The Soviet Assassin

by Allan Leverone

  Then he strode across the lot and directly to Tanner’s front door. He had long ago learned that moving confidently, like a man with a purpose, eliminated most of the risk of appearing suspicious to onlookers.

  Not that there seemed to be any around.

  He unzipped his carrying case and removed his lock picking tools the moment he arrived at the door. Standing flush against the front of the building meant no one inside any of the apartments could see what he was doing if they happened to look out a window, but there was no way to conceal his actions from anyone who might drive into the parking lot.

  He glanced back at the lot and saw no activity.

  Not a single vehicle had come or gone since his arrival.

  Piotr turned back to the door and set to work.

  It took even less than the sixty seconds he’d allotted to the task; Tanner’s lock was cheap and easily breached. In maybe half a minute, he’d stepped into his victim’s apartment and closed the door behind him.

  Smiling, Piotr crossed the living room, moving quietly. He was certain Tanner was not here, but there was never a reason to take unnecessary chances. He stayed close to the wall until reaching a short hallway off his right side. The apartment was small, even by Washington standards, and it was obvious Tanner’s bedroom and bathroom were located off the hallway.

  He drew his weapon and eased his head through the open bedroom door. The bed was neatly made and the room was empty. The bathroom was right behind the bedroom, and Piotr cleared that as well.

  That left only the kitchen. Piotr reversed course down the hallway and entered the kitchen, which was as tiny as the rest of the apartment, and just as empty.

  He shrugged. Oh well, he hadn’t really expected his victim to be home in the middle of the day.

  He turned to open the refrigerator door and froze. A piece of paper had been torn out of a notebook and was lying in the middle of Tanner’s small kitchen table. Something written on the paper had caught the attention of his subconscious even as he turned toward the refrigerator.

  It was his name.

  His heart thudded inside his chest as he spun on his heel and returned to the table.

  His name was on a note inside the CIA operative’s empty home.

  This could not possibly be good.

  He realized his mouth had become dry and his throat scratchy, and he ignored that realization as he read the note the cyka had left for him:

  Hello Piotr, it read.

  It was cowardly of you to kidnap and murder an unsuspecting man just to get at me. But I would expect no less from you, given that you are, in fact, a coward.

  I spared you once when I shouldn’t have, but by killing my father you have sealed your fate. As you read this, I am on my way to loot your safe house in Leningrad and take from you everything of value you have left.

  Yes, I know about your safe house.

  Yes, I know what is inside it.

  Yes, I am going to rob you and leave you with nothing.

  This is the fate you deserve, to be penniless and adrift.

  After I have removed and safely stored your liquid assets, only then will I end you. You will never see me coming. You will never feel the shot that kills you.

  I almost feel sorry for you.

  But not quite.

  You’ve brought your fate on yourself.

  Tracie.

  A heavy veil of panic and confusion fell over Piotr.

  How could the cyka know of his safe house? How could she know of the cash he’d salted away? How was this even possible?

  He stumbled away from the table and toward the front door. Everything had changed in an instant, and although he’d only just begun to consider the ramifications of the note Tanner had left for him, one thing he knew without a shadow of a doubt was that waiting to ambush his CIA tormentor had been a fool’s errand.

  Labochev had sold him out to the Americans. It was the only logical way Tanner could have learned of his last remaining Soviet safe house. For that, the CIA station chief would pay. Piotr’s original plan had been simply to shoot Labochev in the head and take back was what rightfully his upon his return to Leningrad, but now he vowed he would torture the fat, old, double-dealing mudak for nearly as long as he intended to torture Tracie Tanner herself.

  Right now, though, it was critical he get moving. He should already have been moving, because there was literally no time to spare. He had no way of knowing how long the note had been sitting inside this empty apartment waiting for him, and thus it was impossible to know how extensive Tanner’s head start was.

  His mind was whirring, calculating possibilities and potential responses to this betrayal. He must get to his safe house to stop the American before she removed what was left of the fortune it had taken him decades to amass. But it was clear he could never beat her there, not with her lead time of a day or more.

  He would need help.

  The man who prided himself on always getting the job done alone would need help. The very notion of asking anyone for anything was anathema to Piotr. But he must force himself to do it, because to cling stubbornly to his pride at a time like this would represent the worst kind of hubris.

  But the logistics of acquiring that help would be problematic. He was in the middle of a country he had worked his entire adult life to undermine, a country he hated with every fiber of his being.

  More importantly, it was a country that would like nothing better than to get its claws into him and execute him for espionage, so it was not like he could simply drive to any corner telephone booth and ring up the person he desperately needed to talk to.

  So before he could escape the United States and return to Russia to deal with Tanner, who had now made a fool of him for a second time, he would have to take a detour. He must drive to the Russian embassy and speak with the KGB’s Washington station chief. It was a man named Dmitri Smyrnovich, and his official title was Special Assistant to the American Ambassador.

  But Dmitri Smyrnovich was no one’s assistant. His real purpose in Washington was to coordinate the Soviets’ anti-American propaganda machine from inside the capitol of the very nation he was working to destroy. Piotr had met Dmitri once or twice over the years and taken an instant dislike to the man. Smyrnovich struck Piotr as arrogant, with a superiority complex he’d done nothing in the real world of espionage to earn.

  That was beside the point. Personal feelings were irrelevant. Dmitri would have access to secure KGB telephone lines between Washington and Moscow, lines Piotr could use to make the call he so desperately needed to make.

  Today’s developments were bad; Piotr was not so foolish as to try to convince himself otherwise. But while he had lost a key battle, he would still win the war.

  He would unfortunately have to expend more of his precious fortune to pay the man he was going to call—favors were never free—but the end result would permit him to assassinate Vasily Labochev and recover the rest of his cash. He would similarly recover his standing inside the KGB. And most importantly, he would still get the satisfaction he craved: torturing and eventually killing the little cyka Tracie Tanner.

  At least there was now no mystery as to where she would be found.

  Piotr crumpled up the note and jammed it into his pocket. He was shaking with rage. The redheaded bitch would pay.

  Oh, yes she would.

  30

  May 22, 1988

  12:40 p.m.

  Gulf of Finland

  Finland/Russian border

  The boat ride across the Gulf of Finland felt endless to Tracie.

  It was a trip she’d made numerous times, wedged into an ancient fishing vessel piloted by a bearded Russian whose name she did not know. His age was open to debate also: he may have been thirty-five, sixty-five, or anything in between.

  But he’d been accepting CIA cash to ferry passengers across the Baltic Sea from Finland to Western Russia and vice-versa—no questions asked—for as long as Tracie had been working in the region, pro
bably a lot longer.

  The ride was never a comfortable one. The water was invariably choppy, with gulf swells rising above and beyond what Tracie felt comfortable with in such a small boat. But beggars couldn’t afford to be choosers, as the saying went, and with limited access into and out of Russia, Tracie had no choice but to suck it up and deal with a queasy stomach.

  The unnamed Russian captain—Tracie thought of him as “Gorton,” for his salt-and-pepper bearded resemblance to the fisherman in the seafood commercials she’d seen on television—had met her at the Helsinki airport, ushering her into a car almost the moment the CIA’s Gulfstream jet stopped taxiing. Where he’d gotten the car and what he intended to do with it when they set sail for Russia, Tracie had no idea and didn’t much care.

  They drove wordlessly south after leaving the airport, skirting Helsinki proper and then turning east along the Finnish coast. Within minutes of departing the city the countryside turned steadily more rugged and desolate. With its endless inlets and hidden coves, the Gulf of Finland offered hundreds if not thousands of potential mooring spots for someone looking to conceal a small boat for a few hours.

  After passing Kotka, a small Finnish coastal city, Gorton exited the main road onto a bumpy trail that was nearly impossible to see, even while driving on it. Still without speaking—Tracie didn’t think the man had ever said more than a few words to her at one time—the captain drove on as the trail became ever more difficult to navigate. Fifteen minutes later, Gorton pulled to the side, although Tracie couldn’t have said why he would bother. It didn’t seem likely another vehicle would come this way for months.

  As they climbed out of the car, Tracie could see the boat in the distance, bobbing inside a small sheltered cove. It was the same craft she’d ridden on every time she made this trip, but always with a new paint job and a different name emblazoned on the side, all courtesy of Central Intelligence Agency dollars.

  Tracie watched their transportation as it scraped against the large boulder to which it had been carelessly secured. She thought about asking how long the massive rock may have been eating through the boat’s hull, and how much damage the vessel could take before springing a leak in the middle of the crossing, but didn’t waste her time.

  It wasn’t like Gorton would have answered, and it wasn’t like she had any alternatives, even if he’d said the damned thing was about to plummet to the bottom of the ocean at any moment.

  They clambered aboard and the captain fired up the engine. Within three minutes of climbing out of the car, the little boat was headed out into open water and the Russian coast, roughly thirty miles southeast across the gulf.

  The plan was to set Tracie ashore along the mostly uninhabited area north of the tiny town of Vistino in extreme western Russia, hard by the Estonia border. That portion of the crossing would be simple. She knew so because she’d done it before. That location was even more remote than the area in Finland they’d just left behind.

  But the Soviets weren’t stupid. They were every bit as aware as Tracie of their security vulnerability along the Baltic coastline. They combatted that weakness by heavily patrolling the southern Gulf of Finland using armed Zhuk class Russian Naval patrol boats. They further bolstered those patrols with an amalgam of retrofitted craft, some of them not unlike the boat Gorton was piloting right now.

  It made for a tense ninety-minute expedition across the open sea. More than once Tracie had found herself taking refuge from patrols beneath the false bottom that had been built into Gorton’s boat as the captain calmly explained his business on the gulf to young Red Fleet commanders: he was a humble fisherman merely trying to support his wife and family the only way he knew how.

  It had always worked. Gorton was sent on his way while the defenders of the Soviet coast moved on.

  But the boat’s false bottom hadn’t been constructed for comfort, and Tracie hoped it wouldn’t become necessary to crawl into it today. When not ferrying CIA passengers the boat actually did serve as a fishing vessel, and Tracie knew from the almost unbearable stench beneath the floorboards that the narrow crawl space did not go unused by Gorton when it came to storing his catch.

  The sky was overcast and darkening in advance of a storm, the seas even choppier than usual, and Tracie sighed. She still had to hike a fair distance before she would have any reasonable opportunity to steal a car, and the thought of doing so while being assaulted by a cold rain was not a pleasant one.

  The time dragged, the crossing interminable, and while she was grateful they hadn’t encountered any Soviet patrols—yet—Tracie found herself worrying whether she would have sufficient opportunity to prepare for Speransky’s arrival in Leningrad. There was a lot to do and he wouldn’t be sneaking into Russia at ten miles per hour aboard an ancient, stinking fishing boat, and Tracie could feel the time slipping away.

  She took solace in the knowledge that as time-consuming as it was for her to get into Russia, it should be equally so for Speransky to get out of the United States. And while she had no way of knowing how far behind her the KGB assassin was, she assumed she would have at least twenty-four hours to herself once she finally entered Leningrad. Hopefully that would be enough.

  Sea spray soaked Tracie’s hair and her clothing, and it occurred to her that no matter the weather, she was probably going to be waterlogged by the time she could take shelter in a stolen car. She tried to sit lower in the boat and silently cursed Piotr Speransky for roughly the thousandth time.

  At last the Russian shoreline came into view, still without Gorton’s little boat encountering any patrols. It felt like a minor miracle. Ten minutes later, Gorton had maneuvered as close to the rocky beach as he dared. After shaking his hand, a solemn ritual she repeated every time they successfully completed a crossing, Tracie leapt over the side, splashing up to her knees and wading to the shore.

  The beach was deserted, as she had known it would be. Vistino was located more than five miles from here and it was miniscule, with a population of well under a thousand. Had Tracie seen anyone while sweeping the area with her binoculars during their approach, she would have waved off the landing and instructed Gorton to find another drop-off location.

  She had taken maybe a dozen steps toward the narrow road running along the beach when she turned around. Gorton was already at least fifty feet out into the Baltic, headed for wherever he kept his boat moored. She wondered how much money he’d just made, and whether his boat would receive another new name and paint job, even though they hadn’t encountered any Soviets during the trip.

  Then she put Gorton and his boat out of her mind. The rain had thus far held off, although the sky continued to darken. Tracie slipped her backpack over her shoulder and began hiking. With any luck she could acquire a car sooner rather than later.

  And if that were the case, she would be in Leningrad by tonight.

  31

  May 22, 1988

  11:50 p.m.

  Leningrad, Russia, USSR

  Vasily Labochev’s arm was trapped under a sleeping hooker. Nikita, she called herself, or Natasha. In his drunken haze, he couldn’t quite remember which. Or maybe it was something else.

  It didn’t matter for a number of reasons, one of which was that he was certain the girl’s real name was neither Nikita nor Natasha. Call girls were a lot like covert intelligence operatives, he thought with an intoxicated grin: they never wanted you to know their true identities.

  Vasily’s personal life included many rendezvous with girls just like Nikita/Natasha. At least twice a month for as long as he could remember, Vasily had shared his bed with prostitutes. It was a habit he took great pains to conceal from his KGB superiors, because it was exactly the sort of thing they would worry might prompt extortion by an enterprising Russian criminal type, or much worse, by the American CIA should they become aware of it.

  This latest call girl, Nikita or Natasha, had practically set up shop inside Vasily’s palatial home. She’d spent every night here over the past week, and
Vasily expected she would continue to sleep in his bed until this nasty business with Piotr Speransky was over. He was paying her handsomely, and he knew she would be more than happy to continue earning triple or even quadruple her normal nightly pay until the income stream dried up.

  And he needed her. He hadn’t been sleeping well since beginning his unofficial business transaction with Speransky. It was a natural by-product, he thought, of committing extortion against one of the most lethal assassins in his country’s long and storied history of lethal assassins.

  At least with Nikita/Natasha here, Vasily could drink himself numb and then tire his body to the point of exhaustion through bedroom gymnastics, at which his current paid partner was exceptional. He would then fall into a troubled slumber. He would still awaken multiple times overnight, sometimes to pee and others to fret.

  Often both.

  But at least he was able to manage a few hours rest each night.

  He felt his arm going numb and tried to slip it out from under Nikita/Natasha without waking her. He didn’t care about the quality of her rest; she was a contract employee, nothing more, and normally he would have poked her in the ribs or shoved her off his arm, and the hell with her if she didn’t like it. But if he woke her, she would think he was ready for another round, and he was too prideful to turn her down if she awakened and expected sex.

  The problem was all he wanted right now was to get out from under her damned body so he could roll over and get back to sleep.

  He worked his arm out slowly and carefully and had almost freed it when he heard a loud THUMP from downstairs. Every once in a while his cats would knock a candlestick off a table while roughhousing; it was a sound he’d heard more than once in the middle of the night.

  This was something else entirely.

  It was heavier than a candlestick, and muffled, and less metallic.