The Zebra Network

by Sean Flannery

  Stephanie jumped up, and together they started down the road, McAllister’s grip tightening on his pistol.

  Zebra One, Zebra Two. Kathleen O’Haire would be saying those words now.

  A white Mercedes entered the park from the same direction Harman had arrived. One man was driving, another sat in the passenger seat.

  The car was moving fast, much too fast for the narrow park road.

  Suddenly McAllister understood that the situation was about to explode! But how had they known?

  “Down,” he shouted, shoving Stephanie aside. The Mercedes began to accelerate as it reached Harman and Kathleen O’Haire who both looked up in surprise. The man on the passenger side leaned out the open window and began firing a big, silenced pistol. Harman was shoved off his feet, something flying out of his right hand, blood erupting from at least three wounds, and a split instant later, Kathleen O’Haire’s head exploded in a mass of blood, bone, and white matter.

  McAllister was tearing at his pocket, trying to get his pistol out as the car raced past them, neither the assassin nor the driver paying him the slightest attention, and then it was gone around the curve.

  Chapter 29

  McAllister raced up the road knowing that he was already too late. Harman had received three hits to his chest and one that had taken off part of his right cheek. Kathleen O’Haire’s face and the back of her head were destroyed.

  But Harman had had a gun in his hand. It lay in the snow a few feet from his body; a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson Police Special, the hammer cocked. He had been ready to kill the woman.

  McAllister’s breath was coming like a steam engine. What had happened? How had it happened? If Harman had been Zebra One, who were his killers?

  He reached the Taurus as Stephanie hurried up past the Wagoneer, the side of her coat soaking wet from where she’d fallen when he shoved her aside.

  “Move it,” he shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Potemkin… David, it was Gennadi Potemkin driving that car.

  I recognized him. He’s head of KGB operations out of the Soviet Embassy here in Washington.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes!”

  He yanked open the driver’s door and climbed in behind the wheel. He had the car started when Stephanie jumped in beside him, and he pulled out around Harman’s car and raced out of the park. Traffic was normal on Fourth Street even though Howard University was all but closed down for the Christmas break. McAllister forced himself to slow down, to act and drive normally. It had been his fault. He had promised the woman he would protect her. But it had been impossible.

  Zebra One was for Harman here in Washington. Zebra Two was for someone in Moscow. Who was their common enemy? Someone had signed the order releasing McAllister from a Soviet prison, and someone in Washington had ordered the assassination of Harman. Why? What was he missing?

  “Where are we going?” Stephanie asked breathlessly. “I don’t know. I’ve got to have time to think.” Images and snatches of conversation were flashing through his head. He could feel blinding pain stabbing at his groin and across his chest. He could hear his heart hammering raggedly in his ears… but then it stopped! “Are you all right, David?” Stephanie asked softly. He glanced at her. She was pale and shaking. The insanities they had both endured over the past days had taken its toll.

  Wherever he showed up death followed on his heels. One by one every person he’d had come in contact with since his release from the Lubyanka had been killed. Everyone except for Highnote and Stephanie. How much longer could they possibly hold out? Where were the answers?

  Run. Was that the answer after all? Could they go away and manage to hide for the rest of their lives? Christ, was such a thing possible? If not that, then what were their alternatives? He’d been driving aimlessly. They reached Rhode Island Avenue and he turned right toward Logan Circle, traffic very heavy. A police car, its siren blaring, raced past them, but it was going in the same direction, not back toward the park.

  Very soon the bodies would be discovered and reported. Another massacre in Washington. The press would go wild. If someone had seen the Taurus the police would be looking for it.

  The only advantage they had now was their altered appearances. No one knew yet what they looked like. Potemkin and the assassin had not paid them the slightest attention, their concentration locked on their targets and then getting away. He glanced at Stephanie again. She was watching him, deep concern in her eyes.

  “Harman was going to kill her,” he said.

  Stephanie nodded. “I know, I saw the gun fly out of his hand when he went down.”

  “Which means he was probably Zebra One.“Again she nodded. “Working for the Russians, then why did they kill him?”

  “A coverup,” McAllister said. “But how did he know that Harman would be meeting with Kathleen O’Haire in that park at that moment, unless Harman told him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There’s one man who does.”

  “Who?” Stephanie asked, her eyes narrowing. “Gennadi Potemkin,” McAllister said. “And I’m going to ask him. Tonight.”

  Stephanie walked across the lobby to the pay phones at the back. McAllister had dropped her off at the Marriott Twin Bridges Hotel, where she had checked in and had waited in their room for a full four hours to give him time enough to make his preparations. They were the longest hours of her life. She kept seeing the image of her father’s destroyed body in her mind’s eye; kept feeling his cold, lifeless flesh, barely able to look at his face for the last time as she covered him with the sheet. Zebra One, Zebra Two, obviously code names for two men who had worked at the highest levels of the Soviet and American governments for a long time. Long enough to create the O’Haires’ Zebra Network. Long enough to do what else?

  When she’d told McAllister’s story to her father he had not been happy that she wanted to help, but he had understood, as he’d always understood.

  “He may not have known himself what is driving him,” her father had said. “And already there has been a lot of killing around him.”

  “What else can I do?” she’d asked. “I’m already involved. I was from the moment I pulled him half dead out of the river.”

  “I know. Just take care, Stephanie. Please. For me.” Reaching the telephones, she put her purse on the shelf and placed the call to the Soviet Embassy across the river in D.C. While she waited for the connection to be made, she turned and looked across the busy lobby. Nobody was watching her, no one seemed interested. She was merely a woman making a telephone call. Nothing more.

  The number rang and she turned back.

  “Cood afternoon, you have reached the Embassy of the Union ofSoviet Socialist Republics, how may we help you?” a pleasant man’s voice answered, his English nearly accentless.

  “I would like to speak with Gennadi Potemkin.”

  “I’m sorry, madam, but we have no person by that name here,” the embassy operator replied smoothly.

  “I happen to know that you do,” Stephanie said, forcing a reasonable tone to her voice. “If you will just pass him the message that McAllister was in McMillan Park this noon, I think he’ll speak with me.”

  “I am so sorry, madam, but..

  “It will be the biggest mistake of your life, comrade, if you don’t pass that message.”

  “One moment, please,” the operator said, unperturbed, and the line went dead.

  It was possible, she thought, that she had been disconnected. The Soviet Embassy received dozens of crank calls every day from disgruntled American citizens and Soviet emigres. But she waited on the line.

  A full five minutes later, another man came on, his voice much older, his accent strong. “Is this Miss Albright?”

  “Yes, are you Potemkin?” Stephanie asked, startled by his use of her name, and yet not really surprised he knew it.

  “Indeed it is,” Potemkin said. “I assume you are telephoning from a reasonably secure loca
tion, somewhere within the city?”

  “Close,” Stephanie said. “We were in McMillan Park this morning.”

  “Yes?” Potemkin said.

  “McAllister would like to meet with you.”

  “To what purpose, Miss Albright? What could we possibly have to say to each other?”

  “Listen to me, you sonofabitch. We know about Zebra One and Zebra Two. We know about the network, and we know a lot more.”

  Potemkin laughed. “My dear girl, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do, and I think you’d better agree to meet with him. Alone. Both of you alone.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Neither are you. I don’t know what you think you know, but it is meaningless.”

  “As meaningless as McAllister’s release from the Lubyanka within hours of his trial and conviction? No explanations. No prisoner exchanges. No publicity. Nothing.”

  Potemkin did not reply.

  “He’s at Janos Sikorski’s house right now, waiting for you. It’s out near Reston, but I’m sure you know where it is. He wants to make a deal.”

  “What sort of a deal?” Potemkin asked, his voice guarded. “His life for yours,” Stephanie said, and she hung up as Mac had instructed her to do. Gathering up her purse she turned and walked back across the lobby, her legs weak, her breath catching in her chest. She had done everything she could and now it was up to him.

  McAllister sat in the Taurus parked diagonally across Sixteenth Street from the Soviet Embassy a few blocks up from the White House. He had made it down from Reston fifteen minutes ago, about the same time Stephanie had placed her call to Potemkin. He had done what little he could to even the odds after first making sure Sikorski’s place wasn’t still staked out. Now it was up to the Russian, who, if he was smart, would simply ignore the message.

  Do nothing, McAllister said to himself, and you’ll be safe this time. From Kathleen O’Haire, the wife of a convicted spy, to Donald Harman, a presidential adviser. And from Harman to Gennadi Potemkin, head of all KGB operations in the United States. Where would it lead from there? How many more dark corridors would he have to travel before he made his way through the labyrinth?

  “Even if he does agree to meet with you, David, he certainly won’t go out there alone,” Stephanie had objected when he’d laid out his plan.

  “He’d be a fool if he did,” McAllister agreed. “Which is why I’m going to wait for him outside the embassy and see who goes with him.”

  “Let me go with you.”

  “No.”

  “Damnit, David..

  “No,” McAllister said again. “You’ll stay here and do exactly as I say. No games now. I don’t want you out there. I don’t want to have to worry about you. I know what I’m doing.” She looked at him for a long time. “If you’re spotted it will blow the entire thing.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  It’s tradecraft, pure and simple, and it won’t be very pleasant. It was in his family heritage, in his blood, in the training he had received and the experiences he had survived over the past fourteen years.

  Once a spy always a spy, that was the old adage. But after this, if by some miracle he survived, he was through. The business no longer held any fascination for him, if it ever had.

  The roof of the embassy bristled with antennae and microwave dishes that bounced signals off a Soviet communications satellite for transmission direct to Moscow. He stared at the complex electronic arrays, his brain making automatic connections, skipping like a computer down long lines of facts and figures, each one leading inexorably to the next. Anomalies, Wallace Mahoney had called the bits and pieces that didn’t seem to add up. Stephanie’s father had been tortured and killed because of a transmitter? In his mind’s eye he could see the open cabinet door, the wires emerging from the wall. He focused again on the antennae on the embassy roof. Had Albright been communicating with the Russians? Was his murder a part of some coverup as well? The same white Mercedes 450SEL sedan from the park emerged from behind the embassy, and as it passed, McAllister got a brief glance at its passengers. Potemkin was driving, the assassin from this morning beside him in the front, and three other men in the backseat.

  McAllister put the car in gear, drove to the end of the block, turned the corner, and caught up with the Mercedes on H Street in front of Lafayette Park. He held back, keeping several car lengths behind the big German car, which turned south on Seventeenth Street, the White House to the left, the huge Christmas tree on the front lawn lit up already in the diminishing light as evening approached. Potemkin was driving at a sedate speed. This would be no time forhim to be stopped and issued a speeding warning. He would be careful now; so much depended upon his not being delayed. He would remain scrupulously within the speed limit.

  Reaching Constitution Avenue, the Mercedes turned right toward the Roosevelt Bridge, merging smoothly with traffic as it picked up speed.

  The question was, which route would the Russians take to get out to Reston? South through the edge of Alexandria then up 1-495 through Annandale; north to the Capital Beltway which crossed the Dulles Airport access road; or the shortest route through Arlington on the partially completed 1-66 that branched off north of Falls Church?

  He got his answer about three miles later when the Mercedes, heading north, passed the 1-66 exit and continued toward the Capital Beltway. His luck was holding.

  Swinging west on 1-66 he speeded up, the sun only a vague brightness low in the overcast sky ahead, traffic picking up, all of it running at a good speed as everyone headed home.

  McAllister parked his car about seventy-five yards up from Sikorski’s clearing, dousing the lights and shutting off the engine, but leaving the keys. Under the hood he pulled out the main wire from the electronic ignition system, rendering the car inoperative for the moment.

  It was nearly dark now. He trotted down the road to the clearing and in the distance to the north he could see the lights of Reston.

  The snow was deep up here, the only footprints were his, leading directly across to the front door of the cabin. He hurried down the same path so that it wouldn’t appear as if he had come and gone and returned again, entered the dark, silent house and crossed immediately to the kitchen where he let himself out, crossed the backyard well out of sight of the driveway, and scrambled down the steep hill to the path he’d found this afternoon. Now that the sun had gone down the temperature was dropping rapidly. Still he was sweating and the wound in his side was aching by the time he had circled around to the woods that sloped up from the house parallel to, but above, the driveway. A few snowflakes began to fall as he stopped about fifty yards from the house, cocking his ear to listen and scanning the dark woods in the direction of the driveway for any sign that Potemkin and his triggermen had shown up. But there was nothing, only the occasional whisper of a light wind in the treetops, and he continued up the hill.

  For a while he was back in Bulgaria, racing for the border, the militia hot on his trail. He could hear the helicopters and from time to time the sounds of the dogs. It was winter, like now, and the snow was deep. Then, as now, he had been racing for his life.

  He reached a spot directly above where he had parked his car and started down toward the driveway when he saw the flash of a car’s headlights below. He pulled up short, leaning against a tree, holding his breath as best he could while he listened.

  The light flashed again, and then was gone. Moments later he heard car doors opening and closing, and the muffled sound of someone talking, issuing orders.

  Still he held his position. There were five of them, all killers. He needed to even the odds before he confronted Potemkin.

  The Taurus’s engine turned over, but of course the car would not start. Whoever was behind the wheel tried again, and then there were more voices, this time it sounded as if at least one of them was angry about something.

  Finally the voices began to fade, moving down the driveway toward th
e clearing. McAllister pushed away from the tree and keeping low hurried through the woods, crawling the last twenty feet on his stomach.

  They had left one man with the Mercedes. He was leaning up against the hood of the car, a cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth, a big silenced pistol held loosely in his right hand.

  McAllister took out his gun and continued crawling the rest of the way down the hill to a spot just a few feet above the driveway and ten yards behind the Mercedes. The lone man was gazing intently down the driveway in the direction the others had gone. He did not turn around as McAllister slipped out of the woods and crept forward to the big German car. At the last possible moment the man, hearing something or sensing that someone was behind him, started to turn. At that instant, McAllister sprang up, smashing the butt of the heavy P38 into the side of theman’s head. He went down heavily, his shoulder glancing off the car’s bumper, but still semiconscious he tried to bring up his gun. McAllister grabbed a handful of his coat, pulled him half up and smashed the butt of his gun into the man’s face, opening his nose with a gush of blood and knocking him senseless. Working fast now, with one eye toward the slope of the driveway lest one of Potemkin’s people had heard something and was coming back to investigate, McAllister stripped the unconscious man of his belt and tie, trussing his arms and leg together behind his back. He jammed his handkerchief into the man’s mouth, holstered his own gun, and snatched the silenced weapon. It was a big, heavy 9-mm automatic. A proper mokrie dela weapon for destroying faces.

  They’d left the Mercedes open. He popped the hood, yanked out the ignition wire and careful to make as little noise as possible, closed the hood again, before he scrambled back up into the woods.

  Neutralizing the first of the Russians had taken barely three minutes. By now he figured the other four would have reached the clearing where they would be holding up to watch the cabin for signs that this was a trap. Potemkin would probably be dispersing his men left and right so that they could come up from behind the house. They would be moving through the woods, but well within sight of the clearing. No one wanted to get lost in these dark woods. It would take them several cautious minutes to circle the entire clearing and then cross at the back. It took him precious minutes to find the path he’d made through the woods this afternoon, and then follow it to a spot about ten yards from the clearing and an equal distance up from the driveway. He thought he might be able to hear someone talking off to his left, and someone else moving through the woods toward his right, but again the sounds faded.