But to his surprise, no sooner had he turned the corner onto Seventh Street than Tracie’s battered Toyota pulled away from the liquor store and turned south.
And Marshall followed, much more carefully this time, reminded by his last attempt that, until getting fired earlier today, Tracie Tanner did this sort of thing for a living and he did not. Unless he focused one hundred percent of his attention on staying out of sight, she would spot him again. And send him home again.
It might happen anyway. Probably would, in fact.
He tried to figure out why in the world he was doing this, skulking around in the middle of the night following someone who had made it clear she didn’t want his help, but he couldn’t come up with a good answer. Tracie was little more than a work acquaintance, someone with whom he had shared good conversation at one party years ago.
And it wasn’t like she needed his protecting. She was the covert ops specialist. She had risked her life dozens of times in locations spanning the globe, where one slip-up would have resulted in imprisonment or worse. She had been involved in fistfights, knife fights, gunfights, and more.
He, on the other hand, was nothing more than a data analyst, sifting through reports, video and voice recordings, and other minutiae in search of intel with national security implications. His work was important, Marshall knew, but nothing about it qualified him in any way to assume he could protect a seasoned CIA field operative from the scary bad guys.
It was silly. Pointless. He should be home in bed, getting a good night’s sleep in preparation for another long day sifting through foreign telecommunications data in the never-ending quest to keep America safe and secure.
And yet here he was, maintaining a reasonable distance from Tracie’s car while still—more or less—keeping it in sight. He knew she must be distracted by the events of the last few days, or she likely would have made him within five blocks, extra precautions or no extra precautions.
The fact that she hadn’t seen him yet told him he was doing the right thing. Tracie Tanner was truly alone. Even more alone than she had been on the most dangerous mission she had ever undertaken inside the borders of the Soviet Union. She had no job. No backup. No official sanction. No one else was even aware of what she was doing.
She continued to drive and Marshall continued to follow in a seemingly random pattern that somehow felt not so random, and it occurred to Marshall with the force of a ton of bricks why he was out here in the middle of the night doing a job for which he was utterly unprepared. It was more than just the fact that she was working on a high wire with no safety net.
She was on to something. She knew it and so did he.
Everyone else would recognize it as well, eventually. But for now, Washington officialdom was lurching along as it always did—with a slavish devotion to geopolitical narratives that were often alarmingly out of date but that survived unquestioned until some watershed event occurred, significant enough to shake the blinders off of the bureaucrats and the politicians.
Tracie was convinced that the kidnapping of Secretary of State Humphries was such an event, and Marshall wanted to help her. He needed to help her.
And then another realization struck him with a crystal clarity he had never before experienced. He was infatuated with her. He might even be falling in love with her, despite the fact such a notion was patently ridiculous. Was it even possible to love someone when the sum total of your personal interaction with that person could be counted on the fingers of one hand? When the only thing you have in common is a national security emergency?
Marshall Fulton was a muscular bear of a black man, raised in Louisiana by parents who had nothing much to offer their children but unconditional love and boundless optimism. He had escaped the grinding poverty of a New Orleans Eighth Ward housing project and against all odds carved out a life and a career for himself. He was proud to know he made a difference; that every day when he went to work he was contributing to the security of his country.
Tracie Tanner, on the other hand, was a petite redheaded white woman with porcelain skin who had been raised among the D.C. elite. He didn’t know much about her background, but what difference did it make, really? He was a large black man and she, a tiny white woman. To contemplate a relationship would be silly. Even if it was 1987 Washington and not 1963 Alabama, the hurdles facing them as a couple would be enormous.
And she had made it perfectly clear she was not interested.
Romance-wise or any-other-kind-of-wise.
Yet here he was, acting for all the world like a love-struck teenager trailing along behind his crush, wide-eyed and stupid, after being dismissed in no uncertain terms.
He followed anyway.
Eventually Tracie pulled her little Toyota to a stop in one of the grubbiest sections of D.C., a roughly ten-square-block underbelly of poverty and despair that was deceptively close to the White House and the Capitol building, but at the same time seemed light-years away.
He crept along a couple of blocks behind her, driving with his lights off. Traffic was almost nonexistent thanks to the neighborhood’s sheer devastation, and he was sure she would have noticed him had he not done so.
The moment she parked, Marshall drove into a trash-littered alleyway between two darkened three-story tenement buildings. He turned around—the space just barely wide enough—then nosed forward to the intersection and stopped, double-checking to be sure his doors were locked. The area seemed deserted, but Marshall had no desire to be pulled from his vehicle and beaten for cash because he was so focused on what was taking place up the block that he neglected to maintain awareness of his surroundings.
He peered to his right, eying the deserted sidewalk. Dozens of apparently abandoned, junked cars sat between his position and Tracie’s, their rusting hulks stripped of any items of value and left to rot. The junkers obscured his view of Tracie’s car, but he could clearly see the area immediately surrounding it on both sides, and knew he would be able to spot her the moment she climbed out.
And he did.
She got out and shrugged a backpack onto her right shoulder, looking like a young college girl setting off to a class that was being held in a war zone. She took a moment to scan in all directions before setting off along a cross street to Marshall’s right. She disappeared in seconds and he was faced with his first tough decision: follow her or stay where he was?
He reached for the door handle and then changed his mind. He would wait where he was. For a while.
28
Thursday, September 10, 1987
2:20 a.m.
Washington, D.C.
Tracie moved carefully but quickly. She had briefly considered trying the keys she had secured to enter the school through the front door—time was of the essence, after all—but immediately discarded the idea as reckless. If more than one man had been stationed inside the old building, and she was almost certain that was the case, she could be walking right into his arms by using the main entrance.
Instead, using the building for cover, she melted into the shadows and moved directly to the rear corner. On each side wall of the schoolhouse was an old-fashioned cast-iron fire escape bolted to the bricks. It was the type with a small landing outside an oversized second-story window, where children and teachers could exit through the window onto the landing, and then lower the iron ladder to the ground and descend to safety.
The ladder had been folded into two long sections and stored on the second-floor landing. It had been padlocked in place years ago, probably decades ago, to prevent vandals from lowering it and climbing into the building. Even from the ground, in the darkness and shadows, Tracie could see the lock was rusted and corroded so badly it would never open, even if she had a key.
But she didn’t care. She wasn’t going to use the ladder.
She knelt and uncoiled a length of light mountain climbing rope from her backpack, then closed the pack and tucked it neatly against the wall on the ground. She hated to leave it but couldn’t
afford the extra weight. The length of rope featured a carabiner on one end and was longer than what she needed, but that was a hell of a lot better than the alternative.
Tracie knew she had to hurry. She would be completely unprotected during this process, an easy target should a second guard come to check on the whereabouts of the first.
She grasped the carabiner end of the rope in her hand and stepped backward to get a better angle. Then she tossed it up and over the iron railing ringing the landing. It dropped through the grates in the landing’s floor and fell to the ground. She quickly picked it up, gripping both ends of the now-secured rope in her hands.
Looked around carefully, alert for any signs of the presence of another human being.
Saw none.
And began climbing, hand over hand, lifting her entire one-hundred-ten-pound frame solely with her arms and shoulders. If anyone came around the front corner of the building now and saw her, she would be a sitting duck, hanging in the air, totally exposed, her Beretta and the gun she had taken off the Iraqi guard tucked away in the rear waistband of her jeans.
She climbed rapidly, her deceptively strong upper body allowing her to reach the iron landing after just a few seconds. Long experience and training had taught Tracie Tanner that survival in the field of covert ops almost always depended upon the operative’s ability to outmaneuver and outthink her enemies, and her near-obsessive focus on an exhaustive training regimen favored by elite Delta Force operators had more than once enabled her to fight—and/or run—her way out of tight situations.
But that was before she had been shot in both shoulders and though doctors told her the healing process was progressing well, the strain of climbing was testing those weakened shoulders to their very limit.
She shifted her grip from the rope to the iron bars of the landing’s railing, first her left hand and then her right, and tried to pull herself up. The bars were cool and slick with condensation from the autumn dew, and for a moment she struggled to maintain her grip. One hand slid down the railing, smashing the iron floor and bruising her hand.
She cursed silently and tried again.
Slipped again.
It wasn’t going to work. The bars were too slick.
She hung for a moment, considering her options. There was only one, short of admitting defeat and accessing the school some other way. She transferred her grip from the vertical bars of the railing to the horizontal grillwork of the landing’s iron floor. Then she lifted her feet, pushing them through the gaps between the railing bars, hooking them as tightly as she could. She tightened her stomach muscles and lifted her torso upward, straining to reach the top of the railing with her right hand.
An inch short.
She was sweating despite the cool temperatures, and her muscles were beginning to burn from the exertion of fighting gravity to keep her body suspended in the air. She could feel the iron bars bruising her ankles where they were jammed into the muscle and bone. Her calves felt as though they were being blasted from the inside with a flamethrower.
She panted out a deep breath and tried again, this time straining for the extra inch, feeling the iron dig into her ribs as she thrust her arm upward.
Her open left palm impacted the upper portion of the railing. She wrapped her fingers around the iron, withstanding the pain in her ribs for a moment longer to ensure she had the best possible grip. Then she unthreaded her feet from the bars. Her body swung away from the railing and then back, slamming into the iron and taking her breath away.
She held on doggedly. Gasped. Reached up with her right hand and gripped the iron, taking some of the strain off her left hand and aching shoulder. And then drew herself up until she could hook her armpits over the railing. She swung her legs over the top and dropped soundlessly to the floor of the fire escape.
The entire process took less than a minute.
* * *
The second floor window was closed and locked, but almost all of the ancient glass panels had been broken away over time, and Tracie simply reached through one of the panes, moving carefully to avoid slicing her arm on a jagged shard of broken glass, and unlatched the brass locking mechanism from the inside.
She struggled to push up the big casement window, to break the seal that time, weather, and lack of use had created on the moisture-swollen wood. After a moment the window slid sluggishly upward on its frame, and she was in.
She slipped through the opening and then turned and pulled the window closed behind her. Tracie quickly walked to a wide stairway adjacent to the end of the hallway. Now that she was inside, she had to discover what the hell was so important in here that armed members of the Iraqi mission to the United States were protecting it while other members visited in official vehicles at all hours of the night.
Before searching the school, though, it was critical she determine whether another guard was stationed at the front entrance or roaming the building. She removed her Beretta and crept down the stairs, alert for anyone who might appear around the corner.
No one did.
At the bottom of the stairs, Tracie went methodically from room to room, clearing them and finding nothing—and no one—of interest. The long-abandoned classrooms were all identical and all mostly empty, except for the occasional desk or chair that had for whatever reason never been removed.
She checked every classroom closet and each restroom, approaching with extreme caution, fully aware that behind every toilet stall might be a man with a weapon.
Nothing.
At the far end of the apparently deserted first floor was a suite of offices, some with windows that looked out on the front yard, offering a clear view of the main entrance. It was in one of these offices that Tracie assumed the guard who had stalked her earlier must have been stationed. The view of the empty street was as clear as the view of the front door.
But no one was here, either.
Why would the Iraqis go to such great lengths to keep secret whatever was happening inside this building, and leave just one man to guard the place, especially in the middle of the night? Were they that confident their activities would remain undetected? It was giving Tracie a bad feeling.
She shook her head in frustration. She must be missing something; what was it? She rolled her shoulders in a vain attempt to loosen them—they continued to ache badly after the strain of climbing the fire escape—and moved to the janitor’s stairway leading to the school’s basement.
It was almost completely dark, and as she descended the stairs, Tracie became aware of the sound of a running engine, muffled but identifiable. She waited at the bottom, giving her eyes time to adjust to the darkness and listening intently for any sign that she might not be alone.
A minute passed. Two. The only sound was the engine.
Acutely aware of the time passing—the risk of being discovered increased with each passing minute—Tracie removed the flashlight from the pocket of her jeans. She covered the lens as she had done across the street, leaving just a pinprick opening for the light to penetrate, then crouched and flicked the switch.
She rotated three hundred-sixty degrees, moving quickly. The basement was almost completely empty. It was a cavernous storage area from which all supplies, heating equipment, and whatever else had once occupied the space had long since been removed.
Except for a small generator that had been placed in one corner. Orange power cords snaked from it and ran up the concrete wall, where they continued through a hole in the ceiling. A crude exhaust system had been fashioned out of aluminum tubes, venting gases through a small window.
The generator chugged contentedly, the accompanying engine noise minimal thanks to generous amounts of acoustical padding that had been stuffed around the unit. The result was a small supply of power for whoever was using this building that would be undetectable to anyone who hadn’t done what Tracie did—break in.
She examined the generator assembly for a moment and then flicked off her flashlight and dropped it back into her
pocket. The discovery of the generator helped confirm her suspicions about the Iraqis and J. Robert Humphries. They needed power because they were keeping the secretary of state prisoner right here in this building, just blocks from the White House.
But so far she had found no concrete answers as to why, just more uncertainty, more unanswered questions. Maybe the answers were on the second floor. Unless she had missed something, the basement and the entire first floor were empty.
Something was here. Something had to be here. There was no way members of the Iraqi embassy were driving out here in the wee hours of the morning just to avail themselves of the fine D.C. late-summer air, and certainly no way they were employing one or more armed guards to protect an abandoned hulk of a building in which they should have no legitimate interest.
She thought about J. Robert Humphries and climbed the stairs. It was time to check out the second floor.
29
Thursday, September 10, 1987
2:35 a.m.
Washington, D.C.
Tracie flattened herself against the wall and strained to hear. The moment she had reached the top of the stairway leading to the long central hallway bisecting the second floor, she had seen what she was looking for: an open doorway with artificial light spilling out of it far down the hallway on the left.
The hallway itself had appeared deserted, and Tracie moved toward the light, knowing that any of the darkened rooms she passed on her way could contain some form of security prepared to put a bullet in her head. She cleared the rooms as quickly as possible as she went. None of them were occupied.
Beretta in hand, Tracie flitted silently along the hallway, keeping as close to the ancient metal lockers ringing the concrete-block construction as she could, until she reached the doorway. It had been left ajar, and an open padlock hung in a hasp, ready to be snapped closed to keep anyone from entering.
Or exiting.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 41
