The Silent Sisters (Charles Jenkins #3)(47)
Even more sickening, Lebedev, the leering shit, had been right.
Ibragimov’s wife had not returned home by coincidence. The Americans only wanted it to look that way. It had been, as Lebedev had insisted, an effort by the Americans to protect a high-level asset who had disclosed details of the plan to kill Ibragimov. A high-level asset with access to what had been extremely restricted information.
Maria Kulikova.
Lebedev, smelling Sokalov’s blood in the water, would have reason to demand an investigation, one that would no doubt reveal other information Sokalov had divulged to Maria during the past decades. But that was not the worst of it. Far from it. Lebedev would argue that, given the magnitude of and the protracted years of these revelations, Sokalov had to have been complicit, himself an American spy.
What other explanation could explain such a wanton breach?
What was Sokalov to say in his defense? That he was addicted to the sex? What evidence could he produce to defend himself?
He couldn’t even recall everything he had divulged.
And what of the Polaroid photographs he had Maria take of him in various stages of bondage? The pictures were a testament to how muddled his thinking became, how misguided. He wanted the photos so he could look at them whenever he and Maria could not get together, or on those occasions when they could, to heighten his arousal.
Earlier that evening, after Sokalov had dismissed Egorov and admonished him to not mention the news of Jenkins’s return to anyone, he had hurried into Maria’s office. He had access to the passwords of every member of the directorate. When he finally opened her safe, he found only files. The jewelry he had given Maria over the years—and the photographs—were not there.
He would surely be executed, but only after he was tortured in Lefortovo. The president would see his betrayal as an egregious slap in the face, but that would be far better than what his father-in-law would do to protect his little girl and the family reputation.
Sokalov had returned to his office frantic, angry, and terrified of what awaited him. In time he had calmed enough to realize that the timing of Charles Jenkins’s return to Moscow could also not be a coincidence, not with the creation of the clandestine FSB operation to find and terminate the seven sisters. Maria had access to this information as well, and she clearly had alerted American intelligence. Jenkins’s return to Moscow could be for just one reason, to bring home the remaining sisters before they, too, were discovered and executed. To bring home Maria Kulikova, and whoever else remained out there in operation.
Maria fit the profile. Her age. Her position at work. Her access to confidential information. She had cultivated her relationship with Sokalov, playing on his prurient desires until he craved them as much as he craved her, addicted to the pleasure and the pain that she could so artfully administer. But in the midst of Sokalov’s torment and despair, a flicker of clarity revealed itself, a flicker that provided perhaps his only hope, his only means to survive.
He could still save himself. Even now. He had always been able to save himself.
The FSB, like the KGB, was compartmentalized for security reasons. No one outside his division knew what happened within his directorate. Nothing was taken home. Not a tape recorder or a scrap of paper. At night, each agent locked his work in a safe in his office affixed with a personal seal broken only by that agent the following morning. The computer server was an internal network that only allowed officers to send communications to other officers within the Counterintelligence Directorate.
Operation Herod was known by fewer still. The president had entrusted the matter to Sokalov in complete confidentiality. Sokalov had handpicked the half-dozen members of the operation team, and they, too, had been sworn to secrecy under penalty of termination.
Sokalov replayed what Bogdan Petrov had last said to him, Lebedev, and Pasternak in the conference room.
But let me make myself very clear, gentlemen. A head . . . or heads . . . will roll. And it will not be mine. I would suggest that you get busy finding the president an alternative he can use to save face if you wish to keep your heads attached to your bodies.
And that was when Sokalov hit on the idea—just how he might manipulate his way out of this predicament. The arrest of General Pasternak’s two men might very well prove to be a stroke of fortune, as opposed to a massive intelligence breach, that could save Sokalov’s life. If Zhomov could kill Maria, her betrayals would remain hidden. If he could bring in Jenkins, the Kremlin could use him as the needed bargaining chip to exchange for Pasternak’s two men. Sokalov would not look like a fool but a hero. He would eliminate one of the seven sisters—not that anyone would know Maria had been one—while reprising another biblical story of King Herod. He would bring the president the head of Charles Jenkins, though still very much attached to his body, and very much alive.
Zhomov sat patiently. He fingered the silver crucifix that hung around his neck, a habit when deep in thought, or interrogating a suspected spy. “Tell me what you need, Dmitry.”
“First, I need a few loose ends taken care of,” he said, so no one could ever talk of what Sokalov had allowed to happen, and with Zhomov’s help, no one ever would. “Then I will need you to do what you do best—hunt down an American spy and bring him to me.”
21
Korolyov
Moscow Oblast, Russia
As Jenkins applied Petrekova’s mask and makeup, he could not shake the thought of FSB officers barging in the door to arrest him, could not shake the vision of spending years in a Lefortovo prison cell like the one Paulina Ponomayova had occupied.