The Silent Sisters (Charles Jenkins #3)
Robert Dugoni
Prologue
Irkutsk Meatpacking Plant
Irkutsk, Russia
Charles Jenkins struggled to lift his chin from his chest. His head flopped to the left, then rolled to the right. The muscles in his neck could no longer hold the weight upright. He could see, with difficulty, out of his left eye; his right eye had long since swollen shut. The metallic taste of blood filled his mouth, and he could not breathe through his nostrils—his nose broken from the repeated blows. His tongue touched the sharp shards of what remained of several of his teeth. So much for all that dental work, and those braces he had worn as a child.
The woman stepped forward, the soles of her brown leather boots in the puddle of his sweat and blood on the finished concrete beneath where he dangled, from the meat hook, suspended by his bound wrists. On the hooks beside him hung large carcasses of meat, not yet halved—too big for cows, he recalled thinking before the beating began, maybe buffalo. He no longer felt the ropes biting into the flesh of his wrists or the strain of his weight on his shoulder joints. The bitter cold had initially exacerbated the pain of each blow his interrogators inflicted, but Jenkins had since grown numb.
He no longer felt much of anything.
“Do you know where we are?” The woman asked the question in heavily accented English, each word punctuated by a wisp of condensation.
He could guess at an answer to her question, but even if he knew, he didn’t think he could form the words. No matter. Her question had been rhetorical.
“Like all American men, I’m sure you watched your Rocky Balboa use the sides of beef as punching bags. No? I stopped watching after the fourth picture show. The one in which Mr. Balboa defeats the Russian, Ivan Drago. It became . . . too far-fetched.” Her lips formed just the hint of a smile. The two men who had taken turns punishing Jenkins laughed. A third man, his interrogator, sat stoically in a folding chair.
The woman turned her head and glanced around the expansive hall as if taking in the loading bays and finished concrete floor of the expansive room. “This is the largest meat processing plant in Irkutsk. On weekdays the refrigerated trucks arrive early each morning. When they come, you can feel the reverberation of the truck engines as the drivers back into place at the loading bays and the workers fill their shipping containers and satisfy orders all over Russia. Until then . . .” She glanced about the empty room again, took a deep inhale, exhaled a cloud of mist. “It is quiet. Peaceful. No?”
Jenkins tried to spit blood, but he could not generate the strength. His saliva dribbled down his chin. “Peaceful” was not exactly the word that came to his mind.
The woman took out a cigarette, holding it in her gloved hand. Her driver dutifully stepped from the parked SUV to her side and thumbed a flame on his lighter. She inhaled and blew out smoke. “Do you know how I know this?” she asked.
Jenkins’s chin fell again to his chest. Just as quickly one of his punishers grabbed his hair and yanked back his head. “Pay attention, Mr. Jenkins,” his interrogator, the eldest, said from his chair. “We are coming to the good part.”
“My grandfather owned this processing plant,” the woman said. “His name was not on the building, but he owned it. Each month he received a bag of cash for providing the plant with protection from its competitors. Each week my grandmother would come here for meat until our freezer at home was full. You see, Mr. Jenkins, when my grandfather was freed from Stalin’s gulags, he came here, to Irkutsk, and built his business with men from inside those gulags—men loyal to him who hated the communist government. My father used to tell me stories about coming here as a boy, about seeing these slabs of meat. ‘Thousands of them,’ he would say. ‘All hanging from hooks.’ He loved to watch the conveyor belt in motion, hear it hum and shake as it pulled the meat along the track to the parked trucks in the bays. He told me he loved the simple efficiency of the operation. That is what my father taught me about business. He would say to me, ‘Malen’kaya Printsessa,’ Little Princess. ‘Simplicity is efficiency. Your profit margins will be higher for it, and your blood pressure lower.’” A thin smile. Wistful. “I loved my father as much, if not more, than any girl, and I passed his advice on to my son. I wanted my son to possess this same wisdom when it was his time to run the family business. Do you know what else I taught him?”
Jenkins spit, then rolled his head to the right so he could better see her. Attractive. Well put together. Not tall like his wife, Alex, maybe five five or six at most. Built like a gymnast. Light-brown hair fell softly to her shoulders. Elegant. That’s how he would describe her, though maybe her beauty was just a contrast to the savagery surrounding them. Fine Slavic features. Oval face and eyes—blue, maybe green. Her skin, what he could see anyway, was the color of weak tea, her nose thin and straight, as were her teeth. Wealthy. He could tell not just from her appearance but from the car in which she arrived—a black Russian GAZ Tigr, which looked like an American Humvee. Probably $250,000. Four-wheel drive. Bulletproof windows. Tires that don’t deflate. Secure.
Jenkins spit again and this time formed the words to answer her question. “How to treat a woman?” he said.
Her face soured. Her eyes shifted.
The blow to Jenkins’s ribs was fast and hard. He felt only a dull pain. His punishers knew how to throw a punch, how to turn their shoulders and hips to deliver maximum force. Boxers, likely.
The woman stepped closer. She stared into his eyes. She didn’t flinch at his battered appearance. She understood and was familiar with violence. “I taught him to be deliberate, to be careful, as my father taught me. I taught him to never leave behind evidence.”
“Should have taught him how to treat a woman; we wouldn’t be here if you had.”
Jenkins braced for another blow, but the woman’s eyes shifted to his punishers and she shook her head. “Perhaps,” she said in a peculiar moment of honesty. “My son was too much like his father. He inherited his ill temper and his lust for the wrong women, but he was my son. Do you have a son, Mr. Jenkins?”
Jenkins thought of Alex and their son, CJ; their daughter, Lizzie. This was not supposed to end this way. He had expected to enter Russia this final time anonymously and leave the same way. In and out before the Russian FSB, the successor to the KGB, ever knew he had been there, his handler, Matt Lemore, said. Jenkins had screwed up.
He’d cared.
He should have just walked away.