Stallings sighed deeply. “It’s about Speransky,” he said after a long silence. “But it’s also about…something else.”
“What else is it about? Stop beating around the bush and just tell me,” Tracie said.
“It’s also about your father,” Stallings said.
Tracie went numb. Her arms and legs, her fingers and toes and lips, all numb.
Her hair went numb.
She couldn’t breathe.
In one overwhelming rush of insight she knew the truth, but somehow she still managed to mumble, “What about my father?”
“He’s dead, Tracie. I’m sorry.”
21
She felt her legs give way but somehow managed to avoid smashing her face on Stallings’ desk as she toppled to the floor.
He rushed to help her but she raised one hand and said, “I’m okay,” even though she knew she wasn’t. Her ears were ringing and she felt herself begin to hyperventilate so she concentrated on controlling her breathing as she struggled to push herself up into the chair.
It was important to her that she do it herself, and to his credit the CIA director seemed to understand as much. He stood next to her, arms half raised as if to catch her should she fall again, but he never touched her and after a struggle that was much more difficult than it should have been, she found herself slumped in the leather chair, suddenly grateful for the padding.
She squeezed her eyes shut, determined not to cry in front of her boss, although why the hell that mattered at this point she had no earthly idea. With her eyes still closed she said, “What did Speransky do to him?”
“It doesn’t matter. Not to you.”
“Of course it matters.” She opened her eyes and fixed Stallings with a glare. She hadn’t begun sobbing yet, although how long she might manage to continue that magic trick she had no idea. “It matters more than ever.”
“What I mean is this is over, at least for you. I give you my word the agency will find him and deal with him, but you’re too close to this now. It’s too personal. You’re off this assignment.”
“Too personal? It’s always been personal, boss. From the moment Ryan Smith and I kidnapped him off that snowy road in Russia it’s been personal to him. And now it’s personal to me. So I need to know what was done to my father. I need to know everything. I need to.”
“Listen to me,” Stallings said. “That’s not how it works. You just found out your father is gone and you’re going to need time to deal with that. Time to grieve. I know how close you were to him and I will not allow you to put yourself in harm’s way while you’re not thinking clearly.”
“At least tell me what happened to him.”
“You don’t want to know the details, Tracie, trust me.”
“I don’t want to know the details? I have to know the details. I have to know everything. Most importantly, how do you know it was Speransky?”
“Tracie…please just let it g—”
“I can’t just let it go, sir. Don’t you see? I can’t. I feel numb and empty and it’s going to take a long goddamned time to come to grips with the knowledge that my father—the man I grew up idolizing, the person I’ve tried to model my life after—has been ripped away from me and my mother and everyone else who loved him. It would be hard enough to deal with if he died in a car accident, or suffered a heart attack, or even was killed in a mugging, for Christ’s sake. But if Piotr Speransky is responsible, I have to know everything, because I will not let it stand. So no, I won’t let it go. I can’t let it go. Tell me. Please.”
Stallings continued to stand next to her chair. He looked her up and down and then stared at the floor. He shoved his hands into his pockets. Even lost in her grief and bewilderment, Tracie thought he looked more human than she’d ever seen him.
Finally he wandered back behind his desk and sat, thrumming his fingers on the surface.
“Please,” she repeated, and he nodded tiredly.
“I guess I understand the need to know,” he said softly, and then sighed. “Alexandria police got an anonymous tip by telephone last night alerting them to a murder. The tipster identified the victim by name.”
“The victim being my father.”
“Yes. The person calling in the tip was male, and he spoke with a slight but detectable Russian accent.”
“That doesn’t mean it was Speransky,” Tracie said, although she knew it was, because she knew what was coming next.
“No it doesn’t,” Stallings agreed. “But the details of the crime scene make the connection unmistakable.”
She closed her eyes again. This was her fault. This was all her fault. “He’d been duct-taped to a sturdy wooden chair and tortured, before being shot in the head, exactly like the last of the three ambassadors.”
“Yes.”
“The similarities were intentional. He wanted me to know.”
“Yes.”
“Speransky murdered those three diplomats for one reason: to draw me to Europe, so he could be sure I was out of the way while he tortured and murdered my father.”
“Yes.”
“I need to see the crime scene photos, and don’t tell me you don’t have them. I know you can get them, which means I know you have them.”
“Yes, I have them. But you don’t want to see them, Tracie.”
“No, I don’t want to see them. But I need to, and you’re going to show them to me. You owe me that much.” She thought he would get defensive like he always did, that he would rant and rave about not owing her a goddamned thing, that he would tell her to understand her place in the pecking order, that he would say all the things she had heard dozens of times from him whenever he felt she was questioning his authority.
He didn’t say any of them. He locked eyes with her, testing her, gauging her resolve.
She held his gaze, steely-eyed and determined, all trace of her tears gone, at least for the time being. She would grieve for her murdered father, of course she would, but she would lock the grief and pain away until she could at least look at herself in the mirror and tell the person staring back that she’d settled the score.
Or she would die trying. It was really that simple.
They measured each other for a long time. Tracie didn’t care. She would stare at her boss for as long as it took to get what she needed.
Finally he nodded.
Then he shook his head.
Then he reached into a drawer and pulled out a yellow file folder and tossed it across the desk. It spun once and landed directly in front of Tracie, the photos spilling out onto the polished walnut surface like the desecration they were.
She clamped her mouth closed and ground her teeth and steeled herself for the worst. Then she began sorting through the pictures, each a visual stab in her heart that was every bit as real as if Piotr Speransky had snuck into the office and was even now thrusting a combat knife into her back, over and over.
Her father lay slumped to the side, a portion of his skull blown off by one or more slugs from a weapon far more powerful than it needed to be to accomplish its task. That had been done for effect too, Tracie knew. What was left of his head lolled on his shoulder, gore covering his face. The amount of blood that had been spilled was sickening. It ran down his neck. It soaked his shirt. It covered virtually all of the surrounding area.
His body strained in death against the bonds keeping him in the chair, and Tracie’s heart broke, over and over, as she sifted through the photos.
“He was taken to an abandoned house in a secluded area of Alexandria, on Telegraph Road,” Stallings said. “A stolen car was found abandoned on the side of Route 644, which, as you know, is along your father’s commute home from the Pentagon.”
Tracie closed her eyes and ran her hands through her hair.
“Are you sure you want to hear this?” Stallings asked gently.
“Keep going.”
He sighed. “The current working theory by law enforcement is that this was a random act, that your fat
her stopped to help what he thought was a stranded motorist and was kidnapped, tortured and robbed, possibly in a gang-related incident. But of course we know differently.”
“Do they know how long he was tortured?”
“They suspect the call was made to the police shortly after your father died, and given the fact he typically left work at the same time every evening…they think it was five hours, give or take.”
“What was done to him, specifically?” Tracie asked, doing her best to ignore the drumbeat of accusations screaming inside her skull that said she was to blame, that she had killed her father, that she was the reason he lay slumped in a chair with his head blown apart.
“Chemicals were involved,” Stallings said, choosing his words carefully. “As were blades. But they won’t really have any more specifics until after the autopsy has been completed.”
She shuffled through the photos again before slipping them neatly back into the file folder. She had seen enough. The images they contained would be burned into her memory for the rest of her life.
“I assume you’ve arranged protection for my mother?” she said.
“Of course. She’s under round-the-clock surveillance. There’s no way Speransky can get anywhere near her even if he’s still in the country, which I very much doubt.”
“Thank you,” Tracie said. “And thank you for sending the Gulfstream to bring me home.”
“The murder of a four-star general is big news. I didn’t want you finding out from the television.”
“I appreciate that,” she said. Her hands were folded in her lap and she stared at them as if they were the most fascinating things she’d ever seen. Then she raised her eyes and met Aaron Stallings’ steady gaze. “There’s something else.”
“I know there is.”
“How the hell did Piotr Speransky find out who I was?”
22
They stared at each other for a long time, nobody speaking. As the silence stretched on, Tracie felt the shock and grief draining from her system, replaced by something else.
Something diamond-hard.
Something cold and furious.
Something beyond furious.
“The mole,” she said.
“Yes,” Stallings agreed. “There’s a mole.”
“No, you’re not hearing me,” Tracie said. “I’m not saying, ‘Gee whiz, Director, there must be a mole.’ I’m saying the mole I told you about at least a year ago is still there, leaking information, doing what moles do, and now, because you ignored me and did nothing, I’ve been compromised and my father is dead. That’s what I’m saying.”
Stallings’ complexion began to change, his face coloring and his expression darkening. Nobody talked to him the way Tracie just had, and she knew he would not tolerate it, not even from an operative lost in her grief. She knew it; she just didn’t care.
He started to speak, only to slam his jaw closed and stop himself.
Then he cleared his throat and said, “There are things of which you are unaware.” It was obvious he was biting back his legendary temper, but Tracie didn’t care about that, either.
“No,” she said, interrupting her boss before he could continue. “That doesn’t cut it. You don’t get to sit behind your desk and dismiss me with the excuse that I don’t have clearance to know everything, or that you know the identity of the mole but have been allowing him to continue to operate because you’re gaining valuable intel from him. That’s not acceptable. I’ve been outed to a Soviet assassin and now the best man I’ve ever known is dead. And he wasn’t just killed. He was tortured for hours and then killed. And there’s no justification for that. None.”
Stallings had shown no reaction while she spoke, other than the steady coloring of his face. By the time she finished, it was just shy of purple, the shade of an overcast sky before a vicious thunderstorm.
He sat for a moment and then said, “Are you finished? Have you gotten it all out of your system?”
“For the time being.”
“Good. Because now it’s my turn to talk.”
Tracie stared at him without speaking.
“Last year you accused me of sitting on the intel you extracted from Winston Andrews regarding other leaks inside the agency, and now you’re doing it again. I know you’re devastated by the loss of your father, so I understand you lashing out. I certainly understand your anger and frustration. I feel it, too.
“And if you truly believe I was dismissing your concerns back then or I’m dismissing them now, I’m very sorry but there’s nothing I can do about that. Because the fact of the matter is that I can’t and won’t run everything I’m doing as head of this agency past a field-level operative. The system doesn’t work that way, and it shouldn’t work that way.
“All I can tell you is that it is, by nature, extremely difficult to flush out a mole, particularly inside an organization filled with people trained better than anyone else in the world in the skills of deception and stealth. But I have been working steadily on identifying the leaker, and I’ve been making progress.
“I am heartily sorry I wasn’t able to do so in time to prevent what happened to your father, and that’s the truth. Whether you choose to accept that explanation is up to you. Frankly, it’s more than you’re entitled to as an employee, and I wouldn’t be offering any elucidation at all were it not for the horrible murder last night of General Tanner.
“But I will not tolerate you coming into my office and accusing me of intentionally allowing a mole to operate for the past year, undermining the security of this nation and resulting in the deaths of some of its citizens, because I felt I was getting something out of it, professionally or personally. That’s where I draw the line. That’s what is unacceptable.”
Tracie was at a loss. She had no idea how to respond. She’d expected a full-on barrage of invective from the CIA director, an unleashing of insults that would allow her to respond in kind and maybe, just maybe, release some of the awful tension and grief and fury swirling inside her. Subconsciously, she suspected that was why she had attacked him so heatedly in the first place.
But instead, his response was measured and fair, probably more so than she deserved. And he was right. Her job had been to deliver the information about a possible leak inside the agency to her superiors, and that was what she had done. What happened to that information after she passed it along, how it was processed and what became of it, was far above her pay grade. That would have been the case even if her father was still alive and had never been kidnapped.
She had lowered her head and was again staring down at her hands fidgeting in her lap, seemingly of their own accord. She steeled herself and raised her eyes and met those of her handler and held them steadily.
“You’re absolutely right,” she said. “That was unfair of me and I apologize. We’ve had our disagreements over the course of working together, and I’ve felt unfairly treated at times. A lot of the time, in fact. But never once in my nine years working inside this agency have I ever seen you act with anything less than the safety and security of this country as your foremost consideration.”
“Apology accepted,” he said quietly. “You’ve been blindsided and I would have been shocked had you not reacted strongly.”
“That’s still no excuse, but thank you. And I suppose it goes without saying, but I’m going after Speransky. I’ll be leaving right after the funeral.”
“I can’t let you do that,” Stallings said firmly. “I meant what I said before. I give you my word we’ll handle this, but you’re not to get involved.”
“Then I quit.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. If I can’t do this as an operative, I’ll do it on my own.” She stood and faced the CIA director, still seated behind his desk. His jaw hung open and he stared at her, nonplussed. In other circumstances she would have derived great pleasure from the sight, but right now she just felt numb.
“Thank you for everything,” she said. She exte
nded her hand and he shook it reflexively. “It’s been an honor serving this country and a privilege working with you.”
She turned toward the door and walked out, closing it softly behind her.
23
May 19, 1988
2:30 a.m.
Leningrad, Russia, USSR
Vasily Labochev arranged his daily briefing papers into a neat stack and slid them to the side of his desk. By now they were eighteen hours old and he’d been over them four times already, but what else was there to do in the middle of the night when the hooker he’d paid good money for was sleeping alone in his bed?
He sipped from a large tumbler of vodka and stroked his beard. Sometimes the cost of amassing wealth was high.
Vasily had been in charge of the KGB’s Leningrad station for well over thirty years. His rise through the ranks of the Soviet Union’s legendary spy agency had been meteoric, thanks in large part to the success he’d had developing sources of information inside the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency in the years following World War II, and continuing to this day.
A young intelligence operative at the time the Red Army surrounded Berlin, Vasily had struck up something like a friendship with an American operative also developing intel in the area. The American’s name was Winston Andrews, and despite the fact that with the end of the war, the United States and the USSR turned from reluctant allies to hated enemies, the two men remained in contact.
Although their personalities were about as different as it was possible to get—Vasily was oversized and ebullient, a heavy drinker and inveterate womanizer while Andrews was slim and serious—through many hours spent drinking and talking, Vasily began to realize the serious-minded Andrews shared his interest in profiting personally as well as professionally from his work.
And a career in covert intelligence offered a unique opportunity to do so.
A feeling-out process began, one that was lengthy and incremental, taking place over the course of several years as each man gauged the other’s dedication to his country and willingness to sacrifice ideals—or at least bend them a little, and sometimes a lot—in favor of personal gain.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 157