The Zebra Network

Chapter 9

The coming days were difficult for McAllister and doubly difficult for Stephanie. He was on the mend, but it was going to take some time before he would be fully mobile. Each day he could feel his strength coming back. Each day he pushed himself to the limit with his exercises, often falling into the narrow bed totally exhausted from the effort, his body bathed in sweat.

Stephanie had to arise each morning before dawn so that she would have enough time to drive down to Washington to go to work. The questions about her kidnapping and escape from McAllister had finally stopped, and she’d been allowed to return to her routine of background checks on prospective Agency employees, but she had to constantly watch herself, lest she make a slip of the tongue.

She’d offered only the vaguest of explanations for her absence to her roommate, but the girl was too busy with her own life to pay any real attention. “Have a good time, Steph, whoever he is,” she’d said.

In the evenings they talked. Hesitantly at first, feeling each other out, learning about the other’s background, their likes and dislikes, their fears, their hopes. McAllister still wasn’t sure exactly why she was doing what she was doing, but he was grateful. Without Stephanie and her father he knew that he could not have possibly survived. He owed them his life.

“Let’s just say that what I was seeing didn’t add up to what I was hearing,” she said. “It was the look on your face when your wife called you a traitor. I can’t explain it, but it wasn’t the look of a spy. And you should have shot me that night. You didn’t.”

“Not very scientific,” he said.

She smiled.“My father said the same thing to me.”

“Does he realize the danger he’s in?”

Stephanie nodded, her expression serious again. “He’s not particularly proud of what I do for a living. He always thought that I’d become a vet and take over his practice some day.”

“No brothers or sisters?”

She shook her head. “Just the two of us.”

“What about your mother?”

“She died when I was in college.” Stephanie looked toward the dark window. “I dropped out of school and came back here to help out. But it didn’t last a year before he made me go back.” She shook her head. “He was so lost in those days. But he was right, of course.”

“What about afterward?” McAllister asked.

“I got my degree in psychology and joined the air force as a second lieutenant, exactly what every veterinarian’s daughter does with her life.”

She laughed, the sound gentle, almost musical, and McAllister had to smile with her.

She was given a top-secret crypto-access security clearance, and spent her four years’ service career running background investigations on young enlistees. She got to travel all over the country, as often as not in civilian clothes, working with local FBI offices and police departments. She got to know a lot of good people. Interesting, if not always exciting work, until she fell in love, and her world was suddenly turned inside out.

“He was a captain, my section chief; very tall, very handsome, and very, very married,” she said wistfully. “Sap that I was, I actually believed that he was going to leave his wife for me.”

“It didn’t work out?” McAllister asked gently. “No,” she said tersely. She looked at McAllister. “I was going to reenlist, we were going to get married as soon as his divorce was final, and we were going to see the world together, courtesy of Uncle Sam.” She shook her head again. “Instead I resigned my commission and came back here to my father, and worked in the clinic for a year.”

“Until you were hired by the Agency?”

She nodded. “I knew Dexter Kingman from my University of Maryland days. I’d worked with him a couple of times while I was in the Air Force, too. It was he who approached me, asked if I wanted a job.”

“No regrets?”

She smiled wanly. “A lot of regrets, but then who doesn’t have them?”

The Office of Security were the paper pushers, she said, though she was given the short course out at the Farm shortly after she’d been hired.

“I wasn’t very good on the small-arms range, even though I did learn one end of the gun from the other.” She smiled. “It came as quite a shock to me when Dexter handed me a pistol and assigned me to the team watching your house.”

McAllister’s gut tightened. Their conversations had been leading up to this point, and now that they had arrived she seemed nervous, less sure of herself than before, almost hesitant. Gloria had called out her name on the stairs. They’d obviously spoken during that day. “I’m sure it was a shock to you. What about my wife?”

“What about her?”

“Was she surprised when you showed up on her doorstep?”

“No. Mr. Highnote had set up the surveillance.”

“She was to be used as bait.”

Stephanie nodded glumly. “They figured you’d be showing up at home sooner or later. But I never dreamed that she would pull out a gun… that it would turn out the way it did.”

“Neither did I,” McAllister said looking away, the pain of the memory every bit as hurtful as his wounds, in some respects even more so because he had no idea how he could heal that particular hurt.

They had both spent a great deal of time talking about the distant past, and the very immediate present, but had until now scrupulously avoided any discussion of the future. McAllister was presumed dead. His body would show up sooner or later somewhere down river. And yet there seemed, to Stephanie, to be an undercurrent running through the Agency.

“A lot of people are walking around on eggshells,” she said.

“Such as?”

“Mr. Highnote, for one.”

“He’s a good man,” McAllister said. “He’s been caught in the middle.“Stephanie started to say something, but then evidently changed her mind. She got up from where she’d been sitting and went to the window. It was nearly midnight. Traffic below had settled down, but it had begun to snow lightly. Winter had finally arrived. “What is it?” he asked, watching her back. Her hair was pinned up, her neck long and thin, her ears tiny and delicate.

“I don’t know,” she said after a long time. “There’s something not quite right. Something about..

“He’s been my friend for a lot of years.”

“Everyone talks around that night at his sailboat,” she said. “The official word is that the Russians killed you, though how they traced you there is anyone’s guess.”

“But they weren’t Russians.”

“No,” Stephanie said, turning back. “They definitely were not.”

“Then who?”

On the afternoon of the fifth day, McAllister got dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen in the rear of the big house. The surgery was in the front of the house, in what used to be the living room dining room-library area so he had been assured that there was no risk of being spotted should he come down.

The house was located downtown, just a half a dozen blocks up from the bayfront, in what used to be a terribly run-down neighborhood, but that was now becoming a charming place to live and work. “The Yuppies have discovered Front Street,” Nicholas Albright said.

He’d run his small-animal practice out of this house for nearly twenty-five years, and at this stage of his life was disinclined to move out into the countryside. In any event, the suburbs were now starting to move in to him, and his practice was thriving. McAllister made himself a sandwich and opened a bottle of beer. He was seated at the big table when Nicholas Albright came in, smelling of disinfectant, a little blood on the side of his short white lab coat.

“I see my two-legged patient is up and about. How are you feeling today?”

“Caged.”

“I have a few of those out back, that is if you want to change your accommodations.”

“No thanks,” McAllister said. “But I’m going to have to get out of here pretty soon. Am I fit to travel?”

Albright looked at him critically. “How do you really feel?”

“Tired. A little weak and sore, but better than I did when I first got here, thanks to you.”

“If you were a dog, I’d say go out for a short walk in the sun-on a leash-maybe piss on a few fire hydrants, then come back and sleep in front of the fireplace. But you’re not a dog, and I’m not a people doctor, but I do know that five days ago you were damned near dead. Discounting the bullet wounds and the subsequent loss of blood, whoever smacked you on the back of the head meant to do you a great deal of damage… and managed, in a manner of speaking, to accomplish just that. You’re still suffering, to one degree or another, from a concussion, and I can’t guarantee that your vision won’t go double on you whenever it feels like it. Nor can I say that you won’t simply collapse in the middle of the street somewhere if you push yourself too hard.”

“Thanks for the words of encouragement.”

“Those are the good parts, Mac,” Albright said. “Seriously, you should have a nice long R and R someplace in the sun, for at least six weeks. Have a checkover by a real doctor.”

“I don’t have the six weeks.”

“No.”

“I’m putting you and your daughter in danger by being here like this.”

Albright nodded. “Yes, you are. But if you haven’t learned by now, I’ll let you in on a little secret: Stephanie gets what Stephanie wants. And at this moment you are the object of her… interests.”

“What did she tell you about me… about the situation?” McAllister asked.

Albright held him off. “Nothing, and that’s more than I want to know. Stay if you will, go if you must, but be honest with my daughter. She’s in danger, you say, so tell her everything so that she’ll know exactly what she’s up against.” He smiled wanly. “She’s no longer alittle girl, you know. She’s grown into a very strong, very capable woman.”

“I know,” McAllister said softly.

Two days later Stephanie brought him a gun. It was Friday and she had the weekend off. When she came in, she laid the bundle on the table by the window where McAllister had been sitting reading the newspapers.

“Anything?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, glancing at the package wrapped in brown paper. “What’s this?”

“It’s for you,” she said. “I borrowed it from a friend. Told him I was tired of being kidnapped off the streets.”

The instant McAllister picked up the package he knew what was inside. He opened it. The gun was a German P38, 9 mm with two loaded clips of ammunition. The weapon was old, but seemed to be in very good condition. He worked the well-oiled slide back and forth a couple of times, then looked up. “A discreet friend?”

“Very,” she said. “We were lovers for nearly a year. He still has a thing for me.”

“He’s in the Agency?” She nodded.

“Would I know him?”

“His name is Doug Ballinger. He works in town for Technical Services.”

McAllister had never heard the name. “You’re sure he won’t mention this to anyone? If it got out somebody might put two and two together and come up with your father’s name.”

“It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” she said. “Besides, he won’t say anything. Not Doug.”

“I’m going to have to get out of here.”

“I know, Dad said you were starting to make rumbling noises.”

“I’ll need a car.”

“That can be arranged.”

“Something that can’t be traced here.”

“I can do it,” Stephanie said. “The question is, where are you going?”

“I have a couple of ideas.”

“Such as?”

“You’re not included,” McAllister said firmly. “Someone is trying to kill me, and Langley thinks I’m a traitor. To this point you’re not publically involved. The moment they know that you’re helping me, however, you will become their next target.”

“I can handle it…”, Stephanie started to protest, but McAllister held her off.

“Probably. But I don’t think I can. If they grabbed you it would make me vulnerable.”

“I wouldn’t tell them anything,” she flared. “You might not be given that choice,” he said softly. Her eyes went round, but she said nothing for the moment. Get out… traitor! Go back to your Russian friends. Get out before I kill you myself. What had Gloria been told? God… it didn’t make any sense. McAllister got up and went to the nightstand where he’d left his cigarettes. He lit one, drawing the smoke deeply into his lungs.

Look to Washington. Look to Moscow.

He’d been to Moscow, and now it was time to continue looking to Washington. The answers were down there somewhere. At Langley, most likely… or at least he found himself hoping that the answers, if they could be found, would be contained to Langley, and that the sickness hadn’t contaminated another institution… let’s say the Pentagon. That thought was too frightening to contemplate.

“Was Voronin to be trusted?” Stephanie asked. McAllister turned to her-out of his thoughts. “At first he was.”

“But not later?”

“I wasn’t sure. I was starting to have my doubts about him.”

“In fact, you told me that you were finished with him on the night you were arrested.”

“I thought he was talking gibberish.”

“And the Russians never asked you about it? About what you were doing out so late?”

“No.”

“Didn’t that strike you as odd?”

Odd, he thought? At first it had, but then later his body had been so filled with drugs that he’d begun to distrust his own thoughts, his own sanity even. The only reality for him then was the present; whether he was being beaten or being questioned, there had been no past or future, only the present.

“Maybe they didn’t consider it important,” he heard himself saying. “Or so important that they didn’t want to give it validity by questioning you, therefore putting it in the record.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Maybe they already had the answers.”

“Then why was I released?”

“Maybe to do exactly what you’ve done; come back to Washington and look for answers.”

McAllister ran a hand over his eyes. “Answers, hell, I don’t even know the questions. They were Russians in Arlington Heights.”

“And Americans in Dumfries. Perhaps it’s a fight between two factions. And perhaps you do know the questions.

“look to Washington. Look to Moscow,” he repeated the words softly.

“A man in Moscow and one in Washington? An agent and his controller? It’s possible, isn’t it?”

“Which would mean that I was released to come back here and dig them out.”

“They’d try to stop you, of course, ‘Zebra One and Two.” They’d have to protect themselves. The Russian controller sent his people after you, and his American agent has done the same thing.”

“Yet whoever signed the order releasing me had to have a certain amount of power himself. A position within the KGB.”

“Maybe the man trying to stop you is even more powerful,” Stephanie said, her eyes alight. “Maybe your release was a mistake on his part. A lapse of concentration. Maybe you just fell through the cracks, and by the time he realized what was happening, he arranged for the two hit men to meet your plane in New York.”

“They would have shot me first.”

“You’re not thinking logically, Mac. You were unarmed. Their firstjob would have been to eliminate the firepower. They hadn’t counted on you reacting so quickly. And when it began to fall apart they got out of there. If they had been captured it would have blown everything.”

“For someone who can’t shoot straight, you have a devious mind.” She shook her head. “Not deviousness, just logic. Which leads us back to Langley, and who is the most likely candidate.”

“Bob Highnote,” McAllister said it before she could. She nodded. “The three Russians were waiting for you outside his house. And the two Americans came to you at Highnote’s boat.”

“It’s too pat.”

“Highnote ordered the surveillance on your house. He must have told your wife something to make her react the way she did.”

“Still too pat. I’ve known Bob for years. He wanted me to come to Langley with him that night. He said that we could have straightened everything out.”

“Do you think you would have made it that far?”

“Not Highnote,” McAllister said with finality, though he had begun to harbor the same thought at the back of his mind. Impossible, wasn’t it, to know someone for so long and yet not really know them? Kim Philby had been everyone’s best friend for years, the perfect spy, and yet in the end he’d turned out to be a Russian agent.

“I think you’re going to need some help, Mac,” Stephanie said. “Someone on the inside. A sympathetic ear.”

“You?”

She inclined her head. “For a start.”

“The answers are at Langley,” he said.

“Yes. We just have to keep you alive long enough to find them.”

One of the answers came that night a few minutes after eleven. McAllister was alone in his own room, trying to sleep, but his mind was seething. Over the years Highnote had been more than a friend; he had been a mentor, a confidant, a never-ending source of information and support. To believe that he was a traitor was impossible.

In the morning he would take the car that Stephanie had promised to get for him down to Washington where he would set up in a small, out-of-the-way hotel. From there he would again approach his oldfriend and lay everything out for him. If Highnote was a mole, it would show up in his eyes.

Zebra One, Zebra Two. Was it possible that Highnote was Zebra One? All these years?

The bedroom door crashed open, and in the light spilling in from the hallway Stephanie’s figure was outlined through the thin nightgown she wore. Her face was animated.

“It’s happening now. On the news,” she said excitedly. McAllister sat up. “What?”

“Hurry, or you’ll miss it…

He got out of bed and hurried after her to her room at the end of the corridor. She stood in front of the television set, a stern-faced newscaster reading a story.

“What is it?” McAllister asked.

“Listen,” Stephanie shot back, motioning for him to keep silent.

…sentenced today in U.S. District Court in Washington to life imprisonment,” the newsman was saying.

A photograph of a husky man with graying dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard appeared on the screen.

“O’Haire, along with his younger brother, U.S. Air Force Captain Liam O’Haire, and seven others pled guilty last month to charges that they operated a spy ring for the Soviet government. Calling themselves the Zebra Network, the O’Haires stole Star Wars data which they passed over to an as-yet-unnamed Soviet contact in Washington..

“There,” Stephanie said softly.

McAllister was staring at the television set, the newscaster’s words flowing around him. Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. Zebra One, Zebra Two. Was this what Voronin had meant to tell him? The Zebra Network passing its secrets to a contact here in Washington who in turn was pumping it to Moscow?

But the network had been smashed. It was over. Or, was it?

“I should have known,” Stephanie was saying. “When I heard the words, there was something at the back of my head. It was as if I had a memory that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Until just now.”

“The answers are still in Washington,” McAllister said.“You bet. Their ‘as-yet-unnamed Soviet contact,’ and I’ll bet anything that it’s Robert Highnote, our deputy director of operations.”

“No,” McAllister said. “That I can’t believe. Not yet.” Stephanie turned down the television sound and looked at him. “I’m telling you that you’d better go easy with him until you know for sure. Whoever is Zebra One-whether or not it’s Highnote-is going to do everything in his power to protect himself. Friend or not, if it is him he won’t hesitate a second to kill you.” McAllister’s thoughts were ranging far ahead. “IfI surface, whoever he is, he’ll have to come after me.”

“That’s right,” Stephanie agreed, her eyes narrowing. “For the moment everyone thinks I’m dead.” She nodded.

“It’s time then, to show them otherwise.”

“Don’t be stupid…

“When I surface, all hell is going to break loose. And while that’s going on, I’ll be getting the information we need to expose him. Whoever he is.”

“Robert Highnote or not?”

“Right,” McAllister said.

Stephanie had stepped a little closer, and McAllister suddenly became aware of the fact that they were alone together in her bedroom, and that she was dressed in nothing more than a thin, almost translucent nightgown and he in a pair of her father’s pajama bottoms. She reached out for him, but he stepped back.

“No,” he said softly.

She started to protest, but then backed down, letting her hand fall to her side. “I understand,” she said. “I do.”

It was morning and the snow that had begun in the night was still falling, lightly blanketing the city of Washington. The husky man in the charcoal-gray overcoat and dove-gray fedora, stood just within the main hall of the Lincoln Memorial, his hands folded behind him, staring up at the inscription on the wall behind the statue.

In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union, the memory ofAbraham Lincoln is enshrined forever. This was his favorite place in all of the city. It reminded him, in many respects, of Lenin’s Tomb in Moscow’s Red Square. Both men had been revolutionaries, in a manner of speaking. Each had saved his nation, and was rightly venerated now.

“It’s pleasant here in the summer,” someone said behind him. The man didn’t turn, he didn’t have to because he recognized the voice from years of association. “Not so bad now,” he said, his English very good with hardly a trace of accent.

“McAllister is still alive.”

“You have heard something?” the man said, his heart quickening. “His body hasn’t been found, and he’s a very resourceful man. Until we can be absolutely certain, we must go on the assumption that he survived, somehow.”

“Is he God then, this one?”

“No,” the voice behind him said. “Just very good, very dedicated. We must be sure.”

“What do you suggest?”

“We must go back over his track, beginning in Moscow. No stone must be left unturned. No possibility must be ignored, no matter how fanciful. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly,” the Russian said. “And here in Washington?”

“His wife is being questioned and so is Sikorski.”

“What about the girl?”

“Albright?”

“Yes, her.”

“Her too. No stone will be unturned, as I was saying. The instant he is spotted he must be killed. There can be no question of it this time. None whatsoever.”

“I agree,” the Russian said, his eyes lingering on the words above Lincoln’s statue. “There is simply too much at stake here. Far too much.”