The Silent Sisters (Charles Jenkins #3)(16)
“You there! What are you doing?”
A security guard in a blue uniform had entered the temple and stood inside the door staring at him.
“Nothing. I . . . I dropped my phone and was having trouble locating it.”
The man gave him a disbelieving look, but since he had no real authority, he didn’t inquire further. “The temple is closed now. You must leave. I am locking the door.”
Helge held up his phone. “Good thing I found my phone then.”
“Yes. Good thing,” the man said.
Helge stepped past him and hurried outside in search of a cab.
6
Sheremetyevo Airport
Moscow, Russia
Two weeks after Jenkins had first entered Langley, he pushed and shoved against a horde making their way to the border guard seated behind the glass partition at Sheremetyevo Airport, the busiest of Moscow’s three main airports.
Jenkins had spent those two weeks at CIA headquarters getting cross-trained in a variety of disciplines including how to use audio devices, detect camera and listening equipment, and how to communicate using a personal hot spot and an encrypted chat room to which only he and Matt Lemore would have access. He memorized the information on multiple passports and other documentation that identified him as anything from a white British businessman to an elderly babushka, what Langley’s disguise division called “counterfeit people.”
The division measured him in the same way a fine tailor measured a client—inseam, neck, sleeve length, waist, and chest. They photographed him from every angle, the lens capturing 360-degree images. They measured his shoe size, hat size, and hand size. They took hair samples and made wig patterns ranging from a bald man to a man with a full head of hair. He learned how to apply elaborate masks to disguise his face in under a minute, and how to go from a businessman carrying a briefcase to a grandmother pushing a shopping cart in just forty-six steps. He learned from the CIA’s best that a disguise was not just a mask or applying makeup, but about creating illusions and deceptions so a witness would swear Jenkins had not been a six-foot-five Black man, but a five-foot-ten Asian man, for example.
At the airport it took Jenkins more than an hour to reach the border guard window and present his passport. The besieged guard held up the passport to better compare the photograph with the man standing on the other side of the glass. The young guard looked bored and indifferent as he scanned the booklet beneath an ultraviolet light. The code provided by the CIA would generate a number of visits to various destinations around the world, including Russia.
“And what is the purpose of your visit to the Russian Federation?” the guard asked, speaking monotone English.
The Border Guard Service was a department within the FSB. If Jenkins’s papers or his disguise failed to conceal his identity, it would be a short drive to the front gates of Lefortovo Prison. Having been there once, he had no interest in returning.
“Business,” Jenkins said in a British accent.
“What type of business?”
“Textiles. My company supplies the raw material used to manufacture uniforms, much like the one you are wearing. I’m here to visit manufacturers of machinery used in that process.”
“You manufactured this uniform?” The young man held out the lapel of his military-green jacket and looked and sounded less than impressed.
Jenkins smiled. “Not the uniform. We provide the material to make the product—the cotton, wool, synthetic fibers.”
“Polyester?” the man asked.
“Yes.”
“Do me favor? Make the uniforms with cotton. Something that breathes. In summer I sweat like pig, especially if no air-conditioning.”
“I will do what I can, young man.”
“What businesses in particular you will be visiting?”
Jenkins furrowed his brow. “More than a dozen that make the various components of the textile machinery used in our factories. Would you like me to list them for you?”
“Place right hand on machine.”
Jenkins set his right hand on the scanner and a light illuminated his palm and fingers. The guard’s eyes shifted from the machine to his computer. “You’ve been to Moscow before, Mr. Wilson.”
“Several times, actually.”
The guard stamped Jenkins’s passport and handed it back through the hole in the glass. He wasn’t interested. “Have nice visit.”
Jenkins hailed a taxi outside the airport and instructed the driver, in Russian, to take him to the Gostinitsa Imperkiy in the Yakimanka District. The driver turned and looked at him.
“Adres dadite?” Do you have an address?
Jenkins provided one. Unlike many hotels in Moscow’s historic center, the Hotel Imperial was off the beaten track and did not cater to American and European travelers. It had been vetted by CIA assets in Russia, who confirmed that the rooms were clean, and without microphones or cameras, though there was a low-quality camera in the lobby.
Maria Kulikova lived in the Yakimanka District. Jenkins’s hotel was within walking distance of her apartment, which would ease his surveillance until he determined the reason for her silence. Zenaida Petrekova, the second sister, worked in the State Duma and lived further north, a thirty-minute train ride to the Korolyov suburb where her husband had been an engineer in the Russian space program until his unexpected death from a heart attack.