“Two eggs, sunny-side up. Fruit instead of hash browns. Hold the bacon and the toast.”
“The Countryman, extra bacon. Hash browns, extra crispy. Wheat toast?”
Jenkins smiled. “Sounds good to me.”
“And a doggie bag?”
“Max would be most appreciative.”
“Picked up some of your lip balm the other day. Stuff really works.”
“I’d never cheat the person responsible for serving my meals.”
“Smart man,” she said, departing.
Jenkins flipped open the newspaper. A headline caught his attention. An American citizen claiming to have traveled to Moscow for a wedding had been detained by the Kremlin and charged with spying. After weeks of saber rattling, the man had been released from Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo Prison.
About to turn the page, Jenkins sensed someone hovering over his table. Maureen was fast when the restaurant was hopping, but not this fast. He lowered the paper. Matt Lemore wore a sheepish grin, his hands raised. “I promised to buy you a cup of coffee,” he said.
Jenkins folded the paper and nodded to the other side of the vinyl booth. Lemore sat and picked up one of the laminated menus from a rack on the table. “What’s good around here?” he asked.
“Coffee,” Jenkins said, and he sipped from the mug.
Maureen returned with a pot and topped off Jenkins’s mug. “I’ll have . . .” Lemore began, flipping the laminated menu, but Maureen turned and walked from the table as if she hadn’t heard him.
“She doesn’t know you,” Jenkins said.
“She only serves people she knows?” Lemore smiled through his nervousness.
“Or likes.” Jenkins sipped his coffee.
Lemore slid the menu back into the rack.
Jenkins set down his mug. “That move you made at the farm, what was it?”
“The wrist takedown? Sorry about that.”
“What was it?”
“Judo mostly, a technique called osoto-gari, with some Krav Maga,” Lemore said. The latter term referred to the tactical training techniques of the Israel Defense Forces. Jenkins had employed Krav Maga on the countermove to take down Lemore, though in his day it had been called Tang Soo Do.
Lemore was not a desk jockey.
“Paramilitary training. Where? Harvey Point?” Jenkins asked, meaning North Carolina.
“Camp Peary,” Lemore said, referring to a covert CIA facility known as “the Farm.”
“Where were you assigned?”
“Mostly Russia and Eastern Europe. More recently I’ve been sitting at a desk in Langley. I’m newly married. My wife is expecting our first child. We thought it best if I stayed closer to home.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks.”
“So your spy days are at an end?”
Lemore nodded. “For now. As are my wife’s.”
Many officers married other CIA officers—Jenkins included. Officers understood why their spouses could not come home and share the details of their day, and why they could leave on a moment’s notice and return without a word as to where they had been.
“And how did you get this plum assignment?”
Lemore tapped on the newspaper. “I was running him.”
Jenkins reconsidered the article on the inside page. “You were his case officer?”
“Well, yes, though we use different terminology now.”
“How old are you?”
“Forty-two.” Lemore looked like a college kid.
“How many years do you have in?”
“Sixteen. I entered after college and four years in the marines.”
“You served?”
“I wanted to fight for my country.”
“Did you?”
“Two tours in Iraq.”
“How’d you get to the agency? Let me guess. You wanted to serve your country again.”
“No. I needed a job.”
Jenkins chuckled. “Why Russia and the Eastern Bloc countries?”
“That was my area of study in college. The Bolshevik revolution, the rise of communism and the Soviet Union, and the economic collapse and ultimate breakup.”
“Not if Mr. Putin gets his way.”
“Russia today is a lot like the Soviet Union used to be,” Lemore said, not sounding impressed.
“You’re telling me?”
“Sorry. I just meant there’s a lot of bluster they’re not always capable of backing up.”
“Are you Russian?”
“My mother’s family is Russian. Lemore is French.”
“A ty govorish’ po russki?”
“Da.”
“The country interested you?”
Lemore smiled. “That and I couldn’t do math worth a shit, so accounting was out . . .”
Maureen returned with Jenkins’s meal. Lemore kept his eyes down and his hands folded. He looked like a penitent in a catechism class.
“Hey,” Maureen said. Lemore looked up. “You going to eat?”
“Ah, yeah. I’ll—”
“Have what he’s having?” Maureen said.
Lemore’s eyes shifted to the platter of food. “Sure. What’s he having?”
She flipped over and filled Lemore’s coffee mug before departing.
“She must like you,” Jenkins said. “That’s as much hospitality as you’re going to get.” He picked up one of his bacon slices and took a bite. “How’d your guy get caught?” Jenkins tapped the newspaper article.
“He was supposed to get caught.”
Interesting. “Why?”
“You recall Olga Ivashutin?”
“The Russian attorney accused of playing a part in the meeting with Donald Trump’s election staff during the 2016 campaign.”
“We couldn’t hold her, and we’d gotten everything out of her that we were going to get. We wanted the Russians to think they had us over a barrel and that we’d release her only because they had one of ours.”
“You wanted them to believe they had the upper hand and forced yours. You did study Russian culture.”
Lemore smiled. Then he said, “There was another reason for him to get caught. It’s why I’m here.”
Jenkins set down his mug. “I’m all ears.”
“We’ve been seeking to confirm a months-long rumor about Lefortovo Prison. I figured the easiest way to do so was to get someone in who we knew we could get out again.”
“What’s the rumor?”
“Could I ask you a few questions?”
Jenkins cut into his eggs and took a forkful mixed with the hash browns. “You can ask.”
“When you were in Russia, how did you get out?”
“I came across the Black Sea on a Turkish fishing boat and eventually made my way to Çeşme, then paid my way across the Aegean Sea to Chios.”
“I meant how did you get out of Moscow to the Black Sea?”
“An agent. A Russian woman. It’s a long story.”
“Paulina Ponomayova?”
Jenkins set down his fork, sensing something coming. He’d initially gone into Russia after his former case officer, Carl Emerson, told him that seven unrelated Russian women known as “the seven sisters” had been targeted by Russia’s secret police. The women had served for decades as American moles privy to highly classified information. Three had been exposed and executed. Emerson told Jenkins the hunter was known as “the eighth sister” and asked Jenkins to determine that person’s identity. But everything Emerson had told Jenkins had been a lie. Emerson himself had exposed the three sisters in exchange for millions of dollars. Paulina Ponomayova had been working not for Russia’s secret police but for the CIA, trying to identify the CIA leak. When Jenkins learned of Emerson’s betrayal, he’d barely escaped Russia alive, and only with Ponomayova’s significant sacrifice. Once back home, things got worse. When Jenkins alerted US authorities to Emerson’s betrayal, Jenkins had been accused and tried for espionage. Only his lawyer’s brilliance and a judge with brass balls had kept him from a life in prison.