The Silent Sisters (Charles Jenkins #3)(2)

The woman stepped closer. She stared into his eyes. She didn’t flinch at his battered appearance. She understood and was familiar with violence. “I taught him to be deliberate, to be careful, as my father taught me. I taught him to never leave behind evidence.”

“Should have taught him how to treat a woman; we wouldn’t be here if you had.”

Jenkins braced for another blow, but the woman’s eyes shifted to his punishers and she shook her head. “Perhaps,” she said in a peculiar moment of honesty. “My son was too much like his father. He inherited his ill temper and his lust for the wrong women, but he was my son. Do you have a son, Mr. Jenkins?”

Jenkins thought of Alex and their son, CJ; their daughter, Lizzie. This was not supposed to end this way. He had expected to enter Russia this final time anonymously and leave the same way. In and out before the Russian FSB, the successor to the KGB, ever knew he had been there, his handler, Matt Lemore, said. Jenkins had screwed up.

He’d cared.

He should have just walked away.

“I’m not married.”

Another smile. “You are a very good liar, but your FSB profile says otherwise. Born in New Jersey. A Vietnam veteran. America’s Afghanistan, no? Central Intelligence officer stationed in Mexico City, though only for a short time. Then you disappeared. You did not resurface until decades later, in Moscow, asking to be a double agent. A ruse you somehow survived. You returned to Moscow a second time and managed to free a woman from Lefortovo Prison, which, I must tell you, is impressive. No one who enters Lefortovo leaves. So, you are a man of courage, principle, morals, ethics.”

Jenkins grunted. “Doesn’t do me much good now, does it?”

“Married to Alex Hart, also once a CIA analyst,” she continued. “You have two children. A son, CJ, and a daughter, Elizabeth, not yet two.”

Jenkins felt the adrenaline rush at her mention of his wife and children.

She dropped the cigarette and crushed it beneath her shoe. “So . . . you can understand my pain.”

He shook his head. “No.”

She looked up from beneath bangs and met the gaze from his one eye. “No?”

“Your pain is a mother’s pain. A mother’s loss. A father doesn’t know that kind of pain.”

His answer momentarily silenced her. When she finally spoke, she sounded emotional. A small burst of air preceded each word. “So, you do know.”

“I did not kill your son,” Jenkins said again, too many times to keep count.

“But you did cause his death.”

Jenkins couldn’t dispute that, nor did he believe this was the time to get into semantics. “What, then?” he said. “You’re going to have Boris here kill me?”

“You have left me without choices.”

“I’m sure we can think of some.”

“Another thing my father taught me that has served me well. ‘Never look weak. Others will take advantage.’”

“I won’t tell,” Jenkins said.

She chuckled. “No, Mr. Jenkins. You will not.” She stepped away, checking the diamond-studded watch on her wrist. “Do you know what they do with the scraps of meat and the sides of beef they do not sell, Mr. Jenkins?”

“I can guess,” he said.

“Yes. I am sure you can. But let me tell you. They grind the unwanted pieces into hamburger and sausage. Have you ever seen a slab of meat go through the meat grinder, Mr. Jenkins? No? The grinder crushes everything—the bones, the cartilage, the tendons, the muscle, the fat. Of course, the cow is already dead. It feels no pain.” She considered him coolly; he could see now that her eyes were as blue as ice. “You will not be so fortunate.”

Jenkins gave her a tired smile, then said, “Nor will be the person who gets a sausage made out of me.”





1


About Three Weeks Earlier

Lubyanka

Moscow, Russia

Maria Kulikova pulled a brown paper napkin from the dispenser on the cafeteria counter and blotted the sweat beading at her temples. Her early morning Pilates class at the Ai-Pilates studio had been particularly challenging. The exercises activated the muscles deep in her abdomen, glutes, and obliques. She usually cooled down on her walk from the studio to Lubyanka, where she worked as the FSB’s director of the Secretariat. But not this week. Moscow was enduring a September heat wave, and the morning meteorologist had again forecast temperatures of thirty-four degrees Celsius.

The bitter aroma of coffee teased her, as did the tempting odors of scrambled eggs, ham, and sausage, but those were luxuries not on her menu. Coffee made her jittery, and she followed a strict diet to keep her figure. She supplemented her three-day-a-week Pilates class with yoga to stay limber. At sixty-three, she could no longer run, though she had once been an Olympic-caliber long-distance runner who had held the Soviet record in the three thousand meters. Her years of training had worn out her knees.

It could have been worse. At least she had avoided the “supplements” her Soviet trainers imposed on other athletes, who now experienced heart and lung problems and various forms of cancer.

Maria had loved the competition, but that had not been the reason for her pursuit of athletics. Being a Soviet athlete had elevated her stature and given her access to people she would not have otherwise met. She exercised now for much the same reason. Her appearance. Her figure opened doors and provided opportunities. Her boss, Dmitry Sokalov, the FSB’s Counterintelligence Directorate’s deputy director, liked fit women with large breasts. The joke within the Secretariat, a ruthless rumor mill at Lubyanka, was that Sokalov liked the contrast to his own slovenly visage—he, too, had large breasts, to match his even larger gut.