The Zebra Network

by Sean Flannery

“Throw out your gun, no one will hurt you,” McAllister called. “He’s a mess in there,” the man said. “In the back.”

  “I said throw out your gun.”

  The man popped up over the back of the trunk lid and fired twice, both shots coming within inches of McAllister, who ducked back behind the tree. Whoever they were, they were both good shots, professionals.

  He remained hidden until he heard someone crashing through the trees and brush on the other side of the road. He looked back around the tree in time to see the man disappearing into the woods and he snapped off a shot knowing even as he fired that there was no chance of hitting him. McAllister ran through the woods back toward the Buick where Stephanie was waiting. The only way out of here was in that direction, and sooner or later the man would have to show up on the road. He was slipping and sliding all over the place in the snow. He stopped and listened. In the distance, across the driveway, he could hear someone crashing through the forest, and then the sounds were lost.

  If Stephanie had hidden herself well, the man might run past her, never seeing her. If she was out in the open, she would be in trouble. McAllister redoubled his efforts, angling back toward the dirt road where he would be exposed but where he knew he would make better time.

  He was in the field again; in the Rhodope Mountains just inside the Bulgarian border with Greece. He’d been running all night and now with the sun coming up he had less than a kilometer to safety across the border, but the Bulgarian Secret Police patrol was gaining. He could hear them coming, he could hear the dogs and the helicopters, still he kept running because he had no other option.

  There was the distant crack of a single pistol shot, and then nothing. McAllister pulled up short just at the edge of the road and held his breath to listen. The Buick was parked twenty-five or thirty yards farther up the dirt road. Nothing moved. Again the woods were silent. His side ached, and he thought he could feel something oozing downfrom his left arm. He figured he had probably opened one of the stitches.

  He slid carefully down to the road, and crouching to keep below the level of the embankment, hurried up the road to the car. He stopped again to listen, but the woods were still silent.

  “Stephanie?” he called out.

  “Here,” she shouted from the woods a moment later. McAllister stepped around the front of the Buick and looked up over the embankment in the direction her footprints in the snow led. He couldn’t see a thing except for the trees. He climbed up into the forest.

  “Stephanie?” he called again, this time her answer seemed fainter, and to the right.

  “Here,” she called. “I’m over here.”

  The hair at the back of his neck prickled. Something was definitely wrong. She was in trouble. He could hear it in the few words she had spoken.

  “Coming,” McAllister shouted, and he started noisily along the path of her footprints. After ten feet he stopped to listen, then stepped off the path and taking great pains to make absolutely no noise, circled widely to the left, moving from tree to tree as fast as he dared.

  He came to a narrow clearing about twenty-five yards up the hill.

  A set of footprints led from left to right, disappearing into the woods above. She had to be close, though he could not see a thing as he moved across the clearing and once again held up just within the forest.

  “Where are you?” Stephanie called, her voice shockingly close. Just to the right now. “Mac?”

  He searched the trees and brush out ahead of him, moving his eyes slowly, searching each square foot of dark against white. They were there. Behind a large tree. The man in the dark overcoat held an arm around Stephanie’s chest, while with his right hand he held a pistol to her head. They were barely ten yards away and slightly above, their backs to him.

  McAllister got down on his stomach and crawled up the hill, keeping the trees and brush between him and them as much as possible. They were concentrating in the opposite direction, back toward the road. When he was barely ten feet away he got slowly to his feet and raised the pistol in both hands. “Stephanie,” he called out loudly.

  The man in the dark overcoat, startled, looked over his shoulder and started to bring his gun around. It was all the opening McAllister needed. He fired, the shot catching the man in the forehead, taking off a big piece of his skull in the back, splattering Stephanie with blood. The man slumped down against the tree, his legs giving way beneath him and then fell face forward into the snow.

  Stephanie, a horrified expression on her face, stepped back away from the man, and suddenly she leaped forward, raced down the hill and fell into McAllister’s arms.

  “I heard the shots and then all of a sudden he was there behind me,” she cried in a rush. “He made me fire my gun into the ground, and call for you. We could hear you coming. I wanted to warn you. But then there was nothing. Oh, God, Mac..

  “It’s all right,” he said, looking over her shoulder at the dead man. “What about the other one?” she said, suddenly stiffening in his arms, and pulling away.

  “He’s down by their car. I killed him.”

  She looked into his eyes. “They were here to kill Sikorski,” she said.

  “He’s already dead. But this one said they found him that way,” McAllister said tiredly. His head was spinning. “Are you all right?”

  She nodded. “You?”

  “I think so,” he said. He went up the hill and turned the dead man over. Stephanie helped him. They went through his pockets, coming up with five or six hundred dollars cash, which McAllister took, and his wallet. He was Treffano Miglione, from Jersey City; a member of the Sons of Italy and the Teamsters Local 1451. Apparently he was married. There were several snapshots of three young children and a fairly goodlooking young woman.

  McAllister sat back on his heels and looked up at Stephanie. “This one wasn’t with the Agency or the Bureau.”

  “No,” she said. “Mafia?”

  “Yeah,” McAllister replied. “They were independent contractors. Someone hired them to get rid of me, Ballinger, and Sikorski. So, who hired them?“ The dead man’s weapon was a 9 mm SigSauer. McAllister removed the clip from the gun, ejected the shells from it, and pocketed them. He needed them for his own weapon.

  He stood up. They were isolated here in the woods so that it was unlikely that anyone had heard the gunshots. But he didn’t want to take any more chances. It was time to get out.

  “Where do we go now?” Stephanie asked.

  It was almost axiomatic, he thought, that the further you got into an operation, the more restricted your options became. He could feel the so-called “funnel-effect” pulling him inexorably downward. But toward what?

  “You’re going to arrange a meeting between your boss, Dexter Kingman, and me,” he said. “For tonight.”

  Janos Sikorski’s shoeless, shirtless body lay over a pile of fireplace logs in the woodshed behind the carport. He had been dead for at least two days, his body frozen stiff in the cold. He had been beaten to death, his arms and legs broken by repeated blows from a large piece of wood.

  McAllister stood just within the doorway, the dim light spilling across the floor on the old man’s half-naked body. His ribs had been broken, his teeth knocked out, and finally the side of his skull crushed.

  “What did you tell them, Janos?” McAllister mumbled half to himself. Because of the cold there was no smell in the shed and yet he could imagine the odors of death, and his stomach heaved. Stephanie was right behind him. She gasped when she saw the body, and she turned away and threw up in the yard.

  The two up in the woods had probably killed Ballinger, so who had done this to Sikorski? More important: Why? Was it a faction fight after all?

  An organization will of necessity protect itself from any and all invasions. A basic tenet. But which organization had done this, and how far was it willing to go in its effort at self-protection?

  McAllister stepped the rest of the way into the woodshed and tried to close Sikorski’s eyes, but the
lids were frozen open. “Ah, Janos, what did you know about Zebra One and Zebra Two?” McAllister murmured. Traitor, Sikorski had screamed. They’ll give me a medal for your body.

  Who would have given you a medal, Janos? Goddamnit, who?

  They parked the Buick in the clearing in front of Sikorski’s house and drove the Thunderbird over to Dulles Airport, where McAllister, using one of the assassin’s driving licenses and credit cards, rented a Chevrolet Celebrity from the Hertz counter for Stephanie. She followed him back into the city, and they stashed both cars in the same parking garage a couple of blocks from their downtown hotel.

  It was three in the afternoon by the time they were back in their room, and Stephanie rebandaged the wound in McAllister’s side which had opened and was leaking.

  She was clearly shook up. This morning she’d still had a choice: stay or go. Now it was too late for her. She had crossed over. Now it would be impossible for her life ever to return to normal.

  “We’re back to square one,” she said. They were having a muchneeded drink together. “If I set up a meeting between you and Kingman he’ll have half the Agency waiting to grab you.”

  “Just what I want,” McAllister said. He was staring out the window across the city. It looked as if it were going to snow again soon.

  “Actually we’re worse off than before,” she said. “They’ll suspect that you killed Sikorski. And sooner or later the Mafia is going to come looking for their people. That Thunderbird is going to stick out like a sore thumb.”

  McAllister turned back to her. “The only reason I took their car is because of what I found in the trunk. I need it.”

  “Such as?”

  “Burglar tools.”

  She looked at him, her lips pursed. “For Nhat, Mac? What are you going to do?”

  “First things first,” he said. “Let’s say that you call Kingman this afternoon, right now and tell him that I want a meeting. Just the two of us, tonight at ten o’clock in front of the Naval Observatory. What will he do? Exactly?”

  “If you’re going to have any chance of getting in and out, without being taken, we’ll have to provide ourselves with a couple of blinds. Wouldn’t be difficult to set up. A call to a telephone booth, for example. But he would be followed. He won’t come alone.”

  “No fallbacks,” McAllister said. “What if we tell him up front when and where I want the meeting?”

  “Within an hour of my call he’d have his people stationed all over the place, you know that. There wouldn’t be a chance of your getting in without being spotted.”

  “He’d agree to the meeting if you called him?” McAllister insisted. “Certainly. He’d try to talk some sense into me. He would be disappointed. But he’d come. I suspect you’ve become a very big prize.”

  “Kingman would come in person, but so would a lot of his people.”

  “Half the Agency,” Stephanie said. “And I’m sure he’d get the FBI involved. Probably even the district cops.”

  “Our little meeting would draw a lot of people over to the observatory. A lot of sensation.”

  “Naturally…” she started to say, but then what he had been trying to tell her began to penetrate, and her eyes opened wide. “While they’re all looking for you to show up at the meeting, you would be someplace else. A diversion.”

  “Exactly,” McAllister said. “But I’ll want you nearby so that you can see who shows up and exactly what they do. Close, but out of sight.”

  “The Holiday Inn,” she said. “It’s on Wisconsin Avenue just a couple of blocks from the observatory. Doug and I stayed there once.”

  “You’d have a clear line of sight to the observatory grounds?”

  “From the upper floors,” she said. “But what about you? Where will you be?”

  “Getting us the information we’re going to need if we want to stay alive,” he said.

  She started to reply, but then backed off, a wry smile on her lips. She nodded. “I understand,” she said softly.

  “Call him now.”

  It was snowing again by the time McAllister pulled off Georgetown Pike and parked the Thunderbird on a dark street below LangleyHill. The CIA’s grounds were just on the other side. He sat in the darkened car for several long minutes, watching for traffic, but nothing came. It was a little past nine-thirty. By now Kingman’s people would be in place around the observatory north of Dumbarton Oaks Park, and no one would be getting suspicious for at least a half hour yet. Security would still be tight, but Kingman and Highnote and the other brass who might be involved in this business would certainly be gone. He needed access to a computer terminal in one of their offices.

  He got out of the car and from the trunk took out the long-handled bolt cutters and the small tool kit he had found earlier. The two assassins had come down from Jersey City well prepared for their assignment. In addition to the tools, he’d also discovered a highpowered rifle and night spotting scope in an aluminum case, a MAC 10 compact submachine gun with three hundred rounds of ammunition, and a short-handled sawed-off shotgun for close work, leaving absolutely no doubt as to exactly what line of work they’d been in.

  Careful to lock the trunk, he stepped off the road, down into a ditch and then up the other side toward a line of trees at the edge of a clearing at the top of a shallow hill, scrambling on his hands and knees at times because of the slippery going.

  At the top he ducked into the protection of the woods and looked back the way he had come. The snow was falling in earnest now, so it wouldn’t be too long before the marks he had made coming up the hill would be partially covered, masking his trail.

  Luck, he thought, turning toward the northeast. So much of his life had depended upon it.

  Within a hundred yards he came to a tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. A big metal sign warned that this was government property, and that entry was prohibited.

  Putting down the tool kit, McAllister quickly cut a large square opening at the base of the fence with the bolt cutters, peeled it back and crawled through. On the other side he crouched in the darkness, waiting, listening for the sound of an alarm. But the night was still, even the occasional traffic sounds from the Georgetown Pike were muffled by the trees and falling snow.

  Leaving the bolt cutters behind, he hurried down into the shallow valley, and then up the other side, stopping every hundred yards orso to listen for the sound of one of the patrols that operated back here twenty-four hours per day.

  But there was nothing. He could have been alone in another universe, surrounded by dark trees, slanting snow and except for the noise of his own movements and breathing, total silence.

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

  The O’Haires’ organization had been called the Zebra Network. The soldiers were all safely in prison. What about the generals? Zebra One and Two?

  Their control officer or officers had never been named. Why? Lack of information, or were they being protected for some reason? Three-quarters of a mile from the fence he came to the first paved road. There were no tire marks in the fresh snow. He stood by the side of the road. If he crossed here the next patrol to come along would spot his footprints.

  He turned and followed the road directly north for a few hundred yards, coming at length to an intersection which had been recently traveled. It was exactly what he had been looking for. Fresh tire marks led off toward the northeast, and in the distance he thought he might be able to make out the soft glow of lights. Stepping out onto the paved roadway, he walked in the tire tracks, his footfalls crunching in the snow. He could definitely see the glow of lights ahead now, almost pink in the falling snow. It would be the rear parking lot behind the construction site. A big earth mover parked beside the road loomed up ahead of him, and beyond it two cement trucks and a crane, its boom lying down on the bed of a long trailer, waited for the Monday morning shift. McAllister followed the road as it curved toward the right, finally opening onto a vast p
arking lot, mostly empty at this hour. In the distance was the seven-story CIA headquarters complex, with its addition under construction outlined, as if by deck lights, like a hulking ship at sea in a storm. He pulled up behind a dump truck. The questions had been posed in Moscow; were the answers to be found here, he wondered.

  He was suddenly very cold.

  Headlights flashed at the far end of the parking lot, and McAllistercrouched down behind the big dump truck as a light-gray pickup truck raced across the parking lot and passed him, heading down the road he’d just come up. He caught a glimpse of the driver and his passenger, who was talking into a microphone. Had the hole in the fence been discovered already? The truck’s taillights disappeared into the night, and McAllister quickly crossed the road and hurried along the edge of the parking lot.

  Construction on the new addition had been started nearly a year ago. The last bulletin he’d read indicated that it would be spring before the new offices would become available, because of numerous, as yet unexplained, delays. Scaffolding rose on all three sides of the U-shaped building that butted up against the original headquarters. Construction equipment and piles of material lay everywhere.

  He crouched again in the darkness for a full minute, studying the building, but nothing moved, no lights shone from any of the windows. Around front the main building was brightly lit from the outside, for security’s sake, but most of the office windows were dark. Operations would be fully staffed, as would communications and a few of the other vital functions, but for the most part the building would be quiet.

  McAllister worked his way around to the north side of the new building. Reaching the scaffolding he stuffed the small tool kit in his coat and started up. The windows on the fourth floor and above had not yet been installed. The canvas that covered the openings billowed and moved slowly in the light breeze.

  When he reached the fourth story he was sweating lightly, and he had to stop for just a moment to catch his breath before he ducked beneath the lower edge of the canvas and stepped inside the building.

  He was not alone. He stood stock-still in the nearly absolute darkness waiting for a sound, a movement, anything to accompany the cigarette smoke that he could smell. Someone was here. Very close.