She handed it to him and said, “Goodbye, Alexei.”
She turned her back on the KGB man and walked out of the safe house, pulling the door securely closed behind her.
41
May 23, 1988
9:35 p.m.
Druzhba Industrial Park
Leningrad, Russia, USSR
Think like a spy.
That had been Tracie’s mantra from her earliest days in the field when dealing with Soviet operatives. She felt blessed to have been the recipient of the finest intelligence training in the world, but the KGB had been doing its thing for nearly seventy years, and they trained their people extensively as well.
Any operative to disregard that fact, or to underestimate the enemy, was risking violent death. Or worse, agonizing torture followed by violent death.
So after securing the three combination padlocks on the safe house door, she moved toward the industrial park entrance, rather than deeper into the park. Speransky’s assumption would be that Alexei had by now neutralized Tracie, but still, he would take no chances.
It was inconceivable to think he would enter the park through the front gates.
A much more likely possibility was that he would cut through the chain link fence surrounding the park from somewhere in back, approaching the building from the rear. In fact, Tracie guessed, he had probably compromised the security fence somewhere back there shortly after establishing his safe house. As rundown as this industrial park was, the odds of anyone fixing a damaged fence—or even finding it, for that matter—were so slim as to be negligible.
Druzhba Industrial Park had long ago ceased to be a going concern, assuming it ever had been one. But what little activity remained was concentrated much deeper inside the park, meaning Tracie had her choice of every building surrounding Speransky’s safe house when it came to taking cover and awaiting his arrival.
She selected a concrete-block structure similar in size and design to the safe house. She knew Speransky would come at night, under cover of darkness, so she needed to camp out as close to the target’s building as she could manage and still remain out of sight.
The storage unit had once featured a pair of narrow windows like the ones in Speransky’s safe house, but they had long ago been smashed out and never replaced. No iron bars covered the empty window frames, either.
Darkness was falling as Tracie pushed open the door and entered the abandoned building. She was tired but not sleepy, a seeming incongruity she’d encountered before, usually as a confrontation approached. Adrenaline raced through her but the tiredness prevented her from feeling jittery and allowed for a clarity of thought that went above and beyond what she felt at any other time.
And she would need that clarity. She would need every advantage she could muster. If she were to stand any chance against a man like Piotr Speransky she would have to be on top of her game.
She yawned and stretched and gazed out the empty window frame at the industrial park in the direction of Speransky’s safe house. Darkness had fallen and the area was quiet and still.
From out of her pocket she removed the small gold cross she’d taken off Ryan Smith’s corpse with the intention of returning it to the dead CIA operative’s family. She’d been disappointed and angry when Aaron Stallings refused to consider her request, and while she understood his reasoning it seemed the sort of rule he could have bent, if only to bring some small measure of comfort to a dead hero’s family.
But right now, at this moment, she was almost thankful for the way her request had turned out. The cross felt strong and inspirational in her hand, not for its religious connotations—Tracie didn’t consider herself a particularly religious person—but because it served as a tangible reminder of the man who’d been captured and tortured by the Soviets and had faced the most horrible of fates with grace and dignity.
Tracie wondered whether she could have done the same.
She sat staring out the broken window and running her fingers over the cross, grateful for Ryan Smith’s presence, remorseful that she’d failed him in her rescue attempt.
It was exactly how she’d failed her father.
***
May 23, 1988
3:05 a.m.
Druzhba Industrial Park
Leningrad, Russia, USSR
There was no security lighting inside the industrial park like there would have been inside a similar facility in the Unites States. No sodium vapor lights hanging from tall poles to aid Tracie in identifying approaching danger. Apparently the Soviets had decided that whatever was manufactured here when the buildings were all in use had been sufficiently protected by the chain-link fence topped with razor wire.
The good news—if there could be said to be any good news in this whole mess—was that the skies had cleared over the course of the day. The night was clear and the moon nearly full. It wasn’t quite like the brightness of midday out there, but Tracie could see well enough from her vantage point to know when the KGB assassin was making his approach.
Hopefully.
The last of the few workers populating the park rolled along the main driveway and out the front gate just before six p.m., a parade of rust-bucket Ladas, Dacias and one East German Trabant. In the hours since, Tracie had seen no hint of activity from anywhere inside the park.
It was now after three a.m., and she knew if Speranksy were going to show tonight it would be soon. Even in such a secluded location, he would not want to risk torturing Tracie past six or seven a.m., when the workmen began showing up and one of them could potentially hear anguished screams and come to investigate.
And she knew Speransky would want several uninterrupted hours in which to play with her before ending her life. It was entirely possible he planned to transport her somewhere even more private to conduct his torture session, but before he did anything of the kind, Tracie knew he would want to reassure himself that his cache of money was safe and to—
From around the far corner of Speransky’s safe house came a shadowy figure, moving with stealth but speed. The figure was dressed all in black, and appeared as nothing more than a vague, undefined shape, a suggestion of a person silhouetted briefly against the light-colored background of the building against which it flattened itself before continuing across the narrow alleyway.
It was Speransky.
It had to be.
Tracie watched as the figure moved directly to the first of the two narrow windows built into the safe house’s front wall. She couldn’t see whether Speransky had his gun out, but she didn’t have to see it.
Of course he would have his gun out.
She began crawling through the empty window frame as quickly as possible but cognizant of the need for utter silence. Alerting Speransky to her presence while still this far away would not end well for her.
She dropped to the ground outside the building with a soft thump and then froze.
No reaction from the shadowy figure across the alleyway.
She began creeping across the pothole-strewn pavement as Speransky bent and peered through the grimy glass, exactly as she had hoped he would. The interior of the safe house would be bathed in shadows, but he should at least be able to make out the figure of the injured Alexei sitting in the middle of the room, leg elevated.
Speransky reached up with both hands—yes, he was holding a gun in his right hand—and grabbed hold of the iron bars as he forced his face closer to the window. Then he muttered a curse in Russian and bounded up to the locked front door.
Tracie had been moving steadily toward him, gun held in front of her in a two-handed shooter’s grip just in case Speransky should hear her or detect movement in his peripheral vision and whirl around to shoot.
But her ruse had worked. She knew a man like Piotr Speransky wouldn’t give a damn about the injury to his fellow operative; he would have only two concerns: checking the status of his money first, and determining the fate of Tracie Tanner second.
Those two concerns were overriding all
else for Speransky at the moment. He’d thrown caution to the wind. As carefully as he’d approached the safe house a moment ago, he was now jabbing at the combination locks with shaking hands while muttering angry curses.
Tracie found herself maybe ten feet behind Speransky as he opened the first padlock. He removed it and tossed it to the side, immediately focusing on the second lock.
She had closed to within a half-dozen feet when he opened and discarded the second lock. He was lost in his task, panicked and worried that he’d lost everything.
But he had no idea what it was like to lose everything.
Tracie relished introducing him to the concept.
By the time the third lock clicked open, Tracie was close enough to reach out and touch the man who’d murdered her father. He never once considered checking his six to ensure he wasn’t being ambushed, and now it was too late. She reached up and shoved the Makarov 9mm handgun against the side of Speransky’s skull.
“Hello, Piotr,” she said softly in Russian. “Move so much as an inch and you die.”
Speransky froze, his left hand suspended eye height in front of the door, holding the lock. The gun he held in his right. Its barrel was pointing toward the sky.
“You should have let it go,” she continued. “You could have lived to a ripe old age instead of dying in a graveyard of abandoned factory buildings.”
“I could not let it go,” he hissed. “When you walked out of that Moscow safe house you left me with nothing.”
“I wouldn’t say nothing. Some of those boxes in there are damned heavy. I know, because I moved them around. If they’re all filled with cash, you could have disappeared and lived a pretty lavish lifestyle.”
“I could not let it go,” he repeated.
“But now,” Tracie continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “now you’ll die exactly as you lived—violently and alone.”
“Your father begged for his life before I killed him,” Speranksy taunted. “He cried like a little child and pissed his pants like a baby.”
“My father was ten times the man you’ll ever be. Twenty times.”
“Tell yourself that if you wish, but by the time I finished with him, he was begging for mercy, snot dripping from his nose and blood from everywhere else. He would have given you up to save himself if he could have. He would have—”
Without warning, the assassin stomped down on Tracie’s foot with his boot as he spun and dropped into a crouch in a desperate effort to lower his head below the level of her gun.
But she was ready for him. She’d known exactly what he was doing, attempting to anger her and destroy her focus, and had known exactly what was coming when he felt the time was right. It was the only thing he could do if he wanted to live.
The pain exploded in her foot and she ignored it.
He fired his gun and she felt a 9mm slug whiz past her ear. She ignored that, too.
A preternatural sense of calm descended over her and everything slowed down and she lowered her gun in perfect timing with Speransky’s body as he dropped into his crouch. It was as if she’d glued the weapon to his skull, and she squeezed the trigger and the gun roared and flame licked out of the barrel and Piotr Speransky’s head exploded.
And as blood and gore and bone fragments flew, Tracie realized she was crying, and she was surprised by that fact because the last thing she could remember was responding calmly to the assassin’s taunts and waiting for him to make his move.
She had known this was as close to a suicide mission as she would likely ever undertake. Had known there was every possibility Speransky would get the better of her and he would be the one to survive this showdown. And now that it was over, somewhere in the dark recesses of her mind she wished he had.
Somewhere in the dark recesses of her mind she longed to join her father in darkness and peace.
And then everything resumed normal speed, and Speransky was falling to the ground, a large chunk of his skull blown off, and Tracie was standing in front of the door holding the gun she’d taken off Vasily Labochev and crying as the bloody mist continued to fall.
42
“I am armed,” Alexei shouted from inside the safe house, and Tracie realized he’d heard the confrontation, had heard the gunshots, but had no idea who was still standing.
If anyone.
Tracie swiped an arm across her face to clear the blood and the tears, and bent over the crumpled body of the man who had tortured and murdered her father. She knew he was dead but checked for a pulse anyway. It was an action ingrained in her through years of training and experience.
She found no pulse and checked again.
When he remained dead, she pushed herself to her feet, suddenly exhausted. She forced her voice steady and called through the closed door, “That’s a bad strategy.”
“CIA?” Alexei answered. “You survived? I would not have predicted that,” he said with a chuckle that revealed not amusement but pent-up fear and tension.
“Never bet against me,” Tracie said, more to herself than to the injured KGB man. “You’ll lose every time.”
The safe house fell silent, both inside and out.
After a moment, Alexei said, “What do you mean about strategy?”
“I mean you had a bad one. In fact, it likely would have gotten you killed if things had gone the other way and Speransky was standing outside this door.”
“I do not know what you are talking about.”
“Of course you do. You just admitted you thought Speransky would kill me. By yelling, you were warning him not to come after you, letting him know he would face a hostile reception if he came charging through the door, gun blazing, as he tried to punish you for failing in your mission.”
“So I should just have let him come in here and shoot me in the head?”
Tracie shook her head and tried to suppress a laugh. I just put down one of the most dangerous men in the Soviet Union and now I’m discussing strategy with a KGB operative. I think I need a vacation.
“Are you still there?” A nervous tinge had crept into Alexei’s voice, as if he suspected Tracie might even now be finding a hidden entrance to the safe house and sneaking up behind him to put a bullet in his skull, exactly as she had done with Piotr Speransky.
“I’m still here.”
“Then tell me what you would have done in my place, Miss Superstar CIA Operative.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have told my adversary I was holding a gun, that’s for sure. I would have sat in the safe house and said nothing, put the pressure on Speransky to make a move. I would have bet on him being furious with me for failing and at the same time hopped up from a just-completed deadly confrontation, adrenaline racing through his system.
“I would have banked on him assuming my captor had confiscated my gun. I would have expected him to bull through the door bent on putting two 9mm slugs in my brain,” she continued. “And when he charged mindlessly inside, I would have been waiting with my gun trained on the only entryway into the safe house. Then I would have started firing and I would have continued until my magazine was empty and he was lying fully ventilated on the concrete floor.
“That’s what I would have done,” she concluded. “Since you asked.”
Another silence, this one longer than the first.
“So, what happens now?” Alexei said. “Am I next on your hit list?”
“I already told you, I have no reason to kill you. I certainly wouldn’t have returned your gun to you if I were planning on eliminating you after I finished with Speransky. For that matter, if I was going to kill you I could have done it at any time today, before Speransky’s arrival. You would have made just as effective bait dead as alive.”
“It is silly to be having this discussion through a closed door,” Alexei said. “Come inside and say goodbye before you leave the country.”
This time, Tracie didn’t bother to suppress her laugh. It sounded loud and long and foreign to her, almost like it was coming from someone el
se. Someone hollow and sad.
“What is funny?” Alexei called.
“I said I don’t have any reason to kill you,” Tracie answered. “But you have plenty of reasons to kill me. Why would I walk through the door and give you the opportunity?”
“I do not know what you mean.”
“Come on, Alexei, of course you do. You needed me alive before, in order to protect you from Speransky. Now that he’s dead, there is absolutely no reason for you to hold your fire.”
“I do not know what you mean.”
“You keep saying that when we both know it’s not true,” Tracie said with another laugh. “But that’s fine, you can play devil’s advocate if you want.”
“What is…devil’s advocate?”
“It means you advance an argument you know is not true, just to see how the other person will respond. Like, for example, claiming you would not fill me full of Russian lead the second I walked through that door.”
Silence again. This one lasted longer than the first two put together.
“But that’s fine,” Tracie said. “I’ll play your little game.”
“Please,” Alexei said. “Explain it to me.”
“When I get far enough away from here, I’m going to drop a dime to the Leningrad police and tell them where to find you. About two hours after that happens, the fine folks at Lubyanka will be notified what went down here tonight. By midday tomorrow, you will find yourself answering a series of very pointed questions from your KGB superiors. Things would go much more smoothly for you if you were able to hand them the scalp of the CIA operative who killed their best assassin and injured you in the process.”
By now, Tracie knew exactly what to expect, and she allowed the ensuing silence to drag out. Alexei had nothing to say because there was no denying her point.
“I told you I liked you,” she said with a tired smile she knew Alexei could not see. “But I don’t like you enough to let you kill me to save your career.”
The Soviet Assassin Page 23