The Zebra Network

Chapter 1

October had come early to Moscow. A few minutes after ten on an evening late in the month, the air was January-crisp. Snow lay everywhere in big dirty piles. Moscow was an eastern city; dark, brooding, mysterious. The onion domes of St. Basil’s on Red Square seemed a natural counterpoint to the Kremlin’s Spassky Tower. A trollybus rattled by. Two soldiers, drunk stupid on vodka, paused beneath a streetlight to pass their bottle. An official Zil limousine raced along the right-hand lane, ignoring the stoplights.

A tall, well-built American stepped from the doorway of a dumpy apartment building on Yelizarovoy Street, just around the corner from the Embassy of Chad. He hunched up his coat collar, looked both ways up the deserted street, and started on foot to where he had parked his car two blocks away. He was just a little disgusted with himself, and nervous. From time to time he looked over his shoulder as if he knew that someone or something might be coming after him. At the end of the block he looked back once more to the secondstory apartment window still lit with a dull yellow glow. He was never going back. No reason for it. Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. Zebra One, Zebra Two. They were Voronin’s words. Cryptic. Spoken in a self-pitying drunken haze. Spittle had run down the cripple’s stubbled chin, his rheumy eyes hazed with cataracts, his fists pounding on his useless legs.

This is the end then, the American thought turning once again and heading the last blocks to his car. “When they start talking claptrap, boyo, it’s time to get yourself free lest you get caught with your paws up some girl’s panties.” For six months he’d worked Viktor Voronin, who had until eighteen months ago been an officer in the KGB. A stupid, senseless automobile accident had crippled the man for life. The KGB had retired him, of course, and he’d begun drinking on the same evening he got religion. No more wars, he rambled. A world state in which everyone is equal. The perfect socialism. But Voronin had been a gold seam. The mother lode. Some of what he had provided them had been stunning, hadn’t it? Worth the risks. But tonight the clock had run down. Voronin had finally slipped into a fantasy world in which he began to mix the truth with his wild imaginings. He could no longer be considered reliable. Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. What the hell was it supposed to mean? Zebra One, Zebra Two.

He decided that his final report could wait until morning. It would go out with the daily summaries to Langley by four in the afternoon, Moscow Civil Time. Operation Look Back was finished, and he was glad of it. From start to finish it hadn’t been his sort of project. “Listening to old bitter men vehemently denying their own countries, spewing out their hate and vindictiveness is like digging through someone’s rotting garbage looking for a decent meal,” he’d said.

At thirty-nine, David McAllister-Mac to his wife and friends did not like hiding in closets, skulking around dark corners, opening other people’s mail, or listening to their personal telephone conversations. An unlikely combination for a spy, he supposed, but then he’d never known a spy who was-likely. He was a cautious man, which came from his Scots’ heritage, though the nearest he’d ever come to his distant past was an admitted enjoyment of bagpipe skirling and a pride in his grandfather, Stewart Alvin McAllister, who’d come down to London from Edinburgh to straighten out the fledgling British Secret Intelligence Service during the first world war. His father, who had immigrated to the States in the early twenties, had joined the U.S. Army, had risen to the rank of brigadier general, and had been one of the shakers and movers of the OSS during the second world war, and the CIA afterward. The military, spying, and tradecraft… all these things were in McAllister’s blood. Not babysitting old bitter men with an axe to grind.

McAllister’s little Fiat was parked half up on the curb in the middle of a narrow, deserted block. He took out his car keys as he reached it at the same moment a pair of headlights appeared at the end of the street. He stopped and looked over his shoulder as another pair of headlights appeared from behind. Both vehicles stopped.

They’d blocked off his only exits. McAllister forced himself to remain calm as he stepped back and put his hand in his coat pocket, his fingers curling around the grip of his Beretta 9 mm automatic. Carrying a gun around Moscow is madness, his station chief had argued. “Until you need it,” he countered.

An amplified voice, speaking English, came from the end of the street. “Put your hands up, please, in very plain sight.”

McAllister hesitated. Two men stepped out of the doorway of an apartment building across the sidewalk from his Fiat. They were dressed in civilian clothes, but they were armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles. In unison they drew back the ejector slides.

Do not be foolish, Mr. McAllister. Do as you are told,” the amplified voice instructed.

Two other men appeared on the opposite side of the street. There were no lights in any of the apartments. The streetlights were out as well. He should have noticed. Above, on the roofs on both sides of the street, he could make out the shadowy figures of at least a dozen marksmen. They’d gone through a lot of trouble to get him. Because of Voronin? He doubted it. They would have arrested him there. Slowly he took his hand out of his pocket and then raised both hands over his head.

A short, very thin man dressed in a fur hat and bulky sheepskin coat came up the street. He was dark, in a Georgian sort of a way, and intense, his motions quick, birdlike. He stopped a couple of feet away.

“David Stewart McAllister,” he said, his English thick with a Russian accent. He smiled. “At last. You are under arrest.”

“Charged with what?” McAllister asked, keeping calm. He’d be reported missing within a couple of hours. Gloria would call the Embassy.

“Spying against the Soviet Union,” the little man said.

The morning came cold and dark gray as General Aleksandr Ilyich Borodin stepped from the elevator on the fourth floor of KGB’s Lubyanka Headquarters and charged down the corridor to his office, like a one-man freight train. He was a tall man, by Russian standards, thick of neck and broad of chest, with a nearly bald head and deep, penetrating eyes. Except for a certain overzealousness when it came to some of his projects, it was rumored that he could have risen to director of the Komitet. For the moment, it was said that wiser heads prevailed in the Kremlin which held him as director of the First Chief Directorate’s Special Counterintelligence Service II, charged with penetrating foreign secret intelligence operations.

On the way in from his dacha on the Istra River outside of town, the general had run through the morning reports his driver had brought out. And now he was angry that he had not been included in last night’s operation.

“Good morning, Comrade General,” his secretary said as Borodin charged through his outer office and into his own private domain with its view of Dzerzhinsky Square. “Get me General Suslev on the telephone,” Borodin bellowed, throwing off his great coat and lighting a cigarette.

How could one hope to run an overseas operation without knowing what was happening in one’s own back yard? All the years of work could easily be escaping like a puff of smoke. Once it was away and dissipated no science in the world could reconstruct it. Like acid rain it could even spread destroying everything in its path. Coordination, was all he asked. Not so much. Even the CIA had its oversight committee to make certain their people didn’t step on each other’s toes. It made sense, damnit. He had argued until he was blue in the face, first with Andropov and then with that fool of a successor.

He sat down, inhaling smoke deeply into his lungs, then closed his eyes. “With care, Aleksandr,” he told himself. “It is time to move with care.”

His intercom buzzed. “It is General Suslev, sir,” his secretary said. Suslev was head of the First Chief Directorate, charged with watching Americans in Russia.

Borodin picked up the telephone. “Nikolai, now what exactly was it you did last night?”

“My job, Aleksandr Ilyich,” 5uslev said. “Arresting spies.”

“Who is he?”

“Come down and see for yourself, if you’re so anxious.”

General Borodin rode the elevator down to the basement and strode through the broad stone-walled corridor to the interrogation center where he was immediately passed through to Chief Interrogator Miroshnikov’s office. General Suslev was already there. They were watching the American in the interrogation chamber through a one-way glass. He’d obviously been here since they’d arrested him shortly after ten last evening. His coat was off, his tie loose and at that moment he was seated in a straight-backed chair, smoking a cigarette as he faced his two preliminary interrogators.

“Who is he?” General Borodin asked.

“David McAllister,” General Suslev said, looking up. The general, who had changed his name from the Georgian Suslevili, was a small, intense man whom Borodin hated with a passion. Suslev, however, would probably become the KGB’s director one day. “He is a special assistant to the Ambassador.”

“CIA?”

“You’re particularly astute this morning, Aleksandr. Actually he’s deputy chief of station.”

Borodin ignored the sarcasm. He stepped a little closer to the window so that he could get a better look. McAllister seemed weary, his complexion pale in the harsh white light reflecting sharply off the stark white tiles. He looked nervous, perhaps even concerned, but he did not seem like the sort of man who would give in easily. It was something about the American’s eyes that Borodin found fascinating. He could see in them, even from this distance, a hint of power, of raw strength. It was a look he saw in his own eyes each morning in the mirror. A look he admired. This one would be tough to break.

“You have an interest in this case, Comrade General?” Chief Interrogator Miroshnikov asked. He was a big, oily man, nearly as large as Borodin. But his eyes were small and narrow and close set. They reminded his subordinates of pig eyes. No one liked him. Even his wife, it was said, waited for the day her husband would be struck down by a bus. But he was very good at his job, which was finding out things.“Is there a possibility of turning him?” Borodin asked, masking the real reason for his interest.

“I do not believe so,” Miroshnikov said wistfully. “Perhaps, given the time.

“You are on the wrong side of the ocean with this one, Aleksandr,” Suslev said. “Your job is penetrating the CIA in Washington, not Moscow.”

“He will not remain in the Rodina forever, Nikolai,” Borodin said, gesturing toward McAllister. “Not unless you mean to kill him.” He looked at the American again. His eyes narrowed, as if he had thought of something else. “Where was he when you picked him up?”

“Just off Lyalina Square,” Suslev answered. “What was he doing there at that hour of the night? Meeting someone? Passing secrets?”

“We don’t know, yet. But he was armed,” Suslev said. “Perhaps we’ll find that out this morning, Comrade General,” Miroshnikov said.

I Borodin looked at him, and then in at McAllister. He nodded.

With Miroshnikov across the table from you, anything was possible. He shuddered inwardly. With Miroshnikov the coming days would not be very pleasant for McAllister.

Colonel Petr Valentin Miroshnikov switched off the tape recorder and laid the headphones on his desk. He sat back and stretched, temporarily relieving the pressure on his lower spine. The day had not been entirely satisfactory. The American had refused to give them anything, anything at all, and General Suslev had called every hour wanting to know what progress had been made. Yet the interrogation was going as it should. As he expected it would. There was a certain symmetry to these things. First came the shock of arrest which led to a timidity between the prisoner and his interviewers. It was up to the good interrogator to make the prisoner understand, as soon as possible, that his very existence was no longer in his own hands. Someone else controlled his destiny. From that moment on, the prisoner would become the interrogator’s friend. They would become allies. Confidants in the end.

Miroshnikov looked at the tape recorder, then glanced into the empty interrogation chamber: its stainless steel tables, its sturdy chairs, the instruments, the white tiled floor and walls gleaming like an operating theater beneath strong overhead lights, excited him. With McAllister the symmetry was there, but Miroshnikov knew that the process would be long and drawn out and painful. From the first moment he’d laid eyes on the American he’d instinctively sensed a strength in the man, well beyond the men who had passed this way before. And for that Miroshnikov was grateful. Breaking a man’s will, his spirit, was the real joy. If it was too easily accomplished, if it came too quickly, there was little or no satisfaction. “The world is my will and my idea.” It was bad 5chopenhauer philosophy, but one which Miroshnikov had embraced early as a young exile growing up in Irkutsk in Siberia. He was an outsider. The foreigner in a land of displaced persons, and he had to fight his way through school. His father had never learned to fight or even cope and he had died out there, as had Miroshnikov’s mother. But Petr had learned that the key to the domination of any man was in first understanding his will and then making it yours.

The pitiful little Jews they sent to him who wanted to emigrate so badly to the West, or the poor farmer boy turned soldier who was guilty of nothing more than perhaps a moment’s indescretion were of no consequence. Boring actually. Just hauling them into the Lubyanka was often all the impetus they needed to spill their guts. For a few others, a few slihbas, Soviet political officers, who had become just a little too enamored of life in the West, the challenge was somewhat greater, though intelligence was not necessarily the mark of a man who could withstand an interrogation.

With this one, however, Miroshnikov sensed the biggest challenge of all. McAllister was as intelligent as he was strong. Miroshnikov sensed in the American an extremely well-developed instinct for survival. Challenging. Challenging indeed.

The interrogator got up and went into the tiny bathroom just off his office where he closed and locked the door. He looked at his face in the mirror over the sink and liked what he saw, because he could see beyond mere physical appearance. The eyes are windows into the soul. Looking into his own eyes he could see no soul. Nothing. Only a deep, smoldering hate for Great Russians. Hate for what the Soviet Union had done to him, for what he had been made to endure as a boy, for what he had become. He took a bottle of cognac and a glass from his medicine cabinet, poured himself a stiff measure and drank it down, the liquor warming his insides, straightening out the knots in his stomach. He splashed some water on his face, then tipped his head back, stretching the muscles at the base of his neck, releasing some of the tension that had been building. He took a deep breath, held it for the count of five, and then let it out slowly, forcing all the air out of his lungs, before he turned and went back out to his office.

They’d started with McAllister last night the moment he had been brought in, and had not let up until three this afternoon. Four interrogators, rotating on two teams, had begun the softening up process, the opening acts. McAllister had been allowed a few hours rest, and now it was time to begin in earnest.

Miroshnikov took McAllister’s files, left his office and next door let himself into the interrogation chamber. The tape recorders and video cameras would run automatically. He allowed no one to watch his work. It was his way. And his staff respected his wishes.

He smiled. He’d been waiting for this for a long time. A challenge that he intended savoring slowly, and with delicacy. He pressed the intercom button.

“Bring him in now,” he said, his voice as soft as wind through a graveyard.

McAllister was dressed in a pair of thin coveralls and paper slippers. His eyes were red from lack of sleep, but he seemed alert. He sat erect in the thick, unpadded steel chair.

“Your name please,” Miroshnikov said, studying the open file on the steel table in front of him.

“David McAllister.”

“Your occupation, Mr. McAllister?”

“I am employed by the United States Department of State. At present I am a Second Secretary under Ambassador Leland Smith.”

“You are not a spy?”

“No.“Miroshnikov looked up. He smiled gently. “Do you speak Russian?”

he asked in Russian. McAllister did not reply.

“I asked if you spoke Russian,” Miroshnikov said in English. “No.”

“I think you are lying to me. I think you will be doing a lot of lying at first. But there is time. All the time in the world.”

“I’d like to speak with a representative of my embassy,” McAllister said. His voice was clear, but held just a hint of an East Coast accent.

Miroshnikov sat forward and glanced at McAllister’s file. “An odd job, wouldn’t you say, a Second Secretary? Odd, that is, for a man who graduated first in his class at West Point. Quite an achievement, I might add.”

“It happens.”

“What I don’t understand, however, is why you resigned your commission after only two years. I am under the impression that upon graduation from West Point you are required to serve six years. Your father, the general, must have been terribly disappointed in you.”

McAllister held his silence.

“Or was he, I wonder,” Miroshnikov said.

McAllister had lost all sense of time, though he suspected that it might be after midnight. He was tired, hungry, cold, and stiff from sitting so many hours in the steel chair.

“I wonder if you are aware of Soviet law in regards to suspected foreign agents,” Miroshnikov said.

“Only vaguely,” McAllister replied. He was thinking about his wife. By now she would be safely at the embassy. She would light a fire under Ambassador Smith himself, if need be.

“Unfortunately for the individual there is no right of habeas corpus here. I can keep you like this for as long as I want. For as long as it takes to find out what it is my superiors are so anxious to learn.”

“I am not a spy.” He had been through this training at the Farm.

It was called Progressive Resistance Under Interrogation. Give nothing at first, they’d been taught. Only later should you admit to bits and pieces, nothing important at first. In the end, of course, they all knew that a man’s will could be broken. Torture or drugs. Sooner or later it would come, and with it the possibility of mental or physical damage. But with this one, he thought, damage would not matter. It was in the interrogator’s eyes. The man was not human.

“Oh, but you are, Mr. McAllister. We knew that from the very moment you set foot on Soviet soil twenty-three months and eleven days ago. We have been watching you. Waiting for the proper time to arrest you. And it has come. We are now in what can be considered the pretrial phase. Are you listening to me?”

“I’m listening,” McAllister said. By now Langley would have been notified that he was missing. The first stage of the search was called Pre-Comms, in which his haunts in Moscow would be quietly visited. Perhaps he was having an affair, and he was at the home of his mistress. Perhaps he was involved with one of his sources and could not break free. Perhaps he was with friends. Later, the Ex-Comms stage would be initiated. Hospitals would be contacted, as would the Moscow Militia equivalent to American civil police. Perhaps McAllister had been injured in an auto accident. Perhaps he had been arrested for drunken driving, or running a stoplight. In Moscow it took very little to land in jail, especially for a foreigner. But all that took time.

“Very good,” Miroshnikov was saying. “Because believe me, your life depends upon your complete understanding.”

“I demand to speak to a representative of my embassy.”

“Let’s talk, for a moment, about your grandfather… “Let’s not.”

“Stewart Alvin McAllister. A Scot. Very important man in Great Britain in his day. Did you know, by the way, that your grandfather came here to Moscow in 1920? He was sent to study the Cheka the forerunner of our KGB. He was looking for ideas for his own Secret Intelligence Service. And he was quite effective, from what I gather.”

“I never knew him.”

“More’s the pity,” Miroshnikov said. “It’s an odd thing about us Russians, but don’t you know that in one respect we are very much like the German peoples. We have a propensity for keeping records. We write things down in triplicate, and then file the bits and pieces in little cubbyholes. Someday you will have to see the great pile of records we’ve amassed since 1917, awesome.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“Your father, for instance, is in our files. He immigrated to the United States in 1923, joined the army and became a general. Another amazing achievement. In fact it was your father, along with Alan Dulles, Bill Donovan, and a few others, who created your secret intelligence service. So I imagine he was actually quite proud indeed when you resigned your army commission to work for the Company.”

“I work for the State Department.”

“It is too bad your father isn’t alive now to see this. He was a good man. A brave man. A straightforward man. A soldier. He knew who his enemies were, and he met them head on. He didn’t have to sneak around back alleys talking to dissidents.”

McAllister held himself in check. Had it been because of Voronin after all? If they got to that old man he would fold and they would have all the evidence they would need for a conviction. He began to have his first doubts that this would turn out so good after all. He sat a little forward. “May I have something to eat?”

“No.”

“Something to drink, at least?”

“I think not. There is more ground to cover here. For instance, why didn’t you make a career of the military service? You were raised in an officer’s household, you attended military boarding school the Thomas Academy in Connecticut-and you graduated West Point. Class of ‘71.

“I was tired of the military.”

“I haven’t seen your complete service record yet. But I am sure that you distinguished yourself in Vietnam. Or did something happen in 1973? Did you feel the sense of shame that you had lost your little war? Is that it? Are you a dropout?”

“The State Department was hiring.”

Miroshnikov smiled again. “You thought you could do more for your country with words than bullets, is that it?”

“Something like that.”

“Are you a Democrat or a Republican, Mr. McAllister? A registered party member?”

“What about it?”

“You’re not. Curious that you are willing to fight, or talk, for your freedom, but you are not willing to register with a party. In this country we take our government much more seriously.”

“You don’t have the choice.”

“Neither do you now,” Miroshnikov said softly. “Only because I’m here in this place for the moment.”

“For the moment, yes, Mr. McAllister. But a moment that could stretch to the end of your life. It depends on you. Upon how willing you will be to cooperate. And in the end you will talk to me. They all do.”

“If I don’t?”

“You will.”

“If I’m damaged you’ll have a hard time explaining it.”

“I think not.”

“Drugs, is that it?”

“Perhaps,” Miroshnikov said. “But I am glad to see that you are beginning to have a healthy curiosity about your future. It means to me that you will not be so tough, though from what I understand the CIA’s training camp outside of Williamsburg the Farm, isn’t that what you call the place? is staffed with some of the very best instructors in the business. I’ve often found myself wishing I could see it.”

McAllister allowed himself a smile. “With my connections at State, I’m sure something could be worked out. Perhaps a tour of the headquarters building at Langley, Colonel…

Miroshnikov glanced at the file again. “I suspect you were trained at the Farm in 1974, did your desk duty at Langley and then received your first overseas posting shortly afterward. I show you in Greece in 1975.”

“As a Special Assistant in the Political Affairs Section.”

“Your cover.”

“I am not a spy, I don’t know how many times I have to tell you that.”

“No?”

“No.”

Miroshnikov smiled gently, indulgently, as a father might at a child who has been naughty.” Then a dreadful mistake has been made here, Mr. McAllister. A letter of apology will have to be sent, of course. This sort of thing has never happened before. You understand?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Just a few more questions, I think. You can manage just a little longer?”

“A mistake has been made. So release me. Now. Short of that let me speak with a representative from my embassy.”

Miroshnikov’s eyebrows rose.“Dear me, my good fellow, I believe you don’t understand after all.”

“What?”

“A mistake has been made, but not by us. By you, sir. By your government. By your ambassador.”

McAllister glanced up at the video camera mounted on the ceiling, its lens staring implacably toward the center of the room. He looked back at Miroshnikov.” What are you talking about?”

“The gun. The Beretta automatic that you were carrying in your pocket. Your ambassador must write us an immediate letter of explanation and apology. Second secretaries, even assistants to the ambassador, do not run around Moscow armed with deadly weapons. Only spies carry weapons, don’t you see? And in Moscow we execute spies.”