He didn’t say any of them. He locked eyes with her, testing her, gauging her resolve.
She held his gaze, steely-eyed and determined, all trace of her tears gone, at least for the time being. She would grieve for her murdered father, of course she would, but she would lock the grief and pain away until she could at least look at herself in the mirror and tell the person staring back that she’d settled the score.
Or she would die trying. It was really that simple.
They measured each other for a long time. Tracie didn’t care. She would stare at her boss for as long as it took to get what she needed.
Finally he nodded.
Then he shook his head.
Then he reached into a drawer and pulled out a yellow file folder and tossed it across the desk. It spun once and landed directly in front of Tracie, the photos spilling out onto the polished walnut surface like the desecration they were.
She clamped her mouth closed and ground her teeth and steeled herself for the worst. Then she began sorting through the pictures, each a visual stab in her heart that was every bit as real as if Piotr Speransky had snuck into the office and was even now thrusting a combat knife into her back, over and over.
Her father lay slumped to the side, a portion of his skull blown off by one or more slugs from a weapon far more powerful than it needed to be to accomplish its task. That had been done for effect too, Tracie knew. What was left of his head lolled on his shoulder, gore covering his face. The amount of blood that had been spilled was sickening. It ran down his neck. It soaked his shirt. It covered virtually all of the surrounding area.
His body strained in death against the bonds keeping him in the chair, and Tracie’s heart broke, over and over, as she sifted through the photos.
“He was taken to an abandoned house in a secluded area of Alexandria, on Telegraph Road,” Stallings said. “A stolen car was found abandoned on the side of Route 644, which, as you know, is along your father’s commute home from the Pentagon.”
Tracie closed her eyes and ran her hands through her hair.
“Are you sure you want to hear this?” Stallings asked gently.
“Keep going.”
He sighed. “The current working theory by law enforcement is that this was a random act, that your father stopped to help what he thought was a stranded motorist and was kidnapped, tortured and robbed, possibly in a gang-related incident. But of course we know differently.”
“Do they know how long he was tortured?”
“They suspect the call was made to the police shortly after your father died, and given the fact he typically left work at the same time every evening…they think it was five hours, give or take.”
“What was done to him, specifically?” Tracie asked, doing her best to ignore the drumbeat of accusations screaming inside her skull that said she was to blame, that she had killed her father, that she was the reason he lay slumped in a chair with his head blown apart.
“Chemicals were involved,” Stallings said, choosing his words carefully. “As were blades. But they won’t really have any more specifics until after the autopsy has been completed.”
She shuffled through the photos again before slipping them neatly back into the file folder. She had seen enough. The images they contained would be burned into her memory for the rest of her life.
“I assume you’ve arranged protection for my mother?” she said.
“Of course. She’s under round-the-clock surveillance. There’s no way Speransky can get anywhere near her even if he’s still in the country, which I very much doubt.”
“Thank you,” Tracie said. “And thank you for sending the Gulfstream to bring me home.”
“The murder of a four-star general is big news. I didn’t want you finding out from the television.”
“I appreciate that,” she said. Her hands were folded in her lap and she stared at them as if they were the most fascinating things she’d ever seen. Then she raised her eyes and met Aaron Stallings’ steady gaze. “There’s something else.”
“I know there is.”
“How the hell did Piotr Speransky find out who I was?”
22
They stared at each other for a long time, nobody speaking. As the silence stretched on, Tracie felt the shock and grief draining from her system, replaced by something else.
Something diamond-hard.
Something cold and furious.
Something beyond furious.
“The mole,” she said.
“Yes,” Stallings agreed. “There’s a mole.”
“No, you’re not hearing me,” Tracie said. “I’m not saying, ‘Gee whiz, Director, there must be a mole.’ I’m saying the mole I told you about at least a year ago is still there, leaking information, doing what moles do, and now, because you ignored me and did nothing, I’ve been compromised and my father is dead. That’s what I’m saying.”
Stallings’ complexion began to change, his face coloring and his expression darkening. Nobody talked to him the way Tracie just had, and she knew he would not tolerate it, not even from an operative lost in her grief. She knew it; she just didn’t care.
He started to speak, only to slam his jaw closed and stop himself.
Then he cleared his throat and said, “There are things of which you are unaware.” It was obvious he was biting back his legendary temper, but Tracie didn’t care about that, either.
“No,” she said, interrupting her boss before he could continue. “That doesn’t cut it. You don’t get to sit behind your desk and dismiss me with the excuse that I don’t have clearance to know everything, or that you know the identity of the mole but have been allowing him to continue to operate because you’re gaining valuable intel from him. That’s not acceptable. I’ve been outed to a Soviet assassin and now the best man I’ve ever known is dead. And he wasn’t just killed. He was tortured for hours and then killed. And there’s no justification for that. None.”
Stallings had shown no reaction while she spoke, other than the steady coloring of his face. By the time she finished, it was just shy of purple, the shade of an overcast sky before a vicious thunderstorm.
He sat for a moment and then said, “Are you finished? Have you gotten it all out of your system?”
“For the time being.”
“Good. Because now it’s my turn to talk.”
Tracie stared at him without speaking.
“Last year you accused me of sitting on the intel you extracted from Winston Andrews regarding other leaks inside the agency, and now you’re doing it again. I know you’re devastated by the loss of your father, so I understand you lashing out. I certainly understand your anger and frustration. I feel it, too.
“And if you truly believe I was dismissing your concerns back then or I’m dismissing them now, I’m very sorry but there’s nothing I can do about that. Because the fact of the matter is that I can’t and won’t run everything I’m doing as head of this agency past a field-level operative. The system doesn’t work that way, and it shouldn’t work that way.
“All I can tell you is that it is, by nature, extremely difficult to flush out a mole, particularly inside an organization filled with people trained better than anyone else in the world in the skills of deception and stealth. But I have been working steadily on identifying the leaker, and I’ve been making progress.
“I am heartily sorry I wasn’t able to do so in time to prevent what happened to your father, and that’s the truth. Whether you choose to accept that explanation is up to you. Frankly, it’s more than you’re entitled to as an employee, and I wouldn’t be offering any elucidation at all were it not for the horrible murder last night of General Tanner.
“But I will not tolerate you coming into my office and accusing me of intentionally allowing a mole to operate for the past year, undermining the security of this nation and resulting in the deaths of some of its citizens, because I felt I was getting something out of it, professionally or personally. That’s where I draw th
e line. That’s what is unacceptable.”
Tracie was at a loss. She had no idea how to respond. She’d expected a full-on barrage of invective from the CIA director, an unleashing of insults that would allow her to respond in kind and maybe, just maybe, release some of the awful tension and grief and fury swirling inside her. Subconsciously, she suspected that was why she had attacked him so heatedly in the first place.
But instead, his response was measured and fair, probably more so than she deserved. And he was right. Her job had been to deliver the information about a possible leak inside the agency to her superiors, and that was what she had done. What happened to that information after she passed it along, how it was processed and what became of it, was far above her pay grade. That would have been the case even if her father was still alive and had never been kidnapped.
She had lowered her head and was again staring down at her hands fidgeting in her lap, seemingly of their own accord. She steeled herself and raised her eyes and met those of her handler and held them steadily.
“You’re absolutely right,” she said. “That was unfair of me and I apologize. We’ve had our disagreements over the course of working together, and I’ve felt unfairly treated at times. A lot of the time, in fact. But never once in my nine years working inside this agency have I ever seen you act with anything less than the safety and security of this country as your foremost consideration.”
“Apology accepted,” he said quietly. “You’ve been blindsided and I would have been shocked had you not reacted strongly.”
“That’s still no excuse, but thank you. And I suppose it goes without saying, but I’m going after Speransky. I’ll be leaving right after the funeral.”
“I can’t let you do that,” Stallings said firmly. “I meant what I said before. I give you my word we’ll handle this, but you’re not to get involved.”
“Then I quit.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. If I can’t do this as an operative, I’ll do it on my own.” She stood and faced the CIA director, still seated behind his desk. His jaw hung open and he stared at her, nonplussed. In other circumstances she would have derived great pleasure from the sight, but right now she just felt numb.
“Thank you for everything,” she said. She extended her hand and he shook it reflexively. “It’s been an honor serving this country and a privilege working with you.”
She turned toward the door and walked out, closing it softly behind her.
23
May 19, 1988
2:30 a.m.
Leningrad, Russia, USSR
Vasily Labochev arranged his daily briefing papers into a neat stack and slid them to the side of his desk. By now they were eighteen hours old and he’d been over them four times already, but what else was there to do in the middle of the night when the hooker he’d paid good money for was sleeping alone in his bed?
He sipped from a large tumbler of vodka and stroked his beard. Sometimes the cost of amassing wealth was high.
Vasily had been in charge of the KGB’s Leningrad station for well over thirty years. His rise through the ranks of the Soviet Union’s legendary spy agency had been meteoric, thanks in large part to the success he’d had developing sources of information inside the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency in the years following World War II, and continuing to this day.
A young intelligence operative at the time the Red Army surrounded Berlin, Vasily had struck up something like a friendship with an American operative also developing intel in the area. The American’s name was Winston Andrews, and despite the fact that with the end of the war, the United States and the USSR turned from reluctant allies to hated enemies, the two men remained in contact.
Although their personalities were about as different as it was possible to get—Vasily was oversized and ebullient, a heavy drinker and inveterate womanizer while Andrews was slim and serious—through many hours spent drinking and talking, Vasily began to realize the serious-minded Andrews shared his interest in profiting personally as well as professionally from his work.
And a career in covert intelligence offered a unique opportunity to do so.
A feeling-out process began, one that was lengthy and incremental, taking place over the course of several years as each man gauged the other’s dedication to his country and willingness to sacrifice ideals—or at least bend them a little, and sometimes a lot—in favor of personal gain.
The early, tentative exchanges of intelligence were successful. Both men received high praise from their handlers for collecting intel on the enemy, while successfully concealing the fact they were selling intelligence of equal or greater value to the very same enemy. It was a decades-long high-wire act; with a treason charge certain to follow for either man should the illicit arrangement ever be exposed.
But Vasily’s arrangement never came to light inside the KGB, and for the longest time, neither did the CIA tumble to Winston Andrews’ activity. By the nineteen-fifties, each spy was rocketing up the ranks inside his agency. Vasily became the youngest station chief in KGB history when placed in charge of Leningrad in 1957, and he’d remained in his position ever since.
The key to his success, and the factor that allowed him to act both as a traitor to his country and a valuable collector of intelligence at the same time, was the fact that Vasily never overstepped. He only utilized his CIA contacts for information once of twice a year on an official basis, making the flow of information slow and occasional rather than rapid, which would have drawn far too much attention from the wrong people and resulted in his—and his American comrade—getting caught.
And then shot; at least in his case.
Shortly after assuming his duties in Leningrad, Vasily expanded his operation to include contract work: utilizing his American contacts to gain intelligence not for the benefit of the Soviet government, but for private entities willing to meet Vasily’s extremely steep asking price.
In this manner, he was able over the years to amass exorbitant wealth through the sale of intelligence to mercenaries and other interested parties, while charging an extremely steep fee, thus assuring he did not run the risk of going to the well too often and seeing the entire operation blow up in his face.
From the early nineteen-sixties until last year—a span of more than a quarter-century—the mutually beneficial arrangement between Vasily and Winston Andrews ran with the smoothness of a finely crafted Swiss watch.
And then, last year, abruptly and without warning, Andrews disappeared.
Details were sketchy and hard to come by, even for a KGB station chief, and it took Vasily a long time to learn Winston Andrews’ fate. He was still uncertain of all that had happened. But apparently someone inside the CIA finally uncovered Andrews’ status as a KGB collaborator and the man had taken his own life to avoid suffering the humiliating consequences of his treachery.
This should have marked the end of Vasily’s long run as a collector of intelligence for the KGB—not to mention his lucrative private business—but Vasily was nothing if not resourceful. He had long ago envisioned a scenario whereby Andrews was outed or killed, and he had planned for the future accordingly.
He had developed a second conduit of intelligence inside Langley.
An even more valuable one.
As soon as Vasily learned of Andrews’ disappearance he withdrew from all activity with his secondary source, like a turtle retreating inside its shell. He kept a low profile for months, concerned that prior to his suicide, his old comrade Winston Andrews might have revealed the identity of his collaborator to someone inside the CIA.
A revelation that would most likely get Vasily killed.
When nearly a year went by and that dire consequence never materialized, Vasily cautiously renewed acquaintances with his second contact, his big fish. The contact’s name was Roger Thornton, one of just three deputy CIA directors. Like Vasily and Winston Andrews, Thornton had begun his career as an operative, rising through agency ra
nks over the years until eventually ascending to a position just one rung below that of Director Aaron Stallings himself.
Unlike Andrews, Thornton had become more reluctant to share intel the higher he climbed on his organizational ladder, but that fact was irrelevant to Vasily. He had Thornton by the balls, because he’d recorded multiple conversations with the man in which information was exchanged that was damaging to the United States of America.
Vasily had only needed to mention this fact to Thornton once to make his point: he would cooperate fully with Vasily when asked, or the KGB station chief would leak some of his hours of incriminating conversations with Thornton to the American press, and Thornton would be finished. His career would be destroyed and he would face life in prison—perhaps even execution—for treason.
Despite having been nearly a year since they last spoke, Vasily found it unnecessary to remind Thornton of the consequences for not complying with a request when they renewed acquaintances in January. They made a bit of small talk and then got down to business
Thornton reacted angrily to Vasily’s request. “The name of a covert operative? That’s going too far, Vasily. I can’t possibly provide you with that information. It’s…it’s just…impossible.”
“It is possible, my friend,” Vasily had answered, speaking calmly and quietly. “In fact, not only is it possible, it is exactly what you are going to do.”
Thornton had gone quiet for a long time, and Vasily let the silence drag on, knowing the CIA deputy director was considering his options, knowing also that he had none.
At last Thornton had said, “Hypothetically speaking, if I were to provide you with a name, what operative would we be referring to?”
The Soviet Assassin Page 12