The Zebra Network

by Sean Flannery

  “Naturally,” Highnote said.

  Innes ignored the sarcasm. “The second was the disturbing possibility that not only were the Russians trying to kill him, but that someone had hired the Mafia to stop him as well. In each case it appeared that someone was feeding them inside information about McAllister. The third was the apparent connection between McAllister and the O’Haires. In the first place your own people were told that McAllister had worked with them as their Russian pipeline. And in the second place, NSA intercepted the burst transmission within hours of which the O’Haires were murdered.”

  “We can go two ways with this,” Reisberg interjected. “Whoever is trying to silence McAllister set up the O’Haires to implicate him on the hope that we would do their job for them. In other words, if we believed that McAllister had been the O’Haires’ control officer all along, we might not hesitate to shoot to kill when the opportunity arose. The O’Haires, of course, were then silenced so that they would have no chance to recant. Either that, or we can believe that McAllister indeed was their control officer, and still is very much in charge of the network, and had to silence them himself… or at least arrange for them to be killed.”

  “Not the act of a desperate, driven man,” Highnote said. Innes shook his head. “Which brings us to Stephanie Albright, who apparently has agreed to help him.”

  “I don’t think that has been established with any degree of certainty,” Highnote said.

  “Forgive my skepticism,” Reisberg countered, “but I think there can be no question that she is willingly helping him. In fact it would be my guess that it was she who helped him in Dumfries.”

  “What?”

  “She apparently visited McAllister’s home in Georgetown on the night she managed to escape from him at Sikorski’s. It’s possible that she saw a photograph in the living room which showed McAllister and his wife aboard your sailboat. The Dumfries Yacht Haven sign is clearly visible in the background.”

  “That’s quite a leap,” Highnote said. “But assuming that was the case, why would she have done such a thing? I’ve looked at her file. She is totally above suspicion.”

  “Yes,” Reisberg said. “My thought exactly. She is a woman totally beyond reproach. We went up to Baltimore to interview her father, who told us that she is a headstrong girl, but that she is an idealist; very much in love with her country, which is why she sought employment with the CIA.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Just that we were doing a routine, prepromotion background check.”

  “Had he heard from her?”

  “Not for months,” Reisberg said. “But it strikes me as curious that such a patriot as Stephanie Albright should be so actively helping McAllister, that she was willing to lie to her own boss about setting up a meeting between him and McAllister, which of course gave McAllister the opportunity to break into CIA headquarters.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Our point, Bob, is that Stephanie Albright wouldn’t be helping McAllister unless she believed in him,” Innes said.

  “Come off it…

  “In itself, the notion is a weak one. We all agree with you. But taken with everything else… well, it’s given us pause for some serious thought.”

  Highnote looked from Innes to Reisberg to Quarmby and back again. “Which brings us to the actual purpose for this meeting.”

  “The President is offering McAllister amnesty, and I think it’s up to us in this room to figure out how to get to him as soon as possible with the message, and without any more casualties,” Innes said.

  “Because he knows something?” Highnote said. “Because he evidently learned something in Moscow that has the Russians so concerned… and possibily someone else… so concerned thatthey are willing to risk exposure in order to make sure he doesn’t talk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which is?”

  “We believe that there is more than a fair possibility that a Soviet penetration agent is working within the CIA at fairly high levels. We think that somehow McAllister stumbled onto this information while in the Soviet Union.”

  “Good Lord,” Highnote said. “Then why did they release him in the first place?”

  “An error, we suspect,” Innes said. “Once it was realized however, they tried to kill him. And they will keep trying. The Russians with their own people, and the mole using Mafia contract killers.”

  David McAllister’s white Peugeot 505 sedan got off the Capital Beltway at Baltimore Avenue and proceeded south just within the speed limit. Traffic had been quite heavy from Georgetown, but Royce Todd was an excellent driver, and the directions Donald Harman had provided them were complete.

  This was the big score they’d both been waiting for. After this they would be able to retire for at least a few years until the furor died down. Which it would eventually, Harman had assured them. With his help.

  “Another half a mile,” Carol Stenhouse said, looking up from the sketched map.

  It is essential that you not fail. It is the reason we are offering so much money. I need your assurances.

  We’re here. It’s a job and we will do it.

  No need for confirmations in this case. I’m sure I’ll be reading about it in the afternoon papers. The whole world would be reading about it, Royce Todd thought. And the beauty of it, is that the police would be searching for the wrong couple, giving them more than sufficient time to get out of the country.

  “Are you ready?” he asked, glancing over at Carol. She looked into his eyes and smiled. “Of course,” she said softly, competently.

  They turned off the main road and started up the long drivewaythrough the heavily wooded piece of property adjacent to the University of Maryland. It was quiet back here, and dark. Todd could see where other cars had already come this way this morning. He counted at least three sets of tire tracks in the snow.

  Carol took out her suppressed.22 magnum automatic, levered a round into the firing chamber and switched off the safety. Todd took his out of his pocket and laid it on the seat beside his right leg.

  They’d met five years ago in Honduras, where they had both been doing contract work for the CIA. He had been a graduate of the Delta Force out of Ft. Bragg, and was working with a Nicaraguan contra assassination team, and she, a former United States Army noncombat helicopter pilot, had been running arms across the border.

  She had literally saved his life during a night raid in which he had gotten cut off across the border. She had spotted the intense gunfire in the hills a half mile inside Nicaragua, had choppered down to investigate, and when she had spotted him alone, had picked him up and flew him back into Honduras.

  They’d gotten out of Central America when the Sandinistas began shooting down contract pilots with regularity, and the CIA, with as monotonous a regularity, began denying their own people.

  Carol had changed into a short khaki skirt and blouse before they’d left McAllister’s house. As they came up over a rise that opened the last fifty yards to the large three-story Colonial, she shifted in her seat so that her skirt hiked up, exposing her thighs all the way to her lace panties. She spread her legs, the dark swatch of her pubic hair clearly visible.

  The driveway circled around to the right of a big cement goldfish pond and marble fountain. A black Cadillac was parked beneath the overhang in front. As they pulled up beside it, a large man dressed in boots and a white parka came around from the side of the house. A second man appeared right behind him. They separated as they approached.

  Carol powered her window down, as Todd opened the door and got out of the car. He held his gun beside his leg so that the two men could not see it. He stood just behind the open car door.

  “Good morning,” the guard nearest said pleasantly. The other one angled toward the passenger side of the car.“We’re here to see Mr. Innes,” Todd said. He switched off his weapon’s safety with his thumb.

  “Yes, sir,” the guard said. “If you would just step away from yo
ur car. Ask the lady to get out as well.”

  “My damned seatbelt is stuck,” Carol called out her open window. Todd smiled and looked back in at her. The second guard had reached the passenger side.

  “I feel like such a fool,” Carol said.

  The guard bent down so that he could see into the car, his eyes automatically going to Carol’s spread legs. “What seems to be the problem?..

  She raised her pistol and shot him in the forehead at point-blank range.

  Todd turned back, bringing up his pistol, and fired one shot a split second later, catching the first guard in the left eye, his head snapping back, and his arms flying outward as he crumpled in the driveway. The entire time elapsed from the moment the two guards had first appeared until they lay dead, was less than ten seconds, the two silenced shots inaudible more than twenty feet away.

  Carol was out of the car and across the driveway by the time Todd had reached the front door. He stood to one side as she came up onto the porch. He nodded.

  Holding the gun at her side, she tried the doorknob. It wasn’t locked. She opened the door and Todd slipped past her inside the main stair hall.

  A woman in a pretty print dress was just coming down the stairs. Without hesitation Todd shot her, the bullet smacking into her chest just below her left breast, piercing her heart, killing her instantly. Her legs collapsed beneath her, and she tumbled halfway down the stairs, her eyes open, and her lips parted for a scream she hadn’t been able to utter.

  The meeting was to be held either in Innes’s study or in the breakfast room. Both were at the back of the house, making it unlikely that anyone witnessed what had happened out front in the driveway.

  Todd started down the corridor to the left of the staircase, Carol directly behind him. She did not close the door, nor had they closedthe Peugeot’s doors or shut off its ignition-all steps to save them precious seconds if need be.

  The corridor was one step up from the stair hall. To the right was the living room, to the left a drawing room, its French doors slightly ajar. Todd hesitated as Carol stepped around him and ducked inside, sweeping her gun from left to right.

  She shook her head and rejoined him just as the door at the far end of the corridor opened and they could hear voices.

  “It’s simply a matter of procedures now, but you must understand the importance,” someone said from within the room.

  A fat, academic-looking man with thick glasses stepped out, clutching a bulging file folder. He started to say something to the others in the room when he realized that someone was in the corridor. He brought up his right arm as if to fend off a blow, as Todd fired two shots, the first catching Reisberg in the face, destroying the bridge of his nose, the second hitting his chest, driving him back against the door frame.

  Pandemonium broke out in the breakfast room. Todd raced the rest of the way down the corridor without a word, confident that Carol was right behind him as backup.

  Turning the corner he stepped over Reisberg’s body, his eyes automatically scanning the small room, right to left.

  Paul Innes, his tie loose, was shouting into a telephone. Todd shot him in the side of the head, the telephone flying out of his hand as he crashed sideways into the long glass buffet table. A glass door leading out to the rose garden crashed open and Todd switched his aim left, firing one shot that went wide and to the right, just as Robert Highnote disappeared across the narrow veranda.

  “Get him,” Todd whispered, and Carol stepped behind him, and rushed across the room.

  Melvin Quarmby had snatched up the sterling silver coffee server and he threw it at Todd in a final desperate act. Todd easily sidestepped it, and fired one shot, this one catching the NSA counsel in the throat, destroying his windpipe and severing a carotid artery. The man fell backward as he clawed at the fatal wound.

  There was an unsilenced shot outside. Todd reached the glass doorin time to see Carol sitting down hard in the snow, clutching her left shoulder with her right hand.

  Highnote was racing across the rose garden with surprising speed and agility for a man of his age. Todd crouched in the classic shooter’s stance, followed Highnote’s retreating figure and squeezed off a single shot, the bullet catching Highnote high in the back, his body falling forward and lying still.

  Carol was just getting to her feet when Todd reached her. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She nodded, grim-lipped. “Are we finished here?”

  “Yes,” Todd nodded. “It’s time to go.”

  Chapter 20

  Stephanie had wanted to leave the hotel immediately, but McAllister convinced her that they would run less of a risk of being spotted if they waited a couple of hours until normal workday traffic began. They wouldn’t stand out as the only ones on the street. They checked out a few minutes after seven-thirty, paying their bill and walking three blocks down to New York Avenue directly across from the sprawling Washington Convention Center.

  The dawn was gray and overcast. Traffic was extremely heavy and still ran with headlights. The gaily lit Christmas decorations seemed somehow out of place, especially considering Stephanie’s dark mood. She had convinced herself that something terrible had happened to her father, and McAllister had no real idea what he could or should say to her, because he thought there was a better than fair possibility she was correct.

  They found a cab almost immediately, the driver a young black man with Walkman headphones half over his ears, beating a rhythm on the steering wheel. “Can you take us to the BaltimoreWashington Airport?” McAllister asked when he and Stephanie got in the backseat.

  The driver looked at their images in his rearview mirror. “Man, in this shit?” he asked, indicating the thick traffic.

  “A hundred dollars,” McAllister said. “We’ve got a plane to catch, and we can’t afford to screw around.”

  The driver grinned, hitting the button on his trip meter as he pulled out into traffic. He reached down with his right hand and turned up the volume on his Walkman, his head bobbing with the music that was suddenly so loud McAllister and Stephanie could hear it in the backseat.

  McAllister looked over his shoulder a couple of blocks later to seeif they had picked up a tail. He decided after a few moments of watching traffic, that they had not, and he sat back. They’d done the impossible, so far, he thought. But from this moment on it was going to start getting difficult. Stephanie was holding his hand, her palms cold and wet, her entire body shivering. She looked into his eyes. “If something has happened to him, I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said, her voice cracking. “Someone from the Agency and probably the FBI was sent up to interview him,” McAllister said. “But I don’t think they’d do anything more than ask a few questions.”

  “He wouldn’t have told them anything.”

  “Of course not.”

  “It’s not them I’m worried about, David. It’s the Russians, or the Mafia.”

  “There is no reason for them to go to him,” McAllister said, not really believing it himself. “It’s me they’re after.”

  “And me, because I’m helping you.”

  “But they’re not after my wife. There’s no reason to suspect they’d go after your father.”

  “God, I wish I could believe you,” Stephanie whispered, sitting back. “I wish it was that easy.”

  He let it rest for the moment. Trust your instincts, she had told him.

  I think that something did happen to you in the Lubyanka. Something that changed you, something that made you unsure of your own abilities. But deep in your gut you know what moves to make, you know how to protect yourself… Let yourselfgo, David. Let your old habits, your old instincts take over…. You have the tradecraft, use it.

  “He doesn’t know anything,” she said softly. “I didn’t tell him what we were doing, just that we were together.” He squeezed her hand. “It may be that we won’t be able to get to him.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, her eyes wild. “You’re on the run. De
xter Kingman might figure that you’d try to contact your father. They could be watching the place, waiting for you to show up.”

  “Then why didn’t they put a tap on his phone?” she asked. “There was no answer last night and again this morning.”

  “Because they knew that even if you did call him, you wouldn’t reveal your location.”

  She suddenly saw what he was driving at. “They could have shunted his incoming calls to a dead number, making me believe that something had happened to my father. Bait. It could be a trap.”

  McAllister nodded, thinking that in a way it would be much easier on her if that were the case, and yet doubting it. They reached the parkway just past the National Arboretum, and the driver sped up across the Anacostia River, merging smoothly with the traffic that had thinned out. Most people were coming into the city at this hour, not leaving it.

  They were in Maryland now, and a couple of minutes later as they passed over lLandover Road, three highway patrol cars, their lights flashing, their sirens blaring, raced beneath the parkway heading northwest toward Hyattsville and College Park.

  Stephanie stiffened, but when the police cars did not take the entrance ramp onto the parkway, but instead continued northwest, she relaxed slightly.

  McAllister watched out the rear window as the squad cars were lost in the distance, then he cranked down his window a couple of inches. At first he could hear nothing but the roar of the wind. The driver, feeling the sudden cold air, looked up. Then in the far distance, McAllister thought he could hear sirens. A lot of sirens.

  An accident, he wondered. Or was it?

  It was nearly nine by the time the cabbie dropped them off at the Eastern Airlines passenger departures entrance of the BaltimoreWashington International Airport in Ferndale just south of downtown Baltimore. After McAllister paid the driver, he and Stephanie hurried into the terminal, took the escalator downstairs to the baggage pickup area, and stowed their two overnight bags in a coin-operated locker.

  Their driver had taken the down ramp around and was waiting in front for a fare back to Washington. It had begun to snow lightly again. Christmas music was playing on the overhead speakers. It wasfaintly depressing. A young couple climbed into the cab a few minutes later, and when it was gone, McAllister and Stephanie went outside and got a cab into Baltimore, Stephanie giving the driver an address a couple of blocks from her father’s house. Once again McAllister got the odd feeling that he was coming back on his life. That he was retracing old steps. That he was making no progress. Stephanie sat on the edge of the seat, her hands together in her lap, holding herself rigidly erect as if she were afraid she would break something if she moved.