Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set

by Allan Leverone

  The woman took a quick look at the card and backed off a step. She raised her hands and turned away.

  “How may I help you?” the receptionist asked.

  “I need to speak with your supervisor,” Tracie said.

  “That would be Mr. Foley, but he is in a meeting and currently unavailable. Did you have an appointment?”

  “No appointment,” Tracie said, “but it’s critical I speak to him now. Get him.”

  “I’m sorry, but—”

  “Pull him out of his meeting and get him here now. This is the last time I’m going to ask.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I go get him myself. This is literally a matter of life and death.” Of course it was a bluff. Tracie didn’t have the first clue where to begin looking for the receptionist’s supervisor, but time was short and getting shorter, and she was desperate to light a fire under this bureaucratic battle axe.

  It worked. The receptionist took one last frosty look at Tracie’s ID, now back in her breast pocket with the photo facing outward, and then punched a button on her telephone with a look on her face that suggested she would rather be eating bugs.

  She spoke quietly into the handset for a few seconds, listened, said something else, her face wrinkled in distaste, and then hung up.

  “Mr. Foley is on the way,” she said, refusing to look at Tracie.

  “Thank you for all your help,” she replied sweetly, doing her best to look earnest and sound sincere.

  “Thank you, also,” she said to the customer she had interrupted, this time hoping she actually did seem earnest and sincere.

  She turned on her heel and moved to the center of the lobby, conscious of the seconds ticking away. Moments later, a middle-aged man with perfectly coiffed silver hair and an air of authority stepped out of an elevator and walked hurriedly toward the receptionist’s desk, glancing around the lobby as he did so.

  Halfway to the desk he spotted Tracie and turned toward her like a guided missile. The man had impatience written all over his face—that makes two of us, Tracie thought—and was dressed in a suit that she guessed cost more than her monthly salary.

  As he approached, Tracie flashed her FBI ID and the man waved it away, fluttering his fingers as if shooing away a pesky mosquito.

  “FBI Special Agent Madison James,” she said, doing her best to sound clipped and officious, guessing the tone would appeal to a man who struck her as the very definition of the word “officious.”

  “Doug Foley,” he answered, taking her hand reluctantly, giving it one moist pump and then dropping it as if perhaps he feared he might catch something contagious. “Would you mind telling me why I had to interrupt my weekly meeting with the claims department? We’re very busy here and I don’t have time to hold the FBI’s hand.”

  “I wouldn’t mind at all,” she shot back. “It’s about President Reagan’s appearance, which is due to begin down the block in just,” she glanced at her watch, “nine minutes.”

  “Yes,” he said in exasperation, “what about it? You people were a major disruption yesterday, disturbing my employees and poking around my building. Last night I was promised these disruptions were over with. So what is it now?”

  “We’ve had a report of a man acting suspiciously in the area. The report stated the man might have entered this building. I need to take a walk through to check it out. I just wanted to let you know I’ll be here for the next few minutes. Oh, and I’ll need a key for roof access. Preferably a master, if you have one.”

  The manager huffed and looked at his watch distractedly. “Fine, look around, just try not to disturb my people too much this time.” He didn’t specify whether he considered his employees or the customers—or maybe both—to be “his people.”

  He pulled a set of keys out of his pocket and fussed with it, finally removing one and handing it to Tracie.

  She took it and said, “I’ll return the key to your receptionist when I’ve finished. Thank you for your time.”

  The manager had begun striding away before she finished talking, barreling back toward the bank of elevators on the far wall.

  She lowered the hand she had offered him and followed, moving just as quickly. She didn’t trust the speed of the elevators so her goal was the fire stairs, the doorway to which was located in the same corner of the lobby as the elevators.

  When Foley stopped suddenly and turned, she almost plowed him over. He blinked in surprise at finding her right behind him. “You say there may be someone inside the building who’s been acting strangely?” he said.

  “That was the report,” she answered brusquely, anxious to get to the roof.

  “You know, there was one odd incident this morning,” he said, cupping his chin with one hand.

  “Yes?”

  “That’s right. We employ a security staff of one during overnight hours. Break-ins are not uncommon in this neighborhood and it just seems prudent.”

  He seemed to be waiting for a response, so Tracie nodded impatiently and he continued. “Well, the guard on duty last night, Sean Sullivan, never clocked out at the end of his shift and he was nowhere to be found when we opened up this morning. Nothing is missing, and the janitorial staff reported that he was here to let them into the building at midnight last night.”

  “Maybe he simply forgot to sign out before he went home,” Tracie said.

  “I don’t think so. Sean has been with us for over five years and has never forgotten to sign out before. He is ex-police and very professional. Anyway, with the report of a suspicious person, I thought you should know. We’ve been trying to get in touch with our man at home, but so far, no luck.”

  “Hmm,” Tracie said, thinking. “What time do the rest of the employees typically show up for work?”

  “The managers and supervisors around eight, and the rest of the staff just before nine.”

  “Okay, thank you,” Tracie began, but the man had once again dismissed her. He turned and punched an elevator button. Tracie pushed through the door to the stairs and began sprinting up them two at a time.

  The guard was dead, Tracie was certain of it. There was no doubt in her mind what had happened—the KGB’s man had overpowered the guard sometime between midnight and eight this morning.

  Her calves began to tighten as she rushed up the stairs. She tried to tell herself maybe she was wrong, that the assassin might simply have neutralized the guard and then tied him up somewhere, but it didn’t feel right. There would be nothing for the KGB to gain by leaving a witness alive.

  The guard was dead, his body dumped somewhere out of the way. He would be discovered in the next day or two.

  The floor numbers were posted in the stairwell next to the doors. Tracie passed the fifth floor and pushed herself harder. Two more to go. She was beginning to breathe heavily. A few seconds later she arrived at the seventh floor landing, surprised to see the stairway suddenly end. There was no roof access.

  She paused, taking a moment to get her breathing under control and to think. There had to be a way to access the roof from the inside of the building. If it wasn’t via this stairway, then there would be another somewhere. Maybe at the opposite end of the hallway.

  She drew her weapon and eased the door open a crack.

  Peered into the hallway.

  Nothing out of place.

  A third of the way down the length of the corridor she could see a sign on a closed metal door that read ROOF – AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. She slipped into the hallway, eased the door closed quietly behind her, and began walking rapidly toward the roof access.

  47

  June 2, 1987

  9:52 a.m.

  Minuteman Mutual Insurance building

  Nikolai was hot. He had been huddled on the roof for two hours on a sunny day in early June.

  If there was one thing Nikolai Primakov hated it was heat. Cold he knew. Cold he could deal with. In seventeen years growing up in Yakutsk, and the years of service to the Soviet government, Nikola
i had lived and worked in some of the most frigid, forbidding places on earth.

  But here, today, the sun caused the heat to radiate off the asphalt roofing gravel, making the temperature skyrocket. He was thankful the mission would soon be complete and he could climb down off this roof and out of the damned sunshine.

  Nikolai had burned a lot of nervous energy simply waiting. After killing the guard and dumping his body next to the roof’s access bulkhead, he had lugged his cart up the stairs and then hustled down to the seventh floor entryway. There he removed the belt sander he had been using to prop the door open and placed it on the stairs while he used a strip of duct tape to seal the latch open. Then he eased the door closed and retreated back up the stairs to the roof.

  With the door’s one-way locking system, if the tape were to fail and the latch were to operate as designed, the door would open only from the interior and Nikolai would be trapped on the roof, unable to escape after shooting Reagan. There was an iron ladder fastened to the rear of the building to be used as a fire escape, but Nikolai fully expected that escape route to be blocked within seconds after the U.S. president fell.

  Once he had ensured the viability of his escape route, Nikolai returned to the roof and rolled his cart toward the front of the building, struggling to pull it through the asphalt. He stopped next to a gigantic air conditioning unit that rose out of the roof like a monstrous tumor. He snugged the cart up against the west side of the unit, using the massive structure to shield him and his equipment from prying eyes in the closest buildings.

  To counteract the possibility of being seen by a worker inside the office building adjacent to the Minuteman Insurance building, Nikolai dug through his cart, pulling out two signs attached to portable metal stands. He unfolded the signs and placed one six feet away from each corner of the air conditioning unit, facing the adjoining building. The signs read, CAUTION, CONSTRUCTION ZONE – HARD HATS REQUIRED!

  After erecting the signs, Nikolai pulled off the heavy canvas tarpaulin he had used to conceal his guns and other equipment. A large clamp had been affixed to two of the corners. Nikolai unfolded the tarp and lifted one corner up to the edge of the air conditioning housing. He clamped it home and then repeated the process on the other side. He pulled the remaining two edges as far away from the unit as he could manage, and then anchored them to the roof with the belt sander on one side and a heavy portable jigsaw on the other.

  The work took only a few minutes, but by the time he had finished, Nikolai had transformed the east side of the air conditioning unit into a portable work area. Stamped on the side of the tarp, in bright red letters, were the words DC HVAC INC – INSTALLATION AND SERVICE – AVAILABLE 24 HRS A DAY.

  The KGB’s theory was that hiding in plain sight would be the most effective way to avoid detection on the roof of a Washington building. Residents of large cities were so accustomed to construction sites and repair work on infrastructure that eventually the workers became almost invisible. It was simple human nature. People saw what they wanted to see.

  Once he had placed his signs and set up the tarp, Nikolai finalized his preparations and then ducked his head and disappeared out of sight under the canvas lean-to. He had stayed there ever since, munching on his candy bars and sipping on his water, not even leaving the protection of the tarp to take a leak. When nature called, he simply unzipped and pissed into one of his empty water bottles.

  To pass the time once day had broken, he disassembled and reassembled the Dragunov, working methodically, then checked the magazine on his Makarov pistol and sharpened his combat knife. None of it needed to be done but he did it anyway.

  He checked his watch and discovered it was barely past nine.

  So he started over, did everything again.

  Out on Columbia Road, eight stories below in front of the Minuteman Mutual Insurance building, Nikolai could hear the city as it groaned and creaked through another late spring morning, the nonstop rumble of cars and trucks, horns and voices floating through the air, and the occasional far-off scream of a siren.

  Early in the morning the sounds of the police cars and fire trucks had caused Nikolai to tense up and become instantly wary, but he concluded in short order that there must be no shortage of crime in America’s capitol city because the sirens seemed often to come almost nonstop.

  The time passed slowly, but Nikolai was well acquainted with the prospect of lying in wait for his prey. He had hunkered down much longer than this plenty of times, spending one memorable mission shivering for three days inside the hollowed-out trunk of a massive downed oak tree on the outskirts of Moscow waiting for a local party commissar who had become a little too fond of the wife of a Red Army general.

  The general had commissioned Nikolai privately, paying him out of his own pocket, not that Nikolai cared where the money came from. Somehow the guilty party had been tipped off that the general was gunning for him. The man had holed up inside his house like a scared rabbit, refusing to move.

  Eventually he had, though, peeking out the back door—who knew why?—and Nikolai had put a bullet through the center of his forehead.

  After three days,

  In the bitter chill of a Moscow winter.

  So in many ways, to Nikolai this was a walk in the park. The only thing complicating the mission was the stature of the target, but Nikolai had eliminated high-profile men before and had always been as cold as the Siberian wind when the time came to pull the trigger.

  Today would be no different.

  ***

  June 2, 1987

  9:56 a.m.

  Minuteman Mutual Insurance building

  At last it was time to assassinate the president of the United States.

  Nikolai wished he could have napped at some point, but hadn’t felt comfortable enough in his surroundings to do so. If someone discovered the taped latch on the roof access door and came to investigate, Nikolai knew he would have only seconds to eliminate the intruder and do it quietly enough to avoid jeopardizing the entire mission.

  He stretched.

  Yawned.

  Checked the time.

  Nine-fifty-six.

  President Reagan’s remarks were to take place at ten o’clock exactly. The KGB hadn’t been able to access text of the president’s speech so there was no way to be sure how long it would last, but the consensus had been that it would likely be short and to the point. The U.S. president was not a young man and the speech was to take place outdoors in the sun and heat of June in Washington.

  This meant Nikolai needed to be in position and ready to go the moment Reagan stepped to the podium.

  He shook out his arms and then did a quick set of deep knee bends to get his blood flowing. Then he crawled to the edge of his shelter and poked his head out the side, like a turtle gazing out of its shell.

  He looked first at the much higher structure next to the Minuteman Building and saw nothing. Banks of windows soared overhead, but no faces looked down on him, at least none that he could see.

  He shrugged. It didn’t matter anyway. It was time to get to work.

  He stepped out from under the shelter of the tarpaulin and carried his sandbags to the two-foot-high retaining wall at the edge of the roof, facing Columbia Road. He duck-walked as he approached, to better avoid detection by the crowd assembled eight stories below in the event anyone happened to look up.

  After stacking the sandbags and creating a nice V-shaped notch, Nikolai retrieved his sniper rifle. Fully assembled, scope attached, full magazine. He combat-crawled to the edge of the roof. Reached the retaining wall and eased his rifle onto the sandbags. Peered over the edge.

  The top of his head would be visible from street level but there was no way to avoid that. The Secret Service would be scanning the buildings, but from a distance of over one hundred feet and eight stories up, he would be as good as invisible.

  The temporary platform from which Reagan would deliver his remarks—the few he would live to deliver—was filled with digni
taries. There was not one empty chair behind the podium. Nikolai didn’t recognize any of the people, but why would he? They were undoubtedly all local politicians and businessmen.

  The sun was shining brightly and everyone was squinting against the glare and fanning themselves.

  Nikolai eased his Dragunov onto the sandbags, taking his time and seating it carefully.

  Behind the podium a pair of shiny black armored limousines idled at the curb. As Nikolai watched, the rear door of the first one in line opened and out stepped the target. Ronald Reagan rose to his full height—he was taller than Nikolai would have expected—and strode briskly along the sidewalk. A group of people moved with him, like moons orbiting a planet. Nikolai assumed the moons probably represented roughly an even split between political aides and Secret Service agents.

  When he reached the platform, Reagan climbed the stairs, moving well for a man in his seventies. He stopped short of the podium, waiting to be introduced. In his hand he held a sheaf of papers, undoubtedly the notes for his remarks.

  At the podium, a youngish man, hair slicked back, glasses perched on his nose, was speaking into a microphone. The air was clear and Nikolai could hear every word. “And now, please join me in welcoming the man responsible for the resurgence of our economy, and of the United States in general, President Ronald Reagan!”

  The people behind the podium stood and clapped, the crowd cheered, and Reagan stepped to the podium, pausing to shake the hand of the man who had introduced him. He smiled easily and waited for the applause to die down so he could begin.

  Nikolai leaned onto the top of the retaining wall, bracing himself with his elbows, holding the Dragunov loosely in his hands. He peered through the scope and after a quick adjustment Reagan’s face filled the viewfinder, his teeth white and straight and his smile perfect. It was as if he was standing directly in front of Nikolai, no more than a few feet away.