“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 back.
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 that 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.
__________
Tracie Tanner returns soon in her eighth action-packed thriller. In the meantime, if you’d like to read the series in order from the beginning, please visit Amazon’s Parallax View page. Happy reading!
To be the first to learn about new releases, and for the opportunity to win free ebooks, signed copies of print books, and other swag, take a moment to sign up for Allan Leverone’s email newsletter at AllanLeverone.com.
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About the author
Allan Leverone is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than twenty novels and four novellas, as well as a 2012 Derringer Award winner for excellence in short mystery fiction and a 2011 Pushcart Prize nominee. He 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 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
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
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