Black Ops Bundle: Volume One

by Allan Leverone

  She stepped back and examined her handiwork with a critical eye. “Hmph. Guess it’ll have to do,” she muttered. “Good thing it’s dark out there.”

  She walked around the bed, darting past Shane with the grace of a dancer. “Toss me the pillows,” she said, and when he did, she arranged them lengthwise along that side of the bed, creating a second sleeping body. Then she pulled the original blankets back over her creation, covering the two lumps.

  She took one more look and shrugged. “What do you think? Does it look like two sleeping people?”

  “Maybe to Ray Charles,” Shane said and she punched his arm.

  “Wise ass,” she said. “It only has to fool them for a couple of seconds.”

  “Then what happens?” he asked.

  “Then they get interrogated.”

  “By you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But this is all for nothing, because nobody’s coming.”

  “Hope so.”

  “You and me both,” Shane said, concern in his voice.

  She winked at him and walked to the bathroom, flipping on the light. Then she pulled the door almost all the way closed. A thin shaft of dirty yellow light slashed across the main room, illuminating just enough of the bed, she hoped, to convince any interested observers that two people were actually sleeping in it.

  “That’s going to have to do,” she said.

  “Now what?” Shane asked.

  She pulled her dwindling supply of cash out of her pocket and studied it. “You said you had a little money, right?” she asked hopefully.

  Shane said, “Yeah, I’ve got about twenty bucks.”

  “Good,” she answered, tossing him the car keys. “Take the Granada and find a hardware store that’s still open. We need duct tape.”

  “Duct tape. What do we need duct tape for?”

  Tracie grinned and waggled her eyebrows as he had done when they entered the first motel room. “Use your imagination.”

  ***

  Back in the original room, Tracie picked up the phone and dialed a complex series of numbers from memory, waited for an accompanying series of beeps, then dialed more numbers. After a thirty-second silence the earpiece buzzed, indicating the line was ringing.

  The call was answered almost immediately. “Green twenty-seven,” a voice said.

  “Red eighteen,” Tracie answered.

  “Thank God you’re okay,” Winston Andrews said. “When I didn’t hear from you last night I started to think maybe you had crawled off into the woods somewhere and gotten yourself eaten by a bear.” He seemed to be enunciating carefully, like he was trying not to slur his words.

  “Nope, I’m still kicking. So far.”

  “Do you have the cargo?”

  “I have it.”

  “Any damage?”

  “No, it’s like me: a little beat-up but otherwise okay.”

  “How close are you?”

  “Still a few hours out. We’re going to hole up in a cheap motel for the night and come into D.C. tomorrow.”

  “We?”

  “I have a civilian with me. It’s the guy who rescued me from the burning B-52. The media got wind of his name and plastered it all over the news. He’s got a target on his back now and will until this thing is over. I thought it best to keep him close.”

  “That’s a serious breach of mission protocol.”

  “I know that. I’ll deal with the consequences later.”

  Andrews sighed heavily. Through the phone’s earpiece the sound was like a strong wind. Tracie had worked with her handler a long time, and she was convinced he had been drinking.

  Like he had a lot on his mind.

  Like he was worried.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “In the New Haven area, somewhere safe,” Tracie said, hoping against hope he would let the issue drop.

  “Tell me where, and I’ll pull some strings,” Andrews said. “You know, keep you safe. You left one hell of a mess up there in Bangor. Every cop along the Eastern Seaboard is looking for the dirtbag that shot one of their brethren point blank in the chest and drove off. They’re out for blood, and it seems they don’t much care whether they shoot one of the Russian guys or you.”

  Her heart sank—and not because of the police that could be after them. Her worst fears had just been confirmed. Andrews was involved with the Soviets. She had always wondered about that, had heard whispered rumors over the years. The fact he wanted to know exactly where she was verified her worst fears.

  Tracie hesitated, trying to put just the right amount of indecision in her response. “Me revealing my location is against mission protocol, too.”

  “I understand that, but I’m trying to keep you alive. I have some connections in the New Haven area. Tell me where you are and I can call in a few favors, divert the attention of the law from your area until you’re safely out of there tomorrow.”

  Tracie sighed loudly and gave in. “Okay. We’re holed up in Room Twenty-One at the New Haven Arms, just south of I-95. It’s a cheap little dive, well off the beaten path. There’s no way anyone could track us here. We’ll be fine.”

  “I hope so,” Andrews said. “Just the same, I’ll call my people in the area and make sure the authorities stay away from there overnight.”

  “Thanks. We should see you by late afternoon tomorrow.”

  “Roger that,” Andrews said. “Stay safe.” He broke the connection and Tracie sat on the edge of the bed, staring out the dirty picture window at the dark parking lot. She couldn’t decide whether to be angry or sad. She settled on both.

  31

  May 31, 1987

  10:50 p.m.

  New Haven, Connecticut

  Shane pulled the Granada into the spot it had previously occupied in front of the dummy hotel room, then shut the engine down and trotted across the pavement to Room Twenty. The door swung open and he knew immediately something was wrong. Tracie barely acknowledged him; her face was troubled and she was obviously deep in thought. “What is it?” he said. “What’s the matter?”

  She smiled forlornly. “You mean aside from this whole mess?”

  Shane nodded.

  “I just got off the phone with my handler, a man named Winston Andrews, an intelligence specialist who’s been the company’s foremost expert on Soviet covert activities since well before I was born.”

  He placed the bag onto the ancient dresser next to the bed. “Okay. And?”

  “And I’m almost certain he’s involved with the guys who are trying to kill us.”

  Shane froze. “Why do you say that?”

  “He asked where we were staying, claimed he could use his influence to divert the attention of the police away from this area. They’re looking for us and are pretty pissed off about the dead cop back in Bangor. Anyway, Andrews said he would help keep the police from shooting our asses off.”

  “So what’s the problem? I’m pretty fond of my ass and I’d hate to see anything happen to yours. We could certainly use all the help we can get.”

  “This is the problem.” Tracie picked the telephone’s black plastic handset off its cradle and brandished it front of him, dropping it back onto the receiver with a thud. “The telephone connection in his home office is secure. It’s a dedicated CIA line, encrypted, almost impossible to hack into. But this—” she pointed again at the offending motel phone— “is anything but secure. Anyone could have been listening in. Andrews violated Rule Number One of covert operations. He should never have asked me to reveal our location on an unsecured connection when there’s a Russian hit team chasing us all over the East Coast.”

  “Maybe…” Shane’s voice trailed off as he struggled to come up with a reasonable explanation, knowing he was wasting his time, that Tracie would already have found one if it existed.

  “No,” she said grimly, shaking her head. “He’s involved. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Obviously the KGB is up to something big, something potentially game-
changing, or else they would never have risked exposing so many of their U.S. people in such a desperate manner for one simple op.”

  Her eyebrows knitted together in concentration. “This letter I’m tasked with bringing to Washington—no one besides Gorbachev himself knows what’s in it. I think Gorbie knows the KGB is up to something drastic and he doesn’t like it. I think he’s trying to send a warning directly to the president.”

  Shane was skeptical. “I don’t know,” he said. “It sounds pretty farfetched, like something out of a Hollywood movie. The Manchurian Candidate or something.”

  “It sounds farfetched, I’ll give you that, but I can’t imagine what else could have the KGB this spooked.”

  “But they’ve only thrown three guys at us. I mean, it’s pretty daunting from our point of view, but what are three guys to the KGB in the grand scheme of things?”

  “Three guys is a lot,” Tracie said, her face burning with intensity. Shane was amazed. She barely resembled the All-American-looking girl he had gotten used to riding with.

  She paused, thinking something over, and Shane wondered if he had just been dismissed. Then she said, “How much of your American History do you remember from high school?”

  “I don’t know, enough, I guess. I mean, it was interesting, so I mostly paid attention.”

  “You’ve heard of the McCarthy hearings?”

  “Of course. Joe McCarthy was a U.S. Senator back in the 1950s. He started a big Communist scare, claiming the Commies had gained influence in all levels of U.S. society, governmental and otherwise.”

  “Exactly,” Tracie said, nodding, still intense. “McCarthy had a lot of people running scared, but eventually it was determined there was no way the Soviets could possibly have infiltrated our government to the extent McCarthy was claiming. He was discredited.” Her laser stare bored in on him as if willing him to understand. He didn’t.

  “Don’t you see?” she said. “There weren’t a huge number of Soviet Communists in the United States, at least not such a large number they could do any real damage. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t any. The Soviets probably have an agent or two in many of our major cities, enough operatives to pass along whatever intel they can gather, but not the numbers to really accomplish much. Maybe a few dozen people total, similar to the number of assets we have in Russia. The numbers just aren’t that great.

  “So when they expose three of those few dozen people in such an obvious way, it’s significant. It means something if you’re paying attention. And like I told you before, attention to detail is what keeps me alive.”

  “So what are we going to do?” Shane asked.

  “Well, if what I believe is true, we’ve probably got a minimum of, say, two hours before anything happens. The goons chasing us will have expected us to head toward D.C., but they have no way of knowing how far we would have gotten. They’re probably ahead of us because they’ll assume we wouldn’t stop—”

  “—which we wouldn’t have,” Shane interrupted, “if you didn’t need to get at your cash.”

  “Exactly,” Tracie said. “So they’ll have to double-back once Andrews relays our location to the Russians. That’s why I say we should split the night into two-hour shifts. One of us keeps watch while the other sleeps. If it’s all right with you, you can start with the first watch, since I really don’t think anything will happen for a while.”

  “Of course I’ll take the first watch. I’ll do whatever you need me to do. But in the meantime, there’s something we need to talk about.”

  “And that is?”

  He cut a look at Tracie. “You need to open that letter. I mean, like, right now.”

  “That letter is classified.”

  “I understand that.”

  “It’s Top Secret.”

  “I understand that.”

  “It’s for the president’s eyes only.”

  “I understand that.”

  “I’m expressly forbidden to open it, Shane.”

  “I understand that, too, and under normal circumstances I would never suggest you disregard protocol. And I’m well aware that you’ve been doing this black ops stuff—”

  “—clandestine operations,” she interrupted.

  “What?”

  “I don’t do ‘black ops,’ I do clandestine operations, missions that by necessity must remain deniable by those in positions of authority all the way up the political and military food chains.”

  “Whatever,” Shane said. “And thank you for making my point for me. As I started to say, I understand you’ve been doing these types of things for years and I’ve only been exposed to this shit for a day, but it’s pretty obvious to me you’re just stumbling around in the dark unless you know what you’re up against. If your fears about your handler are anywhere close to being accurate, reading that letter might make the difference between living and dying. More to the point, only one person in the world knows what it contains, and it seems to me becoming the second person to know might be the best way to figure out how to proceed. Hell, it’s probably the only way.”

  Shane took a breath, amazed he had not been interrupted, amazed she had not yet shot him down. “I know,” she said quietly. “I’ve been thinking the same thing. Opening this little letter”—she patted her pocket lightly—“could get me executed for treason, but I don’t see any way around it. I’ve been sitting here trying to work up the courage to do it.”

  She took a deep breath. “I guess now’s the time.” She held up Mikhail Gorbachev’s letter. The envelope was soiled and wrinkled from its travels but even from across the room Shane could see it remained sealed. Tracie ran her fingers over the surface as if trying to divine its contents via osmosis. Finally she tore off one end of the envelope, careful not to damage the contents, then removed two handwritten sheets of paper, which she held up for Shane’s inspection.

  He took one look and felt like an idiot. The letter was written in Russian. Of course it was. Mikhail Gorbachev was General Secretary of the Soviet Union; why would Shane have assumed the damned thing would be written in English?

  He shook his head. “Oh, for Christ’s sake. What do we do now?”

  “I can read it,” Tracie said. “You can’t be in my business and work in and around the Soviet Union without demonstrating some proficiency with common Russian dialects.”

  She pulled the letter back and squinted down at it, concentrating. “To President Ronald Reagan,” she began, then continued haltingly. “Dear Mr. President. Please accept my apologies for this most unusual method of communication. The contents of this letter are of the utmost importance, critical to the security of both of our countries and, in fact, the entire world. The information I am about to impart to you is so explosive, I am afraid I cannot trust the usual diplomatic channels for delivery. You will soon understand why.”

  Tracie lifted her head and looked at Shane. Her face was troubled, her beautiful eyes haunted. She looked back down at the letter and continued reading. “As you know, Mr. President, changes are sweeping the globe. Many inside the Kremlin insist on resisting these changes and are intent on preserving the Soviet Union in its current incarnation at all costs.

  “I do not agree with the assessment of these people, but they constitute much of my government, and their plan for assuring the survival of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is one that has a direct impact on you personally.

  “Mr. President, a plan to assassinate you has been set in motion by a small but powerful minority at the highest levels of the KGB. Your travel itinerary for June 2 has been acquired and your outdoor speech celebrating the District of Columbia urban renewal has been targeted. An operative placed on the roof of a nearby building and armed with a high-powered sniper rifle has been assigned to assassinate you as you deliver your remarks at ten o’clock.

  “Please treat this information with the gravity it deserves, Mr. President. Relations between the world’s two great superpowers have improved steadily during the term
of your presidency, and I cannot allow the progress we have made to be nullified by the single-minded fanaticism of those inside my government who refuse to recognize the future, even as it approaches.

  “Understand this assassination is being undertaken without my approval, but understand also that my administration does not currently possess the means to put a stop to it. I hope you see now, Mr. President, why I am being forced to contact you via these drastic and unusual measures. I am subject to constant surveillance. There is no other alternative.

  “Good luck, Mr. President. Cancel that appearance and avoid a catastrophe that will launch a third World War.

  “Sincerely, Mikhail Gorbachev.”

  Tracie looked again at Shane. Her face had gone white. “June Second. That’s the day after tomorrow,” she said.

  ***

  Shane had to remind himself to breathe. He gazed at Tracie, still seated on the bed staring at the letter. The Top Secret document she had risked her career, her freedom, maybe even her life to open. “You have to alert someone,” he said.

  “I can’t,” she answered simply. “Not until I know whether Winston Andrews has been compromised. If I’m right about him, I can’t trust him with this information, and if that’s the case, I have no idea who above him in the chain of command I can trust. If he’s been compromised, anyone could be compromised. If I’m wrong, and the night passes quietly, no Russians show up to kill us and gain possession of this”—she held up the letter—“then first thing tomorrow, I’ll tell Winston everything.”

  Shane whistled quietly. “Holy shit,” he said. “So what do we do now?”

  “Now we wait. Try to get some sleep and see if we get any visitors in the night.” Tracie stood slowly from the bed, wincing as she placed her weight on her injured leg.