Objekt 825 (Tracie Tanner Thrillers Book 9) by Allan Leverone (phonics reading books .txt) 📕

get the jump on his pursuer as the man entered, but that wouldn’t work. The tracker had to remain on his car in order to prevent the operative following him from being spooked. The minute his pursuer realized the tracker had been removed from Andrei’s car, he would know he’d been made and would disappear.

He decided the best strategy would be to park the Volga nose-in to the front of the old factory building. It was how one would park if he had nothing to hide, and thus the least likely to arouse suspicion.

Andrei did so and then entered the building to wait.

33

 

June 25, 1988

10:25 a.m.

Northern outskirts of Sevastopol, Russia, USSR

 

Following the blinking red dot was not an easy proposition. The screen on Tracie’s GPS receiver was small, and to make matters worse, the only guidance it provided as to the location of the transmitter was directional. The positioning of the dot on her screen—at the top right-hand corner—meant nothing more specific than that the target was somewhere northeast of her current location.

There was no way of gauging distance. The Weasel could be a few hundred feet in front of her or he could be five miles or more. Or anything in-between.

She knew he’d been moving, though, as she drove away from forest where she’d hidden Morozov. The dot meandered around the upper portion of the screen as Lukashenko drove, his position changing relative to the GPS receiver.

Tracie had been tracking him for forty minutes, slowly circling Sevastopol to the east, when the dot became stationary. Lukashenko was no longer driving.

Strange.

She glanced at her watch. It was just before ten-thirty in the morning, an odd time for him to be stopping considering he couldn’t have been on the road for more than an hour. Probably less, assuming he’d overnighted in Sevastopol.

Instantly alarm bells began ringing in her head. She’d thought she would be tailing the man for hours, that maybe he would stop around noon for lunch and then continue on  until late afternoon or early evening.

Could he be eating lunch already? It was possible but unlikely.

Maybe he had a meeting set up with another KGB operative?

Again, it was possible, but without any intel regarding Andrei Lukashenko and the kind of schedule he kept, there was no way for Tracie even to hazard a guess.

Or it could be something entirely different, unrelated to his work for the KGB. Maybe he had a relative in Sevastopol, or a friend or lover. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well and had pulled his car over to rest.

The possibilities were endless. The one thing Tracie wasn’t going to do was give up after deciding on a course of action, especially without a concrete reason for doing so. The Weasel had unexpectedly fallen into her lap after completing the first half of her mission. Whether she ended him in Sevastopol, or Moscow, or somewhere else entirely was irrelevant.

She continued to drive, studying the dot closely, not sure whether she was hoping it would begin moving again or remain stationary. Traffic had been moderate as she skirted Sevastopol, but the area north of the city seemed relatively remote. As she continued to close on her target, the roads emptied out further, until Tracie found herself in a rural, heavily forested area. What few vehicles she encountered were almost all trucks, eighteen-wheel box carriers, tankers and the like.

She had a strong suspicion The Weasel was near.

She watched the screen closely and drove on.

The multiple turns had left her uncertain of her exact position in relation to Sevastopol proper, although she knew the city was somewhere to the south. She wondered whether Morozov and the dead soldier had been discovered yet.

Probably.

If so, the furious base commander would even now be organizing an intensive search for the woman who’d humiliated him and stolen what he certainly viewed as Soviet property. She doubted he would advise his men to spare her life as she had spared his.

She forced that thought from her mind and focused on her current situation. She was in an area that was mostly deserted but industrial, passing a series of concrete and metal buildings that at one time had seemingly been a sort of loosely interconnected manufacturing park, its facilities separated by the occasional private Russian home.

The lack of vehicular traffic was cause for concern. If the Soviets weren’t looking for the woman who’d killed a Russian soldier and assaulted Objekt 825’s commanding officer yet, they would be very soon, and this area seemed to offer little in the way of concealment for someone who stood out the way Tracie knew she did.

For a moment she considered giving up on The Weasel and getting out of Sevastopol while she still could. No one would ever know she’d bailed out of the second half of her assignment. She could tell Aaron Stallings Lukashenko had driven out of Objekt 825 after dropping off the electronic device and disappeared, and he would find that explanation perfectly plausible.

And her odds of escaping successfully would be much greater.

The notion flitted through her mind for a half-second, maybe less, before she disregarded it, feeling a sense of shame even to have entertained the possibility. She’d failed on assignments before, of course she had. It was the nature of covert intelligence work; the victories were few and far between while the losses seemed to mount continuously.

But one thing she had never done was to abandon an assignment. She’d put her heart and soul into every mission, in ways that had cost her immeasurably, both physically and emotionally.

That wasn’t going to change now.

One more turn brought one more ancient Russian factory into view, crumbling, ghostly and almost certainly abandoned. But parked in front of the structure was a car she recognized from her surveillance yesterday.

Andrei Lukashenko’s car.

She slowed