The Zebra Network

by Sean Flannery

  If anything, downtown Baltimore was even more decorated for the holidays than was Washington. A tall Christmas tree stood in front of the Civic Center, and a few blocks south in the harbor, the USS Constellation on permanent display, was decked out with all her flags. At night she would be lit. The cabbie dropped them off in front of Union Station on Exeter Street. They waited just within the main entrance until the taxi had disappeared around the corner. McAllister took Stephanie’s arm. “Come on,” he said.

  “Where are we going now?”

  “To phone your father.”

  They crossed the cavernous departure hall, angling to the left when McAllister spotted the bank of telephones along the far wall. Stephanie plugged a quarter in the phone and dialed her father’s number. When the connection was made she held the phone away from her ear so that McAllister could hear as well. After ten rings she looked at him and shook her head.

  “Same as last night and early this morning,” she said, hanging up. “He should be there.”

  “Has he got an assistant, maybe a secretary working with him?”

  “Only in the summers when he sometimes takes a couple of interns from the college. The rest of the time he prefers to work alone. David, it’s never been a very large practice.”

  “Is there anyplace else he might have gone last night? An emergency call, or something like that? Friends? Maybe a woman friend?”

  “It’s Tuesday. He might go away for a weekend, he sometimes does that, but never on a weekday. Something has happened.”

  McAllister glanced across the large hall. The station was fairlybusy at this hour. Across from the telephones were a few shops and a small snack bar. He felt for the gun at the small of his back. “Have you still got your gun?”

  “Yes.”

  He took her shoulders and looked into her eyes, wanting to impress her with the seriousness of what he was about to say. “This part is very important, Stephanie,” he said. “If we’re confronted or cornered, or anything like that, and they clearly identify themselves as FBI or the police or even the Agency, you won’t resist. You’ll put down your gun and surrender immediately.”

  “They’ll kill us.”

  “Maybe,” McAllister said grimly. “But we’re not going to start shooting innocent people. Not now, not ever. Clear?”

  She nodded.

  “Let’s get going,” he said. “Keep your eyes open Stephanie.”

  Albright’s house was on Front Street about three blocks from Union Station in a neighborhood of similarly large houses that had at one time probably belonged to ship captains. For years the neighborhood had deteriorated, but over the past few years Baltimore had revitalized its harbor area and had gone on an inner-city cleanup and rebuilding campaign. Stephanie’s father, she’d told him, had weathered all the changes in the more than twenty years he had lived and worked in the neighborhood.

  There was a fair amount of traffic this morning, all moving slowly because of the continuing snowfall that made the streets very slippery. A few BMWs, a Mercedes, and several American-made cars were parked along the curb, but none of them sported any extra antennae, nor were any of them occupied. There were no lingering taxis, wIndowless vans, or suspicious-looking trucks parked anywhere in the vicinity, and so far as McAllister could see there were no people on foot in the near vicinity of Albright’s house; no meter-readers or telephone repairmen, no newspaper delivery boys, no bakery or delivery people. Nothing or nobody who could be a cover for a surveillance team.

  They passed a corner grocery store and crossed the street after a big Allied moving van rumbled by. McAllister watched it turn thecorner at Union Station and when it was gone he and Stephanie waited across the street for a full five minutes, half expecting the truck to come back around the block. When it did not reappear, they continued.

  Coming up on the house, McAllister could see nothing out of the ordinary, nothing out of place at first, but Stephanie let out a little gasp and pulled up short.

  “What is it?” he asked. “It’s my father’s car,” she said.

  McAllister could just see the rear deck of a dark-brown station wagon parked in the back. “He doesn’t have another?”

  “No,” she said softly.

  They came up the walk and mounted the steps. McAllister turned and looked back to the street. No one was there. No one was watching this place. The neighborhood felt empty, somehow deserted to him.

  A cardboard clock with the message WILL BE BACK AT was hung in the front-door window, the hands pointing to nine o’clock. It was well past that time now. But nine o’clock last night or this morning?

  The door was locked, but Stephanie produced a key from her purse and opened it. She started inside, but McAllister held her back. He took out his pistol, switched off the safety and stepped just inside the vestibule.

  A tall oak door with an etched-glass window leading into the main stairhall was half open. Today’s mail lay in a pile on the vestibule floor behind the outside door. McAllister moved on the balls of his feet to the partially open inner door and looked inside. Straight ahead, the stairs rose to the second floor. A corridor led back to the kitchen. On the left was Albright’s office, on the right, in what originally had been the living room and dining room were a small waiting room, a surgery, and a laboratory. The house smelled faintly of disinfectant and an odd, animal odor. From somewhere at the back of the house he thought he could hear a cat, or perhaps a small dog, whining softly.

  Stephanie came the rest of the way into the vestibule. She closed and locked the door. She heard the whining. “It’s coming from the animal cages on the back porch,” she whispered. She was very pale and her nostrils were flared, her lips half parted, as if she were starting to hyperventilate. McAllister went the rest of the way into the house and looked into the waiting room. A half a dozen chairs were grouped around a low plastic coffee table on which several magazines lay in a disarrayed pile. The sound of the animal’s pitiful whining was a little louder now, and it set his teeth on edge.

  Stephanie came up behind him.

  “You take the upstairs,” he whispered to her. She had taken out her.32 automatic.

  “Is someone still here?” she asked. “I don’t think so, but be careful.”

  She hesitated a moment, but then nodded and turned away. McAllister watched her go up the stairs, the gun at her side, then he went across the waiting room to the swinging door that led into the surgery, careful to avoid stepping in the narrow puddle of blood that had seeped under the door and had dried to a hard black crust. She had not come far enough into the waiting room to see it. But he had. And he knew exactly what it meant, and what he would find inside.

  Steeling himself, McAllister pushed open the surgery door and went inside. The room wasn’t very large, perhaps ten feet by fifteen feet overall. On two sides were glass-fronted cabinets that had contained medical supplies. On a third side was a long Formica-topped counter which ran the length of the room. On the fourth were shelves containing medicines, and a doorway that led into the laboratory. Nicholas Albright’s nude body was trussed on the stainless steel examining table in the middle of the room. He had lost a lot of blood before he died, some of it pooling up beside him on the tabletop, more of it running down onto the floor where it had gathered and trickled along the white tile floor to the waiting room door.

  McAllister looked away from the corpse, his stomach rising up into his throat. The room had been thoroughly searched. The glass on the cabinet fronts had been smashed, and most of the instruments and medicines had been pulled down and scattered all over the room.

  Outwardly it appeared as if someone had come here looking for drugs. When they hadn’t found any they had tied Albright to theexamining table and had tortured him for the information. But McAllister saw beyond that. The overhead light fixtures had been taken apart, the cabinets had been moved away from the walls, and even the heating vents had been uncovered. Whoever had done this were professionals. They had come here to find som
ething; something hidden in this room. He could see through into the laboratory. Nothing had been disturbed in there, nor had anything been touched in the waiting room. It was here in Albright’s surgery that the search had been concentrated.

  Still careful not to step in any of the blood, McAllister crossed around behind the examining table to the long counter on the opposite wall. A small cabinet had been left partially open. Using his thumbnail, he eased the door open all the way. The cabinet was empty except for several electrical wires leading from inside the wall. McAllister stared at them for a long time. One of the wires carried power, another was a ground connection, and the third obviously led to an antenna, the barrel of the coaxial plug dangling. A transmitter. Why?

  He turned again to look at Albright’s body. The scalpel they had used to cut him with was jutting from his left eye socket. His arms were tied behind him beneath the table, as were his legs. They had cut long strips of flesh from his abdomen, from his arms, and from the sensitive areas around his nipples and his inner thighs. His mouth was filled with gauze pads to stop him from screaming while they tortured him.

  His penis had been slit lengthwise, his scrotum had been opened and he had been castrated, and in the end they had cut the main arteries high on his legs near his groin so that he had bled to death.

  The scalpel thrust into his eye had probably been done out of frustration. It was possible that they had got nothing from him.

  He had to look away from the body again, his stomach rolling, the disinfectant smell of the surgery suddenly clawing at the back of his tongue. Stephanie could not be allowed to see this.

  They had come looking for something. A transmitter, perhaps. Still, he was missing something. He knew that much, but for the life of him he could not think it out. They’d come for more than a clue as to Stephanie’s whereabouts. In the first few minutes it would have become evident that the man didn’t know anything. Unless he had been working for them. The thought was chilling. They had stuffed his mouth full of gauze so that he couldn’t make enough noise to rouse the neighbors. But he could not talk either. This was a warning. The brutality of it struck him. The Russianness of it. He had seen things like this before. A mokrie dela. A wet affair. Blood will be spilled as a warning to all other spies.

  The animal at the back of the house had stopped whining, and Stephanie’s sudden scream at the surgery door shattered the eerie silence.

  Chapter 21

  The limousine of Howard Van Skike, director of central intelligence, was admitted without ceremony at the west gate past the executive offices onto the grounds of the White House. His car drew up beneath the overhang and a uniformed guard came down and opened the door for him. He got out and sniffed the air; tall, imperious in his immaculately tailored suit and top coat. He was a presence on the American political scene, and even more of a presence in the intelligence community.

  This noon hour he was preoccupied, even angry. He strode up the steps and into the west wing, taking the elevator to the President’s second-floor office, a thin alligator briefcase under his left arm.

  Up to this moment he had remained relatively aloof from the business of David McAllister. He had known the man’s father, and in fact had modeled much of his intelligence career after the grandfather, Stewart Alvin, who by the time Van Skike had known him was already one of the holy cows of Whitehall who’d been to Moscow in the early days and who knew the Soviet mentality inside and out.

  “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” the elder McAllister maintained was the only decent quote ever to have come out of the Americas. But good Lord he had known the business inside and out. They were still writing books about him.

  McAllister’s father had been a power in the OSS and the early days of the CIA as well, and the son, by all accounts had been the natural extension, continuing the long family tradition that had stretched back to the First World War. Now, as hard as it was to believe, the tradition had fallen apart somehow, giving Van Skike pause to consider in the deepest recesses of his mind just what sort of a star he had hitched his wagon to. Van Skike entered the President’s study, the door closing softly behind him, and crossed the room to the massive desk. John Sanderson, director of the FBI, had been speaking with the President. They both looked up.

  “You’ve heard?” the President asked, his voice as always, no matter the circumstances, soft. Some years ago he had been DCI, so he well understood what Van Skike was faced with at this moment.

  “Yes, Mr. President, I have, though I’ve not yet seen any of the details.”

  “Well look at these,” Sanderson said, stepping away from the President’s desk, and indicating a half a dozen photographs spread out there.

  Van Skike laid his briefcase on a chair and bent over the black and white photos.

  “Two of my people were killed in the driveway,” Sanderson said. “They used twenty-two-caliber silenced automatics. Highly accurate. One at point-blank range, the other at ten to fifteen feet; whoever was doing the shooting knew what they were doing.”

  The first photographs showed the FBI agents lying in the driveway, blood staining the snow.

  “They got Paul Innes’s wife on the stairs, Reisberg at the study door, Paul at the telephone… he was talking to our desk-duty operator… Quarmby at the end of the table in the breakfast room… and Highnote outside in the backyard.” The other photographs showed a woman in a print dress sprawled on a stairway, Reisberg’s body crumpled in a doorway, and Innes half sitting up against a glass buffet.

  “Quarmby is in critical condition,” Sanderson was saying. “And Bob Highnote is in serious condition, but he’ll probably make it. The bullet hit half an inch from his spinal column.”

  “The others?” Van Skike asked, looking up. “Dead,” Sanderson replied. He pulled out his pipe and tobacco, and turned away. “He was your boy, Van.”

  Van Skike looked to the President. “Was it McAllister?” he asked. “Has that been established?”

  The President nodded. “The Albright woman was with him. His car was spotted leaving Paul Innes’s place. From what I understand, the tire prints match.”

  Sanderson turned back. “We interviewed McAllister’s neighbors. He and the Albright woman were spotted at the house. Around seven they definitely saw his Peugeot leaving his garage. They saw him and a small dark-haired woman leaving together.”

  “Why?” Van Skike asked. “Bob Highnote was his friend. And how could he have known that Paul had called such a meeting?”

  Sanderson and the President exchanged glances, which secretly infuriated Van Skike.

  “There’s more,” Sanderson said. “McAllister and Albright were at the house. We’re definite about that. But someone else was there too.

  Someone came to visit them early this morning.”

  “Who?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Sanderson said. “A man, well dressed. Came on foot, let himself in as if he belonged there.”

  “Yes, and what does this prove?”

  “I think you’d better listen to this, Van,” the President said. Sanderson came back to the desk and switched on a tape recorder.

  …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 anymore casualties.”

  “That’s Paul Innes’s voice,” Sanderson said. “He recorded the meeting.”

  “Because he knows something?” another man asked. Van Skike recognized the voice as Highnote’s. “Because he evidently learned something in Moscow that has the Russians concerned… and possibly someone else… so concerned that they 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…

  Sanderson switched off the tape recorder. “You will be provided with a copy of this tape, of
course.”

  “It sounds as if they thought McAllister was innocent. That the KGB was after him,” Van Skike said.

  Sanderson advanced the recording.

  “Then why did they release him in the first place?” Highnote asked. “An error, we suspect,” Paul Innes said. Sanderson switched off the tape recorder. “Not an error,” he said. “McAllister is trying to protect whomever he is working for, whoever showed up at his house this morning with the orders to kill Innes and the others.”

  Again Sanderson advanced the tape recording.

  “…a matter of procedure now, but you must understand the importance,” Innes said.

  A moment later two soft noises came from the speaker, almost as if someone had closed a book, softly, and then closed it again. The hair prickled at the nape of Van Skike’s neck. He recognized the sounds as silenced pistol shots. The murders had been taped. He was listening to them now.

  There was a sudden cacophony of noises. Innes was shouting something, wildly; more silenced shots were fired; there were crashing sounds, the sounds of breaking glass and then a man whispering as if from a very great distance, said: “Get him.” Sanderson shut off the tape recorder. “McAllister and Albright,” he said. “Are you certain, John?” Van Skike asked again. “Absolutely certain?”

  “Yes,” the President interjected. “I’m convinced. David McAllister and Stephanie Albright have stepped over the edge. No matter what happens or does not happen, they must be stopped. Immediately. At all costs.”