The Eighth Sister (Charles Jenkins #1)(80)
“Ask the waiter for a table on the patio in the back. The temperature is dropping so he’ll suggest you sit inside. Tell him it’s your first night and you want to experience Greece.”
Light spilled from the windows of the shops and restaurants surrounding the plaza. Jake crossed to the restaurant and spoke to the ma?tre d’. As Charlie had predicted, the man suggested Jake would be more comfortable sitting inside, but he relented when Jake said it was his first night in Greece. He lit a candle in a red glass jar, and Jake ordered a Greek beer while he waited.
Minutes after Jake had sat down, he looked up to see Charlie filling the patio doorway and heaved a sigh of relief. He came around the table and gave him a bear hug.
“You shouldn’t have done this, Jake,” Charlie said, emotion leaking into his voice.
“Yeah, well, there really weren’t a lot of choices,” Jake said. They took their seats at the table. The waiter reappeared. Charlie ordered a beer.
“Do you know how they ended up at the Chios Airport?” Jake asked. “I was under the impression David led them to Costa Rica, then to Cyprus.”
Charlie shook his head, thinking of Federov. He had begrudging respect for the man’s counterintelligence skills. “Apparently they figured out that was a ruse. It makes sense. David was too obvious. In counterintelligence you must always have a backup plan. So how did you get through customs without them stopping you? If I were Federov, I would have been looking for anyone entering Chios with a US passport, especially someone traveling alone.”
Jake reached into his pocket and handed Charlie a hunter-green booklet with gold lettering.
“A Mexican pasaporte,” Jenkins said. “Good old Uncle Frank.”
Jake shook his head. “Uncle Frank died seven years ago from cancer. His son, Carlos, has taken over the family businesses. And it was Alex who suggested I get a Mexican passport.”
He smiled at the mention of his wife. “You have my papers?”
Jake opened his jacket. “Hand me your knife.”
Jake picked at the stitching on the inside lining and pulled loose the thread. He removed the envelope and handed it to Charlie, who placed it beneath the napkin in his lap, opened the flap, and considered but did not remove a Greek passport, a Mexican passport, and a Canadian passport, along with corresponding driver’s licenses, a couple thousand dollars in US currency, and an airplane ticket leaving Athens tomorrow evening.
“How are you going to get off this island if they’re watching the airport?” Jake asked.
“Another principle of good counterintelligence when you’re on the run is to keep moving forward—never double back.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“There’s a ferry leaving Mesta, Greece, early tomorrow morning for Piraeus. You’re going to be on it. From Piraeus, it’s a cab ride to Athens, and from Athens you fly home.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be on a different boat, but not far behind you.”
The waiter returned. “I’ll bet you’re hungry,” Charlie said to Jake.
“I’m starving, actually.”
Charlie looked to the waiter. “Pyrgi pizza. Extra large. Extra cheese. And two more beers.”
PART II
47
After days on the run, Charles Jenkins sat at David Sloane’s kitchen table peering out at the blackened waters of Puget Sound, still disbelieving he was actually home. He’d arrived at SeaTac Airport thirty-six hours earlier, groggy from lack of sleep, jet lag, and physical and mental exhaustion—another reminder that he wasn’t the twenty-five-year-old man who had chased KGB agents in Mexico City. This ordeal had taken its toll. The mental exhaustion surprised him the most. Escaping Russia had been like a marathon chess match, requiring that he constantly think two moves ahead of Federov, with contingencies for moves Jenkins had not anticipated. He never realized, in the moment, how the constant mental strain could wear on the body. When he had finally arrived home, he’d crashed hard, and he was still trying to recover.
“You hungry?” Alex asked, eyes red from too little sleep and too much worry.
White take-out boxes from a Thai restaurant littered the kitchen table, but the normally intoxicating aroma of chicken pad thai, tom yum soup, and phat khing did little to entice Jenkins’s appetite, which remained virtually nonexistent since he’d arrived in the US. Not that he wasn’t grateful to be back, grateful to be holding his wife’s hand, grateful to read CJ a book before bed, but something gnawed at the recesses of his mind, and he couldn’t shake the thought that his ordeal was not yet over.
“Maybe a bit later,” he said.
Max, perhaps sensing how close her master had been to never coming home, lay curled at his feet beneath the table. CJ, too, seemed worried for his dad, sensing things had changed though not understanding why. Earlier that evening, when Jenkins put his son to bed, CJ had begged him to continue reading past the usual one chapter. Jenkins realized the request was not an attempt to manipulate, but born from a deeper concern, or fear, of losing his dad. Jenkins had read until CJ drifted to sleep.
He released Alex’s hand and cradled a porcelain mug of coffee. The warmth against his palms conjured images of the mug of Turkish coffee he’d held after being plucked from the Black Sea’s frigid waters. That feeling evoked memories of Demir Kaplan and his two sons, and of the sacrifices they had made. That thought led to another memory—of Paulina Ponomayova just before she’d departed the beach house to create a diversion.