The Zebra Network

by Sean Flannery

  McAllister knew that he could not use Carrick’s gun. It was not silenced and the noise of the gunshots would mark him immediately. He could feel blind panic rising up inside of him. Already a crowd had gathered around the Pan Am aircraft, and in the distance he could hear the sounds of the first sirens. He was going to have to get out of here now, or else he would be trapped.

  He shoved the gun in his pocket as the big car turned and headed off into the night, its taillights winking. He had caught enough of a glimpse of the license plate to see that it was a New York tag; nongovernmental, nondiplomatic.

  Even more people were racing to the Pan Am plane as McAllister forced himself to walk calmly to where the service cart was parked. Two sets of coveralls were stuffed behind the seats. One of them had a lot of blood on the shoulder, the other was clean. Airport identification badges were still clipped to the pockets. looking around to make certain that no one had noticed him yet, he took the clean set of coveralls out of the cart and stepped around behind a big truck where he hurriedly pulled them on. By the time he walked back around to the service cart the two cops from the window had raced up from the Pan Am baggage area, and had emerged from the Eastern’s service area. Too late McAllister realized that they might recognize his face. He averted his eyes.

  “Did you see anybody coming out of here?” one of the cops shouted. The other was speaking into his walkie-talkie.

  McAllister nodded over his shoulder the way the car had gone. “Some guy got in a car,” he said, doing to best he could with a New Jersey accent. “What’s going on?”

  “Where?” the cop shouted. “Just now?”

  “Yeah,” McAllister said, climbing behind the wheel. “Just now. Headed outta here in a big hurry. Wasn’t wearing no badge either.”

  The cop’s eyes strayed to the badge on McAllister’s pocket. Airport security lived and died on such open identification. If you had such a badge you were legitimate. If you didn’t, you did not belong. Another car was drawing up between the Eastern and Pan Am planes as McAllister started the service cart’s motor and backed out. This one he recognized. The plates were United States government, the series the FBI used.

  The two cops hurried back to the growing commotion around the Pan Am plane. McAllister swung the service cart around and headed in the opposite direction. The FBI had come to pick up him and his Agency escorts. They would be expecting three men. Once they realized that McAllister was missing, they would seal the airport, although the report from the cops that a ground crewman had seen a man getting into a car and driving off, might confuse them for a little while. long enough, McAllister hoped. It was his only chance at this point.

  He drove down the line of planes and around the international terminal, finally angling across the tarmac to where the domestic flights were serviced as the sun began to lighten the eastern sky in a grayish-pink haze. Getting out of the international terminal without going through customs would have been impossible for him. Only his apparent status at this moment as a ground crewman intent on some airport business allowed him to cross the ramp without being stopped and questioned. Nevertheless it wouldn’t be very long now before the entire airport would be closed. Unless he got out before that happened he would be stuck here, and slowly but surely the noose would be tightened and he would be taken.

  Washington. The answers were in Washington, and so was his safety. Home base. The free zone where he could surround himself with friends who knew and understood that he of all people could not be a traitor or a murderer. Once he was allowed to tell his side of the story, Langley would understand. But what story was it he could tell them? About the rambling9 of a vodka-crazed old bitter Russian? A former KGB officer? Or, of his own interrogation under torture and drugs? There were, in reality, no concrete answers he could give them. Nothing solid other than the fact the Russians had suddenly let him free with no apparent motive. Even more sirens were converging on the international terminal as McAllister parked the service cart in a row of others and hurried through Piedmont Airline’s baggage area and out into the passenger terminal, nearly deserted at this hour. No one saw the ground crewman in white coveralls enter the men’s room, nor did anyone notice the tall man in civilian clothes emerge moments later and head for the main concourse and the taxi ranks outside.

  He was going to have to get down to Washington. To safety. Some sort of a message had been sent from Moscow to Langley: McAllister was the mark, kill him at all costs. He mustn’t be allowed to live.

  But by whom? And why?

  The Soviets had not returned his gun, of course, but they had been meticulous in returning his passport, wallet, credit cards, a few hundred dollars in American currency, and other things just before he had been handed over to Carrick and Mass at Sheremetyevo. The cabby dropped him off in front of Eastern Airlines at LaGuardia Airport in plenty of time for him to ditch the gun he had taken from Carrick’s body, and then purchase a roundtrip on the eight o’clock shuttle to Washington’s National Airport, with a return on the five o’clock shuttle under the name G. Thompson. A one-way ticket would have been a dead giveaway to the first inquiries the FBI undoubtedly would begin making this morning. It was just one more bit of tradecraft designed to buy him a little extra time. A couple of minutes before he was to board, he found a pay phone just down the corridor from the gate and direct-dialed his house in Georgetown. Bill locey had told him that Gloria was back in the States. He assumed she had reopened their house.

  He let it ring ten times before he hung up. If Langley believed that he was a traitor, they might have isolated her either in an Alexandria safehouse, or possibly even down in Williamsburg at the Farm. Nevertheless, he would have thought they’d have placed a monitor on his phone line with automatic switching to bring all incoming calls out to Langley. Nothing that had happened to him since his arrest seemed to add up. He thought with a twinge that by now Gloria would have been informed that something was wrong. What exactly had they told her, and how she had taken the news was bothersome. Their marriage wasn’t on the strongest of grounds, though they had both been trying very hard to make it work. They wanted different things; it was as simple and as terribly complex as that. She wanted Washington on a regular basis, and he wanted… what? Exactly what was it he wanted?

  He glanced down the corridor as the first boarding call for his flight came over the speakers. Maybe he didn’t know what he wanted. Maybe he never would. And part of the problem was that she couldn’t stand his searching.

  He picked up the telephone and started to dial a second Washington number, but then decided against it and hung up. In the last analysis, boyo, you can’t trust anyone in the business, he’d been told. Which is too bad, because people like us need and demand just that; a trust in something or short of that, a trust in somebody. But not over the telephone lines, he decided. He would have to tell his story face-to-face so that he could gauge reactions from the other man’s eyes. Other men, he corrected himself. How many were there whom he could trust? One, two, a handful? No more than that. But would they believe him? Could they possibly believe him against the weight of evidence that had already been built against him?

  Traitor. Murderer. You’ve gone over to the other side. Not an uncommon failing. It was the business that did it in the end. Turn a man, make him sell out his country, take his secrets from him, and on your side of the border he is a hero, but back home he is a traitor. What did that do to such men, and more important at this moment, what did such work do to the agent runner? How did it warp their sense of right versus wrong, of justice, of fair play?

  McAllister ran a hand over his eyes. He was sweating slightly, even though the corridor was chilly. The effects, still, of the drugs he’d been given during his captivity, or something else? Fear? Confusion? Shame?

  We’re — king progress and I feel very good about it. And so should you. We have finally broken down the first barrier… really quite excellent. You have been cooperative… Mac.

  Bits and pieces of Mi
roshnikov’s words came back to him, like gentle whispers in the darkness, like water moving softly on a sand beach. Frightening and yet oddly comforting. They were reassurances from a source that should not have provided him assurances.

  God, what had happened to him in Moscow? What was happening to him now? What did they want? Why him? McAllister stepped away from the pay phone, realizing that the boarding-gate area which had minutes earlier been filled with passengers was now empty except for the airline clerks, one of whom was looking up the corridor toward him. Another, behind the counter, picked up the telephone.

  “This is the final boarding call for Eastern’s shuttle service, 1411, to Washington, D.C.,” the clerk’s amplified voice came from the speakers in the ceiling. “Passengers holding confirmed reservations, please board now.”

  The answers were in Washington. Pulling his ticket and boarding pass out of his pocket, he hurried down the corridor to the gate. His answers were there, if he could survive long enough to find them.

  His flight touched down a few minutes after nine, and twenty minutes later he was heading up the Washington Parkway, in heavy traffic in a rental Ford Escort, the day bright and warm in contrast to Moscow, the city with her parks and monuments gleaming green and white, and at this distance clean and somehow safe. This was the capital. Home base. The reason for his existence, for his life, in fact.

  He had decided that whoever was trying to stop him, for whatever reason, would not suspect that he would run here, and so he openly rented a car in his own name. For the moment speed would be more effective than stealth.

  Robert Highnote.

  McAllister’s mouth was dry, his stomach rumbled and his peripheral vision was still slightly blurry from the cumulative effects of the drugs, the lack of sleep, and the lack of decent food. But he understood his tradecraft at a deeper, instinctual level; covering his tracks, making the proper moves at the proper times, knowing when to hesitate and when to act, were almost like knee jerk reactions to him. Before he approached his old friend, mentor and boss, he needed to know the extent of the Agency’s concern over him.

  Crossing the river on the Key Bridge into Georgetown, he reached M Street and turned right, merging with traffic. He stopped for a red light across from the Rive Gauche, a restaurant he and Gloria frequented each time they’d been reassigned briefly to Washington between foreign postings. It gave him an odd feeling to be here like this now.

  He turned left up Wisconsin Avenue, the sights and sounds and smells coming back to him like an old familiar jacket one has rediscovered in his closet; oddly out-of-date, and out-of-fashion. Yet oh so comfortable and friendly. New York and especially Moscow seemed like a long way away now, not only in distance but in time.

  Highnote would listen to him, would help him, if anyone would, or could. But first he had to know one thing. A couple of blocks past the Georgetown Theater he took the Street over to 31st, that ran at an odd angle up toward Montrose Park, then slowed down two blocks later, passing the intersection with Avon Lane. This was a neighborhood of three-story brownstone houses each attached to the next. His was six doors from the corner on the upper side.

  McAllister had participated in enough surveillance operations over the past fourteen years to know what he was looking at. A Toyota van, its windows blocked with reflective film, was parked twenty yards beyond his house. A yellow cab was parked at the far corner. Behind it the cabby and a big burly man in shirtsleeves were looking at something beneath the raised hood of a Mercedes.

  They were waiting for him. Expecting him to come here. Two hours ago when he had telephoned from New York there’d been no answer at his house, no switching equipment. If they’d been waiting for him two hours ago, the telephone would have been manned.

  This surveillance had been ordered up because of what had happened on the ramp at JFK. A traitor is loose; a dangerous lunatic who has killed two of our own is heading our way.

  McAllister realized that he was shaking. Violently. Sweat had popped out on his forehead and yet he was freezing cold. He turned east on R Street and a couple of blocks later pulled over across from the Oak Hill Cemetery.

  Life was going forth at an ordinary speed all through the city. McAllister felt as if he were a tree limb snagged in a swiftly moving stream, the waters swirling around him. He was helpless. Once he was caught up in the swift current he would drown. There was no avoiding it.

  They were waiting for him.

  God in heaven what was happening? What did they think he had become?

  Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. He had been to Moscow, and here he was in Washington. But look for what, for whom?

  He was driving through Arlington National Cemetery across the river from the Lincoln Memorial, and there was very little traffic. It was early evening and behind him the city lights were beginning to mingle with the darkening star-studded sky. Being here like this now, he was struck with a sense of unreality, not only with what he was doing, and why, but with the fact he was doing anything at all. He was on the outside looking in. It was very strange.

  If anyone had the answers it would be Highnote. Earlier he had driven out to Dulles International Airport where he had left the rental car in the long-term parking garage, because if they were expecting him to come to Washington they’d be checking with all the car rental agencies and his name would turn up.

  It had taken him less than a half hour in the busy air terminal to find a man about his own height, general build and age, lift his wallet as he stood at one of the cocktail lounge bars, and using the man’s driver’s license and credit card, rent a car from the Hertz counter.

  By the time he had hurried back to the cocktail lounge, the man — Thomas Hobart from Muncie, Indiana-was still at the bar. McAllister dropped his wallet on the floor, then turned and left, retrieving the Ford Taurus from where he had left it out front.

  In the afternoon he had had a late lunch at a roadside restaurant south of Alexandria where he had searched the Washington and New York afternoon papers for a story about the shootout at JFK, but there’d been nothing. He would have been surprised if there had been.

  At first he had watched in his rearview mirror each time he turned a corner, switched lanes, or changed speeds. But so far as he had been able to tell, no one was on his tail. They might suspect, at this point, that he was in Washington, but so far he had not been spotted. That wouldn’t last, of course. It couldn’t last. Sooner or later someone would see and recognize him, especially if he kept moving around. As it began to get dark he had driven back up past National Airport and into the cemetery where he had slowed his speed. If they got to him now and shot him to death, would he be buried here at Arlington with his father? It wasn’t likely. He was a traitor and a murderer. But was there any peace for him, could there be any peace for him even in death? Somehow he doubted that as well.

  He passed through the western edge of the vast cemetery, crossed Washington Boulevard and was in Arlington Heights, a nice but unpretentious neighborhood of pleasant homes. It was dark by the time he reached Astor Avenue, parking in the middle of the block, and shutting off his lights and engine.

  Highnote’s house was located at the end of a cul-de-sac. Except for a light over the garage door and another on the front porch, the place was dark.

  McAllister got out of his car, walked the rest of the way down the block, and crossed the lawn between Highnote’s house and his neighbor’s, also dark. Somewhere in the close distance a dog started barking, and McAllister stopped a moment in the darkness. After a few seconds the dog stopped, and he continued around to the rear through a tall hedge, and across the patio past the swimming pool. The kitchen light was on, but Highnote’s study was in darkness.

  At the study window, McAllister put his ear to the glass. He could vaguely hear someone talking, or a television set playing, and through the curtains he could see that the study door was closed.

  Stepping back he took off his jacket, wrapped it around his right elbow, and using a
s little strength as possible, broke one of the small square windowpanes just at the lock. The noise seemed very loud in the still night air, and for several seconds McAllister held his breath waiting for the sounds of an alarm to be raised. But there was nothing. He reached inside, undid the lock, slid the window open and crawled through.

  McAllister had been in this room before. Quite often. He and Gloria had been friends with Highnote and his wife Merrilee for years, despite the age difference of fifteen years. He knew the layout well. The desk was directly opposite the window, a leather couch and coffee table were to the right, and on the left was the door to the tiny bathroom. Books lined two walls, and a third held framed photographs and certificates of achievement. With the curtains open he could see well enough in the dim light coming from outside.

  Sitting down at the desk McAllister opened the bottom left drawer and took out Highnote’s Walther PPK. The flat automatic, which at one time had been the weapon of choice among British Secret Intelligence Service field operatives, had been a gift from Kim Philby when the Brit was stationed here in Washington. Highnote always said the gun gave him a lot of ironic pleasure. He’d been one of those, even as a young man, who’d thought Philby was too good to be true.

  He checked the action of the gun. It was well oiled and loaded. There were two telephones on the desk; one was the house line, and the other was Highnote’s private number. McAllister picked up the second one and dialed the house number. The connection was made and he could hear the telephones in the rest of the house ringing. Highnote picked it up on the second ring.

  “Yes?”

  “Hello, Bob,” McAllister said. The gun was on the desk in front of him. He was watching the door. “Jesus,” Highnote whispered. “Where the hell are you? Are you alone?”