The Zebra Network

Chapter 8

The sounds of the silenced shots were clearly recognizable for what they were, even at a distance of twenty-five yards.

A moment later McAllister fell into the river with a loud splash. Stephanie Albright stepped back into the shadows behind the dockmaster’s office at the end of the quay, hardly able to believe what she had just witnessed. Watch out, the one in the cockpit had shouted, in English. These were no Russians. The two of them held a hurried conference on the boat, then one of them went below while the other moved slowly up the length of the deck, searching the water.

Stephanie had no gun. But even if she had been armed she didn’t think she would have gone in and opened fire.

The boat light went out, and the first man came up from below and closed the hatch. He joined the other man searching the water.

After a minute or so they both climbed up on the dock and began searching the water on both sides, between the other boats, along each finger pier, and even beneath the dock, getting down on their hands and knees.

They worked quickly and efficiently. Watching them, Stephanie knew that they were professionals. But from where? The Agency or the Bureau?

We don’t work this way. We don’t shoot people in cold blood. She’d seen McAllister’s hands when he’d come up through the forward hatch. He’d not been armed, yet they had shot him.

After a long time, the two men said something else to each other, then holstered their weapons and headed back up the dock without a backward glance. They passed within ten feet of where Stephanie had edged around to the opposite side of the small building, and then crossed the street and got into a dark Ford Thunderbird. She had spotted the car parked on the street when she’d come in, but she hadattached no significance to its presence. Other cars were parked nearby, and the plates were not of any government series that she knew of.

They left, making a U-turn and heading back toward the Washington highway, their job finished.

McAllister was dead. There could be little doubt of it, he’d been hit at least once in the head. She’d seen that much very clearly.

She stepped out from behind the dockmaster’s building, walked to the end of the dock and looked out across the narrow bay. The wind was biting cold, raising whitecaps on the dark water. He was dead, so what was she doing here like this? Turn around and go home, get some sleep. Forget about it.

Something is going on here that you don’t know about, something that you are not supposed to know about, something that you don’t want to know about.

Yet she had just witnessed a murder. It was her job… her duty to report what she’d seen. Telephone Kingman, tell him everything, including why she had come down here. She cursed her own stupidity, but it was happening so fast, it was so unexpected.

She looked down at how the water swirled around the dock pilings.

It was the river current, eddying here in the narrow bay. Sweeping everything out toward the Chesapeake Bay and beyond to the ocean.

Stephanie’s thoughts stopped in mid-stride. Everything would be swept down river. At least as far as the south side of the bay. Everything. Everybody.

But he was dead, she thought as she hurried back off the central dock, then over to the next pier south. The two professionals who had tracked him here and shot him had been certain enough of their work to leave after only a cursory search. They knew what they were doing. They had fired at him from a distance of less than twenty feet. Impossible to miss. Impossible to be misled into believing he was dead.

At the end of the pier, she flopped down on her stomach and hung way over the edge so that she could see along the line of pilings. The choppy water was barely two feet beneath the bottom of the dock. Even if he had somehow survived the gunshot wound to his head, he would have been knocked unconscious, and surely would have drownedby now. The water was very cold. Hypothermia would make it impossible to move his arms and legs so that he could stay afloat.

She scrambled to her feet and rushed back to the quay and out the final pier to the south. Halfway to the end she heard a soft groan under the dock. She dropped to her hands and knees and looked over the edge.

McAllister, blood streaming into his eyes from a wound in the side of the forehead just at the hairline, was clinging to one of the fat wooden pilings just behind a low-slung power boat, its big outboard motor tilted up out of the water. His mouth was opening and closing, his eyes fluttering.

“McAllister. Can you hear me?” Stephanie called softly. He reared back as if he were going to try to swim away from her voice, and he lost his grip on the piling, his head sinking beneath the water.

“Oh, God,” Stephanie cried. She scrambled down into the back of the powerboat, and was about to jump into the water when McAllister’s head surfaced a couple of feet away, pushed closer to the boat by the current.

She grabbed a handful of his sweater and hauled him closer. “No,” he mumbled. “Enough… no more… please. “It’s all right,” Stephanie said, pulling him around the motor to the boat’s swim platform just at the water level. “You’ve got to help me. I don’t think I can pull you out of the water myself.”

“No,” McAllister mumbled, trying to pull away from her. “Go away leave me alone… they’ll come back… impossible.. Stephanie managed to get him turned around, his back to the boat, and bracing her legs against the transom heaved with all of her might, getting him into a sitting position on the teak grating of the low swim platform.

“Put your arm up here,” she said, pulling his right arm up over the edge of the transom. She climbed over the back of the boat onto the swim platform with him, the water coming up over her anKles. She pulled his legs out of the freezing water, and then turned his body around so that his right side was up against the back of the boat.

“Pull yourself up,” she said, heaving his body over the edge. “Now,” she grunted with an effort. “Pull.“He did as she told him, finally, and with a sudden heave he was up over the back of the boat, and tumbled loosely into the open cockpit, blood everywhere from his wounds.

Stephanie clambered back onto the dock and hurried back to the quay, then across the street to the next block where she had parked the Toyota. So far her luck was holding. The streets were deserted at this hour. Only the local police would be out and around. Sooner or later they would be cruising past. If they spotted her, she had no idea what she would say to them.

She got the van started and drove back down to the marina, backing up to the quay, and dousing her lights, but leaving the engine running. Just a few minutes longer, she told herself jumping out. She opened the side door, then glancing both ways up the street, hurried back onto the dock.

McAllister had come around again, and by the time she reached him, he had somehow managed to pull himself up on the back of the boat, and was halfway up onto the dock.

“You,” he said looking up when she reached him. “I’m going to get you out of here,” Stephanie said, pulling him the rest of the way up.

“Why…?” he mumbled. “Why are you doing this…?”

“I don’t know,” she said, helping him to his feet and starting back to the van. “I just don’t know… yet.”

McAllister’s first conscious thoughts were of a dry, stationary bed, blankets covering him, warmth, and of bandages around his head, and tightly binding the wounds in his side. There had been lights and voices and movements around him, but he wasn’t at all sure he hadn’t been dreaming that part.

He was in a small bedroom, with a sloping ceiling. He could see city lights outside the single window. It was night.

“How do you feel?” a voice came at him from the left. McAllister turned his head as an older man with a kindly face and a thin, hawk nose came from the door. “Weak. Hungry, I think.”

“That’s good,” the man said. He wore thick, horn-rimmed glasses that made his eyes seem huge and vulnerable behind the lenses.

“Where am I?” McAllister asked. His voice sounded distant to him.“Baltimore,” the man said. He’d been carrying a white enameled tray. He put it on the table next to the bed, and did something with the bandages at McAllister’s head. His touch was gentle.

“Are you a doctor?”

“In a manner of speaking. I’m a veterinarian. Nicholas Albright. Stephanie’s father.”

McAllister tried to digest that news. The last thing he could remember was the boat… Highnote’s sailboat in Dumfries… and then the shots, and the cold, dark water. “What am I doing here?”

Albright smiled gently. “Stephanie brought you here.” He shook his head. “She’s been doing that all her life. Bringing home hurt strays. Though I must say you’re her biggest find to date.”

“How long…?”

“Three days.”

It seemed impossible. McAllister pushed the covers aside and tried to get up, but the doctor gently held him down. “You’re not going anywhere for a while yet, Mr. McAllister. Even if you could get out of this bed, which I doubt, you wouldn’t get ten feet with your injuries. In fact by rights you should be dead. Most men don’t take well to bullets in the skull.”

“The Agency… the Bureau..

“You’re safe here,” Albright said. “Get some rest now, Stephanie should be home soon.”

It was still dark when McAllister awoke again. He had a feeling that it was very late at night, though why he felt that he didn’t know. He turned his head. Stephanie Albright was asleep, curled up in a big easy chair in the corner by the door. She was dressed in blue jeans and a sweatshirt, her features softened by the tiny night light on the bureau.

The house was very quiet. Outside in the distance he thought he could hear a siren. But then he remembered that he was in Baltimore, and like any big city, Baltimore was never completely quiet.

Pushing back the covers he sat up. The dizziness was gone, as was the double vision. He felt much better than he had earlier, though he was still terribly weak, and there was a deep, hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach. He glanced back over at Stephanie. She had awakened, and she was looking at him, her eyes blinking.

“Your father is quite a man,” McAllister said. “Yes, he is.”

“If you’ll get me my clothes, I’ll leave. It’s too dangerous for him and you with me here.”

“You’re in no shape to be going anywhere yet,” she said. “If I have to do it on my own, I will.”

“No,” Stephanie said. “No one suspects a thing. They all think you’re dead.”

McAllister stared at her. “They?”

“Langley. My boss, Dexter Kingman, and your boss, Mr. Highnote.”

“How?”

“They found Sikorski’s truck, and they found the blood all over Mr. Highnote’s sailboat, and the powerboat where you’d evidently tried to pull yourself out of the river, and then fell back in. The search has spread all the way down to Norfolk.”

“How did you know I was at the boat?”

“Just a guess. I saw the photograph on your bookshelf.”

“Why haven’t you turned me in?” McAllister asked. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” she said after a long hesitation. “But you’re not a killer. You should have killed me and Sikorski when you had the chance, but you didn’t.”

“I’m a traitor.”

She shook her head. “You don’t believe that, and I don’t think I do either.”

“What then?”

“I think you stumbled onto something in Moscow that has a lot of people scared silly. Something that no one at Langley is talking about. Something even Sikorski omitted when he gave his report.”

“Go ahead,” McAllister prompted.

“Everything was fine with Sikorski at first. He was willing to listen to you, I think, until you whispered something. It made him crazy.” “You heard?”

She nodded. “But I had no idea what it meant then, nor do I haveany idea now. But before I go poking around records, I thought I’d better talk to you about it.”

“About what?” McAllister asked carefully. “What exactly was it you think you heard?”

“‘Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. Zebra One, Zebra Two.” What’s it supposed to mean?”

There it was, the same words again. He could see Voronin’s frail, crippled figure seated in his chair. He could hear the words coming from the man’s lips; slurred but clearly understandable. Cadence and syntax, not the insane ramblings of a drunken, bitter old man.

“I wish I knew,” he said, shaking his head. “I just know that within a half an hour after hearing those words I was arrested by the KGB.” Stephanie got up and came across the room. She sat on the foot of the bed, and looked into his eyes. “I think you’d better tell me everything, Mr. McAllister. From the beginning. Maybe we can figure it out together.”

“I’ve got to ask you again: Why are you doing this?”

“And I’ve got to tell you again: I don’t know.”

“It’s very dangerous for you and your father.”

“I know.”

“Maybe I am a traitor. Maybe I was brainwashed, my mind altered. They had me at the Lubyanka for more than a month. It’s certainly possible.”

“The three Russians you said you killed in Arlington Heights were found,” Stephanie said.

“So I’m a double gone bad.”

She shook her head. “The two men who tried to kill you on the sailboat were Americans. I heard them speak.”

“Everyone is after me,” McAllister said bitterly. “Including my wife.”

Stephanie’s eyes were wide and serious. Her lips compressed. “I think you’d better start at the beginning. Tell me everything, every single thing that you can remember, from the moment you heard those words, until right now.”

“And then?”

“Then we’ll try to figure out a way of keeping you alive.”