The Russian paled and nodded. “I understand,” he said in his heavily accented English.
Tracie dialed the last digit and held the handset between her own head and the Russian’s, angled so he could speak into it but so she could still hear everything that was being said.
The call was answered on the first ring, as if Andrews had been sitting right next to the telephone. Undoubtedly he had. “Go,” he said without preamble.
“We have retrieved the letter.”
“Very good. Casualties?”
“Your CIA asset and the young man are both dead.”
There was a short silence and then Andrews said. “Dispose of the bodies and then get back here with the letter. Do not let it out of your sight.”
“We will be there as soon as possible.”
The line went dead and Tracie replaced the telephone on the bedside table. A numb sense of shock filled her body. Her handler, a man she had worked with for years, had just spoken of her murder with no more emotion than if he were discussing a change in the weather.
She turned back to the Russian. “I’m going to go and ask your comrade the same questions I just asked you. Do you understand what will happen to you if I find out you’ve been lying to me about any of this?” Tracie said.
“I understand,” he said, defeated.
“Is there any part of your story you would like to change? If so, now’s the time.”
He shook his head. She nodded once and then walked out the door.
Tracie was gone longer than Shane had expected her to be, and when she returned, her face was pale and drawn. She stepped through the door and he asked, “Are you all right?”
She ignored the question. “Did this one give you any trouble?” she asked.
“No, he never said a word. We just sat here.”
“Good,” she said, and her face softened just a bit. “Nice job. Do me a favor now, and go keep an eye on the lookout. Our talk was very fruitful. It required a little persuasion to convince him to open up, but eventually we reached an understanding.”
Shane stared at Tracie. Her voice was hard and cold and bore little resemblance to the one he had heard moaning and gasping in pleasure just a couple of hours before. “Okay,” he said. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to make sure the first guy told me the truth.”
34
They moved quickly, Tracie directing the action. She had returned fifteen minutes after leaving Shane with the lookout, her face grim but satisfied. “I got what we need,” she said, “and now we have to move. Help me get this guy to the other room.”
After Shane had secured the man in the dummy motel room, she instructed him to wipe down all of the surfaces they may have touched. “I’m going to call the spooks on these two once I’m sure about who we can trust at CIA,” she said, “so fingerprints won’t be an issue. But just in case someone finds them before I do that, I want to make sure you’re protected. My prints are untraceable, but I doubt you would be so lucky.”
While Shane toured the room with a worn bath towel, scrubbing every surface he could, Tracie double-checked Shane’s bindings to satisfy herself they would hold. Then she applied a double layer of tape over each man’s mouth, winding it tightly around their heads and patting it in place. Despite the fact the two men had been there to kill them, Shane almost felt sorry for them. They looked like twins, their cheeks flaming crimson, shiny and burning, and the tape’s sticky adhesive must have felt like an additional torture session.
Tracie didn’t seem to notice.
Once she seemed satisfied both men would stay immobilized, she gathered up the weapons and picked up a DO NOT DISTURB placard off the inside doorknob and told Shane, “Let’s go.” She said nothing to the Russians, neither of whom had spoken since the end of the interrogation, and both men stared straight ahead, ignoring Tracie and Shane and, it seemed, each other.
They paused at the door, Tracie doing one last quick check of the room, Shane pondering how quickly his life had turned upside-down. After a few seconds, she hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the doorknob, then eased the door shut and locked it from the outside.
They hurried across the rapidly lightening parking lot to the second motel room and threw their gear together quickly. Shane repeated his print-scrubbing exercise with the bath towel while Tracie packed their few meager supplies in the Granada. Tracie hung another DO NOT DISTURB sign on that door, then they slid into the car and drove to the motel office.
After paying for a second day’s rental of both rooms, they hurried back to the car and drove out of the New Haven Arms lot, Tracie at the wheel. They turned toward New Haven proper in search of an all-night restaurant. It was 5:05 a.m.
They found one almost immediately, tucked away under an I-95 overpass. The Original Greasy Spoon seemed to embrace the 1950s with an enthusiasm bordering on obsession. Shane knew Tracie was almost out of money and he thought he might have just enough cash left for two cups of coffee and a couple of blueberry muffins. He was right, and they walked out of the diner and back into the 1980s with their food and coffee less than three minutes later.
Tracie asked Shane if he wanted to drive. He hadn’t bothered to offer because even with all the traveling they had done yesterday she had not so much as considered giving up the wheel. “Sure,” he answered, surprised and pleased although he was not entirely sure why. It was as if he had passed some kind of test back at the tumbledown New Haven Arms in the surreal few hours they had spent there.
She climbed into the passenger seat and sat demurely, smiling at him while he dropped into the driver’s seat. “What?” he asked. “What’s so funny?”
Then he went to start the car and realized. There was no key. “Okay, you win. Would you mind starting this piece of junk for me?”
“No problem,” she answered, pleased. “We’ll make a proper criminal out of you yet.” She leaned over his lap to hot-wire the ignition and he flashed back to their time together in bed at the motel before the Russians had arrived. Her silky skin, her luscious lips, the curve of her naked hip under his hand, the way her breathing quickened as he had stroked her inner thigh, the sweet sound she made when—
He realized she had spoken to him and he cleared his throat. “Uh, sorry, I missed that,” he said, embarrassed.
“I asked if you were going start driving or whether you planned to sit there the rest of the day replaying your mental movie of us together in the sack.”
“I wasn’t…”
“Don’t even try to deny it. I’m a trained interrogator, remember?”
He could hear the smile in her voice. “Okay, okay, I admit it. Just don’t come at me with an iron.”
She laughed, the sound light and girlish, light-years removed from the ice-pick chill she had displayed when dealing with the Russians. Shane shook his head and dropped the car into gear, turning left, right and then left again, climbing the ramp onto I-95 south, thoroughly confused by this young woman sitting to his right.
Thoroughly enchanted by her as well, although he knew he could not afford to be.
She ate delicately as Shane drove, picking tiny pieces off the muffin with her fingers and placing them on her tongue before chewing soundlessly and swallowing, brow furrowed in concentration. Shane had to be careful not to get so caught up watching Tracie out of the corner of his eye that he drove off the highway and into the guardrail.
He let her think for a while and when it became clear she had no intention of starting a conversation, said, “So what did those guys tell you back there?”