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Tracie rose slowly
to her feet. Her eyes were twin pools of shocked hopelessness. She shrugged. “I
have no idea. It was imperative I find out who else is involved in this
conspiracy. Without knowing that, I won’t be able to get within fifty feet of
the president. I’ll be intercepted, the letter will disappear. Without that
proof, my story is nothing more than a wild fiction.”

She stared at
Shane. “We’re screwed.”

39

June 1, 1987

6:40 p.m.

Washington, D.C.

Tracie picked up her intended
instruments of torture and tossed them into the backpack. She pulled out a rag
and ran it over the surface of the desk, then looked around the room pensively
before asking Shane, “Have you touched anything in here?”

“I don’t think
so,” he said, trying to comprehend what had just happened. She zipped the
backpack closed, still clutching the rag in one hand, and said, “There’s
nothing more we can do. Let’s get out of here. I need to get somewhere where I
can sit and think.” She peered up at Shane. “And you really look like you need
to lie down.”

“I’m fine,” he
said automatically, his thoughts still focused on Winston Andrews and the
shocking abruptness of his suicide. Tracie trudged out of her CIA handler’s
home office and Shane followed her down the stairs. “What are we going to do
about him?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean,
‘nothing’? We’re just going to leave him in his office?”

“Unless you want
to invite the police over and answer lots of invasive and time-consuming
questions about what you’re doing here, and why the owner of the house is dead
on the floor with a lethal poison clogging his system.
Maybe
you’ll be
able to convince them you didn’t kill Andrews, but I guarantee you won’t do it
before spending a full day—if not more—in custody. I don’t know about you, but
I don’t have that kind of time to spare.”

“I suppose, but
still…”

“Don’t worry about
him; he’s beyond caring about his present situation. If it makes you feel
better, I’ll let someone at the agency know about this as soon as I can. But
everything comes back to the same logjam: I don’t know who I can trust. If I
alert CIA before figuring out what to do about this letter,” she patted her
pocket protectively, “and the wrong person takes the call or hears the message,
we get eliminated and the president gets killed. I just can’t afford to take
that chance.”

“Can’t you at
least leave an anonymous call or something?”

Tracie stopped and
shook her head in frustration. “Everything we do leaves a trail. An ‘anonymous
call’ would add one more unnecessary link to the chain. A determined KGB or CIA
entity with the proper tools can track us much more easily than you realize. I
can’t make that call, Shane. I just can’t do it yet.”

Shane nodded,
forgetting Tracie was in front of him and couldn’t see him. “Besides,” she
continued. “When he doesn’t show up for work, they’ll call over here and when
Andrews doesn’t answer, they’ll send someone to check on him. He’ll be found,
probably by tomorrow, even if we do nothing.”

Tracie walked to
the picture window in the townhouse’s elegantly appointed living room. She
peered out into the Georgetown neighborhood. A couple of houses away, a young
boy rode a tricycle up and down the length of his driveway, otherwise the
street appeared empty. “Let’s go,” she said, and they stepped out the front
door. He watched as she wiped down the inside and outside of the doorknob, then
used the rag to pull the door closed behind them. Thirty seconds later, they
were accelerating away from the well-maintained home with the dead body of
Winston Andrews inside.

***

“Pull over,” Shane said suddenly.
They had been driving for no more than ten minutes, working their way through
Georgetown toward a motel on the outskirts of D.C. He had known the nausea
would strike suddenly and it had.

“What are you
talking about?” Tracie asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Just pull over,
right here, right at this corner.” Shane clamped a hand over his mouth like
that might make a difference as Tracie swerved to the curb. He pushed the door
open before the car had even stopped rolling, vomiting mostly stomach acid into
the dirt and trash littering the gutter.

He leaned out the
door, retching, waiting for the nausea to pass, embarrassed and humiliated. At
last it did and he eased back into the seat. He pulled the door closed and
accepted a tissue from Tracie without a word. He wiped his mouth. His head felt
like someone was attacking it with a jackhammer. While he knew from recent experience
the feeling wasn’t going to go away any time soon, he suspected he would begin
to feel marginally more human shortly. For a little while.

“I’m all set,” he
said quietly, looking straight out the windshield, refusing to meet Tracie’s
gaze. He could feel her watching him, holding him in her intense stare with
those captivatingly beautiful eyes. Somehow that made things much worse.

The car didn’t
move. “You can start driving again any time now,” he said, then gave up and
turned to look at her, waiting for the question he knew was coming.

“What’s going on?”
she asked quietly. “Something is wrong. What is it?”

“I’m dying,” he
said.

***

June 1, 1987

7:30 p.m.

Washington, D.C.

“It’s a brain tumor. Inoperable and
growing like a weed.” They had checked into a motel on the outskirts of D.C.,
close to the city but cheap and anonymous. It was maybe a half-step up on the
quality scale from the New Haven Arms. The minute they checked in, Tracie
pulled the bedcovers down, plumped up the pillows, and helped Shane into bed.
He hadn’t needed the help, not really, but her touch was so comforting he
wasn’t about to try to dissuade her, even feeling as poorly as he was.

“The tumor is
growing and I’m dying and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.” Shane
shrugged. He sat propped against the cheap motel headboard as Tracie stared at
him, horror written on her delicate features.

“Can’t they treat
it somehow? What about surgery? Chemotherapy?”

“The tumor’s too
advanced. There’s no way to remove it or kill it without also wiping out most
of my grey matter. And I don’t have that much to spare,” he said, trying to
make her smile.

It didn’t work.
Her eyes began to fill with tears and he said quickly, “Most of the time the
pain’s not that bad. I go for days on end without feeling any different than I
ever did. Then, out of nowhere, it’ll strike.”

“Like now.”

“Like now,” he
agreed.

“How much worse is
this headache going to get?”

“There’s no way to
tell. Over time, obviously, the headaches are going to get worse and worse, but
each individual one is a crap shoot. I’m hoping this time that it won’t get too
much worse than it is right now. I can still function, more or less, except for
those brief time-outs when I have to puke my guts out.” He was trying to keep
things light, still embarrassed.

Tracie looked away
and shook her head.

 He said, “I’m
really sorry about this. I was hoping nothing would happen until our little
road trip was all over.”

“My God, Shane,
you don’t have to apologize.
I
should apologize to you for dragging you
into this mess. It’s not bad enough you’re suffering from a terminal illness, I
have to pull you away from your family and your job and haul you into the
middle of an international incident.”

Shane smiled
weakly. “Are you kidding me? I haven’t had this much excitement in…hell,
probably ever. When your plane crashed, I was driving to work, I already told
you that. What I didn’t tell you was that I had come from an appointment with
the oncologists that afternoon. They told me there was nothing more they could
do, that they would help make me comfortable when the time came, but that I
needed to get my affairs in order. That’s exactly how they said it, too: ‘Get
your affairs in order,’ like we were in some bad Hollywood movie or something.

“So, needless to
say, I was feeling pretty sorry for myself that night. But then, when your
plane crashed and I worked my way through the woods and saw you trapped inside
that B-52, somehow still alive but about to be burned to a crisp, it served as
the wake-up call I think I needed. It shook me out of my self-pity, reminded me
other people have problems, too, and that I could still actually make a
difference to someone. It made me realize that I might be dying, but I’m still
here for now. I’m not dead yet.” He looked up and Tracie had moved next to him,
tears running silently down her face.

He took her hand
and she squeezed it ferociously. “Besides,” he said, “we’re all dying. Some go
quicker than others, but nobody gets out alive.”

Tracie looked
away, her eyes bleak. “What about medication? I’ll go to the drugstore and try
to get you something for the pain.”

He shook his head.
“It won’t matter. Just talk to me. That’ll give me something else to think
about besides the pain.”

“Of course.” Her
voice sounded gravelly and she cleared her throat. “What would you like to talk
about?”

“With Andrews
dead, what happens now? I’ve only known you for a couple of days, but that’s
long enough for me to know you’re not just going to shrug your shoulders and
give up and accept that the KGB is going to assassinate the president of the
United States. Have you decided who at the CIA you’re going to give Gorbachev’s
letter to? I think you should go right to the top, to Aaron Stallings.”

“I’m not giving it
to anyone,” Tracie answered, her lips set in a grim line. “Nothing’s changed. I
still don’t know who I can trust. If they could get to Winston Andrews, they
could get to anyone, even Director Stallings.”

“So, what are you
going to do?”

“I’m going to
catch the assassin.”

Shane leaned back
on the pillow and closed his eyes as the waves of pain rolled through his head.
He pictured the tumor as an invading army, the attacking troops dressed all in
black, his body repelling them time after time, fighting hard but eventually
weakening in the face of the tumor-army’s endless supply of reinforcements.
“How do you propose to do that without any backup? It seems impossible.”

She shrugged.
“Why? Between the letter and the information our KGB friends supplied in New
Haven, I have everything I need: I know where the hitter is going to set up, I
know the method he’s going to use to take out the president, and I know he’s
going to strike at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. This will be no more difficult
than a dozen other missions I’ve completed—all successfully, I might add.”

“But isn’t the CIA
prohibited from working inside the boundaries of the United States? Aren’t you
only supposed to operate in foreign countries?”

“That’s true,”
Tracie admitted. “But this situation is one in a million; it seems highly
unlikely anyone in Congress could have envisioned this scenario. I’ll take my
chances and worry about the fallout later.”

Shane nodded. He
saw Tracie watching him closely and tried not to wince from the pain. “I
figured you were going to say something like that. But I still can’t imagine
taking down a professional hit man without a team to work with, especially with
no time to develop a plan.”

“Even with the
support of a team,” she said, “there are no guarantees. Things always go wrong,
that’s a given. It’s just that this time there won’t be anyone to pull my butt
out of the fire if I get in trouble.”

“Yes there will.”

“You?”

Shane nodded
gingerly.

“Absolutely not.
That’s out of the question. You’re not going to be there.”

“That’s what you
think.”

“There’s nothing
you can do for me.”

“Bullshit. I can
at least drive a car. I’m going.”

Tracie shook her
head, her lips compressed into a thin slash across her pretty face. She had
placed her fists on her hips and her eyes looked like chips of flint. Her red
hair hung in fiery ringlets, cascading over her shoulders. Shane thought she
might just be the sexiest thing he had ever seen.

He reached for her
right wrist and pulled her down onto the bed, her lithe form molding onto his
like they had been meant to be together. Maybe they had.

She whispered,
“What about your headache?”

He said, “What
headache?” as the tumor armies continued their assault, wave after wave of pain
rolling through his skull.

But right now,
none of that mattered. He didn’t care about the tumor. Didn’t care about the
pain. Didn’t even care that a KGB assassin was out there somewhere right now,
waiting to pull the trigger on the president of the United States. He needed
Tracie and, what was more, he knew she needed him. Tomorrow she would undertake
what might be a suicide mission, her protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.
But tonight there was nothing to do but pass the time and wait. It was nine
p.m.

He began caressing
her, his hands moving of their own accord, breaking down her half-hearted
resistance, until soon everything melted away and nothing existed but their
dance.

***

June 1, 1987

8:20 p.m.

Washington, D.C.

Tracie lay still, listening to
Shane breathe, the sound slow and steady. Peaceful. He had fallen asleep
quickly, not surprising given what she now knew about his health. She savored
the nearness of his body, warm and comforting under the blankets, wanting
nothing more than to join him in sleep.

But there were
things to do first. She sighed softly and slipped out of bed. Dressed quietly.
Then she walked out the door, locking it behind her.