The Eighth Sister (Charles Jenkins #1)(40)

Federov switched to different footage, this film from a camera on the eighth floor. He watched the woman step from the elevator and walk down the hall toward Jenkins’s room. Again, she kept her head down, likely to prevent the camera from obtaining a meaningful shot of her face. She used a key card—one she had purchased with the rubles—to gain access to Jenkins’s room, and slipped inside.

Sometime later, Jenkins exited the elevator. Before reaching his room, he stopped and retrieved something from a food tray. Federov backed up the tape and watched again in slow motion, zooming in on the plate. A knife. Jenkins had picked up a knife and slid it up the sleeve of his coat.

“Interesting,” Federov said.

When he reached his room, Jenkins did not immediately enter. Rather, he dropped to the ground—as if anticipating a gunshot—reached up from his knees, and pushed the door open. Only then did he step inside and allow the door to close behind him.

“He suspected she was in his room,” Federov said. “How?” He made a note to talk again to the clerk. Someone had alerted Jenkins to the woman’s presence at the hotel.

The only reasonable deduction from Jenkins’s actions was that he also knew, or at least strongly suspected, the woman could be in his room. And his retrieval of the knife strongly indicated he did not consider the woman a friend, at least not initially, though something had apparently changed his perspective.

Roughly fifteen minutes after Federov had been informed by his hotel contact that the woman had come to the desk and asked for Charles Jenkins—after the third act of his daughter’s play but before the cast party Federov had promised to attend but did not—Federov and Volkov arrived at the hotel. Federov watched the tape of the eighth floor to determine how they had missed Jenkins and the woman. He sat forward as Jenkins exited his room. He had a black backpack slung over his shoulder. The woman followed. Jenkins initially moved toward the staircase at the end of the hall but stopped and turned back. The woman had said something to him, most likely that the staircase would be covered. It had been.

Whatever had happened inside the hotel room, Jenkins and the woman were now acting as a team.

Without the long coat and the scarf, which Volkov had found in Jenkins’s hotel room—a ruse to make Federov believe Jenkins and the woman had quickly fled—Federov got a better look at the woman. He estimated her to be five foot seven or eight, based on a comparison with Charles Jenkins. She also looked to be in good physical condition, with developed shoulders and a thin waist. The woman walked across the hall, stopping to pick up a champagne flute from a room-service tray. She knocked on the hotel room door. Federov felt sick to his stomach and it had nothing to do with the coffee. He knew what was to happen next. The tape only confirmed it.

Federov noted the hotel room into which Jenkins and the woman had fled. He would send someone to speak to the guest and find out what, if anything, Jenkins or the woman had said to him.

Simon Alekseyov knocked on Federov’s door as he entered the office. “I have the list of female employees who did not report for work this morning. There are six.”

“Did you cross-reference them with their car registration?”

Alekseyov nodded. “Two drive a Hyundai. One is blue. The other is gray.”

Federov motioned for Alekseyov to hand him the sheets of paper. He stared at a picture of Paulina Ponomayova. Forty-eight years of age, she was attractive, with light-brown hair, brown eyes, and a strong jawline. She was also five feet eight inches and weighed 130 pounds, which comported to what Federov had just seen on the tape.

“What do we know of her?”

Alekseyov read from a sheet of paper. “She was hired by the FSB fresh out of Moscow University, where she earned degrees in computer science and systems hardware, and mathematics. At the FSB she has had an exemplary work history, with promotions to positions requiring higher and tighter security clearance.”

Based on the ages of the three sisters already detected, Ponomayova was not one of the seven. Federov looked through her personal life, which was equally unremarkable. She’d been married in her early twenties but divorced. She had no children. Her parents were deceased, as was her only sibling, a younger brother, Ivan.

“She has very little to live for,” Federov said.

“She works as a computer systems analyst for the Directorate of Records and Archives,” Alekseyov said, which meant that Ponomayova would have computer access to all reports filed by all personnel, including reports by and about Russian assets and targets, such as the reports Federov had written about Charles Jenkins.

“You have an address?” Federov said, already moving around his desk to his coat stand.

“Yes.”

Federov grabbed his heavy winter coat and hat from the hook and started from the office, then stopped. “What do you know of Volkov’s condition?”

“He is in the hospital but he is alert,” Alekseyov said.

Federov would stop by to see him when he got the chance. At present, he had a man to catch. “Come. You will drive. I wish to review the file.”



Federov stepped from Paulina Ponomayova’s apartment into the drab hall. Inside, FSB technicians would continue processing the apartment, but it appeared to have been cleaned. The shelves and walls contained no framed photographs of family members or friends. They found no photo albums on the shelves and no personal mail, not even junk mail, in any of the drawers. They did not find a computer. The kitchen was spotless and smelled of a lemon-ammonia product, though they had found a spent match in the sink. The rest of the furnishings were equally Spartan. Even the trash bag had been removed from the wastebasket in the kitchen. Federov had a junior officer checking the garbage bins in the parking lot, though he thought it highly unlikely Ponomayova would have dumped anything compromising in so accessible a location.