And now, as he crouched in the shadows outside Vasily Labochev’s home, Alexei had to seriously question Speransky’s frame of mind, not to mention his professionalism. He had been watching the CIA woman for the better part of the day, picking up her trail this morning when she cased Speransky’s personal safe house located inside the Druzhba Industrial Park on the outskirts of Leningrad.
And she was nothing.
She was less than nothing, a tiny wisp of a woman who would have trouble remaining upright against a stiff breeze.
Not only that, she had walked right past him to examine Speransky’s safe house, utterly oblivious to his presence and to the fact he’d then begun following her around Leningrad. She seemed unaware of her surroundings, and if he hadn’t been given a very specific description of his target, Alexei would have assumed she was a tourist, and not a very bright tourist at that.
This was the deadly CIA agent who had gotten the better of Speransky, and not once but twice?
Granted, with a gun in one’s hand any person with a pulse could be considered dangerous, but this was ridiculous. If this woman weighed forty-five kilograms Alexei would be shocked. And her lack of situational awareness was stunning.
He had to give her credit for guts, if nothing else. Once arriving at Labochev’s home, and after only a short time spent casing the property, she had taken down Labochev’s security without breaking a sweat. Then she entered the house and apparently handled the KGB station chief as well.
But the security guard was nothing more than a hired goon, and if Labochev had ever spent time in the field, it was decades ago. He would have offered little in the way of real resistance.
It hadn’t taken anything special to do what this petite woman had done here tonight.
She would find the going a little more difficult if she attempted to access Speransky’s safe house while Alexei was holding down the fort. Now that he’d seen her in person, he almost wished she would try to access it before Speransky’s return. It would be a fun little diversion.
Alexei leaned against a tree, keeping his eyes on Labochev’s home, wondering what the hell had gotten into Piotr Speransky, and marveling at how quickly the great man had fallen.
He shook his head.
This girl was tiny.
She was nothing.
35
May 23, 1988
7:15 a.m.
Leningrad, Russia, USSR
Tracie had fully expected Speransky to call back to Russia for assistance once he broke into her D.C. apartment and found her note. And while the note was necessary to set up their final confrontation on Tracie’s terms, it also presented a problem. Recognizing the enemy in a land where everyone was a potential enemy could be next to impossible, so how would she know who to defend herself against once Speransky had made that call and enlisted help?
But she had one trump card, and she decided to play it immediately: she knew exactly where the enemy would be waiting. Speransky would be desperate to protect his stolen wealth, so his KGB buddy would be camped out at the safe house. And since the nature of a safe house was to remain…well…safe…she guessed it would be located in a relatively secluded area, making the threat easier to spot.
She’d never spent much time in Leningrad, other than to skirt the city on her way to somewhere else, so her familiarity with the industrial park name Vasily Labochev had given the traitor Roger Thornton was nil. When she arrived at the park yesterday she had been surprised to discover it wasn’t particularly isolated at all.
The “safe house” was actually a small, square concrete-block building, and the Druzhba Industrial Park’s heyday, if there had ever been one, must have occurred during the reign of Vladimir Lenin. The building’s original purpose most likely had been as a warehouse of some sort, or a transfer station used for shipping a product that had been manufactured somewhere else in the park.
A single entrance into and out of the structure was flanked in front by a pair of narrow windows, both fortified by iron bars that had clearly been retrofitted recently, obviously by Speransky, The door looked old but sturdy, and a series of heavy padlocks locks would slow down anyone intent upon accessing the safe house with anything smaller than a battering ram.
A small loading dock on the other side of the building had clearly not been used in decades. Its concrete slab was crumbling, and its iron latticework had rusted almost entirely away. The loading dock’s garage door had been removed and the doorway bricked up tight.
She decided Speransky had made a decent choice if he wanted a secure building inside which to protect cash or other easily marketable liquid assets. The concrete construction offered a real challenge for any would-be thief, and the bars covering the dual windows were thick and appeared to be of the highest quality.
But Speransky’s biggest advantage, and probably the reason he’d selected the building in the first place, was its apparent condition. It was entirely unmemorable, a rundown industrial building located in a cluster of rundown industrial buildings in a shabby neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. As much as she despised Piotr Speransky, Tracie had to give him credit: it was a good choice and had undoubtedly served his purposes well.
That was about to change.
She had observed the building from a distance for over an hour yesterday before ever approaching it. Despite the fact it was a weekday morning, activity inside the industrial park was minimal, and while she hadn’t seen anyone who looked suspicious, she felt confident the threat would reveal itself as she moved closer to the safe house.
So that was what she did. She knew she looked out of place in this grimy area, and that was intentional. She wanted to look out of place.
More importantly, since Speransky had paid Vasily Labochev to learn her identity, she knew that whoever Speransky had recruited to protect his safe house would have been given a precise description of her. Rather attempting to disguise her appearance, Tracie made certain her flame-red hair was plainly visible: no hat, no scarf, no high-collared blouse. Nothing that would cause Speransky’s newly recruited partner to doubt that he’d gotten the right person in his sights.
She half expected to be assaulted before ever getting near the safe house and was a little surprised when it didn’t happen. She made a show of emphasizing her interest in that particular building, ignoring all the others and circling the safe house several times.
She rattled the door.
She checked the bars on the windows.
She climbed onto the ancient loading dock and examined the brickwork.
Before she’d completed her first circuit, Tracie had identified the KGB operative. It was a man standing in the shadows two buildings deeper inside the park. While he was dressed slightly more appropriate to the surroundings than Tracie—jeans and a light jacket—he wore no work boots, no hard hat, and seemed to have no purpose inside the industrial area other than to observe Tracie’s activities.
She loitered around the building for a long time, drawing no attention from anyone besides the mysterious man lurking a couple hundred feet away. Then she left the industrial park and spent the rest of the day in preparation for her meeting with Vasily Labochev.
Three times over the next several hours Tracie caught a glimpse of her tracker, and while the KGB man did a better job at concealing himself than he had at the industrial park, she still felt he’d done a damned poor job overall. Even during the raid last night on Labochev’s home, she thought she observed him skulking around the rear of the property as she was disabling the security guard prior to entering.
She’d again expected to be assaulted by the KGB man after leaving Labochev’s home. The conditions were perfect for a kidnapping or attempted murder: a partly cloudy night obscuring the moon, and a distinct lack of potential witnesses because virtually everyone in Leningrad was fast asleep.
Again she had been surprised when he hung back. Apparently her escort had been given strict orders not to engage. He was to keep her under surveillance b
ut leave her alone unless she made an assault on the safe house.
When Tracie thought about it, those orders made sense from Speransky’s perspective. He had gone to a lot of trouble to ensure she knew exactly who was murdering her relatives and attempting to destroy her. He would not want someone else to end her life. It would be critical for his sense of self-regard—and maybe even his career—that he be the one to do it.
Tracie wondered if she could use that knowledge to her advantage. Piotr Speransky’s single-minded obsession with revenge for the way she’d tortured and humiliated him had been fueling his every action since the day he’d escaped he CIA safe house.
That obsession would become his downfall.
She hadn’t wasted a lot of time developing a strategy on her way to Russia because there had been far too many unknowns to develop anything. All she had really known was that she wanted to use Speransky’s little piggybank as a lever to turn the tables on him, to let Tracie control the engagement and put her back in the position of hunter, rather than that of prey.
But now a plan was beginning to take shape. She thought she could use what she had learned at the industrial park—not just about the safe house, but about her opponent as well—to her advantage. It would not be easy, but she liked her chances.
Tracie had played sports in high school, and even as busy as her father was, he still managed to make it to almost all of her games. He’d drilled something into her head that she hadn’t fully appreciated at the time, but that in the years since had played a significant role in the foundation of her career and, in fact, her life.
And it was something simple: always respect your opponents. Don’t fear them, don’t be intimidated by them, but respect them.
“They want to win every bit as much as you do,” he’d said. “They’re out there competing just as hard as you are. So give them credit, give them their due, but trust in your own practice and skill and preparation. And win or lose, do it with grace and compassion. Shake hands when it’s over and move on, no matter the result.”
She had approached every CIA assignment she’d ever been given with those words in the back of her mind. The enemy—in most cases, that meant the KGB—was every bit as dedicated to their mission as she, every bit as convinced they were fighting on the right side of history.
She would respect their training and abilities while trusting in her own. It meant never becoming overconfident, never believing herself better prepared than the enemy, but also trusting that she was as prepared to face a challenge as she could possibly be.
Her father’s words had served her well, and she had no doubt he’d intended them as a message that would be carried far beyond the soccer pitch or basketball court or softball diamond. And while she had no intention of ever shaking Piotr Speransky’s hand—or the hand of the nameless KGB operative currently shadowing her for that matter—she would once again take his words to heart.
She would avenge her father’s murder using his own advice against his killer.
36
May 23, 1988
7:50 a.m.
Druzhba Industrial Park
Leningrad, Russia, USSR
The padlocks securing the single entrance to the concrete-block safe house were accessible not by key, but via combination tumblers. It was an arrangement that made sense, Tracie thought. Given the uncertainty and danger of his employment as a KGB assassin, Speransky could never be sure he would be carrying the proper keys if he needed to access the building in a hurry.
Tracie’s first impression during yesterday’s reconnaissance was that the locks represented a potential security weakness. Their size and quality—not to mention the fact they were on the door in the first place—would be a strong indication to any enterprising Russian burglar that the structure might be something other than it appeared.
Speransky had probably felt confident the safe house would never be disturbed, though, mostly because it was such an unlikely-looking repository for marketable liquid assets. From a distance and to the naked eye the building appeared decrepit, abandoned years ago and left to slowly crumble under the weight of inattention, much like the rest of the industrial park only at a slightly faster pace. An interested party would have to circle the building and approach it at the proper angle to see the combination locks at all.
For Tracie, the important question was whether Piotr Speransky would have trusted his KGB buddy with the combinations to all three locks. It would require a major leap of faith to assume from his location thousands of miles away in the United States that if he provided his comrade with access to the building, that man would not simply loot the safe house on his own and disappear.
She had slept inside her stolen car last night after leaving Labochev’s home, and now she considered the issue on her way to the industrial park. There was no way to know the answer to that question, and while it would better suit her purposes if the KGB shadow had been given the combinations, she decided she could adjust her plan if necessary.
She had been sure to lose the man tailing her last night before finding a secluded area in which to catch a few hours of sleep, and hadn’t seen any sign of him since. By now it had become apparent that Speransky had given strict orders to his KGB comrade that Tracie was not to be touched; that he was to protect the contents of the safe house but leave Tracie to him.
It was the only explanation for why the man wouldn’t have tried to take Tracie down last night outside Labochev’s home, when the conditions were as perfect for such an operation as they ever would be. He had tailed Tracie initially to become as familiar with her as he could, to get a feel for her habits and a sense of how dangerous an opponent she may or may not be, and then he had backed off to focus on his primary mission.
And she could use that knowledge to her benefit. If it came down to a confrontation—when it came down to a confrontation—the man’s reactions would be a hair slow, because he would be worried about killing her and thus triggering the rage of one of the most deadly and unstable men Tracie had ever encountered.
That was her working theory, anyway.
She was about to test it.
She parked her stolen car an eighth of a mile from the industrial park and began walking. By now she was as certain as she could be that the KGB man had taken up a position in or around one of the abandoned industrial buildings surrounding the safe house. There were plenty of them to choose from.
In the event she was wrong, though, and Mr. KGB was still tailing her but had gotten suddenly much better at it, she wanted to give him plenty of advance notice that she was making a move on Speransky’s precious safe house. She wanted to provoke him, to make him commit to taking action against her, but at the same time not surprise him into a deadly overreaction.
She walked at a rapid pace, not quite trotting but almost, and in just a few minutes found herself at the entrance to the grimy industrial facility. There was still no sign of the man who’d followed her most of the day yesterday.
An ancient chain-link fence surrounded the park, topped with three parallel strands of barbed wire angled outward at roughly forty-five degrees, the universal security measure designed to protect against vandals or drunk kids looking to get into places they shouldn’t. Any professional thief, or even a vandal who had planned ahead, would be able to circumvent the measure easily, and in a matter of seconds, by bringing along a set of bolt cutters and slicing through the fence.
Even that simple action was rendered moot, though, because the swinging gate located at the park’s entrance had been standing open each time Tracie had been here. From the looks of the rust coating the hinges, it hadn’t been years since anyone had closed the gate, it had been decades.
She turned left and walked straight through the gate and into the park. As was the case yesterday, the facility appeared mostly deserted, the majority of the structures standing empty and forlorn. The sound of work in progress somewhere deeper in the park echoed through the access roads and off the concrete and met
al buildings, but mostly the place felt forgotten, a crumbling relic of a repressive political system that was finally beginning to topple under the weight of inevitability.
Tracie never slowed after entering the park. She turned immediately left and then right, moving between buildings like a woman on a mission, which, of course, she was. It just wasn’t the mission she wanted KGB Man to think it was.
She moved straight to Speransky’s entry door, the one protected by the series of combination locks. She bent and focused her attention on the locks, spinning the dials like she knew what she was doing, making it clear to KGB Man—wherever he was—that unlike yesterday, she was serious about accessing the building this morning. She’d purchased a hacksaw yesterday at a Leningrad hardware store, and if the business with the locks didn’t get her shadow’s attention, she would pull the tool out from under her jacket and begin slashing away at the bars covering the windows.
The damned hacksaw was so cheap she wasn’t sure she would even make it through one bar before the teeth were so badly dulled the thing was rendered useless, but that was irrelevant. She hoped. The point wasn’t to access the building by herself; the point was to convince KGB Man to do it for her.
She played with the locks and tried to use her body to block the view of her shadow, assuming he was watching from somewhere around the area she’d seen him yesterday. A minute went by, and then two, and she wondered how much longer the charade would remain believable, if it ever had been.
She sighed and was reaching for the hacksaw under her jacket—Time for Plan B—when she felt the heavy mass of a gun barrel being shoved into her back.
Finally.
From behind her, angled slightly off her right, a deep voice said, “Remove your hand from your weapon or die.”
Despite the adrenaline racing through her system, or perhaps because of it, Tracie had to fight the urge to laugh. KGB Man was worried about her whipping out a semi-auto pistol when the only thing hidden beneath her jacket was a Russian handyman’s tool she’d bought for the equivalent of seven U.S dollars.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 165