Lifting the gun over Lukashenko had probably taken all of half a second, but it was half a second that felt endless. Tracie’s hair hung down over her face. Sweat flowed freely into her eyes, causing them to tear and sting. She was shaking and exhausted.
But she’d done it. Andrei Lukashenko’s gun lay on the floor at her feet.
44
June 25, 1988
3:25 p.m.
Abandoned factory north of Sevastopol, Russia, USSR
Tracie still couldn’t reach all the way to the floor with her free hand, thanks to the height of the table and the angle at which she’d been restrained. This meant her career as a contortionist hadn’t quite drawn to a close, but she told herself the really hard part was over.
Maybe.
She allotted thirty seconds to her recovery, acutely aware of General Gregorovich’s impending arrival. She wiped her face on her right shoulder to clear the sweat from her eyes, took a couple of deep breaths, and then got back to work.
Lukashenko’s Makarov had fallen onto the floor almost directly beneath her, so she barely had to move to position herself over it. Once the gun was centered between her feet, she repeated the process she’d just undertaken on the other side of The Weasel, clamping her feet closed, trapping the weapon between them.
She shuffled backward until the edge of the table was pressing firmly into her lower back. For once during this nightmare you don’t have to stretch your handcuffed arm out like Gumby, she thought, and snickered aloud. It was the sound of a young woman she did not recognize, a woman who was stressed out and exhausted and terrified.
Once in position against the table, Tracie lowered her body into a half-crouch. One more time, she pushed off with her feet while pressing both hands palms-down on the tabletop. The half-jump lifted her into a sitting position on the table.
But she’d allowed her concentration to wander and her feet drifted apart, not much, maybe half an inch, but it was enough to allow the gun to slip from between them and clatter back onto the floor.
Tracie watched in horror as the Makarov bounced crazily twice, each time moving a little farther away from her. It came to rest following the second bounce close enough that she could recover it and try again, but at a dangerous enough distance that she vowed to think of nothing but keeping the weapon trapped between her feet until she’d finished doing what needed to be done.
No more stray thoughts of Gumby.
No more snickering.
She would visualize that damned gun Super-Glued to her feet. Nailed to her feet. It would become a part of her feet.
She slipped off the table and pulled the gun back into position with her left foot and tried again, moving quickly but also smoothly and carefully.
The second try was the charm. A moment later, she was once again planted in a sitting position on the top of the table, the gun still firmly trapped between her feet. She braced herself with her hands and rotated her butt, lifting her legs and swinging left until the gun dangled over the table instead of the floor.
Then she pulled her feet as close to her body as possible, lowered them, and released the gun.
And breathed deeply in relief.
Dropping to the floor again, Tracie faced the table and picked the gun up in her left hand. She was right-handed and had only rarely held a pistol in her left, so it felt awkward and strange to be doing so.
But that strangeness was a small price to pay for the possibility of freedom.
She pulled her right hand toward her body until the metal links had been stretched tight. Instantly her wrist and knuckles began screaming in complaint. Again.
She ignored the complaints and leaned down over the table until her face was inches above its surface. She placed the business end of the Makarov directly against the links, keeping the barrel parallel to the tabletop, the gun aimed the length of the big room to minimize the possibility a ricochet striking her body.
Then she squeezed the trigger.
The gun roared and the links snapped. Tracie had been exerting as much force as she could manage in order to keep tension on the links, and she tumbled off the table before she could catch herself.
She dropped onto her side on the concrete floor, bruising her elbow and knee and not caring in the least.
She was free.
There was no time to spare. She sprinted into the hallway where Lukashenko had forced her to drop her weapon. It was also where she’d seen him disappear after picking up her backup gun and combat knife. She entered the office where he’d been lying in wait for her and found all three of her weapons tossed on top of an ancient, dented metal desk. He’d been so confident she was no threat he hadn’t even bothered to hide them.
She slipped her combat knife into its sheath at her right ankle and then repeated the process with her backup Beretta in the holster at her left ankle. Instantly she felt more at ease, more like herself, more in control.
Her primary weapon didn’t get holstered. She held it in her right hand, barrel facing the floor, ready to raise it and fire instantly should Ivan Gregorovich come waltzing through the door. Hopefully, killing him wouldn’t become necessary, because now that she was free, she thought she might have a better plan than two 9mm slugs in the back of her nemesis’ skull.
If she got lucky—even luckier than she’d been to recover Lukashenko’s gun and escape her bindings—she might just manage to divert the Red Army’s attention long enough for her to slip out of the country with the submersible communications decoder.
If she got really lucky, maybe she could even get Gregorovich—and by extension, the KGB and Red Army—off her back permanently.
But none of that would come to fruition if she were forced to execute him.
And she knew he would be here soon.
She ran back into the plant’s main assembly floor and knelt next to Andrei Lukashenko’s prone body, careful to avoid stepping in the blood. There was a lot of blood.
She was by now almost certain he was dead, because he hadn’t moved so much as an inch since she’d stomped his skull while chained to the equipment arm. A quick check of the nonexistent pulse at his carotid was enough to confirm her suspicions.
Lukashenko was long gone. He’d probably been dead from the moment her body weight crushed his skull.
It would have been better for her plan had he still been alive, but there was nothing Tracie could do about that now. She wrinkled her nose and placed her left hand on Lukashenko’s shoulder, then lifted his bulk just enough to slip her right hand into his suit coat’s breast pocket and remove the Olga Koruskaya ID he’d removed when patting her down.
The ID went into her own breast pocket and then she picked up Lukashenko’s weapon and placed it against his temple. She squeezed off two rounds in rapid succession, BOOM-BOOM, the blasts echoing through the empty room.
Then she wiped down the gun to remove any trace of her fingerprints. It wasn’t like the Soviet police—or anyone else, for that matter—would be able to track her down via those prints. There was no official record of them in either the Soviet Union or the United States.
But there was no reason to offer them up to the Soviets, and besides, she had another reason for wiping the weapon clean.
She took her time and did it right. Then, satisfied with her handiwork, Tracie dropped the weapon next to Lukashenko’s corpse, his skull now featuring two extra holes.
Hopefully, once Gregorovich arrived and found The Weasel dead on the floor, he would pick up the weapon and check it to be sure it wasn’t going to discharge and kill him. It was the kind of reflexive action a military man might take when faced with the scenario he would be walking into.
Getting Gregorovich to contribute his prints to the gun’s surface would be helpful to Tracie’s plan but not necessary. If he was smart and didn’t touch it, the homicide investigators would hopefully come to the logical conclusion upon discovering it had been wiped clean: that he’d done it to protect himself after shooting Lukashenko.
/> The scene wasn’t perfect, as far as framing General Gregorovich for murder was concerned. Tracie knew there was plenty of evidence indicating another person had been inside this manufacturing plant. The single handcuff still secured to the iron equipment arm was proof enough of that.
If the police did even an adequate investigation—assuming Tracie was fortunate enough to get them here after Gregorovich’s arrival and before he fled the scene—they would quickly determine General Gregorovich had not been the one to murder Andrei Lukashenko.
But she had been working in and around Soviet Russia for years, plenty long enough to see firsthand how their justice system worked. There were Russian law enforcement officers every bit as dedicated as any she might find in the United States, but there were also plenty of others who wanted nothing more than to complete any investigation as quickly as possible.
Tracie guessed that with a suspect as high profile as Ivan Gregorovich, the Sevastopol Militsiya would assign an experienced, dedicated and thorough investigator to the case. If that were to happen, Gregorovich might well escape prosecution. At the very least, though, there would be enough police attention on this location that once she was away from here she should be able to complete her escape north to Moscow with relative ease.
And there was another possibility. A man didn’t rise to a position of prominence like Ivan Gregorovich had in the Red Army without making more than a few enemies. If any of those enemies were powerful enough to take advantage of the scenario Tracie had handed him, there was a very real possibility Gregorovich would be convicted of murder no matter how clear it was he hadn’t killed anybody.
That was Tracie’s theory, anyway.
But none of it would matter if she took too much time to get the police here.
She crossed the factory floor at a dead run and burst into the heavy, humid air outside.
45
June 25, 1988
3:35 p.m.
Abandoned factory north of Sevastopol, Russia, USSR
Tracie tried to guess how long Andrei Lukashenko had been gone when he left the manufacturing plant earlier to call General Gregorovich. The Weasel had removed her watch before chaining her up, so there was no way to know for sure, but she figured between thirty and forty-five minutes would be a reasonable estimate.
And he’d been driving a car, which meant he either drove around randomly until locating a telephone booth, or he’d known where one was.
Either way, she was positive she couldn’t spare that kind of time, not if she wanted to have any chance of putting her plan for Gregorovich into motion. Lukashenko had proudly told her that the general was dropping everything to fly to Sevastopol and torture Tracie. If that was true—and Tracie believed it was—the man would arrive at any moment.
She had started turned toward her car upon exiting the abandoned factory, but now she stopped in her tracks just as she reached the stand of trees behind which she had parked. Thought back to what she’d observed as she drove here.
From the earliest years following the Russian Revolution, the USSR’s central planners had paid little heed to the notion of sparing citizens the burden of living and working near industrial areas and manufacturing complexes. When locations were deemed appropriate to the construction of factories or warehouses, or even entire industrial parks, the question of whether citizens’ homes may or may not have been impacted was almost never addressed.
That had quite clearly been the case in this now-defunct manufacturing zone. Tracie recalled passing multiple ramshackle homes interspersed among the empty industrial buildings, at least one of which had been located not much more than a stone’s throw from the final turn in the winding access road leading here.
Where there was a home, there would be a telephone, even in a rundown neighborhood that had clearly been ignored for decades.
She reversed course, trotting once more past the factory from which she’d just escaped. Running along the side of the narrow road, she prepared to melt into the cover of the trees should she see Ivan Gregorovich’s car approaching. She had given some thought to her earlier assumption that the general would have a team of soldiers with him when he arrived, and changed her mind on that point.
Now she thought it was highly likely he would be alone.
A military officer of General Ivan Gregorovich’s stature would not want any witnesses observing his treatment of the prisoner. A guy like Gregorovich would have enemies, and witnesses meant the potential for blackmail.
She thought he would be too savvy to expose himself to that kind of risk.
She reconsidered her plan as she moved. If Gregorovich was really going to be alone, there was nothing stopping Tracie from awaiting his arrival and then putting two 9mm slugs into his head as he entered the facility. It would be a simple task to accomplish and would get him off her back better than any other plan she could possibly devise.
She discarded the thought almost the moment she had it. Shooting a high-profile Soviet general like Ivan Gregorovich would be the absolute worst thing she could do. The ensuing investigation would be exhaustive, and if it was determined that an American CIA operative had been the shooter, there was every possibility the Soviet Union would retaliate in kind.
They might even declare war.
No. The plan she’d already begun putting in motion was a better way to deal with Gregorovich, even though the results were much less certain.
No cars had appeared from either direction as Tracie hurried along the side of the road, and after maybe three minutes, the first of the houses she recalled seeing came into view. It was a tiny rectangular box, eight hundred square feet of living space at the most, with a sagging roof and mildewed wooden siding, some of which she could see even from a distance had rotted entirely away, exposing badly weathered plywood.
But no mansion would have looked more inviting to Tracie, because a telephone line ran from a pole at the road to a junction box mounted on the side of the house. Better yet, no cars were parked in the driveway. The lack of a vehicle didn’t necessarily mean no one was home, of course, but she chose to take it as a positive sign.
I could sure use a little luck along about now.
She angled off the road and into the woods. The scrub brush and tree coverage in this area was minimal, but Tracie used it as much to her advantage as possible as she approached the home, crouching when necessary, moving from stand of trees to stand of trees, taking a roundabout route despite the time pressure.
The closer she came to the residence, the more she became convinced that no one was home. Still, she moved cautiously. She’d gotten herself in trouble in the first place by assuming she had the upper hand on Lukashenko when she’d burst into the abandoned factory, and she wasn’t about to repeat that mistake.
When she reached the edge of the tiny, weed-infested yard, Tracie paused and debated the best plan for approaching the home. She was still wearing her counterfeit Red Army uniform, and even though it was by now dirty and disheveled, she felt a direct approach would be best if anyone were home. She’d recovered her Olga Koruskaya ID, and her years working inside the Iron Curtain had illustrated to her just how much the average Soviet citizen mistrusted and feared his government’s centralized authority.
As a military officer, Tracie—“Olga”—would represent that authority. If she said she needed to make a telephone call, the resident would almost certainly allow her to do so.
And if not, she would force her way inside and do it anyway.
She stepped out of the trees and strode across the yard, head up, eyes focused on the home. Her gun was concealed inside her shoulder rig for now. Anyone who happened to glance out the window at the time she broke cover would certainly be suspicious to see her approaching from the woods and not the road, but there was nothing she could do about that now; she simply could not afford to take the time to retrace her steps and return via the pavement.
In a matter of seconds she had arrived at the front door. She lifted her hand
and rapped sharply, waited the briefest of intervals and then rapped again. She was a Soviet military officer on a time-critical mission who needed to make a telephone call, and she wanted to convey that sense of urgency to anyone inside the home.
Nobody answered.
Tracie waited a bit longer and tried again, two more sets of knocks, delivered with an even heavier hand.
Still no response.
One more try convinced Tracie that her sense of the home being empty was accurate.
Or maybe the resident was in a coma.
Either way, she felt it was time to enter. She reached for the doorknob and twisted it and was unsurprised to discover it would not turn. If no one were home, of course the front door would be locked.
In keeping with the general disrepair of the structure, though, the wooden door frame looked spongy and weak, its structural integrity compromised by decades of exposure to the corrosive effects of the salty Black Sea air and high humidity. Tracie’s first instinct had been to break into the house through a rear window, but a quick inspection of the door led her to believe she might not have to take the time to do even that.
And time was of the essence.
She glanced toward the access road. It remained every bit as deserted as it had been since she’d escaped the KGB interrogation facility.
There was no way to avoid being seen if a car were to pass by as she was breaking in, but the risk seemed minimal at this point. Tracie took a step back and raised her left foot nearly to waist height. She would have preferred to use her other leg, but with a badly sprained ankle, there would be no way to generate the power she needed.
So she would improvise.
She pivoted on her right leg and fired out a sidekick, generating as much torque as she could without anything to brace herself against.
Her heel slammed against the door below the knob as her right ankle crumpled, and she was rewarded with a loud crack! She stumbled backward, catching herself against a rickety railing that creaked threateningly but supported her weight.
Objekt 825 (Tracie Tanner Thrillers Book 9) Page 22