” she said. “Let me do this for my brother.”

  “For your brother—”

  “What I have done, all these years, I did to avenge his death. But I have spent my entire life living in the shadows, Charlie. I have never loved after my divorce—because I could not take the pain of losing another person. You are married. You love your wife. You have a son and another child on the way. You have love in your life, Charlie. I was never so fortunate. I want this chance to step from the shadows, and to look the people in the eye who killed Ivan. I want to tell them that everything I have done, I have done because I love him.”

  Jenkins sat on the sofa across from her. “It won’t be that simple, Paulina. They’ll torture you to find out what you know about me, and where I have gone.”

  Again, she smiled. “They will never have the chance, Charlie.”

  Jenkins knew she meant that she would take her own life when the time came.

  “I will tell them that for decades my brother did them more harm than they could ever have imagined doing to him, or to me. And they will have to live with the knowledge that revenge has eluded them, once again.”

  Jenkins sighed, fighting back his emotions.

  “Do not be sad for me, Charlie. This is a day I have anticipated, and for which I have long prepared. I am at peace with my God, and I am anxious to see my brother dance the ballet in the greatest ballroom in all eternity. Give me this gift. Give me this opportunity to know that I have harmed them one last time.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I will get to the car, and I will lead them away from here. When I do, you must go quickly. There is a gap in the fence at the back of the property. The lot behind us is vacant but filled with trees and shrubbery to provide cover. Make your way to the access. It will lead you to the water’s edge. Have everything prepared so that when you reach the water you can submerge.”

  “The compass,” he said. “I don’t know how to use it.”

  She removed the compass from her wrist and fastened it to his. “You keep this arm straight. The arm with the compass you bend at a ninety-degree angle, gripping the other wrist, like this.” She showed him. “You follow a compass heading of 210 degrees.”

  “How do I—”

  “We will set the compass bezel until the north arrow is aligned, like this.” She moved the bezel counterclockwise. “This red line is the lubber line. This we will adjust to 210 degrees. In the water, this button is the light to illuminate the watch, but the compass will glow continuously, and you will be able to see the direction you are heading. Keep your arm and the compass as level as I showed you, and keep the lubber line on 210 degrees as you kick.”

  “What about the current?”

  “The Black Sea does not have any appreciable tide. Just follow the lubber line and kick hard. It is not an inconsequential distance, and keeping the course will be difficult, but it can be done. How well do you swim?”

  “It’s been a while.”

  “You look to be in good shape. Your legs are strong, yes?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You must be in the water no later than five forty-five. Thirty minutes is a decent time to swim three hundred meters. Stay under the water no more than three meters to conserve your air. The boat will come between six fifteen and seven o’clock. It will not appear one minute before, and it will not stay one minute longer.”

  “How will I see it?”

  “He will drop a light into the water. You must look for the light. When you see it, release your beacon but keep the string wrapped around your wrist. He will have the coordinates. He will come to you. Surface only when he comes.”

  “What if I run out of air before he gets there?”

  “You are going to have to relax. Breathe calmly. You can do this, Charlie. Do this for me and do this for Ivan. Do this for your wife and your son and your unborn child.” She paused, staring at him as if there was something else to tell him.

  “What?”

  “Your wife will have a daughter,” she said softly.

  Jenkins took a moment, considering her. She seemed so certain. “How could you know that? I don’t even know that.”

  She shrugged. “I do not know, but about this I feel strongly.”

  Jenkins nodded. “If we do have a daughter, I’ll name her Paulina, and when she is old enough, I’ll tell her about the sacrifice you have made.”

  Ponomayova looked to be fighting emotions. She stood and checked her watch. “We must go now.” She moved to where she had placed her black coat and black knit hat.

  “Paulina?”

  She turned and smiled, but she spoke no words. No words came to Jenkins either. He watched her walk to the back of the house. A second later, he heard the back door open and click closed.

  29

  Alekseyov called Federov with news regarding the house with the shed. FSB agents found the owner at his apartment in the Yasenevo District just northeast of downtown Moscow. He told the officers that he and his wife inherited the beach property from her parents and used it during the summer months. He stored his truck and his tools in the shed. He had no other car. The shed should have been empty.

  Like the house.

  “They are not in the house,” Federov told Alekseyov after he’d gone room to room. “Tell the men to go door-to-door starting with the first house at the end of the block. I want every room in every house checked. If no one is home, break down the doors.”

  Federov disconnected and slid the gun back into his shoulder holster. He walked to the back of the house and stepped into the yard, still fuming at the police officer’s stupidity for engaging Jenkins at the gas station, thereby alerting him that Federov had discovered the car. Had the officer not done so, this matter would have likely already concluded and Federov would have had Mr. Jenkins. Or his body.

  Soon enough, he thought. Soon enough.

  30

  Paulina slid out the back door into the yard. The clotheslines swayed in a breeze and the poles creaked as if with displeasure. She slid through an opening in the stone wall, moving down the easement toward the house and the shed where she had ditched the car. The marine layer tempered sounds, and the quiet reminded her of those final days in Moscow, when a thick blanket of snow had fallen over the city. She would not see Moscow again, or the Bolshoi, where she and Ivan had once roamed the hallways and the secret rooms, and climbed to the roof to gaze out at their city. Those were good memories she had of her brother, those and the memories of him dancing. He’d looked like an angel trying out his first pair of wings.

  She would cling to those memories now, but she could not dwell on them.

  She proceeded down the easement, gun in hand, eyes and ears attuned to every movement and sound. A dog barked, but it was a distant echo, the wail of a dog pleading to be let inside, not the barking of a dog disturbed. She continued on.

  When she reached the stone fence at the back of
the home closest to M27, she paused to study it. The house looked as it had, dilapidated and deserted. As she started to go over the stone fence, movement caught her attention. She retreated and ducked behind the wall. A man, dressed in a long coat, exited the back of the house.

  She watched him remove a pack of cigarettes from his inner coat pocket and flick the blue flame of his lighter. The flame briefly illuminated a hardened face she recognized. Federov. The red ember glowed as Federov sucked in the tobacco, then blew smoke into the night air.

  She could think of only one reason for Federov to have been inside the house. He had discovered the Hyundai parked in the shed, and he had suspected she and Jenkins were in the house. Now that Federov knew they were not, the FSB and local police would go door-to-door, as Jenkins had said. She did not have much time.

  She rested the handle of the pistol on the top stone. The shot was no more than five to seven meters. She would not miss. More importantly, the reverberation would echo and draw attention away from Charlie. She might even have time to get into the Hyundai and get away, if they had not disabled it. She would drive as far as she could, hopefully far enough. She took aim just as Federov tossed his cigarette butt into the yard and moved down the side of the house, in the direction of the front yard.

  Time for her to move.

  She climbed the wall and dropped into the yard. She crossed to the shed, keeping watch for others. At the back of the shed she paused again and peered around the side of the building. She saw another glowing ember; someone watching the garage. This was a problem.

  She retreated, took just a moment to catch her breath, and moved to the opposite side of the shed, sliding to the corner. She picked her steps carefully so as not to disrupt a misplaced sheet of aluminum siding or inadvertently kick a can. She peered around the front of the building. The guard paced as he sucked on his cigarette. She estimated he was no more than three meters from her, an easy shot. She looked down the road—to where others had likely established a roadblock of some kind, trying to keep her and Jenkins from escaping on M27.

  She’d deal with that if she got the car out of the shed.

  She had run out of time. So, too, had Mr. Charles Jenkins.

  She removed the silencer, which was no longer needed, raised the barrel, and peered around the edge. When the man turned toward her, she took aim.

  “For you, Ivan,” she whispered.

  Jenkins jumped up and down and pulled and tugged on the stubborn dry suit, eventually getting it over his shoulders. When he had done so, he reached for the long strap of fabric attached to the zipper key. Finding it, he sucked in his stomach, thankful he’d lost weight, and raised his arm, tugging on the strap. The zipper slowly pinched the suit together, moving up his back. When the zipper cleared his shoulder blades, it slid easily up his neck.

  The suit was tight. So be it.

  He sat to pull on his booties and his gloves. Then he took the ziplock bag with his medications, his passport, and his rubles and dollars, and slid it into a pocket of the buoyancy vest, what Paulina had called a BC. He zipped the pocket closed. He’d also take the gun he’d removed from Arkady Volkov. If he reached the beach, he’d discard it in the water. A gun would be of no help to him once he dove.

  He crouched down and slid the straps of the vest onto his shoulders, then straightened and lifted the tank from the kitchen table, feeling its weight. He fastened the clips and straps so the vest rested on his hips and was otherwise snug, as Paulina had instructed. Moving with the tank on his back would be easier than trying to carry it, along with his fins and his mask, and it would allow him to keep a hand free in case he needed the gun. He was also mindful of Paulina’s last instruction. When he got to the water, he needed to be ready to submerge.

  He picked up his fins and his mask by their straps, moved to the front of the house, and pulled down a blade of the blind. It crinkled and pinged. Peering out the gap, he saw the car still parked in the street, and he hoped that whatever Paulina did, it would be enough to get the two men to move away, and quickly.

  He was about to let the blind snap shut when he noticed movement inside the car. The two men got out simultaneously. Something was up.

  The driver talked on his cell phone, looking up and down the street as he did. Then he lowered the phone, slid it into his coat pocket, and said something to the passenger, who had come around the back of the car. Together they walked toward the house. They’d probably been instructed to search door-to-door.

  “Shit,” Jenkins said.

  He watched them tug on the gate. It shook and rattled. Not about to give up that easily, the first man moved to the aluminum siding used for fencing, gripped a gatepost, climbed atop the fence, and jumped into the yard. The second man mimicked his moves. When he’d landed, the two approached the front of the house.

  Jenkins moved to the door at the back of the house, gun in hand.

  One of the men knocked on the front door. After a pause, he knocked again, this time with more force, more insistent, and called out, asking if anyone was home. About to open the back door and move toward the easement, Jenkins caught sight of a shadow on the blinds covering a window along the side of the house. The second man had started to work his way to the back of the house. Was the man at the front of the house a decoy, someone to draw Jenkins’s attention?

  He retreated from the door into the shadows of the room, bent to a knee, difficult with the weight of the tank on his back, and pressed against the wall. His hand holding the gun shook. He wouldn’t hit much if he couldn’t calm his nerves. He took deep breaths to steady his aim.

  He heard feet outside and followed the sound to the back door. The man climbed the steps. Jenkins could see his shadow on the thin piece of cloth covering the window. The door handle turned. Locked. A sharp ping followed, and a large piece of the glass fell inward, shattering on the floor. The man reached his hand through the hole, unlocked the door, and reached for the doorknob.

  Jenkins raised the gun, gripping his right wrist with his left to steady it. He couldn’t wait for whatever it was Paulina planned to do.

  He’d have to shoot and take his chances.

  Paulina pulled the trigger. The agent’s left shoulder looked as though someone had yanked a string attached to his back. His feet came out from under him and he hit the ground hard. The crack and thump of the shot echoed in the still night air. Most would mistake the sound for a car backfiring, but those who knew guns, like Federov, would not.

  Paulina moved quickly and deliberately to the agent on the ground, removed his gun from its holster, and tossed it into the bushes. “Vy budete zhit,” she said. You’ll live.

  Hurrying to the front of the garage, she picked up the rock holding the doors shut, flung it into the yard, and yanked open the doors. She squeezed along the driver’s side of the car and managed to open the door enough to press inside.

  She inserted the key, said a silent prayer, and turned the ignition. The engine came to life. “Time to run, Ivan.”

  She dropped the car into drive, saw headlights approaching from the intersection at the end of the road, and, not wanting to get pinned inside the shed, gunned the engine. The car leapt forward, the back end fishtailed on the dirt and gravel before the tires gripped and the Hyundai straightened. She aimed directly at the oncoming car.

  She glimpsed two men in the front seats just before the driver yanked the wheel and their car swerved and plowed through shrubbery, striking the trunk of a tree with a loud thud, followed by the persistent blast of a car horn.

  Charles Jenkins had his distraction. She hoped it worked.

  Paulina accelerated toward the intersection. Without headlights, she saw gray shadows in the road, two cars serving as a roadblock. She aimed for the gap between the front bumpers, powered down the driver’s-side window, and shot at the police officers getting out of their vehicles. They ducked and sought cover. Just before impact, she brought her arm in, dropped the gun into her lap, gripped the steering wheel with
both hands, and braced herself.

  The Hyundai crashed between the two cars and forced its way through the narrow opening. She felt her body jolt forward, the safety strap digging into her shoulder and across her lap then being pulled back hard against the seat. She hit the brakes, yanked the steering wheel to the right to correct the back end, and punched the gas. The car sputtered up the M27 incline. Behind her she heard more shots.

  She wouldn’t get far, but hopefully she’d get far enough to give Charles Jenkins time to run.

  Jenkins released pressure on the trigger when he heard the echo of a gunshot fired from somewhere down the street. Paulina. The man at the back door heard it also. He paused, then removed his hand and stepped away. The man at the front of the house shouted something, and the man at the back took off running.

  Jenkins stood, struggling for balance, and moved to the door. He stepped outside and heard the sound of tires spitting gravel. No time to waste, he moved as quickly as he could across the backyard, stopping to slip through the gap in the stone fence. The bottom of his tank clanged against a rock. Stepping through, he hurried across the adjacent empty lot, toward the path leading to the Black Sea. Down the street, the opposite direction, he saw the taillights of the car that had been parked in front of the house.

  He came to another stone fence, this one just a couple feet high, but it slowed him as he struggled to get over it. Wearing booties, he felt every rock and branch he stepped on. He crossed another yard and came to a house under construction. This was the house at the turn in the road. The path to the beach was across the street and about fifteen yards west. Jenkins moved along the side of the house to the front yard. He paused, looked left and right, saw no one. As he was about to move forward, the bushes rustled. Jenkins took aim. A dog came out of the brush, startling him. It briefly considered him, then curled its tail between its legs and scurried down the road.

  Jenkins moved forward, sweat dripping down his face and burning his eyes, blurring his vision. With his hands occupied, he had no ability to wipe the sweat away.