She stepped to the counter, purchasing several items, then exited the store, the little white dog trotting along beside her. She walked along Novoyasenevskiy Prospekt. Light faded, night becoming more prominent. As there were fewer people on the sidewalk and fewer cars, he decided to pull back. He stopped at a bus stop and watched Maria cross the street, again looking over her shoulder.
She walked into a Teremok. Had she come all this way just to buy food? Helge did not know for certain, but it seemed there had to be a Teremok closer to their apartment.
Fifteen minutes later Maria exited the restaurant carrying a bag of food, but she did not walk toward the Metro. She turned into a parking lot with a single-story, white-brick building with two spires, a cross atop each spire. Helge was unfamiliar with this church, or its significance, if any, to Maria. He expected his wife to remain outside the building, perhaps for a designated rendezvous, but Maria surprised him again when she pulled open the green door and stepped inside.
Helge crossed the street to the church and settled outside a stained-glass window. Beyond a pane of red glass, his wife knelt before an icon—a woman holding a cross in one hand and a small bottle in the other. Helge stepped back to read the sign bolted to the building. Temple Martyr Anastasia. He did not know this martyr or her significance to Maria.
Maria remained kneeling, and Helge began to doubt she intended to meet a lover. Did she suspect Helge knew or had she seen him, making this visit to a temple an attempt to throw him off? After several minutes, the only other couple inside crossed themselves repeatedly, then departed, paying him no notice. When Helge looked back through the window Maria was no longer at the kneeler. He didn’t immediately see her, but he saw Stanislav at the end of his leash staring up at someone behind the statue. Maria.
After a few seconds, Maria came out from behind the statue and moved without hesitation to the front door. Helge stepped from the wall to the opposite end of the temple. Maria quickly exited and crossed to the street. She stopped and looked back. Helge shrunk into the shadows and waited until his wife walked toward the Metro station.
Such odd behavior.
About to leave, Helge noticed the headlights of an approaching car. It parked beside the church and a man stepped out and walked to the church door. Was this Maria’s lover? Had he missed their rendezvous? Did Maria have second thoughts? Or was this an innocent penitent? Helge stepped back to the window. The man gazed up at the same icon, crossed himself, then walked behind it. Moments later, the man reappeared, exited the temple, and departed in his car.
Uncertain what he had witnessed, Helge went inside the temple. He didn’t have much time. He needed to catch a taxi and get home before Maria, or at least buy cigarettes to have an excuse for having left the apartment. Dozens of candles burned and flickered, emitting small spires of black smoke and the odor of melting wax. A click behind him caused him to turn, but it was only the door shutting. He caught his breath and walked to the icon, looking at the pedestal, then moving behind it.
“You there! What are you doing?”
A security guard in a blue uniform had entered the temple and stood inside the door staring at him.
“Nothing. I . . . I dropped my phone and was having trouble locating it.”
The man gave him a disbelieving look, but since he had no real authority, he didn’t inquire further. “The temple is closed now. You must leave. I am locking the door.”
Helge held up his phone. “Good thing I found my phone then.”
“Yes. Good thing,” the man said.
Helge stepped past him and hurried outside in search of a cab.
6
Sheremetyevo Airport
Moscow, Russia
Two weeks after Jenkins had first entered Langley, he pushed and shoved against a horde making their way to the border guard seated behind the glass partition at Sheremetyevo Airport, the busiest of Moscow’s three main airports.
Jenkins had spent those two weeks at CIA headquarters getting cross-trained in a variety of disciplines including how to use audio devices, detect camera and listening equipment, and how to communicate using a personal hot spot and an encrypted chat room to which only he and Matt Lemore would have access. He memorized the information on multiple passports and other documentation that identified him as anything from a white British businessman to an elderly babushka, what Langley’s disguise division called “counterfeit people.”
The division measured him in the same way a fine tailor measured a client—inseam, neck, sleeve length, waist, and chest. They photographed him from every angle, the lens capturing 360-degree images. They measured his shoe size, hat size, and hand size. They took hair samples and made wig patterns ranging from a bald man to a man with a full head of hair. He learned how to apply elaborate masks to disguise his face in under a minute, and how to go from a businessman carrying a briefcase to a grandmother pushing a shopping cart in just forty-six steps. He learned from the CIA’s best that a disguise was not just a mask or applying makeup, but about creating illusions and deceptions so a witness would swear Jenkins had not been a six-foot-five Black man, but a five-foot-ten Asian man, for example.