“I’m not worried about Speransky. I outwitted him so badly back in the states I had some extra time because he ended up so far behind me. I figured I might as well make good use of that time and kill you first, rather than hanging around this dump of a city one second longer than I have to.”
“Again,” Labochev said. “I must remind you, you are forgetting something.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. I have a hostage, and thus possess the upper hand in this situation. You will not shoot the girl, and thus you cannot shoot me.”
“There’s a flaw in your logic.”
“We already discussed the supposed flaw. I know you will not shoot an innocent girl.”
Tracie shook her head. “That’s not the flaw I was referring to.”
Labochev’s forehead furrowed and his eyes darkened. “What do you mean?”
“Well,” Tracie said. “How do I put this politely? You’re a…rather large man and your girlfriend is quite petite. Pretty, too, I might add. Too pretty for you. You’re paying her to be here, aren’t you?”
“That is none of your business,” Labochev said archly, as if Tracie’s judgment might be his biggest problem. “What does my personal life have to do with anything?”
“You’re right. I apologize. But my point is, this young lady is quite a bit smaller than you.”
“So? I like my women petite. Like you.” Labochev grinned wickedly. He was gaining confidence, certain he held the upper hand.
“I’d rather feed myself to a hungry alligator than be touched by you. But back to my point. You think because you’re hiding behind this little tiny girl, I’m helpless? That I’ll wait until just before dawn and then flee the house because I’m afraid of getting caught?”
“That is exactly what I think. What choice do you have?”
“I don’t know. I could always do this, I suppose.” Tracie stepped into the middle of the hallway, her movement swift but measured.
A startled Vasily Labochev began swiveling his gun away from his hostage, panicked, desperately bringing it to bear on Tracie.
And Tracie shot him in the forehead.
33
Labochev dropped straight down and the girl in the nightgown screamed. She tried to back away from Tracie, tripped over her captor, and her head thunked against the hallway wall as she fell onto Labochev’s dead or dying body.
And she never stopped screaming.
Tracie rushed forward, partly to reassure the girl she was safe but mostly to recover Labochev’s gun. It had come to rest on the floor next to the girl’s right hand, and Tracie had no desire to die in a hail of bullets in the unlikely event it occurred to the young woman to lift it and begin blasting away.
She knelt next to the two bodies, one with a single clean hole in the middle of his forehead, the other complaining loudly about her current situation. She swept the gun away from the girl and it skittered halfway down the hallway behind her.
That was good enough for now.
One look at Labochev’s head wound was enough to convince Tracie the man was dead, but she was taking nothing for granted. She ignored the screaming banshee in front of her just long enough to ensure there was no pulse on the man she’d shot, that there was no way he could somehow awaken and threaten either of them.
No pulse. He was never going to threaten anyone again.
He immediately became a nonentity to Tracie and she turned her attention to the terrified woman screaming into her ear. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said, holding the woman’s head between her hands and forcing her to look directly into Tracie’s eyes. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
Some of the goodwill behind the message was lost due to the fact Tracie practically had to scream to be heard. She might be small but she has one impressive set of lungs, Tracie thought, repeating her message over and over in Russian until it began to sink in.
The woman wasn’t even a woman at all, Tracie realized. She was much younger than Tracie and probably not yet out of her teens.
She was obviously a prostitute, and likely thought she’d scored a plum gig spending the night with a guy like Labochev. Even if she were unaware of his status as a KGB bigshot—and that was probably the case—one look at his home and furnishings would have been enough to convince her he was a high roller of some sort.
Now her plum gig had turned into a nightmare: held at gunpoint by one lunatic and then shot at by someone she clearly thought was another.
The girl’s screams finally died out and she lay panting and shaking in Tracie’s arms.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Tracie repeated one more time, and the girl looked up at her with wide, still-frightened eyes.
“Who are you?” she whispered. “Are you the police?”
Tracie couldn’t help smiling. “Something like that.”
“How did you know Vasily was going to try to hurt me?”
“Because that’s what Vasily does,” Tracie said, realizing a lie wasn’t even necessary, at least not as far as that one question was concerned. “Do you have somewhere to go tonight where you’ll be safe?”
The girl thought for a long moment before finally nodding, and Tracie’s heart broke. She was probably sixteen or seventeen years old, forced into prostitution by family or circumstances or both. Her idea of a safe place would be radically different than Tracie’s: a pimp’s stable where a half-dozen or more young girls were crammed into one tiny Leningrad apartment, in all likelihood.
But there was nothing she could do about that.
“Okay,” Tracie said. “I want you to go straight there tonight. You do not need to go the police about this, because we’re already here and we already know about what Vasily tried to do to you. We will want to interview you about what happened tonight, so you need to remain available, but it will probably be a few days before we get to it. We have a lot of investigating to do before we talk to you. Do you understand?”
The girl nodded solemnly. Apparently it didn’t occur to her that the “police” had never asked her for her name or even why a clearly underage young woman had been spending the night in the bed of a man old enough to be her grandfather.
“I understand,” she said.
“Good.” Tracie helped her to her feet. “Do you have clothes you can change into before you leave?”
The girl nodded and turned toward the bedroom she had exited just a few minutes ago with a gun to her head. She closed the door behind her modestly and Tracie shook her head grimly.
You can’t save everyone,” she reminded herself. Hell, you couldn’t even save your own father.
While the girl was changing, Tracie backtracked down the hallway and picked up Labochev’s gun. She glanced at it quickly and then jammed it into her jeans at the small of her back. Then she returned to Labochev’s body, thinking about a teenage girl with no future besides prostitution with a likely side order of drugs and abuse.
She knelt on the floor next to the KGB station chief. There was almost no blood coming out of the hole in his head, meaning he’d died instantly. It had been a hell of a shot under extreme circumstances, but rather than being proud, the only thing she felt was sadness for the girl changing clothes in the bedroom off her right.
Tracie placed her gun on the floor, close enough that she could retrieve it immediately even though she knew the threat had been eliminated. Then she began rifling through Labochev’s pockets, looking for a wallet or any loose cash. While the prostitute had been wearing a gauzy, practically see-through nightgown, Labochev had come out of the bedroom still fully dressed. The upstairs smelled of vodka and it was clear the girl was not drunk, meaning Labochev had drunk himself into a near-stupor before falling fully dressed into his bed.
Good. That scenario seemed better for the girl than the alternative.
The bedroom door opened and out stepped the prostitute. She looked even younger fully dressed and Tracie revised her estimate of the girl’s age down further.
The prostitute watched wordlessly as Tracie removed Labochev’s wallet from a rear pocket and pulled out a thick wad of bills. Tracie counted the cash and did a little quick math in her head. There was over two hundred-fifty thousand rubles, or roughly five thousand American dollars, give or take.
Tracie looked up at the girl, who still hadn’t said a word since exiting the bedroom. “Do you have somewhere you can safely keep this money?” she asked the girl quietly.
“Me?” the girl said as her eyes widened in surprise.
“Yes, you. Not your pimp. Not your father. Not your boyfriend. You.”
“I-I think so,” she said. “Yes, I have a place I can stash it.”
“Good girl,” Tracie said. She handed over the money and repeated, “This is for you, and no one else.”
The girl nodded. She looked like she might be about to start crying again, and this time not from terror. “Thank you,” she said.
Tracie smiled at her.
The girl blinked. “You are not the police, are you?”
“Why would you ask that?”
“Because if you were the police, this money—” she held up the wad of bills—“would be going into your pocket, not mine.”
“Just remember I want that money in your pocket and not anyone else’s.”
“I will remember.”
“Okay. It’s time for you to go, so I can begin my investigation.” Tracie led the girl down the hallway and through the house, careful to avoid the kitchen, where she’d left the three “security guards” trussed up. Any or all of them may have regained consciousness by now, and while they could not hurt the girl, they would probably frighten her much more than she needed to be frightened at the moment.
She escorted the girl out of Labochev’s home and stood watching her walk away. Eventually she was swallowed up by the black Russian night and Tracie retraced her steps inside Labochev’s home, closing and locking the door behind her.
There was no way of knowing how long it would take Labochev’s security detail to be discovered or his dead body found. In all probability, both things would happen mere hours from now. But she knew the prostitute wouldn’t be going to the police any time soon, and that was the best she could do under the circumstances.
In the meantime, she still had work to do. She needed to move the security guards to a more out-of-the-way location inside the house, and then double-check the entire scene to ensure she’d left no incriminating evidence.
She had expected to feel good at this point in the operation. She’d eliminated one of the two men responsible for her father’s death, and if Aaron Stallings’ assessment was correct, the only man in the Soviet Union besides Piotr Speransky who could identify her as an American intelligence operative. She was halfway to avenging her father and ensuring not just her mother’s safety but the continuation of her CIA career as well.
She still didn’t feel happy.
The reality was just the opposite. All she felt was gloom and a bleak sense of loneliness.
34
May 23, 1988
2:00 a.m.
Leningrad, Russia, USSR
Alexei Volkov was beginning to think his old colleague Piotr Speransky might just have lost his mind.
He knew Speransky had become involved in some nasty business with an American CIA agent, who’d kidnapped and tortured him until extracting vital intelligence that had led to the murder of a key researcher in the Soviet Union’s chemical and biological weapons program.
Specifics were impossible to come by, of course, and that was as it should be. Alexei had no more right to know Piotr’s KGB business than Piotr had to know his. But what he did know was that Piotr had fucked up badly, and that knowledge had led Alexei to the logical—indeed, the inescapable—conclusion that he would never see or hear from Piotr again, that his fellow KGB assassin was even now moldering in a shallow grave somewhere outside Moscow, victim of the most permanent form of punishment available to KGB officers who disgraced themselves and their country as badly as had Speransky.
So when he received a telephone call a couple of days ago, purportedly from Piotr Speransky himself, Alexei had almost refused it. He considered slamming the telephone receiver down into its cradle and forgetting all about the call, which was clearly some kind of bizarre prank.
But something had made him hold off on hanging up the phone, and that something was the voice of the KGB’s Washington—as in the United States—Station Chief, Dmitri Smyrnovich. The call had come in on a secure line to the Moscow station. Smyrnovich had insisted Piotr Speransky, of all people, was seated in his office in Washington and desperately needed to speak with Alexei regarding a KGB operation.
Dmitri Smyrnovich, while being a smug, officious little prick, was not the sort of man who would waste his or anyone else’s time with a pointless prank. If Smyrnovich said something was important, it was at the very least worth a little of Alexei’s time.
So he had stayed on the line, stunned. Rather than being dead, the victim of two Makarov 9mm slugs delivered into the back of his skull, Speransky was alive. Not only was he alive, apparently he was already deeply involved in another KGB mission despite being just a few months removed from one of the most disgraceful failures in the history of Soviet intelligence.
Alexei would not have been more surprised had he learned United States President Ronald Reagan was secretly a KGB plant.
And the tale Speransky spun over the line had been spellbinding. A CIA covert agent was on her way—her way!—to Russia to destroy valuable intelligence being stored by Speransky in a Leningrad safe house. Piotr needed someone he could trust to watch over the safe house until he could return to Russia to deal with the CIA agent himself.
Alexei listened mostly without speaking. He had never claimed to be as talented an operative as Speransky, but neither was he a complete idiot. He knew Speransky’s failure had involved being tortured and interrogated inside Moscow’s city limits by a female CIA agent, and now, here he was referencing another female CIA agent.
Women spies were not unheard of, of course. The Soviets had employed more than their share against the United States, often to great effect. But using women as spies was not exactly the same thing as sending women out to kidnap and torture KGB assassins, and Alexei had never heard of the United States employing a woman in such a dangerous capacity in his entire career.
So the likelihood the agent who had tortured Speransky a few months ago was a different woman than the agent he was referencing now was practically nil. It had to be the same person. Which meant the KGB—incredibly—had sent Speransky to exact vengeance on the very operative who’d gotten the better of him once already.
To say Alexei was shocked would be an understatement. But Piotr Speransky had long been valued more highly than any other operative by the powers-that-be inside Lubyanka, given his particular talents at torture and assassination. If anyone would be granted this nearly unheard-of second chance, it would be Speransky.
But of one thing Alexei was certain: Speransky’s claim to have valuable intelligence he needed safeguarded was a complete fabrication. His concern was for the extortion money he had set aside over the course of his career. All Soviet operatives employed the same retirement strategy, including Alexei, so it came as no surprise to think Speransky had squirreled away his own lucrative stash in Leningrad.
Somehow the American had become aware of Speransky’s personal vault and was on her way to Russia to steal or destroy its contents, and Piotr was so far behind her he would be unable to return to his home base fast enough to stop her.
So much for Lubyanka’s faith in their golden boy.
Alexei had never been one to shy away from helping out a fellow operative, but he was damned if he would allow himself to be played for a fool by the very man who had brought such recent shame to the KGB. He spelled out his theory regarding what was really happening quite succinctly to Piotr, who responded by admitting the truth.
Yes, the woman who had tor
tured him and the woman on her way to Russia were one and the same.
Yes, he had traveled to the United States on a mission of vengeance and had been outsmarted by the American again.
Yes, he stood to lose what was left of the wealth it had taken his entire career to build.
“I will pay you one million rubles to prevent the American from looting my safe house,” Speransky had said, finally getting to the heart of the telephone call. “It is a fair offer, as it will require only the investment of a few days’ time. In fact, it is more than fair, given the very small amount of work that will actually be required of you. Can I count on you, Alexei?”
He pretended to think about it, but he didn’t really have to. One million rubles for a couple of days’ surveillance and the potential capture of an unwitting foreign agent? It was no-brainer.
“There is something else I must ask of you, though,” Speransky had said after Alexei’s acceptance of his offer. “And this is a non-negotiable condition.”
“What is it?”
“When you encounter the American CIA agent, you will detain her, only. You will not kill her unless it is absolutely necessary to defend your own life. I have some unfinished business with this woman and I intend to handle it myself.”
Self defense? Against a woman? Alexei couldn’t imagine what kind of woman could have gotten the great Piotr Speransky so spooked, but he readily agreed to the condition, knowing it would never be an issue.
“One last thing,” Speransky had said after an awkward silence.
“What is it?”
“You sound…cavalier.”
“It is an assignment, Piotr, one of hundreds we have both executed throughout the years.”
“Do not take this woman lightly, Alexei. You will regret it if you do. Watch your step around her.”
“Fine, Piotr. I understand. You do not have to worry, I will be careful.”
Speransky had dithered a little longer before finally disconnecting. Alexei thought it might just have been the strangest telephone call he’d ever been part of.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 164