Objekt 825 (Tracie Tanner Thrillers Book 9), Allan Leverone [books to read for 13 year olds txt] 📗

And if her guess about Lukashenko holing up in the city just a few miles away was correct, she could also—if her luck held—complete the second half of her mission and rid the world of The Weasel forever.

32

June 25, 1988

9:40 a.m.

KGB interrogation facility, Sevastopol, Russia, USSR

Andrei Lukashenko had no way of knowing exactly when the tracking device had been placed on his car, but he did know it had been done recently. He’d last checked his vehicle for bugs/trackers just before leaving Lubyanka to drive the submersible communication decoder to Objekt 825.

It wasn’t that Andrei had a great memory for such things. Rather, years ago he’d begun searching himself and his car after every contact he made with KGB representatives; it was simply a matter of self-preservation. You could never be sure when officials inside Lubyanka might decide an operative required closer-than-usual supervision, and Andrei wanted to be certain he was aware as soon as possible if they decided that of him.

He was sure the car had been clean when he left Moscow, meaning, obviously, that the tracker had been attached to the underside of the wheel well either during a stop for gas along the way—possible but unlikely, since the car had been out of his sight for no more than a minute at a time, when he’d needed to pee—or while he’d been parked outside Objekt 825’s administration building, or last night at the Sonnoye Utro Motel.

If the KGB had been planning on tracking his movements, Andrei felt certain they would have tagged his vehicle while he was busy inside Lubyanka. Why wait to do it on the long drive to Objekt 825, when there would be a much great chance of being detected?

But if the KGB was not following him, then who was?

The only reasonable answer to that question was either the United States’ CIA or Great Britain’s MI6. Those two countries were where Andrei had undertaken the vast majority of his missions, including each of the last four. It had been several years since he’d worked anywhere else, and while it was always possible another country’s intelligence service had begun hunting him, simple mathematics suggested otherwise.

The real question was what to do about it. Tossing the tracker into a garbage can or placing it on the underside of another vehicle driven by an innocent party would be easy enough. It would get the CIA or MI6 operatives off his ass, and he could then easily disappear.

It was the obvious solution. Andrei was an experienced operative, but his specialty was in researching and then blackmailing or otherwise coercing civilians or military personnel into selling or (preferably) giving him classified information. He had killed and committed other violent acts in the process of completing assignments—had done so plenty of times—but his victims had never been well-trained, highly skilled professional intelligence operatives like the person presumably stalking him now.

On the other hand, Andrei was on his home turf. Not only that, he owned a tremendous advantage over his pursuer: he now knew he was being followed, and unless the operative chasing him had been watching outside the Sonnoye Utro Motel when he’d discovered the tracker—a possibility Andrei considered highly unlikely—his pursuer did not know that he knew.

So what Andrei lacked in operational experience, he felt he more than made up for with the element of surprise.

And it would be one hell of a career-maker if he could show up at Lubyanka tomorrow or the next day with an American or British spy trussed up in his back seat.

The potential gains were well worth the risk of trying to lure his pursuer into the open, where he could capture or—not quite as beneficial, career-wise, but still highly satisfactory—kill him.

Ultimately, the decision was an easy one. He would not throw the tracker away or place it on an innocent vehicle. He would return it to the underside of his car and use it to his benefit.

***

The KGB maintained properties in almost every major Soviet city, safe houses of a sort, used only when necessary to interrogate and/or intimidate citizens whose support for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was deemed insufficiently enthusiastic. Typically the buildings were abandoned factories, warehouses, or similar industrial-type structures, and most of the time they stood empty.

But when a potential enemy of the state was identified, they offered handy locations in which to determine the extent of the danger posed by the person or persons, and then to re-educate the offending citizen.

Or, if necessary, to eliminate that person, as had been done millions of times since the People’s Revolution.

Sevastopol’s KGB interrogation facility was located on the northern outskirts of the city, in an abandoned factory building that had once been used to manufacture supplies for Russia’s Black Sea fishing fleet. Andrei was familiar with its location; it was nearby, and it was secluded.

And, he thought, it is well worth spending a few hours of my time there to see what will happen.

It was always possible nothing would happen, that the operative following him would somehow sniff out the fact that Andrei had located the tracker. If that were the case he would never show up. All it would cost Andrei, though, were those few hours of his time. If it got to be late afternoon and Andrei found himself still alone at the safe house, he would then toss the tracker aside and continue his journey north to Moscow.

But if his theory was accurate, Andrei could bag himself a tremendous prize.

He circled the ancient factory building three times, examining it closely, trying to determine the best location in which to park his car. He would have liked to bring the tracker inside the building, using its exterior walls to provide cover and allow him to