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

in a ragged semicircle approximately twenty feet from the entrance to the old factory building, and a total of six officers had emerged: a pair of Russian cops from two of the cruisers and single officers from the other two. Their guns were drawn and the tension in their posture as they took cover behind their open doors told Tracie the militsiya dispatcher had treated her report of a shooting in progress with the seriousness it deserved.

He came waltzing out of the factory, clearly planning to flee the scene, and walked straight into the thicket of guns being held by the half-dozen anxious cops.

And he was holding Lukashenko’s Makarov—the apparent murder weapon—in his hands. It was everything Tracie could have hoped for.

Eventually an autopsy would be performed on the dead KGB operative and it would become clear he’d died before the pair of 9mm slugs had been fired into his skull, but for now she felt certain the police activity accompanying the murder arrest of a prominent Soviet general would be more than sufficient to permit her to slip quietly away.

If she could put fifty to one hundred kilometers between herself and Objekt 825 before Gregorovich explained the scenario to the investigators’ satisfaction—and she suspected it was going to take a lot longer than that—she knew she would be able to evade capture and escape Russia with the submersible communication device.

She smiled grimly as Gregorovich tossed Lukashenko’s gun aside and dropped to the pavement. The officers broke cover and approached him slowly. One cop stepped to the gun and kicked it farther away from Gregorovich, as though he thought the general—now face down on the hot pavement—might somehow slither to it and open fire, all while being covered by five other cops.

It occurred to Tracie that she should be using this time to make her way to her Lada and get the hell out of Dodge. But this assignment had been so difficult, with none of it going the way she’d planned and every step of the way being filled with figurative landmines, that she thought she’d earned the satisfaction of taking a few minutes to watch Gregorovich suffer.

Besides, these cops weren’t going anywhere anytime soon. A pair of them would load Gregovoich in the back of their cruiser and take him away, and boatloads more cops and investigators would begin arriving any time now, but all of their attention would be devoted to the crime scene.

Eventually, they would fan out and search a wider area for evidence, particularly if Gregorovich were able to convince them an American spy had, up until three-thirty or so, been held at the facility.

That would take time, though, and by then Tracie would be long gone.

Across the parking lot, an officer knelt with his knee centered on Gregorovich’s back as he slapped a pair of handcuffs onto the general’s wrists. Even from a distance, Tracie could see two things quite clearly: the cuffs were nearly identical to the ones Lukashenko had used to secure her to the iron equipment arm, and the militsiya officer was being much rougher with Gregorovich than he necessarily needed to be.

The officer pulled the general to his feet and marched him across the lot to one of the cruisers. The distance was too far for Tracie to hear what was being said, but she could see Gregorovich speaking urgently to the cop, a stream of narrative that she didn’t need to hear to interpret: “I am General Ivan Gregorovich, and you are making a big mistake. Let me explain what happened right now, or I will have your job.”

Whatever he was saying, the general’s soliloquy was having little effect on the cop. The man remained stone-faced and silent as he loaded Gregorovich into the back of the cruiser and slammed the door.

Tracie almost felt a stab of sympathy for the handcuffed general. The day was overcast, but the air remained warm and laden with moisture. With all of the cruiser’s windows tightly closed, the interior of the car would become unbearably hot in a matter of minutes. It probably already had.

Then she thought about what she’d had to endure with Lukashenko, and imagined some of the things Gregorovich had had in store for her. Any grain of sympathy that had been trying to sprout dried up and disappeared.

After securing the general in the car, the officer returned to the others, who had clustered together and begun approaching the factory entrance. The man who’d slapped the cuffs on Gregorovich was clearly in charge, pointing to the building and instructing two of the officers to enter, while the others fanned out to secure the exterior.

And Tracie decided it was time to leave.

All of the cops’ attention would be on the building, particularly when they observed the gruesome scene inside. Lukashenko’s demise had not been pretty, and even the cops, who witnessed ugliness and death on a routine basis, would feel their stomachs turn a bit when they saw The Weasel’s partially crushed skull.

She melted back into the trees and began making her way to her car. Accessing it would take a little time, since she was forced to give the factory building a wide berth. Her whole body ached, including her ankle. Running on it might not have been her smartest move, but if she hadn’t done so, her plan to entrap General Gregorovich might not have succeeded.

Overall, more than a fair trade-off, she thought.

It took better than ten minutes to work her way around to her parked car. She’d placed it where a thick stand of trees separated it from the old factory building, so the only chance of being spotted by a militsiya officer was if the man abandoned his position outside the crime scene and hiked through the trees to this secondary parking lot.

She knew that would not happen, so once satisfied that the trees stood between