The Zebra Network

Chapter 7

McAllister had been lying in a heap behind the couch for how long? He realized with a terrible start that he had no idea. The sudden movement and fall had jarred something in his head. He must have blacked out.

He still had the Walther, though. He tried to push himself over with his left hand, but his arm collapsed beneath him, his entire left side ablaze in pain. He could feel blood trickling down his side.

“Janos?” he called out.

There was no answer. The only sounds in the house were the crackling of the flames in the fireplace.

“Janos, let’s talk,” he called into the darkness. “It’s not what you think. I swear to God…

There was a noise. Off to his right. In the kitchen. The scrape of something soft against the floor. Sikorski’s slippers?

“Janos?” McAllister shouted, scrambling as best he could to his feet.

The kitchen door banged open.

McAllister tottered across the room as fast as he could make his legs work, his head spinning, his heart thumping raggedly in his chest. At the entryway into the kitchen he held up, listening for sounds, any sounds. There was something in the distance. Outside. Someone running.

Stepping around the corner, he rushed to the open kitchen door and stepped out into the night. At first he could make out nothing except the dark woods rising up from the clearing in front of the cabin, the dirt road leading back over the hill, and to the north the lights of Reston in the far distance. And then he saw Sikorski’s frail form disappearing over the edge of the hill, his white hair flying behind him.

Standing in the darkness McAllister wavered, trying to decide whatto do. It was hard to make his thoughts come straight. The old man had lived alone up here for the past six years. He almost certainly knew his way around these hills in the darkness. To go after him now like this would be to invite suicide. There would be any of a dozen places within a hundred yards of the cabin where Sikorski could stage an ambush. He turned and staggered around to the front of the cabin, searching the darkness up the narrow dirt road. Stephanie had to be here someplace. She couldn’t have gone far on foot. He patted his pocket where he had dropped the van’s keys, but it was empty, as were his other pockets. The keys were gone. He still had her.32 automatic, but the keys were gone. He looked back toward the cabin. He hadn’t dropped them. But how…? Then it came to him. She had fallen against him getting out of the van. They had been in close contact with each other long enough for her to have stolen the keys.

Christ. A part of him had to admire her courage. She had taken a big risk. By now she could have reached a telephone. Other men would be coming. Professionals with orders to kill him. There would be no way out for him. The fact of Sikorski’s pickup truck parked under the carport suddenly penetrated. He’d been lucky so far, too lucky. There was no reason for it to hold much longer. It was possible that the old man had the keys in his pocket, or had placed them in some obvious spot in the house that could take minutes to find-minutes he did not have.

His luck held. The keys dangled from the ignition. McAllister got painfully behind the wheel, pumped the gas pedal a couple of times and turned the key. The engine roared to life with a noisy clatter. Switching on the headlights-now was no time to run off the road in the darkness-he backed out of the carport, his left foot so numb that he jerked the clutch, nearly stalling the engine. His head was spinning badly, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for him to keep his head up, let alone see much more than faded double images.

Somehow he got the old truck straightened out and headed back up the dirt road. Time. He had to get as far away from this place as quickly as possible before his escape routes were completely cut off. But where?

At the base of the hill he turned left on the secondary highway, away from Reston. Traffic was light, but each time he met an oncoming car the headlights temporarily blinded him, making it almost impossible to keep the truck in a straight line. Minutes later he passed under the Dulles Airport access road, and continued south into the Virginia countryside, traffic almost nonexistent now. He drove with the window down, and at one point he thought he could hear the sound of sirens, a lot of sirens, in the distance to the southeast toward Washington. He pulled over to the side of the road, shut off the truck’s engine and lights, and stepped out, cocking his ear. It was there again, faintly on the night breeze. Sirens. And low in the sky toward the east, he thought he could pick out slow-moving lights, though it was hard for him to focus his eyes. Probably helicopters. They wanted him in a very big way, and once they understood he was gone the search would fan out.

He looked at his watch: It was nearly eleven. He had been running continously since early this morning when the insanity had begun at JFK Airport in New York. There was nothing much left inside of him. He needed a place to hole up; a first-aid kit, food, and sleep, in that order. He climbed back into the truck, started the engine, flipped on the headlights and pulled up onto the highway.

He could see the glow of Washington to his left, fifteen miles away. The Potomac was between him and the city. That fact stuck in his mind. The river flowing south past Alexandria and Woodbridge and a dozen quaint little towns all the way down to the Chesapeake Bay had some significance for him at this moment.

Look for the anomalies. The irregularities. The bits and pieces that don’t seem to fit the mold. Down those avenues you willfind the answers.

The Potomac. A first-aid kit. Food. Rest. The river. He was free-associating again. Each time, his thoughts came back to the river. Something about it, something remembered from a time past.

An afternoon of warmth in the sun. Drinks, food, good company. Gloria had scraped her knee on a deck fitting. They’d been on a boat, sailing down the river. Her knee had been inexpertly bandaged. They’d all laughed about it… especially Bob Highnote. She was called the Merrilee, and she was docked at a small marina somewhere south of the city.

In Dumfries. He remembered the name of the town now, because of the jokes they’d made about it, and about Gloria’s silly accident. By your tradecrafi you shall be known. Do the unexpected. Run inward when they expect you to run away. It’s the principle of the children’s game: hide-the-thimble.

He desperately needed to rest. Even more important, he needed time to think, to reason it out. Sikorski’s reaction to Voronin’s cryptic words had been immediate and swift, lending a terrible credence to the message. At this point, he knew that his only hope for survival would be in unraveling its meaning. But it was only a slim hope.

A damp cold wind was blowing directly across the river raising whitecaps in the narrow bay that fronted the tiny town of Dumfries. McAllister had left the truck in a public parking lot a block from the Marina. He’d taken the tire iron from behind the seat, stuffed it in his belt beneath his coat, and walked back along the quay to the half-empty yacht haven. At this time of the year many of the owners had pulled their boats out of the water until spring, but there were still at least fifty vessels of all sizes and descriptions left. Halyards slapping in the wind against the aluminum masts of the sailboats set up a tinkling, almost musical racket. All the boats bobbed in the wavelets crossing the harbor.

The town was very quiet. He kept to the shadows as much as possible, and the occasional car that passed paid him no attention.

There was no security guard in the marina, and the dockmaster’s office was closed. It took him less than five minutes to find Highnote’s forty-five-foot sailboat securely tied between a pair of finger piers twothirds of the way out the main dock. He clambered silently aboard and huddled out of the wind at the main hatch, waiting for an alarm to be raised, for someone to come out of the darkness and demand to know what he was doing aboard. But no one came. The marina was deserted. He pulled the tire iron out of his belt, inserted it in the loop of the combination lock and yanked down with all of his strength, putting his weight into it. The lock held, but the hasp broke with a loud snap, the entire mechanism falling to the fiberglass deck with a huge clatter.

Again McAllister crouched in the darkness waiting for someone to investigate the commotion, but after a full minute he was satisfied that he had not been heard simply because there wasn’t another soul in the place. Below, he closed the hatch, made sure the curtains were tightly drawn over the windows, and searched for the electrical panel, finding it after a couple of minutes by feel. He turned on the battery switch, the cabin lights breaker, and then the small gooseneck light over the chart table, the interior of the big sailboat’s salon suddenly bathed in a soft red glow. His knees were shaking from fatigue. He had to hold on to the chart table for support until he could catch his breath. The simple action of walking one block and forcing his entry in here had completely drained what little strength he had left.

After a minute or so, he went looking for the first-aid kit, finding it in a cabinet in the forward head. It took him another ten minutes to find the valves for the propane stove one of which was outside in a locker with the tanks), and put on some water to boil. Laying Highnote’s Walther and Stephanie Albright’s.32 automatic on the salon table, he took off his jacket and peeled off his blood-soaked shirt. The handkerchief had stuck to the wound in his chest, and he had to yank it off, blood oozing again out of the angry-looking hole. A huge bruise had formed on his shoulder and down his side, but he understood that he had been very lucky. Again. If he’d been hit just an inch farther to the right he would have been dead. He soaked a big wad of paper towels with hydrogen peroxide from the first-aid kit and gingerly daubed both the entry and exit wounds in his side, and then the gash on his forehead. Working carefully and deliberately because he could move no faster in his present condition, he pulled off long strips of adhesive tape from the roll, sticking them to the edge of the table, and then folded up two big squares of gauze from one of the sterile packets. When the water was nearly at a boil, he soaked a clean towel and carefully washed both wounds, and then the rest of his side and chest, cleaning off as much of the crusted blood as he could reach.

When he’d dried off, the wounds were seeping quite a lot of blood, and it took him nearly a half an hour to daub disinfectant cream on the gauze pads and tape them in place, his fingers thick and numb, and his side so stiff and painful that when he moved wrong, he nearly passed out.

He began to hallucinate then as he forced himself to fix a packet of dried soup. His father helped him find a can of beer in the locker, and a package of crackers in another. He also found one of Highnote’s old sailing sweaters.

The old man had not aged very much. He was still dressed in a natty houndstooth hunting jacket with a sweater vest beneath it and a silk cravat around his neck. But sitting across the table from him, McAllister could see that his mustache had begun to turn gray, and he wondered why his father wasn’t wearing his uniform. He loved wearing its and he loved being called the general.

He told a story while McAllister ate his soup. “Back in the late forties we hosted a high-ranking British intelligence service officer in Washington. He was an expert on the Soviets and was a natural to set up the lines of liaison between the CIA and FBI on this side of the Atlantic, and the OSI and MI5 in England. We were just getting started in the business and he was a godsend. You know how it was, you read the histories. There was so much going on in those days none of us could understand, that the one hand didn’t know what the other was doing. It was like drowning, let me tell you. The chap tossing out the life ring was the one to rally ‘round. Problem was, of course, that this fellow was a hard one to fathom. Rather like the blind Indians and the elephant. The man cut a damned dashing figure in a tuxedo, flitting here and there to every Washington function. He was a socialite. But he also was a one-man blizzard with the paperwork and organization. He had our sections humming within six months of his arrival. He was a genius at administration. He was a friend of the U.S., too. Used to drop in on you any time of the day or night with one of his brainstorms for makingwhatever it was you happened to be doing, easier. He was sort of a repayment for all the years of lendlease. But finally he was a Russian spy. Sold us and the British down the river. For years this went on. And even up to the end his own people convinced Hoover to back down, close the files. Wasn’t till he disappeared from his posting in Beirut in sixty-three and turned up big as life in Moscow, that we knew that side of him. But don’t you see, Philby was all of those things… all at the same time… and more. He was just a man, though. Put his trousers on one leg at a time every morning just like the rest of us. Don’t be blind, boyo, see it all, this time.”

“Thank you,” McAllister said out loud, but his father wasn’t there. He got up weaker than he imagined he was, and stumbled into the forward cabin where he fell into bed, his eyes closing immediately.

Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. Zebra One, Zebra Two. Voronin’s words.

Traitor!

All the way back into town from Janos Sikorski’s hilltop cabin, Stephanie Albright had been troubled by something. By words spoken.. or, rather by a phrase not repeated. “Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. Zebra One, Zebra Two.” McAllister’s words, spoken in a pained whisper, almost as if he had been in a trance. She had heard them, and so had Sikorski. But the old man had not mentioned it. He had not said a thing about the exchange, or his reactions. McAllister had shown up with her in tow, had asked for help, and in the confusion Sikorski had grabbed a gun and opened fire. That was his entire story.

The FBI was involved now. An APB had been put out on the pickup truck McAllister had used for his escape. They’d find it sooner or later.

“looks as if he’s running to all his old pals,” her boss, Dexter Kingman had said.

“Some friends,” she’d murmured. The woods had been crawling with agents from the Bureau and from the Company’s Office of Security. Three helicopters had been brought over from Andrews Air Force Base and were following the highways leading away from Reston.“We’re probably too late from this end,” Kingman had said. “But he won’t get far if he’s in as bad a shape as you say he is. He’s going to have to find a rat hole, some place to tend to his wounds. We’ll find him.”

Kingman was a big southerner with a barrel chest and a ruddy, outdoors complexion. He’d been trained as a psychologist, but had risen rapidly in Security to head the section. All of his people, Stephanie included, had a good deal of respect for him, though sometimes he tended to get a bit stuffy and overbearing. “You were lucky, Stephanie,” he said. She looked up at him.

“He could have killed you. It’s a wonder he didn’t.” Yes, she thought, as she drove. It’s a wonder he hadn’t killed her. He could have, perhaps even should have. Once they had reached the dark woods above Sikorski’s house he could have shot her and left her body somewhere off the road. They wouldn’t have found her until morning, and perhaps not for days.

It would have made his escape much easier. Nor had he killed the old man. Sikorski had admitted that McAllister had not returned his fire. Only the one shot, his own, had been fired. He had crawled into the kitchen and then had escaped down the hill into the woods.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me,” Kingman had told her just before she left. She was off duty. He was sending her home for a few hours’ sleep.

“He kept saying that someone was trying to kill him, and that he needed the answers.”

“I’d like a few answers myself,” the security chief said, shaking his head. “We found his pals in Arlington Heights.”

Stephanie looked at him. The place was crawling with Agency and Bureau people. They were alone for the moment, however, out of earshot from the others. “Russians?”

Kingman nodded. “A half a block from Highnote’s house. All three of them dead. Wasn’t a pretty sight from what I’m told. Two of them died of gunshot wounds, the other had his neck broken.”

“Then why…” Stephanie started to ask the obvious question, but Kingman held her off.“I don’t know. But if we can take him alive, we might find out.” He shook his head again. “It beats the hell out of me, Stephanie. It surely does.”

She had an apartment in Alexandria which she shared with a girl from State. But instead of taking the Capital Beltway south, she stayed on the highway back into Washington, crossing the river on the Key Bridge into Georgetown. It was late, nearly one in the morning, and she was dead tired, but not the least bit sleepy. Her mind was seething with a dozen conjectures. Something about McAllister, his manner, his actions, the words he had spoken, disturbed her. He hadn’t acted like the demented agent turned double she’d been led to believe he was. He’d acted more like… what? A terribly confused man who was desperately seeking something. A solution to some deadly riddle.

And what about the Russians in Arlington Heights? He’d told the truth about that much at least.

Looks as if he’s running to all his old pals, Kingman had said. He’s going to have to find a rat hole someplace to tend to his wounds.

Traffic was almost nonexistent on 31st, but when she’d turned down Avon Place she was stopped by a Washington PD roadblock and had to show her Agency identification. “Your people are inside,” the cop said, passing her through. She parked across the street from McAllister’s house and went inside. Two Bureau agents wearing baseball caps and dark-blue windbreakers, FBI stenciled in yellow on the back, were talking with Hollis Winchester, one of the Agency’s security officers.

“Any word yet?” he asked when she came in. “I just came from Reston. He’s still on the loose.” She glanced toward the head of the stairs. “She still upstairs?”

“Mr. Highnote came for her an hour ago.”

Stephanie looked at him. The news was bothersome to her, yet she couldn’t really say why. It just struck her as odd that the deputy director of operations should be taking a personal hand in caring for the wife of an agent gone bad. A killer. A traitor. But then she’d had a rough night. She wasn’t thinking straight. What was she doing here anyway?

“I’m going up for a minute,” she said.“Anything I should know about?” Winchester asked, his eyes narrowing. The Bureau agents were looking at her.

“No,” Stephanie said tersely, and she went upstairs. All the lights in the house were on, which also struck her as odd. Gloria McAllister had cooperated with them completely. They’d hastily gone through the house searching for anything that might help them track down her husband. A half a dozen technicians had come over from Technical Services and had taken the place apart this morning… yesterday morning, actually. But they’d found nothing and had left by early afternoon. Everyone was gone. Why the lights?

It was obvious at first glance that the place had been searched, though Gloria had made an attempt to straighten up. The living room was furnished pleasantly modern with a white couch and loveseat, glass and brass tables, some artwork on the textured walls, and a lot of books and bric-a-brac from all over the world. The McAllisters had done a lot of traveling; this place had been their home base. It was a refuge, the thought came unbidden to Stephanie. As was Gloria a refuge. It’s why McAllister had come here, even though he had to know that his house would be watched. What a shock it must have been for him when Gloria had turned on him.

She moved through the living room, passing the bookshelves, glancing at some of the titles, at the bits and pieces from the McAllisters’ lives: a handmade vase that looked Greek and very old, a brass sailboat on a polished granite base, an elaborate wax figure of a medieval wizard, a beer stein with a silver hinged lid, and several photographs in acrylic frames… smiling faces, happy times with friends… winter scenes, summer scenes on the water.

In the kitchen two coffee cups, a spoon, and a coffee pot sat upside down on the drain board. Gloria had rinsed them out before she’d gone off with Highnote. Stephanie stared at them. Everything was striking her as odd now. It was the lateness of the hour, and the ordeal she’d gone through. You’re lucky…. He could have killed you…. It’s a wonder he didn’t.

The woman had shot at her husband. She had wounded him. She had screamed at him. Called him a traitor. And then she had come back here and rinsed out her coffee things. Looks as if he’s running to all his old pals…

First Robert Highnote. Next his wife. Then Janos Sikorski. Where was he going next?

He’s going to have to find a rat hole someplace.. tend to his wounds.

Stephanie turned suddenly and hurried back to the bookshelves in the living room. To the photographs. To one in particular.

She took it down from the shelf and stared at it. The McAllisters were seated in the cockpit of what appeared to be a large sailboat. Gloria had a clumsy bandage on her knee. Highnote was just coming through the hatchway with three glasses of wine, a big grin on his face. They were tied up at a dock, and whoever was taking the picture was standing off to the side. On the opposite side of the slip was a big signboard attached to a piling. She could just read the words. DUMFRIES YACHT HAVEN. She knew the place.

A rat hole? A place to hole up, to tend to his wounds?

The boat rocked and settled very slightly to port. The motion was subtly different from the wave-induced movements. An anomaly. McAllister opened his eyes, for just a moment disoriented.

Someone had gotten aboard the boat. As the cobwebs cleared he could hear the very slight scuffling of shoe leather on the fiberglass deck. Whoever was above was taking great pains to move in silence.

McAllister sat up, the sudden movement causing a wave of dizziness and nausea to pass through him, sweat popping out on his forehead. They had found him. Somehow they had tracked him here.

Christ, was there no peace?

They’d spotted the truck, of course. And he had forgotten to turn off the light over the chart table. The conclusions were obvious. Check all the possibilities. His tradecraft is good. Expect the unexpected with him.

McAllister started to crawl out of the V-berth. The guns were in the salon on the table. The main hatch suddenly slid open and the figure of a man was outlined in the opening.

No time now! He reared back and frantically undogged the Lexan hatch just over the bed. It sprung open with a crash at the same moment the man at the main hatch fired.“Watch out,” someone shouted.

McAllister levered himself out of the hatch onto the foredeck, mindless of the damage he was doing to his wounds. The night wind was suddenly terribly cold.

He started to turn when two more silenced shots were fired, the first catching him in his side, and the second slamming into his head, the impact sending him backward. The lifeline caught his legs just above the knees and he flipped over, plunging into the river, the dark swirling waters closing over him, a billion stars bursting in his eyes.