She worked for a while on the chain and then took a break, calling her father just to say hello, something she didn’t think she’d done in years. After his initial concern that something was wrong, the delight he took in hearing from his little girl was so clear through the phone line that she vowed to make similar calls on a regular basis.
They chatted about everything and nothing, a situation so out of character for her that he asked on three separate occasions whether something was wrong. But nothing was wrong, at least nothing she could talk to her father about, and when they finally hung up she felt better that she had in a very long time.
Peaceful, if not exactly at peace.
After ending the call to her father she got back to work.
She finished cleaning the chain and then turned her attention to the cross. Covered in dried blood and gore, its gold finish was barely discernable, but Tracie knew after working on the rope chain that restoring the cross would take only time and effort.
She was more than happy to expend both.
An hour later she had placed both items on a fresh towel to dry, and this one she knew she would not have to throw away. The chain and cross sparkled like new, and although the chain’s clasp would have to be repaired—it had been torn off its owner’s neck the last time he’d worn it—Tracie knew the jewelry would hold a special place in its new owner’s heart.
She gazed at her handiwork for a while and then turned her attention elsewhere. Her phone would ring soon enough, and when it did she would be able to deliver the restored jewelry to its rightful owner, whoever—and wherever—that person might be.
***
She didn’t have to wait long.
The telephone call came during dinner: canned ravioli, which she was attempting to wash down with the remains of a quart of milk on the verge of going sour. She doubted she’d ever been happier to hear the damned phone ring, even if it ended up being a telemarketer or political survey on the other side of the conversation. Either one would be preferable to finishing the ravioli and milk.
But when she answered the call she discovered it wasn’t a telemarketer, and it wasn’t anyone taking a survey.
It was CIA Director Aaron Stallings, and he was characteristically gruff. “Get your ass in here first thing in the morning,” he said as soon as she picked up. He didn’t even bother with a “hello” first.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Thanks for asking. And how are you?”
He ignored her comment. “What time can you get here tomorrow?”
“How early is too early?”
He snorted. “Christ, Tanner, have you learned nothing from working with me? There’s no such thing as too early.”
“Then what about tonight instead?”
“Tonight?” Stallings answered. Tracie knew he was still in his office at Langley and she pictured him looking at his watch, trying to figure the traffic and determine how long it would take to get from there to his suburban home. None of their meetings ever took place at CIA headquarters, given Tracie’s status as an unofficial employee.
“Tonight works,” he said after an extensive delay. “I said tomorrow morning in an attempt to minimize interference with your life, but I forgot you have no life.”
“Look who’s talking,” Tracie shot back. “I’m not the one who’s still in the office at seven o’clock on a Friday night.”
“No, you’re sitting alone at your kitchen table eating a frozen pizza and waiting for the movie of the week to start on TV.”
She dropped the handset onto the table with a thud, hoping it sounded as annoying on the other end of the line as it did to her. She walked into her living room to shut off her tiny black and white television and then she returned to the phone. “Shows what you know. It’s canned ravioli, not frozen pizza. And the movie of the week doesn’t even start for another two hours.”
“Fine. Then you were watching reruns of some stupid sitcom that went off the air twenty years ago.”
Not for the first time she glanced around her apartment looking for a miniature camera or hidden listening device. “For your information, my television’s not even on.”
He snorted again. “Not since you turned it off a minute ago.”
She sighed into the phone, intentionally loudly enough for him to hear. “What time do you want me there?”
“Give me an hour. That way you’ll have enough time to meet with me and still make it home for the beginning of the movie.”
“Don’t worry about it. Tonight’s is a repeat. I’ve already seen it.”
He snorted again and hung up without another word.
4
May 13, 1988
8:00 p.m.
McLean, Virginia
“Took you long enough,” Stallings said without raising his eyes from the stack of paperwork cluttering the desk of his home office. He’d been hard at work on the stack every time she’d ever been here, and it never seemed to change in size.
She made a point of lifting her wrist and staring at her watch, an effort that was lost on her boss because he still hadn’t looked up. “It’s eight o’clock on the nose,” she said. “Exactly the time you told me to be here.”
“Traffic was light tonight. I could have seen you twenty minutes ago.”
She spread her hands in frustration. “How was I supposed to know—”
“Let’s get started, shall we? Unlike you, I didn’t get to lounge around in my pajamas all day. I’m tired and I’ve got a long day tomorrow and I’d like to get to bed.”
Tracie rolled her eyes—another wasted effort—and sat in her usual chair, which had been placed in its usual location: directly in front of Stallings’ desk. Every time she came here she felt like a grade school student who’d been sent to the principal’s office without knowing why.
“I’m all ears,” she said.
Finally Stallings lifted his head. He caught her gaze and held it. “Tell me what you know about the status of our European ambassadors.”
“I know what I’ve seen on the nightly news, namely that they’ve had a run of pretty bad luck.”
“Explain.”
“They keep dying.”
Stallings nodded. “Explain further.”
“I don’t know much more than that. One was killed a couple of weeks ago in a traffic accident—a hit-and-run, if I remember correctly—and another died shortly afterward of…I don’t exactly recall. A stroke, maybe, or a heart attack?”
Now that he’d removed his attention from his paperwork, Stallings seemed unwilling to look away from Tracie’s eyes. He stared her down and said, “What else?”
She held his gaze without blinking. Stallings’ hostility toward her seemed even greater than usual, and that was saying something. There was a battle of wills taking place, but what it was in reference to she had no idea.
She thought about his question for a moment and then said, “Well, let’s see. The ambassadors’ deaths are related, and they’re far more suspicious than the media reports would indicate.”
Stallings’ eyes narrowed as she was speaking until by the time she’d finished they were mere slits. “Why would you say that?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I’m sitting in your office at eight o’clock on a Friday night discussing the deaths of two public figures, that’s why. You and I are not in the habit of analyzing current events except as they apply to my employment situation, and you wouldn’t have called me here unless you needed something from me. All of which means the deaths are related and suspicious and you want me to do something about it.”
He stared at her a little longer and then returned his attention to the stack of papers. Eventually he muttered something under his breath and lifted a single sheet from the stack. He flipped it around so it was facing Tracie and then slid it across the desk in front of her without another word.
It was clear he wanted her to examine it, so she did.
The examination didn’t take long.
The paper was a photoco
py of a typewritten note. The note had been flattened out prior to being photographed, but it was badly crumpled, and some of the ink appeared smudged, as though the paper had gotten wet. Bloodstains flecked its edges like brownish-red raindrops.
The note was short and not terribly sweet. Its writer had used an ink pen and written in large block letters: SEND THE REDHEADED SPOOK OR MORE WILL DIE.
Tracie looked up at Stallings and found him watching her closely.
She looked back down at the paper and read it again. Its contents didn’t change.
“What is this?” she finally said.
“You tell me.”
“How the hell would I know? I suppose I must be the redheaded spook the writer is referring to?”
“Presumably,” Stallings said. “After checking our records I found we’ve had two other operatives working in and around Europe with red hair in the past decade, but one of them was reassigned shortly after you were hired.”
“That was eight years ago.”
“Exactly. A lifetime ago in the intelligence business.”
“What about the other?”
“The other is a man with short hair. It’s reddish-brown, more of a rust color than blood red. It’s not the kind of identifying characteristic anyone would use if they were referring to him in this type of note. Your hair, on the other hand…”
He stared at her skull, making clear he thought the connection was obvious, and Tracie couldn’t really disagree with him. Her hair was thick and lustrous and flame-red. It was exactly the kind of identifying characteristic anyone who wasn’t stone blind would use to describe her.
“Okay,” she acknowledged. “Whoever wrote this is probably referring to me. I assume this was found on one of the two dead ambassadors?”
“It was found on both. Identical messages written with the same pen. Our analysts assure me they were almost certainly both produced by the same person.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Tracie said. “It’s obvious you’re looking for something from me, but I don’t have the first clue what this is all about.”
“There’s more,” Stallings said.
“Of course there is.”
“There’s been a third death.”
“Another ambassador.”
“Yes. And this one wasn’t even made to look like an accident. We take that as an indication that the perpetrator is getting frustrated. He’s becoming more insistent you respond.”
Tracie stared at the note in concentration. “If it wasn’t made to look like an accident, what did it look like?”
“A staged scene.”
“Staged how?”
“You tell me.” The CIA director rummaged around in his stack of papers until pulling out another photocopy. This one was of a photograph.
The picture was disturbing and violent. A man Tracie did not recognize, presumably a United States ambassador, had been secured in a chair with duct tape. He’d been gagged with what looked like a piece of paper—the note, most likely—and then the paper had been secured with more duct tape.
Then the man had been shot in the head. Tracie thought the killer had likely placed his gun under the ambassador’s jaw and fired upward, based on the damage done to the top of the victim’s skull and the amount and location of blood and viscera she could see surrounding the scene.
The photograph closely resembled something in her memory from a few months ago, except in Tracie’s memory the man duct-taped to the chair had been alive.
She closed her eyes and lowered her head to the desk.
“Tell me,” Stallings said gently.
So she did.
***
A few months ago Tracie had been dispatched to Moscow on an assignment regarding a series of murders of American intelligence operatives working inside the Soviet Union. The men had been dosed with poison so difficult to identify that the murder spree was several months along before the agency even recognized it for what it was.
Her assignment had been to trace the poison back to the perpetrators and to stop those men and/or women permanently. She had done exactly that, identifying the KGB agent operating as the assassin, and then kidnapping and torturing him in an effort to learn the identity of the person in charge of the operation.
But the assassin had been tough and resilient. She eventually extracted the intel she needed and eliminated the KGB scientist responsible for manufacturing the poison, but only after agreeing to spare the Soviet agent’s life in exchange for the scientist’s identity.
She’d known it was a mistake to allow the man to live—he was a cold-blooded murderer of American assets and a career KGB assassin—but hadn’t been able to bring herself to renege on their agreement. At the conclusion of the mission she’d left the man trapped inside a CIA safe house in Moscow, gagged and duct-taped to a chair.
It was exactly as he’d been secured during their torture sessions.
The helpless KGB assassin was the first thing that came to Tracie’s mind when she saw the picture of the slain U.S. ambassador. The scenes were eerily similar, so much so that to assume those similarities were coincidental would require a greater leap than Tracie was willing to make, even to ease her conscience.
To her the killings of the ambassadors and the notes that had been left behind on their bodies, combined with the horrifically staged scene at the most recent murder, could mean only one thing: the assassin Tracie had known as Piotr Speransky had eventually escaped his bindings and was active again.
And he was seeking vengeance against her.
And he was killing innocent Americans to lure her into the open.
***
Aaron Stallings’ office fell silent when Tracie finished speaking. She’d expected him to launch into one of his patented angry tirades of the sort that had been intimidating operatives and politicians alike for decades the moment she finished speaking, but he surprised her by keeping his mouth shut.
He had of course registered his displeasure in no uncertain terms months ago with the fact that she allowed the KGB assassin to live. During her mission debrief after executing the Soviet scientist and stopping their poisoning program he’d pointed out what she already knew: that the man would likely come back to haunt them again at some point in the future.
Tracie had agreed with him at the time, and as angry as Stallings had been, she’d been even angrier with herself. She had known this day was coming from the moment she walked out of the Moscow safe house with Piotr Speransky still breathing. She hadn’t expected the blowback from that fateful decision to come this soon—or to be this severe, with three innocent victims dead—but, still, she had known it was coming.
But she’d been raised to believe in the seemingly antiquated notion that a person’s word was her bond. Her father was a U.S. Army general and her mother a career state department diplomat. In the Tanner household, honor and commitment weren’t just words or even worthy goals; they were the foundation upon which her entire value system had been built.
She simply could not bring herself to abandon that value system in the case of the Soviet assassin, even knowing all that was at stake.
The office was quiet for a long time before Stallings spoke. When he did his voice was calm, the words measured, but there was no disguising the fury behind them. “We discussed the possible ramifications of allowing a KGB dirtbag like Speransky to live a few months ago, did we not?”
“We did, sir.”
“So we are in agreement, then, that your decision to spare the life of one murderous Soviet agent has resulted in the loss of at least three more innocent American lives?”
“Yes sir, we are.”
“I think you know what you need to do.”
“I need to get to Paris and fix this mess.”
“That’s right. I want you on the first plane out tomorrow.”
“Sir, if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to leave tonight. I thought this might be something critical, so I brought my go-bag with me. It’s
sitting on the floor just outside your office door. I’d like to go straight to the airport from here. I don’t want to wait one second longer than I have to, in case Speransky decides to up the ante and start killing more frequently than once a week.”
“Fine,” Stallings spat. “I can arrange to free up the agency jet. But let me tell you something.”
Here it comes, Tracie thought. It was about time. She deserved every insult he was about to hurl her way. She deserved worse. She was every bit as guilty for the murders of the ambassadors as if she’d executed them herself.
In a way, she supposed she had.
“We’ve worked together a long time,” Stallings said, “and I know how you think. You’re planning to waltz into Paris and offer your life up to this KGB asshole in some misguided mea culpa for your error in judgment. And as bad as that error was—and there’s no getting around it, it was bad—I will not see one of my most valuable assets go down without doing everything in my power to prevent it.”
“And how can you possibly prevent it? Speransky will expect me to come and he’ll be waiting. That’s the whole point of leaving the notes on the victims.”
“Agreed,” Stallings said.
“He’s an experienced operative and will be able to elude detection.”
“Maybe,” Stallings said, “and maybe not. But I’m going to work with French authorities to sew up the area surrounding the U.S. embassy tighter than a drum. If this assassin tries to kill you, we’ll—”
“You mean when he tries to kill me.”
“Okay, fine, when he tries to kill you. We’ll stop him before he can manage it.”
“Or at least take him down after he succeeds.”
“Or at least that, yes.”
Tracie sat staring at the floor. The prospect of violent death didn’t frighten her. She’d long ago come to grips with the knowledge she could be killed performing her duties as a covert intelligence operative.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 148