In the evenings they talked. Hesitantly at first, feeling each other out, learning about the other’s background, their likes and dislikes, their fears, their hopes. McAllister still wasn’t sure exactly why she was doing what she was doing, but he was grateful. Without Stephanie and her father he knew that he could not have possibly survived. He owed them his life.
“Let’s just say that what I was seeing didn’t add up to what I was hearing,” she said. “It was the look on your face when your wife called you a traitor. I can’t explain it, but it wasn’t the look of a spy. And you should have shot me that night. You didn’t.”
“Not very scientific,” he said.
She smiled.“My father said the same thing to me.”
“Does he realize the danger he’s in?”
Stephanie nodded, her expression serious again. “He’s not particularly proud of what I do for a living. He always thought that I’d become a vet and take over his practice some day.”
“No brothers or sisters?”
She shook her head. “Just the two of us.”
“What about your mother?”
“She died when I was in college.” Stephanie looked toward the dark window. “I dropped out of school and came back here to help out. But it didn’t last a year before he made me go back.” She shook her head. “He was so lost in those days. But he was right, of course.”
“What about afterward?” McAllister asked.
“I got my degree in psychology and joined the air force as a second lieutenant, exactly what every veterinarian’s daughter does with her life.”
She laughed, the sound gentle, almost musical, and McAllister had to smile with her.
She was given a top-secret crypto-access security clearance, and spent her four years’ service career running background investigations on young enlistees. She got to travel all over the country, as often as not in civilian clothes, working with local FBI offices and police departments. She got to know a lot of good people. Interesting, if not always exciting work, until she fell in love, and her world was suddenly turned inside out.
“He was a captain, my section chief; very tall, very handsome, and very, very married,” she said wistfully. “Sap that I was, I actually believed that he was going to leave his wife for me.”
“It didn’t work out?” McAllister asked gently. “No,” she said tersely. She looked at McAllister. “I was going to reenlist, we were going to get married as soon as his divorce was final, and we were going to see the world together, courtesy of Uncle Sam.” She shook her head again. “Instead I resigned my commission and came back here to my father, and worked in the clinic for a year.”
“Until you were hired by the Agency?”
She nodded. “I knew Dexter Kingman from my University of Maryland days. I’d worked with him a couple of times while I was in the Air Force, too. It was he who approached me, asked if I wanted a job.”
“No regrets?”
She smiled wanly. “A lot of regrets, but then who doesn’t have them?”
The Office of Security were the paper pushers, she said, though she was given the short course out at the Farm shortly after she’d been hired.
“I wasn’t very good on the small-arms range, even though I did learn one end of the gun from the other.” She smiled. “It came as quite a shock to me when Dexter handed me a pistol and assigned me to the team watching your house.”
McAllister’s gut tightened. Their conversations had been leading up to this point, and now that they had arrived she seemed nervous, less sure of herself than before, almost hesitant. Gloria had called out her name on the stairs. They’d obviously spoken during that day. “I’m sure it was a shock to you. What about my wife?”
“What about her?”
“Was she surprised when you showed up on her doorstep?”
“No. Mr. Highnote had set up the surveillance.”
“She was to be used as bait.”
Stephanie nodded glumly. “They figured you’d be showing up at home sooner or later. But I never dreamed that she would pull out a gun… that it would turn out the way it did.”
“Neither did I,” McAllister said looking away, the pain of the memory every bit as hurtful as his wounds, in some respects even more so because he had no idea how he could heal that particular hurt.
They had both spent a great deal of time talking about the distant past, and the very immediate present, but had until now scrupulously avoided any discussion of the future. McAllister was presumed dead. His body would show up sooner or later somewhere down river. And yet there seemed, to Stephanie, to be an undercurrent running through the Agency.
“A lot of people are walking around on eggshells,” she said.
“Such as?”
“Mr. Highnote, for one.”
“He’s a good man,” McAllister said. “He’s been caught in the middle.“Stephanie started to say something, but then evidently changed her mind. She got up from where she’d been sitting and went to the window. It was nearly midnight. Traffic below had settled down, but it had begun to snow lightly. Winter had finally arrived. “What is it?” he asked, watching her back. Her hair was pinned up, her neck long and thin, her ears tiny and delicate.
“I don’t know,” she said after a long time. “There’s something not quite right. Something about..
“He’s been my friend for a lot of years.”
“Everyone talks around that night at his sailboat,” she said. “The official word is that the Russians killed you, though how they traced you there is anyone’s guess.”
“But they weren’t Russians.”
“No,” Stephanie said, turning back. “They definitely were not.”
“Then who?”
On the afternoon of the fifth day, McAllister got dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen in the rear of the big house. The surgery was in the front of the house, in what used to be the living room dining room-library area so he had been assured that there was no risk of being spotted should he come down.
The house was located downtown, just a half a dozen blocks up from the bayfront, in what used to be a terribly run-down neighborhood, but that was now becoming a charming place to live and work. “The Yuppies have discovered Front Street,” Nicholas Albright said.
He’d run his small-animal practice out of this house for nearly twenty-five years, and at this stage of his life was disinclined to move out into the countryside. In any event, the suburbs were now starting to move in to him, and his practice was thriving. McAllister made himself a sandwich and opened a bottle of beer. He was seated at the big table when Nicholas Albright came in, smelling of disinfectant, a little blood on the side of his short white lab coat.
“I see my two-legged patient is up and about. How are you feeling today?”
“Caged.”
“I have a few of those out back, that is if you want to change your accommodations.”
“No thanks,” McAllister said. “But I’m going to have to get out of here pretty soon. Am I fit to travel?”
Albright looked at him critically. “How do you really feel?”
“Tired. A little weak and sore, but better than I did when I first got here, thanks to you.”
“If you were a dog, I’d say go out for a short walk in the sun-on a leash-maybe piss on a few fire hydrants, then come back and sleep in front of the fireplace. But you’re not a dog, and I’m not a people doctor, but I do know that five days ago you were damned near dead. Discounting the bullet wounds and the subsequent loss of blood, whoever smacked you on the back of the head meant to do you a great deal of damage… and managed, in a manner of speaking, to accomplish just that. You’re still suffering, to one degree or another, from a concussion, and I can’t guarantee that your vision won’t go double on you whenever it feels like it. Nor can I say that you won’t simply collapse in the middle of the street somewhere if you push yourself too hard.”