As far as she could tell there was only one. A small paved alleyway, barely wide enough to accommodate a vehicle, snaked out from behind the tree-lined fence surrounding the Iraqi mission. There was no way from Tracie’s brief drive through the neighborhood for her to determine whether any other, more clandestine, entrances studded the property. It was hard to believe there weren’t any, but if the CIA’s occasional surveillance had captured an increase in nighttime embassy activity, Tracie felt it was fair to assume that activity had probably occurred through one of the two public entrances.
Following her quick tour, Tracie had gone home to nap. She tried without much success to avoid dwelling on the circumstances of her firing, or to consider just how far her CIA star had fallen in such a short time. Just a few months ago, Tracie Tanner had been a busy covert ops specialist, highly regarded within the agency, mentored and handled by one of the longest tenured and most accomplished CIA men in history, Winston Andrews. Then had come a seemingly simple mission: recover a top-secret document from an informant in East Germany and hand-deliver it to the White House.
Simple.
Tracie had pulled off far more difficult assignments, dozens of them over the years, without a hitch.
But this one had begun unraveling almost immediately, and before all was said and done, she had been attacked and nearly killed, forced to go on the run with no agency backup, fallen in love, seen her mentor kill himself before her eyes, gotten into a deadly gun battle atop a Washington insurance building during which she had taken two bullets, and watched as her newfound love sacrificed his own life to save hers.
In the end, she had delivered the document and stopped a shocking assassination attempt, but only President Reagan’s intervention had saved her job, and she had fallen into a morass of self-pity and self-recrimination as she recovered from the surgery that repaired the bullet wounds in her shoulders.
The wounds inflicted on her heart were less easily repaired. She missed Shane Rowley more than she could ever have imagined missing anyone, and only the prospect of returning to the job she loved had given her any semblance of hope for the future.
And now, even that hope was gone. She was jobless, with no relevant work experience that would translate into other gainful employment. She supposed her desperate resolve to continue the search for the kidnappers of J. Robert Humphries was her way of avoiding the recognition of how screwed-up her life had become over the last three months. But even in her state of denial, she knew that one way or the other, this silly notion of saving the secretary of state all by herself would end soon enough, and she would be left with nothing.
And no one.
She fell into a fitful doze on her couch, tossing and turning and dreaming about Bangor, Maine, and a handsome air traffic controller who changed a young woman’s life and then disappeared forever. She dreamed about loyalty and betrayal and sacrifices large and small, and when she awoke, night had fallen and her series of intense dreams had become nothing more than a hazy mishmash of heartache and tears.
She sat up and checked her watch.
Showered.
Ate.
And trudged to her car, where she would force herself to do the only thing she could think of.
Her job.
20
Thursday, September 10, 1987
1:00 a.m.
Iraqi Embassy, Washington D.C.
Tracie parked on a quiet side street that ran perpendicular to Massachusetts Avenue. She found a curbside spot covered in shadows that offered an unobstructed view of the paved alleyway running behind the Iraqi embassy. It would be impossible to watch both the main entrance and this one, and she reasoned that if the Iraqis were involved in the disappearance of Secretary of State Humphries, their operatives would want to come and go in a less obtrusive manner than via the main gate.
A light drizzle had fallen while she was sleeping, and the air was muggy, heavy with the threat of more showers. Tracie hoped they would hold off. She had parked a fair distance from the embassy and reduced visibility would severely hamper her ability to maintain effective surveillance.
She shut down the engine and settled back in her seat, trying to get comfortable while also exposing as little of her body as possible to anyone who might be paying attention. The neighborhood seemed utterly still, but there were no guarantees the Iraqis didn’t have someone keeping watch.
Once situated, she used her time to review what she had learned about the kidnapping of J. Robert Humphries. Much of it seemed to make no sense. She could accept the theory that a Middle Eastern government had been behind the kidnapping, even in the absence of any logical explanation why they would do so, because over the years she had seen plenty of ops that would have seemed nonsensical to any observer except the authority who thought them up. And that included plenty of American operations.
What she didn’t understand was why the Iraqis would be involved. An Iranian plot against the United States at least made sense from a strategic point of view. Even after the Ayatollah Khomenei’s 1981 release of the American hostages who had been taken toward the end of Jimmy Carter’s presidency and held for a year and a half, relations with the Iranian government had been strained, to say the least.
That the Ayatollah and his followers would try to strike at the “Great Satan” again, given the opportunity, went without saying.
But Iraq? The U.S. had provided weapons and support to Saddam Hussein in his seven-year (and counting) war against Iran. Tracie knew him to be unstable and thus untrustworthy. But the idea that he would mastermind a plot as complex as the Humphries kidnapping without having some strategic benefit in mind commensurate with the risk involved made no sense whatsoever.
Still, Marshall Fulton’s intelligence report suggesting increased covert activity around the Iraqi embassy coincided precisely with the timing of Humphries’s disappearance. And Professor Brickley’s educated guess that the Russian ransom documents were most likely written by an Iraqi couldn’t be coincidental.
A siren wailed from somewhere across the city, muffled by distance and the muggy night air. She had cracked the driver’s side window in her little car after parking, both to allow some fresh air into the vehicle and to monitor the ambient nocturnal sounds of the slumbering neighborhood. A cat meowed plaintively. A television set blared out an open window, the volume cranked up much too loud. Tracie couldn’t tell which house it was coming from.
The Iraqi embassy complex—or at least the portion Tracie could see—remained still and quiet. It had now been almost an hour since she had pulled to the curb and in that time not a single soul had come or gone via the narrow alleyway.
The time was nearly two a.m. Tracie knew she would have to maintain the stakeout at least until sunrise, since Marshall’s intel regarding the embassy indicated the potential for covert activity until at least four a.m.
She wished she could have reviewed the surveillance reports turned in by the agents covering the embassy, but hadn’t even considered asking Marshall for them. Accessing them herself was now impossible, given her status as an ex-CIA employee, and Marshall had already risked far more on her behalf than she had any right to expect. Sharing classified documents with a civilian—Tracie thought about the term and was overcome by a wave of sadness—would be grounds not just for Fulton’s termination but for criminal prosecution.
She could not ask that of someone who had treated her so well.
She began to wonder whether maybe she had shown up too late. Perhaps whatever was going to happen—if anything—had already gone down. Tracie had assumed any kidnapping-related activity would not occur until the quietest part of the overnight. It was the most likely possibility, according to Marshall’s intel.
But who really knew? Tracie was grasping at the most unlikely of straws anyway; maybe she had misread the situation entirely and the Iraqis had already left for wherever they were holding J. Robert Humphries. Maybe they were even now cutting off another of the man’s fingers.
Or maybe Humphries really was being held inside the embassy complex. Maybe no one would leave the grounds at all because the secretary of state was trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey in a soundproof room inside a hidden underground bunker deep beneath the mission grounds.
Or maybe they weren’t involved in Humphries’s disappearance at all.
A sense of hopelessness crept into her thoughts. What the hell did she think she was doing? She had been fired from her job, kicked out of Langley like a common criminal, and yet here she sat, alone, maintaining surveillance on the sovereign territory of a foreign government in the vain hope of . . . What? Catching masked Iraqis as they prodded the terrified J. Robert Humphries out the back door of the embassy at gunpoint?
She yawned and shook her head at her own foolishness, and that was when she detected a furtive movement out of the corner of her eye. She came immediately alert. Focused her attention on the shrubs lining the fence along the alleyway.
For a moment nothing happened, but as she began to question what she had seen—Maybe I’m batshit crazy in addition to being tired—she saw it again.
There. A hint of motion behind the screen of bushes, sensed more than seen.
Then, to her astonishment, she caught sight of a car, moving slowly, headlights extinguished. It stopped at the chain-link fence and idled for a moment. Then the gate swung open, apparently operated remotely, and the vehicle nosed into the alley and crept slowly along the path lined by shrubs, almost-but-not-quite invisible.
The car—it was either black or dark blue or perhaps forest green—rolled the length of the alley and then stopped just short of the road, lights still off. Tracie resisted the urge to slide farther down in her seat. She knew there was no way she could be seen by the occupants of the mystery vehicle; the angle was wrong and her car was bathed in nighttime shadows.
But here was exactly the sort of suspicious activity Marshall’s surveillance reports had been referring to. She squinted and tried to see inside the car, which was long and wide, a Lincoln Town Car or something similar. She didn’t think she would be able to and she was right. No luck.
The car sat a heartbeat longer and then eased onto the deserted side street. The headlights blazed on. It rolled to the Massachusetts Avenue intersection and stopped again. Now directly under the glare of a streetlight, Tracie could see her speculation was correct—the vehicle was a Lincoln Town Car. It turned right, accelerated past the embassy complex and disappeared into the night.
Tracie started her engine and counted to ten. This section of Massachusetts Avenue was long, wide, and straight, meaning that at two a.m. the Town Car would be visible for a long distance unless it had turned immediately onto another side street.
Tracie rolled the dice and assumed the driver would remain on Mass. Ave., at least for a while. The lack of traffic that would make it easy to keep the car in sight would make it just as easy for the driver to spot a tail if she wasn’t extremely careful.
Finally, she pulled out of her curbside spot, executing a quick K-turn and rolling the short distance to the Massachusetts Avenue intersection. She peered along the mostly empty thoroughfare and saw the red taillights of the Lincoln a quarter-mile ahead, now traveling at full speed, moving north out of D.C.
Tracie flipped on her headlights and followed.
21
Date unknown
Time unknown
Location unknown
J. Robert Humphries awoke with a start. An ex-marine, he had served with distinction in World War II and the early days of the Korean conflict, and until a few days ago had always viewed himself as strong and tough. Steely eyed. Stoic. Able to take whatever life threw at him.
The qualities that had made him a good marine and had seen him through tours of duty in two wars, one declared and one undeclared, were the same qualities that had made him so valuable to Ronald Reagan when it had come time for the president to fill his cabinet. Reagan had wanted a strong-willed, no-nonsense secretary of state, a man who would not blink when it came to high-stakes diplomacy with the Soviets.
Humphries had been that man. A lifelong friend and confidante of the former actor, California governor, and now United States president, J. Robert Humphries had projected the image of toughness and hard-nosed diplomacy abroad that former president Jimmy Carter’s administration had lacked, particularly following the disastrous rescue attempt of the American hostages in Iran.
J.R. Humphries wondered where that strong, tough ex-marine had gone. Lack of sleep, nonstop stress, fear, and the relentless throbbing in his hand where his little finger had been sheared off just below the knuckle had reduced him to a shell of his former self. For a while, he had attempted to keep rough track of the time since he had been taken. But he was so disoriented he really had no idea. It might be a couple of days, might be a week. Time had lost all meaning.
Now, as the door to his room crashed open, J.R. realized his restless doze was being interrupted by one of his captors.
It was the man who had cut off his finger. He entered the room carrying what looked like a small tray table and a pad of paper.
J.R. cringed involuntarily, blinking hard and wishing he could wipe the sleep from his eyes but was unable to get his shackled hands anywhere near his face. He tried to control his rising panic in the face of the knowledge that he might be about to lose another body part. “What now?” he asked quietly, impressed by the relative steadiness of his voice.
The man smiled broadly, making clear to J.R. that he could see right through his captive’s forced nonchalance. “It is time to keep the pressure on your boss,” he said.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
The man slid a chair across the dirty floor and positioned it directly in front of J.R. Then he sat. “It means you are going to compose a letter to President Ronald Reagan.”
“And why would I do that?”
“Because if you don’t you will soon discover that you are two fingers short of a full complement, rather than one.”
J.R. sighed, and this time his nerves betrayed him. The shaking sound came through loud and clear, and he saw the man’s smile grow wider. “I don’t suppose I’ll be writing down my own thoughts,” he said.
“You are correct,” the man answered. “You are to be strictly the middle man.” He turned the small tray table over in his hands and unfolded two sets of wire legs, clicking them into place. Then he spun the table around and set it across J.R.’s lap. He placed a blank sheet of paper on top of the table and removed a pen from his breast pocket. He clicked the pen and held it in front of J.R.
“What am I supposed to do with that?” J.R. said bitterly. “You cut off my finger, remember? I’d be lucky to even hold a pen in this bandaged mess of a hand, never mind write anything!”
“You can write, and you will,” insisted his captor, who leaned over and inserted a key into the handcuff securing J.R.’s right hand to the chair. Sweat stains pitted the man’s shirt, arcing in big semicircles under each armpit. The sour smell of body odor assaulted J.R.’s senses, and he wrinkled his nose in disgust. The man turned the key and the bracelet fell off of J.R.’s wrist.
He reached up and tentatively took hold of the pen. It felt awkward and foreign in his heavily bandaged hand. He lowered the pen to the paper and blew out a breath in frustration. “What do you want me to write?”
“‘Dear President Reagan,’” the man began.
J.R. scrawled the words along the top left side of the page and grunted. “It’s barely legible,” he said, fighting the urge to collapse into tears as he contemplated the missing finger on his right hand and his near-inability to do something as simple as transcribe a few words onto a piece of paper. With an exertion of will as great as any he had ever expended, J.R forced himself to keep his emotions under control, refusing to give this barbarian the satisfaction of seeing him break down.
“Just keep writing,” the man spat, and continued to dictate a letter to the most powerful man in the world.
Dear President Reagan,
I write to assure you that I am still alive. The finger you received yesterday as a demonstration of my new friends’ seriousness was, indeed, my own, as you undoubtedly are by now aware. The injury is painful, but I am receiving medical attention. Aside from that issue, I am not being harmed and, in fact, am being treated well.
By now you have had time to review the evidence my friends sent to the State Department. You have certainly reached the same conclusion I did a couple of nights ago: the people holding me are devoted to their mission. They are serious about their achieving their goals and will not stop until these goals have been met.
Now, to the point of this correspondence.
You already received one letter detailing the demands of my hosts. These demands are simple and unyielding: begin the immediate dismantling of all allied missile defense systems in Western Europe.
Thus far, these demands have been ignored.
We all know the demand is a simple one, and once complied with will allow my hosts the opportunity to reciprocate, to begin the process of removing their own systems. But the United States must go first. My friends chose this rather unconventional method of breaking the stalemate between the world’s two great superpowers because they recognize what both sides have long understood but have lacked the courage to say: neither side wants to be the first to blink in this dangerous nuclear stalemate.
Mr. President, you must understand that my friends have eyes everywhere. Your sluggishness in responding to their simple and most logical request has been observed and noted. Be aware that if no evidence is immediately forthcoming of your willingness to take the specified actions, my friends will be forced to remove another of my fingers, and another, and will continue to do so until their simple demands have been met.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 37