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 v
ision. 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.”
Chapter 9
The coming days were difficult for McAllister and doubly difficult for Stephanie. He was on the mend, but it was going to take some time before he would be fully mobile. Each day he could feel his strength coming back. Each day he pushed himself to the limit with his exercises, often falling into the narrow bed totally exhausted from the effort, his body bathed in sweat.
Stephanie had to arise each morning before dawn so that she would have enough time to drive down to Washington to go to work. The questions about her kidnapping and escape from McAllister had finally stopped, and she’d been allowed to return to her routine of background checks on prospective Agency employees, but she had to constantly watch herself, lest she make a slip of the tongue.
She’d offered only the vaguest of explanations for her absence to her roommate, but the girl was too busy with her own life to pay any real attention. “Have a good time, Steph, whoever he is,” she’d said.
In the evenings they talked. Hesitantly at first, feeling each other out, learning about the other’s background, their likes and dislikes, their fears, their hopes. McAllister still wasn’t sure exactly why she was doing what she was doing, but he was grateful. Without Stephanie and her father he knew that he could not have possibly survived. He owed them his life.
“Let’s just say that what I was seeing didn’t add up to what I was hearing,” she said. “It was the look on your face when your wife called you a traitor. I can’t explain it, but it wasn’t the look of a spy. And you should have shot me that night. You didn’t.”
“Not very scientific,” he said.
She smiled.“My father said the same thing to me.”
“Does he realize the danger he’s in?”
Stephanie nodded, her expression serious again. “He’s not particularly proud of what I do for a living. He always thought that I’d become a vet and take over his practice some day.”
“No brothers or sisters?”
She shook her head. “Just the two of us.”
“What about your mother?”
“She died when I was in college.” Stephanie looked toward the dark window. “I dropped out of school and came back here to help out. But it didn’t last a year before he made me go back.” She shook her head. “He was so lost in those days. But he was right, of course.”
“What about afterward?” McAllister asked.
“I got my degree in psychology and joined the air force as a second lieutenant, exactly what every veterinarian’s daughter does with her life.”
She laughed, the sound gentle, almost musical, and McAllister had to smile with her.
She was given a top-secret crypto-access security clearance, and spent her four years’ service career running background investigations on young enlistees. She got to travel all over the country, as often as not in civilian clothes, working with local FBI offices and police departments. She got to know a lot of good people. Interesting, if not always exciting work, until she fell in love, and her world was suddenly turned inside out.
“He was a captain, my section chief; very tall, very handsome, and very, very married,” she said wistfully. “Sap that I was, I actually believed that he was going to leave his wife for me.”
“It didn’t work out?” McAllister asked gently. “No,” she said tersely. She looked at McAllister. “I was going to reenlist, we were going to get married as soon as his divorce was final, and we were going to see the world together, courtesy of Uncle Sam.” She shook her head again. “Instead I resigned my commission and came back here to my father, and worked in the clinic for a year.”
“Until you were hired by the Agency?”
She nodded. “I knew Dexter Kingman from my University of Maryland days. I’d worked with him a couple of times while I was in the Air Force, too. It was he who approached me, asked if I wanted a job.”
“No regrets?”
She smiled wanly. “A lot of regrets, but then who doesn’t have them?”
The Office of Security we
re the paper pushers, she said, though she was given the short course out at the Farm shortly after she’d been hired.
“I wasn’t very good on the small-arms range, even though I did learn one end of the gun from the other.” She smiled. “It came as quite a shock to me when Dexter handed me a pistol and assigned me to the team watching your house.”
McAllister’s gut tightened. Their conversations had been leading up to this point, and now that they had arrived she seemed nervous, less sure of herself than before, almost hesitant. Gloria had called out her name on the stairs. They’d obviously spoken during that day. “I’m sure it was a shock to you. What about my wife?”
“What about her?”
“Was she surprised when you showed up on her doorstep?”
“No. Mr. Highnote had set up the surveillance.”
“She was to be used as bait.”
Stephanie nodded glumly. “They figured you’d be showing up at home sooner or later. But I never dreamed that she would pull out a gun… that it would turn out the way it did.”
“Neither did I,” McAllister said looking away, the pain of the memory every bit as hurtful as his wounds, in some respects even more so because he had no idea how he could heal that particular hurt.
They had both spent a great deal of time talking about the distant past, and the very immediate present, but had until now scrupulously avoided any discussion of the future. McAllister was presumed dead. His body would show up sooner or later somewhere down river. And yet there seemed, to Stephanie, to be an undercurrent running through the Agency.
“A lot of people are walking around on eggshells,” she said.
“Such as?”
“Mr. Highnote, for one.”
“He’s a good man,” McAllister said. “He’s been caught in the middle.“Stephanie started to say something, but then evidently changed her mind. She got up from where she’d been sitting and went to the window. It was nearly midnight. Traffic below had settled down, but it had begun to snow lightly. Winter had finally arrived. “What is it?” he asked, watching her back. Her hair was pinned up, her neck long and thin, her ears tiny and delicate.
The Zebra Network Page 11
