“That’s what you think.”
“There’s nothing you can do for me.”
“Bullshit. I can at least drive a car. I’m going.”
Tracie shook her head, her lips compressed into a thin slash across her pretty face. She had placed her fists on her hips and her eyes looked like chips of flint. Her red hair hung in fiery ringlets, cascading over her shoulders. Shane thought she might just be the sexiest thing he had ever seen.
He reached for her right wrist and pulled her down onto the bed, her lithe form molding onto his like they’d been meant to be together. Maybe they had.
She whispered, “What about your headache?”
He said, “What headache?” as the tumor armies continued their assault, wave after wave of pain rolling through his skull.
But right now, none of that mattered. He didn’t care about the tumor. Didn’t care about the pain. Didn’t even care that a KGB assassin was close by right now, waiting to pull the trigger on the president of the United States.
He needed Tracie and, what was more, he knew she needed him. Tomorrow she would undertake what might become a suicide mission, her protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. But tonight there was nothing to do but pass the time and wait.
It was eight p.m.
He began caressing her, his hands moving of their own accord, breaking down her half-hearted resistance, until soon everything melted away and nothing existed but their dance.
***
June 1, 1987
8:20 p.m.
Washington, D.C.
Tracie lay still, listening to Shane breathe, the sound slow and steady. Peaceful. He had fallen asleep quickly, not surprising given what she now knew about his health. She savored the proximity of his body, warm and comforting under the blankets, wanting nothing more than to join him in sleep.
But there were things to do first. She sighed softly and slipped out of bed. Dressed quietly. Then she walked out the door, locking it behind her.
40
June 1, 1987
11:50 p.m.
Columbia Road, Northeast of Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
Nikolai Primakov eased his plain white panel van into an empty parking space. The spot was perfect—a block and a half away from his destination. Close enough to be within walking distance, but far enough away for the vehicle to go unnoticed.
Tomorrow would be a long day, a history-making day. Nikolai pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes out of the breast pocket of his shirt and tapped out a cigarette. He lit it and took a deep drag. Lucky Strikes were the closest thing he could find in this country to the Soviet-made Belomorkanals—unfiltered, strong and cheap—that he smoked when he was home.
Outside, the dim light from a quarter-moon coated the buildings of the city in a gauzy sheen. Millions of stars twinkled overhead.
Nikolai examined the horizon and nodded. The weather would be perfect. Clear skies, virtually no wind. The temperature was chilly right now, but the day would warm nicely.
Besides, cold didn’t bother Nikolai. He had been born and raised in the bitter chill of Yakutsk, where winter temperatures plummeted to depths the soft citizens of this decadent country couldn’t even comprehend, much less withstand. But Nikolai had withstood the temperatures just fine.
He had been comfortable with weapons from a very young age, excelling as a marksman. He’d trained as a sniper in the Red Army, serving with distinction in Afghanistan before being recruited by the KGB for more delicate, and much more important, work.
Nikolai was one of the finest assassins in the Soviet arsenal. Over the course of the last decade-plus, Nikolai Primakov had eliminated somewhere in the neighborhood of forty people; he’d lost track of the exact number years ago.
All of his targets had been enemies of the Soviet state, although surprisingly few had been politicians. Some were, of course, but many more were business leaders, or dissidents, or people who to Nikolai’s eye were nothing special, simple people living simple lives who had somehow found themselves on the KGB’s radar, marked for removal from this earth.
Their offenses were irrelevant to Nikolai, as were their job titles. When he was given an assignment he carried it out, coldly and efficiently, and then moved on to the next. It was a job, no different than farming or factory work.
He had a talent for assassination, so he was an assassin. End of story.
Tomorrow’s job, of course, was an exception. Eliminating the president of the United States was an assignment even Nikolai had to admit was special, even though it was a mission no one could ever know he had performed.
He checked his watch. Nearly midnight. It was time to go.
Nikolai took one last deep drag on his Lucky and opened the door, flicking the butt onto the pavement where it dropped into a thin film of condensation. It hissed and died away. He slipped into a windbreaker with the Capitol Floor Refinishing logo sewn onto the breast pocket and stepped out of the van.
Capitol Floor Refinishing did not exist. It was a cover created specifically by the KGB for this mission. The temperature was cool, but not so cold Nikolai actually needed his jacket. However, creating the illusion of legitimacy was critical to mission success, so he shrugged it on over a uniform shirt with the same logo, opened the van door and slid to the ground.
He stepped to the rear of the vehicle and glanced around for any sign of law enforcement. All clear. He opened the rear doors, revealing only one item secured in the back of the van—a wheeled cart with the Capitol Floor Refinishing logo prominently displayed on its canvas sides.
To the casual observer, the cart would appear identical to those used by janitorial services everywhere. The top portion was filled with tools and equipment necessary for the business of refinishing floors. There was an electric hand buffer, brushes and cloths of all sizes and shapes, and a healthy assortment of hand tools and small power tools, none of which Nikolai would be utilizing tonight or tomorrow.
Hidden under the top portion of the cart were the items he really needed, the tools necessary for the business of ending lives. There were four sandbags, each roughly the size of a cement block. There was a Soviet-made Dragunov SVD rifle, disassembled and secured inside a hard plastic traveling case, along with three cartridges filled with 7N1 steel-jacketed sniper rounds, though Nikolai was confident he would require just one shot. There was a PSO-1 Optical sniper sight with Bullet Drop Compensation turret and quick-release mounting bracket.
There were shooting glasses, binoculars, a small pillow, candy bars and water. There was a Makarov PB silenced semiautomatic pistol with three eight-round magazines, an NR-40 combat knife, and a change of clothes in which Nikolai intended to effect his escape upon mission completion.
Unlike the floor refinishing equipment, these were the items with which he was intimately familiar, items he had used—or identical to items he had used—on dozens of successful missions. They were hidden under the diversionary floor tools beneath a canvas separator, which would be folded up and used for camouflage once Nikolai was in position on the roof.
The cart would stand up to casual inspection, which was sufficient for Nikolai’s requirements. He would not permit a more thorough inspection by anyone, under any circumstances.
Nikolai wrapped his arms around the cart, straining under its weight, and lowered it to the sidewalk. He stumbled to his knees and the cart landed hard, clattering but remaining upright.
He breathed a sigh of relief. Scattering the tools of his trade on the sidewalk just a few hundred yards from where the U.S. president was scheduled to make an appearance tomorrow morning would not be conducive to a successful mission.
A casual look around confirmed for Nikolai that there were still no police in the area. He locked the van and began pushing his cart along the sidewalk. He crossed Columbia in front of an empty Plexiglas-enclosed bus stop and continued halfway down the block, eventually arriving in front of the Minuteman Insurance building just before midnight.
His timi
ng was perfect. Three men stood in front of the entrance, dressed in the identical charcoal-colored slacks of Cote Cleaning, the company contracted to provide janitorial service for the building. They wore button-down shirts similar to his, except with Cote Cleaning sewn onto the pocket instead of Capitol Floor Refinishing.
He dragged the cart up the stairs one at a time. It was big and bulky and Nikolai had begun to sweat lightly despite the cool temperatures. As he approached the top of the stairs, the last janitor was being ushered through the front door by a uniformed security guard. The guard closed and locked the door. He was large and blocky, with greying brown hair trimmed in a military-style buzz cut. He wore a white uniform shirt and dark blue pressed trousers, a handgun displayed prominently in the leather holster at his hip.
Nikolai knocked and the guard reluctantly opened the door, squinting as he gave Nikolai the once-over.
“Who’re you?” he asked with an aggrieved air, as if Nikolai’s sudden appearance represented some kind of personal affront. He stood half-in and half-out of the doorway, blocking access with his bulk.
“Nick Kristoff,” Nikolai answered with an easy smile. “I am here for floor refinishing project.”
There was no way to hide his thick Russian accent, so Nikolai didn’t even bother to try. His English was passable, but would never be anything more. He had neither the time nor the inclination to master the language, particularly since he figured one day soon the Americans would be learning to speak Russian. It was inevitable.
“Floor refinishing, huh?” the guard said skeptically. He frowned. “Nothing like that on my board for tonight.” He held up a clipboard for Nikolai’s inspection as though it might mean something to him. Idiot.
“Capitol Floor Refinishing,” Nikolai said helpfully, pointing to the logo on the side of his cart. “We were contracted to service floors in entire building. You would like to see work order?”
“Yeah, I would like to see work order,” the guard answered in a tone which was just mocking enough to be clear to Nikolai, but not so obvious the guy couldn’t make a plausible denial later if he were called on it.
Nikolai didn’t care about mocking tones, obvious or otherwise. He unzipped his windbreaker, making a show of shivering. “Cold,” he observed, and the guard said nothing.
He pulled a folded document out of his breast pocket, making sure the Capitol Floor Refinishing logo on his shirt flashed at the guard. Positive reinforcement. He handed the paperwork to the guard and re-zipped, then stood rubbing his hands together while the man peered at the “work order.”
The forgery would stand up to the guard’s—or anyone’s—inspection. It had been created by top forgers inside the KGB, men who did nothing all day but reproduce important items for the Soviet Union. Currency, licenses, permits, work orders. You name it; the KGB forgers could reproduce it. The work order looked real, right down to the signature of Minuteman Mutual’s office manager. There was absolutely no chance this drone would identify the work order as being forged.
What there was a chance of—and the one way this mission could fall apart before it even got started—was the guard smelling a rat and deciding to phone the manager at home to question the legitimacy of the project. Given the time of night, and the relative stations in life of the guard and the manager, Nikolai didn’t think the likelihood of that happening was very high.
But if it did, Nikolai would be forced to take out the guard, something he absolutely could not afford to do here on the front steps of the Minuteman Mutual building, not fifty feet from Columbia Road. He had already decided that if the guard made any mention of double-checking with his superiors, Nikolai would slip his NR-40 combat knife—identical to the one currently hidden inside his cart, right down to the curved blade and lethal, razor-sharp cutting edge—out of its sheath strapped above his ankle and force his way inside the building. He would then bring the man to the interior stairwell, where he would kill him and hide the body.
He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
It didn’t. The guard glanced at the paperwork, sweeping his eyes over it for maybe five seconds, not bothering to hide his utter disinterest.
Then he handed it back to Nikolai and said, “Come on in, then,” in a tired voice. He stepped back, and just like that Nikolai was inside.
Nikolai smiled again and nodded. One of the reasons he had been so successful in his current line of work—in addition to his proficiency with dozens of weapons and his total lack of compunction when it came to taking human life—was his physical appearance. Nikolai Primakov was utterly unremarkable, from his thinning sandy hair to his gold-rimmed glasses, to his wiry frame, to his average height, to his lack of identifying scars or blemishes.
He was easy to underestimate.
He blinked owlishly at the guard and said, “I would like to start on top floor. Where is elevator, please?”
The guard shook his head slightly. “The elevators are right over there, on the far side of the lobby.” He gestured vaguely at the far wall.
Nikolai pretended not to notice the guard’s derisive correction of his phrasing and peered across the lobby. He nodded, as if he hadn’t known for weeks where the elevators were located. He suspected he was more familiar with the interior of this building than the guard had ever been.
“Thank you,” he said, bowing his head submissively and trundling his cart across the shiny marble floor.
He was completely alone when he reached the elevators. Thanks to his exchange with the guard at the front door, all three janitorial workers who had entered in front of him were by now dispersed throughout the building. He pressed the button with the up arrow and turned to look in the direction of the front entrance while waiting for the elevator car.
The guard hadn’t moved. He stood staring at Nikolai through narrowed eyes, his forehead wrinkled like a Shar-Pei puppy’s.
Nikolai hoped the man wouldn’t become a problem.
41
June 2, 1987
12:05 a.m.
Washington, D.C.
Tracie rolled over and checked the bedside clock. Its iridescent numerals bathed the room in an eerie green glow, giving the unfamiliar surroundings an alien, almost lunar cast. She slipped out of bed, barely rippling the mattress, moving with a feline grace and economy of motion that belied her tension. Shane continued to sleep, breathing heavily, smoothly.
She padded to the bathroom, peed without flicking on the light, and then returned to bed, knowing she likely wouldn’t sleep any more tonight.
She hadn’t lied to Shane, not exactly, when she told him taking down the Russian assassin would be just another operation. But what she hadn’t told Shane, what she suspected he knew anyway—he was a lot of things, including one amazing lover, but he wasn’t stupid—was that a typical CIA op would have taken place only after dozens, if not hundreds, of hours of preparation, and would only have been green-lighted after briefings, surveillance, and meticulous planning. And it would have involved a hell of a lot more people than one lone agent.
Her mission later today would be the exact opposite of that: a rushed intervention based on the uncorroborated words of a Soviet politician sitting thousands of miles away, and information offered up under duress by a pair of Russian spies.
There had been no preparation. Tracie had never even set foot inside the building she would enter to stop the assassination.
And she would be alone. Utterly and completely alone.
She slipped under the covers. Next to her, Shane snored softly, the rhythm of his respiration steady, almost hypnotic. She supposed it stood to reason she would find herself going solo on the most important mission she would ever undertake. She had always been alone. Career-wise, personal-life-wise, every kind of wise. She had steadfastly refused to allow herself to get close to anyone, preferring to rely on her own devices, always.
Until the last couple of days.
Until falling like a lovesick teenage girl for the handsome Maine air traffic controlle
r who had appeared out of nowhere, like the hero in some ridiculous romance novel, a hero who had saved her life at the last possible moment, literally sweeping her off her feet. He was good-looking and self-deprecating and generous and kind. His smile took her breath away. When they were together it was all she could do not to throw him to the ground and rip his clothes off and ravage him.
And she knew he felt exactly the same about her.
And he was dying.
And when he was gone she would once again be alone.
She ran her hand gently over his chest, twirling the wiry hairs in her finger. She wondered how long it would take before he ceased to have any semblance of a normal life, before the cancer took him and he had no life at all.
She thought about what he’d said, how no one really knows how long they have, how we’re all dying, some quicker than others, and realized it was truer of her than most. Covert CIA work was dangerous and the careers of operatives tended to be short. So did their life spans.
Hell, there was the very real possibility that she wouldn’t survive beyond a few more hours. She was trying to put up a brave face—for herself as much as for Shane—but the fact of the matter was trying to take out a KGB pro, who had undoubtedly been planning this assassination for weeks if not months, with no backup and no real action plan, was the very definition of a suicide mission.
And wouldn’t that be ironic? Fall in love, find out the man who had stolen your heart had mere weeks to live, and then die before he did. It was almost humorous in a cynical, black-hearted way. It was a play Shakespeare might have written had he been born four hundred years later than he was. Romeo and Juliet for the twentieth century.
Tracie smiled at the thought and was surprised to feel her eyelids getting heavy. She glanced at the clock with the ghostly green numerals. 12:15 a.m.
She closed her eyes and slipped away.
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Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 20