Objekt 825 (Tracie Tanner Thrillers Book 9)

keep him alive until the ambulance’s arrival.
Judging from the man’s apparent condition, it had better get here quickly.

 
6
 
June 20, 1988
1:15 p.m.
Washington, D.C.
 
Tracie Tanner paced her tiny apartment, plodding in an endless loop, her sense of isolation and depression increasing with each step.
The pattern of her movement was precise and unvarying. She began each lap at her apartment’s front door, moving along the north living room wall and then turning right at the entrance to her hallway. Marching its length took just a few steps and then she turned into her bedroom, circling it like a caged animal. Once complete, she exited into her bathroom, where she reversed course and moved back along the hallway to the kitchen. She passed the refrigerator, stove, and tiny kitchen table in seconds before returning to the living room, walking past the picture window with the breathtaking view of the paved parking lot before finding herself back at her starting point.
Then she repeated the process, over and over, restless and unhappy, craving release from her thoughts and regrets but unable to achieve anything close to what she needed.
Typically, that release came from her work. Employed secretly by the Central Intelligence Agency after her official firing last year, Tracie reported solely to her handler, legendary CIA Director Aaron Stallings. For the last year-plus she had been entrusted with the most critical—and most dangerous—of intelligence assignments, almost always working alone.
But in the course of completing her most recent mission, the car Tracie had been driving was rammed at full speed by a Russian delivery truck. In addition to receiving assorted bumps and bruises, her right ankle had been badly sprained and she’d suffered a serious concussion.
As painful as those injuries were, none would have been sufficient in and of themselves to interrupt her work, or even to slow her down in any significant way. She’d suffered more serious injuries in the past and never missed a beat. The day after arriving back at her Moscow safe house and completing mission debriefing, Tracie had been ready and willing, anxious even, to accept another assignment.
Anything to banish those ever-present regrets for a little while.
But in the course of the automobile accident that resulted in all her other injuries, Tracie had also suffered a deep, meandering gash up the right side of her skull. While she lay unconscious in a Russian emergency room, doctors had cut half of Tracie’s lustrous, flame-red hair and shaved it to the scalp in order to suture the wound.
The result was an ugly trail that resembled the map of a railroad track designed by an engineer suffering a schizophrenic breakdown. The wound was fresh and raw and red.
Tracie had been afraid she knew what Stallings’ reaction would be when he learned of her injuries, and her plan had been to “forget” to fill him in on the full extent of them.
But of course concealing information from the man who’d headed up America’s premier intelligence service for decades formed the very definition of the term “easier said than done,” and before their debrief was half over, Tracie had been forced to acknowledge exactly how badly she’d been injured.
And Stallings had recalled her stateside.
“Boss, I’m fine,” she’d protested, bitterly disappointed by his decision even as she was unsurprised by it.
“Fine is a relative term,” he replied.
“I’ve been hurt much worse than this in the course of completing assignments,” she’d argued, “and I’ve always managed to get the job done.”
“True enough. But I doubt you’ve ever suffered an injury that made you as easily recognizable as having half your hair cut off, with dozens of stitches running up the side of your head. You literally could not be more memorable.”
“But I could easily—”
“Listen to me, Tanner,” he’d said, cutting her off in mid-sentence as he so often did. “You did a fantastic job locating and disarming the tactical nuke the Soviets so carelessly misplaced. But in the course of doing so, you assaulted and thereby pissed off one of the half-dozen or so most influential Russian generals in the entire Red Army command structure. Your likeness is going to be plastered over every KGB field office in the USSR. We need to get you back to D.C. for a few weeks.”
“I really don’t think that’s necess—”
“Once your hair has grown out enough to cover the scars that are going to remain from your head injury, things will have calmed down in Moscow. The Soviets would never expect you to return after the heartburn you’ve caused them on several different occasions now, but once things cool off, you’ll be free to return to work in and around the Soviet states if you choose to.”
“I choose to. In fact, I don’t choose to come home. I want to stay here and—”
“You get your ass back here ASAP. Contact me with a timeline by tomorrow and I’ll send the agency Gulfstream to pick you up in Helsiki.”
“Sir, please, I really don’t think—”
“My decision is final, Tanner.”
“But if you…” Tracie’s voice had trailed off as she realized Stallings had already cut the secure satellite connection. Protesting any further would be as pointless as talking to herself, which was exactly what she would have been doing.
Three days after their conversation, Tracie had found herself in a face-to-face meeting with her handler, where she’d again attempted to convince him to return her to Moscow—or wherever she was needed—immediately. She’d known what his response would be but had been determined to try.
He shut her down just as completely as he’d done by sat phone.
Now she paced, wearing a pathway into her apartment’s cheap carpeting, glancing side-eyed into the mirror on every trip through her bathroom. She hated being sidelined when there was intelligence work to be done but had to admit Stallings was right about one thing. With