The Zebra Network

Chapter 22

McAllister sat on the edge of the bed stroking the back of Stephanie’s head with a gentle touch. They were in a nightmare that neither of them seemed able to wake up from. Yet in this dream world real people were dying. She was still shaking, her breath coming in great sobbing gasps.

“Why?” she kept crying. “There was no reason for them to have killed him… especially not like that. He didn’t know anything.”

He didn’t answer her.

It had been very difficult to pull her away from the surgery door and calm her sufficiently so that they could go upstairs to her old room, where he threw a few of the things she kept there into a small suitcase and then walked with her arm-in-arm back to Union Station, where they caught a cab to a dumpy little hotel near the State Historical Society.

“She’s not feeling well,” McAllister explained to the indifferent clerk. “She’s pregnant. It’s morning sickness.”

Upstairs in their shabby room he took off her coat and shoes and made her lie down on the bed.

“Why, David?” she sobbed. “It can’t be possible.”

“Russians,” McAllister said, staring across the room. But it hadn’t been a simple torture and killing in an effort to find Stephanie.

“What?” Stephanie asked, looking up at him. McAllister focused on her. “The Russians did it to your father.”

“How do you know that?”

Like I know a thousand other things, he thought. It’s tradecraft, part of the game, part of the knowledge that a field man needs in order to keep alive. “It’s the way they do things,” he said. “I’ve seen it before.”

“Because of you? Us? Because I’m helping you?”

“Yes,” he said. The truth was crueler than she could imagine. We are making great progress together, you and I, Mac. And I am so very pleased. It was Miroshnikov speaking to him. His face loomed in McAllister’s head. It was always there. It had always been there, and always would be. There was no escape.

“What is it?” Stephanie asked, sensing something of his pain. There was a continuing symmetry, of course, to the Zebra Network in the four names he had taken from the Agency’s computer archives. Suspects, evidently, that the investigators had no evidence to prosecute. They’d still be in place so that they could be watched.

The first, Ray Ellis, was a civilian communications expert working out of the American Embassy in Moscow. McAllister thought he might recognize the name, but he couldn’t fit a face to it. He’d be the Russian conduit. The link from Moscow through which information was passed.

The second link would be Air Force Technical Sergeant Barry Gregory, who worked as a cryptographic-equipment maintenance man in the Pentagon’s vast communications center. He would be the stateside relay point.

Some information could have come from Charles Denby, the third name on the list. He worked as an engineer with Technical Systems Industries in California’s Silicon Valley outside of San Francisco. TS Industries was one of the major contractors on the Star Wars research program.

And finally Kathleen O’Haire’s name appeared on the list of suspects by simple virtue of the fact she was the wife of James O’Haire, the head of the Zebra Network. The weak link?

“David?”

“We’ve got to get out of Baltimore,” he heard himself saying. But he was still drifting. Free associating. Thinking out the possibilities, the pitfalls, the moves they would have to make, the ramifications.

“Not back to Washington?” Stephanie was asking. “California.”

She was staring intently at him. “The list,” she said. “How will we get out there? When?”

“I’ll get our bags. We’ll take a flight out of New York. This afternoon. Tonight.”

“What about our guns?”

“They’ll get through with the checked-in baggage in the hold. It can be done.”

“Denby and Kathleen O’Haire will be watched in California.”

“Then we’ll have to be careful,” McAllister said, finally looking up out of his thoughts. “We don’t have any other choice now.”

Stephanie left their room ten minutes after McAllister had gone to take a cab back to the BaltimoreWashington Airport to fetch their bags. She had splashed some water on her face, and had paced back and forth until she could not take it anymore. It wasn’t the inactivity that bothered her, it was the fact that she knew she was never coming back here to Baltimore. Her old life was gone forever, and she couldn’t stand leaving it this way.

The clerk at the front desk didn’t bother looking up as she emerged from the hotel, turned left and walked rapidly two blocks up toward the Maryland General Hospital on Madison Street, where she caught a cab back to Union Station. Early afternoon traffic was in full swing and the snow had not let up. If anything it had increased again. The cabbie was playing Christmas music on the radio, and despite her resolve she felt tears slipping down her cheeks for all the years that were now lost. Her father had never told her in so many words that he would like to have grandchildren, but she could tell he had thought about it.

On weekends she would often come to visit, helping out in the surgery during the day, and talking until all hours of the night over dinner and a bottle or two of wine. Her father was her best friend. She told him about her work, about her day-to-day life, and about her loves… or lack of them. Always he had listened with keen interest, but never with criticism, though when she’d asked for his advice he would never hesitate to give it. Always thoughtful, always kind. She was going to miss him very badly.

She wasn’t going to leave him this way. Take care of yourself I’ll be all right. I know you will be, father.

They were among the last words they had spoken to each other. There would be no more. After the cabbie dropped her off she lingered inside Union Station for another ten minutes, watching the passengers coming and going, listening to the occasional rumble below as a train arrived or departed, studying the train schedules, looking at the people in the coffee shop.

Mac had ordered her to remain in the hotel. “It’s too dangerous for you to be out on the streets now.” Can’t you see, my darling, that this is something I must do? she cried inside.

The big clock on the back wall of the main departures hall read 1 one-thirty as she finally left the station and hurried on foot up Front Street. It was very dangerous coming here like this, but nothing seemed to have changed in the few hours since she and Mac had been here. There were no police cars out front, no crowds of curious onlookers wondering what was going on, nobody waiting at the front door with a dog or a cat needing the doctor.

Her father’s station wagon was still parked in the back when she mounted the steps. The newspaper boy had brought the early afternoon edition of the paper already. It was lying on the porch in the snow. She picked it up and let herself into the house, passing through the vestibule into the stairhall where she laid the paper on the table.

The house was quiet. Mac had let the two dogs out of their cages and had opened the back door for them. Outside they’d at least have a chance for survival. Here was… only death. She went to the waiting room door and stopped. For the moment her legs would carry her no farther. She could see the blood that had seeped under the surgery door and lay now in a black, crusty patch on the tile. Her stomach turned over, and she thought she was going to be sick. Insanity. All of it was insane, including her coming back here. She forced herself across the waiting room to the surgery door, took a deep breath and opened it, her legs instantly turning to rubber. “Oh, Father,” she whispered.

She’d not really seen him the first time. A haze had filled her eyes, as it threatened to do now. But she made herself look at him, study his body, study the destruction that had been wreaked on him.

Russians, Mac had said. Animals.

Even now she had the crazy thought that her father was going tosit up at any moment and laugh. “It’s a joke, Stephanie,” he would say. But she pushed that macabre thought aside and went the rest of the way into the surgery where she got a pair of shears from one of the drawers and concentrating only on what her hands were doing, cut the tape that held her father’s arms and legs together beneath the table.

His body was cold but surprisingly loose. Bile rose up at the back of her throat as she lifted his legs up onto the steel table, and then his arms, folding his hands together over his chest.

She hurried upstairs, tears blinding her eyes, where she got a clean bedsheet from the linen closet and brought it back to the surgery. She draped it over her father’s body.

“I’m sorry, father,” she said staring at the bulge in the sheet where the scalpel handle stuck out of his eye. All the rest she had been able to do. That one thing was impossible.

She backed to the surgery door then hurried across the waiting room to the stairhall where she raced to the downstairs bathroom and was violently ill in the toilet.

The body in the surgery was her father’s, but it wasn’t him, she kept telling herself. The thing was flesh and bone, and fluids. Her father had been a bright, alive human being; a personality, someone who gave sage advice and warm comfort. The body in the surgery was not capable of such things.

“Father!” she screamed rising up suddenly and swiveling on her heel.

At the door she had to hold onto the wall for support lest she collapse. She was going to have to go on. There was no other possibility. Mac was everything now. There was nothing… absolutely nothing else in her life.

She staggered out into the stairhall. She could see through the front windows that the snow had intensified and that the wind had begun to rise. They were in for a full-fledged storm. She shook her head. Would it ever end? Could it ever end?

At the vestibule door she turned and looked back toward the waiting room, a sudden panic rising up in her breast. Her father was alone. He would lie there until someone came to investigate. Strangers would come, handle his body, and take him away. How could she stand it?

She took a step back when her eye fell on the newspaper lying on the table. It was folded into a plastic bag, Mac’s photograph staring up at her. With shaking hands she picked up the newspaper, pulled the plastic wrapping off and opened it to the front page. Hers and Mac’s photographs stared up at her beneath the headlines: