The Zebra Network

by Sean Flannery

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You were a spy. You had been caught with a weapon in your possession. You should have gotten the death penalty. I prevented it.”

  “How?”

  “By convincing General Suslev, the head of my division, that you would be of more use to us in the States than in a Gulag, or two meters down.”

  McAllister could feel his finger tightening on the Makarov’s trigger. He had no idea how much pressure it would take before the gun fired.

  Miroshnikov saw it. “What did you do to me?”

  “I convinced Suslev that I had turned you into an agent for us. The chances that it would work, that you could convince your people you were legitimate, were slight. But even a small chance is better than none.”

  “What did you do?” McAllister shouted into the wind. “You son-of-a-bitch, what happened?”

  Miroshnikov let the cigarette fall to the ground. “I gave you. motivation.”

  “What else?”

  “I gave you my… hate. I gave you.. “They were waiting to kill me in New York. Who ordered that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  McAllister cocked the Makarov’s hammer. “Who told them I would be coming in on that flight?”

  “Potemkin,” Miroshnikov cried. “How did he know?” Miroshnikov said nothing.“How?”

  “I told him that someone ordered your release, and that you knew about the O’Haire network.”

  “You set me up.”

  “I knew he would fail. He was a fool, like the others. Not like you!

  I knew that you would survive. I recognized it in your eyes the first time I saw you.”

  “Why?” McAllister shouted. “Why did you do this?”

  “I knew that if you survived New York you wouldn’t stop until you had found out who tried to kill you. I knew that you would discover our CIA agent.”

  “Harman wasn’t CIA.”

  “I didn’t know about him. I’m talking about Robert Highnote. Your friend.”

  All the air seemed to be gone. McAllister couldn’t catch his breath. His hands began to shake.

  “You didn’t know?” Miroshnikov cried in alarm. “Highnote?”

  “He and Potemkin worked together. Have for years. I wanted to strike back.”

  Highnote. The years of their friendship, their mutual trust, their assignments together, all of it came as a whole to McAllister. A huge, hurtful, impossibly heavy weight on his shoulders. He was Atlas. Only his burden was overwhelming.

  “And you did it,” Miroshnikov said. “You struck back. You ruined them.”

  McAllister was shaking his head. He lowered the pistol and turned away. He remembered an evening in particular; he and Highnote had gone out on Berlin’s Ku-Damm and had gotten stinking drunk. They’d been celebrating something…. He couldn’t quite remember just what. When they got back to the apartment, Merrilee and Gloria were waiting up for them, angry at first, but they’d all ended up laughing so hard that Merrilee had actually wet her pants. Good memories. Fine times.

  “Now we’ll finish it, Mac. You and I. We’ve come so far together…

  “It was you all along,” McAllister said, amazed.“Borodin is the last of it. We’ll kill him and then get out.”

  “You,” McAllister said, his voice rising as he started to turn, bringing the gun up.

  “I saved your life,” Miroshnikov screamed.

  “But you took my soul,” McAllister shouted, and he fired, the shot catching Miroshnikov in the center of his forehead, and he seemed to fall backward into the snow forever.

  Chapter 32

  Stephanie Albright paid her lunch bill and walked across the crowded restaurant to the elevator. After twenty-four hours alone in her hotel room she had been unable to stand the isolation any longer and had left. For an hour she had wandered around Helsinki’s beautiful downtown area, passing the ornately designed opera house and the old church on Lonnrotinkatu, but the weather was so bitterly cold that she had finally ducked into the Hotel Torni with its tower restaurant that afforded a view of the entire city. Alone, as she had often been in her life, she had done a great deal of thinking about David, about the insanity they had somehow lived through over the past weeks. Something was driving him. That had been obvious from the first moment she’d laid eyes on him.

  Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. Zebra One, Zebra Two. Janos Sikorski had known what those words meant. And his reaction when David had spoken them had been immediate and violent.

  “Who else have you spoken those words to?” Sikorski had demanded.

  Picturing the scene, she remembered that by then she had been out of the kitchen. But just before the shot had been fired, she heard the old man scream: “Traitor! They’ll give me a medal for your body!”

  It hadn’t made sense then, and it made less sense now. Sikorski had been long out of the business, retired to his cabin outside of Reston, and yet he had known and understood the meaning of Zebra One, Zebra Two. Whoever those two were-if they were real-they had evidently been in place for a long time. All the way back to when Sikorski was still active.

  But he had called David a traitor. Why? What did it mean? She’d waited only twenty-four hours. David had asked for forty-eightbefore she was to begin making noises. But she couldn’t stand it any longer. It had gone too far. In fact it had gone too far the moment she’d allowed him to board the plane for Moscow.

  Oh, God, David, she cried to herself riding the elevator down, where are you? What is happening to you? It was time now, she decided, for the insanity to finally end. Time to get him out of Russia.

  Reaching the lobby she crossed to the line of telephones and placed a call to the American Embassy on Itainen Puistotie. While she waited for the connection to be made, she tried to calm down. But it was difficult.

  It rang, and she tightened her grip on the telephone. “This is Stephanie Albright, and I need some help.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” a man with a pleasant voice answered. “Are you an American citizen?” Hadn’t he heard that along with McAllister she was wanted for murder? Was it possible? “Yes, I am,” she said.

  “Are you presently here in Helsinki?”

  “Listen to me,” Stephanie said. “I want you to tell someone upstairs that I’m here in the city. And I want a message sent to Dexter Kingman. He is chief of the CIA’s Office of Security in Langley. Do you have that?”

  “Ma’am, I don’t know what you’re talking about. But if you are here in Helsinki I think it might be easier for you to get help if you came to the embassy. I’m sure that someone here..

  “Goddamnit,” Stephanie shouted. “You’re not listening to me. Take my name upstairs and give them the message.”

  “Upstairs?”

  “He’ll be a special assistant to the ambassador.”

  “Who will?”

  “Your CIA bureau chief.”

  “I don’t

  “Just do it,” Stephanie snapped. “I’ll call back in exactly thirty minutes.” She hung up the phone and stood there shaking for a moment or two, until she got hold of herself, then she turned, crossed the lobby to the front doors and outside headed the few blocks to her hotel on Bulevardi. She and McAllister were registered under the names on their diplomatic passports. It would do the embassy no good to search for Stephanie Albright. Officially she wasn’t in Finland.

  Time, she thought. It was crucial now. If she could convince someone in the embassy to patch her through to Dexter on a secure line, and if she could convince him of everything that had happened, it was just possible word could be sent to our embassy in Moscow. Someone there would know General Borodin, and would know how to reach David. They had to! It was just a few minutes past two by the time she reached the Klaus Kurki Hotel, and took the elevator up to her floor. She was thoroughly chilled. Walking outside she had thought again about David in Moscow. He too would be cold and frightened. But he wouldn’t be feeling the pain. His concentration would be on one man. For him the
re would be nothing else.

  She unlocked her door and stepped into the room as a smiling Robert Highnote, his overcoat off and tossed casually on the bed, turned away from the window.

  “Hello, Stephanie,” he said.

  Shock mixed with an instant feeling of relief rebounded from her stomach, and her knees were suddenly weak. “Oh, God,” she said. “How did you find me?”

  “I had your diplomatic passports flagged here in Helsinki. Mac’s artist in Munich did a fine job, from what I can gather.”

  “He’s gone to Moscow,” Stephanie said, and she suddenly remembered the open door behind her. She turned and closed it.

  “After General Borodin?” Highnote asked.

  “Yes, and we’ve got to help him,” she said turning back. Her heart skipped a beat.

  Highnote held a small, flat automatic in his hand, pointed at her, a wistful expression on his face, almost as if he were sorry for what he was doing. It all came to her now. The Russians waiting for Mac outside Highnote’s house. The killers coming for him at Highnote’s sailboat. Even the killers at Sikorski’s. Highnote knew Mac’s tradecraft well. He knew that Mac would be showing up there sooner or later. And Highnote was the only one who had survived the shooting in CollegePark. He had taken a terrible risk, but the prize had evidently been worth it to him.

  “It wasn’t Harman,” she said, finding her voice. “It was you all along.”

  “It was both of us, actually,” Highnote said. “Though at first I had no idea that Donald was in on the action as well. We never worked together.”

  “Then which one of you was Zebra One?”

  Highnote shook his head. “I have no idea what that means, Miss Albright. Of course you don’t have to believe me, but it’s the truth.”

  “The O’Haire organization was called the Zebra Network.”

  “That’s correct. But there never were any such code words as Zebra One or Zebra Two.”

  “Who did you work with?”

  “Poor Gennadi Potemkin,” Highnote said, his jaw tightening. “We had done good things together. And we would have done much more if Mac hadn’t come after us.”

  “Why?”

  Highnote managed his wan smile again. “A very large question,” he said. “Which I don’t have the time or patience to answer at this moment. Suffice it to say that in a world in which fingers are poised over tens of thousands of nuclear triggers, the only guarantee of safety is in knowing each other’s true intentions. It is the only way, I can assure you, that we can possibly avoid a nuclear confrontation.”

  There was an old CIA acronym for why spies defected. She’d heard it during training at the Farm. MICE, which stood for Money, Ideology, compromise, and Ego. Highnote certainly hadn’t become a traitor for money. Ideology? Compromise, as he suggested now? Or had it simply been ego? He was the last bastion of hope for the survival of mankind. Had he become so egocentric that he believed that? “It wasn’t Mac and me at College Park.”

  “I know that.”

  “Who then?”

  “I’m not one hundred percent sure, but I suspect Don Harman probably arranged it.”

  “Why?”

  “Again the very big question,” he said. “Because, my dear, noone believes any longer that you and Mac are traitors or killers. We were meeting to discuss a way in which to convince you of just that. We wanted to bring you in to safety so that we could find out what was going on.”

  “But we would have been killed the moment we showed our faces.”

  “Yes.”

  Stephanie’s head was spinning again. “Then what has this entire thing been all about?”

  “That is one question I cannot answer, because I don’t know. I’m just as much in the dark as everyone else. But it doesn’t matter any longer, you see, because Mac certainly won’t survive against General Borodin… I called him and warned him that Mac was coming. and you, unfortunately, won’t survive either.”

  “No,” Stephanie screamed, and she dove to the left through the open bathroom door as Highnote fired, the shot plucking at her coat sleeve.

  A tremendous crash shook the walls, and the corridor door burst inward, the door lock shattering, the entire frame splintering.

  Highnote fired again, someone cried out, and a half a dozen other shots were fired from what sounded like at least three different weapons.

  Stephanie was scrambling up and frantically trying to shove the bathroom door closed when Dexter Kingman appeared, blood leaking from his left arm, just below his shoulder.

  “Dexter?” she cried.

  “It’s all right, kid, we heard enough,” Kingman said, his southern drawl tinged with pain.

  Others were crowding into the room past him. She picked herself up.

  “It’s not all right, Mac is in Moscow! We’ve got to help him!” Kingman was shaking his head. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  General Aleksandr Ilyich Borodin got up from where he’d been kneeling in the snow fifty meters from the end of his driveway, and looked back through the trees toward the main road. It was late afternoon and already getting dark, but he could still make out the silhouette of the covered bridge that crossed the river. If McAllister came… when McAllister came… it would be from that direction. By car or on foot? Either, for the American, would be impossible. Yet McAllister had seemed to have done just that and more already.

  Again Borodin struggled with the same questions that had been eating at him all along. Why was McAllister coming? Someone had to have been directing him. No one man was that good. To think otherwise would be to sink into insanity. But who? Suslev, who envisioned himself taking over the directorship one day? Or his own number two in command of the Directorate, Sergei Nemchin, who’d run that fool Harman for these past few years? Or someone on the other side of the Atlantic? Someone who had discovered.

  He stepped back a pace from the antipersonnel mine he’d just buried in the snow. On foot McAllister would be dead. By car he might survive, though he’d probably be injured.

  Picking up his shovel Borodin started back toward his dacha a half a kilometer along the ridge that separated the valley from the cliffs overlooking the river. His footprints from earlier that led left and right off the driveway, had already been covered over by the blowing snow. He stopped a moment and cocked his ear to listen, but there were no sounds other than the wind in the treetops. If McAllister survived the land mine, he might suspect the driveway was unsafe, and would take to the woods on either side of the road. Borodin had rigged a pair of Kalashnikov assault rifles, set on full automatic, to trip wires. The American would not survive those. possibly.

  Borodin hurried the rest of the way back to his house, stopping a moment again as the driveway opened onto a narrow clearing. From here he could just make out a stray reflection from one of the closed-circuit television cameras mounted just beneath the eaves. There was one on each side of the house, covering each of the four possible approaches. They were the latest technology from the Surveillance directorate’s Seventh Department, capable of operating satisfactorily n minimal light. Inside, he stamped the snow off his boots, laid the shovel aside and hung up his coat. In his study he turned on the television monitors, each showing a different scene just outside the house. Nothing moved. Taking his pistol out of his pocket, he checked to make sure it was ready to fire, and laid it on the desk. Next, he checked the AK74 assault rifle with its night-spotting scope, leaning it up against the wall near the door, then poured himself a stiff measure of cognac which he drank down before cutting the lights all through the house.

  He’d sent his secretary Mikhail away, and his wife Sasha was safely in place in town. Now there was only him and a lone American. Coming here, of all places.

  But who was McAllister? What was McAllister? It was worrisome.

  When McAllister reached the Istra River Museum Village, it was already very dark, and the wind had picked up considerably so that at times the little Moskvich was nearly blown off the slippery
roads. It had been very difficult for him to concentrate through the interminably long afternoon. For several hours he had waited off the highway north of the city where Miroshnikov’s body lay stiffening in the snow. He’d run the car’s engine whenever he got too cold, but the heater did little more than raise the temperature inside the car by a few degrees, though being out of the wind helped. He’d wanted to get some rest. He desperately needed it. He hadn’t slept in more than forty-eight hours, nor had he eaten in nearly as long. But his brain wouldn’t shut down.

  Zebra One, Zebra Two.

  There was still no definitive answer. It was possible Donald Harman had been Zebra One, but it was just as possible, and in some ways more likely, that Robert Highnote had been the prime agent working with General Borodin through Gennadi Potemkin.

  McAllister turned that over in his mind for a time, thinking back to the moment he’d said those words to Highnote. He knew the man or at least he thought he had… and yet he had been able to detect no reaction, not a trace that Highnote had known what he was talking about.

  Which left what?

  In the late afternoon, when the light began to fail, he climbed out of the little car and walked around to where Miroshnikov lay on his back. The wind had piled snow up against his body, the flesh on his face tinged blue, his open eyes no more empty in death than they had been in life.

  His interrogator, in the end, had become his creator. “I gave you motivation…. I gave you my hate…. I gave you your life.

  But at what price? McAllister asked the dead man. Stephanie had told him to let go, to trust in his own instincts not only for tradecraft, but for his sense of right versus wrong. Yet all that had been confused by the drugs and the brainwashing he’d been subjected to at Miroshnikov’s hands. At this point it was nearly impossible for him to separate his own thoughts and impulses from those that had been implanted.

  At one point he had told himself that he could still run. Get out of Moscow before it was truly too late. Break the cycle of events that Miroshnikov had set into motion. Yet even as he’d had that thought, e knew that he could not do it. If Borodin were left alive, then everyone else who had died-and their number was a legion-would have been in vain.