Home > The Last Agent (Charles Jenkins #2)

The Last Agent (Charles Jenkins #2)
Author: Robert Dugoni

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.

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