The Last Agent Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE LAST AGENT

  “The thriller equivalent of a matryoshka nesting doll: an outer layer of geopolitics; a deeper layer of intricate spycraft; and at its center, an unlikely CIA-FSB off-the-books alliance to save a brave Russian asset from the worst fate imaginable.”

  —Barry Eisler, New York Times bestselling author

  “Dugoni supercharges his Charles Jenkins series with The Last Agent. Fast-paced and mesmerizing from start to finish, Dugoni flawlessly executes one of the best spy novels I’ve read in years. The Last Agent grabs you and doesn’t let go—one twist and turn after another had me tearing through the pages.”

  —Steven Konkoly, USA Today bestselling author

  PRAISE FOR THE EIGHTH SISTER

  “The Eighth Sister is a great mix of spycraft and classic adventure, with a map of Moscow in hand.”

  —Martin Cruz Smith, international bestselling author

  “Feels so fresh and authentic we could see the story breaking in the headlines tomorrow.”

  —Mark Sullivan, bestselling author of Beneath a Scarlet Sky

  “Exhilarating . . . A tightly written, flawlessly executed espionage novel that takes the reader on a refreshingly unique, white-knuckle journey through the byzantine world of modern intelligence.”

  —Steven Konkoly, USA Today bestselling author

  “A gripping thriller . . . [The Eighth Sister] is destined to be a classic in the genre, and Dugoni is arguably one of the best writers in the field right now.”

  —Associated Press

  “With lean prose and spot-on local color, this plot-driven thriller pulses with tension and fraught escapes, the action capped by a courtroom drama as good as any from Grisham. A must-read for fans of legal thrillers and/or spy novels.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Dugoni delivers an exceptionally gripping spy thriller that will keep readers on the edge of their seats.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “[Dugoni] has outdone himself here, serving up a double-barrelled blast of action mixed with espionage in what’s perhaps his most unputdownable thriller yet . . . Treason, moles, and plenty of misdirection . . . Robert Dugoni’s The Eighth Sister is a high-stakes game between spies, and he doesn’t take his foot off the gas pedal for a second.”

  —The Real Book Spy

  “A marvelous read that begs for a sequel. There is more story to tell.”

  —Missourian

  “The Eighth Sister is a taut thriller in the fine tradition of spy stories.”

  —Authorlink

  “If you’ve eagerly devoured [Dugoni’s] previous works for their cinematic pacing, tautly written thrills, and wonderfully developed characters, you’re in for all of that and so much more with [The Eighth Sister].”

  —Bookreporter

  “The perfect pacing and brilliant intrigue of [The Eighth Sister] result in a page-turning, intelligent tale that will keep readers engaged until the very last page . . . The perfect combination of espionage, history, and quick-witted characters—a rare feat in the thriller genre.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “Dugoni’s novel is, on all counts, a first-rate thriller!”

  —Popular Culture Association

  ALSO BY ROBERT DUGONI

  The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell

  The 7th Canon

  Damage Control

  The Charles Jenkins Series

  The Eighth Sister

  The Tracy Crosswhite Series

  My Sister’s Grave

  Her Final Breath

  In the Clearing

  The Trapped Girl

  Close to Home

  A Steep Price

  A Cold Trail

  The Academy (a short story)

  Third Watch (a short story)

  The David Sloane Series

  The Jury Master

  Wrongful Death

  Bodily Harm

  Murder One

  The Conviction

  Nonfiction

  The Cyanide Canary (with Joseph Hilldorfer)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by La Mesa Fiction, LLC

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542014984 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542014980 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542014977 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542014972 (paperback)

  Cover design by Kaitlin Kall

  First edition

  For my friend Martin Bantle

  Martin passed away unexpectedly during the writing of this novel. He was just fifty-six years young. His death will always be a reminder that every day is a gift, one I will cherish. I will miss Martin’s smile and his impish laugh, and the twinkling in his eyes that always made you think he held a powerful secret. I am grateful to his wife and to his children for New Year’s 2019, when we all spent a wonderful evening together with friends and their families. When we left that night, my two grown children smiled at me and said, “That was a lot of fun. We should do that again.” I wish we could, with Martin. Making Martin a character in this book is a poor substitute for a husband, father, and friend, I know.

  But I just didn’t want to let him go.

  And I know that while he didn’t want to go, he didn’t have a choice. But I also know that he’s okay, and he’s in a good place, watching over his family.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Prologue

  Men rushed into her hospital room and yanked her from the bed without uttering a single word. They slid a black bag over her head and cuffed her wrists behind her back. Her stay in the hospital had come to an end, as she knew it eventually would, but she did not fear what next awaited her.

  She no longer cared to live.

  Ankle cuffs bit into her flesh, a link of chain between them. A stick jab to her ribs prodded her forward, and she shuffled, barefoot, the chain scraping the linoleum.

  She had no idea how long she had spent in the hospital. No
calendar told the month or the day of the year. No window revealed morning or night. No clock told the time. No newspapers, magazines, or books told her the news. Time had become meaningless.

  The beeps and blips of the hospital machines and monitors had been the only sounds during her stay in isolation. No one spoke to her. Not the doctors. Not the nurses. They did not ask if she had discomfort, if she needed more pain medication. They didn’t care—or had been ordered not to. No one came to interrogate or to threaten her.

  That was about to change. She had existed in a fog, on the edge of pain, kept alive for one reason—to be interrogated.

  Then she would be executed.

  She would give them nothing.

  A stick across her chest induced her to stop. A bell rang, this one the elevator. She stepped inside the car. It descended. Another bell. The stick prodded her forward.

  Cold concrete scuffed the soles of her feet. The stick swat to the back of her legs instructed her to step up—like a trained circus elephant beaten into submission, another technique to make her feel no longer human.

  She did so with difficulty, the chain too short. Two steps. She entered what she suspected to be a metal transport van. A stick to both legs, this time hard enough to induce her to sit. A bench. Her cuffed hands were fastened to the wall behind her, adding to the strain on her damaged shoulders, the pain exacerbated with every bounce and turn of the vehicle.

  After a short ride, the van stopped. She knew her location. Moscow had long been her home. She knew it well.

  A lock disengaged. The hinged door opened and she felt a cool breeze—the first fresh air since she’d awoken in the hospital bed. A guard freed her wrists from the wall, but they remained cuffed behind her back. Another stick tap instructed her to rise. She shuffled forward—the breeze now caressing her neck, the back of her hands, the tops of her feet.

  A stick tap behind her right knee prodded her to step down. This time her bare foot did not touch solid ground and she fell, landing hard on her face and her shoulders. Despite excruciating pain, she withheld any moan of agony, any grunt of displeasure, any verbiage of hatred. She would not give them the satisfaction.

  Hands gripped her elbows and yanked her to her feet. In pain, she moved forward, tasting the metallic tang of her own blood. Doors were opened and closed. Still no voices—complete isolation.

  She smiled behind the mask. What did a condemned woman care if anyone spoke to her?

  Another tap to the chest. She stopped. Another door opened. She stepped forward. The stick tapped her shoulders. She sat. A metal stool. Three legs. Easily toppled. A guard released her right hand, yanked both hands beneath the seat, then reapplied the handcuff to her wrist. Her feet were similarly immobilized, attached to the legs of the stool. She leaned forward, hunched like one of the monstrous gargoyles protruding from a church façade.

  The door closed, leaving the buzz of an eerie and profound silence.

  She waited, for what or whom she did not know. Or care.

  Her shoulders, back, and knees burned from her fall and soon ached from her awkward posture atop the stool. Again, she lost track of time, whether she sat for minutes or hours.

  “They say you have yet to speak.”

  A male voice. Soft-spoken. Deep and gruff—a smoker’s voice. After months of silence even Russian sounded foreign. She did not react, did not respond. She had not heard a door open or close, or the shuffle of shoes on concrete. This man had been in the room. Watching her. Studying her. He would be her interrogator—calm at first, rational, perhaps even polite. That would change.

  “They think, perhaps, it is brain damage from the accident.” He audibly exhaled. Disbelieving. She smelled nicotine, not the acrid aroma of cheap Russian cigarettes, though she would have gladly smoked one. Sweeter, lighter, a high-end brand she could never have afforded.

  “They don’t know,” he said.

  Chair legs scraped concrete. Footsteps approached.

  He pulled the hood from her head. The sudden and unexpected light blinded in its intensity. She closed her eyes, blinking back the pain.

  The man came into focus. He leaned against the edge of a metal desk. Not particularly tall, but thick. Powerfully built. The fabric of his white dress shirt stretched across his chest and his arms. Gray hair closely cropped. Crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes. He had years under his belt. He looked at her from beneath a brow that extended well over dark, lifeless eyes. His jaw was scarred with crude stitch lines, another over his right eye, a third across the bridge of his nose, which looked to have been broken, perhaps more than once, and poorly fixed. So very Russian.

  Tendrils of smoke swirled from the lit end of a cigarette held between his fingers, the smoke spiraling to an overhead cloud. She had never seen this man, not at the FSB offices—Russia’s Federal Security Service—but from his practiced demeanor and his weathered appearance, she suspected he had once been KGB. Something.

  He’d undone the top two buttons of his dress shirt and neatly folded back the cuffs of his sleeves, revealing thick fingers, meaty palms, forearms like woven ropes. A tie rested on the desk. Beside it, a red, rectangular brick. Odd.

  “That is what I shall determine.”

  The first threat.

  He took another drag and blew smoke ringlets into the stale air. Although more than half the cigarette remained, he dropped it. His eyes searched her face for a reaction; she had smoked three packs a day before the accident. Then he crushed the tip beneath the sole of his dress shoe.

  He reached and picked up the brick as if weighing a gold bar. “Do you know what this is?”

  She did not answer.

  “It is fairly obvious, no? A brick, for certain. But not just a brick. No. A reminder. A reminder to always pay close attention. Pay close attention, or suffer the consequences. As a boy, I learned to pay attention.”

  It explained the scars, the kind left to heal on their own, and the ring finger of his right hand, bent to the left at the first knuckle.

  “It took time,” he said.

  He set the brick back on the desk. “The question is: Are you paying attention?”

  Close attention.

  But she would not speak, not to this interrogator or to any other.

  She would not prolong the inevitable, anxious to be with her brother and her family, those whom she had loved, and who went before her. She thought again of the biblical passage, of her mantra in the hospital.

  You hold no power over me.

  Though I walk through the valley of death, I will fear no evil.

  I will lie down in green pastures.

  And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

  The man gazed at her as if he could read her thoughts. “We shall see.”

  1

  Freedom did not come the day a jury exonerated Charles Jenkins of espionage and federal judge Joseph B. Harden declared him “free to go.” It did not come when the deadline for the government to appeal the jurors’ decision passed. Though Jenkins was not physically incarcerated for the remainder of his life, and grateful for the jury’s decision, his true freedom did not come until today, six months after the jury’s verdict and Harden’s proclamation. He returned home from his morning run, entered his office, and wrote the last check to the last security contractor hired by his former company, CJ Security.

  His business had provided security to the discredited international investment firm LSR&C. That LSR&C had been a CIA proprietary and not a legitimate investment company, and that it had retained CJ Security under these false pretenses, did not matter. Jenkins had been lied to, defamed, shot at, and nearly imprisoned for life because of LSR&C’s deception, but CJ Security’s contractors and vendors had no part in any of that either. They had performed their services pursuant to a written contract, and they were entitled to be paid.

  His attorney had recommended bankruptcy to get out from under the contractual obligations. Jenkins had rejected that advice. He would not right a wrong
with another wrong. Negotiate a payment schedule. I’ll make it work, he’d said.

  And he had done so—not by accepting the six-figure book deal a publisher offered him to write of his escape from Russia and of his subsequent trial and acquittal of the espionage charge. He’d also refused to sell any of the acreage of his Camano Island farm.

  He’d paid off his debts the old-fashioned way.

  He’d worked his ass off.

  He performed investigative services, served subpoenas, and did background checks on employment candidates for any business that would hire him. He made organic honey, lip balm, and hand cream from his beehives and sold those products at a store in Stanwood and online. He divided his pasture and boarded horses, and he cut and sold cords of firewood. He’d done what he needed to do to pay his debts and support his wife and two children.

  Jenkins licked the back of an envelope and sealed the final payment to the final contractor. He stared at the address label, feeling a sense of accomplishment . . . but also betrayal—a bitter pill that left a taste more unpleasant than the envelope glue.

  Let it go, he told himself.

  He considered Max, his mottled pit bull asleep at his feet. “You ready to go outside, girl?”

  Max instantly rose, her tail whipsawing the air. Jenkins had taken his early morning run without his trusted companion. Max was certainly willing—but she was also long in the tooth. Her joints would thank him for leaving her at home three of the five days he ran. In between, she gobbled glucosamine to ease her joint pain.

  Fifteen minutes later, Jenkins had changed into his work coveralls and drunk a morning protein shake. He’d increased his workout regimen and started a plant-based diet that had cut another five pounds. He now carried 225 pounds on his six-foot-five frame—his weight on his military service records.

  When he opened the back door, Max bolted outside, hurtling down the porch steps and across the lawn to bark at the boarded horses. The two Appaloosas and the Arabian lifted their heads from their feed bags, twigs of hay protruding from their mouths, but they otherwise ignored the disruption of their meal. The paddocks had held up well since Jenkins had installed a hot wire across the top rail to dissuade the horses from using the posts to scratch their backsides.