The Zebra Network

Chapter 20

Stephanie had wanted to leave the hotel immediately, but McAllister convinced her that they would run less of a risk of being spotted if they waited a couple of hours until normal workday traffic began. They wouldn’t stand out as the only ones on the street. They checked out a few minutes after seven-thirty, paying their bill and walking three blocks down to New York Avenue directly across from the sprawling Washington Convention Center.

The dawn was gray and overcast. Traffic was extremely heavy and still ran with headlights. The gaily lit Christmas decorations seemed somehow out of place, especially considering Stephanie’s dark mood. She had convinced herself that something terrible had happened to her father, and McAllister had no real idea what he could or should say to her, because he thought there was a better than fair possibility she was correct.

They found a cab almost immediately, the driver a young black man with Walkman headphones half over his ears, beating a rhythm on the steering wheel. “Can you take us to the BaltimoreWashington Airport?” McAllister asked when he and Stephanie got in the backseat.

The driver looked at their images in his rearview mirror. “Man, in this shit?” he asked, indicating the thick traffic.

“A hundred dollars,” McAllister said. “We’ve got a plane to catch, and we can’t afford to screw around.”

The driver grinned, hitting the button on his trip meter as he pulled out into traffic. He reached down with his right hand and turned up the volume on his Walkman, his head bobbing with the music that was suddenly so loud McAllister and Stephanie could hear it in the backseat.

McAllister looked over his shoulder a couple of blocks later to seeif they had picked up a tail. He decided after a few moments of watching traffic, that they had not, and he sat back. They’d done the impossible, so far, he thought. But from this moment on it was going to start getting difficult. Stephanie was holding his hand, her palms cold and wet, her entire body shivering. She looked into his eyes. “If something has happened to him, I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said, her voice cracking. “Someone from the Agency and probably the FBI was sent up to interview him,” McAllister said. “But I don’t think they’d do anything more than ask a few questions.”

“He wouldn’t have told them anything.”

“Of course not.”

“It’s not them I’m worried about, David. It’s the Russians, or the Mafia.”

“There is no reason for them to go to him,” McAllister said, not really believing it himself. “It’s me they’re after.”

“And me, because I’m helping you.”

“But they’re not after my wife. There’s no reason to suspect they’d go after your father.”

“God, I wish I could believe you,” Stephanie whispered, sitting back. “I wish it was that easy.”

He let it rest for the moment. Trust your instincts, she had told him.

I think that something did happen to you in the Lubyanka. Something that changed you, something that made you unsure of your own abilities. But deep in your gut you know what moves to make, you know how to protect yourself… Let yourselfgo, David. Let your old habits, your old instincts take over…. You have the tradecraft, use it.

“He doesn’t know anything,” she said softly. “I didn’t tell him what we were doing, just that we were together.” He squeezed her hand. “It may be that we won’t be able to get to him.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, her eyes wild. “You’re on the run. Dexter Kingman might figure that you’d try to contact your father. They could be watching the place, waiting for you to show up.”

“Then why didn’t they put a tap on his phone?” she asked. “There was no answer last night and again this morning.”

“Because they knew that even if you did call him, you wouldn’t reveal your location.”

She suddenly saw what he was driving at. “They could have shunted his incoming calls to a dead number, making me believe that something had happened to my father. Bait. It could be a trap.”

McAllister nodded, thinking that in a way it would be much easier on her if that were the case, and yet doubting it. They reached the parkway just past the National Arboretum, and the driver sped up across the Anacostia River, merging smoothly with the traffic that had thinned out. Most people were coming into the city at this hour, not leaving it.

They were in Maryland now, and a couple of minutes later as they passed over lLandover Road, three highway patrol cars, their lights flashing, their sirens blaring, raced beneath the parkway heading northwest toward Hyattsville and College Park.

Stephanie stiffened, but when the police cars did not take the entrance ramp onto the parkway, but instead continued northwest, she relaxed slightly.

McAllister watched out the rear window as the squad cars were lost in the distance, then he cranked down his window a couple of inches. At first he could hear nothing but the roar of the wind. The driver, feeling the sudden cold air, looked up. Then in the far distance, McAllister thought he could hear sirens. A lot of sirens.

An accident, he wondered. Or was it?

It was nearly nine by the time the cabbie dropped them off at the Eastern Airlines passenger departures entrance of the BaltimoreWashington International Airport in Ferndale just south of downtown Baltimore. After McAllister paid the driver, he and Stephanie hurried into the terminal, took the escalator downstairs to the baggage pickup area, and stowed their two overnight bags in a coin-operated locker.

Their driver had taken the down ramp around and was waiting in front for a fare back to Washington. It had begun to snow lightly again. Christmas music was playing on the overhead speakers. It wasfaintly depressing. A young couple climbed into the cab a few minutes later, and when it was gone, McAllister and Stephanie went outside and got a cab into Baltimore, Stephanie giving the driver an address a couple of blocks from her father’s house. Once again McAllister got the odd feeling that he was coming back on his life. That he was retracing old steps. That he was making no progress. Stephanie sat on the edge of the seat, her hands together in her lap, holding herself rigidly erect as if she were afraid she would break something if she moved.

If anything, downtown Baltimore was even more decorated for the holidays than was Washington. A tall Christmas tree stood in front of the Civic Center, and a few blocks south in the harbor, the USS Constellation on permanent display, was decked out with all her flags. At night she would be lit. The cabbie dropped them off in front of Union Station on Exeter Street. They waited just within the main entrance until the taxi had disappeared around the corner. McAllister took Stephanie’s arm. “Come on,” he said.

“Where are we going now?”

“To phone your father.”

They crossed the cavernous departure hall, angling to the left when McAllister spotted the bank of telephones along the far wall. Stephanie plugged a quarter in the phone and dialed her father’s number. When the connection was made she held the phone away from her ear so that McAllister could hear as well. After ten rings she looked at him and shook her head.

“Same as last night and early this morning,” she said, hanging up. “He should be there.”

“Has he got an assistant, maybe a secretary working with him?”

“Only in the summers when he sometimes takes a couple of interns from the college. The rest of the time he prefers to work alone. David, it’s never been a very large practice.”

“Is there anyplace else he might have gone last night? An emergency call, or something like that? Friends? Maybe a woman friend?”

“It’s Tuesday. He might go away for a weekend, he sometimes does that, but never on a weekday. Something has happened.”

McAllister glanced across the large hall. The station was fairlybusy at this hour. Across from the telephones were a few shops and a small snack bar. He felt for the gun at the small of his back. “Have you still got your gun?”

“Yes.”

He took her shoulders and looked into her eyes, wanting to impress her with the seriousness of what he was about to say. “This part is very important, Stephanie,” he said. “If we’re confronted or cornered, or anything like that, and they clearly identify themselves as FBI or the police or even the Agency, you won’t resist. You’ll put down your gun and surrender immediately.”

“They’ll kill us.”

“Maybe,” McAllister said grimly. “But we’re not going to start shooting innocent people. Not now, not ever. Clear?”

She nodded.

“Let’s get going,” he said. “Keep your eyes open Stephanie.”

Albright’s house was on Front Street about three blocks from Union Station in a neighborhood of similarly large houses that had at one time probably belonged to ship captains. For years the neighborhood had deteriorated, but over the past few years Baltimore had revitalized its harbor area and had gone on an inner-city cleanup and rebuilding campaign. Stephanie’s father, she’d told him, had weathered all the changes in the more than twenty years he had lived and worked in the neighborhood.

There was a fair amount of traffic this morning, all moving slowly because of the continuing snowfall that made the streets very slippery. A few BMWs, a Mercedes, and several American-made cars were parked along the curb, but none of them sported any extra antennae, nor were any of them occupied. There were no lingering taxis, wIndowless vans, or suspicious-looking trucks parked anywhere in the vicinity, and so far as McAllister could see there were no people on foot in the near vicinity of Albright’s house; no meter-readers or telephone repairmen, no newspaper delivery boys, no bakery or delivery people. Nothing or nobody who could be a cover for a surveillance team.

They passed a corner grocery store and crossed the street after a big Allied moving van rumbled by. McAllister watched it turn thecorner at Union Station and when it was gone he and Stephanie waited across the street for a full five minutes, half expecting the truck to come back around the block. When it did not reappear, they continued.

Coming up on the house, McAllister could see nothing out of the ordinary, nothing out of place at first, but Stephanie let out a little gasp and pulled up short.

“What is it?” he asked. “It’s my father’s car,” she said.

McAllister could just see the rear deck of a dark-brown station wagon parked in the back. “He doesn’t have another?”

“No,” she said softly.

They came up the walk and mounted the steps. McAllister turned and looked back to the street. No one was there. No one was watching this place. The neighborhood felt empty, somehow deserted to him.

A cardboard clock with the message WILL BE BACK AT was hung in the front-door window, the hands pointing to nine o’clock. It was well past that time now. But nine o’clock last night or this morning?

The door was locked, but Stephanie produced a key from her purse and opened it. She started inside, but McAllister held her back. He took out his pistol, switched off the safety and stepped just inside the vestibule.

A tall oak door with an etched-glass window leading into the main stairhall was half open. Today’s mail lay in a pile on the vestibule floor behind the outside door. McAllister moved on the balls of his feet to the partially open inner door and looked inside. Straight ahead, the stairs rose to the second floor. A corridor led back to the kitchen. On the left was Albright’s office, on the right, in what originally had been the living room and dining room were a small waiting room, a surgery, and a laboratory. The house smelled faintly of disinfectant and an odd, animal odor. From somewhere at the back of the house he thought he could hear a cat, or perhaps a small dog, whining softly.

Stephanie came the rest of the way into the vestibule. She closed and locked the door. She heard the whining. “It’s coming from the animal cages on the back porch,” she whispered. She was very pale and her nostrils were flared, her lips half parted, as if she were starting to hyperventilate. McAllister went the rest of the way into the house and looked into the waiting room. A half a dozen chairs were grouped around a low plastic coffee table on which several magazines lay in a disarrayed pile. The sound of the animal’s pitiful whining was a little louder now, and it set his teeth on edge.

Stephanie came up behind him.

“You take the upstairs,” he whispered to her. She had taken out her.32 automatic.

“Is someone still here?” she asked. “I don’t think so, but be careful.”

She hesitated a moment, but then nodded and turned away. McAllister watched her go up the stairs, the gun at her side, then he went across the waiting room to the swinging door that led into the surgery, careful to avoid stepping in the narrow puddle of blood that had seeped under the door and had dried to a hard black crust. She had not come far enough into the waiting room to see it. But he had. And he knew exactly what it meant, and what he would find inside.

Steeling himself, McAllister pushed open the surgery door and went inside. The room wasn’t very large, perhaps ten feet by fifteen feet overall. On two sides were glass-fronted cabinets that had contained medical supplies. On a third side was a long Formica-topped counter which ran the length of the room. On the fourth were shelves containing medicines, and a doorway that led into the laboratory. Nicholas Albright’s nude body was trussed on the stainless steel examining table in the middle of the room. He had lost a lot of blood before he died, some of it pooling up beside him on the tabletop, more of it running down onto the floor where it had gathered and trickled along the white tile floor to the waiting room door.

McAllister looked away from the corpse, his stomach rising up into his throat. The room had been thoroughly searched. The glass on the cabinet fronts had been smashed, and most of the instruments and medicines had been pulled down and scattered all over the room.

Outwardly it appeared as if someone had come here looking for drugs. When they hadn’t found any they had tied Albright to theexamining table and had tortured him for the information. But McAllister saw beyond that. The overhead light fixtures had been taken apart, the cabinets had been moved away from the walls, and even the heating vents had been uncovered. Whoever had done this were professionals. They had come here to find something; something hidden in this room. He could see through into the laboratory. Nothing had been disturbed in there, nor had anything been touched in the waiting room. It was here in Albright’s surgery that the search had been concentrated.

Still careful not to step in any of the blood, McAllister crossed around behind the examining table to the long counter on the opposite wall. A small cabinet had been left partially open. Using his thumbnail, he eased the door open all the way. The cabinet was empty except for several electrical wires leading from inside the wall. McAllister stared at them for a long time. One of the wires carried power, another was a ground connection, and the third obviously led to an antenna, the barrel of the coaxial plug dangling. A transmitter. Why?

He turned again to look at Albright’s body. The scalpel they had used to cut him with was jutting from his left eye socket. His arms were tied behind him beneath the table, as were his legs. They had cut long strips of flesh from his abdomen, from his arms, and from the sensitive areas around his nipples and his inner thighs. His mouth was filled with gauze pads to stop him from screaming while they tortured him.

His penis had been slit lengthwise, his scrotum had been opened and he had been castrated, and in the end they had cut the main arteries high on his legs near his groin so that he had bled to death.

The scalpel thrust into his eye had probably been done out of frustration. It was possible that they had got nothing from him.

He had to look away from the body again, his stomach rolling, the disinfectant smell of the surgery suddenly clawing at the back of his tongue. Stephanie could not be allowed to see this.

They had come looking for something. A transmitter, perhaps. Still, he was missing something. He knew that much, but for the life of him he could not think it out. They’d come for more than a clue as to Stephanie’s whereabouts. In the first few minutes it would have become evident that the man didn’t know anything. Unless he had been working for them. The thought was chilling. They had stuffed his mouth full of gauze so that he couldn’t make enough noise to rouse the neighbors. But he could not talk either. This was a warning. The brutality of it struck him. The Russianness of it. He had seen things like this before. A mokrie dela. A wet affair. Blood will be spilled as a warning to all other spies.

The animal at the back of the house had stopped whining, and Stephanie’s sudden scream at the surgery door shattered the eerie silence.