The attendant came after her. “You need the cops?” he shouted. She rushed behind the counter and picked up the telephone on the desk.
“Hey, you can’t go back there..” the young man was saying, but Stephanie waved him off.
She dialed a Langley number which was answered on the first ring. “This is Albright,” she said, forcing herself to calm down. “McAllister is on the loose. Outside of Reston.”
“Stand by,” the Security Section OD said with maddening calmness.
The attendant was staring at her, open-mouthed. “Stephanie, is that you?” Dexter Kingman, director of security, said.
“Yes,” she cried in relief. “I’m at a Texaco station just outside of Reston. McAllister brought me out to a cabin nearby. He spoke with an old man. Janos… something.”
“Sikorski,” Kingman said. “Where is he now?”
“When I left he was still with the old man. There was a gun shot.” Kingman said something away from the telephone. When he came back he seemed out of breath. “Are you all right, Stephanie?”
“I’m fine.”
“Stay where you are, were on our way.
Chapter 7
McAllister had been lying in a heap behind the couch for how long? He realized with a terrible start that he had no idea. The sudden movement and fall had jarred something in his head. He must have blacked out.
He still had the Walther, though. He tried to push himself over with his left hand, but his arm collapsed beneath him, his entire left side ablaze in pain. He could feel blood trickling down his side.
“Janos?” he called out.
There was no answer. The only sounds in the house were the crackling of the flames in the fireplace.
“Janos, let’s talk,” he called into the darkness. “It’s not what you think. I swear to God…
There was a noise. Off to his right. In the kitchen. The scrape of something soft against the floor. Sikorski’s slippers?
“Janos?” McAllister shouted, scrambling as best he could to his feet.
The kitchen door banged open.
McAllister tottered across the room as fast as he could make his legs work, his head spinning, his heart thumping raggedly in his chest. At the entryway into the kitchen he held up, listening for sounds, any sounds. There was something in the distance. Outside. Someone running.
Stepping around the corner, he rushed to the open kitchen door and stepped out into the night. At first he could make out nothing except the dark woods rising up from the clearing in front of the cabin, the dirt road leading back over the hill, and to the north the lights of Reston in the far distance. And then he saw Sikorski’s frail form disappearing over the edge of the hill, his white hair flying behind him.
Standing in the darkness McAllister wavered, trying to decide whatto do. It was hard to make his thoughts come straight. The old man had lived alone up here for the past six years. He almost certainly knew his way around these hills in the darkness. To go after him now like this would be to invite suicide. There would be any of a dozen places within a hundred yards of the cabin where Sikorski could stage an ambush. He turned and staggered around to the front of the cabin, searching the darkness up the narrow dirt road. Stephanie had to be here someplace. She couldn’t have gone far on foot. He patted his pocket where he had dropped the van’s keys, but it was empty, as were his other pockets. The keys were gone. He still had her.32 automatic, but the keys were gone. He looked back toward the cabin. He hadn’t dropped them. But how…? Then it came to him. She had fallen against him getting out of the van. They had been in close contact with each other long enough for her to have stolen the keys.
Christ. A part of him had to admire her courage. She had taken a big risk. By now she could have reached a telephone. Other men would be coming. Professionals with orders to kill him. There would be no way out for him. The fact of Sikorski’s pickup truck parked under the carport suddenly penetrated. He’d been lucky so far, too lucky. There was no reason for it to hold much longer. It was possible that the old man had the keys in his pocket, or had placed them in some obvious spot in the house that could take minutes to find-minutes he did not have.
His luck held. The keys dangled from the ignition. McAllister got painfully behind the wheel, pumped the gas pedal a couple of times and turned the key. The engine roared to life with a noisy clatter. Switching on the headlights-now was no time to run off the road in the darkness-he backed out of the carport, his left foot so numb that he jerked the clutch, nearly stalling the engine. His head was spinning badly, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for him to keep his head up, let alone see much more than faded double images.
Somehow he got the old truck straightened out and headed back up the dirt road. Time. He had to get as far away from this place as quickly as possible before his escape routes were completely cut off. But where?
At the base of the hill he turned left on the secondary highway, away from Reston. Traffic was light, but each time he met an oncoming car the headlights temporarily blinded him, making it almost impossible to keep the truck in a straight line. Minutes later he passed under the Dulles Airport access road, and continued south into the Virginia countryside, traffic almost nonexistent now. He drove with the window down, and at one point he thought he could hear the sound of sirens, a lot of sirens, in the distance to the southeast toward Washington. He pulled over to the side of the road, shut off the truck’s engine and lights, and stepped out, cocking his ear. It was there again, faintly on the night breeze. Sirens. And low in the sky toward the east, he thought he could pick out slow-moving lights, though it was hard for him to focus his eyes. Probably helicopters. They wanted him in a very big way, and once they understood he was gone the search would fan out.
He looked at his watch: It was nearly eleven. He had been running continously since early this morning when the insanity had begun at JFK Airport in New York. There was nothing much left inside of him. He needed a place to hole up; a first-aid kit, food, and sleep, in that order. He climbed back into the truck, started the engine, flipped on the headlights and pulled up onto the highway.
He could see the glow of Washington to his left, fifteen miles away. The Potomac was between him and the city. That fact stuck in his mind. The river flowing south past Alexandria and Woodbridge and a dozen quaint little towns all the way down to the Chesapeake Bay had some significance for him at this moment.
Look for the anomalies. The irregularities. The bits and pieces that don’t seem to fit the mold. Down those avenues you willfind the answers.
The Potomac. A first-aid kit. Food. Rest. The river. He was free-associating again. Each time, his thoughts came back to the river. Something about it, something remembered from a time past.
An afternoon of warmth in the sun. Drinks, food, good company. Gloria had scraped her knee on a deck fitting. They’d been on a boat, sailing down the river. Her knee had been inexpertly bandaged. They’d all laughed about it… especially Bob Highnote. She was called the Merrilee, and she was docked at a small marina somewhere south of the city.
In Dumfries. He remembered the name of the town now, because of the jokes they’d made about it, and about Gloria’s silly accident. By your tradecrafi you shall be known. Do the unexpected. Run inward when they expect you to run away. It’s the principle of the children’s game: hide-the-thimble.
He desperately needed to rest. Even more important, he needed time to think, to reason it out. Sikorski’s reaction to Voronin’s cryptic words had been immediate and swift, lending a terrible credence to the message. At this point, he knew that his only hope for survival would be in unraveling its meaning. But it was only a slim hope.