Objekt 825 (Tracie Tanner Thrillers Book 9)

by Allan Leverone

  Overall, more than a fair trade-off, she thought.

  It took better than ten minutes to work her way around to her parked car. She’d placed it where a thick stand of trees separated it from the old factory building, so the only chance of being spotted by a militsiya officer was if the man abandoned his position outside the crime scene and hiked through the trees to this secondary parking lot.

  She knew that would not happen, so once satisfied that the trees stood between herself and the car, Tracie broke cover and double-timed to the vehicle. She slipped behind the wheel and eased her door closed, then checked the back seat to be sure her shoebox-sized prize was still where she’d left it.

  It was.

  She started the car and began driving north, away from Lukashenko and Gregorovich and the six-man Sevastopol police contingent. She was sweaty and dirty and sore and exhausted, but also happy. Against all odds, she had completed both prongs of her dual assignment, and while it hadn’t been easy, getting back to work had allowed her to put the depression of her time in D.C.—on the sidelines—behind her.

  She followed the access roads, unsure exactly where they were taking her but satisfied that as long as she continued more or less in a northerly direction, she would eventually emerge from this massive industrial/residential area and find her way to a decent-sized north-south roadway. Her plan was to avoid major thoroughfares for at least fifty kilometers, just in case her theory about Gregorovich’s arrest taking the pressure off the search for the person who’d killed a Red Army soldier outside Objekt 825 was wrong.

  Then she would hit the highway and make for her Moscow CIA safe house, where she could coordinate a pickup by the Gorton’s Fisherman and a boat ride out of Russia.

  The area began to morph from mostly industrial to mostly residential, and Tracie knew she would soon emerge from this grimy neighborhood. She was now more than a kilometer-and-a-half north of the manufacturing plant where she’d been held captive. She rounded a curve that didn’t seem to exist for any particular reason, and then her eyes widened as she hit the brakes.

  Angled across the road was a Sevastopol Militsiya cruiser with its warning lights flashing. The vehicle’s positioning clearly indicated that any oncoming cars should stop.

  Tracie gauged the distance between the cruiser and the sandy verge on either side of the road. She thought she could squeeze past its rear bumper without impacting the trees or getting stuck in the loose terrain, but then what? Even if she managed to evade the police stop, there was no way on God’s green earth her little Lada, with its lawn mower engine, was going to outrun a Soviet police cruiser, even given a head start.

  Goddammit.

  She pulled to a stop in front of the cruiser.

  48

  June 25, 1988

  4:15 p.m.

  Country road north of Sevastopol, Russia, USSR

  Tracie hadn’t expected the police to set up a perimeter nearly two kilometers around the crime scene based simply on an unverified report from an unidentified civilian of a murder in progress, but the moment she rounded the corner and saw the police vehicle, she knew exactly where she’d gone wrong.

  She had told the police dispatcher she watched as an “army officer” fired a gun into the head of another man. That kind of report would immediately put the Sevastopol Militsiya on high alert. Red Army officers were one step below gods in the hierarchy of Soviet society, and the watch commander on duty would want to take no chances of being second-guessed by a military review of his handling of the situation weeks or even months down the line.

  She had accomplished her goal of focusing police attention on the abandoned manufacturing plant, but by sticking around to watch the takedown of General Gregorovich, she may have inadvertently engineered her own capture as well.

  A police officer had been watching Tracie’s approach, leaning against his cruiser and squinting at her with what looked a lot like suspicion. He finally pushed off from the vehicle and approached, moving slowly, clearly with the intention of reminding this civilian motorist who was in charge here.

  He was alone.

  During the ten seconds or so that it took for him to meander from the cruiser to her driver’s side window, Tracie forced herself to stay calm and consider her options.

  She had no doubt she could put him down with a 9mm slug between the eyes, despite the fact her weapon was currently nestled in its shoulder rig and his right hand was resting lightly on the Makarov holstered at his hip. She’d spent hundreds of hours on the range and at home, practicing drawing her weapon in preparation for a moment exactly like this one.

  No sooner had she considered this option than she eliminated it, at least for now. For all his carefully manufactured superiority and obvious suspicion, he was just a guy doing a job. He probably had a wife and children at home, and she had no desire to make some poor young Russian woman a widow. Plus, murdering a Russian cop less than two kilometers from the scene of another killing would do the opposite of what she’d intended—it would bring massive amounts of police attention down on this area, just as she was trying to escape it.

  Her second option was disabling him physically. He was much larger than she, easily eighty pounds heavier, and he held the position of superiority, standing next to the car while she sat inside it. But all of those factors could be mitigated by inventing some reason to step out of the Lada. Once on solid ground, Tracie knew she could make quick work of the cop.

  This option she also quickly discarded. Disabling him without shooting him would require she restrain him in some way, and doing so would take time she didn’t think she had. The longer she sat here, the greater the probability became that she would never make it out of Sevastopol.

  That left Option Three.

  She breathed deeply, calling on her years of experience to force back the nerves threatening to set her voice and hands shaking. By the time the officer had sauntered next to the car and made the “Roll down your window” circular motion with his hands, she had completed her transformation.

  She was KGB Auditor Lieutenant Olga Koruskaya.

  Before complying with the officer’s request, she jammed the handcuff still hanging on her right wrist as far up her arm as she could, pretending to scratch her forearm. She said a silent prayer that it wouldn’t loosen and slide down while she sat talking to the cop. The length of handcuff chain she’d blown apart with Andrei Lukashenko’s gun hung nearly to her wrist, tickling the skin just north of her jacket sleeve and reminding her how tenuous her continued freedom hung.

  She rolled down the window and met the cop’s glare with one of her own.

  “Yes?” she said, wanting to take control of the conversation before he could speak. “What is the meaning of this? I need to get to Lubyanka as soon as possible, and I am already late, thanks to these endless, confusing roads.”

  She was betting everything on the theory that Objekt 825 Commander Aleksander Morozov hadn’t reported the murder of his soldier to the Sevastopol Militsiya yet; that personal humiliation and professional embarrassment had caused him to launch a search for Tracie using his own soldiers instead of the police.

  If she was wrong, and the cops were on the lookout for the young woman with the half-shaved head and the jagged scar on her skull, Tracie knew she would have to move to Plan B very quickly.

  Or her freedom would come to an abrupt end.

  Again.

  The cop raised his eyebrows in surprise. He clearly was not accustomed to being regarded with anything other then humble obeisance by the public he was being paid to protect.

  He recovered quickly, though, and said, “What is your business in Sevastopol, Miss?”

  She regarded him coldly. “I am not at liberty to share that information.”

  “Excuse me?” His eyes narrowed.

  She said, “I assume you are aware of the existence of the restricted area along the coastline south of Sevastopol?”

  “Of course. It is a classified military facility.”
/>
  She noted that his tone had softened slightly. The arrogance and suspicion were still there, but his hand had strayed from his weapon and with her mention of Objekt 825 he seemed to regard her in a slightly different light.

  “I cannot comment on that,” she said. “But my business was related to that location,” not even a lie, she thought ironically, “and now it is critical I return to Moscow as soon as possible. Unfortunately these roads have gotten the better of me and I am lost.”

  He nodded, gazing at her critically. Then he said, “You say you have business at Lubyanka. I am just supposed to take your word for that?”

  “Of course not,” Tracie answered immediately. “If I may reach into the pocket of my blazer, I will show you my identification.”

  The cop nodded and Tracie removed her Olga Koruskaya ID, moving slowly and deliberately, both to avoid spooking the cop and to be sure she didn’t accidentally expose her shoulder holster or the handcuff she’d jammed onto her forearm. It was like trying to juggle chainsaw, a bowling ball and a baby and she hoped she’d managed to disguise the stress she was feeling.

  She lifted the card and held it out the window facing the cop.

  He examined it for a moment and then said, “Are you aware we have had a report of a military officer involved in a shooting not far from here?”

  Traci furrowed her eyebrows as she replaced the ID into her pocket. “A shooting? No, I was not aware of that.”

  “Yes. And the report came from a woman.”

  She shrugged and spread her hands. “So? I do not understand what…”

  She paused as she pretended to connect the dots. “You think I made such a call?”

  A quick chuckle at the absurdity of such a suggestion, and then she continued speaking before he could answer. “I am sorry, Officer, but I am not in the habit of calling the police about shootings I did not witness. All I wish to do is get out of this snarl of confusing roads and on the highway north to Moscow.”

  He nodded again. It was make-or-break time. He would either accept her story at face value and allow her to pass, or he would decide he needed to detain her while he checked it out.

  And if that were the case, things were about to get violent, perhaps even deadly.

  She worked at keeping her face bland and unconcerned as he considered her words. She’d begun to sweat as she spoke with the officer, partly from nerves but mostly because it was damned warm and humid, and her jacket did little to promote comfort.

  In any event, the perspiration was causing the handcuff she pushed up toward her elbow to loosen. It threatened to slide down to her wrist, an occurrence that Tracie thought would change the entire dynamic of this encounter.

  She pretended to scratch her right arm again, forcing the loosened cuff back toward her elbow. Just stay up there a little longer, she thought. One way or another, this meeting was about to end.

  “Okay,” the cop said, nodding one more time. “You may pass, Lieutenant. Have a nice drive to Moscow.”

  With all the nodding, Tracie had the absurd thought that he resembled one of the bobble-head animals people used to place in the rear windows of their cars when she was a kid, and she had to swallow back a relieved giggle.

  “Thank you, Officer,” she said as the cop turned to walk back to his cruiser.

  “Excuse me,” she called through the window, thinking she might just as well get something positive out of this delay. “Could you direct me to the highway?”

  Five minutes later she was on her way to her Moscow safe house.

  There wasn’t a cop in sight.

  49

  June 28, 1988

  3:15 a.m.

  CIA safe house, Moscow, Russia, USSR

  “So, how the hell did you do it?” In typical fashion CIA Director Aaron Stallings hadn’t bothered with any type of normal greeting upon answering her call via secure satellite phone.

  For her part Tracie was exhausted, having driven twenty-eight hours, straight through from Sevastopol to the CIA’s Moscow safe house. She’d arrived a little after eight-thirty in the evening and dropped into a deep sleep, waiting only long enough to remove the submersible communication decoder from her car and secure it inside the safe house before falling into bed. Eight-thirty in Moscow would be the middle of the workday in D.C., which meant Stallings would not be reachable for several hours.

  Her mouth felt dry and cottony when she awakened in the middle of the night to contact her handler, and a headache pounded relentlessly in her skull. She tried to recall the last time she’d gotten a good night’s sleep and could not.

  But she wasn’t about to reveal herself at anything less than full strength to Stallings, and she concentrated on putting plenty of energy into her answer. “I don’t have a clue what you mean. How did I do what? I recovered the comm device and then I eliminated The Weasel. Wasn’t that the plan?”

  “Sure, that was the plan. I assume you were too busy effecting your escape from Objekt 825 to pay much attention to the news reports in your area?”

  “You assume correctly. I haven’t read many newspapers since I left D.C.”

  “Well, you may want to check out yesterday’s issue of Pravda.”

  “I could do that. Or you could fill me in. One of the benefits of reporting directly to the head of the world’s preeminent intelligence-gathering agency is that the information I get from you is typically much more accurate than anything I could read in the paper anyway.”

  “One of the benefits?”

  “Yes.”

  “Presumably another is the pleasure of dealing with me one-on-one.”

  “Exactly. I’m sure I love our little chats every bit as much as you do.”

  Stallings chuckled. Or maybe he cleared his throat; Tracie wasn’t sure which. “Anyway,” he said, “my sources are telling me that your good friend, General Ivan Gregorovich, is being held on a murder charge. The victim, as you’re undoubtedly aware, is a KGB operative by the name of Andrei Lukashenko.”

  “So he has been charged.” It was her turn to chuckle. “I have to be honest, Boss, I figured he’d be released from custody within a few hours, because it was one of the weakest setups you could possibly imagine. There’s absolutely no forensic evidence suggesting he killed The Weasel because, of course, he didn’t.”

  “You know how things work in the USSR. If you make enemies of the wrong people, there’s little doubt as to the result of any criminal trial, evidence be damned. And in this particular case, the KGB is furious to have lost their trusted pipeline into the classified secrets of their enemies.”

  “But surely the KGB doesn’t really believe Gregorovich killed their guy. What possible motive would he have?”

  “Undoubtedly they do know. But the last thing the KGB will ever acknowledge is that a foreign operative was able to eliminate their man inside their own country.”

  Tracie chuckled. “That would be a really bad look for them.”

  “That’s right. And add to that the fact that as the top military purchasing specialist, it’s a given that somewhere along the line—probably more than once—General Gregorovich likely vetoed the purchase of equipment the KGB very badly wanted, earning himself—”

  “Earning himself a very powerful enemy,” Tracie interrupted, pleased to be able to finish the boss’s sentence and thereby annoy him.

  “More than one enemy would be my guess.”

  She chuckled again. “The whole plan was spur of the moment. I mostly did it to create a diversion in order to cover my escape. I didn’t think there was any way it would actually work.”

  “It worked.”

  “So you really believe Gregorovich will be convicted?”

  “I do. And even if I’m wrong about that, and he somehow manages to escape conviction, his military career is certainly over. He’s finished.”

  “So his obsession with me—”

  “Is irrelevant,” Stallings interjected, clearly pleased to even the score at one interruption apiece. “H
e can rant and rave all he wants about the redheaded American spy; no one in any position of authority will pay attention to him ever again. His credibility is shot.”

  “That’s the best news I can ever remember getting at three o’clock in the morning,” Tracie said.

  “I’m glad to hear it. And since you’re so wide-awake, you might just as well load the comm device into your car and start driving now. I want to get that thing out of Russia and back to the states as soon as possible. I’ll have your Gulf of Finland ride ready in twelve hours, and the agency jet waiting in Helsinki to get you home.”

  “No rest for the weary, I guess.”

  “Pssh,” Stallings huffed. “You’ll have a whole transatlantic airplane ride to sleep.”

  “I’ll see you soon, Boss.”

  “Yes you will.”

  “One last question before I go.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I assume now that Gregorovich is out of commission, presumably for good, I won’t be stuck cooling my heels in D.C. this time when I get back?”

  “You assume correctly,” Stallings shot back. “Now get moving and stop bothering me. I’ve got work to do.”

  __________

  Tracie Tanner returns soon in her tenth action-packed thriller. 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 two dozen novels and five 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 four beautiful grandchildren. He loves to hear from readers and other authors; connect on Facebook, Twitter @AllanLeverone, and at AllanLeverone.com.