He was suddenly very cold.
Headlights flashed at the far end of the parking lot, and McAllistercrouched down behind the big dump truck as a light-gray pickup truck raced across the parking lot and passed him, heading down the road he’d just come up. He caught a glimpse of the driver and his passenger, who was talking into a microphone. Had the hole in the fence been discovered already? The truck’s taillights disappeared into the night, and McAllister quickly crossed the road and hurried along the edge of the parking lot.
Construction on the new addition had been started nearly a year ago. The last bulletin he’d read indicated that it would be spring before the new offices would become available, because of numerous, as yet unexplained, delays. Scaffolding rose on all three sides of the U-shaped building that butted up against the original headquarters. Construction equipment and piles of material lay everywhere.
He crouched again in the darkness for a full minute, studying the building, but nothing moved, no lights shone from any of the windows. Around front the main building was brightly lit from the outside, for security’s sake, but most of the office windows were dark. Operations would be fully staffed, as would communications and a few of the other vital functions, but for the most part the building would be quiet.
McAllister worked his way around to the north side of the new building. Reaching the scaffolding he stuffed the small tool kit in his coat and started up. The windows on the fourth floor and above had not yet been installed. The canvas that covered the openings billowed and moved slowly in the light breeze.
When he reached the fourth story he was sweating lightly, and he had to stop for just a moment to catch his breath before he ducked beneath the lower edge of the canvas and stepped inside the building.
He was not alone. He stood stock-still in the nearly absolute darkness waiting for a sound, a movement, anything to accompany the cigarette smoke that he could smell. Someone was here. Very close.
Gradually his eyes became accustomed to the darkness and he was able to distinguish shapes and outlines of walls, hanging wires, and pipes and piles of construction materials. He remained standing by the canvas-covered window opening listening and watching. He was in a large, unfinished room. Directly across from him was an open doorway into a broad corridor. A man in the corridor, somewhere tothe left, coughed. McAlIister pulled out his gun and crept forward, feeling ahead with his free hand so that he would not trip over something.
At the doorway he stopped again to listen. The smell of cigarette smoke was much stronger here and he could feel the warmth of a portable heater wafting back to him. It would be a guard on duty. The new building was attached to the old just here. There would be a door. Some access from the new into the old. Someone would have to guard it. One guard or two? How much further would his luck hold? Gripping his gun a little tighter, McAllister stepped around the corner. A lone guard sat at a small table in front of a plywood bulkhead into which a padlocked door was set. A portable heater was set up at his feet. He was reading a magazine, smoke curling up from a cigarette in an ashtray in front of him. A single light bulb dangled from the ceiling.
McAllister was halfway down the corridor before the guard realized that someone was coming, and looked up, his eyes growing wide in alarm, his mouth opening. He reached for his walkie-talkie lying on the desk.
“Don’t,” McAllister said raising his pistol.
The guard hesitated just long enough for McAllister to reach him and snatch the walkie-talkie, his initial surprise turning to anger.
“Here, who the hell do you think you are?” the man sputtered jumping to his feet.
“I don’t want to have to kill you, but I will if you force me to it,” McAllister said, keeping his voice low and menacing. He hadn’t wanted this at all. There was no way he was going to kill this man, no matter what happened. Getting what he had come here to get had suddenly become more than difficult.
In the next moment McAllister’s luck completely ran out. “Raise your hands very carefully, if you please, Mr. McAllister,” someone said behind him.
McAllister stood absolutely still. He knew the voice, remembered it from somewhere years ago. He wracked his brain trying to come up with a face and name. Someone from the last time he had done desk duty here at Langley.“I asked you to raise your hands, sir, and I’m not kidding now.”
“Who is that?” McAllister said, turning very slowly. The man was very short and well-built with thick graying hair and dark eyebrows over wide eyes. The face was vaguely familiar, still he couldn’t put a name to it. “Tom Watson, sir. We were told that you might be showing up here. Now if you please, raise your hands.”
McAllister remembered. Watson had been one of the front-door guards. They’d often bantered back and forth when McAllister had come to work. He was holding a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson in his right hand. He wasn’t carrying a walkie-talkie. McAllister raised both of his hands; in one he held the walkie-talkie, in the other his gun. “Now what, Tom?”
“Disarm you, then call for help,” Watson said warily. “Get his gun, Frank.”
The other guard came up behind McAllister and reached for the gun. It was a mistake on his part. McAllister turned as if he were going to hand his gun to the guard, but then continued to swivel around until he was completely behind the man, his left arm clamped over the man’s throat, his pistol at the man’s temple.
Tom Watson moved forward, raising his gun, a frightened, uncertain look of surprise on his face.
“I don’t want to shoot him, Tom, but I will if I must,” McAllister said.
Tom Watson stopped in his tracks. “Damn you,” he said. “Do as I say for the next five or ten minutes and I promise you that no one will get hurt.”
Chapter 13
Something had gone wrong. Stephanie watched from the seventh-floor room she’d taken in the Georgetown Holiday Inn as two men got out of a car parked on Observatory Place and rushed back into the woods. Moments later they returned in a hurry with two other men, got back into the car and raced out of sight around the main building.
She had checked in here around six o’clock after calling Kingman, who had been deeply upset, and had watched from her darkened room as the first of the surveillance units had begun to show up shortly before seven. It was ten after ten now.
Kingman had given his word that McAllister would not be taken by force. “I’ll talk with him, Stephanie, if that’s what you want,” he’d said coldly. “But I can’t guarantee anything else.”
“That’s all he wants. But if you come in there in force, he won’t show up.
“If I come alone, he’ll shoot me in cold blood just like he’s done the others.”
“The only people he has killed were three Russians outside Mr. Highnote’s house, and then only in self-defense.” She assumed the trouble at Sikorski’s had not yet been discovered.
“I’m not going to argue that point with you. I’ll meet with him, and I promise no force.”
“If it doesn’t work out, you’ll let him turn around and leave?”
“If he’s innocent, as you say he is, he won’t have to leave. We’ll work it out together. But Stephanie..