“Did you see anyone?”
“Just a lonely widower unable to sleep.”
Jenkins let out another held breath and rubbed the top of his head. Under the circumstances he figured this was as good a time as any to leave the cabin.
“Are you hurt?” she asked.
“Only my pride.” He pulled a timetable from the unused bed and studied it. “We will arrive in Perm tomorrow and then Yekaterinburg. I will get off at each stop in case someone is trying to pass us a message, and to try to get an Internet connection on the platform. Hopefully, I’ll get more information and we’ll both know what to expect going forward. I don’t like traveling blind like this.”
“At least, Charlie, we are traveling. It could be much worse.”
40
Velikaya Estate
Novorizhskoye, Moscow
Two days after they lost Jenkins and Kulikova, Mily stepped into Yekaterina’s darkened study. He smelled cigarette smoke. A cigarette burned in an ashtray alongside several spent butts, the smoke spiraling languidly toward the ceiling. Yekaterina sat behind her desk, spotlit in one incandescent circle of light as she spoke on a cell phone, one of many burner phones she used and frequently discarded. The shades had been pulled across the two arched windows, the air inside the room so still Mily could hear the static in his ears.
Yekaterina picked up the cigarette and inhaled deeply, like giving a hug to an old friend after a long absence. She had stopped smoking when information on the correlation between smoking and cancer could no longer be refuted. She’d simply removed the cigarettes from the house, forbade anyone from smoking in her presence, brought in cleaners who sprayed various aromas to remove or mask the smell, and quit cold turkey. Because he spent so much of his time in her presence, Mily, too, had to quit, though not as easily. He still occasionally smoked at home.
She picked up the cigarette and inhaled as she turned her head to the sound of the door handle clicking shut behind him. Yekaterina looked to Mily as if she had aged ten years over the past three days. Her hair seemed to have more gray, and the lines in her skin—what his mother had called “worry lines”—appeared to have been etched deeper, like paper cuts. In this instance he disagreed with his mother’s characterization. These were not worry lines. Yekaterina mourned. Mily suspected there was nothing less natural than a child passing before a parent and nothing as painful.
Yekaterina disconnected her call and set the cell phone gently on the desk. Mily noticed the rise and fall of her chest, as if it pained her to take each breath, to go on living. Eldar had been an ass, spoiled, self-centered, and intoxicated by power and money, neither of which he had created or earned. But Mily knew Eldar had not always been that way, nor were those a mother’s memories now. Yekaterina remembered the baby boy to whom she had given birth, the still-innocent child she had cared for and loved, the young man who had showed so much promise before the drugs and the booze unleashed a genie she hardly recognized—cruel, angry, bitter, and vengeful.
“You have news?” she asked softly and without emotion.
“Ugolov has located Jenkins and Kulikova,” he said, referring to the director of the Moscow Department of Information Technologies.
“Where?”
“The Yaroslavsky rail terminal in Moscow. They boarded a Trans-Siberian train, 322, two days ago.”
“They could be anywhere.”
“No,” he said. “Ugolov and his technician worked around the clock reviewing video of the platforms and tracks between Moscow and Novosibirsk at the time the 322 was designated to arrive. They have not departed the train.”
“Where is the train now?”
“It will be arriving in Krasnoyarsk at 8:24 this evening and departing at two minutes after nine. The flight there is more than four hours, and it will take time to get to the airport and then from the airport in Krasnoyarsk to the railway terminal. However, the train’s next stop is Irkutsk at 3:47 a.m. We can be there. We can meet the train.”
“And what if Mr. Jenkins and Ms. Kulikova again do not depart in Irkutsk?”
Mily smiled. “I have a plan, Comare, but if we are going to act, I must move now to get everything in place. I will call you when I have Mr. Jenkins and Ms. Kulikova on the plane back to Moscow.”
The faintest smile curled a corner of Yekaterina’s lip, the first Mily had seen in days. “No, Mily. I have no intention of sitting here.”
Mily shook his head. “I must disagree. Let us bring them back here on the plane. It is safer here on the estate where we can protect you and keep you out of view of the many cameras.”