The Silent Sisters (Charles Jenkins #3)(6)

Maureen looked to Lemore. “What have you been dreaming about, Gorgeous George?”

“Countryman Special with extra bacon.” He sipped his coffee. Jenkins raised a hand. Too late. “Wow.” Lemore smiled. “This coffee is fantastic. New blend?”

Maureen closed her eyes, shook her head, and departed.

“You were so close,” Jenkins said.

“What did I say?” Lemore looked flummoxed.

“Next time we come to eat, you don’t speak until we get our food.”

Lemore set down his mug.

“I assume this isn’t a social visit,” Jenkins said. “The remaining sisters? Any news from Russia?”

He and Lemore had a conversation on his farm when Jenkins had returned from Russia after rescuing Paulina Ponomayova from Lefortovo Prison. Lemore had discussed exfiltrating the remaining four of the seven women who had spied on Russia for decades. The CIA operation had been named “the seven sisters” after the seven buildings Stalin commissioned following the Second World War to glorify the Soviet state. Taking a page from the KGB playbook, seven Russian women had been raised from birth to be American spies, what the KGB had referred to as “illegals”—deep-cover agents who blended in seamlessly with a target country’s citizenry. Three sisters had been exposed by Carl Emerson, Jenkins’s former CIA station chief turned traitor, and presumably killed. Over the prior six months, Lemore had advised Jenkins of the CIA’s success in exfiltrating two of the remaining four sisters. It had not been easy. The Kremlin had authorized a secret branch within the Counterintelligence Directorate, a task force formed to find and terminate the remaining sisters.

“Operation Herod” was named for the Israeli king who, according to biblical accounts, feared the Christ child’s birth and sent soldiers to kill infant Israeli males born in Bethlehem. The operation instituted a shotgun approach when the rifle could not find a target. Women sixty years of age and older working in the Russian government had been identified and were being extensively vetted. It sounded like an insurmountable task, except men still dominated most high-level Russian government positions, and even fewer women held such positions and were more than sixty years of age.

A similar task force, formed in 2008, had succeeded in identifying and assassinating prominent heads of mafiya families, as well as several powerful oligarchs the president considered a threat to his power.

Maureen set down plates containing heaping portions of eggs, ham, sausage, bacon, home fries, biscuits, gravy, and toast. “Anything else?”

“I think we’re good,” Jenkins said.

“More coffee?” Maureen asked Lemore.

Jenkins subtly shook his head.

“The coffee wasn’t as good as I initially thought,” Lemore said. “Leaves a bad taste in your mouth.”

Maureen nodded. “I think ‘bitter’ is the word you’re looking for.” She left a check on the table and departed.

Both men dug in. “How are the two women you exfiltrated doing?”

“The NROC is helping them establish new identities and arranging new homes beyond Russia’s wrath.”

“NROC?”

“Sorry. National Resettlement Operations Center.”

“Russia’s reach is getting longer since they went after Alexei Navalny.” Jenkins referred to the prominent Vladimir Putin opponent poisoned with a rare chemical agent before he boarded a flight from Siberia. Navalny had been hospitalized in Berlin, Germany, then imprisoned when he returned to Russia.

“They won’t risk a poisoning on US soil,” Lemore said. “There’s too much at stake.”

Jenkins ate a piece of ham with eggs and home fries. “I assume the two remaining sisters are the reason I’m sitting across the table from you at this god-awful early hour.”

“They’ve recently gone silent.”

“Meaning what exactly?”

“Meaning neither is responding to dead drops or phone calls.”

“But still alive?”

“Still alive. We assume one sister’s silence is the result of her knowledge of Operation Herod. We are uncertain about the reason for the second sister’s silence. It could be she has detected some surveillance and had decided to go dormant.”

The lack of specifics did not surprise Jenkins. Personal contact between a handler and a spy in Moscow was limited. The KGB, and now the FSB, intensely scrutinized Americans, especially those working at the US embassy. An experienced handler could utilize a brush pass, where the handler and spy passed one another, and the handler, using sleight of hand, provided a critical piece of information. They also utilized dead drops, a location known only to the handler and the spy where each could leave packages or messages without the two ever meeting face-to-face. To arrange these, the handler called and asked to speak to the agent, giving a wrong name that was actually code for the specific location. If the spy could meet, she would respond, “I’m sorry, you have the wrong number.” If not, the spy would respond, “There is no one here by that name.” Meeting locations could also be hidden in classified newspaper ads and, Jenkins assumed but did not know, through the use of computers. The spy would respond with a check mark on a certain bus stop, by opening a particular window of her apartment, closing a particular window blind, or placing flowers on a balcony.