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

By the time he’d taken three steps into the facility, Ivan knew something was wrong. The place was still and silent, and felt empty for a building inside which two other people should have been standing. Not only that, he thought he could smell the sharp tang of gunpowder.

By the time he’d taken three more steps the problem had become clear.

And it was a big one.

A large man with long silver hair lay prone on the floor in front of a long manufacturing table, blood splattering the floor around his skull.

The prisoner was nowhere to be seen.

Ivan cursed and hurried across the room, cognizant of the fact that the woman—who’d already proven herself to be extremely dangerous—could be lurking somewhere inside this facility, waiting to blow his brains out. He knew it as a theoretical concept, but the room was massive and open, with nowhere for her to hide. And he needed to see what the hell had happened.

He slowed his approach as he neared Lukashenko. Squinted and examined the body without touching it. The Weasel was almost certainly dead. Even through the blood and the mass of hair, Ivan could see that one side of the man’s skull currently featured two holes more than it should have, and the other side had been partially caved in, as if the girl had bludgeoned him with some unknown heavy object.

Lying on the floor perhaps a meter from Lukashenko’s body was a gun. A Makarov. It was The Weasel’s own weapon, in all probability.

Ivan stepped to it and then bent and picked it up. He didn’t know where the young woman who’d done all this damage had gone, but he wasn’t taking the chance that she might step out from behind a pillar or somehow materialize from under the long table, pick up the gun and use it on him.

He stood unmoving, trying to decide how to proceed. This development was confusing and, needless to say, more than a little unsettling, but one thing that had become crystal clear the last few seconds was that there would be no “interrogation” of the redheaded spy today.

There would be no transporting of the woman to Lubyanka.

There would be no satisfaction in his obsessive quest to extract vengeance from the woman who had caused him such personal humiliation.

He turned in a full circle, fuming. He hadn’t realized until just now how badly he needed to unleash his inner demons, to give in to the long-dormant compulsion to lash out, to strike and slash and damage human flesh.

To make another person cringe and cower before him and beg for mercy that would not come.

Ivan sighed deeply and tried to tamp down on his bitter disappointment. If there was one positive to take out of this experience, it was that the woman had clearly not been removed from the Soviet Union. He had thought her CIA handlers would be smarter than to allow her to remain within his reach, but her presence indicated otherwise.

If she’s been apprehended once, she can be apprehended again. Today’s utter—and deadly—failure by Lukashenko to control one prisoner did not mean Ivan’s quest for revenge would not be successful, it meant only that it must be delayed. He did not like waiting, but Ivan Gregorovich could be a patient man when necessary.

He would wait her out.

Obviously the flyers he had distributed to Lubyanka and other KGB facilities had served their purpose. He would redouble his efforts, produce even more flyers and distribute them even farther afield. He would include military bases and militsiya stations in his distribution.

Eventually, he would find her again.

Eventually, he would have his vengeance.

Ivan looked down at Lukashenko and shook his head. “You should have been more careful, Comrade,” he muttered, before spinning on his heel to exit the facility and return to Moscow.

There was no reason to call the authorities because it was clear the redheaded CIA agent was long gone. Had she still been here, she would almost certainly have assaulted Ivan again. She was his only concern. The fact that Andrei Lukashenko had gone and gotten himself killed was of no concern to Ivan, and contacting the militsiya at this point would result only in Ivan having to answer a lot of pointless questions about what he was doing here and why he’d shown up unexpectedly hundreds of kilometers from Moscow at the scene of a brutal murder.

Better just to fly home and wait. Eventually Lukashenko’s body would be discovered, and the authorities could conduct their investigation without Ivan’s involvement.

He stepped through the door and into the overcast, humid air and found himself staring into the drawn handguns of at least a half-dozen militsiya officers, all taking cover behind the open doors of their patrol cars. He realized too late that he was still holding Lukashenko’s gun and almost cursed out loud.

“Drop your weapon and get on the ground, face down,” one of the officers called.

“You do not know who I am,” Ivan answered, doing his best to sound haughty and imperious. “I most certainly will not—”

“Drop the gun and get on the ground right now,” the same officer interrupted, his tone sharp and strident. “Or we will put you down. This is your last warning.”

Ivan hesitated for just a moment and then tossed Lukashenko’s Makarov to the side. As he sank to his knees on the crumbling pavement, one thought repeated itself as if on a continuous loop through his racing brain: You are in big trouble.

47

June 25, 1988

3:55 p.m.

Abandoned manufacturing plant north of Sevastopol, Russia, USSR

Tracie watched the takedown of General Gregorovich from the cover of the trees. Four Sevastopol Militsiya cruisers had raced up the access road just minutes after Gregorovich’s arrival, warning lights flashing but without the use of sirens.

They had come to a stop