Gradually his eyes became accustomed to the darkness and he was able to distinguish shapes and outlines of walls, hanging wires, and pipes and piles of construction materials. He remained standing by the canvas-covered window opening listening and watching. He was in a large, unfinished room. Directly across from him was an open doorway into a broad corridor. A man in the corridor, somewhere tothe left, coughed. McAlIister pulled out his gun and crept forward, feeling ahead with his free hand so that he would not trip over something.
At the doorway he stopped again to listen. The smell of cigarette smoke was much stronger here and he could feel the warmth of a portable heater wafting back to him. It would be a guard on duty. The new building was attached to the old just here. There would be a door. Some access from the new into the old. Someone would have to guard it. One guard or two? How much further would his luck hold? Gripping his gun a little tighter, McAllister stepped around the corner. A lone guard sat at a small table in front of a plywood bulkhead into which a padlocked door was set. A portable heater was set up at his feet. He was reading a magazine, smoke curling up from a cigarette in an ashtray in front of him. A single light bulb dangled from the ceiling.
McAllister was halfway down the corridor before the guard realized that someone was coming, and looked up, his eyes growing wide in alarm, his mouth opening. He reached for his walkie-talkie lying on the desk.
“Don’t,” McAllister said raising his pistol.
The guard hesitated just long enough for McAllister to reach him and snatch the walkie-talkie, his initial surprise turning to anger.
“Here, who the hell do you think you are?” the man sputtered jumping to his feet.
“I don’t want to have to kill you, but I will if you force me to it,” McAllister said, keeping his voice low and menacing. He hadn’t wanted this at all. There was no way he was going to kill this man, no matter what happened. Getting what he had come here to get had suddenly become more than difficult.
In the next moment McAllister’s luck completely ran out. “Raise your hands very carefully, if you please, Mr. McAllister,” someone said behind him.
McAllister stood absolutely still. He knew the voice, remembered it from somewhere years ago. He wracked his brain trying to come up with a face and name. Someone from the last time he had done desk duty here at Langley.“I asked you to raise your hands, sir, and I’m not kidding now.”
“Who is that?” McAllister said, turning very slowly. The man was very short and well-built with thick graying hair and dark eyebrows over wide eyes. The face was vaguely familiar, still he couldn’t put a name to it. “Tom Watson, sir. We were told that you might be showing up here. Now if you please, raise your hands.”
McAllister remembered. Watson had been one of the front-door guards. They’d often bantered back and forth when McAllister had come to work. He was holding a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson in his right hand. He wasn’t carrying a walkie-talkie. McAllister raised both of his hands; in one he held the walkie-talkie, in the other his gun. “Now what, Tom?”
“Disarm you, then call for help,” Watson said warily. “Get his gun, Frank.”
The other guard came up behind McAllister and reached for the gun. It was a mistake on his part. McAllister turned as if he were going to hand his gun to the guard, but then continued to swivel around until he was completely behind the man, his left arm clamped over the man’s throat, his pistol at the man’s temple.
Tom Watson moved forward, raising his gun, a frightened, uncertain look of surprise on his face.
“I don’t want to shoot him, Tom, but I will if I must,” McAllister said.
Tom Watson stopped in his tracks. “Damn you,” he said. “Do as I say for the next five or ten minutes and I promise you that no one will get hurt.”
Chapter 13
Something had gone wrong. Stephanie watched from the seventh-floor room she’d taken in the Georgetown Holiday Inn as two men got out of a car parked on Observatory Place and rushed back into the woods. Moments later they returned in a hurry with two other men, got back into the car and raced out of sight around the main building.
She had checked in here around six o’clock after calling Kingman, who had been deeply upset, and had watched from her darkened room as the first of the surveillance units had begun to show up shortly before seven. It was ten after ten now.
Kingman had given his word that McAllister would not be taken by force. “I’ll talk with him, Stephanie, if that’s what you want,” he’d said coldly. “But I can’t guarantee anything else.”
“That’s all he wants. But if you come in there in force, he won’t show up.
“If I come alone, he’ll shoot me in cold blood just like he’s done the others.”
“The only people he has killed were three Russians outside Mr. Highnote’s house, and then only in self-defense.” She assumed the trouble at Sikorski’s had not yet been discovered.
“I’m not going to argue that point with you. I’ll meet with him, and I promise no force.”
“If it doesn’t work out, you’ll let him turn around and leave?”
“If he’s innocent, as you say he is, he won’t have to leave. We’ll work it out together. But Stephanie..
She’d hung up on him then, and driven directly over to the Holiday Inn, where she’d been waiting and watching ever since. She had counted at least eleven different units in and around the Naval Observatory grounds, and she figured there were twice as many she had been unable to see from her vantage point. A District of Columbia police car, its red lights flashing, raced up from Whitehaven Street, turned at Circle Drive and entered the observatory grounds from the southeast.
They’d all hidden themselves. But now they were out in the open. Stephanie turned away from the window and looked at the telephone on the nightstand between the twin beds. McAllister had not told her where he was going tonight, but she’d known just the same. There was only one place where he could get the information he sought. As crazy as it seemed, she had to admit the logic of what he was trying to do. Zebra One, Zebra Two, his contact in Moscow had told him. And the O’Haire organization had been known as the Zebra Network. If there was a connection between the two-and judging from Sikorski’s reaction that first night she strongly suspected there was-then any further information would be buried in the CIA’s archives. More specifically in the Soviet Russian Division’s computerized records. Fourth floor at headquarters. She knew the territory well because she’d been assigned temporary security duty on more than one occasion-watching suspected Soviet spies operating out of their embassy here in Washington when division chief Adam French didn’t want to involve the FBI.
She tried to envision just how he would have gotten himself into the building and then up to the fourth floor. He would have to find an office with a computer terminal. He would have to know the correct access codes. So much could have gone wrong.
Outside, two more District of Columbia squad cars, their lights flashing, their sirens blaring, emerged from the observatory grounds and raced south on Thirty-fourth Street. Moments later Dexter Kingman’s car came around the corner and sped off into the night.
The meeting had been aborted. But at this point, McAllister was barely ten minutes late. Too soon for Kingman to have shut down the operation. The prize was simply too great for him to have quit this early.
Four other cars and a windowless van came out of the observatory and hurried down Thirty-fourth Street toward the Key Bridge-across which was the parkway, CIA headquarters a scant eight miles to the northwest.***********
McAllister had pocketed the walkie-talkie, relieved both men of their handguns, and watched them as Tom Watson unlocked the bulkhead door into the old building. The corridor was long and broad, only dimly lit, deserted at this hour of a Sunday evening.
“What’s the night guard’s schedule for this floor?” McAllister asked, keeping his voice low.
“I don’t know,” Tom Watson said, and the other guard looked up sharp
ly at him.
“You’ve got to believe me, Tom, when I tell you that I don’t want to hurt anybody. If you know the schedule, it would be best if you told me now. I don’t want a confrontation.”
“On the half hour,” Tom Watson said after a hesitation. McAllister glanced at his watch; it was a few minutes after ten, which gave them twenty minutes at the outside to get in and get out-and only that long if his entry onto the grounds hadn’t already been discovered. “Let’s go,” he said.
“I don’t know what sort of trouble you’re in, sir, but don’t do this. You’ll just be compounding.
“And you don’t want to know,” McAllister said, prodding him in the back with the gun. “Down the hall. Now.”
Adam French’s office was at the end of the corridor, which branched left and right. Since he was head of the Soviet Russian Division, immediate access could be obtained to records through his terminal. That is, McAllister thought, if they hadn’t changed the access code on him over the past three years. A lot of ifs here; too many. He made both guards lie facedown on the corridor floor while he selected a slender, case-hardened steel pin from the tool kit he’d taken out of the Thunderbird’s trunk, and had the door lock picked in under twenty seconds. “Inside,” he told the two men.
They got to their feet, a deep scowl on Watson’s face, a look of terror on the other’s, and they entered the office, where McAllister made them lie face down on the carpeting as he closed and relocked the door. “I’ll only be a couple of minutes,” McAllister said. “If you cause no trouble, I promise you won’t be harmed.”
“You won’t get away with this,” Watson snarled. “You’d better hope I do,” McAllister said, sitting down at French’s desk, and flipping on his computer terminal. The screen came to life, with the single word: READY.
This terminal, like hundreds of others in the building, was connected to the computer’s mainframe in the basement. Records were compartmentalized, access given only on a section-by-section and need-to-know basis. Three years ago the Soviet Russian Division’s access code was SIR DIV METTLESOME. It had been someone’s abstruse comment on our Soviet policy.
He typed in the words, and hit the ENTER key. FILE? the word in amber letters popped up on the screen. McAllister glanced at the guards who hadn’t moved, then turned back to the keyboard and typed the most obvious choice. O’HAIRE NETWORK, then hit the ENTER key again.
ACCESS RESTRICTED-PASSWORD?
He stared at the screen, suddenly conscious of just how little time he had left. He’d been afraid that the file might be restricted, and now it was anyone’s guess what the correct password might be. The major problem was that he only had three chances to get it right. After three incorrect tries an alarm was set off on the mainframe, indicating that someone was attempting to gain access to a restricted file.
Where to begin? He had come this far, he wasn’t going to back out. Not yet.
He typed the first thing that came to mind. ZEBRA, and touched the ENTER key.
INCORRECT PASSWORD.
It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. The O’Haires had operated what was widely considered to be the most damaging spy network against the United States since the Second World War. There was a certain logic to these passwords.
He typed: SPIES, and hesitated a moment before touching the ENTER key.
INCORRECT PASSWORD.
Again McAllister glanced over at the two guards on the floor. TomWatson had raised his head and was glaring up at him. “You don’t want to see this, Tom. Believe me, it’s for your own good.”
“Give it up, sir.”
“Put your head down.”
Watson complied after a moment, and McAllister turned back to the terminal, another thought striking him. This would be his last chance. He typed: ARBEZ, and hit ENTER.
INCORRECT PASSWORD.
He stared at the screen for a long moment or two, conscious of his heart hammering in his chest. He had begun to sweat again. The clock was running now. Someone would be coming to see what the trouble was up here. If they had already guessed he was somewhere on the grounds this now would bring them on the run. He had lost. Yet he had come so close. So tantalizingly close. The O’Haire files were somewhere in the computer. One word. One key and he would know..
In desperation he typed the only other thing he could think of. HIGHNOTE, and the ENTER key.
This time the screen was suddenly filled with a long list of file choices, labeled alphabetically under the heading: ZEBRA NETWORK DIRECTORY.
“Bingo,” he murmured, running his finger down the individual file choices, among them: History and Background, Investigating Authorities, Budget Line Summaries, Damage Assessments, Transcripts — Telephone, Transcripts-Nonsubject Interviews, Transcripts-Subject Interviews, and under the label Code M, the file, SUSPECTS.
He typed M and the ENTER key.
Instantly the directory was replaced by a list of four names, a brief bit of information on each, and instructions for bringing up other files that contained more detailed information.
Four names.
Reaching over he turned on the printer and touched the PRINT key; immediately the machine started to whine as the computer spit out a hard copy of what had come up on the screen.
“Gun or no gun, I won’t stand for this,” Tom Watson shouted, jumping up and lunging over the desk. McAllister had barely enough time to rear backward out of Watson’s grasp, and grab for his gun lying on the desk, when the telephone rang. Watson lashed out at him, then reached the telephone and snatched it off its hook.
“It’s McAllister!” Watson cried.
The other guard had jumped up. McAllister had no choice. He smashed the butt of his heavy pistol down onto the base of Watson’s skull, and the man cried out and crashed off the desk to the floor. The second guard reached the door when McAllister aimed the pistol at him. “Stop,” he shouted.
The man, his hands fumbling with the door lock, looked over his shoulder, his eyes wide with fear, and he froze.
The printer stopped and in the sudden silence McAllister could hear a thin, shrill voice calling his name as from a great distance. It took him a moment to realize it was Stephanie on the telephone. He jumped up and came around the desk. Watson, out cold, had dragged the receiver off the desk with him. McAllister picked up the phone.
“It’s me,” he said, keeping his eye on the guard at the door. “Kingman and the others just left in a big hurry,” she shouted in a rush. “When?” McAllister demanded. There was no time to wonder how she had known he was here.
“No more than two minutes ago. Get out of there, Mac.”
“On my way,” McAllister said, and he yanked the telephone cord out of the wall.
He bent down over Watson and felt for a pulse in the man’s neck.
It was strong and regular. The man was out, but not dead, and McAllister gave silent thanks for that much at least.
Back behind the desk, he tore the computer readout from the printer and shut down the terminal.
“All right, Frank, we’re getting out of here now.”
“What about Tom?” the guard asked fearfully. “He’ll be all right, and so will you if you do as I say,” McAllister said. “Where is your pickup truck parked?”
“In the back, by the elevator.”
“Let’s go,” McAllister said. The guard unlocked the door. The corridor was still deserted. No one had come up from the computer mainframe yet to check on the restricted access-code violation, but someone would be showing up at any minute. They hurried down the corridor and back through the bulkhead door into the new building.
McAllister was just relocking the padlock when the walkie-talkie
in his pocket came to life. “Security Four, Control.” The guard stiffened. “Is it you?” McAllister asked. The man hesitated, but then nodded.
McAllister pulled out the walkie-talkie and handed it to him with one hand, while raising his pistol to the man’s head with his other. “Everything is
fine here,” he said.
The guard keyed the walkie-talkie. “Security four,” he said. His hands shook.
“What’s your situation up there?”
“Normal,” the guard said.
“Keep on your toes, you might have some trouble coming your way. We’ve got an intruder alert.”
“Ask them who it is and how they knew about it,” McAllister said. The guard keyed the walkie-talkie. “Who is it, Control, and how did we find out?”
“It’s McAllister, somebody apparently phoned it in a couple of minutes ago. He’s armed, so watch yourself.”
McAllister nodded, his gut tight. Who had phoned? How in God’s name had they known?
“Roger,” the guard said, and McAllister grabbed the walkie-talkie from his hand and pocketed it.
“Who else is guarding this building?”
“No one else in this wing except for Tom and me.”
“Earlier I saw a pickup truck outside in the parking lot.”
“Unit five. One of the outside patrols.”
“I hope for your sake that you’re not lying,” McAllister said. “I’m not, sir.”
The elevator was located at the end of the corridor. They took it down to the ground floor where they hurried across the mostly completedentry hall and then outside. It was still snowing. In the distance they heard the sounds of a lot of sirens. McAllister ordered the guard behind the wheel of the light-gray pickup truck, then he got in on the passenger side.
“Drive,” he said. “Where?”
“West.”
“But there’s no exit…
“Do it,” McAllister ordered, and the guard hastily complied, heading across the parking lot toward the back road that McAllister had used.
He had to have time to think. Stephanie was an intelligent woman. She knew what he had gone looking for, and she could have guessed where he would have to go to get the information. It explained her telephone call to Adam French’s office warning him that Kingman and his people had deserted the rendezvous. But she was the only one who knew that he would not be at that meeting. If she had tipped off Kingman, why had she called French’s office? None of it made any sense. It was madness.
The Zebra Network Page 17
