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

feet as close to her body as possible, lowered them, and released the gun.

And breathed deeply in relief.

Dropping to the floor again, Tracie faced the table and picked the gun up in her left hand. She was right-handed and had only rarely held a pistol in her left, so it felt awkward and strange to be doing so.

But that strangeness was a small price to pay for the possibility of freedom.

She pulled her right hand toward her body until the metal links had been stretched tight. Instantly her wrist and knuckles began screaming in complaint. Again.

She ignored the complaints and leaned down over the table until her face was inches above its surface. She placed the business end of the Makarov directly against the links, keeping the barrel parallel to the tabletop, the gun aimed the length of the big room to minimize the possibility a ricochet striking her body.

Then she squeezed the trigger.

The gun roared and the links snapped. Tracie had been exerting as much force as she could manage in order to keep tension on the links, and she tumbled off the table before she could catch herself.

She dropped onto her side on the concrete floor, bruising her elbow and knee and not caring in the least.

She was free.

There was no time to spare. She sprinted into the hallway where Lukashenko had forced her to drop her weapon. It was also where she’d seen him disappear after picking up her backup gun and combat knife. She entered the office where he’d been lying in wait for her and found all three of her weapons tossed on top of an ancient, dented metal desk. He’d been so confident she was no threat he hadn’t even bothered to hide them.

She slipped her combat knife into its sheath at her right ankle and then repeated the process with her backup Beretta in the holster at her left ankle. Instantly she felt more at ease, more like herself, more in control.

Her primary weapon didn’t get holstered. She held it in her right hand, barrel facing the floor, ready to raise it and fire instantly should Ivan Gregorovich come waltzing through the door. Hopefully, killing him wouldn’t become necessary, because now that she was free, she thought she might have a better plan than two 9mm slugs in the back of her nemesis’ skull.

If she got lucky—even luckier than she’d been to recover Lukashenko’s gun and escape her bindings—she might just manage to divert the Red Army’s attention long enough for her to slip out of the country with the submersible communications decoder.

If she got really lucky, maybe she could even get Gregorovich—and by extension, the KGB and Red Army—off her back permanently.

But none of that would come to fruition if she were forced to execute him.

And she knew he would be here soon.

She ran back into the plant’s main assembly floor and knelt next to Andrei Lukashenko’s prone body, careful to avoid stepping in the blood. There was a lot of blood.

She was by now almost certain he was dead, because he hadn’t moved so much as an inch since she’d stomped his skull while chained to the equipment arm. A quick check of the nonexistent pulse at his carotid was enough to confirm her suspicions.

Lukashenko was long gone. He’d probably been dead from the moment her body weight crushed his skull.

It would have been better for her plan had he still been alive, but there was nothing Tracie could do about that now. She wrinkled her nose and placed her left hand on Lukashenko’s shoulder, then lifted his bulk just enough to slip her right hand into his suit coat’s breast pocket and remove the Olga Koruskaya ID he’d removed when patting her down.

The ID went into her own breast pocket and then she picked up Lukashenko’s weapon and placed it against his temple. She squeezed off two rounds in rapid succession, BOOM-BOOM, the blasts echoing through the empty room.

Then she wiped down the gun to remove any trace of her fingerprints. It wasn’t like the Soviet police—or anyone else, for that matter—would be able to track her down via those prints. There was no official record of them in either the Soviet Union or the United States.

But there was no reason to offer them up to the Soviets, and besides, she had another reason for wiping the weapon clean.

She took her time and did it right. Then, satisfied with her handiwork, Tracie dropped the weapon next to Lukashenko’s corpse, his skull now featuring two extra holes.

Hopefully, once Gregorovich arrived and found The Weasel dead on the floor, he would pick up the weapon and check it to be sure it wasn’t going to discharge and kill him. It was the kind of reflexive action a military man might take when faced with the scenario he would be walking into.

Getting Gregorovich to contribute his prints to the gun’s surface would be helpful to Tracie’s plan but not necessary. If he was smart and didn’t touch it, the homicide investigators would hopefully come to the logical conclusion upon discovering it had been wiped clean: that he’d done it to protect himself after shooting Lukashenko.

The scene wasn’t perfect, as far as framing General Gregorovich for murder was concerned. Tracie knew there was plenty of evidence indicating another person had been inside this manufacturing plant. The single handcuff still secured to the iron equipment arm was proof enough of that.

If the police did even an adequate investigation—assuming Tracie was fortunate enough to get them here after Gregorovich’s arrival and before he fled the scene—they would quickly determine General Gregorovich had not been the one to murder Andrei Lukashenko.

But she had been working in and around Soviet Russia for years, plenty long enough to see firsthand how their justice system worked. There were Russian law enforcement