The Last Agent

by Robert Dugoni

  “I came across the Black Sea on a Turkish fishing boat and eventually made my way to Çeşme, then paid my way across the Aegean Sea to Chios.”

  “I meant how did you get out of Moscow to the Black Sea?”

  “An agent. A Russian woman. It’s a long story.”

  “Paulina Ponomayova?”

  Jenkins set down his fork, sensing something coming. He’d initially gone into Russia after his former case officer, Carl Emerson, told him that seven unrelated Russian women known as “the seven sisters” had been targeted by Russia’s secret police. The women had served for decades as American moles privy to highly classified information. Three had been exposed and executed. Emerson told Jenkins the hunter was known as “the eighth sister” and asked Jenkins to determine that person’s identity. But everything Emerson had told Jenkins had been a lie. Emerson himself had exposed the three sisters in exchange for millions of dollars. Paulina Ponomayova had been working not for Russia’s secret police but for the CIA, trying to identify the CIA leak. When Jenkins learned of Emerson’s betrayal, he’d barely escaped Russia alive, and only with Ponomayova’s significant sacrifice. Once back home, things got worse. When Jenkins alerted US authorities to Emerson’s betrayal, Jenkins had been accused and tried for espionage. Only his lawyer’s brilliance and a judge with brass balls had kept him from a life in prison.

  “Do you know what happened to her?” Lemore asked.

  “She died.” Jenkins sipped his coffee and set down the mug. The subject matter remained raw and painful.

  “You saw her die?” Lemore asked.

  Jenkins recalled his and Ponomayova’s final moment in the run-down beach house in Vishnevka, Paulina stepping out the back door to a car they had stashed. She intended to create a diversion to give him time to flee. The diversion had worked. “No.”

  Lemore sat back, clearly disappointed.

  “Why are you asking? What was the rumor about Lefortovo?”

  “That a highly placed asset was brought to Lefortovo and was being interrogated there—a female asset believed to have information on a clandestine US mission of a long-standing nature.”

  Jenkins shoved his plate to the side, no longer hungry. “When? When did you first get word?”

  “Several months after you returned to the States.”

  His optimism vanished. “It has to be someone else then.”

  Lemore spoke over him. “The woman had been in a military hospital in Moscow under heavy security for months. She’d had some sort of car accident and was in the intensive care unit for several months before being transferred to Lefortovo.”

  Jenkins gave that some thought. “The Russians went to extremes to keep this person alive.”

  “Which means the asset had to have been highly placed, and that the FSB was concerned about what she had already divulged and what more she might know.”

  Jenkins tapped the newspaper on the table. “What did your asset tell you? What did he learn inside the prison?”

  “He said the Russians were being cautious, and paranoid, more than usual. Prison guards usually talk for the right price. Not this time.”

  “You don’t know her identity.”

  “No. I thought you might be able to help.”

  Jenkins shook his head. He couldn’t.

  But he knew someone who could.

  4

  With Alex on Lizzie duty, Jenkins picked up CJ after his soccer practice at the middle school. Perhaps the only positive outcome from the trial had been the tutor they’d hired to ensure CJ wouldn’t fall behind in his classwork. The tutor had played professional soccer. CJ’s grades and his game both improved dramatically.

  “Good practice?” Jenkins asked.

  His son slid into the passenger seat in his uniform and soccer cleats. He slung his backpack into the back seat and buckled his seat belt. “It’s been a little boring. Nobody is able to stop me.”

  Jenkins suppressed a smile, recognizing a fatherly opportunity. “Well, I hope you haven’t said anything like that to any of your teammates.”

  “No, I didn’t say anything.” CJ turned on the radio. A middle schooler, he’d begun to pick up the social norms, like an interest in music. He’d also developed body odor, and they’d been working on getting him to use deodorant. Based on the smell, it remained a work in progress.

  “Can we stop at Burger King?” CJ asked.

  “Mom’s cooking,” Jenkins said.

  He pulled onto the highway, heading across the bridge toward home. The conversation he’d had with Matt Lemore remained fresh. Jenkins had assumed Paulina Ponomayova had driven the car as far as she could and, when caught, that she had bit down on a cyanide tablet. This had triggered the Baptist sermons he’d endured as a youth.

  Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

  John 15:13.

  Letting Paulina leave the beach house in Vishnevka, knowing the sacrifice she intended to make, had been the hardest thing Jenkins had ever done.

  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’d said. My name is Paulina Ponomayova.

  Now Lemore was telling him she might still be alive.

  “Dad?”

  Jenkins shook his thoughts. “What’s that?”

  “Can I go to William’s after practice on Saturday? He invited me over.”

  “Let’s check with your mom and make sure you don’t have any other commitments.”

  CJ looked at him the way his son had when Jenkins had been on trial. Uncertain and concerned. “Are you okay, Dad?”

  “Yeah, sure. I’m fine.”

  “Really?”

  Jenkins smiled. “I just have a couple of things on my mind.”

  After the acquittal, Jenkins had done his best to be present at home, to help CJ overcome his fear that his father would again be taken away. Still, it had been months before he regained the boy’s trust.

  When they arrived at home, Jenkins helped CJ with his homework and participated in the dinner discussion, struggling to stay engaged so his mind didn’t drift back to the Russian beach house, and to Paulina. He was not always successful.

  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.

  Paulina had been as tough and determined as any KGB or CIA officer Jenkins had ever known. She’d made dying sound honorable and heroic. Now Jenkins struggled with the possibility that she had not died, and the consequences if she had not. Lefortovo was notorious. The Russians would slowly and painfully squeeze every ounce of information from her.

  Then, they would execute her.

  “I’ll finish the dishes if you take care of Lizzie,” Alex said.

  Jenkins smiled and cleared plates.

  “You okay?” Alex asked.

  “Yeah. No worries.”

  Nights at home had returned to routine. Jenkins and Alex took turns putting CJ and Lizzie to bed. CJ still asked to have a book read to him, though he was more than capable of reading the books on his own. As Alex liked to say, There are moments he doesn’t want us around, and moments when he just wants to be a little boy. Cherish those.

  Jenkins changed Lizzie’s diaper and put her in her crib, cautiously handing her the bottle of water, which she had recently become prone to throwing in protest; Alex had read that formula would rot Lizzie’s new teeth and gums. But tonight, Lizzie stuffed the nipple in her mouth, sucking contentedly.

  “Elizabeth Paulina Jenkins,” Jenkins whispered, rubbing his daughter’s curly black hair. They had named Lizzie after his mother—and the woman w
hose sacrifice allowed Jenkins to stand at the crib this night.

  “Good night, baby. Daddy loves you,” he said.

  Jenkins went downstairs to the family room. Alex would be another half hour reading to CJ. He made a fire, smelling the sap from the pine and dogwood logs. When the fire lit, the wood crackled and popped. He sat on the brown leather couch but made no move to turn on the television and channel surf. He thought again of that final conversation with Paulina, and her desire to reunite with her brother, who killed himself when his dream of dancing for the Bolshoi was taken from him.

  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.

  Maybe not.

  The thought sickened him.

  Alex descended the staircase. “Thank you for waiting,” she said.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “Are we going to watch another episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel? I assumed you waited for me.”

  “I did,” he said.

  She gave him an unconvincing grin. “No SportsCenter while waiting? That’s not like you.”

  “I had a visitor today,” he said.

  She paused, no longer smiling. “Everything all right?” She sat on the couch beside him, and Jenkins filled her in on his meeting with Lemore.

  “I hope you told him to go to hell.”

  “I did. He didn’t give up so easily.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He showed up again at the Island Café. You recall the recent news story about the man who went to Russia for a wedding and ended up arrested for espionage?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “This guy, Matt Lemore, told me he was running him. Lemore also said they intended for the man to get caught.”

  “Why?”

  Jenkins explained what Lemore had told him. “Lemore said the agency wanted the Russians to believe they had the upper hand, that they forced the exchange.”

  “So they wouldn’t dig deeper into why the man had been so easy to arrest?” Alex asked.

  “Lemore said the goal was for the officer to get sent to Lefortovo Prison to confirm a persistent rumor that a high-level CIA asset was being held there.”

  Alex studied his face, reading his eyes. She, too, had once been a CIA officer, though in analytical operations. “A high-level asset you met in Russia?” she asked.

  “Paulina.”

  Alex looked stunned. “You said she died.”

  “I thought she did. She told me she had a cyanide capsule, and when she could no longer lead them away, she would take it.”

  Alex blew out a breath, then sucked in another. She stood, wrapping her arms around herself as if suddenly chilled. She walked to the fireplace, facing the mantel and its framed photographs. “What evidence is there that she’s still alive?”

  “Nothing solid. It’s thin, but we both know that human intelligence often is.”

  “It could be anyone.”

  “Apparently not. The rumors started shortly after I returned home from Russia, so the timing is right. And the asset was said to have been in a car accident and believed to have information on a clandestine US mission of a long-standing nature.”

  She turned. “The seven sisters.”

  Jenkins nodded.

  “You don’t have any way to confirm it.”

  “I don’t,” he said, his tone giving him away.

  “But Viktor Federov would,” she said. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

  “Federov would know if Paulina lived,” he said.

  Federov had been the FSB officer who had chased Jenkins from Moscow to the Black Sea and across it into Turkey. When Jenkins escaped, the FSB had fired Federov. Rather than harbor any bitterness toward Jenkins, Federov instead told Jenkins he considered them to be kindred spirits.

  “Can you reach him?” Alex asked.

  Jenkins shook his head. “While I waited for CJ to finish soccer practice, I looked back through cell phone records. His calls to me were too far back, and I suspect the number was either encrypted or from a burner phone he has long since discarded. He has no further reason to get in touch with me.”

  “Then you have no way to find him.” Alex clearly wanted to end the discussion.

  Jenkins gave her an uncomfortable smile. “There might be a way.”

  “You think you can find him? How?” she asked.

  “The Swiss bank account.”

  The last time Federov had called, he informed Jenkins that he had hunted down Carl Emerson and located the money Russia had paid Emerson to disclose the names of three of the seven sisters. Federov had killed Emerson and split the money sixty-forty, providing Jenkins with the Swiss bank account that contained Jenkins’s share, though Jenkins had never touched it and now likely never would. Some weeks after the account was opened, he learned the Russian government had frozen it.

  “The bank is the Union Bank of Switzerland in Moscow. The account is frozen, but I have the account number. If I went into that bank and made a deposit, then told them I needed to update my signature card, I could learn the name of the Russian banker who opened my account.”

  “What good would that do?”

  “Odds are that the same banker opened Federov’s account on the same day and at the same time, though Federov would have used an alias. If I find the banker, I can find the alias.”

  “There’s no guarantee that banker would tell you the name.”

  Jenkins gave Alex a tired smile. “I know from chasing the KGB that if you are an established Russian banker in Moscow, you’re purchasable, have a handler in the government, or have already done nefarious transactions for oligarchs and organized crime figures. Giving me the name on an account for a price would be nothing. Lemore could then run credit card and debit card records, and I could find Federov.”

  “That’s crazy, Charlie. They could send an asset to look for Federov. You don’t have to go. You owe them nothing.”

  “You’re right—I don’t owe the agency anything . . .”

  She sat on the coffee table in front of him. “Paulina made her own choice, Charlie. If she is alive—and that is a big ‘if’—it is not because of anything you did or didn’t do.”

  “She was willing to lay down her life for me, Alex. I never would have seen you or CJ again. Never would have met Lizzie.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I’m the only one who can get the account identification card and determine the name on the other account set up at the same time.”

  “Bullshit.” She stood. “The agency could send in a Moscow asset and do exactly what you explained, someone who could pose as you. Federov likely set up both accounts electronically.”

  “I agree, but if the asset gets the information, then what? Federov won’t speak to just anyone, not about this. He’ll be guarded. If it gets out that Federov killed Emerson and stole the money, he’s a dead man. Like it or not, I’m the only one he’ll trust, and I’m the only one who can blackmail him.”

  “The asset can threaten to expose him.”

  “And Federov will expose the asset to the FSB, as well as his intentions to find out if Paulina is still alive. If she is, the FSB will move her and bury her, and we’ll miss any opportunity to get her out.”

  “Get her out? Get her out of where?”

  “Lefortovo,” Jenkins said. “Russia.”

  “Are you out of your mind? Do you know what that would take? Even if it is her. Besides, if she was in a hospital for months and is now in Lefortovo, you have no idea what kind of physical or mental condition she’s in.”

  “I have to take this a step at a time. First, determine if she’s alive and if she’s in Lefortovo. If she is, Lemore and I will come up with a plan to get her out.”

  She shook her head. “Are you even hearing yourself? You’re going to trust an agency that was about to let you go
to prison for life?”

  “Not entirely, no.”

  “Then who? Who are you going to trust to help you do this, Charlie?”

  “Federov.”

  She looked at him like he was crazy. “A colonel in the FSB?”

  “A disgruntled former colonel in the FSB.”

  “The man who hunted you across three countries.”

  “His agency and country screwed him.”

  “He isn’t trustworthy, Charlie. He could have set up that account to trap you. Maybe that’s why he didn’t use an alias.”

  “He didn’t use an alias because he expected me to empty the account as soon as it opened. It was frozen weeks later. I had time to move the money and close the account. I chose not to do that. It’s blood money.”

  “Regardless, this could all be a trap. The FSB could have spread a false rumor that Paulina is alive to lure you back to Moscow. Putin is arrogant, persistent, and vindictive. Look at the lengths to which he’s gone to kill those who spy on Russia.”

  “I don’t think Federov did this to trap me. He never would have given me the four million dollars in the first place.”

  “Putin was KGB. Federov was and may still be an FSB officer,” Alex said. “And, he profited from having killed Carl Emerson. What, are you going to tell me that he’s now some kind of a Boy Scout?”

  “Mom?” CJ stood halfway down the stairs, dressed in his pajamas. “Why are you mad at Dad?”

  “It’s okay, CJ,” Jenkins said. “We were just having an adult conversation. Go on back to bed.”

  Concern and fear etched CJ’s face, as it had the prior spring and summer. “Are you in trouble again, Dad?”

  “No, CJ. I’m not in any trouble. Everything is fine. Go on back to bed. I’ll be up in a minute to kiss you good night.”

  But CJ did not go up the stairs. He stood resolute, tears streaming down his cheeks. “If everything is fine, why is Mom crying?”

  5

  The following morning Jenkins drove his son to school, and even this small change in routine did not go unnoticed.

  “Why isn’t Mom driving me?” CJ asked.

  “I thought it would give us the chance to talk, in case you have more questions.”