“Secretary of State Humphries has been kidnapped.”
“What?” Tracie exclaimed, momentarily dropping her veneer of guarded calm. “Who’s claimed responsibility? Do we know where he was taken? What are the ransom demands?”
Stallings raised his hands to stop her flood of questions, the flabby skin under his arms flapping like a turkey’s wattle. “We don’t know who’s taken him or where he is. There have been no demands made as yet. No one has claimed responsibility.”
“But you assume he was taken out of the country?”
“No, we do not assume that. Just the opposite, in fact. We believe he is still inside the borders of the United States, likely within a few hours of D.C.”
Tracie shook her head, confused. “Then what am I doing here?”
“We want you to find J. Robert Humphries and return him safely to D.C.”
“Sir, that’s not a mission for the CIA unless and until it can be shown Humphries has been taken abroad.”
Stallings glared down his nose at Tracie. She didn’t care. She had seen his tough-guy act before and it didn’t intimidate her any more now than it had back in June. He said, “I don’t need a lecture on the mission of the CIA, and I don’t need your suggestions about how to run the agency.”
“Then what do you need?” she shot back.
“I already told you. Locate our missing secretary of state and bring him home safely.”
“Director Stallings, not three months ago, I sat in this very office while you threatened me with arrest and prosecution for treason, after saving the president of the United States from assassination, specifically because I opened a classified document from the Soviets and ran an op here in the U.S. Now you’re telling me you want me to run another clandestine Central Intelligence operation inside the borders of this country? Are you out of your mind? Why on earth would I even consider doing that?”
“Because,” Stallings said smugly. “Your protector, President Ronald Reagan, the man whose life you saved back in June, wants it done. He doesn’t believe the FBI can move fast enough to save Humphries, if in fact the secretary is even still alive, and he is willing to, shall we say, push the boundaries of the law a bit.”
“Push the boundaries—”
“Yes. He and Humphries are very close friends; they’ve known each other for decades. Nancy is very close to Humphries’s wife, Sara. The president wants this done and he asked me to pick the right agent to complete the mission. My choice was you.”
“And if I’m caught, or if something happens to me?”
“You’ll receive the full support of the president and everyone here at the agency.”
He was lying.
Tracie knew it.
And Stallings knew that she knew. He smiled thinly. “It goes without saying that time is of the essence. I’ll need your answer now, so I have time to find a suitable replacement if you opt out of the mission.”
“And if I say no?”
“Then you can tender your resignation with Mary on your way out.”
The CIA director’s threat was irrelevant. Tracie had already made up her mind. Ronald Reagan had stood up for her and was the only reason she wasn’t at this very moment rotting away inside an eight by twelve cell in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Her sense of personal loyalty was strong. She could no more abandon the president after he had asked for help than she could cut off her own arm.
“I’ll do it,” she said impassively.
“Good,” Stallings replied with a cold shark smile, as if he hadn’t known all along what her answer would be. “I’ve had Mary prepare a packet for you of the evidence recovered thus far in the case, as well as the contact information of all the principal investigators. Pick up the packet on your way out and get started immediately.”
“Yes sir,” she said, rising slowly. “Who will be my CIA contact?” Her handler for the first seven years of her career, Winston Andrews, was dead. He had committed suicide just a few months ago after having been unmasked as a Soviet collaborator.
“Me,” Stallings said. “My private number is listed in your packet of information. Memorize it and then destroy it. The line is secure and you can get ahold of me any time, night or day.”
Tracie groaned inwardly. She would truly be operating alone. Stallings despised her. But more to the point, he was a political animal, a decades-long Washington insider. His guiding principle, like that of most Washington insiders, was self-interest above all else. Any illusion that the CIA or any other government entity would come to her rescue should she falter, vanished.
She turned and walked to the office door, determined not to show any concern. She refused to give Stallings the satisfaction. She placed her hand on the knob and then turned to look back at her now-direct superior. The CIA director was gazing at her shrewdly. “Why me?” she asked.
“What do you mean?’
“There are plenty of operatives who’ve been working longer than me, who would probably be better-suited to save the life of the man fifth in the line of succession for the presidency. What made you choose me?”
Stallings stared at her a moment, his eyes cold and calculating. She was certain he would give a bullshit answer, but he surprised her. “You managed to elude a team of trained Soviet assassins and take out an experienced sniper on top of the Minuteman Insurance building …” She thought of Shane and her heart ached. “But, more than anything else, I picked you because you’re expendable. You’re a throwaway. We can lose you and not miss a beat.”
She regarded him from the doorway. His arrogant smile remained pasted in place. “I appreciate your honesty,” she said evenly, then opened the door and walked out.
6
Tuesday, September 8, 1987
Time unknown
Location unknown
J. Robert Humphries had been left mostly alone by his kidnappers for what felt like a very long time after being deposited inside a partially remodeled corner of a big empty building. Their only interaction with him had been to escort him to the bathroom a few times and to bring him some food and water.
Conversation was kept to a minimum during these visits, but he had been surprised—and disheartened—to discover that the kidnappers consistently allowed him to see their faces while providing his food and bathroom breaks. The hood that had remained in place over his head was pulled off for the duration of these too-short breaks. While he was thankful to be able to see and to breathe normally for a few minutes, that small pleasure was overshadowed by the knowledge that felons allowing the victim of their crimes to see them, and thus identify them, could mean only one thing: they didn’t expect him ever to get that opportunity.
After being escorted out of his home by the man with the handgun, J.R. had been shoved unceremoniously into the back seat of the automobile that had pulled up behind his murdered protective agent’s car. A sack had been pulled over his head and when he complained, the response had been, “Shut up, or you will end up like the dead agent.”
Although his permanent home was in Fargo, North Dakota, J. Robert Humphries had spent most of the last three decades in the Washington, D.C., area. He had been determined to follow the turns of the kidnap vehicle, to map their route in his head. Sooner or later he would have an opportunity to contact rescuers—he hoped—and he wanted to give the authorities the best possible chance of locating him.
Despite a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of the layout of Washington D.C., with the bag pulled tightly over his head he became lost and confused almost immediately. The driver made several left and right turns in rapid succession and that was the end of Humphries’s plan.
Then they had driven for what seemed like hours.
The car stopped once to refuel. When Humphries heard the distinctive clunk of the nozzle sliding into the gas tank, he thought for one brief second about screaming for help and trusting fate or luck that someone would be within hearing distance. But then a gun barrel had been placed against his temple, the pressure hard and unyie
lding and terrifying, and a soft voice had whispered through the cloth on his head, “Not one word or you die.”
And J. Robert Humphries had closed his mouth. By the time they arrived at their destination, he knew the sun was rising because he could sense the brightness through the sackcloth. But whether they had driven hundreds of miles away from D.C. or taken a circuitous route just to confuse him and ended up near where they had started, he could not guess.
He was being held in an abandoned schoolhouse, made obvious to him through his supervised trips to use a bathroom that would be recognizable to anyone who had grown up in the United States in the last hundred years and attended a public school. The building was old and musty and had clearly been empty for years. Maybe decades.
But this was more than just an abandoned school building. Construction work had been done in the area he was being held. It had been built to look like any bedroom in any anonymous American home. The work was shoddy and the materials cheap, but the illusion was fairly persuasive if you ignored the fact that only three-quarters of a room had been built. The effect was jarring.
The “room” was sparsely furnished, with an iron-framed bed which he assumed he would be handcuffed to when he slept, if he lived that long. There was also the chair to which he was currently manacled and a small bedside table with nothing on it. The white sheetrock walls of his “bedroom” held a couple of unremarkable paintings, reproductions of artwork undoubtedly mass-produced, that likely decorated the interiors of cheap motels all over the country.
When allowed to use the bathroom, he had been escorted a short distance along a typically wide school hallway, dark and barren, and then been locked inside a metal-walled stall to do his business. When he finished, he knocked on the door and waited for it to be unlocked and opened by one of his captors while the man leveled a handgun in his face. Then he was escorted back to his bedroom, where he was once again manacled, wrists and ankles, to the heavy wooden chair with the sackcloth secured over his head.
The same routine had taken place twice thus far. It hadn’t varied. After the first occasion he had asked why the sack was necessary—the bedroom windows had been boarded over and the door to his makeshift cell was locked from the outside. Additionally, he had to assume an armed guard had been posted outside the door.
The answer had been a terse, “Shut up!”
After the second trip to the bathroom he hadn’t bothered to ask again. He assumed at that point that the sack was meant to increase his sense of isolation and thus his fear. Humphries further assumed that if his first request to have it removed had gone unheeded, it was pointless to try again, and he refused to allow them the satisfaction of telling him once more to shut up.
It was a small victory. Likely a meaningless one as well.
The rest of his time had been spent alone and undisturbed, giving Humphries plenty of time to think. Fear was a constant, although after the initial spike of terror he had suffered last night in his townhouse upon seeing the business end of a pistol shoved in his face, it had receded to a more or less manageable level.
For the time being.
He wondered what time it was, and knew that by now the president would have been informed that he was missing. The forces of the United States government would even now be mobilizing to find and save him.
Humphries found the prospect less than inspiring. As a longtime Washington political insider, he was intimately familiar with the capabilities and limitations of Uncle Sam’s massive bureaucracy, and while government force could be a fearsome and awe-inspiring thing, he knew all too well that it could be cumbersome and slow to respond to individual crises.
He was considering the fate of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security agent, ashamed to admit to himself he wasn’t even sure which agent had been assigned to guard his residence, when the sound of the heavy lock turning in the door refocused his terror immediately.
The door opened and he heard heavy footfalls crossing the room. It was the sound of a man moving with a purpose. A second later the cloth sack was ripped off his head.
It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. He blinked rapidly despite the relative darkness of the room, lit only by a single low-wattage bulb screwed into a floor lamp against the far wall. The building’s power had been disconnected years ago, Humphries assumed. His captors must have set up a generator somewhere, although he could hear nothing that sounded even remotely like the running of a small engine.
When he was able to focus, Humphries saw a man standing before him holding a newspaper and a camera. It was the same man who had accompanied him on both bathroom trips, and who brought him food and water. “I hope you are not camera-shy,” he grunted.
Humphries took a deep breath, hoping his heart wouldn’t explode inside his chest and send him to the grave before his kidnappers could. He glanced at the paper and then up at the kidnapper. “Proof of life, I assume?” he said, willing his voice not to shake. He would be damned if he was going to give these lawbreakers the satisfaction of knowing how frightened he was.
The man smiled at the question. “Something like that,” he said. He inserted a key into the cuff securing Humphries’s left hand to the chair and unlocked it. Then he held out the newspaper for Humphries to take.
Humphries looked at the front page and blinked in stunned surprise. It wasn’t the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times. In fact, the newspaper wasn’t even written in English. Covering the entire page was the distinctive Cyrillic script used in Russian dialects.
Humphries was floored. The idea that foreign nationals might have kidnapped him for political purposes didn’t come as any surprise; it was the first thing he had considered. It would explain the choice of victim—the U.S. secretary of state—perfectly.
But the possibility that the kidnappers might be agents of a Soviet-bloc country hadn’t even occurred to him. The three men he had seen since his kidnapping were all physically very similar: olive-skinned and swarthy, with curly dark-brown, almost black hair. Complexion-wise, they were the exact opposite of what he would have expected of Russians or Czechs or East Germans. And their accents sounded not even remotely Russian.
The kidnapper’s eyes narrowed in annoyance. “What do you think you are looking at?” he said.
Humphries shook his head silently. He was mystified, more so than he had been two minutes ago.
The kidnapper eyed him a moment longer and then demanded, “Hold the paper up, just under your chin, front page out.”
J.R. did as he was told and the kidnapper stepped back to snap a photo. J.R. stared directly into the camera with what he hoped was a defiant look, knowing the picture would likely be on the front page of every newspaper as well as being the lead story on every television newscast within a matter of hours.
The shutter clicked and the flash popped, and then the kidnapper stepped forward again and ripped the newspaper out of Humphries’s hand without another word. He yanked the hood back down over Humphries’s head and stalked out of the room.
The door closed and the lock clicked into place.
And J. Robert Humphries sat in solitary terror, wondering what the hell was happening.
7
Tuesday, September 8, 1987
9:50 a.m.
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia
Tracie accepted the packet of evidence offered by Stallings’s secretary and hurried to an empty conference room. She had two hours to absorb as much information as she could before a scheduled noon briefing with FBI and D.C. police officials on the search for Secretary of State J. Robert Humphries.
It was not nearly enough time. Everyone else involved had more than a twelve-hour head start, and Stallings had made it clear he expected immediate results from her, regardless of anyone else’s progress.
And she had precious little experience in locating missing persons.
She had no law enforcement experience at all, really. When she thought about it, she realized most of what she had d
one in service to her country over her seven-year career would be considered by most objective observers to be on the wrong side of the law, at least technically speaking.
That was not to say she felt any guilt. The process of defending the world’s preeminent democracy when many governments would stop at nothing to undermine it, even topple it, was inevitably a messy one. It came as no surprise, at least to Tracie, that it often involved actions some would find distasteful. Morally objectionable. Even repugnant.
But that didn’t mean they weren’t necessary.
However, her operational CIA experience rarely involved finding persons of interest. More often her work involved taking some specified action against persons of interest: Intimidating them. Bribing them. Occasionally saving them, as she had done with Boris Rogaev back in Leningrad. Almost always, though, she knew exactly where to find them.
She sipped a coffee purchased from a break room vending machine—it had the sludgy consistency of well-worn motor oil and was hot enough to melt steel—and spread the materials across the conference table in front of her.
There was a copy of the responding D.C. police officer’s report, as well as of the FBI lead investigator’s report.
There were crime scene photos of the murdered Bureau of Diplomatic Security agent and the interior of his car.
There were contact names and telephone numbers.
There were dozens of photos of the secretary of state’s townhouse, both interior and exterior shots, from all angles. Most of the photos focused on the downstairs study, where Humphries was believed to have been working when he was taken.
Tracie scanned the mass of evidence and pictures of Humphries’s house, and one thing caught her attention immediately. Featured prominently in several of the crime scene photos was a handgun that had apparently been dropped on the carpet behind Humphries’s desk.
And it wasn’t just any handgun. It was a weapon very familiar to Tracie, she had seen dozens of them up close over the years and had been shot twice with an identical weapon just three months ago, not far from where she sat drinking scalding hot coffee.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 29