The Soviet Assassin

by Allan Leverone

  Once out of sight of the embassy, Piotr removed his hat. He shrugged out of his reversible jacket and turned it inside out, then slipped it back on and zipped it up. He stuffed his hat into the front pocket and crossed the street once again. He’d changed his appearance only minimally, but it should be sufficient to prevent recognition. With very few exceptions, the average human being was shamefully unobservant.

  He hurried along the sidewalk until the embassy was again in view. Then he slowed, anxious to take advantage of every last second of surveillance time. He continued to maintain the tourist fiction, being sure to look to his right, away from the embassy, nearly as much as he looked to the left. But his full attention was on the group of men in the suits, who were still loitering in front of the embassy as if awaiting someone’s arrival.

  His gut was telling him this was it, and he knew better than to question those instincts. He delayed his progress as long as possible, but eventually was forced to move past the loitering men and continue along the route he’d originally taken from the café. It was much too soon to turn around again; making a third trip past the embassy in less than five minutes might be pushing his luck too far.

  He supposed he would have to circle the block in order to get into position on the far side of the embassy, and hope that the redhead didn’t make an appearance while he was gone. He hated the prospect of losing eyes on the group of loitering men for even a short time, but given that he was working alone, he had no choice but to—

  There she is.

  Piotr had been scanning the sidewalk in front of the Hôtel de Crillon, more out of habit than because he really expected to see anything of interest, and as his gaze flitted past the entrance, the young woman who’d humiliated him back in Moscow stepped onto the sidewalk and turned toward the American Embassy.

  He froze in his tracks on the busy sidewalk. A man jostled him from behind. The man cursed in French and stepped around Piotr, who barely noticed and didn’t care. His attention was focused one hundred percent on the American agent.

  And it was her.

  It was definitely her.

  He’d studied her endlessly while duct-taped to a chair undergoing interrogation and torture and disgrace. Her face and her hair—oh, that bright red hair—were burned so deeply into his memory he knew he would be seeing her in his nightmares for the rest of his life, even in the unlikely event the KGB kept to their word and allowed him to survive beyond the next few weeks.

  His superiors had been livid when they learned he provided the intel the American agent used to locate and execute Slava Marinov in Moscow, right under their noses. They had cut him loose, revoking his KGB credentials and pulling the rug out from under the only career he’d ever had.

  Then they’d thrown him in jail.

  He had expected to disappear in the night, executed just as Marinov had been and buried in an unmarked grave somewhere, but that hadn’t happened. Instead the same KGB bigshots who had completed his fall from grace by revoking his credentials and stuffing him into a jail cell had come to him with an unthinkable proposal: Piotr could resurrect his career and his stranding in the KGB, but only by tracking down and executing the American who’d so humiliated him and the entirety of Soviet intelligence services.

  Bygones would be bygones, they had told him, but only if he could pull off the impossible.

  Piotr wasn’t certain he believed them. Hell, he was sure he didn’t believe them. Nobody in the world excelled more at deception and manipulation than the KGB. He assumed that even if he could complete his assignment, he would likely still end up face down in the middle of the vast, empty Russian forest, bleeding out of a pair of 9mm holes fired into the back of his skull.

  But anything would be better than pacing inside a six-by-nine meter cell awaiting execution, and the possibility of redemption was a damn sight better than the certainty of death, no matter how unlikely that redemption was.

  So Piotr had accepted the bizarre proposal without hesitation.

  His KGB superiors had unlocked the cell and set him free—more or less—and he had immediately begun planning the mission that would lead here, to Paris, and bring him face-to-face—again, more or less—with his hated enemy.

  He shook himself back to reality, recovering his senses enough to begin moving again. He was angry he’d allowed himself to be so affected by the appearance of the person he despised more than anyone else in the world. He’d known she would turn up eventually and had thought he was prepared for the sight of her.

  Obviously he had been wrong about that. Fortunately for him, though, he was well out of sight of the embassy’s security personnel, and also a sufficient distance away from the CIA cyka that she hadn’t seen him, either.

  She was the one he needed to worry about.

  She was the exception to the general human trait of self-absorption and inattention.

  She would detect his presence if he were not adequately cautious.

  He watched her walk away, her destination clearly the American Embassy. The urge to follow her and finish her now, pumping multiple slugs into her head from behind, was so strong he’d begun moving in her direction without any conscious thought.

  But now he forced himself to turn away. It took an act of will stronger than any he’d ever exhibited.

  But the delay in extracting his revenge would be worth the agony of the wait. He had more planned for the woman with the bright red hair than simply being murdered on a crowded Parisian street. He had much more planned for her.

  She would be made to suffer as he had suffered.

  To suffer more than he’d suffered.

  By the time Piotr was finished with her, she would welcome death. She would beg for a bullet in the head, would view it as far preferable to the shambles he was going to make of her life.

  Piotr Speransky had gone to a lot of trouble to lure the American cyka with the flame-red hair to Paris, and for a very specific purpose. He would stick with his plan, would focus on the long game. It would pay dividends in achieving his goal.

  And he was now one step closer to achieving that goal.

  10

  May 15, 1988

  6:20 p.m.

  Hôtel de Crillon, Paris

  Tracie was exhausted by the time she returned to her room inside the Hôtel de Crillon. She felt as though she’d stayed up all night and then run the New York City Marathon and the Boston Marathon back to back on the same day. With a vigorous ninety minute weightlifting session in-between.

  The reality was that she’d done virtually nothing all day that should result in this degree of exhaustion. It was caused entirely by the stress of serving as a human target for the better part of ten full hours.

  French authorities, accompanied by a team of three marines from the U.S. Embassy Security Group, had paraded her around in front of the embassy complex for roughly thirty minutes following her arrival this morning, and then had done the same thing a half-dozen more times at various intervals throughout the day.

  They were clearly waiting for Piotr Speransky to show—or to gun down Tracie—and they were just as clearly frustrated and disappointed in the lack of activity.

  By the time they took their final trip around the embassy, the French team of police inspectors and military personnel were treating Tracie as if perhaps she had somehow contacted Speransky and advised him not to kill her until later, when fewer police would be in the vicinity and he would thus have a sporting chance at escape. The men were curt, bordering on unfriendly, not exactly rude but close enough.

  Not that Tracie wasted much time worrying about the feelings of the men whose presence was mostly to serve as witnesses to her murder. They were disappointed in the fact she continued to remain upright when everyone thought she should be dead by now, but she was more concerned with the knowledge that she should be dead by now.

  The pressure was unrelenting. Even during the periods of time she was safe—relatively speaking—inside the embassy, Tracie’s thoughts remained
focused almost exclusively on her next escorted trip outside and what seemed like the only possible outcome.

  Because while she was much happier than her escorts seemed to be about the fact she was still breathing, she was every bit as mystified as they were as to why that was the case. Probably more mystified. She certainly had more riding on the answer to that question than they did.

  The embassy killings had clearly been staged to draw her to Paris. Each succeeding one had become more transparent as to the killer’s purpose, culminating in the murder of Ambassador Leavell. Between the note left at all three murder scenes and the staging of Leavell’s corpse, there could only be one possible interpretation of the evidence: that a madman was insisting Tracie come to Paris and face the music.

  Now she’d done so and the result had been…nothing.

  Maybe Speransky had already flown the coop and was even now en route to another U.S. embassy in another European country, where he would commit one more murder of an innocent diplomat and leave another of his goddamned notes. But that made no sense. He had to know it would take time to get Tracie to the scene. Hell, she’d arrived yesterday but that was only because she’d left Washington in the dead of night.

  Speransky couldn’t have planned for that, so he likely would not have expected her to materialize in Paris until today. Why would he leave town on the very day of her arrival?

  It didn’t feel right.

  Nothing about this felt right.

  Something was very wrong with their interpretation of Speransky’s actions, she could feel it in her bones, and that feeling was separate and apart from the knowledge she was serving as a human target.

  Yes, she’d been tense all day, her nerves strung piano-wire tight as she waited for the onslaught of Russian-made lead that would drive her to the ground and snuff out her life. But there was a difference between being tense and being unable to think straight.

  She’d been thinking straight from the moment she sat down in front of Aaron Stallings’ desk until just now when she stumbled, exhausted, into her room.

  And something wasn’t right. She just couldn’t put her finger on what that something might be.

  Late in the afternoon, Tracie had huddled with Henry Gatlin and the French authorities in an embassy conference room, trying to determine where to go from here. They agreed she would stay at least one more night in Paris and continue the little dog and pony show again tomorrow. The consensus seemed to be that perhaps Speransky hadn’t expected Tracie to arrive in the city as quickly as she had, and so he’d spent today in hiding but might be in position tomorrow.

  In Tracie’s opinion that consensus was based on no evidence in particular; she felt it was nothing more than wishful thinking on the part of the authorities. But nobody had any alternative plan—Tracie included—so she agreed to endure the gut-wrenching process of awaiting execution again one for more day.

  The prospect of serving as a bulls-eye for another ten hours was daunting, but after dealing with today’s suffocating pressure, Tracie felt a little more at ease about tomorrow. Maybe it was nothing more than a result of her current exhaustion and she would awaken terrified in the morning, but she didn’t think so.

  Speransky had gone to an enormous amount of trouble and risk to lure Tracie to Paris. It was inconceivable to her that he would simply have stayed away today on the off chance she wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow.

  All she had to do was put herself in his place to reach that conclusion. She recalled the horror she’d felt while interrogating Piotr Speransky, the dawning realization that were it not for the fact they worked on opposite sides of the geopolitical fence, she and Speransky were not all that different. They both received orders they may or may not agree with, and they both then executed those orders to the best of their ability.

  She had tried to tell herself at the time that while he was a sociopathic monster, murdering American operatives without a second thought, she was simply a dedicated intelligence professional, doing her best to further the cause of freedom and protect the interests of the finest country in the world.

  It became a much more difficult distinction to maintain after she’d executed the elderly and defenseless Slava Marinov on a frozen sidewalk in Moscow.

  But the point was, Tracie was every bit the professional operative Speransky was. And had the shoe been on the other foot, had she been ordered to lure Speransky to Paris for the express purpose of filling him full of holes, it would have been dereliction of duty on her part to stay away on the day of his likely arrival.

  She shook her head and sighed. She’d ordered dinner from the hotel’s restaurant after arriving in her room—it was extravagantly priced, as far out of her budget as were the lodgings themselves, but she was far too tired at this point to go searching Paris for a reasonably priced meal—and now she picked at it, eating mostly by rote and barely tasting the food while her thoughts remained focused on what the hell she was missing in this Piotr Speransky situation.

  Because whatever it was, she was pretty sure it would come back to haunt her if she couldn’t puzzle through it.

  She finished eating and wheeled the cart containing the dishes and utensils into the corridor without any conscious thought. She closed and locked the door and undressed next to her bed. She needed a shower but that could wait until morning.

  After stepping into her pajamas, Tracie pulled down the covers and crawled beneath them. The mattress was more than comfortable, it was like floating atop the fluffiest fair-weather cloud on a summer day, and the operative who’d slept on floors and in fields, in the backs of trucks and strapped into uncomfortable cargo planes, in unbearable heat and flesh-freezing cold, dropped off to sleep almost immediately, despite being certain she would remain awake most of the night as she had last night.

  Her last conscious thought before floating away on the fluffy cloud was again, What the hell am I missing?

  11

  May 15, 1988

  6:25 p.m.

  Orly Airport

  Paris, France

  Piotr Speransky caught a cab and hurried straight to Orly after satisfying himself that the redheaded American spy had actually—finally—arrived in Paris. There was no telling how long she would hang around the embassy waiting for him to kill her, and he had a lot of work to do before he could finally realize that dream.

  There wasn’t much about freedom-loving nations like the United States and France that he respected, particularly after spending the better part of a decade working covertly inside them. The faith these countries showed in their citizens was, in Piotr’s opinion, misplaced and dangerous. People were, with rare exceptions, dull and slow, witless animals who needed to be led, by force if necessary.

  He’d grown up inside what people in the West called the “Iron Curtain,” and knew how misunderstood his government really was. Only through strong centralized control could a society and its people begin to realize their full potential. If that meant a few—or even many—of those people had to be prodded into compliance with the central planners’ wishes at the point of a weapon, well, what was the purpose of government if not to make the difficult choices necessary to benefit all of its people?

  But one thing Piotr did appreciate about free societies was how easy they made it for people like him to do his job. Few in the West ever wanted even to question a stranger, much less challenge him, particularly if that stranger came bearing official-looking paperwork that had been drawn up by some of the world’s most accomplished forgers inside the KGB.

  Authorities at airports always made a show of examining his Russian diplomatic credentials. Sometimes they even took the extra step of telephoning…someone; Piotr had no idea who the calls went to and didn’t care. He assumed the U.S. State Department maintained some sort of clearinghouse for approved members of foreign diplomatic missions, and the examiners were calling that clearinghouse.

  In any event, his inquisitors inevitably returned after absences of varying lengths of time, sm
iling and apologizing for the delay and wishing Piotr well as they ushered him around any crowds and straight to his flight.

  He’d been a little nervous this time, given his uncertain status at the KGB, but still only a little. His superiors had offered one last chance to redeem himself, and the only way he could hope to manage that redemption would be with the full support and cooperation of Soviet intelligence. They couldn’t expect him to complete his assignment without utilizing his forged documents and KGB contacts, so for now at least those documents and contacts would remain viable.

  After succeeding in this mission, there was still at least a fifty-fifty chance he would be escorted behind a government building and shot in the head, Piotr had no illusions about that. But for now he was breathing and working, and that was a damn sight better than the alternative, and far better than he’d expected after being thrown into a jail cell a couple of months ago.

  Piotr Speransky knew as well as anyone the risks inherent in his KGB career. He had known since the day he began training as a covert operative that all it would take was one major fuckup to bring the wrath of the Soviet hierarchy down on him. That knowledge had motivated him to begin preparing a strategy that would allow him to disappear without a trace, should that major fuckup ever take place.

  He had seriously considered implementing his exit strategy the moment the American spared his life after extracting the information she needed to eliminate Slava Marinov. That had been his plan during the long hours he spent rubbing and tearing his skin raw as he worked himself free of the damned duct tape the cyka had used to secure him during his torture sessions.

  Then, after finally walking out of the CIA safe house, he’d changed his mind. Vengeance burned like nuclear fusion inside his entire being, and he would stand no chance of extracting that revenge without all the advantages offered him by his KGB status. So he’d decided to return to Lubyanka and spill his guts. He’d seen other operatives disappear without a trace following errors that were far less egregious than his, but he had also seen the occasional instance of an operative being allowed to survive.