Alexei stared at her. “What happened between Piotr and you?”
“You don’t know?”
He shrugged. “Why would I?”
“I thought he might have filled you in on why he needed you to protect his ‘hard-earned’ assets from me.”
“I think you may misunderstand the nature of my relationship with the man known to you as Piotr Speranski.”
“Why don’t you fill me in, then?”
“There is not much filling in to do. We have worked together on a handful of assignments over the years. That is all. We are not friends. We are barely acquaintances. To be perfectly honest, I do not trust him and never have. I find him to be brutal, unstable and dangerous.”
“Then why would you help him?”
A rueful smiled crossed Alexei’s face and then vanished. “I do not know how well intelligence operatives are paid in your country, but in the Soviet Union it is never a good idea to turn away extra income. Piotr called me in a panic and offered to pay what I consider a large sum for just a few days work. And at the time, it seemed like a very simple assignment.”
“Watch his safe house,” Tracie said, “and if I showed up, kidnap me and keep me under wraps until he gets here.”
“Exactly,” Alexei agreed.
“And we see how well that turned out.”
“To be fair, Piotr did warn me about you. He said you were extremely dangerous, but after following you for most of the day yesterday, including to Vasily Labochev’s home, I concluded Piotr’s skills must have begun to slip. You appeared…”
“Harmless?”
“Da.”
They lapsed into silence and Alexei began fussing with his leg. He was clearly in significant pain, but to his credit hadn’t complained once, beyond answering Tracie’s direct question.
“So I have described my relationship with Piotr Speranski,” Alexei said. “Are you going to describe yours? I know you were the CIA agent who interrogated and humiliated him in Moscow, and my assumption would be that he was in the United States to hunt you down and kill you.”
“Something like that,” Tracie said.
“And yet, you are quite clearly still alive. What are you doing in Russia looting his safe house, while he is days behind you?”
“First of all,” Tracie said, “I’m not looting his safe house. I don’t give a damn about his money and, in fact, I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. It’s blood money and I’d rather starve than take any of it.
“Secondly,” she continued, “you’re mostly right about everything. I was the operative who tortured Speransky and it’s to my everlasting regret that I didn’t put a bullet in his brain the second he spit out the intel I needed. But I spared his miserable life and he thanked me by coming to the United States to even the score. Instead of targeting me, though, he kidnapped and murdered someone extremely close to me. I won’t say who the person was, because if you get out of this alive, I don’t want you to be able to guess my identity. That’s how this whole mess started.”
Alexei’s eyes were wide and shocked. “He…he killed an innocent?”
Tracie laughed bitterly. “He didn’t just kill an innocent. He tortured the innocent for hours and then killed him. And please, don’t pretend to be surprised. I’ve worked in and around the Soviet Union plenty long enough to know that targeting or killing family members to keep people in line is a specialty of the KGB.
Alexei looked away and Tracie continued. “Anyway, our friend Piotr Speransky isn’t quite as clever as he thinks he is. I turned the tables on him and came here for one reason, and one reason only: I knew if I threatened his personal retirement account he would have no choice but to react, and that he would come straight to me. When he does, I’m going to finish him, like I should have done last winter.”
“But he knows you will be waiting for him. He will be prepared.”
“I don’t care. One way or the other, this ends here.”
“But…” Alexei shook his head, confused.
“What?”
“You have no idea how long it will take for him to track you here. You—we—could be stuck inside this little concrete building for days. Longer, perhaps.” The KGB operative fussed with his leg and shook his head. “And I need medical attention. If you are going to allow me to live, as you claim, I would like to be able to walk again some day.”
Tracie scoffed. “Come on, Alexei. You claim to know Speransky, do you really think it’s in his nature to wait? He wants to protect his retirement fund at all costs. Hell, you’re living proof of that fact, if he promised you a hefty payment just for keeping watch over this building for a couple of days. And he’s so desperate to torture me, to pay me back for what I did to him in Moscow, that he can hardly contain himself.
“No,” she continued. “He’ll be here, and soon.”
Alexei considered her words. “Alright,” he said, and shrugged. “I will concede that point. But you have an obvious problem, which means I also have an obvious problem.”
“Is that so? And what’s our problem?”
“He knows you are here.”
“Of course he knows I’m here. That’s the whole point. Come on, Alexei, pay attention. I kicked you in the knee, not the head.”
“No, you do not understand,” Alexei said, exasperated. “If he knows you are here, inside this building, what is to stop him from simply waiting you out? Even if you purchase supplies before he arrives in Lenigrad, eventually those supplies will run out. Sooner or later you will have to expose yourself, and the moment you do, Piotr will have you right where he wants you.
“And, incidentally,” Alexei continued. “Just because you are offering me the kindness of survival, that doesn’t mean Piotr will. As I said, I have worked with him before and I know how he thinks. He will see my failure as a personal betrayal. Once he is finished with you, I will be next. We will both disappear and no one will ever know what happened to either of us.”
“I see your point,” Tracie said, “but there’s a flaw in your reasoning.”
“And what is that?”
“Only one of us is going to be inside this building: you.”
“I will be the bait in your little trap.”
“Exactly.”
“And you will be waiting outside somewhere.”
“Correct. And I’ve got another little surprise for him. By the time I’m done with him, he will be sorry he ever decided to renew acquaintances with me.”
Again Alexei shook his head. “Another surprise? I do not understand. If you are outside and you see Piotr approaching the building, you must shoot immediately, and end this situation.”
“I can’t do that, my new friend.”
“But you must! Why give the most unstable man I have ever met any opportunity to turn the tables on you, as you did on him back in your country?”
“He’s not going to turn the tables on me, Alexei, don’t worry. But I can’t simply act as a sniper and cut him down the first opportunity I have.”
“Why on earth not?”
“Because this is personal. He made it personal when he tortured and murdered someone I was extremely close to. He has to look into my face and know who is taking him down. He has to see it coming, even if only for a moment.”
Alexei stared at Tracie in horror, his mouth half open. The pain from his injury had made his face pale and chalky before, but now it was ghostly.
“You told me you would allow me to live,” he said, “but you lied. You are going to kill us both.”
39
Sweat poured off Tracie as she moved crates and boxes around the inside of the building. Some were extremely light, almost as if they hadn’t been filled yet, while others were so heavy she had to drag them across the floor because lifting them was out of the question.
There were only two windows in the entire one-room building, and they were narrow and covered with what Tracie assumed was several decades worth of grime. It was obvious Speransky had wanted them
to be as difficult to see through as possible. She thought if she could line the wall beneath and around the windows with his boxes and crates so that they were not easily seen from the outside, she might buy herself a little time.
It wouldn’t be much, but she wasn’t going to need much.
Initially, Alexei had pleaded with her to reconsider her plan. He called it foolhardy and suicidal, and Tracie allowed for the fact he might be right. It would be far safer, he argued, to establish a position on the roof of one of the surrounding abandoned buildings and pick off Speransky the moment he came into view.
“It won’t work, Alexei. In addition to what I already told you about wanting Speransky to know I’m the one who killed him, there’s a practical consideration, as well.”
“A practical consideration.”
“Yes. I have two weapons: the Makarov I took off Vasily Labochev last night, and the handgun I took off you after you tried to cave my skull in with it, which is almost an identical model. Handguns, Alexei. Neither one would be accurate enough to hit Speransky from a distance. I have to be much closer than that.”
He shook his head and mumbled under his breath and tried again a few minutes later. Tracie ignored him. She was too busy to waste her breath on the same argument over and over.
And besides, he had no say in the matter.
She had moved almost all the crates before finally stopping for a breather. There was no way to know how soon Speransky would appear, but her senses were telling her she was running out of time. And she trusted those senses implicitly. So she’d been working hard, torn between wishing Alexei was healthy enough to help and being glad he could barely move, because his injury rendered him effectively harmless.
She leaned against a tower of crates stacked one on top of the other and wiped a dirty sleeve across her face to clear the sweat from her eyes. The gash on her skull was throbbing with every beat of her heart and the headache she’d had since being clubbed with the butt of the gun had been gradually worsening.
She wondered whether she’d suffered a concussion and decided it was probably better not to know.
“What is the message?” Alexei hadn’t said a word for the better part of the last forty-five minutes, apparently realizing—finally—that he would not be able to change Tracie’s mind regarding her plan.
“Excuse me?” Tracie said.
“You told me you are allowing me to live because you want me to pass along a message to my superiors at Lubyanka. Since I very much doubt either of us will survive beyond the next few hours it is probably irrelevant, but in the unlikely event I do survive, I would like to know what that message is.”
She had bent down, hands on her knees, in an effort to catch her breath, but now she stood and approached Alexei. “It is very a very simple message, and one I want you to repeat verbatim. You tell those sons of bitches that if anyone from your goddamned intelligence services ever comes within shouting distance of a member of my family again, I will return to this country and I will hunt him down, and when I’m finished with him he will wish he’d died quickly like Vasily Labochev did last night and like Piotr Speransky will when he shows up here.
“You tell them that I will then move on to the operative’s family. His parents, grandparents, wife and children. You tell your superiors that I will not stop until I’ve wiped that person’s bloodline clear off the face of the earth.”
Tracie realized she’d begun shaking with rage, and that her voice had increased in volume until it was nearly a shout.
She stopped speaking and walked back toward the boxes. Then she turned and faced him again. “Did you get all that, or would you like me to repeat it? I’ll be happy to go over it as many times as it takes, because I want to make sure the message is clear. I truly feel sorry for whoever touches a member of my family again.”
“You do not need to repeat yourself,” Alexei said quietly. “I understand. And I believe you.”
“Good. Because I told you I have no quarrel with you, Alexei, and I meant it. No matter what had happens inside this building today or tomorrow or whenever, even if one or both of us ends up dead, it is a fate we both signed up for. We understood going in it was always a possibility, understood the risks inherent in a career in covert intelligence. But the torture and murder of innocent family members is going too far. That’s crossing a line I cannot tolerate. And I will not tolerate it.”
Alexei said nothing this time; he simply gazed steadfastly at the filthy windows. Tracie assumed he was considering the likelihood he would die in a hail of bullets inside Piotr Speransky’s safe house.
She didn’t care. After a moment she turned and got back to work.
40
The prospect of spending at least one night inside a mostly abandoned industrial park in northwest Russia was singularly unappealing, but there was no way around it. This was where Speranksy would come, so this was where she would stay until her showdown with the man who’d killed her father was over.
Food and hydration could become an issue if Speransky dragged things out, since she’d brought only a few bottles of water and half-dozen or so protein bars. But she doubted that would happen, because based on what she’d learned about Piotr Speransky, she thought there was no way he could convince himself to delay checking on what was left of his fortune, even if it would be the tactically sound thing to do.
He would have to learn whether or not he’d been robbed blind and left with nothing.
After concealing the crates and boxes as well as she could, Tracie stepped out of the safe house and peered through each of the windows to check her handiwork. The accumulated grime on both sides of the glass, plus the fact that the iron bars would prevent Speransky from pressing his face directly against the window, combined to render a clear view of the building’s interior impossible.
She squinted and could just make out Alexei sitting in the rickety chair in the middle of the open room. His leg was stretched out atop the two boxes Tracie had moved to support his injured knee, and at first glance it appeared that the building had otherwise been cleared out.
If she moved to the side of either window and gazed along the inside of the front wall, however, it was possible to see that some or all of the crates and boxes had been moved and stacked up more or less out of sight.
She shrugged. It was the best she could do, short of actually hauling all the crates out of the safe house and moving them elsewhere, and she had neither the time nor the means to do so.
Time was the real issue. She could feel it slipping away, could sense Piotr Speransky coming ever closer, and if her preparations were not complete upon his arrival in Leningrad, she would die; it was just that simple.
For all her hatred of Speransky—and of herself for that fateful decision to spare his life back in Moscow—she respected his abilities as an operative and an assassin. Her single advantage over him would be that of surprise: she knew where and roughly when he was going to appear. And if she weren’t in position to take him down inside the industrial park, he would quickly gain the advantage.
Any extended conflict would spell doom for Tracie. She was alone and thousands of miles from home; he would be on familiar ground and could marshal significant tactical support if he managed to escape her ambush.
After satisfying herself that Speransky’s crates were mostly invisible from outside the safe house, she returned inside the building for what she hoped would be the final time.
She eyed Alexei and said, “You remember the message I want you to pass along?”
“I remember.”
Tracie nodded. “Good. Then I guess this is it. Goodbye Alexei. Hopefully our paths never cross again.”
“No one wishes that more fervently that I,” he said.
She stepped to the door and he said, “Wait.”
She turned. “What is it?”
“If you are unsuccessful in killing Piotr…”
“I won’t be.”
“But if you are, he will not be kindl
y disposed toward me. He will be enraged at my failure and will almost certainly execute me where I sit.”
“He’s going to die, Alexei.”
“But if he does not, I need a weapon with which to defend myself, or else I will be a sitting duck. I cannot possibly move quickly enough to fight him, or even to escape him. He will put two bullets into my skull and that will be that.”
Tracie stared at him, unspeaking.
“I understand we are enemies. I understand we each work toward the destruction of the other. But if you refuse to provide me the means with which to defend myself, I will die helpless and alone. Can you live with that on your conscience?”
“I’ll already be dead in your hypothetical scenario, remember?”
“You know what I mean.”
She continued to gaze at the injured KGB operative, aware of the eerie similarity between the current situation and the one a few months ago with Piotr Speransky that had set this deadly confrontation in motion. The smart tactical move would be to kill Alexei, or at the very least to leave him unarmed so if she failed in her mission of vengeance, Speranksy would execute him and the KGB would find itself down one more operative.
But she simply didn’t have it in her to abandon a helpless man, even one fighting for the wrong side.
She crossed the room in five strides and stopped next to Alexei. “Are you going to shoot me in the back if I return your weapon to you?”
“Why would I do that? Leaving you alive represents my best chance for survival, because even with a weapon I am likely a siting duck against a man like Piotr Speransky. Probably my only chance at living beyond the next few hours is for you to finish what you have started here.”
A long moment passed, the two operatives regarding each other silently. Then she reached behind her back and removed Alexei’s Makarov from the waistband of her jeans.
The Soviet Assassin Page 22