The Silent Sisters (Charles Jenkins #3)(78)

She picked up the cigarette and inhaled as she turned her head to the sound of the door handle clicking shut behind him. Yekaterina looked to Mily as if she had aged ten years over the past three days. Her hair seemed to have more gray, and the lines in her skin—what his mother had called “worry lines”—appeared to have been etched deeper, like paper cuts. In this instance he disagreed with his mother’s characterization. These were not worry lines. Yekaterina mourned. Mily suspected there was nothing less natural than a child passing before a parent and nothing as painful.

Yekaterina disconnected her call and set the cell phone gently on the desk. Mily noticed the rise and fall of her chest, as if it pained her to take each breath, to go on living. Eldar had been an ass, spoiled, self-centered, and intoxicated by power and money, neither of which he had created or earned. But Mily knew Eldar had not always been that way, nor were those a mother’s memories now. Yekaterina remembered the baby boy to whom she had given birth, the still-innocent child she had cared for and loved, the young man who had showed so much promise before the drugs and the booze unleashed a genie she hardly recognized—cruel, angry, bitter, and vengeful.

“You have news?” she asked softly and without emotion.

“Ugolov has located Jenkins and Kulikova,” he said, referring to the director of the Moscow Department of Information Technologies.

“Where?”

“The Yaroslavsky rail terminal in Moscow. They boarded a Trans-Siberian train, 322, two days ago.”

“They could be anywhere.”

“No,” he said. “Ugolov and his technician worked around the clock reviewing video of the platforms and tracks between Moscow and Novosibirsk at the time the 322 was designated to arrive. They have not departed the train.”

“Where is the train now?”

“It will be arriving in Krasnoyarsk at 8:24 this evening and departing at two minutes after nine. The flight there is more than four hours, and it will take time to get to the airport and then from the airport in Krasnoyarsk to the railway terminal. However, the train’s next stop is Irkutsk at 3:47 a.m. We can be there. We can meet the train.”

“And what if Mr. Jenkins and Ms. Kulikova again do not depart in Irkutsk?”

Mily smiled. “I have a plan, Comare, but if we are going to act, I must move now to get everything in place. I will call you when I have Mr. Jenkins and Ms. Kulikova on the plane back to Moscow.”

The faintest smile curled a corner of Yekaterina’s lip, the first Mily had seen in days. “No, Mily. I have no intention of sitting here.”

Mily shook his head. “I must disagree. Let us bring them back here on the plane. It is safer here on the estate where we can protect you and keep you out of view of the many cameras.”

“My father spent years in Irkutsk after his father’s release from Stalin’s gulags, Mily. I know it well, and I know just the place to bring them. Besides, the farther we keep them from Moscow, the farther we keep them from Sokalov. This is the smart thing to do. Go, get everything prepared. I will change clothes and meet you at the car.”





41


Trans-Siberian Railway

Novosibirsk, Russia

Jenkins and Kulikova spent two days and nights largely out of sight as the train chugged east, passing through miles of forests and muddy villages, past the towns of Yaroslavl, Kirov, Perm, and Yekaterinburg, and finally through the Ural mountain range into Siberia, though the mountains had been no more than foothills. The cities seemed to come and go, indistinguishable from one another, gray and gloomy. In between the cities spread a vast nothingness, grazing for cattle, marshland. Jenkins and Kulikova did not leave their compartment except to use the bathroom at the end of the carriage. They purchased food and a deck of cards from the trolley service, ate in their cabin, and played card games to occupy their time.

“If I eat another cup of noodles I might throw up,” Jenkins said at one point.

With each of the prior stops, Jenkins spent all but a few minutes of the allotted time peering out their carriage window at the people on the platform. He looked for anyone lingering beneath the canopy, or standing near the Victorian-style iron lampposts seemingly without purpose. With each stop, dozens of passengers waited to board the train, and dozens more poured off to buy food or goods in the railway terminal stores or from the men and women who set up tables beneath the terminal canopies. Nicotine-starved passengers hurried from the train to smoke, which was not allowed on board and subject to a heavy fine.

Someone associated with the Velikayas or Sokalov could have already boarded the train, but Jenkins did not think so. Nor did Kulikova. They agreed the best opportunity the Velikayas or Sokalov had to grab Jenkins and Kulikova without drawing significant attention was when the duo departed the train, whenever and wherever that might be.

Jenkins still did not know, and he did not like being in the dark. He needed to find a way to contact Lemore.

Five minutes before the train was scheduled to depart a depot, Jenkins pulled on a sweatshirt and his baseball cap and lifted the hood over his head to cover as much of his face as possible. He stepped off the train holding a cigarette from a pack he had purchased at a terminal stop, lit it, and checked his cell phone. He had no Internet access as the train traveled between cities. He did have access at the depot stops, but his phone remained glitchy since his plunge into the Neglinnaya River. He either could not get a signal or the signal would fade in and out. Mostly out. Watching others on the terminal, their gazes glued to their phones, he deduced the problem wasn’t the signal but his phone.