The briefing continued for another thirty minutes, despite the fact not one participant had anything of import to add. Stallings half paid attention while thinking about Tracie Tanner and whether she had made any progress in tracking J.R. Humphries.
He hoped so. He knew President Reagan would be expecting a personal briefing on Tanner’s unofficial, unsanctioned op later, and he had no desire to have to face the withering gaze of the leader of the free world.
11
Tuesday, September 8, 1987
9:25 pm.
Washington, D.C.
Battery Kemble Park was deserted this time of night, just as Tracie had known it would be. As the daughter of a high-ranking U.S. Army general and a career Washington diplomat, Tracie had spent her formative years in the D.C. area and knew that during daylight hours many locals considered the national park and former Union Army Civil War garrison a prime dog-walking location.
After sunset, though, the rolling hills and winding pathways of Battery Kemble Park emptied and the park became isolated and lonely, making it the perfect spot for what she had in mind.
After boldly snatching would-be ladies man Anatoly Grinkov out from under his security detail at the Heart of Moscow Café, Tracie had walked the reckless politician through an alley behind the restaurant to her waiting car.
She shoved him through the front passenger side door and then reached under the seat and removed a pair of handcuffs she had stored there. She forced him to lean forward and brought the tip of her combat knife to Grinkov’s throat. “Put your hands behind your back,” she whispered. “Do it now.”
He hesitated and then complied. When he did, she cuffed his wrists together behind his back. Then she tore a six-inch slice of duct tape off a roll and slapped it over the Soviet ambassador’s mouth.
She did all of this parked on the side of a relatively busy Washington, D.C., street while managing to look like just another young wife or girlfriend taking care of her man, who had had a little too much to drink and would face her wrath in the morning. Years of clandestine ops on foreign soil had taught Tracie that ninety-five percent of people saw exactly what they expected to see. It was the other five percent who were dangerous.
After securing Grinkov and hoping the dim nighttime light and movement of the vehicle would prevent anyone from noticing that her passenger’s mouth had been sealed shut, Tracie walked around the front of the K-Car and slid into the driver’s seat. Then she drove at a deliberate pace—no one is a better driver than a cautious lawbreaker—through northwest D.C. to Chain Bridge Road. There, she passed a series of stately homes on the right, set well back from the leafy road. Roughly fifty feet from the park’s entrance Tracie cut her headlights and then turned left onto a narrow park access road.
Half a mile later she pulled to the side and killed the engine. Chain Bridge Road had long since disappeared in the rear view mirror and the only danger now would be if a patrolling park policeman were to see the Chrysler. The park police were notoriously understaffed, though, and from her youth Tracie knew nighttime patrols through Battery Kemble were sporadic at best.
Besides, she thought, we won’t be here long.
The hum of the Chrysler’s engine died away and they sat in silence, Tracie letting the Soviet ambassador stew in the juices of his imagination.
She waited one minute.
Two.
Then she turned to face Anatoly Grinkov. “It’s time to ’fess up,” she said coldly. “You understand what will happen if I remove the tape and you scream, correct?”
Grinkov nodded.
Tracie wasn’t sure she believed the man, but she wouldn’t be able to get the information she needed through osmosis, so she reluctantly reached over and ripped the tape off her captive’s face. He gasped at the sudden pain and said, “You are crazy woman. You will pay for this.”
She ignored the threat. “We know your people kidnapped Secretary of State Humphries, and you’re going to tell me where he is. “If you don’t, the next time anyone sees you, your bloated, lifeless corpse will be floating face down in the Potomac River.”
It was obvious Grinkov was afraid but was trying hard to maintain a brave front. He shook his head, his movements jerky. He was blinking rapidly, breathing erratically, on the verge of a panic attack.
He swallowed heavily and said, “I have no idea what you are even talking about. We have kidnapped no one. But I tell you this: if you kill me, such an act of unprovoked aggression will result in all-out war.”
Tracie snorted. “Unprovoked aggression? Did you really think you could kidnap J. Robert Humphries and not face consequences from the United States?” She examined the Russian’s face closely as she talked and was unsurprised at what she saw.
He truly didn’t know what she was talking about.
As a CIA clandestine ops veteran who had served in countries around the globe, Tracie’s survival frequently depended upon her ability to read people, to gauge the truthfulness of their statements and to determine whether a perfect stranger represented a threat, often on little more than their facial expressions and body language.
And everything in Anatoly Grinkov’s expression screamed confusion.
The notion that the Soviets had kidnapped the sitting U.S. secretary of state without their own ambassador to the United States being aware of the plan was ludicrous. If they had done it, he would know.
And he didn’t know.
His eyes narrowed and then he confirmed Tracie’s suspicions by saying, slowly, in his heavily Russian-accented English, “Secretary of State Humphries is missing? How long has he been gone?”
Tracie was nearly convinced that Grinkov knew nothing about Humphries’s disappearance. But she had to be sure. She reached behind her back and retrieved her combat knife. Lifted it nearly to eye height, her movements slow and deliberate. Then she held it before his eyes and rotated her wrist. The lethal silver glittered and winked in the light of the moon streaming through the windshield.
With its black matte handle, curved tip, and partially serrated blade, it was an impressive weapon even to someone familiar with impressive weapons. Anatoly Grinkov was not such a man. His eyes widened. “Wh- What are you going to do with that?” he asked.
“Come on, Mr. Ambassador, get real. The kidnappers sent a proof of life photo of Humphries to the White House. In the picture, he’s holding a newspaper. Today’s date. Care to hazard a guess as to what language the newspaper is printed in?”
Grinkov’s eyes flashed angrily. “I am telling you, I do not know what you are talking about.”
“I don’t believe you,” Tracie lied. “And you’re going to tell me where to find J.R. Humphries. You’re going to tell me right now, or you’re going to lose your most valuable possession. And when it’s gone, there’s no telling how long you’ll live. I’m no first-aid expert, so I don’t know how badly a severed penis will bleed. Then there’s the issue of what people will say when they find your body in the morning, a semi-respected Russian diplomat bleeding to death in the middle of the night with his willy cut off.”
She grinned at him as if sharing a private joke. “Wow,” she said. “Those will be some interesting newspaper articles to read. Too bad you won’t be alive to see them.”
Then she gripped the knife in her teeth and slowly unzipped the ambassador’s fly, removing his member from his trousers and holding it in her two hands. She glanced up into his panicked eyes and smiled sadly. “A little less enthusiastic than the last time I saw it, huh?”
Grinkov began sputtering denials, the skyrocketing stress level causing him to babble half in English, half in Russian. He leaned forward as if to head-butt her but Tracie was ready for it. She shoved him hard, forcing him against the seatback. Then she grabbed the knife out of her mouth with her right hand while maintaining a grip on his member with her left. In an instant, she had the razor-sharp blade pressed against the base of his penis.
“Don’t move a muscle,” she hissed, “or you’ll be s
inging soprano before you can blink.”
By now Grinkov was crying, tears of rage and frustration and fear sliding down his face as he swore on his mother’s grave he had no knowledge of J.R. Humphries’s kidnapping saying that the Soviet government would never stoop to such a heinous crime.
Tracie hated to continue, but she had to play it to the end. “Liar!” she said, increasing her pressure on the combat knife just enough to pierce skin. Blood leaked out of the small cut and the ammonia smell of urine filled her nostrils as Grinkov’s bladder voided, soaking Tracie’s hand as well as his trousers and the K-Car’s seat.
He screamed out one last desperate denial.
Tracie was convinced.
The Soviets were not involved.
12
Tuesday, September 8, 1987
11:10 p.m.
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia
Tracie was late checking in with CIA Director Aaron Stallings.
By the time she had driven the disheveled Anatoly Grinkov out of Battery Kemble Park, stopped the vehicle a half-block north of the Soviet Embassy, removed the Soviet ambassador’s handcuffs and duct-tape gag, and pushed him out onto the sidewalk, it was more than thirty minutes past their agreed-upon check-in time.
Had she still been working with her previous handler, CIA veteran Winston Andrews, being thirty minutes late for a routine check-in would not have been an issue. Andrews had understood that almost nothing ever went as planned with fieldwork. Events were fluid, circumstances changed, and the operative adapted. Sticking to a hard timetable was all but impossible.
But Aaron Stallings was not just another handler. In the strictest sense he wasn’t a handler at all—at least not of individual assets. He was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a man wielding tremendous power, who was subject to little or no direct oversight.
And who was not accustomed to being kept waiting.
By anyone. Ever.
Stallings was far sharper than FBI Director Matt Steinman, and had remained involved in the day-to-day operations of his agency, at least to the extent possible for someone in his position. Tracie had no doubt Stallings understood the elastic nature of clandestine fieldwork. Still, she knew he would not appreciate her being late barely twelve hours into her mission.
So she drove directly to Langley after dropping off Anatoly Grinkov. She was tired but anxious to report to the old CIA man what she had learned. He was expecting results and although she was no closer to determining where Humphries was being held, or even exactly who had taken him, eliminating official Soviet involvement in the kidnapping represented real progress.
She wheeled onto CIA property, knowing without a doubt that Stallings would still be holed up in his office, working. The director was legendary not just for his quick temper and abrasive personality, but for his workaholic nature as well. He had been married for over thirty years, but to Tracie’s knowledge no one had ever met his wife. The joke around Langley for decades had been that the longtime CIA director’s spouse was a fiction, created out of whole cloth to convince subordinates that their boss actually did have a life outside work, when the opposite was clearly the case.
In any event, even if Stallings had been a typical nine-to-five bureaucrat, there would be no question he’d still be manning his desk at this hour. With Secretary of State Humphries missing, it was all hands on deck. Nobody in a position of authority in the Reagan Administration was getting much sleep tonight. And that undoubtedly included the president himself.
Tracie returned the K-Car to a lot where it immediately slipped into anonymity, surrounded by dozens of other similar vehicles. The license plate would be removed and destroyed by an agency staffer within minutes. She retrieved all of her possessions, dumped everything into her own car, and then hurried into the massive agency headquarters building.
Accessing Stallings’s office required being cleared through a second security checkpoint in addition to the one at the building’s main entrance. The process had been slow and cumbersome each of the previous two times she had been summoned, but tonight one glance at her ID was enough for the security officer. He waved her through the checkpoint with an abrupt, “Director Stallings is expecting you.”
Not an encouraging sign.
The hallways were mostly empty at this time of night, especially in the administrative wing. Lights had been dimmed to less than half their daytime wattage and the labyrinthine corridors of the big CIA Headquarters building felt strange and almost alien.
Tracie entered Stallings’s office suite. The door directly into his office was closed. Stallings’s personal secretary had long-since departed for the day, probably heading home about the time Tracie was unbuttoning the top three buttons on her blouse in preparation for her faux-seduction of Anatoly Grinkov.
She didn’t hesitate. Didn’t even slow down. The CIA director was a master of manipulation and intimidation and Tracie Tanner was determined not to give him the satisfaction of seeing the slightest weakness. She marched up to his closed door and rapped twice, loudly. Then she turned the knob and entered the office just as Stallings was barking, “Come in!”
The director’s voice was gruff, angry, and unnecessarily loud. Tracie immediately recognized the implications: she had failed in her goal of reaching Stallings’s office ahead of the official Soviet protest over the treatment of their ambassador to the United States.
In addition to being a horny old bastard, Grinkov was an efficient one as well; she had to give him that.
She had taken three steps across Aaron Stallings’s carpeted office when he raised his head from a document he had been studying and said, “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing, Agent Tanner?”
She met his gaze and said, “What you asked me to do.”
Stallings slammed his fast down on his desk. It was one of his favorite tactics.
She saw it coming and didn’t react.
He scowled. “You want to explain to me how threatening the life of the Soviet ambassador to the United States accomplishes any part of your mission? Christ, I send you out on an unsanctioned, unofficial operation and the first thing you do is attack the highest-profile Soviet bureaucrat you can find. What the hell is wrong with you?”
Tracie sat without being invited and said quietly, “Am I going to get the opportunity to respond, or would you prefer just to rant and rave at me?”
“You’ll not only get the opportunity to respond, I demand a response. And it had better be good.”
“Sir, you’ve been involved in the world of clandestine intelligence gathering since before I was born. In light of that experience, what does it tell you when a Russian-made Makarov semiautomatic pistol is found at the kidnapping scene of one of the highest-profile men in the world? And it wasn’t just there, it was practically anchoring the crime scene. It couldn’t have been more obvious if it had a flashing neon sign pointing at it.”
Stallings said nothing. He continued to stare at Tracie unblinkingly. She considered his silence a marginal improvement over the yelling.
She continued. “Do you really think a team as professional and experienced as was necessary to pull off such a brazen kidnapping would have made that kind of basic error? They do everything perfectly, including getting the drop on an experienced Bureau of Diplomatic Security agent, managing to get close enough to him to blow his brains all over the inside of his vehicle without him even drawing his weapon, and then they accidentally leave such a damning piece of evidence at the scene? Do you really buy that? Because I sure don’t.”
“Mistakes happen, Agent Tanner,” Stallings said evenly but without much conviction.
“That’s exactly what FBI Director Steinman said,” Tracie answered, intentionally tweaking her boss. The CIA director’s views on his FBI counterpart were well known within the agency. Stallings scowled and she continued. “And I’ll tell you what I told him. Of course mistakes happen. But the notion that elite Soviet field operatives would make that kind of
egregious error with the success of the operation—not to mention their lives—on the line, I find simply impossible to believe.”
“You do.”
“Yes, sir, I do. And I’ve dealt with these people for a long time.”
“Noted. But what does any of this have to do with you threatening the life of Anatoly Grinkov?”
“Come on, sir, with all due respect—”
“Just answer the question, Tanner!”
“I needed to confirm my suspicions, sir. I had to interview someone I could be certain would have knowledge if the Soviets were involved in Humphries’s kidnapping. The obvious choice was Ambassador Grinkov. Nothing the Soviets do here in the states happens without his knowledge and approval.”
“Forgetting for a moment how rash and reckless your little stunt was, do you really believe Grinkov would have admitted Soviet involvement in the face of Gorbachev’s official denial, just because you asked him? That would be tantamount to committing suicide!”
“Agreed, and of course he wouldn’t have admitted it. But one thing I’ve learned in seven years is how to read people. I know when someone is lying to me. I have to, because it’s often the only thing that keeps me alive. And even when faced with the ultimate humiliation and the imminent loss of…body parts, and probably his life, I saw absolutely no indication from Anatoly Grinkov that he was lying when he continued to deny that the Soviets had kidnapped Secretary of State Humphries. None. Zero. I don’t know yet who took Humphries, but one thing I do know is it wasn’t the Soviets.”
“You’re one hundred percent certain, just based on reading the face of the man whose life you were threatening?”
“There’s a lot more to it than just reading his face, and there’s no such thing as being one hundred percent certain. But, having said that, yes, I’m as confident as I can be in my analysis.”
“What about the photo of Humphries holding the Russian newspaper?”
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 32