She hadn’t bothered wearing her shoulder-holstered Beretta because the whole point of this morning’s exercise was to get herself captured. That being the case, it seemed like a poor strategy to bring a weapon that would only end up being confiscated, thus providing her captor one more tool to end her life than he’d started the day with.
“Okay,” she said, speaking quietly and calmly. Don’t spook the Soviet spook. She released her grip on the saw and began raising her hands slowly.
“Nyet,” the Russian said. “Do not put your hands over your head, it is too conspicuous,” and again Tracie almost laughed.
Conspicuous? Here? The place was so forlorn they could probably fight a gun battle between two abandoned buildings and no one would notice.
“Spread your feet to at least shoulder width and place your hands flat against the door at shoulder height, and then remain still,” the man said.
“And you think that’s more subtle? A man holding a gun against a woman’s back and forcing her to spread her legs? You don’t go on many dates, do you?”
“Shut up,” the man spat, “and just do it.”
Tracie did it. The hacksaw fell out of her jacket and clattered to the rough pavement and the KGB agent flinched, and for one horrible moment Tracie thought he would squeeze his trigger just out of shock.
But to her surprise, not to mention her relief, he held his fire. For a moment nothing happened, and then he bent slowly, being sure to keep his gun pressed against her spine. He lifted the hacksaw and stared at is as though he’d never seen one before.
Then he chuckled. “You really thought this little blade would be sufficient to slice through these locks, or the bars on these windows?”
Tracie shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Who are you?”
“Just an ordinary girl, out for a walk on a beautiful morning.”
“With a hacksaw under your jacket.”
She shrugged again. “You never know when one will come in handy. Like today, for example. I’m out, minding my own business, when I happen to stumble over this little shack. It’s falling apart and yet it’s got locks on the doors and bars on the windows, the whole thing sealed up tighter than Kresty Prison, and I think to myself, I wonder why? So I pull out my hacksaw and get to work. Or at least I would have, if you hadn’t shown up and spoiled all my fun.”
“You think you are quite clever, don’t you?”
“Again, I don’t know what you mean.”
“I know what you are doing,” the man said, shoving his gun harder against her spine.
“Really? And what’s that?”
“You are trying to keep me talking out here, hoping someone will come along and see us and perhaps rescue you.”
“Is that what I’m doing? I thought we were just having a little chat, you know, getting to know each other, now that you’ve forced me to spread my legs for you.”
“Shut up,” he said. “It will not work. The odds of anyone passing by are minimal, and the odds of anyone doing anything besides minding their own business even if they see us are even less. But still, we will continue this discussion out of sight, since you are so anxious to examine the interior of this building for yourself.”
“That’s very neighborly of you, and just as I was about to ask for my hacksaw back. Now I guess I won’t need it.”
“You will not need the gun you have beneath your jacket, either.”
“Gun? I don’t have any gun beneath my jacket.”
“Of course you do.”
“No, I’m pretty sure I don’t. That seems like the sort of thing I’d remember. Would you like to reach in and check for yourself? Get a little free feel? Normally I wouldn’t offer, but since we’ve already established you don’t date much I thought you might appreciate it.”
“Shut up!” he said again, this time emphasizing his demand by placing one hand against the back of her skull and shoving it against the door. She just managed to turn her head in time to avoid breaking her nose. Still, it was painful, and she blinked and shook her head but refused to give the man the satisfaction of taking her hands off the door to rub the bruise that was already beginning to swell.
“Does this mean you don’t want to date me?” she said. “I’m getting mixed signals.”
“Step aside,” he said. “Move slowly and keep your hands against the door or the wall at all times.”
Tracie did as he demanded, and when her body had cleared the locks he said, “That is far enough.”
She stopped and he continued, “If you make one move I do not like you will suffer a very painful death. Do you understand?”
“I would say there is very little room for misunderstanding in that statement.”
“Good. Do not forget.” He held the gun in his left hand, keeping it pressed against her back, while he began manipulating the tumblers on the locks with his right.
At least you bothered to memorize the combinations, she thought, and didn’t have to pull a slip of paper out of your pocket.
A moment later he had popped all three locks. He removed them, one by one, and tossed them onto the ground. Then he turned the handle and pushed open the door. “Get inside right now,” he said.
That was easier than I expected it to be. She slipped past the KGB man and into Speransky’s safe house.
37
The skies over Leningrad had dawned a slate-grey overcast, and the muted daylight struggled to clear the filthy windows. KGB Man stepped into the safe house behind Tracie and slammed the door closed and the little building’s interior was plunged into a sort of murky semi-dusk.
Crates and boxes were stacked along three of the four walls, some of them two and three rows deep. In one corner, Speransky had set up a small table and a rickety chair, presumably to count and organize his loot.
Tracie assumed the crates and boxes were filled with cash and/or marketable assets such as bearer bonds, and if that were the case, it was no surprise Speransky was so desperate to protect this place. The potential value of the safe house’s contents was staggering.
“You were so anxious to get inside this building,” KGB Man said. “Now that you have done so, it hardly seems worth being held prisoner at gunpoint, wouldn’t you agree?”
“I don’t know about that,” Tracie said. “From the outside, this place is a dump, but whoever redecorated has a real knack for interior design. The inside is just…wow!”
“I would not be so flippant if I were you,” KGB Man said, annoyed. It was obvious he wanted Tracie to be cowed and intimidated, and her failure to cooperate was getting under his skin. “I am not sure you fully appreciate your situation. You will not survive this encounter. You are going to die inside this ‘dump,’ as you call it, and your body parts will be hacked off and scattered over the Russian countryside. You will never be seen or heard from again. No one will ever know what happened to you.”
Tracie stood motionless, arms crossed and her chin resting in one hand as if deep in thought. “Huh. Well, thank you for the explanation, but that seems a little…I don’t know…extreme. Is that how you deal with all curious Russian citizens?”
KGB Man laughed. “Russian citizens. That is a good one. I will admit your Russian is quite good for an American, but you cannot pass for a native of Russia, I assure you.”
“American? I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”
“I think it is time for us to place all our cards on the table, don’t you?”
Tracie shrugged. “You’re the one with the gun. And the saw. Feel free to place those bad boys anywhere you want.”
He shook his head in disgust. “I know exactly who you are, Little Miss CIA Operative.”
He paused, apparently hoping for some kind of reaction. Shock, maybe, or fear. But Tracie simply stared at him, eyebrows raised.
After a moment he continued. “I know you are a covert agent of the United States of America, working for the CIA to destroy the Soviet Union, and I know also that
your interest in this building was neither random nor harmless.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, it is so. I know you have come here to remove the fruit of my friend Piotr’s labors from this storage area while he is away from Leningrad. But I will not allow that to happen, and you will not be breathing much longer, either.”
Tracie had lowered her arms to her side, but now she raised them and began to clap softly. “You have it all figured out, don’t you?”
“I have figured out enough to know you are a menace to my country. Enough to know you will never leave this place alive.”
“And who’s going to kill me? You?”
KGB Man smirked. “You should be a little less concerned about who is pulling the trigger and a little more concerned about the fact you are not long for this world.”
“I only ask the question because it seems obvious to me that you’re nothing more than Piotr Speransky’s errand boy. While he’s running around playing Soviet spy and defending the world from the menace of individual liberty, it’s left to the likes of you to skulk around dirty little industrial parks, assaulting women and guarding the treasure of your betters.”
Even through the murky half-light, Tracie could see KGB Man’s face reddening as she spoke. “You should learn to choose your words more carefully,” he said, his voice taut with fury.
“Or what? Your master gave you strict orders not to kill me, didn’t he?”
“He is not my master,” KGB Man spat. “We are equals. We are both men who have devoted our lives to protecting our country from the likes of you.”
“And yet here you stand, doing exactly what your ‘equal’ demanded. You would like nothing better than to pull the trigger right now, I can see it in your eyes. But we both know you’re not allowed to. Would you like to hear a secret?”
KGB Man stared wordlessly at Tracie, gun aimed center-mass, his angry eyes boring into hers.
“I actually feel sorry for you.”
“You feel sorry for me? That is a good one. You are the one who will soon be dead.”
“I really do,” she insisted. “It must be horribly frustrating to be impotent, just another castrated calf, dominated by the bull.”
With an inarticulate grunt, KGB Man charged her. He raised his gun and swiveled his wrist, aiming to pistol-whip her in the skull.
But Tracie was ready. She’d been pushing him to provoke exactly this reaction, betting her life on her theory that Speransky had insisted the redheaded CIA bitch be left alive for him to torture and kill.
She feinted right and ducked left, lowering her head while whipping out a sidekick. KGB Man’s gun clipped her skull just above her ear, opening a gash but failing to knock her out as he’d intended.
Her kick connected solidly with KGB Man’s knee, though, and he gasped in pain. He’d planted the leg in an attempt to slow his forward motion while pistol-whipping her, and with the kick Tracie heard the snap of bones breaking or ligaments tearing.
His momentum carried him past her, tumbling onto his side and crashing into some of the boxes stacked up against the side wall. He was screaming in anger and pain but he’d managed to maintain his grip on the gun and now he scrabbled to his knees and fired, Speransky’s instructions forgotten in his unreasoning fury.
The slug whistled past Tracie’s head as she was diving at KGB Man, not wanting to give him the opportunity to squeeze off a second round. Her small body crashed into his larger one and they tumbled to the floor. She brought her hands together and wrapped her left hand around her right fist, and rather than going for KGB Man’s gun, she lifted her arms as high as she could and brought them down full-force onto KGB Man’s injured knee.
He screamed in agony and reached instinctively for his knee and the gun fell out of his hand, thudding to the floor next to them. Tracie grabbed for it, but she had landed on the left side of KGB Man and the gun had fallen to the floor off his right and she couldn’t quite reach it.
KGB Man stretched for the gun, grazing it with his hand and pushing it against his right hip. Tracie’s feet scrabbled for purchase on the dirty floor as she tried to launch herself across KGB Man’s body. She dropped onto his stomach and chest, forcing the air out of his lungs with an audible oof.
He could not breathe and his eyes were bugging out of his head, but KGB Man finally wrapped his fingers around his gun and he lifted it by the barrel. His left arm was trapped beneath Tracie’s body and he worked desperately to spin the weapon in his right palm so he could pull the trigger and fire into Tracie’s body.
Tracie was out of time. She swiped at the man’s gun hand and missed, and as he settled the butt of the weapon into his palm she reached back with her right hand and straight up with her left. Then she hammered both hands into KGB Man, slugging him in the face with her right fist and assaulting his injured knee one more time with her left.
This time there was no scream of anguish. All the air had already been forced out of KGB man’s lungs. But he thrashed beneath Tracie in pain and he again released his hold on the gun as he tried to cradle his knee.
Tracie ignored him, instead crawling over his body and falling on the gun, which had skittered maybe six feet away across the floor. She pushed to her knees and whirled, prepared to fire, but KGB man hadn’t made a move to follow. He lay on his back, gasping like a fish out of water, his hands wrapped around his shattered knee.
She rose slowly, breathing heavily, adrenaline racing through her system, blood from the gash on her skull dribbling sluggishly down the side of her face. She walked to KGB man and stood over his prone body, training his own gun on him.
He raised his hands to cover his face, as though that would protect him if she decided to pull the trigger. “Please,” he gasped. “Do not shoot.”
“I’m not going to shoot you unless you give me a reason to,” she said. “But you really need to learn not to be so sensitive. Why would you care what I think of you, anyway?”
38
Tracie walked to the corner of the one-room building and grabbed the chair Speransky had set up in front of his makeshift desk. She dragged it to the center of the room. Pointed KGB Man’s gun at him and then flicked her wrist to indicate the chair.
“Get in it,” she said.
KGB Man looked from Tracie to the chair and then back at her. “I cannot. You have destroyed my knee. I cannot walk.”
“Then crawl,” she said. “Or would you rather lie on the floor like a dying animal?”
“What difference does it make if you are only going to kill me anyway?”
“I told you, I’m not going to kill you. I’ve got no quarrel with you, aside from that business about kidnapping me and threatening me with violent death. Oh, yeah, and let’s not forget opening up a gash in my head that’s going to hurt like a bitch every time I wash my hair for the next two weeks. And the fact you’re a KGB stooge. Other than those minor differences, though, we’re practically besties.”
KGB Man stared at her unblinkingly. It was clear he considered her a few bricks shy of a full load, and that was just fine with Tracie. Keeping him off-balance would make him that much easier to control, although if he were telling the truth about his knee he wouldn’t represent much of a threat, anyway.
But she meant what she said about allowing him to live. This poor bastard was nothing more than a run-of-the-mill operative who had tried to do a favor for a comrade.
“The truth is,” she said, “I prefer to leave you alive.”
He gazed at her suspiciously, or perhaps that was just pain showing on his face. “Why?” he said.
“Because I have a little task for you to do once this is all over.”
The suspicious look on KGB Man’s face deepened.
“Well?” she said. “You going to lie there all day or are you going to get in the chair like I asked?”
He took a deep breath and started moving. It was unclear whether he believed her when she said she wasn’t going to shoot him, but he seemed to have reac
hed the conclusion there was nothing to lose by taking her at her word.
Tracie had placed the chair just a few feet from where KGB Man had fallen, but even traveling that short distance was a real struggle for him. He’d landed on his back, so his first order of business was to roll over onto his belly in order to have any chance of crawling.
He flopped onto his right side and then lifted his upper body with his arm until he was able to lean his weight on one elbow. Then he took a deep breath and pushed hard with his arm as he swiveled his hips, falling onto his chest and trying to stifle a groan prom the pain that was clearly blasting through his knee.
He struggled toward the chair, trying to pull himself along with his arms as he propelled his body forward with his good leg. Sweat covered his face and he gasped in pain every time his injured knee scraped along the floor, which was every time he moved.
He arrived at the chair in maybe ninety seconds, but Tracie had been in similar situations herself, trying to ignore the pain from an injury, and she knew the elapsed time had probably felt a lot longer to KGB Man.
“What now?” he said quietly. “There is no way I can lift myself into that chair.” He was breathing heavily and she almost felt sorry for him.
“Do you regret doing a favor for your buddy yet?” she said.
“We are not friends. This was a contract job. He pays me, I do the job for him.”
“How much is he paying you?” Tracie asked, curious.
“Not enough, it seems.”
She smiled. As much as she wanted to hate this guy, she couldn’t quite manage it. In fact, the reality was just the opposite.
“You know, I kind of like you,” she said. “I truly hope I don’t have to kill you.”
“That makes two of us.”
She gazed at him for a long moment. Dust and dirt from the filthy floor were smeared all over his clothing, and his left leg trailed helplessly behind him. Bruises from their desperate struggle over the gun were beginning to rise on his face and neck. He looked like a vagabond, and Tracie doubted her appearance was much better.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 166