The Silent Sisters (Charles Jenkins #3)(30)

12


Manege Square

Moscow, Russia

Late that afternoon, Charles Jenkins, disguised now as an old man, sat on a bench in Manege Square, kitty-corner from the State Duma federal building on Ulitsa Okhotnyy Ryad. He’d spotted Petrekova’s first tail, the same woman from the railway platform and commuter train earlier that morning. She’d changed her look, trying too hard to be decidedly younger in shorts, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes. She’d pulled her hair back into a ponytail and wore unflattering black-framed glasses.

At just after six in the evening, Zenaida Petrekova exited the federal building and stepped between rows of parked cars and over a chain designating a pedestrian walk. Per her routine each night, she gave every indication she would cross the street and descend to the Okhotnyy Ryad Metro station for her trip back to the Kazansky railway station. She did not look rushed or concerned, and she never let her gaze roam in search of her tail, though she knew she was being followed.

She proceeded across the street during a break in traffic to the Metro station stairs. A taxi sped forward and stopped in the far-right lane. A woman dressed similarly to Petrekova stepped out, moving to the stairs. Petrekova casually slid into the back seat just before the taxi merged into Moscow’s heavy afternoon traffic.

On the sidewalk, near the entrance to the Metro, Petrekova’s tail had her head down, reading her phone and smoking a cigarette. When she looked up, expecting to see Petrekova, she saw the woman from the cab, did a double take, and almost followed her down the steps. Almost. She studied the taxi merging with traffic, dropped her cigarette, and hurried into the street, her hand waving while she simultaneously glanced over her shoulder to track Petrekova’s cab.

A car swerved around her, the driver honking his horn. Petrekova’s taxi turned at the corner just as a second taxi pulled to the curb and the tail got in. Jenkins hoped the head start was enough to shake the woman, at least long enough for him and Petrekova to talk. Moscow traffic would help. Jenkins had an old-fashioned way to avoid it.

He got on a bike and rode around the block.



Arkhip descended an interior stairwell to the Criminal Investigation Department’s Technology Center. Some days, descending and ascending the interior stairs was his only exercise. The Technology Center provided designated investigators with access to live and archived footage obtained from each of Moscow’s two hundred thousand CCTV cameras. The footage was stored for five days at a centralized database at the Moscow Department of Information Technologies.

Computers were to Arkhip what holy water was to a vampire. It seemed every time he touched one something burned, then he would have a technician working at his desk for hours to resolve the problem. He had taken the training classes, and he had been personally tutored. He had improved, but technology remained a foreign language.

He pulled open the glass door and stepped inside the center.

“Mishkin. To what do I owe this great pleasure?” asked Vily Stepanov.

Arkhip smiled. Stepanov was a snake. He would sell his mother to make a dime. “I need some footage,” Arkhip said.

Stepanov let out a burst of air, like a whale spouting through its blowhole. “How many times do we have to tell you that as a criminal investigator you have access to the information from your desktop computer?”

“At least once more,” Arkhip said.

“Very well. It is your time, after all. You’ll have to fill out the forms, though. Do you have the location for the video you wish to see?”

“I do. I have the light stanchion number and the time.”

“You are on top of things, as always. Fill out the forms. It is a necessity to track who views the information.”

“Yes, of course,” Arkhip said. “We would not want unauthorized people viewing the information.” The requirement was supposed to pacify the activists who protested that the cameras were an invasion of their privacy and used more to identify protestors who opposed the government than to catch criminals. No matter. The courts had approved the cameras, and they were here to stay. Arkhip filled out the form, a laborious process that almost made him want to learn how to access the information on his desktop. Ten minutes after starting he submitted the forms to Stepanov.

“Good. Thank you. Now, you can use that station over there.” Stepanov pointed to one of several computer stations in a sealed room. “You will need to type in your identification and your password to gain direct access to the database. From there type in the camera locale and the date and time needed.”

Stepanov was also lazy. “Why then did I bother to fill out the forms if I am only going to have to do it again at the computer terminal?”

“Why then did you come down here when you could have typed in the information from your desktop computer?” Stepanov countered. “We are required to log every request to ensure that users cannot reach outside of their sandbox and misuse the system.”

“We wouldn’t want that,” Arkhip said, trying hard not to sound too sarcastic. He, too, considered the cameras a gross violation of personal privacy, but as his father liked to say, You can sing that song all day long. No one is going to listen.

Arkhip sat at the computer terminal and entered his name and his password. Following the prompts, he entered the database and typed in the required information. Within seconds he stared at four different camera angles that included the Yakimanka Bar, the alley beside it, and two views of the street on which the bar was located, one faced west, the other east.