“You,” he said looking up when she reached him. “I’m going to get you out of here,” Stephanie said, pulling him the rest of the way up.
“Why…?” he mumbled. “Why are you doing this…?”
“I don’t know,” she said, helping him to his feet and starting back to the van. “I just don’t know… yet.”
McAllister’s first conscious thoughts were of a dry, stationary bed, blankets covering him, warmth, and of bandages around his head, and tightly binding the wounds in his side. There had been lights and voices and movements around him, but he wasn’t at all sure he hadn’t been dreaming that part.
He was in a small bedroom, with a sloping ceiling. He could see city lights outside the single window. It was night.
“How do you feel?” a voice came at him from the left. McAllister turned his head as an older man with a kindly face and a thin, hawk nose came from the door. “Weak. Hungry, I think.”
“That’s good,” the man said. He wore thick, horn-rimmed glasses that made his eyes seem huge and vulnerable behind the lenses.
“Where am I?” McAllister asked. His voice sounded distant to him.“Baltimore,” the man said. He’d been carrying a white enameled tray. He put it on the table next to the bed, and did something with the bandages at McAllister’s head. His touch was gentle.
“Are you a doctor?”
“In a manner of speaking. I’m a veterinarian. Nicholas Albright. Stephanie’s father.”
McAllister tried to digest that news. The last thing he could remember was the boat… Highnote’s sailboat in Dumfries… and then the shots, and the cold, dark water. “What am I doing here?”
Albright smiled gently. “Stephanie brought you here.” He shook his head. “She’s been doing that all her life. Bringing home hurt strays. Though I must say you’re her biggest find to date.”
“How long…?”
“Three days.”
It seemed impossible. McAllister pushed the covers aside and tried to get up, but the doctor gently held him down. “You’re not going anywhere for a while yet, Mr. McAllister. Even if you could get out of this bed, which I doubt, you wouldn’t get ten feet with your injuries. In fact by rights you should be dead. Most men don’t take well to bullets in the skull.”
“The Agency… the Bureau..
“You’re safe here,” Albright said. “Get some rest now, Stephanie should be home soon.”
It was still dark when McAllister awoke again. He had a feeling that it was very late at night, though why he felt that he didn’t know. He turned his head. Stephanie Albright was asleep, curled up in a big easy chair in the corner by the door. She was dressed in blue jeans and a sweatshirt, her features softened by the tiny night light on the bureau.
The house was very quiet. Outside in the distance he thought he could hear a siren. But then he remembered that he was in Baltimore, and like any big city, Baltimore was never completely quiet.
Pushing back the covers he sat up. The dizziness was gone, as was the double vision. He felt much better than he had earlier, though he was still terribly weak, and there was a deep, hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach. He glanced back over at Stephanie. She had awakened, and she was looking at him, her eyes blinking.
“Your father is quite a man,” McAllister said. “Yes, he is.”
“If you’ll get me my clothes, I’ll leave. It’s too dangerous for him and you with me here.”
“You’re in no shape to be going anywhere yet,” she said. “If I have to do it on my own, I will.”
“No,” Stephanie said. “No one suspects a thing. They all think you’re dead.”
McAllister stared at her. “They?”
“Langley. My boss, Dexter Kingman, and your boss, Mr. Highnote.”
“How?”
“They found Sikorski’s truck, and they found the blood all over Mr. Highnote’s sailboat, and the powerboat where you’d evidently tried to pull yourself out of the river, and then fell back in. The search has spread all the way down to Norfolk.”
“How did you know I was at the boat?”
“Just a guess. I saw the photograph on your bookshelf.”
“Why haven’t you turned me in?” McAllister asked. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I,” she said after a long hesitation. “But you’re not a killer. You should have killed me and Sikorski when you had the chance, but you didn’t.”
“I’m a traitor.”
She shook her head. “You don’t believe that, and I don’t think I do either.”
“What then?”
“I think you stumbled onto something in Moscow that has a lot of people scared silly. Something that no one at Langley is talking about. Something even Sikorski omitted when he gave his report.”
“Go ahead,” McAllister prompted.
“Everything was fine with Sikorski at first. He was willing to listen to you, I think, until you whispered something. It made him crazy.” “You heard?”
She nodded. “But I had no idea what it meant then, nor do I haveany idea now. But before I go poking around records, I thought I’d better talk to you about it.”
“About what?” McAllister asked carefully. “What exactly was it you think you heard?”
“‘Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. Zebra One, Zebra Two.” What’s it supposed to mean?”
There it was, the same words again. He could see Voronin’s frail, crippled figure seated in his chair. He could hear the words coming from the man’s lips; slurred but clearly understandable. Cadence and syntax, not the insane ramblings of a drunken, bitter old man.
“I wish I knew,” he said, shaking his head. “I just know that within a half an hour after hearing those words I was arrested by the KGB.” Stephanie got up and came across the room. She sat on the foot of the bed, and looked into his eyes. “I think you’d better tell me everything, Mr. McAllister. From the beginning. Maybe we can figure it out together.”
“I’ve got to ask you again: Why are you doing this?”
“And I’ve got to tell you again: I don’t know.”
“It’s very dangerous for you and your father.”
“I know.”
“Maybe I am a traitor. Maybe I was brainwashed, my mind altered. They had me at the Lubyanka for more than a month. It’s certainly possible.”
“The three Russians you said you killed in Arlington Heights were found,” Stephanie said.
“So I’m a double gone bad.”
She shook her head. “The two men who tried to kill you on the sailboat were Americans. I heard them speak.”
“Everyone is after me,” McAllister said bitterly. “Including my wife.”
Stephanie’s eyes were wide and serious. Her lips compressed. “I think you’d better start at the beginning. Tell me everything, every single thing that you can remember, from the moment you heard those words, until right now.”
“And then?”
“Then we’ll try to figure out a way of keeping you alive.”
Chapter 9
The coming days were difficult for McAllister and doubly difficult for Stephanie. He was on the mend, but it was going to take some time before he would be fully mobile. Each day he could feel his strength coming back. Each day he pushed himself to the limit with his exercises, often falling into the narrow bed totally exhausted from the effort, his body bathed in sweat.
Stephanie had to arise each morning before dawn so that she would have enough time to drive down to Washington to go to work. The questions about her kidnapping and escape from McAllister had finally stopped, and she’d been allowed to return to her routine of background checks on prospective Agency employees, but she had to constantly watch herself, lest she make a slip of the tongue.
She’d offered only the vaguest of explanations for her absence to her roommate, but the girl was too busy with her own life to pay any real attention. “Have a good time, Steph, whoever he is,” she’d said.