He remained hidden until he heard someone crashing through the trees and brush on the other side of the road. He looked back around the tree in time to see the man disappearing into the woods and he snapped off a shot knowing even as he fired that there was no chance of hitting him. McAllister ran through the woods back toward the Buick where Stephanie was waiting. The only way out of here was in that direction, and sooner or later the man would have to show up on the road. He was slipping and sliding all over the place in the snow. He stopped and listened. In the distance, across the driveway, he could hear someone crashing through the forest, and then the sounds were lost.
If Stephanie had hidden herself well, the man might run past her, never seeing her. If she was out in the open, she would be in trouble. McAllister redoubled his efforts, angling back toward the dirt road where he would be exposed but where he knew he would make better time.
He was in the field again; in the Rhodope Mountains just inside the Bulgarian border with Greece. He’d been running all night and now with the sun coming up he had less than a kilometer to safety across the border, but the Bulgarian Secret Police patrol was gaining. He could hear them coming, he could hear the dogs and the helicopters, still he kept running because he had no other option.
There was the distant crack of a single pistol shot, and then nothing. McAllister pulled up short just at the edge of the road and held his breath to listen. The Buick was parked twenty-five or thirty yards farther up the dirt road. Nothing moved. Again the woods were silent. His side ached, and he thought he could feel something oozing downfrom his left arm. He figured he had probably opened one of the stitches.
He slid carefully down to the road, and crouching to keep below the level of the embankment, hurried up the road to the car. He stopped again to listen, but the woods were still silent.
“Stephanie?” he called out.
“Here,” she shouted from the woods a moment later. McAllister stepped around the front of the Buick and looked up over the embankment in the direction her footprints in the snow led. He couldn’t see a thing except for the trees. He climbed up into the forest.
“Stephanie?” he called again, this time her answer seemed fainter, and to the right.
“Here,” she called. “I’m over here.”
The hair at the back of his neck prickled. Something was definitely wrong. She was in trouble. He could hear it in the few words she had spoken.
“Coming,” McAllister shouted, and he started noisily along the path of her footprints. After ten feet he stopped to listen, then stepped off the path and taking great pains to make absolutely no noise, circled widely to the left, moving from tree to tree as fast as he dared.
He came to a narrow clearing about twenty-five yards up the hill.
A set of footprints led from left to right, disappearing into the woods above. She had to be close, though he could not see a thing as he moved across the clearing and once again held up just within the forest.
“Where are you?” Stephanie called, her voice shockingly close. Just to the right now. “Mac?”
He searched the trees and brush out ahead of him, moving his eyes slowly, searching each square foot of dark against white. They were there. Behind a large tree. The man in the dark overcoat held an arm around Stephanie’s chest, while with his right hand he held a pistol to her head. They were barely ten yards away and slightly above, their backs to him.
McAllister got down on his stomach and crawled up the hill, keeping the trees and brush between him and them as much as possible. They were concentrating in the opposite direction, back toward the road. When he was barely ten feet away he got slowly to his feet and raised the pistol in both hands. “Stephanie,” he called out loudly.
The man in the dark overcoat, startled, looked over his shoulder and started to bring his gun around. It was all the opening McAllister needed. He fired, the shot catching the man in the forehead, taking off a big piece of his skull in the back, splattering Stephanie with blood. The man slumped down against the tree, his legs giving way beneath him and then fell face forward into the snow.
Stephanie, a horrified expression on her face, stepped back away from the man, and suddenly she leaped forward, raced down the hill and fell into McAllister’s arms.
“I heard the shots and then all of a sudden he was there behind me,” she cried in a rush. “He made me fire my gun into the ground, and call for you. We could hear you coming. I wanted to warn you. But then there was nothing. Oh, God, Mac..
“It’s all right,” he said, looking over her shoulder at the dead man. “What about the other one?” she said, suddenly stiffening in his arms, and pulling away.
“He’s down by their car. I killed him.”
She looked into his eyes. “They were here to kill Sikorski,” she said.
“He’s already dead. But this one said they found him that way,” McAllister said tiredly. His head was spinning. “Are you all right?”
She nodded. “You?”
“I think so,” he said. He went up the hill and turned the dead man over. Stephanie helped him. They went through his pockets, coming up with five or six hundred dollars cash, which McAllister took, and his wallet. He was Treffano Miglione, from Jersey City; a member of the Sons of Italy and the Teamsters Local 1451. Apparently he was married. There were several snapshots of three young children and a fairly goodlooking young woman.
McAllister sat back on his heels and looked up at Stephanie. “This one wasn’t with the Agency or the Bureau.”
“No,” she said. “Mafia?”
“Yeah,” McAllister replied. “They were independent contractors. Someone hired them to get rid of me, Ballinger, and Sikorski. So, who hired them?“ The dead man’s weapon was a 9 mm SigSauer. McAllister removed the clip from the gun, ejected the shells from it, and pocketed them. He needed them for his own weapon.
He stood up. They were isolated here in the woods so that it was unlikely that anyone had heard the gunshots. But he didn’t want to take any more chances. It was time to get out.
“Where do we go now?” Stephanie asked.
It was almost axiomatic, he thought, that the further you got into an operation, the more restricted your options became. He could feel the so-called “funnel-effect” pulling him inexorably downward. But toward what?
“You’re going to arrange a meeting between your boss, Dexter Kingman, and me,” he said. “For tonight.”
Janos Sikorski’s shoeless, shirtless body lay over a pile of fireplace logs in the woodshed behind the carport. He had been dead for at least two days, his body frozen stiff in the cold. He had been beaten to death, his arms and legs broken by repeated blows from a large piece of wood.
McAllister stood just within the doorway, the dim light spilling across the floor on the old man’s half-naked body. His ribs had been broken, his teeth knocked out, and finally the side of his skull crushed.
“What did you tell them, Janos?” McAllister mumbled half to himself. Because of the cold there was no smell in the shed and yet he could imagine the odors of death, and his stomach heaved. Stephanie was right behind him. She gasped when she saw the body, and she turned away and threw up in the yard.
The two up in the woods had probably killed Ballinger, so who had done this to Sikorski? More important: Why? Was it a faction fight after all?
An organization will of necessity protect itself from any and all invasions. A basic tenet. But which organization had done this, and how far was it willing to go in its effort at self-protection?
McAllister stepped the rest of the way into the woodshed and tried to close Sikorski’s eyes, but the lids were frozen open. “Ah, Janos, what did you know about Zebra One and Zebra Two?” McAllister murmured. Traitor, Sikorski had screamed. They’ll give me a medal for your body.