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

herself and the car, Tracie broke cover and double-timed to the vehicle. She slipped behind the wheel and eased her door closed, then checked the back seat to be sure her shoebox-sized prize was still where she’d left it.

It was.

She started the car and began driving north, away from Lukashenko and Gregorovich and the six-man Sevastopol police contingent. She was sweaty and dirty and sore and exhausted, but also happy. Against all odds, she had completed both prongs of her dual assignment, and while it hadn’t been easy, getting back to work had allowed her to put the depression of her time in D.C.—on the sidelines—behind her.

She followed the access roads, unsure exactly where they were taking her but satisfied that as long as she continued more or less in a northerly direction, she would eventually emerge from this massive industrial/residential area and find her way to a decent-sized north-south roadway. Her plan was to avoid major thoroughfares for at least fifty kilometers, just in case her theory about Gregorovich’s arrest taking the pressure off the search for the person who’d killed a Red Army soldier outside Objekt 825 was wrong.

Then she would hit the highway and make for her Moscow CIA safe house, where she could coordinate a pickup by the Gorton’s Fisherman and a boat ride out of Russia.

The area began to morph from mostly industrial to mostly residential, and Tracie knew she would soon emerge from this grimy neighborhood. She was now more than a kilometer-and-a-half north of the manufacturing plant where she’d been held captive. She rounded a curve that didn’t seem to exist for any particular reason, and then her eyes widened as she hit the brakes.

Angled across the road was a Sevastopol Militsiya cruiser with its warning lights flashing. The vehicle’s positioning clearly indicated that any oncoming cars should stop.

Tracie gauged the distance between the cruiser and the sandy verge on either side of the road. She thought she could squeeze past its rear bumper without impacting the trees or getting stuck in the loose terrain, but then what? Even if she managed to evade the police stop, there was no way on God’s green earth her little Lada, with its lawn mower engine, was going to outrun a Soviet police cruiser, even given a head start.

Goddammit.

She pulled to a stop in front of the cruiser.

48

 

June 25, 1988

4:15 p.m.

Country road north of Sevastopol, Russia, USSR

 

Tracie hadn’t expected the police to set up a perimeter nearly two kilometers around the crime scene based simply on an unverified report from an unidentified civilian of a murder in progress, but the moment she rounded the corner and saw the police vehicle, she knew exactly where she’d gone wrong.

She had told the police dispatcher she watched as an “army officer” fired a gun into the head of another man. That kind of report would immediately put the Sevastopol Militsiya on high alert. Red Army officers were one step below gods in the hierarchy of Soviet society, and the watch commander on duty would want to take no chances of being second-guessed by a military review of his handling of the situation weeks or even months down the line.

She had accomplished her goal of focusing police attention on the abandoned manufacturing plant, but by sticking around to watch the takedown of General Gregorovich, she may have inadvertently engineered her own capture as well.

A police officer had been watching Tracie’s approach, leaning against his cruiser and squinting at her with what looked a lot like suspicion. He finally pushed off from the vehicle and approached, moving slowly, clearly with the intention of reminding this civilian motorist who was in charge here.

He was alone.

During the ten seconds or so that it took for him to meander from the cruiser to her driver’s side window, Tracie forced herself to stay calm and consider her options.

She had no doubt she could put him down with a 9mm slug between the eyes, despite the fact her weapon was currently nestled in its shoulder rig and his right hand was resting lightly on the Makarov holstered at his hip. She’d spent hundreds of hours on the range and at home, practicing drawing her weapon in preparation for a moment exactly like this one.

No sooner had she considered this option than she eliminated it, at least for now. For all his carefully manufactured superiority and obvious suspicion, he was just a guy doing a job. He probably had a wife and children at home, and she had no desire to make some poor young Russian woman a widow. Plus, murdering a Russian cop less than two kilometers from the scene of another killing would do the opposite of what she’d intended—it would bring massive amounts of police attention down on this area, just as she was trying to escape it.

Her second option was disabling him physically. He was much larger than she, easily eighty pounds heavier, and he held the position of superiority, standing next to the car while she sat inside it. But all of those factors could be mitigated by inventing some reason to step out of the Lada. Once on solid ground, Tracie knew she could make quick work of the cop.

This option she also quickly discarded. Disabling him without shooting him would require she restrain him in some way, and doing so would take time she didn’t think she had. The longer she sat here, the greater the probability became that she would never make it out of Sevastopol.

That left Option Three.

She breathed deeply, calling on her years of experience to force back the nerves threatening to set her voice and hands shaking. By the time the officer had sauntered next to the car and made the “Roll down your window” circular motion with his hands, she had completed her transformation.

She was KGB