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officers every bit as dedicated as any she might find in the United States, but there were also plenty of others who wanted nothing more than to complete any investigation as quickly as possible.

Tracie guessed that with a suspect as high profile as Ivan Gregorovich, the Sevastopol Militsiya would assign an experienced, dedicated and thorough investigator to the case. If that were to happen, Gregorovich might well escape prosecution. At the very least, though, there would be enough police attention on this location that once she was away from here she should be able to complete her escape north to Moscow with relative ease.

And there was another possibility. A man didn’t rise to a position of prominence like Ivan Gregorovich had in the Red Army without making more than a few enemies. If any of those enemies were powerful enough to take advantage of the scenario Tracie had handed him, there was a very real possibility Gregorovich would be convicted of murder no matter how clear it was he hadn’t killed anybody.

That was Tracie’s theory, anyway.

But none of it would matter if she took too much time to get the police here.

She crossed the factory floor at a dead run and burst into the heavy, humid air outside.

45

 

June 25, 1988

3:35 p.m.

Abandoned factory north of Sevastopol, Russia, USSR

 

Tracie tried to guess how long Andrei Lukashenko had been gone when he left the manufacturing plant earlier to call General Gregorovich. The Weasel had removed her watch before chaining her up, so there was no way to know for sure, but she figured between thirty and forty-five minutes would be a reasonable estimate.

And he’d been driving a car, which meant he either drove around randomly until locating a telephone booth, or he’d known where one was.

Either way, she was positive she couldn’t spare that kind of time, not if she wanted to have any chance of putting her plan for Gregorovich into motion. Lukashenko had proudly told her that the general was dropping everything to fly to Sevastopol and torture Tracie. If that was true—and Tracie believed it was—the man would arrive at any moment.

She had started turned toward her car upon exiting the abandoned factory, but now she stopped in her tracks just as she reached the stand of trees behind which she had parked. Thought back to what she’d observed as she drove here.

From the earliest years following the Russian Revolution, the USSR’s central planners had paid little heed to the notion of sparing citizens the burden of living and working near industrial areas and manufacturing complexes. When locations were deemed appropriate to the construction of factories or warehouses, or even entire industrial parks, the question of whether citizens’ homes may or may not have been impacted was almost never addressed.

That had quite clearly been the case in this now-defunct manufacturing zone. Tracie recalled passing multiple ramshackle homes interspersed among the empty industrial buildings, at least one of which had been located not much more than a stone’s throw from the final turn in the winding access road leading here.

Where there was a home, there would be a telephone, even in a rundown neighborhood that had clearly been ignored for decades.

She reversed course, trotting once more past the factory from which she’d just escaped. Running along the side of the narrow road, she prepared to melt into the cover of the trees should she see Ivan Gregorovich’s car approaching. She had given some thought to her earlier assumption that the general would have a team of soldiers with him when he arrived, and changed her mind on that point.

Now she thought it was highly likely he would be alone.

A military officer of General Ivan Gregorovich’s stature would not want any witnesses observing his treatment of the prisoner. A guy like Gregorovich would have enemies, and witnesses meant the potential for blackmail.

She thought he would be too savvy to expose himself to that kind of risk.

She reconsidered her plan as she moved. If Gregorovich was really going to be alone, there was nothing stopping Tracie from awaiting his arrival and then putting two 9mm slugs into his head as he entered the facility. It would be a simple task to accomplish and would get him off her back better than any other plan she could possibly devise.

She discarded the thought almost the moment she had it. Shooting a high-profile Soviet general like Ivan Gregorovich would be the absolute worst thing she could do. The ensuing investigation would be exhaustive, and if it was determined that an American CIA operative had been the shooter, there was every possibility the Soviet Union would retaliate in kind.

They might even declare war.

No. The plan she’d already begun putting in motion was a better way to deal with Gregorovich, even though the results were much less certain.

No cars had appeared from either direction as Tracie hurried along the side of the road, and after maybe three minutes, the first of the houses she recalled seeing came into view. It was a tiny rectangular box, eight hundred square feet of living space at the most, with a sagging roof and mildewed wooden siding, some of which she could see even from a distance had rotted entirely away, exposing badly weathered plywood.

But no mansion would have looked more inviting to Tracie, because a telephone line ran from a pole at the road to a junction box mounted on the side of the house. Better yet, no cars were parked in the driveway. The lack of a vehicle didn’t necessarily mean no one was home, of course, but she chose to take it as a positive sign.

I could sure use a little luck along about now.

She angled off the road and into the woods. The scrub brush and tree coverage in this area was minimal, but Tracie used it