The Eighth Sister

by Robert Dugoni

  He’d told Alex that LSR&C had made a payment and had promised another, but she knew the severity of their situation.

  Jenkins paced his home office. He’d been unable to reach Traeger for two days, and he was quickly running out of options. Even if he sued and won, payment would take months, maybe years, if there was anything to recover. By then he would have lost everything. He’d be bankrupt and homeless with a wife and two children. For the third time that morning, Jenkins opened his desk drawer and took out the card Carl Emerson had left on his mantel, flipping it between his fingers. There was no business identified, no name or title, no address, just a ten-digit number.

  At noon, Jenkins walked the cobblestone street of the Pike Place Market, hearing fish hawkers call out and hungry seagulls caw. Many of the restaurants and shops had already been decorated for Christmas, though Thanksgiving was still a few days away.

  Radiator Whiskey, a restaurant inside the two-story building at the mouth of the market, had an open floor plan. Ductwork, exhaust fans, and light fixtures hung between wood beams. Pots and pans dangled from a center rack over a noisy kitchen, and bottles of whiskey and aged wooden barrels lined a back wall. The space was flooded with natural light, streaming in through the multipane arched windows, which looked out at the iconic, red Public Market Center neon sign and clock.

  Carl Emerson sat at a table near the window. A chalkboard displaying a handwritten daily menu hung on the wall.

  “How’d you find this place?” Jenkins removed his black leather coat and draped it over the back of a chair.

  “A friend recommended it,” Emerson said. “She said it had a retro feel and good food.” A waitress approached the table. “Can I get you a drink?” Emerson asked.

  Emerson had a glass of Scotch over ice. His choice in alcohol hadn’t changed.

  “Just water,” Jenkins said.

  The waitress departed. “I’m told the pork shank is excellent,” Emerson said, handing Jenkins the menu.

  Jenkins set the menu down without considering it. “How would I find this eighth sister?”

  Emerson picked up his glass, sipping at the Scotch. Then he replied, “As I said, once you mention you have information on the remaining four sisters, we believe she will find you. Russians are curious and paranoid by nature. It comes from looking over their shoulders during eighty years of communist rule.”

  “And how do I establish credibility?”

  “As you said, the Russians will vet you the moment they scan your passport. When you make contact, you let it be known that you’re a CIA case officer—”

  “Former case officer.”

  “A former case officer wouldn’t have much in the way of valuable information, not unless you worked at Lockheed or some such place. No, you lead them to an understanding that while it appeared you left the agency, you’re very much still in play, and have information you believe would interest them. Given your hermit-like existence on your farm these past decades, they won’t have a way to verify or disprove what you tell them. As I said, it is the perfect cover.”

  Jenkins had spent years living off of an inheritance supplemented with cash from selling honey, jams, and Arabian horses. “Hiding in plain sight,” he said.

  “Exactly.”

  “And the information I have is the identities of the other four sisters?”

  “You say that and you’ll likely find yourself in a Russian cell at Lubyanka,” Emerson said, referencing the building that had housed the KGB and now housed the FSB. “Initially you will tell them you have information you wish to sell. Remember, the Russians are sloth-like in this process. They will wait you out, make it look as though they are uninterested, and likely test you before they trust you.”

  “And why am I doing this?” Jenkins asked. “If I’m still active, why am I betraying my country?”

  “The best cover is always one—”

  “. . . closest to the truth,” Jenkins said.

  “You have a business that is seriously low on operating funds.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “An old operative’s intuition—you wouldn’t be here if you were thriving, would you?”

  “How do I establish trust?”

  “I will provide you with names of Russian agents, long since exposed, who worked for the CIA, but who were never acknowledged by the Kremlin or by the agency.”

  “If they were never acknowledged, then how would I have access to such information?”

  “Because they were KGB officers we turned in Mexico City. If the FSB checks, and they will check, they’ll determine you are telling the truth. That should be enough to stir their paranoia pot and pique their curiosity. Once you have established trust, you will tell them you may have access to the names of the remaining four sisters, for an increased price. The number doesn’t really matter, but do recall that the Russians are miserly.”

  Emerson slid a manila file across the table.

  Jenkins opened the back flap and peered inside. He saw a Polaroid picture clipped to a worksheet of a man who looked to be midforties.

  “Colonel Viktor Nikolayevich Federov,” Emerson said.

  “The eighth sister works for him?”

  “Unlikely. We believe her identity is known only at the very highest levels within the FSB. Federov, however, is known to be ambitious. The moment you mention the seven sisters, he will understand the significance, and he will report the information up his chain of command. When the eighth sister presents herself, you will get out with a promise to provide the names of the remaining four sisters. You will provide the eighth sister’s identity to me. We’ll take it from there.”

  “And what if the Russians decide not to play by the rules? What if they decide they’d prefer that I stay as a guest in their country?”

  Emerson never blinked. “If anything goes wrong the agency will disavow the operation. Your work can never be publicly mentioned or acknowledged. To do so would put the remaining four sisters at greater risk.”

  “What about my wife and my son?”

  “Your wife can know nothing about what you are doing.”

  “I understand that. What assurances do I have that if anything were to happen to me they would be taken care of?”

  “None,” Emerson said.

  Jenkins sat back. “At least you’re honest.”

  “Would you have believed me if I had said anything different?”

  “I want two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, fifty thousand up front, the other two hundred paid upon my providing you with the name of the eighth sister.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” Emerson said.

  “It’s a lot of risk, and I have debt I need to resolve. Think of the first fifty thousand as an advance. I’ll ask the FSB for a similar amount to divulge the first name. When I receive that money, I’ll give it to you.”

  Emerson smiled. “You haven’t changed. Still sticking it to the KGB.”

  “I’ve changed a lot,” Jenkins said.

  “I can’t get you a payment in advance,” Emerson said. “When we are certain the FSB is interested, I will authorize payment of fifty thousand. When we have the name of the eighth sister, I will seek another hundred thousand.”

  One hundred and fifty thousand would get CJ Security out of debt and provide a cushion for Jenkins if LSR&C continued to falter.

  The waitress returned with Emerson’s plate. She asked Jenkins if he wished to order, but he waved her away, not hungry. Emerson looked down at his pork shank, topped with red peppers and a green aioli sauce. “Do we have a deal?”

  “Yeah,” Jenkins said. “We have a deal.”

  “Brush up on your Russian.”

  Jenkins looked over the top of the book, expecting CJ to be asleep or close to it, but his son remained awake. Alex had not allowed CJ to read the Harry Potter novels when he’d been younger. She said the stories contained adult themes frightening for a child. On his ninth birthday, CJ asked again to read the books. Jenkins had sid
ed with CJ. Big mistake. Alex relented, but only if Charlie read CJ the first two novels.

  “Next time, just tell me to keep my mouth shut,” Jenkins had said to her.

  Ordinarily, Jenkins loved this time with his son, but tonight he’d been distracted. LSR&C had made another $10,000 payment, but that didn’t compensate for the additional debt. Jenkins was performing a juggling act, trying to appease the security contractors, the vendors, and the bank.

  “Dad,” CJ said. “Are you all right?”

  Jenkins realized he’d stopped reading. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.” He looked at the glowing red numbers of the clock on the dresser—9:00 p.m. “We better stop for the night.”

  “Finish the chapter.”

  “It’s the end of a section and the next section looks pretty long.” Jenkins closed the book and put it on CJ’s nightstand. He moved his chair back to the corner beside CJ’s soccer cleats, shin guards, and uniform. “How was soccer this afternoon?”

  “It was okay,” CJ said, sliding beneath the covers.

  “Just okay?”

  “Coach wants me to play defense. Stopper.”

  “That’s great. That’s one of the most important positions.”

  “You don’t score goals from stopper.”

  “Yes, but if the other team doesn’t score, your team has a better chance to win, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess so,” CJ said.

  “Sometimes the most glamorous positions aren’t the most important,” Jenkins said. “Sometimes the most important positions are the ones that aren’t as flashy.”

  He bent and kissed CJ atop his head. “You know I love you, right?”

  “I know,” CJ said, and he rolled onto his side.

  Downstairs, Alex had a fire burning in the stone fireplace and sat on one of the burgundy leather sofas with a blanket draped over her legs, reading another book on parenting. Just thirty-nine, Alex was far too young for him, but also far more mature. He figured the latter was because she was the only child of two highly educated professors. Her father had worked as a consultant to the CIA during Jenkins’s time in Mexico City. Jenkins met Alex thirty years later when she came to his farm on Camano. She delivered a package from Joe Branick, Jenkins’s partner in the Mexico City field office. Branick had told Alex that if anything happened to him, Alex should get the package to Jenkins.

  Alex looked up from her book as he approached. “Did he put up a fight?”

  “Not too bad,” Jenkins said.

  “I’m thinking of getting him the audiobooks. The counselor said having CJ listen to a narrator while he follows along will improve his vocabulary.”

  Jenkins enjoyed his time reading to CJ. “Let’s not rush it,” he said.

  “You were quiet at dinner, Charlie,” Alex said.

  “Was I? I guess I just have a lot on my mind.”

  “Come sit by the fire for a bit.”

  Jenkins walked around the couch, and she pulled back the blanket. He slid beneath it, the two of them watching the flames flickering an array of colors behind the glass cover of the fireplace insert.

  “What did Randy say?”

  “The investments are strong, but they’ve had some expenses opening additional foreign offices, so cash flow is tight. He says he’ll work to get us and our vendors caught up. Things will work out.” He paused, considering the flames. Then he said, “LSR&C has asked me to fly to London to help them open their office and assess potential security risks. Randy will be there. It will be a good chance for me to speak to him in person about getting current.”

  “When do you leave?” she asked.

  “When things get set up. Could be just after Thanksgiving.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  Jenkins couldn’t be certain, but he recalled an agent once telling him that counterespionage was like dating. You didn’t want to make yourself too available too soon. The initial date was simply to spark interest. “Probably a week.”

  “I like it better when you’re home,” Alex said, nuzzling close to him.

  “Freddie’s in the closet,” Jenkins said. It was the nickname they’d given the sawed-off shotgun Jenkins kept in a gun locker in the bedroom closet. Before Alex and CJ, he’d slept with the shotgun at the side of his bed.

  Alex ran her hand below the blanket. “Freddie is not what I had in mind.”

  “What did the doctor say about sex?”

  She kissed him. “She said it was fine as long as I didn’t exert myself. Looks like you’re on top.”

  4

  A week after Thanksgiving, at 10:30 p.m., Jenkins boarded Aeroflot flight 2579 from Heathrow Airport to Sheremetyevo Airport, roughly twenty miles from the Moscow city center. Two days before, Jenkins had called LSR&C’s office in Moscow to advise that he would be flying in to evaluate their security measures.

  Though the flight was roughly four hours from Heathrow, the entire trip was seventeen hours from Seattle. With the layover and multiple time changes, he’d arrive in Moscow at five in the morning. To maintain his cover, Jenkins used the company credit card to arrange both the flight and his accommodations at the Metropol Hotel in downtown Moscow. He didn’t worry about Alex finding the charges; she rarely checked the company card since her preeclampsia diagnosis.

  Unable to sleep on the plane, Jenkins put on earphones and practiced his Russian and the Cyrillic alphabet. Though it had been decades since he’d last studied the language, he was still able to pull that knowledge from some recess in his mind. By the time the airplane’s wheels touched down, he was far from fluent, but he could understand and speak enough to get by. Jenkins looked out the plane window at a dark sky along the horizon and hoped it indicated snow in Moscow and was not a harbinger of things to come.

  Inside the terminal, the immigration official closely considered Jenkins’s passport, then turned to his computer terminal and typed. After a moment he shook his head and handed the passport back to Jenkins. “Nyet.”

  “Chto sluchilos’?” Jenkins asked. What’s the matter?

  The man looked surprised Jenkins spoke to him in Russian. “Nyet,” he said again and attempted to wave Jenkins out of line.

  “Ya prozhdal chas,” Jenkins said. “I u menya yest’ delo, po kotoromu mne nuzhno popast’ v Moskvu.” I’ve waited an hour, and I have business I need to get to in Moscow.

  At Jenkins’s pronouncement, the man stepped from his booth and called to someone, though Jenkins couldn’t pick up what he’d said. A second man, this one in a drab suit, came quickly. The two men kept their voices low, speaking for a few minutes. Then the man in the suit took Jenkins’s passport and said to him in English, “Come with me, please.”

  Figuring that arguing was not going to speed up the process, and knowing that when things go bad in Russia they can quickly go very bad, Jenkins followed the man through the airport to a general detention room, certain he was about to be processed and put on a plane back to the United States. The man in the suit left him in the room alone. Jenkins set down his backpack and his roller bag. He tried the door. Locked.

  “Nice,” he said. “I can’t even get into the country.”

  After thirty minutes, Jenkins tired of the game. About to bang on the door, he heard men’s voices just before the door burst inward and a man with a shaved head and broad shoulders entered and approached Jenkins as though he’d found a long-lost cousin. The man in the drab suit entered the room looking pale and worried.

  “Mr. Jenkins,” the first man said in accented English. “Please, apologize for the inconvenience. I have been waiting at baggage claim for your arrival. I am Uri, your driver and your head of security here in Moscow.”

  Jenkins had not asked for or expected a driver. “What’s going on, Uri? Why have I been detained?”

  “A misunderstanding.” Uri shot the man in the suit a sharp, withering look. Given their disparity in size, the man looked like a chastised schoolboy. Uri shouted in Russian: “This is an important businessman. Where is his passp
ort?”

  The official quickly surrendered Jenkins’s passport. “You see? A misunderstanding.” Uri smiled and picked up Jenkins’s luggage. “Come. Do you have more baggage?”

  “No,” Jenkins said, following Uri out of the room.

  “You are smart to travel light,” Uri said over his shoulder. “It can take another hour to get your bag from the plane. I think it eats them.” He smiled again. “Come.”

  “Uri,” Jenkins said, catching up as they hurried down a hallway. “I didn’t ask the office to provide a driver.”

  Another smile. “In Moscow, is understood. Construction now is everywhere, tearing down and building up, and more people and more traffic every day.” Uri turned left, proceeding down a long, bland terminal. “Without driver you would not get very far or very fast.”

  It was all very plausible, and Uri a convincing actor. His presence at the airport could have been to pick up his boss—but Jenkins also knew that his passport had triggered an alarm. His detention had provided the immigration official an opportunity to alert the FSB, and gave them time to get people in place to shadow Jenkins’s movement while in the country. One of those people could very well be Uri. It was not uncommon for the Russians to put KGB, and now FSB officers inside American companies.

  Jenkins might now be a United States businessman, but years earlier he had been CIA, and Russian memories, like their winters, were very long.

  Once in Moscow, Uri looped around the Kremlin on Marx Prospekt, giving Jenkins the chance to see the onion-shaped, colorful domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral. A few people milled about the square, braving the cold in warm winter clothing.

  Uri drove to the front entrance of the Metropol Hotel, and Jenkins stepped from the back of the car into a biting cold that stung his cheeks and hands and made it hurt to breathe. He’d packed a knit hat and gloves in the outer compartment of his bag, but instead of removing them, he took the moment to play tourist. He looked across the heavily trafficked road as if to admire the Kremlin’s clock tower, but focused his attention on the two men in the black Mercedes Geländewagen. He’d first noticed the car in the side mirror on the drive into the city.