“Here’s how it was explained to me,” he said, speaking only slightly less aggressively. “Polonium-210, in addition to being deadly, is also nearly impossible to uncover unless the coroner knows what to look for and the autopsy is performed almost immediately.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The element has a very short half-life, meaning all traces of it disappear from the victim’s body quickly. We could dig up the bodies of the operatives and, with the exception of the most recent victim who was buried only a few months ago, all traces of the Polonium would likely be gone. Even the exception I mentioned would be hit-or-miss. It’s possible too much time has passed in his case as well.”
“But you feel certain all six of these men were poisoned in a similar manner by the KGB.”
“Yes I do.”
“And they all suffered the way Fowler has suffered, and continues to suffer.”
“Yes they did.”
“Back at your office, you said you’d tell me how the doctors discovered Fowler had been poisoned by Polonium if I really wanted to know. I really want to know.”
Stallings sighed. “It was a lucky coincidence. By all rights, we still should have no idea.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The medical people were discussing Fowler’s symptoms in the cafeteria while one of the United States’ leading nuclear scientists was getting a cup of coffee on a break from a meeting he was attending. The man’s a genius and an expert on Polonium radiation, and his ears perked up at what he overheard. After his meeting ended, he mentioned his suspicions regarding Polonium to the case officer escorting him out of the facility. That person contacted the doctors. The scientist was right on the money.”
“Lucky break,” Trace said.
“Not for the dead operatives.”
She nodded grimly. “Good point.”
A moment of silence passed and Tracie said, “I’m going to ask again. What’s my assignment?”
“I think you know.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
“You will fly to Russia. You will hunt down the man responsible for murdering our people. When you do, you will execute him.”
5
January 18, 1988
12:20 a.m.
Moscow, Russia, USSR
Finding a secure location from which to maintain surveillance would be Tracie’s first challenge. It wouldn’t be easy. She was dog-tired and jet-lagged, and Moscow’s average January high temperature of approximately twenty degrees Fahrenheit more or less eliminated any outdoor position as a realistic possibility.
With Charles Fowler on his deathbed back in the states—hell, given his condition when Tracie visited, by now he was probably gone—the CIA had been left with a gigantic hole in their Moscow-area operations.
There were other assets in the region, and Tracie had memorized aliases and contact numbers should it become necessary to utilize one. But she was extremely reluctant to do so, for obvious reasons: if the KGB had infiltrated CIA operations to the point they were able to assassinate six agents in the past three years, it would be impossible to know who she could trust and who might turn her into the next victim.
Further complicating things was the fact that the CIA safe house Fowler had been using as a base of operations was almost certainly compromised. If the KGB knew Fowler was CIA, Tracie had to assume they had learned everything about his Moscow operation, meaning the safe house had been bugged, rendering it off-limits.
Nuclear, so to speak.
But redundancy was the key to covert operations, and the more hostile the territory, the more critical redundancy became. In the case of the Central Intelligence Agency’s USSR operations, redundancy meant always maintaining more than one safe house in any particular region, the locations of those safe houses being made available to their operators on a need-to-know basis only.
Fowler hadn’t needed to know the location of the backup safe house in Moscow, so he hadn’t known.
Which meant Tracie should have a safe place to rest her head while here.
Theoretically, at least.
Because, theoretically, Charles Fowler should have been safe here as well. Unless and until Tracie could determine how Fowler had been outed to the KGB, she was willing to take nothing on faith.
The good news was that she had a place to stay. The bad news was that it was a dump. She dropped her travel bag on the floor of a tiny, cold and dirty little ground floor apartment in what she hoped was one of Moscow’s least desirable neighborhoods. If it wasn’t, things were worse behind the rapidly crumbling Iron Curtain than she’d realized.
Calling the safe house an “apartment” would be to do a grave injustice to the term. Wedged between two massive, sagging brick-walled structures—factories or warehouses, from the looks of them—that appeared to have been empty since Nikita Kruschev’s time as Soviet Secretary General, the place was two rooms plus a kitchen Tracie wouldn’t have considered eating in without first updating her tetanus vaccination.
But the condition of the place was irrelevant to her. She’d dealt with worse in the past and undoubtedly would again in the future. Always assuming she survived her current assignment, of course.
She craved sleep but wasn’t going to get any. She splashed water on her face—cold water, naturally; it appeared a hot water heater hadn’t been included in the lease agreement—and then changed into her darkest and warmest clothes.
Then she walked alone into the brutally cold Russian night.
* * *
Among the intel Stallings had supplied was the Moscow address of Gennadiy Alenin, Charles Fowler’s Soviet contact and the man from whom Fowler had been receiving Russian secrets for more than two years. Fowler had met with Alenin at the Grand Kremlin Palace on the night of the poisoning.
It seemed the obvious place to start.
At 1:00 a.m. Moscow time the only people braving the cold were down on their luck—the hookers, the homeless, and assorted other have-nots. Tracie ignored them and they ignored her. Lowering their fur-lined hoods and pulling off their woolen facemasks for the sole purpose of sticking their noses into other people’s business apparently became less desirable the lower the temperature plunged.
Small favors.
Despite Moscow’s huge size, by chance Alenin’s apartment building was located relatively close to Tracie’s safe house. Holding a high enough clearance at the Kremlin to access classified Soviet information was evidently no guarantee of a salary sufficient to afford high-end accommodations.
Tracie elected to ignore the near-zero temperatures and proceed on foot. Even in the dark of night, she could gain a much better feel for her surroundings by walking than would be possible from a bus or a train, even if she could catch one at this hour.
Plus, she guessed the CIA-generated identification documents she’d been issued should be sufficient to fool anyone who might challenge her in this part of town and at this time of night, but why take chances? Freezing-cold toes were far preferable to the prospect of fighting her way out of a Russian jail or facing a firing squad—or Polonium-210 poisoning, for that matter—so not even the slap-in-the-face of the bitter cold as she stepped outside caused her to question her decision.
Twenty minutes of brisk walking got her within sight of Alenin’s building. Like most of the surrounding structures, the high-rise was drab and utilitarian, concrete block construction that appeared to offer the bare minimum in terms of comfort and livability.
Maybe the interior was nicer than the exterior, but Tracie had spent enough time in Soviet-bloc countries to know that was almost certainly not the case.
Shivering slightly but warmer than she would have expected thanks to her brisk pace, Tracie circled the building. She slowed down and took her time, keeping sufficient distance between herself and the apartment house to avoid arousing suspicion in the unlikely event anyone was paying attention.
As she had expected, there were two entrances. The rear doorway
opened onto a trash-filled alleyway filled with broken glass and vagrants, some drinking and some sleeping in doorways, covered in mountains of blankets.
At least, she hoped they were sleeping and not dead.
By the time she’d completed her circuit, it became clear which doorway would have to be kept under surveillance. Nobody with an ounce of common sense would risk using the rear entrance in anything other than an emergency, least of all a worried—or quite possibly by now grieving—young wife.
Tracie turned her attention away from Alenin’s building and began moving slowly along the cracked sidewalk, scanning the area opposite it. She wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking for, but she was sure she’d recognize it when she saw it.
And she did.
Abandoned buildings were not typically lacking in a neighborhood gone to seed. It was true in the United States and it was especially true here. Even in the dirty half-light of the few operating streetlamps, Tracie could see several surveillance possibilities.
She made a couple of passes along the sidewalk adjacent to the two most likely locations, settling on the one that would allow her the best view of the front entrance to Alenin’s apartment while also—hopefully—concealing her from passersby.
She committed the location to memory, by now shivering badly.
Then she turned back toward the safe house, once again moving quickly. This time it wasn’t just to stay warm. She wanted to catch a few hours of sleep before returning in the morning.
6
January 19, 1988
6:40 a.m.
Moscow, Russia, USSR
Tracie slept better than she would have anticipated, probably because she’d been so damned tired by the time she got back to the tiny safe house she was practically asleep on her feet. The temperature inside was chilly but still much warmer than outside, and she took her cue from the vagrants in the alley, piling as many blankets as she could find atop the lone single bed and then crawling under, still fully dressed.
By six in the morning she was up and feeling refreshed, relatively speaking. She bundled up and then retraced her steps to Gennadiy Alenin’s neighborhood. The morning was overcast and raw, the skies as dark and bleak as the city itself, and along the way she grabbed breakfast and the largest coffee she could find at a streetside diner.
The food was overpriced and bland, but the CIA was paying and the coffee was hot and strong, so Tracie considered it a net gain.
Upon her arrival outside Alenin’s apartment building, she again circled the structure, looking for anything she might have missed last night. Sunrise wouldn’t occur for nearly another ninety minutes, so the visibility wasn’t much better it had been a few hours ago. Still, nothing she saw changed her previous assessment that Alenin’s wife—her name was Ekaterina, according to Stallings’s intel—would exit the building via the front door rather than the rear.
Satisfied, Tracie returned to the rear of the building and hiked a block north before crossing the busy street and turning back south. It was early enough that the heaviest rush of commuters, traveling by car, bus, or on foot, wouldn’t begin to clog the streets for another thirty minutes or so.
The city was coming to life, however, and ducking into the abandoned building she had selected last night to conduct her surveillance without raising any eyebrows would present a challenge.
She slowed her pace, ambling along the sidewalk, hoping to give the impression of a young woman who had left her apartment a few minutes early and was taking her time getting to her destination. She wasn’t sure how believable the ruse would be, given the extreme cold, but it was worth a try. Her aim was to arrive in front of the abandoned building accompanied by as few pedestrians—and thus potential witnesses—as possible.
The first trip past the building didn’t work. The sidewalk wasn’t exactly clogged with people, but she wasn’t comfortable slipping sideways and into the recessed doorway. She continued past, taking the opportunity to examine the structure close-up on her way by.
It looked as though it had once housed offices. The large picture windows fronting the street had been smashed out years ago and then boarded up with plywood. Years of Russian winters had taken a toll on the wood, with small sections rotted entirely away, giving the boards the pockmarked look of a severe acne sufferer.
The front entrance had been a set of double glass doors. The doors were chained together and padlocked, but the glass was gone, only a few jagged shards remaining as a potential challenge to anyone who might want to enter. Plywood had been used to seal the entrance, but rot had taken its toll here, too, and a gaping hole provided what Tracie thought might allow sufficient room to slip inside.
She pictured the vagrants sleeping in a freezing Moscow alleyway last night and wondered how many other homeless had spent the night inside this ancient office.
And how many might still be inside.
She would have to deal with that situation when and if it arose, but right now the challenge was simply to enter without being seen. She strolled past the building and continued another block, then feigned checking her pockets frantically. Oh! I’ve forgotten something I need!
She shook her head in disgust for the benefit of anyone who might be paying attention—it didn’t appear as though anyone was—and then reversed course, just another forgetful young woman returning to her apartment to retrieve whatever she’d forgotten.
She approached the crumbling entryway again and decided now was the time. Pedestrian traffic was minimal and she could discern no police presence in the area. She was dressed all in black, and the early-morning gloom should make her difficult to see.
When she reached a point directly in front of the entrance, she lifted her left wrist and glanced down as if checking the time. She slipped left, into the recessed doorway and out of sight of any pedestrians not standing within a few feet of her.
She idled in the doorway, pantomiming reaching into her breast pocket for a pack of cigarettes, and for a brief moment the sidewalk was empty for maybe twenty feet in each direction.
That was when she crouched down and slipped through the rotted-out plywood covering the doorway and into the abandoned building.
* * *
Tracie had expected the building to be hollowed-out and empty, but it wasn’t. Abandoned desks, chairs and other office furniture littered the interior, forcing her to move slowly. What little ambient light there was faded away a few feet inside the smashed doorway, and she didn’t want to alert a passerby to her presence by bumping into a desk, or worse, injure herself on a sharp object she couldn’t see.
She had expected to be tripping over sleeping vagrants, but as far as she could tell she was alone. Perhaps the homeless residents had burrowed deeper into the structure, farther away from the bitter cold seeping into the building through the openings in the doorway and missing windows.
Tracie was relieved not to have to deal with a challenge from someone worried she was encroaching on his territory. She didn’t want to have to hurt an innocent person already beaten down by life, and it was critical she avoid any altercation that might draw the wrong kind of attention—the official kind.
The doorway seemed to give onto a large foyer that at one time had probably been a receptionist’s area. She felt her way along the north wall, moving in the direction of Gennadiy Alenin’s apartment building. Eventually she reached a wide hallway. A short distance along the hallway a door opened into what at one time had been a doctor’s office. Or dentist. Or tailor. Whatever.
The office door was long gone, and Tracie entered the room. Unlike the reception area, this space was completely empty. A ghostly ring of half-light to her right revealed the presence of one of the rotted-out sections of plywood she’d seen covering the windows on her reconnaissance mission.
She moved to the window and bent down. Pressed her face to the plywood and peered out the hole. Bitter cold air whistling through the opening caused her eyes to water, and she blinked rapidly to clear them.
She had a near-perfect, unobstructed view of the front entrance to Alenin’s apartment building.
Now all she could do was wait.
* * *
Tracie had given a lot of thought to how she might pick up the trail of Charles Fowler’s assassin, and her working theory was that a young woman living in an inner city Moscow apartment would likely shop for groceries every day. Over the course of Tracie’s career working in Russia, she’d spent time in numerous apartments, one or two of them in Moscow, and they had invariably been small, dank and depressing, with little room to store extra food.
Perhaps more to the point, shortages in Communist bloc countries were commonplace. Buying anything from fresh fruit to meats to toilet paper was a hit-or-miss proposition, so the savvy Russian consumer was forced to shop nearly every day or risk missing out on an item that might not become available again for weeks.
That was her theory. And she was banking on it being proven correct, even in the case of a woman whose husband was either on the verge of death or already gone.
* * *
For several hours there was nothing. People came and went across the street, obviously; it could hardly be otherwise in any decent-sized apartment complex. But none of the people remotely resembled the woman whose photograph she’d been given by Aaron Stallings.
The CIA had done extensive research into Gennadiy Alenin’s background upon his recruitment by Charles Fowler two years ago. The Alenins had been married a little over ten years and were childless. Ekaterina was a small woman, slender and often sickly. To the agency’s knowledge there was no history of infidelity on either side of the marriage.
In keeping with her straightforward personality, Tracie’s initial instinct had been to act boldly—to march into the apartment building, make her way to the Alenin’s apartment, and talk her way inside. Time was critically important if the KGB planned on continuing to eliminate American assets, and sitting on her heels on a cold concrete floor when lives were at risk chafed badly.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 101