He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
It didn’t. The guard glanced at the paperwork, sweeping his eyes over it for maybe five seconds, not bothering to hide his utter disinterest. Then he handed it back to Nikolai and said, “Come on in, then,” in a tired voice. He stepped back, and just like that, Nikolai was inside.
Nikolai smiled again and nodded. One of the reasons he had been so successful in his current line of work—in addition to his proficiency with dozens of weapons and his total lack of compunction when it came to taking human life—was his physical appearance. Nikolai Primakov was utterly unremarkable, from his thinning sandy hair to his gold-rimmed everyman glasses, to his wiry frame, to his average height, to his lack of identifying scars or blemishes.
He was easy to underestimate.
He blinked owlishly at the guard and said, “I would like to start on top floor. Where is elevator, please?”
The guard shook his head slightly. “The elevators are right over there, on the far side of the lobby.” He gestured vaguely at the far wall.
Nikolai pretended not to notice the guard’s derisive correction of his phrasing and peered across the lobby. He nodded, as if he hadn’t known for weeks where the elevators were located. He suspected he was more familiar with the interior of this building than the guard had ever been. “Thank you,” he said, bowing his head submissively and trundling his cart across the shiny marble floor.
He was completely alone when he reached the elevators. Thanks to the length of his exchange with the guard at the front door, all three janitorial workers who had entered in front of him were by now dispersed throughout the building. He pressed the button with the up arrow and turned to look in the direction of the front entrance while waiting for the elevator car. The guard hadn’t moved. He stood staring at Nikolai through narrowed eyes, his forehead wrinkled like a Shar-Pei puppy’s.
Nikolai hoped the man wouldn’t be a problem.
41
June 2, 1987
12:05 a.m.
Washington, D.C.
Tracie rolled over and checked the bedside clock. Its iridescent numerals bathed the room in an eerie green glow, giving the unfamiliar surroundings an alien, almost lunar cast. She slipped out of bed, barely rippling the mattress, moving with a feline grace and economy of motion that belied her tension. Shane continued to sleep, breathing heavily, smoothly.
She padded to the bathroom, peed without flicking on the light, padded back to bed, knowing she likely wouldn’t sleep any more tonight. She had not lied to Shane, not exactly, when she told him taking down the Russian assassin would be just another operation. But what she hadn’t told Shane, what she suspected he knew anyway—he was a lot of things, including one amazing lover, but he wasn’t stupid—was that a typical CIA op would have taken place after dozens, if not hundreds, of hours of preparation, and would only have been green-lighted after briefings, surveillance, and meticulous planning. And it would have involved a hell of a lot more people than one lone agent.
Her mission later today would be the exact opposite of that: a rushed intervention based on the uncorroborated words of a Soviet politician sitting thousands of miles away, and potentially unreliable information offered up under duress by a pair of Russian spies. There had been no preparation. Tracie had never even set foot inside the building she would enter to stop the assassination.
And she would be alone. Utterly and completely alone.
Tracie slipped under the covers. Next to her, Shane snored softly, the rhythm of his breathing steady, almost hypnotic. She supposed it stood to reason she would find herself going solo on the most important mission she would ever undertake. She had always been alone. Career-wise, personal-wise, every kind of wise. She had steadfastly refused to allow herself to get close to anyone, preferring to rely on her own devices, always.
Until the last couple of days.
Until falling like a lovesick teenage girl for the handsome Maine air traffic controller who had appeared out of nowhere, like the hero in some ridiculous romance novel, a hero who had saved her life at the last possible moment, literally sweeping her off her feet. He was good-looking and self-deprecating and generous and kind. His smile took her breath away. When they were together, it was all she could do not to throw him to the ground and rip his clothes off and ravage him.
And she knew he felt exactly the same about her.
And he was dying.
And when he was gone she would once again be alone.
She ran her hand gently over his chest, twirling the wiry hairs in her finger. She wondered how long it would take before he ceased to have any semblance of a normal life, before the cancer took him and he had no life at all. She thought about what he’d said, how no one really knows how long they have, how we’re all dying, some quicker than others, and realized it was truer for her than for most. Covert CIA work was dangerous and the careers of operatives tended to be short. So did their life spans.
Hell, there was the very real possibility that she wouldn’t survive beyond a few more hours. She was trying to put up a brave face—for herself as much as for Shane—but the fact of the matter was, trying to take down a KBG pro and his team, who had undoubtedly been planning this assassination for months, with no backup and no real plan of action, was likely a suicide mission.
And wouldn’t that be ironic? Fall in love, find out the man who had stolen your heart had mere weeks to live, and then die before he did. It was almost humorous in a cynical, black-hearted way. It was a play Shakespeare might have written had he been born four hundred years later than he was. Romeo and Juliet for the twentieth century.
Tracie smiled at the thought and was surprised to feel her eyelids getting heavy. She glanced at the clock with the ghostly green numerals. 12:15 a.m. She closed her eyes and slipped away.
42
June 2, 1987
12:20 a.m.
Minuteman Mutual Insurance Building, Washington, D.C.
The seventh floor of the Minuteman Mutual Insurance building was used for storage—cleaning and maintenance supplies, reams of paper, cast-off typewriters, word processors, office furniture, boxes and boxes of pens. All of the tools and equipment necessary for the operation of an American insurance company in the late twentieth century.
Nikolai assumed the janitors had already armed themselves with whatever materials they needed to begin their shift, so his only real concern was of the guard becoming suspicious and checking on the progress of the “floor refinishing” project. He pulled his cart quickly down the hallway, stopping in front of a door with a red-lettered sign that warned, ROOF — AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
He had disabled the alarm on a previous visit, so there was no way anyone would realize the door had been breached. Picking the lock was easy. Within thirty seconds of removing his lock-picking tools from the cart, he was pulling open the metal door. He pulled a heavy electric belt sander out of the cart and set it on the floor, using it to prop the door open.
Roof access was via a cement stairway slicing like an artery between reinforced cinderblock construction walls. The building had been erected close to a century ago, but the Victorian-era elegance of its interior did not extend to the portions the public would never see, and Nikolai knew it would take no small effort to muscle the cart up those narrow stairs.
He stepped through the doorway, then turned and grabbed the cart by its reinforced-steel frame. He lifted the front and pulled. The angle was all wrong, it was hard to get any leverage, he was straining, but after a moment he was rewarded by the sound of the cart’s metal front wheels clattering onto the first step.
He lifted and pulled again and gained the second step.
Lifted and pulled. Third step. The rear wheels squeaked and complained and then slid onto the first step.
Nikolai breathed deeply while maintaining a grip on the cart. As he began pulling again, a disembodied voice from somewhere down the seventh-floor hallway said, “Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doin
g up there?”
Nikolai froze. Cursed softly in Russian.
He released his grip on the cart, hoping it wouldn’t lurch back down the stairs and nullify his hard-earned gains. It didn’t.
He wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead and reached down to his ankle, pulling his combat knife smoothly out of its sheath under his pant leg. He positioned it in his right hand, blade resting against his inner forearm, handle nestled in his palm. He turned his arm so the knife would be invisible to whoever was in the hallway, then placed a look of innocent confusion on his face.
He squeezed past the cart and descended the stairs, then walked through the doorway. Moving briskly down the hallway was the guard who had examined his forged work order. Nikolai had known the man was suspicious of him but hadn’t really thought he would pursue him. He had been wrong. The guard’s face was dark, his eyes hooded, and this hand rested on the butt of his weapon as he challenged Nikolai again. “What are you doing, boy? What business does a floor refinisher have on the roof?”
Nikolai walked forward slowly, non-threateningly, smiling and nodding to placate the guard even as the man moved along the hallway to intercept him. He was still at least eight meters away. Too far for Nikolai’s purposes.
“I am sorry,” Nikolai said meekly.
Six meters.
He continued. “I do not know where…”
Four meters. Still too far.
The guard slowed, confused. “Do not know where…what?” He spread his hands in a show of frustration.
Two meters, almost close enough.
“I do not know where…” The man was now directly in front of Nikolai, and although his hand still rested on the butt of his gun, it was as useless to him as if Nikolai had taken it away and thrown it off the roof. He was a dead man. He just didn’t realize it yet.
With a practiced flick of his wrist, Nikolai dropped the knife into his hand, spinning it effortlessly so the blade faced outward. The guard recognized the danger much too late and took one stumbling step backward just as Nikolai attacked, his arm a blur. He plunged the knife into the guard’s ample belly and slashed upward between the bones of the rib cage.
The guard gasped. Drew in a shuddering breath as if to scream. Didn’t. Half-coughed and half-gasped. Started to scream again. Nikolai covered the man’s mouth with his left hand as he used his right to shove the guard’s hand away from his gun. He clubbed the guard behind the ear with the butt of his combat knife, and the man dropped straight to the floor.
Nikolai swore again, angry and annoyed. The man would be dead within minutes, if he wasn’t already, but he was bleeding all over the place. There was suddenly a lot to do. If he didn’t get this mess cleaned up, it would be the first thing the employees noticed when they showed up for work in the morning.
Nikolai reached under the guard’s armpits and dragged him down the hallway to the roof-access door. A trail of blood marked the journey. He dropped the guard onto the floor and grabbed the cart with both hands. The stairway was too narrow to haul the guard up it without first moving the cart, so Nikolai was forced to forfeit his progress. He yanked it angrily back down to the seventh floor hallway where it wobbled dangerously and nearly tipped over.
Shit. Things were not going according to plan. Okay, take it easy. Relax. There was plenty of time to get everything back under control. Nikolai composed himself, slowing his breathing, clearing his mind. Finally, still muttering but now refocused, he hooked his arms once more under the guard’s armpits and dragged the man up the stairs to the roof.
He emerged, breathing heavily, through a rusting steel bulkhead that had once been painted grey but was now pocked with rust and faded almost down to the bare metal. The roof was flat as a flood plain and covered with gravel. Various protuberances—vents and air-conditioning units and pipes whose purposes were unknown to Nikolai—jutted up out of the structure, combining with the gauzy moonlight to make the surface appear stark and menacing.
Nikolai ignored it all. He had seen the roof in surveillance photos and even picked the lock and climbed up here himself during two of the three trips he had made into the building to familiarize himself with its layout in preparation for this mission. He pulled the guard through the entrance and turned toward the rear of the building. Once clear of the bulkhead, he placed the body alongside it as close as possible to the base, concealing the cooling corpse as best he could.
He retraced his steps to the seventh floor, moving quickly. In the hallway he examined closed doors until finding one with a sign on the front that said, JANITORIAL SUPPLIES. He opened the door and found a wheeled plastic cart in one corner. It was shaped like an oversized bucket with a wringer built into the side. A mop had been placed in the wringer, its handle reaching almost all the way to the ceiling. The bucket was half filled with dirty water. Nikolai thanked his lucky stars for the innate laziness of American workers.
He stuck his head out the door and glanced down the hallway. No one there. How likely was it the janitorial workers would notice the guard was missing?
He rolled the cart down the hallway, then stopped at the spot where he had gutted the guard. The man was big, the spillage substantial. There was plenty of evidence to clean. Nikolai dipped the mop into the dirty water and got to work, swishing the mop through the blood, smearing some around the floor but removing the heaviest of the stain, which had only just begun to dry at the edges.
Nikolai examined the floor and decided the stain was still too obvious. He rolled the cart back to the janitor’s closet. Dumped the dirty water and watched it disappear down the sink. Refilled the bucket with fresh water and some detergent, then rolled back to the murder scene.
Tried again.
Better.
One more pass and the evidence of the slaughter was now no more than a faded light brown stain that could have been anything. Nikolai wrung out the mop and moved quickly down the hallway toward the roof access door, erasing from the tiles most of the blood trail he had created when he dragged the guard up to the roof. He stopped when he reached the door. There was no reason to mop the stairway. The door would be closed soon—barring any further interruptions—and no one would see the evidence until it was much too late.
He examined the hallway with a critical eye. Not perfect, but it would have to do. He hurriedly returned the mop and bucket to the janitor’s closet. Stepped out and closed the door. Still no unwanted visitors. He turned and sprinted to the roof access and once more began the laborious process of pulling the tools of his murderous trade up onto the roof.
43
June 2, 1987
8:00 a.m.
Washington, D.C.
Shane’s head hurt. That was the first thing he noticed. His eyes were closed and he lay on his side and it felt as though someone was shining a flashlight squarely into his face. He opened his eyes slightly, two tiny slits. No flashlight. Nobody shining anything into his face. The motel room curtain was half-drawn, holding the morning sun partially at bay. From behind he could hear furtive sounds of movement.
He rolled over and sat up, moving slowly until he could gauge the extent of the pain inside his skull. From in front of the bathroom door Tracie flashed a tight-lipped smile in his direction, and just like that he didn’t give a damn about his headache. She looked even more beautiful than he remembered, and he wouldn’t have thought that possible.
“You’re a heavy sleeper,” she said. She was dressed in an outfit he didn’t recognize, a business suit, something a young female executive might wear.
He rubbed his eyes and ran a hand across his face. He wondered what the hell time it was. “What the hell time is it?” he asked.
“Eight o’clock,” she said. “I knew you were exhausted so I tried to be quiet. We’re not far from the Minuteman Mutual Insurance building, so I wanted to let you get as much rest as possible.”
“Quiet? You were quiet as a mouse,” he said. “Last thing I remember is that noise you make when…well, you know.”
“Where’d you get the outfit?” he asked. “You look terrific.”
“Went shopping last night after you zonked out. Hit the store just before closing. I went out this morning and got breakfast. There’s coffee and a croissant for you,” she nodded at a brown paper bag on top of the small bedside table.
“Thanks for the grub,” he said gratefully, reaching for the coffee.
“No problem.” She looked at him closely. “I brought you something for the pain, too. How are you feeling?”
“Never better,” he lied. He didn’t know exactly how Tracie was planning to stop the assassination scheduled for today, but he knew she needed help, and the only way she might even consider letting him ride along was if she thought his headache had disappeared.
“Liar,” she said mildly.
“Listen,” he said, to change the subject quickly, “what’s the plan for today?”
“Well, let’s see,” Tracie answered, cupping her chin in her hand and pretending to think. “Dress up in my new outfit, have breakfast and, oh, I don’t know, maybe foil an assassination plot. You know, the usual.”
She was keeping things light but Shane could sense her tension. “I don’t understand,” he said. “You know where the shooter is going to be—on the roof of that insurance building—but how in the world are you going to access it? The building will be locked down tight as a drum, won’t it? And for that matter, how is the Russian going to get into position? Won’t he be spotted?”
“All good questions,” Tracie answered. “Undoubtedly the buildings have been swept in anticipation of the president’s visit, but the sweep will have been done yesterday and it will have been routine, matter-of-fact. As far as we know, there is no reason for the Secret Service to suspect anything might be wrong. And don’t forget, this is Washington, DC—presidential movements are routine here.
Black Ops Bundle: Volume One Page 67
