Humphries gasped at Tracie’s sudden appearance, but the two men supporting him looked less surprised. A red flag went up in the back of Tracie’s mind but there was nothing she could do now. She was committed.
For a long moment nothing happened, and then the silent terrorist’s eyes widened briefly and an oily smile slid across the talker’s face. Then Tracie felt the cold, unyielding steel of a gun barrel placed against her temple.
A voice behind her said, “Lower your weapon. Do it now.”
The words were barely louder than a whisper, but the menace behind them was unmistakable.
Tracie hesitated just a moment. With a grunt of frustration, she slowly pivoted her wrist until her Beretta was pointing at the floor.
“Good decision,” the voice said. “Now hold your gun out to the side, gripping the handle with two fingers.”
For a brief moment, Tracie considered spinning and lashing out, pistol-whipping her as-yet unseen captor with the butt of the gun. But although she could sense his bulk in her peripheral vision, there was no depth perception attached, and thus no way of knowing whether she would strike him in the head or simply miss him entirely and flail at the air.
And she would only get one chance.
Presumably the men holding Humphries were also armed and could take down the secretary in an instant if they chose to do so.
The risk was unacceptable.
She did as she was told. And said a silent prayer that the terrorist would not discover the second gun, currently wedged into her jeans at the small of her back.
The weapon was taken from her hand. The barrel of her assailant’s gun remained pressed to her skull. The voice said, “How fortunate is your timing, Miss…”
Silence.
“No matter,” the voice said after a short pause. “As I was saying, your timing is exquisite. Secretary Humphries no longer requires his chair, so we will use it to secure you until you are killed.”
Tracie worked at keeping her expression placid, but beneath it her anger simmered, directed almost entirely at herself. She had known the Iraqis would have posted more than one guard. She had somehow missed the second one and now, thanks to her negligence, not only was Humphries going to disappear, she would pay for her mistake with her life.
She allowed herself to be shoved forward. “Where were you?” she muttered through clenched teeth.
“What do you mean?” the man behind her replied mockingly.
“I searched this entire building. I knew you had to be here. Where were you? You’re going to kill me anyway, the least you can do is tell me where I went wrong.”
“We owe you nothing,” the voice said. “But, just to drive home the point that you are not as intelligent as you think you are, and that a woman should always know her place, I’ll tell you. I waited at the front entrance while Muhammad tracked you. You make a very convincing drunk, by the way, not that you’ll ever get the opportunity to repeat the deception.”
“Thank you. I figured any girl would have to be shit-faced to hang out with the likes of you,” Tracie taunted.
The man either didn’t understand her comment or chose to ignore it. “I waited a few minutes, and when Muhammad did not return, I exited the building through the front door and circled behind it in the opposite direction.”
Tracie shook her head, kicking herself mentally. She should have known. “You were behind me, watching me, the entire time.”
“You are fairly intelligent. For a woman. When I reached the rear corner of the school, you were just making your very impressive assault on the fire escape. I simply returned the way I had come and waited in the stairwell, out of sight, until you entered through the second story window. Then I followed you. The rest of the story, well, it is self-explanatory.”
“Goddammit,” Tracie muttered as the man urged her past Humphries, who was watching the proceedings with wide, hopeless eyes.
“I am curious about one thing, though,” the man said. He took her roughly by the shoulders and turned her around. Tracie could see him now. He was average height, stocky, with olive skin and thick black wavy hair. And a long white scar running up his right forearm. “What did you do to Muhammad?”
Tracie looked up at him a she was pushed into the chair. “The same thing I’m going to do to you in about three minutes.”
This time the man laughed, his contempt clear. “It doesn’t matter. My job after Secretary Humphries is taken away is to stay behind and clean all evidence from this building. It will take all day, but by the time I am done, your FBI can search the school with magnifying glasses and they will find nothing. While I am completing that chore, I will seek out Muhammad and find him. He is obviously somewhere close by. When I find him I will kill him. It is no more than he deserves after his carelessness.”
“You’ll never get out of here,” Tracie said. “This entire block is cordoned off. The building is surrounded by federal agents. You won’t make it fifty feet when you try to leave. I know there was at least one person—a driver—sitting inside your Lincoln Town car a couple of blocks over, and maybe more. Those guys are already in custody.”
A momentary shadow of concern passed behind the man’s eyes and then his cocky demeanor returned. “I don’t think so. If agents were out there, as you claim, we would already have been swarmed under. I don’t know how you found this place or what you’re doing here all by yourself, but you are alone, aren’t you?”
Tracie shrugged, determined keep her features impassive. “Think what you want,” she said. “You’ll see.”
Her assailant began cuffing her arms to the chair. “What do you want me to do with her?” he asked the talkative terrorist, the man who had bragged to Humphries about using him to start a war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The man fished two sets of keys out of his pocket and tossed them to his accomplice. “Secure her here until we have made our escape, and then kill her. After you’ve found and killed Muhammad, take one of the cleanup team’s cars and weight the bodies down with concrete, then dump both bodies off a bridge into the Potomac River. By the time their corpses surface, we will be long gone.”
The man nodded. By now, he had cuffed both of Tracie’s wrists to the blocky wooden chair. He stood and stretched. The man in charge said, “Be thorough cleaning the building and be careful disposing of the bodies.”
“I understand,” the man with the scar on his arm said.
The leader turned his attention away from Tracie, dismissing her as if he hadn’t a care in the world. He began half-dragging, half-supporting Secretary of State Humphries toward the classroom entrance.
Scar-arm walked them to the door and Tracie could see the three Iraqis talking quietly among themselves, probably in Arabic. The secretary of state was the picture of hopelessness, his head hanging. He stared resolutely at the floor. After a moment, the men rounded the corner and were gone.
32
Thursday, September 10, 1987
2:50 a.m.
Washington, D.C.
Within seconds, the Iraqi who had gotten the jump on Tracie returned. He swaggered through the door with the look of an eight year old on Christmas morning.
Tracie eyed him suspiciously.
“Good news,” he said as he entered, “although perhaps more for me than for you. As a reward for the alertness and skill I displayed in following and capturing you, I’ve been given permission to…enjoy you…before killing you. I am only permitted ten minutes, but still, it is ten minutes I suspect I will long treasure.”
Tracie chuckled, trying to keep the overwhelming sense of revulsion she felt out of her voice. “Ten minutes? That’s probably nine-and-a-half more than you’ll need, am I right, big boy?”
The man scowled. “What did you say?” He walked faster. He was now halfway across the room.
“You heard me,” Tracie answered breezily. “In fact, I’ll be surprised if you even last thirty seconds.”
The man frowned, his hooded eyes
darkening. He rushed forward, cocking a fist. He reached her chair and unloaded a roundhouse right at Tracie’s jaw.
She ignored the incoming blow, twisting in her chair and snapping off a karate side-kick aimed at her assailant’s left leg, the leg he had just planted to halt his forward motion. She connected solidly and felt—as well as heard—the man’s kneecap shatter. The force of the blow drove her body backward in the chair and the man’s fist whistled harmlessly past her nose.
He dropped to the floor, gasping in pain, and reached into the waistband of his pants. “Infidel bitch!” he wheezed, half in agony, half in fury. He plucked a gun from under his shirt.
Tracie planted her feet and tucked her head, burying her chin in her breastbone. Then she leaped upward, driving with her powerful legs, executing a forward half-somersault. The heavy wooden chair spun through the air, Tracie still handcuffed to its arms, and landed on its back directly on top of the furious Iraqi.
The combination of Tracie’s weight and the force of gravity generated tremendous torque, and she could hear and feel the man’s bones breaking as the chair shattered against the resistance of his body, crushing him against the floor.
The back of Tracie’s head struck the chair and rebounded violently, and a lightning bolt of pain flared. She ignored it.
The Iraqi screamed and lost his grip on the gun.
Tracie rolled and kicked it away.
He lashed out with his good leg but connected only with air, as Tracie was already moving again. She rolled to her side and pushed off with her right knee against the floor, lifting her body enough to allow her to drop her left knee squarely on the man’s throat, cutting off his air supply.
Then she reached into the front pocket of the Iraqi’s trousers with her left hand, dragging the wooden chair along and stretching her right arm behind her back until she felt as though the muscles in her shoulder would pull away from the bone. There should be two sets of handcuff keys.
She reached to the bottom of the pocket.
There.
Keys.
She wrapped her fingers around them and ripped them from the man’s pocket. Then she dropped them into his hand and said, “Uncuff me.”
His face was bright red, his eyes bulging out of his head from lack of oxygen, but his response was to swing a fist wildly at her ribs.
The blow was harmless—the angle was all wrong for him to generate any power, and the lack of oxygen was already beginning to weaken him badly—but she felt the gesture indicated a fundamental lack of understanding of his new reality.
She leaned forward, increasing the pressure on his windpipe. “Maybe you didn’t hear me,” she said. “Unlock these cuffs or you won’t take one…”
She leaned forward. “More…”
She added weight. “Breath.”
The man’s head whipped back and forth. No matter his determination to hold out, his body’s natural instinct for self-preservation was kicking in and he needed to breathe. It was like a drowning man trying to hold his breath. Eventually his brain would force him to breathe in, even if it meant filling his lungs with water.
The man was now at that point. He began nodding enthusiastically, flailing his arms and his uninjured leg. Tracie eased off his throat and he sucked in a deep breath, coughing and gagging.
“Unlock these cuffs,” she repeated, and after a half-second’s non-response, she eased back down, again cutting off the now-desperate man’s air supply.
The hand with the keys shot forward, smashing into the chair just above Tracie’s manacled wrist. She took that as a sign of compliance and once again lessened the pressure on the terrorist’s throat.
After repeating the coughing and gagging routine, the man forced himself to concentrate, clearly not wishing to have his windpipe crushed a third time. His shaking hand struggled to force the key into the tiny locking mechanism, the difficulty compounded by the fact that he could not lift his head to see what he was doing.
Tracie waited impatiently.
Finally the key slid home. The man twisted it and the cuffs sprang open.
Tracie grabbed the keys with her now-free hand. She maintained just enough weight on the Iraqi’s throat to demonstrate in no uncertain terms who was still in charge. She crossed her left arm in front of her body and unlocked her right wrist.
The mangled chair fell away and crashed to the floor. Tracie shook some feeling back into her hands and rubbed her aching shoulders. She unlocked each bracelet still attached to the chair and then slapped one pair around the man’s wrists. With the other, she cuffed his good ankle to the chair.
Not ideal, but it would have to do. The man wouldn’t be going anywhere with a shattered kneecap, and she was running out of time.
Maybe she was already out.
She tried to estimate how long it had taken to overcome her Iraqi captor and guessed maybe three minutes. Would that have been enough time for the other two men to assist a weakened J. Robert Humphries to their car and then disappear?
Probably not. If they had parked a block-and-a-half away, as they did last night, she might have time to catch up with them and follow.
She leapt to her feet. Bent and retrieved the Iraqi’s weapon—another Makarov semi-auto. They definitely stocked up on Russian weapons. She returned to the terrorist, now sweating heavily, likely going into shock from his injury, and felt around the waistband of his trousers until retrieving her Beretta.
Then she turned and bolted for the classroom door. Before she had taken two steps she was sprinting at top speed.
She prayed it would be enough.
33
Thursday, September 10, 1987
2:50 a.m.
Washington, D.C.
Tracie had been gone more than forty-five minutes. Marshall’s concern had long since transformed into worry and he was by now near panic. He checked his watch, not knowing why. He knew exactly what time it was. What he didn’t know was what to do.
The last twenty-five minutes had been the worst. That was when a dark-colored Lincoln Town Car had rumbled up the street, crossing slowly left to right in front of Marshall’s Buick Regal like something out of a presidential motorcade. Marshall ducked below the dashboard until the car had passed, for the first time in his life grateful that his eight-year-old Buick was beaten and rusted to the point where it looked right at home in one of the worst sections of D.C.
He didn’t know the significance of the Lincoln’s sudden appearance, but guessed it wasn’t good. He wracked his brain and could come up with no legitimate reason in the world why this shiny, fancy automobile would be prowling one of the most devastated sections of D.C. at this time of night.
There weren’t even any hookers on the street corners, so it wasn’t a pimp or a rich guy looking to get laid. In fact, there didn’t seem to be any activity on the street corners.
The Town Car slowed and then stopped, pulling to the curb on the opposite side of the road not fifty feet from where Tracie had left her Toyota. A pair of men climbed out of the back seat, scanned the area much as Tracie had done less than an hour ago, and then set off in the same direction she had gone.
That was when his palms had begun to sweat non-stop and he had instantly developed the habit of glancing at his watch almost often enough to observe the second hand make its three hundred sixty degree journey each minute.
Furtive movement in the semi-darkness along one of the buildings a hundred or so feet away caught Marshall’s attention. It was in the direction Tracie had gone nearly an hour ago and the men from the Lincoln twenty-five minutes later. He squinted, cursing the lack of working streetlights.
People.
Three of them, moving through the shadows. As they approached, they stepped out from the shadows cast by the decrepit buildings and Marshall could see that two of them were the men who had walked away from the Town Car a little while ago. They lurched and stumbled, struggling to support a third man, who was being half-carried, half-pushed toward the still-idling Lincol
n.
The strange-looking group reached the empty street and began to cross, and Marshall gasped in surprise. The weak light cast by a waning moon and the proximity of the group to his position allowed Marshall to identify the third man, the one being forced along obviously against his will.
It was U.S. Secretary of State J. Robert Humphries.
34
Thursday, September 10, 1987
3:00 a.m.
Washington, D.C.
Tracie raced out the abandoned school building’s front entrance. The Iraqis had left the double doors unlocked, either accidentally in their haste to get Humphries safely to the waiting car as quickly as possible, or intentionally to make life easier for the terrorist staying behind to eliminate all evidence that the building had served as a makeshift prison.
Tracie didn’t know which it was and didn’t care. She had been prepared to smash out one of the few remaining windows, but instead barely had to slow, barreling out the door at full speed and taking the wide granite staircase three steps at a time. She leapt to the crumbling walkway and sprinted along the empty road in the direction the Iraqis had parked their Town Car last night.
She hoped they had used the same staging area for their thugs tonight. If they had changed things up and parked in another direction she would lose them for sure.
Before he had been taken away, J. Robert Humphries had appeared basically uninjured—with the exception of the impromptu surgery the terrorists had performed on his hand, of course—but he was not a young man, and the stress of his situation would likely have slowed him down even more than usual. She prayed she had escaped her horny captor quickly enough to catch up to them before they shoved Humphries into their car and disappeared.
They were taking him to rendezvous with a helicopter somewhere along the Maryland seacoast in the vicinity of Ocean City, that much she knew, but it wasn’t nearly enough information to be useful. Even if she could find a phone immediately—an impossibility in this devastated neighborhood—and convinced Aaron Stallings that she hadn’t gone stark raving mad, there wouldn’t be enough time for the CIA to mobilize law enforcement and the military to search every nook and cranny along the east coast. The Iraqis would vanish without a trace.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 43