The Eighth Sister (Charles Jenkins #1)(35)

The woman turned on a radio and lowered the volume. She opened a freezer and removed a bag of vegetables, pressing it to her eye, before she retrieved a bottle of Stolichnaya.

“Sorry about that,” Jenkins said, keeping his voice soft.

“I would have done the same.” She retrieved two glasses from the cabinet and poured two shots. She lifted her glass. Jenkins reciprocated.

“Here’s to luck,” she said.

The vodka burned the back of his throat but tasted good just the same.

“Do you wish for some tea?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said.

“I have pastries.” She opened the refrigerator. “They are not fresh but—”

“No, thank you,” he said, continuing to evaluate her.

She kept the kitchen light off, but ambient light from the moon seeped through the sheer curtains covering the windows, painting the kitchen in black-and-white. She grabbed the kettle with her free hand and set it on the counter. The lid pinged when she removed it, and she filled the kettle from the faucet. Jenkins pushed aside the curtains and looked down on an interior courtyard crisscrossed by clotheslines, some bearing articles of clothing.

He removed the weapon he’d taken from Volkov and placed it on a half-round table beneath that window. The woman turned at the sound of the gun hitting the table.

“Where did you get that?” She set the kettle on the front burner.

“I ran into one of the FSB agents who knew me in the hotel bathroom.”

“Did you kill him?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Possibly.”

She struck a match and turned a knob. The burner emitted the faint odor of gas before igniting in flaming blue fingers. She adjusted the knob and dropped the spent match into the sink. Still holding the bag of frozen vegetables to her face, she moved toward the table.

“It is a PSS,” she said.

“What is a PSS?”

“Pistolet Spetsialnyj Samozaryadniy. Semiautomatic. Accurate up to twenty-five meters. The sealing cartridge neck prevents the escape of a flash or smoke and virtually no noise.”

“No suppressor needed?”

“No. It makes the weapon easier to conceal and is favored by FSB special forces.” She pulled out the chair across from him, the legs scraping against the linoleum, and sat, looking as emotionally and physically spent as Jenkins felt. He’d been running, literally, on adrenaline.

“We can expect that Federov will have much at his disposal to find you,” she said.

“Can he track you somehow? What about your car?”

She gave this some thought. “The disguise will make that unlikely, and the car has plates for another since destroyed. Still, we should not stay long. Tell me why you are here.”

In for a penny, in for a pound, Jenkins decided. Talking might also be the only way to learn the woman’s involvement. “The first visit, I was to provide discreet knowledge of a Russian double agent, information the FSB presumably already possessed, but that would make me look as though I was capable of obtaining highly classified information. On the second visit I was to provide Federov information on a woman who worked in the Russian nuclear energy department.”

“Uliana Artemyeva,” she said.

“You know of her?” Jenkins asked.

“I know she was suspected to have been the confidential source providing the information. However, that was never confirmed. Russia does not like to broadcast each time it has its nose rubbed in the mud.”

“How did she die?”

She shrugged. “Natural causes, but many in Russia suspected of betrayal die of natural causes . . . or suicide.”

The kettle on the stove whistled. She left the frozen vegetable bag on the table and moved to retrieve the kettle. “You told your FSB contacts that Uliana Artemyeva was one of the seven sisters, yes?” She pulled two mugs and two saucers from a sparsely furnished cabinet, and a box of tea from a drawer below it. She set the box on the table and filled the two mugs with hot water.

“Since she was dead,” Jenkins said, “the information could not be confirmed nor denied.”

“It was information meant to impress your contact.” She set Jenkins’s mug on the table. “Cream or sugar?”

“No,” Jenkins said. “And in answer to your question, yes, the information was intended to impress that I could obtain classified information.” He pulled a packet of tea from the box, opened it, and dunked the tea bag in his mug.

“Who sent you here?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“What did this person tell you?”

Jenkins sipped at his tea and felt the water burn his upper lip. He blew on the liquid and set the cup down. “He said Vladimir Putin knew of the seven sisters during his time working for the KGB.”

“This is true,” she said.

“He said Putin commissioned an eighth sister to hunt down the other seven and that she had already identified and assassinated three of the seven.”

“This I do not know,” she said, “though I would doubt its accuracy.”

“My job was to determine the name of the eighth sister.”

“And what?”

“Then I was done.”

“Zarina Kazakova and Irena Lavrova,” the woman said. “Who is the third sister?”