The Zebra Network

by Sean Flannery

  Selfdoubt will come to all of us at one time or another, boyo. He could almost see his father, hear the old man’s voice. But there was no reason to think they had been seen, other than the cabbie talking to the cops outside the station. He could have been talking to them about the weather, about traffic, about football scores, anything.

  And what about his feeling that they were being followed now, that they were being watched? Where were the clues? Where was theout-of-place man or men on the platform, the look in the porter’s eye when they’d come aboard, the note in his voice when he had called through the door? There was nothing. It was paranoia. Just like the old days. Sofia, East Berlin, Prague, Warsaw; a dozen places, two dozen incidents ranging back over fourteen years until his tradecraft had slipped that night in Moscow. Fallbacks, don’t ever forget your back door, kiddo.

  Christ, he’d known the routine. He’d known how to cover himself, yet he had become sloppy. And his lapse had caused the deaths of a lot of innocent people. The train lurched and Stephanie bumped against him. He held her with his free hand while he continued watching out of the window as the station began to slip away. No one came running at the last minute. No one. Moments later they were in the darkness again, and he let the window shade fall back, dropped his gun on the couch, and took Stephanie in his arms.

  When they kissed she shuddered deeply, as if someone had just walked over her grave.

  Gennadi Potemkin hunched up the collar of his charcoal-gray overcoat and adjusted the angle of his fedora as he hurried out of the lobby of the Hyatt Regency two blocks from the train station and approached the waiting Lincoln Continental.

  A squat, very dangerous-looking man dressed in a sharply tailored tuxedo, a white scarf around his neck, looked out from the back seat as the driver opened the door for Potemkin, who climbed in without a word. The events of the past twenty-four hours were nearly beyond belief. Potemkin hoped against hope that this one would have good news for him now. But his hopes faded as he looked into the Italian’s eyes.

  Their driver got in behind the wheel and they headed away from the hotel, plunging into the storm that made driving extremely difficult. Washington seemed, at that hour, like a city under seige.

  “This weather’s a bitch, ain’t it?” the thick-waisted Italian said, his Sicilian accent heavy.

  “I’ve paid you a lot of money,” Potemkin said harshly. “I didn’t come here to listen to your bullshit about the weather.“The Mafia boss turned to look at Potemkin, his eyes hooded. “You’d better listen, because we missed them.”

  A sudden cold wind blew through Potemkin’s soul. “What?” he shouted.

  “We weren’t sure about the train, but we didn’t miss them by much more than a half hour.”

  “Where are they headed? They didn’t get off here in Washington? You’re sure?”

  “Chicago.”

  “West,” Potemkin mumbled, his insides like water. “Go after them.”

  “Impossible in this weather, that’s what I meant. Nothing’s moving out there, and I mean nothing except for the trains.”

  “Take another train.”

  “Isn’t one.”

  The heavy car fishtailed around the corner, but then straightened out. Potemkin tried to reason out the possibilities. He felt as if he were losing control of the situation. It was dangerous. So dangerous it was hard to keep his head on an even keel. “You’re sure it was them? No doubts?”

  “Our guy drove them to the station. We had the word out. There was no doubt of it. He told the cops, just like you said to do, then he called us. They’re on that train all right. Just took us a while to find out which train.”

  “No way of catching them?” Potemkin asked, struggling to maintain his control.

  “Not a chance in hell,” the Sicilian said. He grinned. “But there is another possibility.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’ll cost you.”

  Potemkin looked at the man with disgust. “Up to this point you haven’t done a thing for what you’ve already been paid.”

  The Sicilian leaned forward suddenly and grabbed a handful of Potemkin’s coat. “It was my son out there in Reston. That sonofabitch wasted him. You understand, gumba? I got a stake in this now. But it’ll still cost you.”

  The man’s immense greed was beyond belief. But Potemkin hadworked with this type before. Often. “You’ll get your money,” he said, changing tack.

  The Sicilian let go of his coat. “You haven’t heard how much. “I don’t care what the figure is, you’ll get it,” Potemkin said, interrupting. “On one condition.”

  The Sicilian nodded warily.

  “You’ll get paid for success; there’ll be nothing for failure.”

  “Half now…”

  “No,” Potemkin interrupted sharply again. “Only for success.”

  “Don’t fuck with me. One phone call to the Feds and you’d be through here.”

  “Do you know what we do with traitors?” Potemkin asked conversationally, sure now for the first time that he had regained some control. “We have a thing called mokne dela. Your people shoot kneecaps as a warning, we shoot faces. Your mother wouldn’t recognize you.”

  The Sicilian laughed. “This is my backyard now, gumba. My country.”

  “Don’t be so sure of that,” Potemkin said softly, and something in the tone of his voice backed the Mafia boss off.

  They drove for a few minutes in silence, passing the Capitol building that against the backdrop of black skies and falling snow looked more like a Hollywood set than the real thing. Something was happening that Potemkin couldn’t understand. He was fighting back blindly, but fighting the only way he knew how; directly and with force.

  “There is a family in Chicago,” the Sicilian said. “They owe me a favor.”

  “There can be no mistakes now,” Potemkin said. “McAllister and the girl must not be allowed to get beyond Chicago. Under no circumstances.”

  They swung back toward the Hyatt, again lapsing into silence, Potemkin sinking into his own morose thoughts. Control, that was everything. But his was slipping and he knew it. What he couldn’t understand, what he could not fathom, was the incident at College Park this morning. Had he underestimated McAllister that badly?

  “Is this asshole one of yours?” the Sicilian asked.“No,” Potemkin replied, shaking his head. “He is definitely not one of ours.” He turned. “Kill him. This time, make sure.”

  They’d come out of the storm sometime in the early morning hours. Stephanie stood at the window looking out at the passing countryside, lit now by a full moon that was so bright it obliterated the stars. She wore nothing but a long sweatshirt, her shoulders hunched forward, her forehead against the cool glass.

  “You should get some sleep,” McAllister said from where he lay in the lower bunk. “You too,” she replied, tiredly, mechanically. “I’m sorry about your father.”

  “You’ve already said that. But what happens if there are no answers for us in California?”

  “I’ll talk to Highnote.”

  “What if he dies, or if he decides there’s nothing he can do?”

  “Then we’ll go to the others.”

  “One of them in the Pentagon, the other in Moscow,” she said, contempt in her voice. “let’s stop kidding ourselves.”

  Her skin looked pale as a ghost’s in the moonlight, but he could almost feel the heat radiating off her, as if she were an engine at idle ready to spring into motion at any moment. At one point he could have saved her life by turning around and walking away from her. That was no longer possible. He was sorry for it, and yet he wasn’t.

  He could see her breath fogging the window. The train swayed rhythmically, the motion nearly hypnotic at this time of the night.

  As the dawn began to break over the Indiana countryside they made love, slowly, gently, tenderly as if they were afraid of hurting each other-which in a measure they were-and as if it were their last time-which possibly it was.

  Af
terward, they lay in each others arms, and she began to talk about her father; how it had been when she was a young girl and her mother was still alive, and afterward when she would come back from college to be with him. He had been her Rock of Gibraltar, her mentor, her best friend, her confidant; the one person in the world for whomshe had to put on no false face, the one person on this earth who knew and loved her for exactly what she was.

  As she talked, McAllister thought about his own father, and the fact that although he had had a deep love and respect for the old man, he had felt cheated because of when and how his father had died.

  It had been listed as an accident. The fact of the matter was he had simply worn out and had taken his own life.

  There had been no note, no explanation, no last words. He couldn’t remember the funeral, but he could remember in vivid details the nightmares afterward in which he thought about his father lying in a dark, cold grave alone on a windswept hill.

  Chapter 25

  They entered the city from the south a few minutes past eight, the tracks angling away from Lake Michigan, morning traffic in full swing on the Dan Ryan Expressway. In the distance the Sears Tower rose up into the cobalt-blue sky. Chicago hadn’t got much snow, what there was lay in dirty piles. It looked extremely cold outside.

  Stephanie had worked on their makeup again this morning, giving them a sallow, used-up look. The transformation was complete. Looking at himself in the mirror, McAllister could believe that he wasn’t himself. He looked almost military.

  The train had slowed down in the city. They entered the tunnel that would bring them into Union Station downtown. Stephanie got up as McAllister flipped on the compartment lights, and she took her gun out of her coat pocket. She took the clip out of the butt of the gun, cycled the round out of the firing chamber, reloaded the bullet into the clip, snapped the clip back into the gun, and cycled a round back into the firing chamber, checking to make sure the safety catch was on before she stulled the gun back into her coat.

  She looked up, catching McAllister watching her. “I meant it, what I told you last night,” she said, the tenderness that had been in her eyes while they made love gone.

  “Don’t become one of them,” he said.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” she snapped, a catch in her voice. She was frightened but she was also angry.

  “We can’t fight them all, not this way.”

  “No?”

  “No,” McAllister said. “You’re going to do it my way, and you’re going to follow my instructions.”

  “Up to the point that someone tries to arrest me. I won’t let it happen.”

  “You’d shoot an innocent cop trying to do his job?”

  “If need be,” she said evenly.

  McAllister held out his hand. “Give me your gun,” he said. She backed up a step and shook her head, her left eyebrow rising. “No.”

  “Not that way,” McAllister said. “I want your gun.”

  “Goddamnit, David…” she started to protest when someone knocked at their door, and he held up his hand for her to keep silent.

  “Yes?” he called out.

  “Five minutes until the station, folks,” a man’s voice called back.

  It wasn’t their porter from last night. “All right, thank you,” McAllister said.

  “If you’ll just let me in, sir, I’ll give you a hand with your bags,” the man said, and there was something about his accent that was suddenly bothersome. There was a connection somewhere. McAllister had heard that voice before, or one similar to it. Where?

  The door handle turned slowly. “I’ll get you a redcap in the terminal, sir.”

  The accent was Italian. A snow-covered road, a dark-brown Thunderbird. A man in a bombardier jacket. It was the same accent. New Jersey. Mafia. The Mafia controlled a segment of the Teamsters union. Cabbies, train porters?

  Stephanie’s eyes had grown wide. She had made the same connection. She grabbed her gun out of her coat pocket.

  McAllister motioned for her to move aside as he pulled out his gun and flipped off the compartment lights, plunging them into darkness.

  “All right,” he called out. “Just a moment please.” He moved to the door and silently slipped the lock. He glanced at Stephanie, then yanked the door open.

  A short, heavyset man with thick features, a blue watch cap perched on the back of his head, stood there, his right hand inside his sheepskin jacket. His mouth dropped open when he caught sight of McAllister. “What?” he stammered.

  McAllister grabbed a handful of his jacket and pulled him into the compartment, spinning him around, and slamming him up against the bathroom door, his pistol against the man’s neck, his left hand holding the man’s gun hand in place. Behind him, Stephanie closed and locked the door, then turned on the compartment lights. The man’s eyes were bugging half out of their sockets, and he kept swallowing over and over, though he did not resist.

  “The window shade,” McAllister said. Stephanie lowered it.

  “It’s a mistake,” the man croaked, talking difficult because of the gun jammed into his throat.

  “No it’s not,” McAllister said. “Who sent you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said, but it was obvious he was lying.

  Stephanie reached around and pulled his hand out of his coat, and then reached inside and pulled out his gun, a big.357 Magnum with a thick silencer tube screwed onto the end of the shortened barrel. A devastating weapon, especially at close range. “Who sent you?” McAllister demanded, pressing the barrel of his gun even harder into the man’s throat. “Now, or I’ll blow your neck apart!”

  “I don’t know,” the man croaked. “We got orders from out East that you and the broad were coming in on this train. I got on at Dyer.”

  “Orders from whom?”

  “I don’t know, I swear to God I don’t know. We just got a call, that’s all.”

  “Is someone waiting in the station for us?”

  “No,” the man said. Stephanie brought the barrel of the silenced Magnum up against his temple. “Yes… yes,” he cried.

  “How many of them?”

  “Four. A redcap, two by the stairs, and a cabbie outside.”

  “How will we recognize them?”

  “They’re all dressed like me, except for the redcap.”

  “Then what?” McAllister asked. “What were your orders? Specifically.”

  “Just to take you, that’s all.” The train was slowing down, coming to a stop. Stephanie cocked the Magnum’s hammer.

  “Oh, Jesus and Mary, mother of God,” the man stammered. “I was supposed to kill you. If that didn’t work, you’d get it on the platformor out on the street. Somewhere. We weren’t supposed to fail. This was a big job.”

  “Who sent you? You’ve got to have a name.”

  “I don’t know, I swear it.”

  “This was a big job?” Stephanie asked. “Yeah, yeah, important, like I said.. “Like Baltimore?” Stephanie asked. “Yeah, like Baltimore…” the man said.

  At the last instant McAllister realized what was about to happen, but he was powerless to stop it. He managed to step back as Stephanie moaned, the sound animallike, coming from the back of her throat, and she pulled the trigger.

  The man’s head was slammed violently against the bathroom door, a large piece of the back of his skull blown away, his eyes and nose and mouth filling with blood as he crumpled on the floor dead.

  Stephanie stood, violently shaking, the big gun in her hand pointed at the inert figure on the floor. “Oh, my God,” she cried softly, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  The train had come to a complete stop. Outside in the corridor they could hear the sounds of departing passengers. The others would be waiting on the platform for this one to show up or for a young couple to get off. They were going to have to get out of here now, while they still had the advantage of time, and of their disguises.

  “I killed him,” Stephanie was blub
bering. “My, God, his. head..

  McAllister stuffed his gun in his belt and took Stephanie by the shoulders, pulling her around. “Stop it,” he snapped.

  She looked up into his eyes. She was on the verge of collapsing. “Listen to me, Stephanie. It was either him or us. He was sent here to kill us both. There was nothing else you could have done.”

  “I shot him,” she said.

  “Yes, and now we have to leave. Immediately.” He took the big Magnum from her hand, laid it on the couch, then helped her on with her coat, stuffing her gun in his pocket, and pulling on his coat. He picked up their three bags.

  “No,” she said, suddenly coming out of her daze. “David, they’re out there waiting for us.”

  “They don’t know what we look like yet. Nor do they know that this one has failed. But we don’t have much time. You’ve got to pull yourself together. Now!”

  She was shaking her head and she started to back away. McAllister dropped their bags, grabbed her arm with one hand and slapped her in the face, her head snapping back and a cry catching in her throat.

  “We have to get out of here, Stephanie! Now!” McAllister said. She took a deep breath, nodded and straightened up. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll be all right. We have to leave.”

  She averted her eyes from the body on the floor as McAllister again picked up their bags, listened at the door for a moment then opened it and stepped out. A young couple coming up the corridor stopped respectfully to let them get out of their compartment and close the door. McAllister nodded at them, and smiled, then headed for the end of the car with a limp, Stephanie shuffling along directly behind him.

  They would have to get away from the train station as quickly as possible. It wouldn’t take long for someone to discover what had happened. Coing to ground and lying low for a few days was no longer one of their options. Speed was their only defense.