The Zebra Network

Chapter 29

McAllister raced up the road knowing that he was already too late. Harman had received three hits to his chest and one that had taken off part of his right cheek. Kathleen O’Haire’s face and the back of her head were destroyed.

But Harman had had a gun in his hand. It lay in the snow a few feet from his body; a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson Police Special, the hammer cocked. He had been ready to kill the woman.

McAllister’s breath was coming like a steam engine. What had happened? How had it happened? If Harman had been Zebra One, who were his killers?

He reached the Taurus as Stephanie hurried up past the Wagoneer, the side of her coat soaking wet from where she’d fallen when he shoved her aside.

“Move it,” he shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Potemkin… David, it was Gennadi Potemkin driving that car.

I recognized him. He’s head of KGB operations out of the Soviet Embassy here in Washington.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes!”

He yanked open the driver’s door and climbed in behind the wheel. He had the car started when Stephanie jumped in beside him, and he pulled out around Harman’s car and raced out of the park. Traffic was normal on Fourth Street even though Howard University was all but closed down for the Christmas break. McAllister forced himself to slow down, to act and drive normally. It had been his fault. He had promised the woman he would protect her. But it had been impossible.

Zebra One was for Harman here in Washington. Zebra Two was for someone in Moscow. Who was their common enemy? Someone had signed the order releasing McAllister from a Soviet prison, and someone in Washington had ordered the assassination of Harman. Why? What was he missing?

“Where are we going?” Stephanie asked breathlessly. “I don’t know. I’ve got to have time to think.” Images and snatches of conversation were flashing through his head. He could feel blinding pain stabbing at his groin and across his chest. He could hear his heart hammering raggedly in his ears… but then it stopped! “Are you all right, David?” Stephanie asked softly. He glanced at her. She was pale and shaking. The insanities they had both endured over the past days had taken its toll.

Wherever he showed up death followed on his heels. One by one every person he’d had come in contact with since his release from the Lubyanka had been killed. Everyone except for Highnote and Stephanie. How much longer could they possibly hold out? Where were the answers?

Run. Was that the answer after all? Could they go away and manage to hide for the rest of their lives? Christ, was such a thing possible? If not that, then what were their alternatives? He’d been driving aimlessly. They reached Rhode Island Avenue and he turned right toward Logan Circle, traffic very heavy. A police car, its siren blaring, raced past them, but it was going in the same direction, not back toward the park.

Very soon the bodies would be discovered and reported. Another massacre in Washington. The press would go wild. If someone had seen the Taurus the police would be looking for it.

The only advantage they had now was their altered appearances. No one knew yet what they looked like. Potemkin and the assassin had not paid them the slightest attention, their concentration locked on their targets and then getting away. He glanced at Stephanie again. She was watching him, deep concern in her eyes.

“Harman was going to kill her,” he said.

Stephanie nodded. “I know, I saw the gun fly out of his hand when he went down.”

“Which means he was probably Zebra One.“Again she nodded. “Working for the Russians, then why did they kill him?”

“A coverup,” McAllister said. “But how did he know that Harman would be meeting with Kathleen O’Haire in that park at that moment, unless Harman told him?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s one man who does.”

“Who?” Stephanie asked, her eyes narrowing. “Gennadi Potemkin,” McAllister said. “And I’m going to ask him. Tonight.”

Stephanie walked across the lobby to the pay phones at the back. McAllister had dropped her off at the Marriott Twin Bridges Hotel, where she had checked in and had waited in their room for a full four hours to give him time enough to make his preparations. They were the longest hours of her life. She kept seeing the image of her father’s destroyed body in her mind’s eye; kept feeling his cold, lifeless flesh, barely able to look at his face for the last time as she covered him with the sheet. Zebra One, Zebra Two, obviously code names for two men who had worked at the highest levels of the Soviet and American governments for a long time. Long enough to create the O’Haires’ Zebra Network. Long enough to do what else?

When she’d told McAllister’s story to her father he had not been happy that she wanted to help, but he had understood, as he’d always understood.

“He may not have known himself what is driving him,” her father had said. “And already there has been a lot of killing around him.”

“What else can I do?” she’d asked. “I’m already involved. I was from the moment I pulled him half dead out of the river.”

“I know. Just take care, Stephanie. Please. For me.” Reaching the telephones, she put her purse on the shelf and placed the call to the Soviet Embassy across the river in D.C. While she waited for the connection to be made, she turned and looked across the busy lobby. Nobody was watching her, no one seemed interested. She was merely a woman making a telephone call. Nothing more.

The number rang and she turned back.

“Cood afternoon, you have reached the Embassy of the Union ofSoviet Socialist Republics, how may we help you?” a pleasant man’s voice answered, his English nearly accentless.

“I would like to speak with Gennadi Potemkin.”

“I’m sorry, madam, but we have no person by that name here,” the embassy operator replied smoothly.

“I happen to know that you do,” Stephanie said, forcing a reasonable tone to her voice. “If you will just pass him the message that McAllister was in McMillan Park this noon, I think he’ll speak with me.”

“I am so sorry, madam, but..

“It will be the biggest mistake of your life, comrade, if you don’t pass that message.”

“One moment, please,” the operator said, unperturbed, and the line went dead.

It was possible, she thought, that she had been disconnected. The Soviet Embassy received dozens of crank calls every day from disgruntled American citizens and Soviet emigres. But she waited on the line.

A full five minutes later, another man came on, his voice much older, his accent strong. “Is this Miss Albright?”

“Yes, are you Potemkin?” Stephanie asked, startled by his use of her name, and yet not really surprised he knew it.

“Indeed it is,” Potemkin said. “I assume you are telephoning from a reasonably secure location, somewhere within the city?”

“Close,” Stephanie said. “We were in McMillan Park this morning.”

“Yes?” Potemkin said.

“McAllister would like to meet with you.”

“To what purpose, Miss Albright? What could we possibly have to say to each other?”

“Listen to me, you sonofabitch. We know about Zebra One and Zebra Two. We know about the network, and we know a lot more.”

Potemkin laughed. “My dear girl, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

“I think you do, and I think you’d better agree to meet with him. Alone. Both of you alone.”

“Impossible.”

“Neither are you. I don’t know what you think you know, but it is meaningless.”

“As meaningless as McAllister’s release from the Lubyanka within hours of his trial and conviction? No explanations. No prisoner exchanges. No publicity. Nothing.”

Potemkin did not reply.

“He’s at Janos Sikorski’s house right now, waiting for you. It’s out near Reston, but I’m sure you know where it is. He wants to make a deal.”

“What sort of a deal?” Potemkin asked, his voice guarded. “His life for yours,” Stephanie said, and she hung up as Mac had instructed her to do. Gathering up her purse she turned and walked back across the lobby, her legs weak, her breath catching in her chest. She had done everything she could and now it was up to him.

McAllister sat in the Taurus parked diagonally across Sixteenth Street from the Soviet Embassy a few blocks up from the White House. He had made it down from Reston fifteen minutes ago, about the same time Stephanie had placed her call to Potemkin. He had done what little he could to even the odds after first making sure Sikorski’s place wasn’t still staked out. Now it was up to the Russian, who, if he was smart, would simply ignore the message.

Do nothing, McAllister said to himself, and you’ll be safe this time. From Kathleen O’Haire, the wife of a convicted spy, to Donald Harman, a presidential adviser. And from Harman to Gennadi Potemkin, head of all KGB operations in the United States. Where would it lead from there? How many more dark corridors would he have to travel before he made his way through the labyrinth?

“Even if he does agree to meet with you, David, he certainly won’t go out there alone,” Stephanie had objected when he’d laid out his plan.

“He’d be a fool if he did,” McAllister agreed. “Which is why I’m going to wait for him outside the embassy and see who goes with him.”

“Let me go with you.”

“No.”

“Damnit, David..

“No,” McAllister said again. “You’ll stay here and do exactly as I say. No games now. I don’t want you out there. I don’t want to have to worry about you. I know what I’m doing.” She looked at him for a long time. “If you’re spotted it will blow the entire thing.”

“Yes,” he said.

It’s tradecraft, pure and simple, and it won’t be very pleasant. It was in his family heritage, in his blood, in the training he had received and the experiences he had survived over the past fourteen years.

Once a spy always a spy, that was the old adage. But after this, if by some miracle he survived, he was through. The business no longer held any fascination for him, if it ever had.

The roof of the embassy bristled with antennae and microwave dishes that bounced signals off a Soviet communications satellite for transmission direct to Moscow. He stared at the complex electronic arrays, his brain making automatic connections, skipping like a computer down long lines of facts and figures, each one leading inexorably to the next. Anomalies, Wallace Mahoney had called the bits and pieces that didn’t seem to add up. Stephanie’s father had been tortured and killed because of a transmitter? In his mind’s eye he could see the open cabinet door, the wires emerging from the wall. He focused again on the antennae on the embassy roof. Had Albright been communicating with the Russians? Was his murder a part of some coverup as well? The same white Mercedes 450SEL sedan from the park emerged from behind the embassy, and as it passed, McAllister got a brief glance at its passengers. Potemkin was driving, the assassin from this morning beside him in the front, and three other men in the backseat.

McAllister put the car in gear, drove to the end of the block, turned the corner, and caught up with the Mercedes on H Street in front of Lafayette Park. He held back, keeping several car lengths behind the big German car, which turned south on Seventeenth Street, the White House to the left, the huge Christmas tree on the front lawn lit up already in the diminishing light as evening approached. Potemkin was driving at a sedate speed. This would be no time forhim to be stopped and issued a speeding warning. He would be careful now; so much depended upon his not being delayed. He would remain scrupulously within the speed limit.

Reaching Constitution Avenue, the Mercedes turned right toward the Roosevelt Bridge, merging smoothly with traffic as it picked up speed.

The question was, which route would the Russians take to get out to Reston? South through the edge of Alexandria then up 1-495 through Annandale; north to the Capital Beltway which crossed the Dulles Airport access road; or the shortest route through Arlington on the partially completed 1-66 that branched off north of Falls Church?

He got his answer about three miles later when the Mercedes, heading north, passed the 1-66 exit and continued toward the Capital Beltway. His luck was holding.

Swinging west on 1-66 he speeded up, the sun only a vague brightness low in the overcast sky ahead, traffic picking up, all of it running at a good speed as everyone headed home.

McAllister parked his car about seventy-five yards up from Sikorski’s clearing, dousing the lights and shutting off the engine, but leaving the keys. Under the hood he pulled out the main wire from the electronic ignition system, rendering the car inoperative for the moment.

It was nearly dark now. He trotted down the road to the clearing and in the distance to the north he could see the lights of Reston.

The snow was deep up here, the only footprints were his, leading directly across to the front door of the cabin. He hurried down the same path so that it wouldn’t appear as if he had come and gone and returned again, entered the dark, silent house and crossed immediately to the kitchen where he let himself out, crossed the backyard well out of sight of the driveway, and scrambled down the steep hill to the path he’d found this afternoon. Now that the sun had gone down the temperature was dropping rapidly. Still he was sweating and the wound in his side was aching by the time he had circled around to the woods that sloped up from the house parallel to, but above, the driveway. A few snowflakes began to fall as he stopped about fifty yards from the house, cocking his ear to listen and scanning the dark woods in the direction of the driveway for any sign that Potemkin and his triggermen had shown up. But there was nothing, only the occasional whisper of a light wind in the treetops, and he continued up the hill.

For a while he was back in Bulgaria, racing for the border, the militia hot on his trail. He could hear the helicopters and from time to time the sounds of the dogs. It was winter, like now, and the snow was deep. Then, as now, he had been racing for his life.

He reached a spot directly above where he had parked his car and started down toward the driveway when he saw the flash of a car’s headlights below. He pulled up short, leaning against a tree, holding his breath as best he could while he listened.

The light flashed again, and then was gone. Moments later he heard car doors opening and closing, and the muffled sound of someone talking, issuing orders.

Still he held his position. There were five of them, all killers. He needed to even the odds before he confronted Potemkin.

The Taurus’s engine turned over, but of course the car would not start. Whoever was behind the wheel tried again, and then there were more voices, this time it sounded as if at least one of them was angry about something.

Finally the voices began to fade, moving down the driveway toward the clearing. McAllister pushed away from the tree and keeping low hurried through the woods, crawling the last twenty feet on his stomach.

They had left one man with the Mercedes. He was leaning up against the hood of the car, a cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth, a big silenced pistol held loosely in his right hand.

McAllister took out his gun and continued crawling the rest of the way down the hill to a spot just a few feet above the driveway and ten yards behind the Mercedes. The lone man was gazing intently down the driveway in the direction the others had gone. He did not turn around as McAllister slipped out of the woods and crept forward to the big German car. At the last possible moment the man, hearing something or sensing that someone was behind him, started to turn. At that instant, McAllister sprang up, smashing the butt of the heavy P38 into the side of theman’s head. He went down heavily, his shoulder glancing off the car’s bumper, but still semiconscious he tried to bring up his gun. McAllister grabbed a handful of his coat, pulled him half up and smashed the butt of his gun into the man’s face, opening his nose with a gush of blood and knocking him senseless. Working fast now, with one eye toward the slope of the driveway lest one of Potemkin’s people had heard something and was coming back to investigate, McAllister stripped the unconscious man of his belt and tie, trussing his arms and leg together behind his back. He jammed his handkerchief into the man’s mouth, holstered his own gun, and snatched the silenced weapon. It was a big, heavy 9-mm automatic. A proper mokrie dela weapon for destroying faces.

They’d left the Mercedes open. He popped the hood, yanked out the ignition wire and careful to make as little noise as possible, closed the hood again, before he scrambled back up into the woods.

Neutralizing the first of the Russians had taken barely three minutes. By now he figured the other four would have reached the clearing where they would be holding up to watch the cabin for signs that this was a trap. Potemkin would probably be dispersing his men left and right so that they could come up from behind the house. They would be moving through the woods, but well within sight of the clearing. No one wanted to get lost in these dark woods. It would take them several cautious minutes to circle the entire clearing and then cross at the back. It took him precious minutes to find the path he’d made through the woods this afternoon, and then follow it to a spot about ten yards from the clearing and an equal distance up from the driveway. He thought he might be able to hear someone talking off to his left, and someone else moving through the woods toward his right, but again the sounds faded.

Stuffing the big Russian gun in his belt, he climbed up the tree to the second set of large branches about fifteen feet off the ground where e had left one of Sikorski’s hunting rifles with a big light-gathering scope.

From his vantage point he had an open line of fire across the entire clearing.

He spotted the first man to the west, just emerging from the woods. Swinging the scope quickly across the clearing, he spotted a second man on the east side, working his way slowly toward the house. Potemkin and the other one were probably waiting on the driveway.

McAllister swung the gun toward the west again, catching then losing then catching the Russian who had stopped and was looking down toward the house.

Centering the cross hairs on the man’s chest, he hesitated for just a moment. Pulling the trigger would make him an assassin… no less of a killer than the men he was fighting.

And there it is, boyo, his father had once said. The time will come when you’ll have to make a decision. One of morals. When that happens think out your options, consider the alternatives, work out the consequences not only of your action, but the consequences of your inaction.

They were killers. He had seen what they’d done to Sikorski, and to Nicholas Albright. He had seen first-hand in Bulgaria and East Germany and a dozen other places what sort of animals they could be. Not all Russians were like that, of course. But the special ones they picked to work the KGB’s Department Viktor, the murder squad, they were the worst. They simply had no regard whatsoever for human life.

He squeezed off a shot, finished with his little morality lecture to himself, the heavy deer rifle bucking against his shoulder, the tremendous crack echoing off the hills, and the Russian went down as if he had been struck by a Mack truck. Quickly he brought the rifle around as he ejected the spent shell, pumping a live round into the firing chamber. The second Russian was racing back to the protection of the woods. McAllister led him and at the last moment squeezed off a shot, the man flopping down into the snow, his arms and legs splayed out.

Hooking the rifle’s shoulder strap on a cross branch, he scrambled down out of the tree and headed back the same way he had come, moving from tree to tree, keeping his eye toward the driveway and the spot he had fired from.

After twenty yards he angled toward the driveway, pulling out the Russian’s gun, making certain by feel that it was ready to fire. There was a noise behind him; cloth brushing against a tree trunk, the crunch of a booted foot in the deep snow, and he stopped.

“McAllister,” Potemkin shouted, his voice coming from farther right than the noise. It sounded as if he were still at the end of the driveway near the clearing.

McAllister moved cautiously down the hill behind the hole of a much larger tree where he again held up, searching the dark woods behind him.

There were two of them; Potemkin in the driveway and the one who had come up into the woods. This one would have followed McAllister’s footprints in the snow. Moving slowly just as McAllister had, from tree to tree. Testing each step, scanning the darkness ahead of him.

McAllister remained absolutely still.

“McAllister,” Potemkin shouted again. “I’ve come here to talk. I’ll send my people away. It’ll be just you and me.” There was the flash of movement to the left, about fifteen feet away, and then it was gone.

McAllister, his cheek against the rough bark of the tree, didn’t move a muscle.

“You’re making a big mistake,” Potemkin called. “You don’t know all the facts. I can help you. As strange as that seems, it’s the truth. Just talk. No more killing.”

A big man stepped out from behind a tree and started to move across a narrow open space when McAllister extended the silenced automatic, steadying his aim with his arm propped against the tree trunk.

“Stop and throw your gun down,” McAllister ordered. The man snapped off a single shot and dove for the protection of the trees. McAllister fired two shots in quick succession, the first striking the man in the left leg, and the second in his left side. He tumbled in the snow, thrashed around for a second or two, and then lay still.

McAllister watched him for a full minute before he stepped away m the tree and approached slowly. He was dead, his eyes open, big patch of blood staining the snow. There was something aboutthe man, perhaps his face, or the cut of his clothes, that was oddly familiar to McAllister, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

Turning, he raced back up through the woods parallel to the driveway, making little or no noise as he ran, finally emerging from the woods at the parked cars, and just ducking out of sight behind the Mercedes as Potemkin, huffing and puffing, came into view, a big pistol in his right hand.

The KGB chief of station was obviously highly agitated. What had promised to be a relatively easy job of eliminating McAllister-the odds had been five to one-had somehow gone terribly wrong, and now he was running for his own life, looking over his shoulder every few yards.

McAllister watched him approach, passing the Taurus and then pulling up short when he saw the man lying trussed up in front of the Mercedes. He looked toward the woods on both sides of the driveway, and then did, to McAllister’s way of thinking, the most extraordinary thing possible. He raised his pistol and shot his own man in the head.

McAllister ducked back behind the car, his heart hammering, hardly able to believe what he had just witnessed with his own eyes. Why? It made no sense. Why would he kill his own man?

Potemkin came around to the driver’s side and climbed in behind the wheel of the Mercedes. He turned the ignition and the car’s engine turned over, but it wouldn’t start.

He tried again as McAllister crept around to the side of the car and rose up all of a sudden, yanking the door open and jamming the pistol into Potemkin’s temple.

The Russian nearly jumped out of his skin. He started to reach for his own gun which he had lain beside him on the seat.

“I’ll blow your head off, comrade,” McAllister spat. Potemkin froze, his eyes nearly bulging out of their sockets. “Zebra One was Donald Harman. You had him killed this morning. Who is Zebra Two?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Potemkin stammered. McAllisterjammed the silencer tube of the automatic harder against the man’s temple. “I don’t have the time to fuck with you. Zebra Two, who is he?”

“I don’t know.”

McAllister cocked the pistol, the noise very loud. “A name, comrade, and you may live.”

“I swear to you, I don’t know.”

“Why did you have Harman killed?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“You are either extremely brave or you are incredibly stupid. Why did you have Harman killed?”

“Because he was going crazy. He was out of control.”

“Out of whose control, yours?”

“He didn’t work for me.”

“Who then?”

“I don’t know,” Potemkin shouted. “I swear to you, I don’t know. But he did work with Albright, I do know that.”

“What?” McAllister said, a hot jab of fear stitching across his chest.

“Nicholas Albright was one of Harman’s pipelines to the CIA.” McAllister’s head was spinning. “A man such as Harman wouldn’t need him. Not for that.”

“Albright was also his communications link with Moscow,” Potemkin said. “But that’s something I didn’t find out until a few days ago.”

“When you had Albright murdered?” McAllister was thinking about the cabinet in Albright’s surgery, the wires leading from the wall. He’d been right about the transmitter.

“Yes,” Potemkin said.

“Who did Albright take his orders from in Moscow? Who was his communications link?”

“I don’t know for sure.”

“A name, comrade. A name!”

“It’s probably Borodin. General Aleksandr Borodin.”

“Is he KGB?”

“Yes, of course. He is director of the First Chief Directorate’s Special Counterintelligence Service II. He is a crazy man. This is not beyond him.”

Zebra One was for Donald Harman, in Washington. Zebra Two was for General Aleksandr Borodin in Moscow. But there was more.“What did you mean when you said Harman had gotten out of control?”

“It was he who arranged the killings in College Park.”

“Why?”

“To stop you. He wanted to totally discredit you, make everyone believe for certain that you had gone crazy.”

“How did you know he would be meeting with the O’Haire woman this morning?”

“I sent someone to her house. They listened to a tape-recorded message on her answering machine. She was already gone, so I figured they’d be meeting somewhere, and I followed him.”

Harman and Borodin worked together, Stephanie’s father their link. What else?

“Did the O’Haires work for Harman?”

“No,” Potemkin said. “They were my network.” The further he went into this nightmare the less sense it made. “Why did you just shoot your own man?”

“He’s not mine,” Potemkin said disdainfully. “He… and the others… all of them were Mafia. I hired them. They’ll do anything for money. Anything.” Again something tickled insistently at the back of McAllister’s head, but he couldn’t put a name to it.

“Borodin and Harman worked together. Who is your contact here

in the States?” Potemkin didn’t answer.

“It was a faction fight all this time,” McAllister said. “Harman wanted me dead, but so did you. Why?”

Potemkin turned his head slowly so that he was able to look up out of the corner of his eyes at McAllister. “Don’t you know, haven’t you figured it out yet?”

“Who do you work with?” McAllister shouted. “You’re the most dangerous man alive at this moment. Everyone wants you dead.”

“Who?” McAllister shouted again.

“Fuck your mother,” Potemkin swore and he lunged against McAllister trying to shove him off balance, when the gun went off destroying the side of his head.