He checked his watch. The train would leave in ten minutes. He looked to the metal detectors at the entrance to the station. A line spiraled down the steps. Kulikova’s warning filled his thoughts.
The train will leave on time, with or without you.
Maria Kulikova paced her cabin. Four steps to the window. Four steps to the door. Each time she reached the window she looked to the platform and the commuters smoking furiously or standing in the shadows beyond the reach of the light from the decorative lamp poles. Charles Jenkins had disappeared up the steps of the railway station. She had wanted to go into the terminal with him, to divide the responsibility, but Jenkins had rejected that idea. She understood his commitment to his job, his duty to bring her home alive, but she didn’t like feeling helpless. Her desire to help was also pragmatic. What would she do if Jenkins did not return? Where would she go?
She took a deep breath and brought her thoughts under control. She’d do what she’d done for the past forty years. She’d find a way to survive.
She looked again to the terminal, then checked her wristwatch: 8:59.
Someone knocked on her door, startling her. Her heart skipped. It was not the code she and Jenkins worked out before he left. The wheels of the traveling cart squeaked in the hallway. Someone, the matron, perhaps, knocked a second time. Maria knew the matrons, as well as the provodnik, had a key to her carriage. She pressed her ear to the door and heard a different sound. She looked down at a piece of paper being slipped under the door.
She stepped back. The deadbolt remained in place. The door handle did not rattle. The wheels squealed as the cart continued down the carriage. Maria bent and picked up the slip of paper.
Get off the train in Irkutsk.
Look for a friend.
She stared at the note, not knowing whether to believe what had been written. It could be a trap. Then again, the deliveryman who came to the apartment had provided the train tickets. Jenkins’s contacts would therefore know which train Jenkins and Kulikova boarded, as well as their carriage number. But information could also be bought—and the Velikayas had money to burn—or coerced through the power of an office, and few had more power than the deputy director of counterintelligence.
While she debated the meaning of the note and its legitimacy, she felt the train lurch, then begin to slowly leave the station. Charlie.
They no longer needed a phone.
She shifted her gaze from the note to her watch: 9:03. She rushed back to the window and searched the platform and the steps leading up to the station.
Charles Jenkins was not there.
Another rap on the cabin door startled her, but this time the knocking came in code. Two knocks, then four, then one. Maria stepped to the door and unlocked it.
“There was a Svyaznoy store across the plaza,” Jenkins said as he stepped inside. “I didn’t have—”
Maria hugged him. Then she stepped back and held up the note. Jenkins opened it and read the words. “Where did it come from?”
“The cart matron slipped it under the door.”
“You’re sure?”
“I am not sure. But I heard the cart passing. The matron knocked. Then someone slipped the paper under the door. What do you think of it?”
Jenkins smiled. “My contact told me to think low tech again when high tech failed or could be compromised. This certainly fits that scenario. We’ll need to be careful. We’ll disembark in Irkutsk separately, as we boarded, until we can be certain.”
“Who is ‘a friend’？” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But it must be someone I will recognize or who will use those words to make him or herself known.”
42
Trans-Siberian Railway
Outside of Irkutsk
Maria Kulikova checked her watch—12:42 a.m. She had tossed and turned on her berth, unable to sleep, for several hours. Their train would arrive in Irkutsk at 3:47 a.m., the early hour perhaps the reason why she and Jenkins would depart the train at this platform. The darkness would help to conceal them. Jenkins had told her to get some rest, but that was not likely. She sat up. As before, he slept soundly in the other cabin.
She put on her slippers, unbolted her cabin door, and looked down the train carriage to the samovar. No one. She walked down the narrow corridor, her legs balancing with the rocking of the train. At the samovar she filled a paper cup with hot water and chose a peppermint tea bag, along with several napkins. She looked through the glass partition into the adjacent sitting car. Arkhip sat alone, staring out the window, his gaze fixed to the glass, his thoughts seemingly far from the carriage. She wondered if he thought of his wife—if her death was the reason he did not sleep. She wished she shared his pain. She wished she had felt the same way about Helge as Arkhip felt about his wife. It might help ease the horrible burden Maria felt for Helge’s death—if she had loved him the way Arkhip had loved his wife, still loved his wife. She saw the love in Arkhip’s moist eyes, heard love in the tremor in his voice, deduced it from the fact that two years after his wife’s death, he still wore his wedding ring. Maria wanted to grieve Helge’s death, but she could not lie, at least not to herself.