Almost everything looked the same, but with one key exception: there was no door at the far end of the long hallway. The corridor terminated at a solid concrete-block wall, painted the same drab industrial gray as the rest of the construction.
Odd, Tracie thought. Whatever’s going on down here must be less ambitious. Or more exclusive. Building A had three long tunnels branching off the end of the first hallway, each with their own research areas built off it.
She also observed that the hallway was empty.
For now.
The time was nearly noon, and Tracie assumed that meant many more people would be joining the half-dozen men she’d seen at the snack machines above-ground or would be walking to the dining hall for lunch.
Activity would increase over the next hour or so. She would have to hurry if she was to remain undetected.
She double-checked the hallway and found it still empty.
Then she took a deep breath and pushed through the door.
31
February 3, 1988
11:50 a.m.
Ipatiev Research Facility
Tunnel under Building B
The purpose of the single tunnel located beneath Station B was not immediately apparent. The setup was similar to what she’d seen in the first tunnel, with a series of doors lining the hallway on both sides. As was the case under the previous building, all doors were closed.
But with the exception of the first door on the right—behind which was clearly an office where a doughy-looking middle-aged man sat with his back to Tracie, writing at a desk—the remainder of the rooms had a distinct hospital feel to them.
Trundle beds on wheels sat in the middle of most of the rooms, next to small bedside tables upon which nothing had been placed. Every room was lit but all appeared empty, not just of furnishings but of patients.
She made a cursory inspection of each room as she passed, at this point more to ensure no soldiers were waiting behind the doors than because she expected to see any of the beds occupied. She’d begun to suspect that whatever the Soviets’ plans were for this particular tunnel, they hadn’t yet begun to implement them fully. Maybe not at all.
She began to move faster, aware the group of snackers up at ground level might return down to the strange hospital wing at any moment, equally aware that if they took the stairs they would enter the hallway between her and the only exit she’d yet seen. They would effectively seal off her escape route.
She examined two more rooms and again found nothing of interest. She’d now advanced almost halfway down the hallway beneath Station B and the only living thing she’d seen had been the doughy man writing at a desk in the very first room.
Everything changed at the next doorway.
Because behind it, chained to a bed with a bloody white bandage encircling his head, was Ryan Smith.
What the hell have they done to him? The thought flashed through Tracie’s head as she stood frozen in the middle of the corridor, her previous concern about being discovered forgotten for the moment. She’d worked with Ryan in Russia just last month and he’d been a competent, if raw, operative.
He’d smuggled her into a closed city at significant risk to himself.
He’d saved her life on a lonely Russian road with a dead-solid-perfect sniper shot from a distance of over forty yards, taking out a KGB operative.
He’d put himself at risk again to smuggle her out of Russia following mission completion.
He had been healthy and intelligent and vital.
Now he looked as though he’d aged several decades. His eyes were glazed as he stared into the distance at something only he could see. He was blinking far more often than normal and as she watched, a series of tremors ran through his body.
Then it happened again.
Ryan didn’t seem to notice.
Tracie squinted, focusing on Ryan’s bloody head, and blinked in surprise at what looked like an electrical lead poking through the bandage on the left side. The wire hung suspended above his ear and featured a copper lead at the far end. Its placement made Ryan look like an injured alien with a tiny antenna sprouting from one side of his skull.
Tracie’s stomach did a slow roll.
Good God, the Soviets had drilled into the man’s cranium, and from the looks of things, had done a damned poor job of it.
Had they turned him into a vegetable? There was only one way to tell.
She was at the entrance in one long stride. She turned the handle and entered the room, grateful to see Smith tracking her progress once he noticed the door opening.
His eyes may have been glazed but they widened almost comically at the sight of her. He did his rapid-eye-blinking thing and opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again. Blinked hard several more times, even closing his eyes for a couple of seconds and then reopening them as if unable to quite comprehend that she was actually standing in front of him.
“Fi…Fi…Fi...” He was trying to speak but couldn’t form the words and her heart broke for him. She didn’t know what he was trying to say, but his abrupt deterioration in the short time since she’d seen him last was jarring.
“Fiona,” he finally spit out, and then she broke into a smile. Fiona Quinn was the alias she’d used during her mission inside Kremlyov, Russia, and the name Ryan had known her by. She approached his bed and took his hand and hoped the tears in her eyes weren’t too obvious.
“Ryan Smith,” she said. “Fancy meeting you here. You come here often?”
“O-o-o-once is plenty,” he said.
More blinking and another tremor. “I-is that really you, or am I dr-dreaming?”
“I would classify this place more as a nightmare than a dream, but yes, it’s really me.”
“H-h-how did you f-find me? And so qui-quickly?”
“I’ll tell you the whole story once we get you out of here and someplace safe, I promise. I’ll even embellish it to make it as dramatic as possible. But I don’t think we have much time. I saw a handful of young guys on my way in here and they’ll probably return any minute.”
Smith shook his head and for a moment Tracie wasn’t sure whether he was disagreeing with her or suffering another mini-seizure. “Young guys? No. N-no young guys.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ve dealt with only t-two men since they ch-ch-chained me here. Neither of them young. The head man is m-m-mid sixties, thick beard, l-looks like Karl Marx. His assistant is t-ten or fifteen years younger and c-clean shaven.”
Tracie thought back to the only other person she’d seen since descending the stairs to the tunnel, the one writing at his desk in an office. Was he the head man or the assistant? His back had been turned to her so she couldn’t tell whether he’d been bearded or not.
More importantly, where was the other man, and when would he return?
And where would the men Tracie had seen up top go when they came back to the tunnels?
Smith’s words did little to make her feel time was any less of an issue.
He seemed to guess her concern because he said, “We p-probably have some time, F-F-Fiona. They m-mostly leave me to myself down here. I only s-see the assistant once or twice a d-d-day, and the head man m-maybe another one or two times. I don’t even th-think they know I’m awake from the surgery yet.”
His words made her feel marginally better, but sooner or later someone would enter this room, and it would be far better for all concerned if the two of them were long gone when that happened.
“What the hell are they doing to you, Ryan?” She’d noticed his speech seemed to be slowly improving as he talked, and keeping him occupied would be beneficial as she tried to work up some kind of plan to spirit a seriously injured, impaired man out of a heavily fortified Soviet military base.
“Mind control.” No stutter this time. The words came out almost conversational, but still they threw Tracie for a loop.
“Excuse me?”
“Th-the head man’s name is Protasov. H
e’s some kind of expert on what the Russians c-call ‘psychotronics.’ It’s a f-fancy term for m-m-mind control using electrical stimulation of the b-brain.”
She stared at him in horror. “They’re trying to turn you into a zombie.”
“S-something like that, yes.”
Tracie shook her head. This was even worse than she’d imagined.
She bent and examined the handcuffs chaining Smith to the bed rail. They were old and featured a simple locking mechanism. She was almost certain she could get Smith out of them even without her lock-picking tools.
She lifted her eyes to his and offered what she hoped was a reassuring smile. Said, “Let’s take this conversation somewhere more comfortable, shall we?”
He shook his head again and this time it was clearly no muscle spasm. Rattled his cuffs against the iron bed rail. “Only the head guy has the key. Even the assistant doesn’t have one.”
Tracie scoffed. “You think a simple handcuff is going to do any more than slow me down for maybe thirty seconds? Come on, Smith, didn’t you learn anything when we worked together?”
She was trying to keep it light for the sake of the injured man, but her concern was mounting. She’d been extremely lucky to make it this far without being discovered, but her luck was running out, she could feel it, and now she would have to reverse course across the base when she wasn’t even sure the injured man could walk.
First things first. Take a deep breath and get Smith out of these cuffs.
She’d used a series of bobby pins to cover her flame-red hair with a dark kerchief in order to sneak past the gate guards. Now she removed one and leaned over the handcuffs. She placed one end of the pin into the locking mechanism and began feeling delicately for the tumblers.
“No,” Smith said, his voice almost a whisper. “Don’t bother.”
“Ryan, I can’t save you if you’re chained to a hospital bed.”
“Yes, you can.”
She shifted her attention from the cuffs to Smith’s face. “I’m confused. I can’t wheel the damned bed across the base with you in it. How am I going to get you out of here if I don’t pick the lock on these cuffs? It’s only going to take a minute, I promise you.”
“You’re not going to get me out of here.”
Frustration boiled over. The clock was ticking and Tracie could feel the Russians closing in and she wanted to get them above ground before they were trapped down here by armed sentries standing between the two of them and the only exit.
And Smith was speaking gibberish.
“How am I going to save you with you chained to this bed?” She spread her hands in confusion.
“You’re going to save me by killing me.”
32
February 3, 1988
12:15 p.m.
Tunnel under Building B
“What?” Tracie gaped at Ryan Smith. There was no question what he’d said but she couldn’t quite process the words.
“Y-you heard me. I’ll never be able to m-make it out of here, not in my current c-condition.”
“Of course you can. I’ll help y—”
“No. You d-don’t understand. Protasov, he d-did something to me during surgery. He screwed up somehow, Fiona. He screwed up badly.”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t care what—”
“Listen to me!”
She blinked in surprise and swallowed heavily. His face was a mask of concentration as he continued speaking, the effort to make himself understood grueling and heartbreaking.
“My extremities are g-going numb, Fiona. I’m suffering s-s-seizures and they’re getting worse. My vision is blurry and I c-can’t concentrate.”
They locked eyes, Tracie frozen in horror. Ryan Smith’s expression was one of acceptance. Serenity, even.
“I’m dying, Fiona.”
Tracie was dimly aware of her face being wet with tears and she couldn’t even remember beginning to cry. She shook her head as she searched for words and couldn’t find any because there were no words.
But it didn’t matter anyway because Smith continued speaking. “I d-don’t know how you found me,” he said. “And it’s a tremendous c-c-comfort knowing I wasn’t left here to d-die alone and forgotten. But I am dying, Fiona, and I want to g-go out on my own terms, not on the t-t-terms of a lunatic Russian scientist.”
“I can’t, Ryan. That’s the one thing I can’t do. Don’t ask me to do it.”
“You have to. D-do you want to know how I’ve spent the last two hours?”
She shook her head and had every intention of answering, “Not really.” Instead she heard herself say, “How?”
“I’ve been looking f-for something I can use to k-k-kill myself. Anything. B-but there’s nothing within reach, and as m-my motor control deteriorates I b-began to despair, to fear I had n-no way out, that I wouldn’t even retain enough control over my b-body to commit s-s-suicide.”
He raised his face to hers, his eyes hopeful. “And then I looked up and there you were, m-my very own angel of mercy.”
“Ryan…”
“D-don’t let me linger, Fiona. Please. I d-don’t want to be a vegetable, alone and helpless, th-thousands of miles from home. End it. End me. Just please don’t forget me.”
“I could never forget you,” she heard herself saying. Ryan Smith’s pale form shimmered before her through a veil of tears, prone and suffering but nodding encouragingly to her.
The end was in sight for him, but rather than being fearful he was ready.
She shook her head again, even as she was reaching inside her winter coat for the Beretta. She pulled it from her shoulder rig as she was saying, “Ryan, it won’t work. People will hear the gunshot and come running.”
“Th-these rooms are soundproofed. I heard Protasov t-talking about it with his assistant. The g-g-goal is eventually to stock each room with a m-mind control subject, and they d-d-don’t want screams of p-pain coming from one room to p-p-panic subjects in all the other rooms.
“Besides,” he added with a smile that made him look almost like the Ryan Smith she’d worked with in Moscow. “I kn-know you well enough to know you have a suppressor under your coat right next to that Beretta.”
Tracie pursed her lips and attempted a weak smile of her own. He was right, of course. She did have a sound suppressor inside a pocket built into her customized shoulder rig. He must have seen it during the hours they spent riding together inside the cab of the CIA-modified truck in which they’d smuggled Tracie into Kremlyov last month.
She reached under the coat and withdrew it and began threading it onto the end of the barrel. Her hands were shaking so badly it took three tries to lock it into place.
Black images filled her head and for a moment she was back in Moscow, firing through her coat at Slava Marinov, watching the unarmed, elderly man fall to the sidewalk and then strolling away as a shocked crowd began to gather.
The execution had haunted her every night since, and most of the days. She was rarely able to sleep more than a few tortured minutes at a time, suffering horrific nightmares when she did. The dreams were so terrible, so bloody and vivid and jangling, that insomnia had begun to feel like the more palatable alternative.
Now Ryan Smith wanted her to execute him in the same way. He was one of the good guys, a decent young man who hadn’t even entered the prime of his life yet, who’d already given more than most people could begin to imagine in service to his country. He would die and she would go on living, and his face—pale and twisted and suffering—would take its place alongside Slava Marinov’s in her nightmares.
And how many faces would it take, how many nightmares would she suffer, before she crumpled under the cumulative weight of all she had seen and done? Before she went stark, raving mad and lost herself inside a prison of her own making?
This wasn’t what she’d signed up for. She’d joined the CIA to make a difference in the world, to help bring the chance for freedom to oppressed people, to shine the light of democrac
y and opportunity into the darkest corners of the globe, in places that had known only repression and fear and iron-fisted rule.
She hadn’t become an operative to be faced with this kind of agonizing moral dilemma. Where the choice was stark and unimaginable: refuse Ryan Smith’s request and condemn him to a slow, solitary death inside what was essentially a Soviet prison, or put her weapon to his skull and pull the trigger, and be forced to live with an innocent man’s blood on her hands—literally and figuratively—forever.
She blinked herself back to the present. It was an unimaginable quandary but it was what she faced, and a decision must be made, and the time was still ticking away and they were still exposed and vulnerable inside an underground Soviet military base in the mountains of Bashkir.
“Ryan,” she said again without a clue in the world what she might follow it up with.
“You can do this,” he whispered, still nodding. Incredibly, he was smiling at her and once again, for just a moment, he looked exactly as he had when they were trading good-natured insults outside Kremlyov. “It’s the only way.”
“No one can ever know the sacrifice you’ve made,” she whispered as the tears fell harder.
“I’m f-fine with that. You would be, too, if our p-p-positions were reversed and it were you lying in this b-bed and me with the g-g-gun. It’s a reality we live with every day, F-Fiona.”
He was right. His brain had been compromised by a madman with a drill, and he was slipping away before her eyes, but still he was right.
She made her decision. She realized it had never seriously been in doubt. Ryan Smith was a good man and she could no more leave him to the indignity of his current situation than she could sprout wings and fly him home to the United States, her own inner demons be damned.
By removing her gun from its holster she supposed her subconscious had known what her decision was going to be even before her brain had begun considering the matter.
She placed the Beretta’s barrel—now lengthened considerably by the sound suppressor—against Ryan’s temple. Her tears stopped as soon as she’d made her decision, replaced by a bleak acceptance, a cold calculation of what it would take to get the job done.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 139