The target took her hand as an amused smile played across her face.
The target’s companion watched the exchange from the inside of her car and took the target’s apparent lack of concern as her cue to drive away. She waggled her fingers and then accelerated out of the lot.
And it was just Tracie and the target.
For now.
Tracie turned toward the building. “I don’t want to make you late for work, but if you wouldn’t mind unlocking the door…” She began walking hurriedly across the lot, knowing the target would follow.
She did, saying, “I didn’t even realize there was an empty unit in the building. Which apartment are you in?”
“The one that just became available. You know, the one on the first floor.”
They reached the door as the woman wrinkled her forehead in confusion. “There isn’t any empty unit on the first floor. I live in the middle one and I saw the tenants on either side of me just yesterday. Are you sure…”
By this time, Tracie had slipped the gun from her shoulder holster. She placed it gently against the woman’s ribs and said, “I’m not going to hurt you unless you scream.”
The target’s jaw dropped open. She looked too surprised to scream, too surprised even to be afraid. Yet. She said, “I do not understand.”
“Unlock the front door,” Tracie said, “and take me to your apartment.”
“I do not have anything worth stealing.”
“I’m not here to steal your things.”
“Then what do you—”
“Just do as I ask,” Tracie snapped. Another resident could exit the building at any moment. If that happened, things could get complicated in a hurry. She needed to get to the relative safety of the woman’s apartment.
And time was ticking away. For her plan to stand any chance of succeeding, Tracie needed to be out of here within ten minutes.
“But—”
“Move.” Tracie shoved the weapon hard into the woman’s side, and she reluctantly stepped across the threshold. Tracie followed, using her body to shield the gun from the sight of any unseen observers as much as possible.
The foyer was as drab and utilitarian as the apartment’s exterior. Faded grey indoor-outdoor carpeting covered the hallway floors, worn almost completely through in high-traffic areas.
A door swung open at the far end of the first floor hallway. A beefy older woman lumbered through it and turned toward them and Tracie whispered, “Do not draw any unwanted attention to us or you die. Do you understand?”
The secretary nodded.
“Now, lead the way to your apartment.”
They began moving slowly along the hallway. Halfway between the closed doors of the first and second apartments, they passed the older woman walking the other way.
“Olga,” the woman said, “I thought I heard you leave already.”
“I…” The secretary hesitated. Tracie cleared her throat and then the woman continued. “I forgot something inside.”
“I see.” The woman paused thoughtfully and then continued toward the front door. “Well, have a nice day. I’m sure I’ll see you soon.”
“Yes. Of course. Soon.”
The heavy-set woman hit the front door and exited the building and Tracie breathed a sigh of relief. The secretary moved to the closed door of the middle apartment and slipped her key into the lock with one shaking hand.
She opened the door and they entered the apartment and the frightened woman immediately began begging for her life. “Please do not kill me. Take anything you want but please do not—”
“I told you already,” Tracie said, “I’m not here to rob you and I’m not going to kill you. I won’t even hurt you as long as you do exactly as you’re told.” She prayed no one else had chosen that moment to step into the hallway where they could hear the woman’s pleas before the door had closed fully.
“Then what do you want?”
“I need to be you.”
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t worry,” Tracie reassured the shaken young woman. “It will only be for a little while. Then you can be you again.”
23
February 3, 1988
7:35 a.m.
Mezhgorye, Bashkir
“I do not understand.” The look on the young woman’s face was one of utter confusion. She backed away from Tracie and banged into a small living room table. She didn’t seem to notice.
“I’m going to secure you inside your apartment. I will borrow your car and your identity, both of which I will return to you later today.” She didn’t bother adding assuming I survive.
“I do not understand,” she repeated.
“You don’t have to,” Tracie said. She dropped her backpack onto the floor and unzipped it while keeping her Beretta trained on the target. She found her roll of duct tape and removed it from the bag.
“Where is your husband?” she said.
“Who?”
“Your husband. I assume he’s still sleeping?”
“I am not married,” the secretary said.
“Your roommate, then. Where is she?”
“There is no roommate. I live alone.”
“Good,” Tracie said. “Take a seat.”
“I do not understand.”
“Remember a moment ago, when I said I wouldn’t hurt you as long as you do exactly as you’re told?”
The woman nodded mutely, eyes wide and face pale.
“Right now you are not doing as you’re told. Sit down or I will hurt you.”
The woman shrugged out of her winter coat and dropped it where she stood. Then she edged sideways away from Tracie as if afraid to turn her back on her, as if by watching her she might somehow be able to change her fate if Tracie decided to pull the trigger.
She moved into the kitchen in three steps—the apartment was tiny—and pulled on one of the chairs placed face-in at her dinner table. She turned it around and sat.
“Good job. See? We’re getting along just fine,” Tracie said, and the secretary didn’t respond. She licked her lips nervously and waited.
“Now, hand me your ID, please.” A Red Army-issued identification card hung on a lanyard around the woman’s neck. It was roughly the size of an American credit card and featured a headshot photo of the secretary as well as a series of indecipherable letters and numbers.
“You want…this?” She reached up and touched the card. She had been confused before, but now seemed nonplussed at the notion that the petite criminal holding a gun on her might want to gain access to a restricted area protected by trained soldiers armed with automatic weapons.
I don’t blame you, Tracie thought. In fact, I share your skepticism. This really doesn’t seem like the smartest plan I’ve ever dreamed up.
But she didn’t say that. She just nodded and said, “Yes, I want that.”
The secretary lifted the lanyard over her head and handed the ID to Tracie, who placed it around her neck, wearing it exactly as the woman had.
Then she said, “Now I’ll need your keys.”
This time the woman complied immediately. She’d been unlocking her car when Tracie appeared in the parking lot, and she still held a small fob featuring four keys in her right hand. She reached out and passed them over.
Tracie took them and then began opening kitchen drawers. On the third try she found what she was looking for and removed a small dishtowel.
“I’m sorry to do this to you,” she said, “but I can’t have you screaming and drawing attention to yourself. So open up.”
“I will not scream, I promise you, I will sit quietly and—”
“Open your mouth,” Tracie said firmly, and the woman’s eyes widened exactly as they had when she first got a look at Tracie’s Beretta. She stopped speaking and obeyed.
Tracie stuffed the towel into the woman’s open mouth and then secured the gag with duct tape. She wound it horizontally over her mouth and around the back of her head, and then vertically, winding it und
er her jaw and then over the top of her head. By the time she finished, the only portion of the woman’s face left exposed was her nose and eyes.
Tracie finished by securing the secretary’s wrists and elbows to the chair and then her ankles and knees.
Then she glanced at her watch. Seven forty. She could make it but she had to move now.
She straightened and faced the secretary, now bound and gagged and helpless. “You’re going to have a long and uncomfortable day, but you’ll be fine. Someone will come for you when I’ve finished doing what I need to do.”
The woman looked unconvinced. She returned Tracie’s gaze with pleading eyes, and Tracie felt a rush of shame at what she was putting an innocent woman through.
Then she thought about Ryan Smith, and how exhausted and helpless he’d looked being marched out of the back of a Soviet Army truck, facing who knew what sorts of horrors inside that military base, alone and possibly injured, and her shame vanished, replaced by a steely determination.
Without another word she spun on her heel. She picked up the woman’s coat on the way out of her apartment and slipped into it. Then she double-timed out of the apartment building.
***
Tracie hurried out the exterior door and down the steps. She wanted to sprint but knew that doing so would only raise the suspicions of anyone who might happen to glance out an apartment window.
So she walked. Quickly. As she did so, she glanced at the army-issued ID card hanging on the lanyard around her neck. The woman whose identity she’d just stolen was named Olga Trentiova. She wondered if she would live long enough to return Olga’s things to her.
She moved directly to the secretary’s car and then past it, to the snow piled up at the edge of the parking lot. She picked up piles of it, fluffy and light in the bitterly cold temperatures, and hurriedly smeared it around the window on the driver’s side door. Instantly her bare fingers turned red and numb.
Ignoring her freezing hands, Tracie opened the door and repeated the process on the inside of the window. She packed the snow as tightly as possible, stifling a grin even through her buzzing nerves and pounding adrenaline as she pictured someone watching her, trying to figure out what in the hell the crazy young woman was doing to her car.
She caked on the snow and then shook her hands. Clapped them together in a mostly fruitless attempt to stimulate blood flow. Took another look at her watch.
Seven-forty-five.
She was out of time.
She leapt into the driver’s seat and pulled the door closed. Some of the snow she’d just packed onto the interior and exterior of the window fell away, but more than half remained in place. Hopefully it would be enough. If nothing else it should frost the window.
The car started on the first try—thank God for small favors—and Tracie raced out of the lot, fishtailing around the corners. She slid to a stop at the road, then pointed the car in the direction of the base and jammed the accelerator to the floor.
24
February 3, 1988
7:58 a.m.
Ipatiev Military Research Facility
Two cars were pulling up to the guard shack as Tracie approached the access road. She recognized them from yesterday as vehicles belonging to the secretaries. Her goal had been to arrive at the installation after the rest of the secretarial staff for the obvious reason that if any of the women were watching when she exited Olga Trentiova’s car her cover would be blown immediately.
There was no way for Tracie to know whether any of the other women were still behind her and had yet to arrive, but she doubted it. The time was 7:58, and to a young woman living in a village the size of Mezhgorye, working inside the research facility would likely represent the best career option she would ever have. Tracie was willing to bet that barring an unexpected issue like a flat tire or other car trouble, none of the secretaries would risk losing her job because of a late arrival.
In fact, she was betting her life on it.
She slowed the car to give the women ahead of her plenty of time to park and enter the administration building. Arriving after eight o’clock would be a mistake in that it would make her stand out in the guards’ minds, but she was close enough to “on time” that it would hopefully not raise their suspicions.
She blew out a nervous breath and turned onto the access road. Walking the tightrope of timing was stressful as hell. It had been a long day already and it was only eight a.m.
It was about to get a lot longer.
Halfway between the street and the guard shack Tracie glanced to the left and nodded grimly. Her goal in packing the snow against the driver’s side window had been to make it as difficult as possible for the soldier manning the security building to get a clear look inside the vehicle as she passed, and she believed she had accomplished that goal.
A bit of snow remained on the inside of the window and she brushed it away. Between the condensation on the interior of the glass and the splotches of snow left on the exterior, Tracie guessed it would be nearly impossible for the guard to see that the woman inside the Volga was not Olga Trentiova.
Unless, of course, he stopped her and forced her to roll down the window.
She approached the gate, moving slowly. Lifted Trentiova’s ID and displayed it, picture side out, against the window. She’d covered her flame-red hair with a kerchief this morning, and given the similarity in body type between her and Olga, Tracie figured there should be no reason for suspicion on the guard’s part.
Still, she would be completely exposed should the sentry stop her. She’d placed her Beretta 92SB on the seat under her right thigh, and she fingered it nervously with her right hand while holding the ID card against the window with her left, still rolling slowly and almost abeam the shack.
She’d almost come to a complete stop now, nowhere to go, and she made a gesture of impatience with her hands. Come on, dammit, raise the gate. I‘m late for work.
Just as she resigned herself to a messy scene—she could get the drop on the gate guard easily enough, but undoubtedly some of the men in the guard towers were watching, and with scopes and high-powered rifles they would fill the Volga full of holes long before Tracie ever got close to the end of the access road—the wheeled gate began trundling open.
She breathed a sigh of relief but wondered whether the guard’s hesitation in opening it had been due to suspicion or if he simply hadn’t been paying attention. If it was the former, she could be in big trouble because someone would be watching closely when she exited the car.
There was no way to know the answer to that question, and it was moot anyway, because the gate had now opened widely enough to allow access.
Tracie hit the gas and chugged into the facility. With the exception of Ryan Smith, who had arrived yesterday in chains, she would be the first American—in all probability the first non-Soviet, period—ever to set foot inside this base.
It was not a comforting thought. She was going to attempt the rescue of an American prisoner with no backup, no prior knowledge of the facility’s interior, and no idea where Smith had been taken or for what purpose.
Suicide mission.
The thought flitted into her head and she forced it away. Years of working undercover and in dangerous locations had taught her that an operative’s most valuable tool wasn’t backup or a detailed mission plan or even weaponry, although all those things were important.
The most valuable tool for an operative working undercover was confidence. Ninety percent of the time, people saw what they expected to see. Even if the guards were watching her, as long as she parked the Volga and climbed out like she belonged, the odds were good that none of them would think twice.
Unless they were watching through binoculars. No amount of confidence in the world was going to fool a solider who could see with his own two eyes, up close and personal, that someone other than Olga Trentiova had driven Olga Trentiova’s car onto a heavily fortified military facility.
Tracie turned right, toward
the administration building, watching in her rearview mirror as the front gate reversed direction and rolled closed behind her. It latched with a loud clang that could be heard even through the closed windows and over the old car’s engine noise.
She pulled into the parking lot she’d seen the staff members use yesterday, relieved to see it filled with cars but devoid of people. The other women had already entered the administration building, as she’d hoped. After killing the engine and slipping her Beretta back into her shoulder rig, Tracie took a deep breath and exited the car.
She walked through the lot and toward the building, standing tall and exuding confidence.
She hoped.
A few people wandered the grounds, but they were all in the distance and paid no attention to Tracie. The vast majority of workers had already left the housing units and made their way to one of the three warehouse-looking buildings scattered throughout the base that Tracie had begun to think of as subway stations. Based on her previous surveillance, she guessed few if any of those workers would appear again before late afternoon.
If her theory was correct, those three structures—the subway stations—offered access to the underground portions of the facility. That made the structures her intended destination.
She crossed the parking lot and moved in the general direction of the administration building, praying no one chose this moment to exit in the direction of his or her car. It seemed unlikely, since everyone had just arrived to start the day, but who the hell knew?
As she approached the steps leading to the entrance, Tracie turned left and followed a partially shoveled sidewalk across the front of the building. Pathways crisscrossed the facility, offering Tracie access to the structures she wanted to explore, but the price of that access was an unprotected walk over open land in full view of the guard towers.
It was a price that had to be paid. She’d gotten safely onto the base, but merely gaining entrance to the facility would be pointless. It represented nothing more than the first step toward her ultimate goal: saving Ryan Smith.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 135