The Eighth Sister Read online

  “Where’s your jacket?” Alex asked when CJ ran out the door. The boy wore shorts and a T-shirt.

  “I don’t need one.”

  “It’s freezing out. Grab your down jacket off the hook.”

  CJ ran back inside and returned with his jacket. The boy was all arms and legs, tallest in his class—which was to be expected with a father Jenkins’s height and a mother half an inch over five foot ten. He looked like a mixture of Alex’s Hispanic heritage and Charlie’s African American roots. He even had his father’s green eyes—likely from a recessive gene passed down from Jenkins’s distant Louisiana ancestors.

  CJ ran past Jenkins. “Hi Dad. Bye Dad.”

  “Kiss your father,” Jenkins said.

  CJ returned and allowed Jenkins to kiss him atop the head. “Have a good day at school.” CJ turned for the car. Jenkins followed. The boy climbed into the back seat. “Any more trouble with that boy?” Jenkins asked.

  “No, it’s fine.”

  “If there’s a problem, you call. You remember the code?”

  “Yes,” CJ said, sounding impatient as he buckled in.

  “What is it?” Old habits die hard. Jenkins had a family code, just as he’d had a code when he’d worked in Mexico City, in case the shit ever hit the fan and they needed one another’s help.

  “Dad . . .”

  “We’re wasting time.”

  “How’s Lou?” CJ sighed.

  “He’s sleeping at the moment.”

  “Could you wake him?”

  “If it’s important.”

  “It is.”

  Jenkins tousled CJ’s hair. “Good boy.” He shut the door.

  Alex rolled her eyes. “He’d forget his feet if they weren’t attached to his legs. And the doctor wonders why I have high blood pressure.”

  “You’re going in for a checkup today?”

  “At two.”

  Alex was twenty-three weeks pregnant, and her last doctor’s visit revealed that she had high blood pressure, which the doctor said explained her headaches and upper abdominal pain. He’d diagnosed preeclampsia and told her to slow down and take it easy. The only cure for preeclampsia was to deliver the baby, and Alex was nowhere near term. Jenkins had taken over all the bookkeeping and administration of CJ Security from Alex, in addition to performing the fieldwork. They’d named the family business after their son.

  Jenkins kissed her. “Promise me you won’t overdo it, Alex.”

  “I won’t. They have a desk and chair in the classroom for the pregnant lady.” She got behind the wheel and buckled in. “Have you spoken with Randy?”

  “Alex . . .”

  “I’ll have less stress if you tell me you have.”

  “I have a call in to him.”

  “How much do they owe us?”

  “Let me handle it. I’m sure we’ll get paid by the end of the month.”

  “I think you should tell them you’re pulling everybody out until they’re current. That would get their attention.”

  “I’m sure it would. Don’t stress about it. The doctor said stress isn’t good for the pregnant lady.”

  CJ shouted from the back seat. “I’m going to be late, Mom.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Now he’s worried.” She kissed Jenkins and shut her car door. “Call Randy,” she said, lowering her window and speaking as she drove away. “Give him until the end of the week. Tell him he’s stressing out a pregnant lady and if I go postal, he’s first on my list.”

  Jenkins smiled and called after her. “I’ll let him know.”

  The Range Rover spit gravel as Alex navigated the center turn around the large sequoia and drove toward the asphalt road.

  CJ Security provided services for the Seattle-based investment company LSR&C. The company’s CFO, Randy Traeger, was a fellow soccer parent who had approached Jenkins after learning that Jenkins had security experience working for Seattle attorney David Sloane and his clients. Traeger explained that LSR&C was expanding quickly, with satellite offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, and that it intended to expand overseas. Jenkins could coordinate much of the security work—protecting employees as well as wealthy clients who visited the office—by phone, thereby avoiding commuting an hour and a half in ever-worsening Seattle traffic.

  The Range Rover turned left at the end of the road and disappeared behind trees and shrubbery. Jenkins looked to Max. “The security contractors won’t wait until the end of the month to get paid,” he said.

  The dog gave him a fretful look.

  “Yeah. That’s how I feel.”

  Jenkins disconnected after leaving Randy Traeger another message. If Traeger didn’t call him back today, Jenkins would drive into Seattle and make a personal appearance at LSR&C’s office in the Columbia Center. He clicked through the documents open on his computer. Forming CJ Security had required a hefty business loan and much of their savings, but the work had initially been strong. With the recent change in the market, LSR&C had slowed in paying CJ Security’s bills and was now more than fifty thousand in arrears. Jenkins could not draw again on his business loan to make the midmonth payroll to his security contractors and vendors, and he did not have the money to float LSR&C. He tried to present a calm front for Alex’s sake; additional stress would only exacerbate her preeclampsia, putting both her life and the baby’s at risk. He kept reminding himself that LSR&C had been late paying its bills before, but it had always eventually come through.

  Jenkins shoved his cell phone into his pocket, grabbed a cup of coffee from the pot on the kitchen counter, and stepped outside to get some fresh air. Max trotted along at his side. He walked down to his vegetable garden, which looked like it had been hit with an atomic blast, nothing but withered stalks, wooden stakes, and shriveled leaves. He hadn’t had time to button it up for the winter while running the business by himself.

  Jenkins thought he heard tires crunching gravel—Max’s bark confirmed it—and he looked to the south. A car navigated the dirt-and-gravel path across his neighbor’s property. Many years ago, an easement had allowed the cars to continue along the path onto Jenkins’s land, but when that easement expired, the adjacent neighbor put in a gate and planted blackberry bushes to prevent cars from driving all the way to Jenkins’s home. Charlie built his driveway and an alternative road at the back of his ten-acre lot.

  The car stopped when it reached the overgrown blackberry bushes and locked gate. At least the engine shut off. A car door slammed.

  Jenkins walked to the front of his house. By the time he got there, a man stood as if admiring the property.

  “Can I help you?” Jenkins said.

  The man turned—a ghost from Jenkins’s past. Still tall and lean, he had the bronze skin of someone regularly in the sun, but with hair now a shock of white. Carl Emerson peered at him with familiar, piercing blue eyes.

  “Been a long time,” Emerson said.

  2

  Jenkins entered the living room and handed Emerson a mug of coffee.

  “So, this is where you’ve spent your time?” Emerson stood at the picture window, looking across the horse pasture to what had once been a dairy farm but now stood fallow.

  “This is it,” Jenkins said.

  Emerson sipped his coffee to cover an awkward silence. “Private security?” he said. He’d done his research or had someone do it for him. The question was why.

  Jenkins nodded.

  Carl Emerson had been Jenkins’s CIA station chief when Jenkins served as a case officer, but Jenkins had not had contact with Emerson, or anyone else from the agency, since abruptly leaving that post some forty years ago.

  “You enjoy it?” Emerson asked.

  “For the most part,” Jenkins said. “It has its ups and downs, but it’s mine.”

  “The buck stops with you.” Emerson took another sip of coffee, smiled, and walked from the window to the river-rock fireplace. He considered framed family pictures on the mantel, one of Alex on their wedding day. “You marri
ed another case officer. Her father consulted for us in Mexico City, didn’t he?”

  Jenkins ignored the question. “And you, what are you doing these days?”

  “Keeping busy as a desk jockey in an office in Langley,” Emerson said. “Though I should have retired by now.”

  “And yet, here you are,” Jenkins said.

  “Here I am.” Emerson set his mug on the mantel. “Mr. Putin has brought Russia back to the forefront of American intelligence, making people like you and me, who worked through the Cold War, a hot commodity. Vy yeshcho govorite po-russki?”

  “Not in a long time,” Jenkins said.

  During his training at Langley, Jenkins learned he had an affinity for foreign languages. He spent a year in foreign-language school learning Russian and Spanish before being sent to Mexico City to counter what had become a haven for KGB officers at one of the largest Soviet embassies in the world. “Why are you here, Carl?”

  “The seven sisters.”

  Jenkins shook his head, unfamiliar with the term.

  “Seven Russian women, chosen from dissident parents, trained almost from birth to infiltrate various institutions of the former Soviet Union and provide the United States with intelligence. It’s one of the few times the agency exercised patience,” Emerson said.

  It distinguished the CIA from the KGB, at least when Russia had been the Soviet Union. Soviet intelligence had always moved with great deliberation and patience, and it was accepted in the intelligence community that Russia had agents in the United States who had been inserted as children.

  “The seven sisters were to be totally clandestine,” Emerson continued. “Only a select few in the agency ever knew of the operation, and fewer knew the sisters’ names. I am not among those select few.”

  “They still exist?” Jenkins asked.

  “Some,” Emerson said.

  “We didn’t deactivate them when Gorbachev instituted glasnost and perestroika in the 1980s?” Jenkins said.

  “No,” Emerson said. “And now things have changed both inside Russia and in our relationship to it. Putin is not Gorbachev.”

  Putin had been a KGB foreign intelligence officer who rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and he was generally considered untrustworthy and immoral by the intelligence community.

  Emerson spoke as he walked to one of two red leather chairs. He sat and crossed his legs. “Putin is on record as saying that the breakup of the Soviet Union ‘was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.’ It’s a particularly telling statement when one considers the twentieth century produced two world wars and the Holocaust.”

  Jenkins lowered himself onto the leather couch across from Emerson, the coffee table between them. “Why are you here, Carl?” he asked again.

  “Three of the sisters have been killed within the last two years.”

  “Killed as in—”

  “As in they’ve quit reporting and disappeared.”

  “Maybe they don’t want to be involved any longer.”

  “Unlikely. The more Russia reverts back to a dictatorship, with a constitution that is largely perfunctory, the more it goes against everything the seven sisters were trained to oppose.”

  Jenkins sat back. “You think someone inside Russia has determined their identities and executed them? Why wouldn’t they execute the other four at the same time? If they had three, they would have the names of the others—Russian interrogation techniques are ruthless.”

  “The sisters do not know one another, nor do they know the name of the operation. They don’t even know they’re part of an operation. Each believes she is acting autonomously.”

  “They can’t give each other up.”

  “No. They cannot.”

  Jenkins gave that some thought, then said, “So I ask again. Why are you here?”

  “The millennials have come of age, Charlie, and they’ve moved into the intelligence community. They are very good with computers and electronic intelligence. Human intelligence, however, boots on the ground, has become a lost art. You speak the language or could reasonably do so again quickly. Your employment provides you with a legitimate cover; LSR&C has an office in Moscow, does it not? It would make your presence within the country easy to backstop. You would not need training.”

  “You want to reactivate me?” Jenkins asked, disbelieving.

  “We do,” Emerson said.

  “For what purpose?”

  “We assume that if three of the sisters have been identified and killed, it is just a matter of time before the others are also terminated.”

  Jenkins should have said “No,” but instead he asked, “How much do we know?”

  “Not enough. What we know is Putin first learned of the seven sisters’ possible existence while he worked as a KGB agent, and that he tried unsuccessfully to verify their existence and to identify them.”

  “And he never gave up looking?”

  “He never forgot might be a better way to put it. The FSB is not the KGB. It is a more refined version, with better technology. We have reason to believe Putin verified the operation and activated a counteragent, what he refers to as an eighth sister.”

  “How very James Bond of him,” Jenkins said.

  “Subtlety has never been his hallmark. You’ve seen the pictures of him with his shirt off? Perhaps while riding bareback?”

  “Russian virility,” Jenkins said, recalling how the Russian officers thrived on thinking they were stronger than their CIA counterparts.

  “The eighth sister is in reference to an eighth building Stalin commissioned but never saw built. We need someone to identify who that person is before any more sisters are killed.”

  Jenkins shook his head. “Russian intelligence would pick me up the moment the Border Guard scanned my passport, and they will have a dossier on me from my time working in Mexico City.”

  “I’m counting on it.” Emerson smiled. “A disgruntled former CIA agent now working in Moscow. The FSB will be wary, but also very interested,” he said. “You would start slowly, provide information to interest them but which does not compromise active operations. When you establish their trust, you will indicate that you can provide the names of the remaining four sisters. When you do, we have reason to believe the eighth sister will present herself.”

  “And then what?”

  “Your role would end upon identification.”

  “I’d be a shoehorn agent.”

  “Yes.”

  Jenkins shook his head. “And my successor would kill the eighth sister?”

  “As you said, Charlie, Russian interrogation techniques can be brutal. The remaining four sisters have risked their and their family’s personal safety to provide sensitive and important information.”

  “So, tell the director to get them out. Russia is no longer a closed country. Have the remaining four sisters travel to Europe or have them travel here.”

  “Unfortunately, pulling them out might expose them, and recent events in Britain have proven that pulling them would not protect them from Putin’s wrath. We’d also lose a link to vital information at a time when we cannot afford to do so. Putin has never hidden his nostalgia for the Soviet Union. He restored lyrics chosen by Stalin to the Russian national anthem, marshaled Soviet-style military parades in Moscow, and restarted a national fitness program Stalin first began in 1931.”

  “Maybe he thinks he’s Jack LaLanne.”

  Emerson smiled, but it waned. “With his intervention in Ukraine and his annexation of Crimea, not to mention Russia’s role in Syria, in the 2016 election, and the nerve agent attack in Britain, the days of the Soviet Union seem to once again be upon us.”

  Jenkins stood and paced. “I walked away decades ago and did so for a reason.”

  “Which is what makes you an asset now. What happened in the past was a mistake, Charlie.”

  Jenkins could still see the Mexican village, men and women lying dead on the ground, and the attack based on reports he had fi
led. “A mistake? That’s an interesting way to describe it.”

  “The attack was based in part on your intelligence.”

  He grew angry. “And I’ve had to live with that. That’s been my punishment.” Jenkins checked his emotions. He’d buried the past. He’d never forgotten it. “I don’t have any desire to get involved again. I have a wife and a child, and a second on the way. Find someone else.”

  “There is no one who has your unique skill set who could be quickly activated and believed.”

  “I could go into Russia a dozen times and come up empty, Carl. What makes you think I would have any more success finding this eighth sister than anyone else?”

  “The moment you discussed the seven sisters, you wouldn’t have to find the eighth sister. She would find you.”

  Jenkins had loved that life in Mexico City. The job had given him a sense of purpose, a team intent on doing something important. He’d loved the games he’d played with the KGB officers, and he’d been good at it, better than good. His career had been fast-tracked, before the slaughter in the Oaxacan village changed his perspective.

  “I’m not that guy anymore, Carl.”

  Emerson stood, reached into his suit coat, and pulled out a small business card. “My number, in case you change your mind.”

  Jenkins didn’t reach for it. “I won’t.”

  Emerson placed the card on the mantel and walked from the room.

  Jenkins did not follow.

  After Emerson had left, Jenkins crossed to the mantel and picked up the card, considering the number. He carried the card with him to the plate glass window, and stared out at what had once been a productive dairy, but which had been left to go fallow, despite its potential.

  3

  It had been a week since Jenkins’s deadline to LSR&C, and despite Randy Traeger’s assurances the company would come current on CJ Security’s outstanding bills, LSR&C had made a payment of just $10,000. It had not been enough to make full payroll. Jenkins had security contractors threatening to quit, and vendors and creditors discussing legal actions. Worse, because of a personal guarantee Jenkins had to sign to obtain his business loan, his own assets were also at risk. He stood to lose everything, including the family farm, if the bank called in the loan.