The line went dead and Tracie replaced the telephone on the bedside table. A numb sense of shock filled her. Her handler, the man she had worked with for years, had just spoken of her murder with no more emotion than if he were discussing a change in the weather.
She turned back to the Russian. “I’m going to go and ask your comrade the same questions I just asked you. Do you understand what will happen to you if I find out you’ve been lying to me about any of this?’
“I understand,” he said, defeated.
“Is there any part of your story you would like to change? If so, now’s the time.”
He shook his head.
She nodded once and then walked out the door.
***
Tracie was gone longer than Shane had expected her to be, and when she returned, her face was pale and drawn.
She stepped through the door and he asked, “Are you alright?”
She ignored the question. “Did this one give you any trouble?” she asked.
“No.”
“Good,” she said, and her face softened just a bit. “Nice job. Do me a favor now, and go keep an eye on the lookout. Our talk was very fruitful. It required a little persuasion to convince him to open up, but eventually we reached an understanding.”
Shane stared at Tracie. Her voice was cold and hard and bore little resemblance to the one he had heard moaning and gasping in pleasure just a couple of hours before.
“Of course,” he said. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to make sure the first guy told me the truth.”
34
June 1, 1987
4:50 a.m.
New Haven, Connecticut
They moved quickly, Tracie directing the action. She had returned fifteen minutes after sending Shane to watch the lookout, her face grim but satisfied.
“I got what we need,” she said, “and now we have to move. Help me get this guy to the other room.”
After Shane had secured the man, she instructed him to wipe down all of the surfaces they may have touched. “I’m going to call the spooks on these two once I’m sure who we can trust at the agency,” she said, “so fingerprints won’t be an issue. But just in case someone finds them before I do that, I want to make sure you’re protected. My prints are untraceable but I doubt you would be so lucky.”
While Shane toured the room with a worn bath towel, scrubbing every surface he could think of, Tracie double-checked Shane’s bindings to satisfy herself they would hold. Then she applied a second layer of tape over each man’s mouth, winding it tightly around their heads and patting it into place.
Despite the fact the two men had been there to kill them, Shane almost felt sorry for them as he watched. They looked like twins, their cheeks flaming crimson, shiny and burning above their beards, and the tape’s sticky adhesive must have felt like an additional torture session.
Tracie didn’t seem to notice.
Once she seemed satisfied both men would stay immobilized, she gathered up the weapons and picked up a DO NOT DISTURB placard off the inside doorknob and told Shane, “Let’s go.”
She said nothing to the Russians, neither of whom had spoken since the end of the interrogation, and both men stared straight ahead, ignoring Tracie and Shane and, it seemed, each other.
They paused at the door, Tracie doing one last quick check of the room, Shane pondering how quickly his life had turned upside-down. After a few seconds, she hung the sign on the exterior doorknob, then eased the door closed and locked it from the outside.
They hurried across the rapidly lightening parking lot to the second motel room and Shane repeated his print-scrubbing exercise with the bath towel while Tracie packed their meager supplies in the Granada.
Tracie hung another DO NOT DISTURB sign on that door and then they slid into the car and drove to the motel office.
After paying for a second day’s rental of both rooms, they hurried back to the car and drove out of the New Haven Arms lot, Tracie at the wheel. They turned toward New Haven proper in search of an all-night restaurant. It was 5:05 a.m.
***
They found one almost immediately, tucked away under an I-95 overpass.
The Original Greasy Spoon seemed to embrace the 1950s with an enthusiasm bordering on obsession. Shane knew Tracie was almost out of money and he thought he might have just enough cash left for two cups of coffee and a couple of blueberry muffins. He was right, and they walked out of the diner and back into the 1980s with their breakfast less than three minutes later.
Tracie asked Shane if he wanted to drive. He hadn’t bothered to offer because even with all the traveling they had done yesterday she had not so much as considered giving up the wheel.
“Sure,” he answered, surprised and pleased although he was not entirely sure why. It was as if he’d passed some kind of test back at the tumbledown New Haven Arms in the surreal few hours they’d spend there.
She climbed into the passenger seat and sat demurely, smiling at him while he dropped into the driver’s seat.
“What?” he asked. “What’s so funny?”
Then he went to start the car and realized. There was no key.
“Okay, you win. Would you mind starting this piece of junk for me?”
“No problem,” she answered, pleased. “We’ll make a proper criminal out of you yet.”
She leaned over his lap to hot-wire the ignition and he flashed back to their time together in bed at the motel before the Russians had arrived. Her silky skin, her luscious lips, the curve of her naked hip under his hand, the way her breathing had quickened as he stroked her inner thigh, the sweet sound she made when—
He realized she had spoken to him and he cleared his throat. “Uh, sorry, I missed that,” he said, embarrassed.
“I asked if you were going to start driving or whether you planned to sit there the rest of the day replaying your mental movie of us together in the sack.”
“I wasn’t…”
“Don’t even try to deny it. I’m a trained interrogator, remember?” He could hear the smile in her voice.
“Okay, okay, I admit it. Just don’t come at me with an iron.”
She laughed, the sound light and girlish, light-years removed from the icepick chill she had displayed when dealing with the Russians.
Shane smiled and dropped the car into gear, turning left, right and the left again, climbing the ramp onto I-95 south, thoroughly confused by this young woman sitting to his right.
Thoroughly enchanted by her as well, although he knew he could not afford to be.
She ate delicately as Shane drove, picking tiny pieces off the muffin with her fingers and placing them on her tongue before chewing soundlessly and swallowing, brow furrowed in concentration. Shane had to be careful not to get so caught up watching Tracie out of the corner of his eye that he drove off the highway and into the guardrail.
He let her think for awhile and when it became clear she had no intention of starting a conversation, said, “So, what did those guys tell you back there?”
“I know where the assassin is going to be stationed.”
“How can you be sure they told you the truth?”
“They both gave the same location. There’s no way they would have done that if one of them had been lying.”
“Unless they agreed on a story beforehand, in case they were caught.”
Tracie shrugged, conceding the point. “True enough,” she said. “But I don’t think so. Those guys were one hundred percent certain they were going to walk in on us in our sleep, put a bullet in each of our heads, and walk away with the letter. That’s why they were so sloppy. They had no reason to suspect we were on to them, and thus no reason to make up a story. Plus, they wouldn’t have expected us to know anything about the assassination.”
She paused. “I’m confident I got the truth out of them.”
“Okay,” Shane said. “So what’s the plan from here?”
“The plan? I wish I knew.” Sh
e sighed heavily. “First stop is New York. We’ll pick up my supplies and then head straight to D.C. I’ll find a safe place to stash you, and then I’ll have to pay a visit to my traitorous boss, Winston Andrews. From there, I stop an assassination. I’m not exactly sure how yet.”
“Stash me? I don’t think so. You said yourself I’m neck deep in…whatever is going on, and I’ve nearly been killed twice now in less than twenty-four hours. I have a stake in everything too, Tracie, in case you’ve forgotten. Plus, you can’t do everything yourself. You need help, and I’m going to help you. Period. End of story.”
35
June 1, 1987
5:45 a.m.
Interstate 95, just outside Newark, NJ
“I don’t understand,” Shane said. They had pulled off the highway at a random exit, bought fresh coffee, and then hit the road again. Steam curled out of the plastic lids and dissipated into the air.
“It doesn’t make sense. What possible advantage could there be for the KGB to launch World War Three?”
“It actually does make sense,” Tracie said. “It makes perfect sense if you consider the situation in context. Maintaining tyranny is dependent upon wielding total control, but the world is opening up. Citizens who have been under the thumb of the communists for decades are beginning to get a glimpse of the freedoms they have long been denied, and they’re starting to realize those freedoms are within reach. They want them.
“The Soviet Union is crumbling, Shane. I know because I’ve seen the evidence firsthand. They have arguably the finest, most modern military in the world, next to ours, and yet the rest of the Soviet infrastructure is in a shambles, as is their economy. It’s getting harder and harder for the Soviets to keep their satellite countries in line, and more and more expensive to do so at a time when resources are shrinking.
“This makes perfect sense,” she repeated, a reluctant sense of wonder in her voice.
Shane shrugged, frustrated. “Call me stupid but I still don’t get it. Czechoslovakia wants to break away from the Russians. So what? How does that tie in with the KGB assassinating the president of the United States?”
Tracie sat for a moment, thinking. Shane could see her working through it.
“Okay,” she said at last. “It’s obvious from this letter,” she tapped the grimy envelope, “that Gorbachev can see the changes coming, and that he knows he is helpless to stop them. He admits as much. Whatever the future holds for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in ten years’ time it is going to look very different than it does right now.”
“So?” Shane said. “Things change all the time. I still don’t understand why they have to kill Reagan.”
“Because,” Tracie said, rubbing her eyes. She suddenly looked very tired. “The Soviet Union is no different than any other government, at least as far as the inner workings are concerned. Politicians disagree philosophically, squabble, grab power, consolidate that power, whatever. Obviously there’s a faction—in this case, a group of high-ranking KGB officials—who will stop at nothing to prevent the destruction of their power base and their personal empires. This faction wants to start a war, and the bigger the better. You think Czechoslovakia is still going to want to want to step out from under their protector’s umbrella once the world’s two great superpowers start lobbing nuclear warheads at each other?”
“But all wars end eventually. What happens then?”
“Whoever is behind this mess doesn’t care what happens then. Assassinating Reagan and starting World War Three will give those people inside the Kremlin plenty of time to consolidate their power and stockpile resources so that no matter who wins—and even if everyone loses, which seems likely—they are provided for. Additionally, their precious Soviet empire remains intact that much longer, or at least has not fallen completely apart, which seems the most likely outcome the way things are going right now.”
Shane stared out the windshield at the cars on I-95, metal boxes hurrying toward unknown destinations. “But if Gorbachev is so opposed to this plan, why not just stop it from inside his government? He’s the man in charge, after all.”
“Gorbachev’s skating on thin ice over there. He has instituted reforms that have outraged the political hard-liners, people who would like nothing better than to go back to the days of Khrushchev, or even Stalin. Gorbachev recognizes that he doesn’t have the muscle politically to take on those hard-liners directly, so instead he’s going through the back door. He doesn’t trust anyone within his government to deliver his message intact—he certainly can’t ask the KGB to do it—so he tried to handle it clandestinely, on his own.”
“Why not just go public with what he knows? That would stop the whole thing in its tracks.”
“If he tried to do that he’d be gone by the next day. He would either be arrested or killed. He would likely disappear in the middle of the night and never be heard from again. The Soviet political system is not like ours—there isn’t even the illusion of openness. The truth is considered an asset only when it advances the Communist cause. If Gorbachev went to the press with the details of this plan, even his supporters would consider him a traitor to his country.
“No,” she said slowly, thinking out loud. “This is really the only way he could have handled it, and he’s taking one hell of a big chance as it is.”
“Okay, that’s it,” Shane said. “We’re hours away from the assassination of the president and the start of a war maybe no one will survive.”
He eased down on the accelerator and the car surged forward. “We’ve got to get you to a phone. You have to call your superiors at the CIA and tell them about this. Never mind Winston Andrews. Call the CIA director himself if you have to.”
“I can’t,” Tracie said simply, shaking her head.
Shane pulled his foot off the gas and stared at Tracie in amazement. He ignored the honking of a horn behind him. A middle-aged woman flipped him off as she pulled around the Granada and he barely noticed.
“What do you mean, you can’t? You have to!”
“No,” she said. “I can’t. Nothing’s changed, Shane. I don’t know who can be trusted. I trusted Winston with my life, put it in his hands dozens of times, and it turns out he’s involved with the Soviets, apparently has been for years. I have no way of knowing who else in the power structure is compromised, and that includes Director Stallings. If I alert the wrong people, or even if I alert the right people but the wrong people get wind of it, the letter gets destroyed, you and I get neutralized, and the president of the United States gets assassinated.”
“Everyone can’t be involved.”
“Of course not. I’m sure only a small percentage are involved. But I can’t take the chance of the one person who is involved finding out. The stakes are just too high.”
“Call the cops then. The Secret Service. Alert the media. We have to do something.”
Tracie sighed. “I’d like nothing better. But do you have any idea how many ‘tips’ the authorities get every day about assassination attempts against the president? Dozens, especially when he travels or makes public appearances. We won’t be taken seriously, Shane, trust me on this. We’ll be detained and the speech will go on as planned.”
He stared at her, his stomach turning over slowly. The blueberry muffin he had eaten earlier felt like a ticking time bomb and his mouth tasted sour and acidic, like he might be about to puke.
“What are we going to do, then?”
“We continue to D.C. I have to interrogate Andrews, force him to give up the names of everyone involved in this thing. Once I have those names, I’ll know who’s clean. Then we pass along this damned letter.”
Shane punched the gas and the Granada leapt forward again. They were still hours away from Washington and time was ticking away.
Something was still bothering him, though. “What if Andrews refuses to give up the information you need?”
Tracie stared straight ahead, steely-eyed and determined. “He’ll talk.”
<
br /> 36
June 1, 1987
4:20 p.m.
Washington, D.C.
Winston Andrews’ two-story townhouse was located in Georgetown, a couple of blocks northeast of the Potomac River and Virginia, a couple of blocks west of the D.C. political sprawl. Built of weathered brick and covered in climbing ivy, the house looked lush and full and green in the summer.
Tracie and Shane had been forced to pass the time in the New York City area waiting for the bank containing Tracie’s safe deposit box to open for business. At nine o’ clock sharp, they had parked outside a squat concrete bank building, and the moment the manager had unlocked the front door, Tracie entered.
Shane stayed with the car while Tracie carried in a cheap canvas backpack they had picked up at a roadside Five and Dime store. She returned fifteen minutes later with the pack bulging, then tossed it into the back seat where it landed with a metallic clank.
“Don’t ask,” she said, and Shane didn’t ask.
After that they had taken turns driving, following the interstate, pushing the speed limit as much as they dared. Getting stopped for speeding would be a problem, but arriving in Washington too late to prevent the assassination of the president of the United States would be a bigger problem.
They stopped at a highway gas station just after noon, where they filled up the tank and bought a couple of cold burgers, then got right back on the road and ate as they drove.
Conversation was sporadic. Shane could see plainly that Tracie had been shaken to the core by her betrayal at the hands of Winston Andrews. It was eating at her, seemingly bothering her even more than the idea that the two of them were all that stood between the KGB and likely outbreak of World War Three. She chewed her lip and muttered to herself, shaking her head when she thought he wasn’t looking.
“Can’t talk about it,” was all she would commit to when he tried to get her to open up.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 17