…is offering McAllister amnesty, and I think it’s up to us in this room to figure out how to get to him as soon as possible with the message and without anymore casualties.”
“That’s Paul Innes’s voice,” Sanderson said. “He recorded the meeting.”
“Because he knows something?” another man asked. Van Skike recognized the voice as Highnote’s. “Because he evidently learned something in Moscow that has the Russians concerned… and possibly someone else… so concerned that they are willing to risk exposure in order to make sure he doesn’t talk?”
“Yes.”
“Which is?”
“We believe that there is more than a fair possibility that a Soviet penetration agent is working within the CIA at fairly high levels…
Sanderson switched off the tape recorder. “You will be provided with a copy of this tape, of course.”
“It sounds as if they thought McAllister was innocent. That the KGB was after him,” Van Skike said.
Sanderson advanced the recording.
“Then why did they release him in the first place?” Highnote asked. “An error, we suspect,” Paul Innes said. Sanderson switched off the tape recorder. “Not an error,” he said. “McAllister is trying to protect whomever he is working for, whoever showed up at his house this morning with the orders to kill Innes and the others.”
Again Sanderson advanced the tape recording.
“…a matter of procedure now, but you must understand the importance,” Innes said.
A moment later two soft noises came from the speaker, almost as if someone had closed a book, softly, and then closed it again. The hair prickled at the nape of Van Skike’s neck. He recognized the sounds as silenced pistol shots. The murders had been taped. He was listening to them now.
There was a sudden cacophony of noises. Innes was shouting something, wildly; more silenced shots were fired; there were crashing sounds, the sounds of breaking glass and then a man whispering as if from a very great distance, said: “Get him.” Sanderson shut off the tape recorder. “McAllister and Albright,” he said. “Are you certain, John?” Van Skike asked again. “Absolutely certain?”
“Yes,” the President interjected. “I’m convinced. David McAllister and Stephanie Albright have stepped over the edge. No matter what happens or does not happen, they must be stopped. Immediately. At all costs.”
“Am I understanding you correctly, Mr. President?…” Van Skike started.
“No screwing around now,” Sanderson said. “I’ve given my people explicit orders. McAllister and Albright are to be shot on sight. They can never be allowed to go to trial.”
Van Skike looked aghast at the President who looked away. He understood the logic of it, the necessity. But God in heaven, weren’t we a nation of laws; presumed innocent until proven guilty? “Gentlemen,” the President said, “they must be stopped.”
Chapter 22
McAllister sat on the edge of the bed stroking the back of Stephanie’s head with a gentle touch. They were in a nightmare that neither of them seemed able to wake up from. Yet in this dream world real people were dying. She was still shaking, her breath coming in great sobbing gasps.
“Why?” she kept crying. “There was no reason for them to have killed him… especially not like that. He didn’t know anything.”
He didn’t answer her.
It had been very difficult to pull her away from the surgery door and calm her sufficiently so that they could go upstairs to her old room, where he threw a few of the things she kept there into a small suitcase and then walked with her arm-in-arm back to Union Station, where they caught a cab to a dumpy little hotel near the State Historical Society.
“She’s not feeling well,” McAllister explained to the indifferent clerk. “She’s pregnant. It’s morning sickness.”
Upstairs in their shabby room he took off her coat and shoes and made her lie down on the bed.
“Why, David?” she sobbed. “It can’t be possible.”
“Russians,” McAllister said, staring across the room. But it hadn’t been a simple torture and killing in an effort to find Stephanie.
“What?” Stephanie asked, looking up at him. McAllister focused on her. “The Russians did it to your father.”
“How do you know that?”
Like I know a thousand other things, he thought. It’s tradecraft, part of the game, part of the knowledge that a field man needs in order to keep alive. “It’s the way they do things,” he said. “I’ve seen it before.”
“Because of you? Us? Because I’m helping you?”
“Yes,” he said. The truth was crueler than she could imagine. We are making great progress together, you and I, Mac. And I am so very pleased. It was Miroshnikov speaking to him. His face loomed in McAllister’s head. It was always there. It had always been there, and always would be. There was no escape.
“What is it?” Stephanie asked, sensing something of his pain. There was a continuing symmetry, of course, to the Zebra Network in the four names he had taken from the Agency’s computer archives. Suspects, evidently, that the investigators had no evidence to prosecute. They’d still be in place so that they could be watched.
The first, Ray Ellis, was a civilian communications expert working out of the American Embassy in Moscow. McAllister thought he might recognize the name, but he couldn’t fit a face to it. He’d be the Russian conduit. The link from Moscow through which information was passed.
The second link would be Air Force Technical Sergeant Barry Gregory, who worked as a cryptographic-equipment maintenance man in the Pentagon’s vast communications center. He would be the stateside relay point.
Some information could have come from Charles Denby, the third name on the list. He worked as an engineer with Technical Systems Industries in California’s Silicon Valley outside of San Francisco. TS Industries was one of the major contractors on the Star Wars research program.
And finally Kathleen O’Haire’s name appeared on the list of suspects by simple virtue of the fact she was the wife of James O’Haire, the head of the Zebra Network. The weak link?
“David?”
“We’ve got to get out of Baltimore,” he heard himself saying. But he was still drifting. Free associating. Thinking out the possibilities, the pitfalls, the moves they would have to make, the ramifications.
“Not back to Washington?” Stephanie was asking. “California.”
She was staring intently at him. “The list,” she said. “How will we get out there? When?”
“I’ll get our bags. We’ll take a flight out of New York. This afternoon. Tonight.”
“What about our guns?”
“They’ll get through with the checked-in baggage in the hold. It can be done.”
“Denby and Kathleen O’Haire will be watched in California.”
“Then we’ll have to be careful,” McAllister said, finally looking up out of his thoughts. “We don’t have any other choice now.”
Stephanie left their room ten minutes after McAllister had gone to take a cab back to the BaltimoreWashington Airport to fetch their bags. She had splashed some water on her face, and had paced back and forth until she could not take it anymore. It wasn’t the inactivity that bothered her, it was the fact that she knew she was never coming back here to Baltimore. Her old life was gone forever, and she couldn’t stand leaving it this way.
The clerk at the front desk didn’t bother looking up as she emerged from the hotel, turned left and walked rapidly two blocks up toward the Maryland General Hospital on Madison Street, where she caught a cab back to Union Station. Early afternoon traffic was in full swing and the snow had not let up. If anything it had increased again. The cabbie was playing Christmas music on the radio, and despite her resolve she felt tears slipping down her cheeks for all the years that were now lost. Her father had never told her in so many words that he would like to have grandchildren, but she could tell he had thought about it.