Being inside the CIA complex felt odd, but this wasn’t the first time Tracie had visited Langley since her official removal from agency duty last spring. In fact, she’d probably spent nearly as much time here following dismissal as she had prior to it, when the majority of her time had been spent overseas on assignments.
What did feel different, and somewhat disorienting, was being ushered into Stallings’s inner sanctum. The man had spent more than four decades in service to the CIA, the last twenty-five-plus years as director, and most field operatives had never come within shouting distance of this office.
The air felt heavy with the weight of history, intimidating in a way the security officers could never be.
Don’t let it get to you, Tracie told herself. You’ve dealt with Aaron Stallings plenty, and he’s the same shameless liar and manipulator inside Langley as he is behind the desk of his home office.
Tracie breathed deeply and strode across the room without waiting to be invited. Stallings’s head was down as he pored over a stack of papers on his desk. It was the game he liked to play to demonstrate the pecking order when summoning Tracie to his home for an assignment: pretend to be busy—or maybe he actually was busy—and make the visitor wait.
“How’s Goodell?” she said.
“He’s dead.” Stallings said the words and then raised his head, meeting Tracie’s eyes, his gaze revealing nothing.
“You knew,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“I said you knew.”
“Contrary to what you apparently believe, Tanner, I’m not capable of reading minds. I know any number of things. Could you be more specific as to which one you’re referencing?”
“It doesn’t take a mind reader to know what I’m talking about. You knew exactly what was going to happen when you sent me to Goodell’s apartment this morning, didn’t you?”
“Ah. Now we’re getting somewhere. You’re talking about your failed assignment, then. You’re talking about the fact I sent you to escort a man safely from his home to this building, a distance of maybe four miles, and you weren’t able to manage it without your charge ending up on a slab in the morgue. Is that what you’re referring to?”
“I don’t think you look at it as a failed assignment at all. I think you got exactly the result you wanted.”
He spread his hands and shook his head. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I knew something was off this morning. If I hadn’t been so goddamned tired, maybe I would have seen it sooner.”
“I don’t follow. But you’d better be very careful if you’re going to start leveling charges you can’t back up.”
“There was no good reason to send just one person to apprehend the man responsible for the deaths of six field operatives. Bringing in Goodell wasn’t even the CIA’s purview to begin with.”
“I told you this morning, I wanted the opportunity to speak with Dave Goodell myself, face-to-face, before turning him over to the FBI. It was an opportunity denied me, thanks to your incompetence.”
She shook her head. “You’re not going to use insults to goad me off the subject. Even accepting the notion that using CIA assets to apprehend Goodell was appropriate—something I made clear this morning I disagreed with you on—it never should have been done using only one operative. There should have been a coordinated operation, thoroughly preplanned, with a team of agents, not one exhausted operative fresh off the plane from Europe.”
“Watch it, Tanner.”
“You claim to have a team of agents pursuing Lisa Porter. That’s not even true, is it? Or do you expect me to believe agency assets are so incompetent as to allow a KGB operative to set up a sniper’s nest right outside Goodell’s front door?
Stallings stared, anger smoldering in his eyes, and Tracie continued. “ I don’t doubt you’re going to go after Porter now, but I think you either dragged your feet starting the mission, or deliberately led our people in the wrong direction. I think you knew she’d try to take out Goodell and I think you’re perfectly satisfied she succeeded.”
“That’s enough, Tanner!” Stallings thundered. “Goddammit! What in the hell would I stand to gain by David Goodell’s assassination?”
“Oh, come on, how stupid do you think I am? You stand to gain everything from Goodell’s death. If he had lived to answer questions and face a jury, the damage to the agency could have been incalculable. Secrets would have been revealed, national security potentially compromised. And even worse from your perspective, the agency would have been humiliated by public knowledge of the treason of such a high-ranking administrator.”
Stallings continued to glower at her. He didn’t interrupt, though, and Tracie pressed her luck. She had expected to be thrown out of the office by now and guessed she had nothing left to lose by finishing.
“But now, with Goodell dead, you can control the flow of information. This situation can be anything you want it to be.”
“I’ve heard enough, Tanner.”
She shook her head. “A gunfight in such a public place will be all over the news. I’ll bet you a week’s pay you already have the disinformation machine working overtime on damage control. What’s the story going to be? That Goodell was the victim of a mugging gone wrong? A tragic drive-by shooting that he happened to stumble into? By the time you’re done, David Goodell will be a dead hero, and your precious agency’s reputation will be secure. Tell me I’m wrong, I dare you.”
She was shaking and could feel tears welling in her eyes. She was exhausted and angry, and the sick feeling in her stomach had continued to grow. By now it felt alien and evil, like a parasite eating away at her stomach lining.
“Are you finished?” Stallings’s eyes looked black and dangerous.
Tracie knew she was foolish to go up against the man who had lasted longer by a factor of ten than anyone else in the history of the toughest job in Washington, but she just couldn’t stop herself. It was as if a dam had broken and she had no better chance of stopping the water from gushing out of it than she’d had of stopping David Goodell’s assassination.
She clamped her jaws shut and held his gaze defiantly.
“You said your piece,” Stallings muttered, speaking so quietly his voice was barely comprehensible. “Now it’s my turn. First of all, you won’t be able to bet a week’s pay on anything if you don’t shut your mouth right now and stop with these outlandish and entirely unsupported charges. I’ll fire your ass again and this time there’ll be no coming back.”
He leaned back in his chair. He looked angry but perfectly unruffled. “You’d be gone already if it weren’t for the fact that you have a point. It was wrong of me to send you to pick up Goodell. It should have been a different operative, someone who hadn’t just returned from an assignment in Moscow.”
“That’s it? That’s what you took out of everything I just said? It should have been someone else? That just proves what I’ve been saying! A KGB sniper took out the most critical witness in one of the worst cases of treason this country has seen since the Revolutionary War and all you can say is you should have sent one different operative?”
“I’m telling you, Tanner, this is your last warning.”
“Or what?”
Stallings stared silently, his eyes never leaving hers.
“Oh, that’s right, you’re going to fire me. Guess what, sir? I don’t know if I want to work any more for a man who is so unconcerned for my safety that he’ll send me out to face a sniper, alone, without even the courtesy of a warning.”
“You deal with much worse than what happened this morning every single day in the field, Tanner, so spare me the ‘poor me’ rhetoric.”
“But there’s a difference, and it’s chilling that you don’t recognize it. In the field I have a specific assignment to accomplish, and more importantly, I know I’m in the field, which means I know to expect anything, at any moment and from any direction. This morning’s situation was nothing but an ambush, pure and simple. You knew I was w
alking into it and allowed it to happen, simply because it served your ‘bigger picture.’”
“Get out, Tanner. Get out right now, while you still have a job.”
“I’ll leave. But I don’t know if I want this damned job. I don’t know if I can work for someone like you anymore.”
She spun and marched out of the CIA director’s office, pulse pounding in her ears and struggling to keep herself from falling apart. She slammed the door behind her and ignored the angry glare of disapproval from Stallings’s secretary.
She needed sleep.
She needed a drink.
She needed to cry.
43
January 27, 1988
8:40 p.m.
Washington, D.C.
Tracie had hoped some much-needed sleep would help make her feel better. Bring some clarification to her feelings. Put things into perspective.
She’d gone straight home after storming out of Stallings’s office, her hands shaking and her head pounding. The tears continued to threaten to come and she continued to deny them their due.
The black ball that had begun growing in her belly continued to metastasize until she thought it would detonate, exploding like a nuclear bomb, destroying her from the inside in a white-hot blast that would at least bring relief from the pain and the guilt and the horror and the fear.
She made it inside her apartment before the tears came. They hit like a hurricane, despair sweeping through her and forcing them out in an unstoppable downpour of despair.
She crumbled to her living room carpet. Buried her head in her hands and cried. She thought she might cry forever.
She couldn’t put her finger on exactly why she cried, but stopping the tears now would be impossible.
Maybe she cried for the loss of Shane Rowley last spring. He was the one man she’d truly loved and the one who had proven through his actions he would do anything for her. She’d never stopped to grieve his loss, had never even slowed down. The opposite was true, in fact. She had thrown herself into her work with a mindless frenzy that had to have been as destructive as it was necessary to her sanity.
Maybe she cried for the realization that she was truly alone in the world, in every conceivable way. She’d always known she would remain alone on a personal level after Shane’s death. Professionally, Winston Andrews’ shocking betrayal had demonstrated that no one inside the CIA was truly in her corner, either.
But in her heart she had desperately wanted to believe in Aaron Stallings, despite her clear understanding he was an amoral manipulator who would always advance his own agenda at any cost. Had wanted to believe that if push came to shove, he would do what he could to protect her, as her handler and the only person alive aware of her Black Ops status.
To her dismay, he’d proven otherwise with his decision to use her as bait to draw out a KGB sniper, to manipulate his desired outcome after Tracie had refused to eliminate an American citizen.
But there was one other possibility for why Tracie cried.
It was the most horrifying of all, and for that reason she refused to acknowledge it.
Maybe she cried for what her Kremlyov assignment had revealed about herself. That she possessed the stone cold heart of an assassin.
She had killed before in the line of duty. Had accepted that death and destruction were the cost of doing business in a dirty world, where freedom was constantly under assault by men and governments willing to go to any lengths to eliminate the United States and the liberties for which it stood. Had always gone into her assignments with her eyes wide open.
But she had never before walked up behind a man—unarmed, as far as she knew, and elderly to boot—and pumped multiple 9mm slugs into his body, strolling away like she hadn’t a care in the world as that man crumpled to the ground and bled out on a frozen Moscow sidewalk.
Yes, Slava Marinov had been responsible for the horrific deaths of a half-dozen American operatives, men who did not deserve to die, certainly not in the manner they were dispatched.
Yes, Marinov had brought his death upon himself, and yes, Tracie believed the world was a better place with him gone.
But what did it say about her that she was capable of the act?
How could she look herself in the mirror from this day forward and see anything other than the cold, dead eyes of a killer staring back?
They were legitimate points, she believed, each —or maybe all of them combined—enough to account for her panic attack in Aaron Stallings’s office and near-breakdown here on her living room floor.
She lay just inside her closed front door for a long time. How long, she did not know. Eventually the tears dried up, an occurrence for which she should have been grateful.
But they were replaced by a cold emptiness.
A black void.
She pushed herself to her feet, shaking and stumbling like a drunk at closing time, and shambled off to bed. Surely things would look better when she awoke.
* * *
Tracie was typically a light sleeper. Years in the field had trained her body to deal with potential danger by snapping awake at the slightest sound, fully alert and prepared to take action. Sometimes she found her eyes opening for no apparent reason, and yet she knew there always was a reason.
Today was different.
Today a helicopter could have hovered directly over her and she wouldn’t have awakened. A bomb could have detonated outside her window and she would have slept on. An assassin could have crept into her apartment and placed a gun at her temple and she would have been as helpless as a newborn baby.
Today her condition was closer to unconsciousness than sleep. She dropped off within minutes of her head hitting the pillow and remained in a near-comatose state for several hours.
The room was dark when she awoke. She had drawn her bedroom shade, but the sliver of light that always snuck between the window frame and the shade during the day was nowhere to be found. The blackness inside her apartment was as complete as the blackness of her spirit.
She sat up in bed and waited to feel like herself again. To feel normal.
It didn’t happen, so she waited longer.
When several minutes had gone by and she still felt as empty inside as she had after drying her tears at the front door, she shoved the covers off and slipped out of bed.
Padded to the kitchen and looked at the clock.
The time was a few minutes after 8:30. She’d been sleeping for hours but it was still only early evening. The night stretched in front of her, endless and as terrifying as staring down the barrel of a Russian Makarov.
Maybe more so.
She was no longer tired and knew sleep would prove elusive the rest of the night.
Tracie wasn’t much of a drinker. Never had been. Too much alcohol could prove deadly to a field operative, dulling the senses and promoting sloppiness. When she did drink she almost always stopped at one.
Tonight might just be the exception that proves that particular rule.
She rummaged around in a cabinet, eventually uncovering a dusty bottle of whiskey that was so old she couldn’t remember putting it there. Walked to the fridge and grabbed a half full ginger ale. Twisted open the cover, unsurprised to discover the soda was mostly flat. She couldn’t remember buying that, either.
She mixed a drink anyway, dropping ice cubes into a glass and then pouring too much whiskey into the bottle before filling the rest with the ancient ginger ale.
Took a sip and placed the glass on the counter, then held herself tightly. She wrapped her arms around each other and rubbed vigorously above the elbows, trying to dispel a chill that was coming from inside.
She grabbed her drink and walked into the living room. Cranked the thermostat and then padded to her couch and sat down.
She left the television off.
She left the lights off.
She closed her eyes and tried not to think. Sipped her drink too fast.
When it was gone she mixed another, grimacing when the la
st of the ginger ale dripped out of the bottle. Not only was it old, there wasn’t enough of it.
She returned to the couch and repeated the process of drinking and trying not to think. She discovered she was much better at the first challenge than the second. Turned out shutting off her brain was damned near impossible.
Too quickly her second drink disappeared.
She went to drop her empty glass onto the end table and almost missed.
Didn’t care.
Sat for a while in the dark. Suspected the room would be spinning if the lights were on. Didn’t care about that, either.
After a while she rose unsteadily, grabbed her car keys and walked out the door.
44
January 27, 1988
9:55 p.m.
Washington, D.C.
Tracie knew she shouldn’t be driving but she did it anyway.
Add this to the list of things contributing to the nuclear bomb waiting to detonate in my belly.
The irony of picturing a ball of radioactive material inside her stomach after eliminating the man responsible for assassination via nuclear radiation was obvious, even to a drunk young woman trying her hardest to shut down the cognitive portion of her brain.
If she hadn’t felt so damned bleak she might have thought it was funny.
But it didn’t seem funny. It just seemed appropriate.
The trip was a short one, but the closer she got to her destination the more tempting it was simply to turn around and go home.
She almost did exactly that, and more than once. But the prospect of sitting alone in the dark, drinking herself into oblivion was the only thing she could imagine at the moment that might be more pathetic than what she was actually doing.
So she kept going and in minutes had arrived.
Tracie parked her car and killed the engine, then stepped into the cold Washington night. She crossed the half-empty lot, approaching the apartment she thought—but wasn’t certain—belonged to Marshall Fulton.
She stood just outside the door feeling embarrassed and stupid and ashamed.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 120