She found no pulse and checked again.
When he remained dead, she pushed herself to her feet, suddenly exhausted. She forced her voice steady and called through the closed door, “That’s a bad strategy.”
“CIA?” Alexei answered. “You survived? I would not have predicted that,” he said with a chuckle that revealed not amusement but pent-up fear and tension.
“Never bet against me,” Tracie said, more to herself than to the injured KGB man. “You’ll lose every time.”
The safe house fell silent, both inside and out.
After a moment, Alexei said, “What do you mean about strategy?”
“I mean you had a bad one. In fact, it likely would have gotten you killed if things had gone the other way and Speransky was standing outside this door.”
“I do not know what you are talking about.”
“Of course you do. You just admitted you thought Speransky would kill me. By yelling, you were warning him not to come after you, letting him know he would face a hostile reception if he came charging through the door, gun blazing, as he tried to punish you for failing in your mission.”
“So I should just have let him come in here and shoot me in the head?”
Tracie shook her head and tried to suppress a laugh. I just put down one of the most dangerous men in the Soviet Union and now I’m discussing strategy with a KGB operative. I think I need a vacation.
“Are you still there?” A nervous tinge had crept into Alexei’s voice, as if he suspected Tracie might even now be finding a hidden entrance to the safe house and sneaking up behind him to put a bullet in his skull, exactly as she had done with Piotr Speransky.
“I’m still here.”
“Then tell me what you would have done in my place, Miss Superstar CIA Operative.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have told my adversary I was holding a gun, that’s for sure. I would have sat in the safe house and said nothing, put the pressure on Speransky to make a move. I would have bet on him being furious with me for failing and at the same time hopped up from a just-completed deadly confrontation, adrenaline racing through his system.
“I would have banked on him assuming my captor had confiscated my gun. I would have expected him to bull through the door bent on putting two 9mm slugs in my brain,” she continued. “And when he charged mindlessly inside, I would have been waiting with my gun trained on the only entryway into the safe house. Then I would have started firing and I would have continued until my magazine was empty and he was lying fully ventilated on the concrete floor.
“That’s what I would have done,” she concluded. “Since you asked.”
Another silence, this one longer than the first.
“So, what happens now?” Alexei said. “Am I next on your hit list?”
“I already told you, I have no reason to kill you. I certainly wouldn’t have returned your gun to you if I were planning on eliminating you after I finished with Speransky. For that matter, if I was going to kill you I could have done it at any time today, before Speransky’s arrival. You would have made just as effective bait dead as alive.”
“It is silly to be having this discussion through a closed door,” Alexei said. “Come inside and say goodbye before you leave the country.”
This time, Tracie didn’t bother to suppress her laugh. It sounded loud and long and foreign to her, almost like it was coming from someone else. Someone hollow and sad.
“What is funny?” Alexei called.
“I said I don’t have any reason to kill you,” Tracie answered. “But you have plenty of reasons to kill me. Why would I walk through the door and give you the opportunity?”
“I do not know what you mean.”
“Come on, Alexei, of course you do. You needed me alive before, in order to protect you from Speransky. Now that he’s dead, there is absolutely no reason for you to hold your fire.”
“I do not know what you mean.”
“You keep saying that when we both know it’s not true,” Tracie said with another laugh. “But that’s fine, you can play devil’s advocate if you want.”
“What is…devil’s advocate?”
“It means you advance an argument you know is not true, just to see how the other person will respond. Like, for example, claiming you would not fill me full of Russian lead the second I walked through that door.”
Silence again. This one lasted longer than the first two put together.
“But that’s fine,” Tracie said. “I’ll play your little game.”
“Please,” Alexei said. “Explain it to me.”
“When I get far enough away from here, I’m going to drop a dime to the Leningrad police and tell them where to find you. About two hours after that happens, the fine folks at Lubyanka will be notified what went down here tonight. By midday tomorrow, you will find yourself answering a series of very pointed questions from your KGB superiors. Things would go much more smoothly for you if you were able to hand them the scalp of the CIA operative who killed their best assassin and injured you in the process.”
By now, Tracie knew exactly what to expect, and she allowed the ensuing silence to drag out. Alexei had nothing to say because there was no denying her point.
“I told you I liked you,” she said with a tired smile she knew Alexei could not see. “But I don’t like you enough to let you kill me to save your career.”
“I hope you do not think less of me for trying,” Alexei said, finally admitting the obvious.
“Not even a little bit. Like I said, I’ve been there. But the benefit I gain from leaving you alive is in knowing the message I want passed to Lubyanka will, in fact, be passed. You will pass it exactly as I told you?”
“Da.”
“Then there’s nothing more to discuss, and I have a long journey ahead of me, not to mention a lot of work to do before I can relax. It’s time for me to get started. Goodbye, KGB.”
“Goodbye, CIA.”
By now, Trace had backed away from the door and the dead body of Piotr Speransky, putting maybe eight feet of open space between herself and the safe house. She knelt and held the Makarov she’d taken off Vasily Labochev steadily on the closed safe house door, aiming low.
Alexei was injured and would be dragging himself across the floor in a crawl.
The door swung suddenly open and Tracie fired immediately, squeezing off a half dozen shots before Alexei could even pull his trigger.
The sound of the gunshots echoed off the surrounding buildings and faded slowly away and Tracie realized she’d begun crying again.
She hadn’t lied to Alexei when she said she liked him.
She also hadn’t lied when she’d told him her scalp would have made a tremendous trophy for the KGB, a fact that would not have been lost on any moderately talented intelligence operative. Alexei would have known handing over Tracie’s dead body was likely the only thing that could save his career.
Maybe even his life.
Tracie had known what Alexei was pulling from the moment he began stalling, playing dumb about his situation and giving himself time to struggle off the chair she’d provided him and crawl across the safe house to the door. She had to give him credit, his voice had not revealed any of the pain he must have been feeling from his shattered knee as he struggled forward.
Once they’d said goodbye, she knew he would wait just long enough for her to turn her back on the safe house before pulling the door open and firing into her retreating body.
One last time, she forced herself to stand. She approached the safe house carefully, gun trained unflinchingly on Alexei’s motionless body, despite knowing—as she had known with Piotr Speransky—he was dead.
She knelt over him and verified what she already knew, and then shook her head. “You should have let me walk away,” she whispered. “I really wanted you to pass that message.”
She sighed and turned toward the front gate of Druzhba Industrial Park. One positive result of being forced to kill Alexei was th
at the local authorities would assume Alexei and Speransky had killed each other in some kind of dispute over the contents of Speransky’s safe house. The confusion should allow Tracie the opportunity to get well clear of Leningrad before the truth came out.
Eventually, the KGB would become involved, either because Leningrad police would wise up and notify them of the strange killings at Druzhba or, more likely, the KGB would send someone to investigate before the police had the slightest notion what had actually happened. There was undoubtedly already a team of investigators from Lubyanka working just a few kilometers away in an attempt to get to the bottom of Vasily Labochev’s death.
Tracie entered the narrow alleyway between the buildings. She looked back one last time at the bodies of the two dead Russians, one cooling on the ground outside the safe house, the other lying in the open doorway.
Then she kept walking as the tears continued to fall.
She cried for her father, who had deserved so much better than dying alone inside a wreck of a house after being tortured by a Soviet spy.
And she cried for herself and for what she had become.
By the time she reached the industrial park’s front gate, Tracie had dried her tears and was refocused on slipping out of the Soviet Union and returning to the United States.
She was highly motivated.
She needed to see her mother.
She needed to see Marshall Fulton.
She especially needed to visit her father’s grave, partly to let him know he could now rest in peace, but mostly so she could finally say goodbye to the best man she’d ever known without the bitter weight of vengeance hanging over her.
And she needed sleep. She was so damned tired.
She hiked southeast along the deserted road, reaching her stolen Russian car quickly despite walking at a relatively unhurried pace. It wasn’t like the dead men were going to spring to life and chase after her. They would never chase anyone again.
Tracie slipped into the front seat and turned the key and the engine started on the first try. It was a minor miracle given the vehicle’s age and pedigree.
She executed a neat K-turn and accelerated away, anxious to leave Leningrad behind for good.
She watched in the rear view mirror as the front gate of Druzhba Industrial Park shrank into the distance. Eventually she rounded a corner and it disappeared entirely.
And Tracie shifted her attention forward, settling in for the long trip home.
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Tracie Tanner returns June 16 in her eighth action-packed thriller, The Nuclear Option. Preorder now for just $2.99, half off the regular cover price.
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About the author
Allan Leverone is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of twenty-three novels and five novellas, as well as a 2012 Derringer Award winner for excellence in short mystery fiction and a 2011 Pushcart Prize nominee. His dark thriller, Mr. Midnight, was named one of the “Best Novels of 2013” by Suspense Magazine.
Allan lives in Londonderry, New Hampshire with his wife Sue, and has three grown children and three beautiful grandchildren. He loves to hear from readers and other authors; connect on Facebook, Twitter @AllanLeverone, and at AllanLeverone.com.
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Also by Allan Leverone
Thrillers
Parallax View: A Tracie Tanner Thriller
All Enemies: A Tracie Tanner Thriller
The Omega Connection: A Tracie Tanner Thriller
The Hitler Deception: A Tracie Tanner Thriller
The Kremlyov Infection: A Tracie Tanner Thriller
The Bashkir Extraction: A Tracie Tanner Thriller
The Soviet Assassin: A Tracie Tanner Thriller
The Nuclear Option: A Tracie Tanner Thriller
The Lonely Mile
Final Vector
The Organization: A Jack Sheridan Pulp Thriller
Trigger Warning: A Jack Sheridan Pulp Thriller
Death Perception: A Jack Sheridan Pulp Thriller
Dark Fiction
Mr. Midnight
After Midnight
The Lupin Project
Paskagankee
Revenant
Wellspring
Grimoire
Covenant
Linger: Mark of the Beast (Co-written with Edward Fallon)
Novellas
Darkness Falls
Heartless
The Becoming
Flight 12: A Kristin Cunningham Thriller
Story Collections
Postcards from the Apocalypse
Letters from the Asylum
Uncle Brick and the Four Novelettes
The Tracie Tanner Collection: Three Complete Thriller Novels
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 169