Alexei said nothing this time; he simply gazed steadfastly at the filthy windows. Tracie assumed he was considering the likelihood he would die in a hail of bullets inside Piotr Speransky’s safe house.
She didn’t care. After a moment she turned and got back to work.
40
The prospect of spending at least one night inside a mostly abandoned industrial park in northwest Russia was singularly unappealing, but there was no way around it. This was where Speranksy would come, so this was where she would stay until her showdown with the man who’d killed her father was over.
Food and hydration could become an issue if Speransky dragged things out, since she’d brought only a few bottles of water and half-dozen or so protein bars. But she doubted that would happen, because based on what she’d learned about Piotr Speransky, she thought there was no way he could convince himself to delay checking on what was left of his fortune, even if it would be the tactically sound thing to do.
He would have to learn whether or not he’d been robbed blind and left with nothing.
After concealing the crates and boxes as well as she could, Tracie stepped out of the safe house and peered through each of the windows to check her handiwork. The accumulated grime on both sides of the glass, plus the fact that the iron bars would prevent Speransky from pressing his face directly against the window, combined to render a clear view of the building’s interior impossible.
She squinted and could just make out Alexei sitting in the rickety chair in the middle of the open room. His leg was stretched out atop the two boxes Tracie had moved to support his injured knee, and at first glance it appeared that the building had otherwise been cleared out.
If she moved to the side of either window and gazed along the inside of the front wall, however, it was possible to see that some or all of the crates and boxes had been moved and stacked up more or less out of sight.
She shrugged. It was the best she could do, short of actually hauling all the crates out of the safe house and moving them elsewhere, and she had neither the time nor the means to do so.
Time was the real issue. She could feel it slipping away, could sense Piotr Speransky coming ever closer, and if her preparations were not complete upon his arrival in Leningrad, she would die; it was just that simple.
For all her hatred of Speransky—and of herself for that fateful decision to spare his life back in Moscow—she respected his abilities as an operative and an assassin. Her single advantage over him would be that of surprise: she knew where and roughly when he was going to appear. And if she weren’t in position to take him down inside the industrial park, he would quickly gain the advantage.
Any extended conflict would spell doom for Tracie. She was alone and thousands of miles from home; he would be on familiar ground and could marshal significant tactical support if he managed to escape her ambush.
After satisfying herself that Speransky’s crates were mostly invisible from outside the safe house, she returned inside the building for what she hoped would be the final time.
She eyed Alexei and said, “You remember the message I want you to pass along?”
“I remember.”
Tracie nodded. “Good. Then I guess this is it. Goodbye Alexei. Hopefully our paths never cross again.”
“No one wishes that more fervently that I,” he said.
She stepped to the door and he said, “Wait.”
She turned. “What is it?”
“If you are unsuccessful in killing Piotr…”
“I won’t be.”
“But if you are, he will not be kindly disposed toward me. He will be enraged at my failure and will almost certainly execute me where I sit.”
“He’s going to die, Alexei.”
“But if he does not, I need a weapon with which to defend myself, or else I will be a sitting duck. I cannot possibly move quickly enough to fight him, or even to escape him. He will put two bullets into my skull and that will be that.”
Tracie stared at him, unspeaking.
“I understand we are enemies. I understand we each work toward the destruction of the other. But if you refuse to provide me the means with which to defend myself, I will die helpless and alone. Can you live with that on your conscience?”
“I’ll already be dead in your hypothetical scenario, remember?”
“You know what I mean.”
She continued to gaze at the injured KGB operative, aware of the eerie similarity between the current situation and the one a few months ago with Piotr Speransky that had set this deadly confrontation in motion. The smart tactical move would be to kill Alexei, or at the very least to leave him unarmed so if she failed in her mission of vengeance, Speranksy would execute him and the KGB would find itself down one more operative.
But she simply didn’t have it in her to abandon a helpless man, even one fighting for the wrong side.
She crossed the room in five strides and stopped next to Alexei. “Are you going to shoot me in the back if I return your weapon to you?”
“Why would I do that? Leaving you alive represents my best chance for survival, because even with a weapon I am likely a siting duck against a man like Piotr Speransky. Probably my only chance at living beyond the next few hours is for you to finish what you have started here.”
A long moment passed, the two operatives regarding each other silently. Then she reached behind her back and removed Alexei’s Makarov from the waistband of her jeans.
She handed it to him and said, “Goodbye, Alexei.”
She turned her back on the KGB man and walked out of the safe house, pulling the door securely closed behind her.
41
May 23, 1988
9:35 p.m.
Druzhba Industrial Park
Leningrad, Russia, USSR
Think like a spy.
That had been Tracie’s mantra from her earliest days in the field when dealing with Soviet operatives. She felt blessed to have been the recipient of the finest intelligence training in the world, but the KGB had been doing its thing for nearly seventy years, and they trained their people extensively as well.
Any operative to disregard that fact, or to underestimate the enemy, was risking violent death. Or worse, agonizing torture followed by violent death.
So after securing the three combination padlocks on the safe house door, she moved toward the industrial park entrance, rather than deeper into the park. Speransky’s assumption would be that Alexei had by now neutralized Tracie, but still, he would take no chances.
It was inconceivable to think he would enter the park through the front gates.
A much more likely possibility was that he would cut through the chain link fence surrounding the park from somewhere in back, approaching the building from the rear. In fact, Tracie guessed, he had probably compromised the security fence somewhere back there shortly after establishing his safe house. As rundown as this industrial park was, the odds of anyone fixing a damaged fence—or even finding it, for that matter—were so slim as to be negligible.
Druzhba Industrial Park had long ago ceased to be a going concern, assuming it ever had been one. But what little activity remained was concentrated much deeper inside the park, meaning Tracie had her choice of every building surrounding Speransky’s safe house when it came to taking cover and awaiting his arrival.
She selected a concrete-block structure similar in size and design to the safe house. She knew Speransky would come at night, under cover of darkness, so she needed to camp out as close to the target’s building as she could manage and still remain out of sight.
The storage unit had once featured a pair of narrow windows like the ones in Speransky’s safe house, but they had long ago been smashed out and never replaced. No iron bars covered the empty window frames, either.
Darkness was falling as Tracie pushed open the door and entered the abandoned building. She was tired but not sleepy, a seeming incongruity she’d encountered before, usually as a confrontation ap
proached. Adrenaline raced through her but the tiredness prevented her from feeling jittery and allowed for a clarity of thought that went above and beyond what she felt at any other time.
And she would need that clarity. She would need every advantage she could muster. If she were to stand any chance against a man like Piotr Speransky she would have to be on top of her game.
She yawned and stretched and gazed out the empty window frame at the industrial park in the direction of Speransky’s safe house. Darkness had fallen and the area was quiet and still.
From out of her pocket she removed the small gold cross she’d taken off Ryan Smith’s corpse with the intention of returning it to the dead CIA operative’s family. She’d been disappointed and angry when Aaron Stallings refused to consider her request, and while she understood his reasoning it seemed the sort of rule he could have bent, if only to bring some small measure of comfort to a dead hero’s family.
But right now, at this moment, she was almost thankful for the way her request had turned out. The cross felt strong and inspirational in her hand, not for its religious connotations—Tracie didn’t consider herself a particularly religious person—but because it served as a tangible reminder of the man who’d been captured and tortured by the Soviets and had faced the most horrible of fates with grace and dignity.
Tracie wondered whether she could have done the same.
She sat staring out the broken window and running her fingers over the cross, grateful for Ryan Smith’s presence, remorseful that she’d failed him in her rescue attempt.
It was exactly how she’d failed her father.
***
May 23, 1988
3:05 a.m.
Druzhba Industrial Park
Leningrad, Russia, USSR
There was no security lighting inside the industrial park like there would have been inside a similar facility in the Unites States. No sodium vapor lights hanging from tall poles to aid Tracie in identifying approaching danger. Apparently the Soviets had decided that whatever was manufactured here when the buildings were all in use had been sufficiently protected by the chain-link fence topped with razor wire.
The good news—if there could be said to be any good news in this whole mess—was that the skies had cleared over the course of the day. The night was clear and the moon nearly full. It wasn’t quite like the brightness of midday out there, but Tracie could see well enough from her vantage point to know when the KGB assassin was making his approach.
Hopefully.
The last of the few workers populating the park rolled along the main driveway and out the front gate just before six p.m., a parade of rust-bucket Ladas, Dacias and one East German Trabant. In the hours since, Tracie had seen no hint of activity from anywhere inside the park.
It was now after three a.m., and she knew if Speranksy were going to show tonight it would be soon. Even in such a secluded location, he would not want to risk torturing Tracie past six or seven a.m., when the workmen began showing up and one of them could potentially hear anguished screams and come to investigate.
And she knew Speransky would want several uninterrupted hours in which to play with her before ending her life. It was entirely possible he planned to transport her somewhere even more private to conduct his torture session, but before he did anything of the kind, Tracie knew he would want to reassure himself that his cache of money was safe and to—
From around the far corner of Speransky’s safe house came a shadowy figure, moving with stealth but speed. The figure was dressed all in black, and appeared as nothing more than a vague, undefined shape, a suggestion of a person silhouetted briefly against the light-colored background of the building against which it flattened itself before continuing across the narrow alleyway.
It was Speransky.
It had to be.
Tracie watched as the figure moved directly to the first of the two narrow windows built into the safe house’s front wall. She couldn’t see whether Speransky had his gun out, but she didn’t have to see it.
Of course he would have his gun out.
She began crawling through the empty window frame as quickly as possible but cognizant of the need for utter silence. Alerting Speransky to her presence while still this far away would not end well for her.
She dropped to the ground outside the building with a soft thump and then froze.
No reaction from the shadowy figure across the alleyway.
She began creeping across the pothole-strewn pavement as Speransky bent and peered through the grimy glass, exactly as she had hoped he would. The interior of the safe house would be bathed in shadows, but he should at least be able to make out the figure of the injured Alexei sitting in the middle of the room, leg elevated.
Speransky reached up with both hands—yes, he was holding a gun in his right hand—and grabbed hold of the iron bars as he forced his face closer to the window. Then he muttered a curse in Russian and bounded up to the locked front door.
Tracie had been moving steadily toward him, gun held in front of her in a two-handed shooter’s grip just in case Speransky should hear her or detect movement in his peripheral vision and whirl around to shoot.
But her ruse had worked. She knew a man like Piotr Speransky wouldn’t give a damn about the injury to his fellow operative; he would have only two concerns: checking the status of his money first, and determining the fate of Tracie Tanner second.
Those two concerns were overriding all else for Speransky at the moment. He’d thrown caution to the wind. As carefully as he’d approached the safe house a moment ago, he was now jabbing at the combination locks with shaking hands while muttering angry curses.
Tracie found herself maybe ten feet behind Speransky as he opened the first padlock. He removed it and tossed it to the side, immediately focusing on the second.
She had closed to within a half-dozen feet when he opened and discarded the second lock. He was lost in his task, panicked and worried that he’d lost everything.
But he had no idea what it was like to lose everything.
Tracie relished introducing him to the concept.
By the time the third lock clicked open, Tracie was close enough to reach out and touch the man who’d murdered her father. He never once considered checking his six to ensure he wasn’t being ambushed, and now it was too late. She reached up and shoved the Makarov 9mm handgun against the side of Speransky’s skull.
“Hello, Piotr,” she said softly in Russian. “Move so much as an inch and you die.”
Speransky froze, his left hand suspended eye height in front of the door, holding the lock. The gun he held in his right. Its barrel was pointing toward the sky.
“You should have let it go,” she continued. “You could have lived to a ripe old age instead of dying in a graveyard of abandoned factory buildings.”
“I could not let it go,” he hissed. “When you walked out of that Moscow safe house you left me with nothing.”
“I wouldn’t say nothing. Some of those boxes in there are damned heavy. I know, because I moved them around. If they’re all filled with cash, you could have disappeared and lived a pretty lavish lifestyle.”
“I could not let it go,” he repeated.
“But now,” Tracie continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “now you’ll die exactly as you lived—violently and alone.”
“Your father begged for his life before I killed him,” Speranksy taunted. “He cried like a little child and pissed his pants like a baby.”
“My father was ten times the man you’ll ever be. Twenty times.”
“Tell yourself that if you wish, but by the time I finished with him, he was begging for mercy, snot dripping from his nose and blood from everywhere else. He would have given you up to save himself if he could have. He would have—”
Without warning, the assassin stomped down on Tracie’s foot with his boot as he spun and dropped into a crouch in a desperate effort to lower his head below the level of her gun.
But
she was ready for him. She’d known exactly what he was doing, attempting to anger her and destroy her focus, and had known exactly what was coming when he felt the time was right. It was the only thing he could do if he wanted to live.
The pain exploded in her foot and she ignored it.
He fired his gun and she felt a 9mm slug whiz past her ear. She ignored that, too.
A preternatural sense of calm descended over her and everything slowed down and she lowered her gun in perfect timing with Speransky’s body as he dropped into his crouch. It was as if she’d glued the weapon to his skull, and she squeezed the trigger and the gun roared and flame licked out of the barrel and Piotr Speransky’s head exploded.
And as blood and gore and bone fragments flew, Tracie realized she was crying, and she was surprised by that fact because the last thing she could remember was responding calmly to the assassin’s taunts and waiting for him to make his move.
She had known this was as close to a suicide mission as she would likely ever undertake. Had known there was every possibility Speransky would get the better of her and he would be the one to survive this showdown. And now that it was over, somewhere in the dark recesses of her mind she wished he had.
Somewhere in the dark recesses of her mind she longed to join her father in darkness and peace.
And then everything resumed normal speed, and Speransky was falling to the ground, a large chunk of his skull blown off, and Tracie was standing in front of the door holding the gun she’d taken off Vasily Labochev and crying as the bloody mist continued to fall.
42
“I am armed,” Alexei shouted from inside the safe house, and Tracie realized he’d heard the confrontation, had heard the gunshots, but had no idea who was still standing.
If anyone.
Tracie swiped an arm across her face to clear the blood and the tears, and bent over the crumpled body of the man who had tortured and murdered her father. She knew he was dead but checked for a pulse anyway. It was an action ingrained in her through years of training and experience.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 168