The Eighth Sister (Charles Jenkins #1)(34)

“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 moved 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.