They’d had no problem getting out of Munich Sunday morning. The passports were perfect as were the visa stamps in McAllister’s. Their first test came in Helsinki, but on the basis of their diplomatic status hey had been given preferential treatment and had been passed hrough customs without any of the usual checks. Sunday afternoon Stephanie had taken a cab out to the airport with him, and had watched him board the Aeroflot flight for Moscow. As the plane had taxied away from the terminal he had looked for her, but she had already gone.
If he failed, he had thought at that moment, so would she. Their lives had been inextricably intertwined from the moment she had fished him out of the Potomac River in Dumfries.
Thank you for saving my life, darling, but you should have turned your back on me while you still had the chance. Now there was absolutely nothing he could do for her.
At Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport his passport had received much more scrutiny than in Helsinki, but as with the Finns, the Russian officials treated him with respect, and within twenty minutes of his arrival in customs hall, he had been cleared through passport control and had taken a taxi into the city.
He turned away from the window and tiredly went into the tiny bathroom where he looked at his haggard reflection in the mirror. His hair was extremely short and dyed jet black. His skin all over his body had been made several shades darker than his normal coloring by a dye made from almond shells. His eyebrows had been thickened, he had been given an excellent mustache and once again he wore the clear-lensed glasses Stephanie had purchased for him in Baltimore what seemed like centuries ago.
He ran his fingers across the bristle of his hair, wiped the sweat off his forehead with a towel then walked back into the bedroom. He pulled on his sport coat and then a lined nylon jacket.
Run, he thought.
KGB Headquarters was housed in a complex of unmarked buildings on Dzerzhinsky Square a couple of blocks north of the Kremlin and barely a hundred yards from the Berlin Hotel. The main building of gray stone rose nine stories from street level. Behind it one of the older sections enclosed a courtyard on one side of which was the Lubyanka Prison. It was just eight o’clock and traffic was heavy as the first of the KGB officers and clerks began showing up for work at the six pedestrian gates. From where he stood, pretending to read Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper on display in a glass-enclosed bulletin board, McAllister could see all six of the gates. The entrance to the Lubyanka Prison gate was a dozen steps away. People streamed past him, all of them in a hurry, intent on getting to work. He had been inside. Even now the thought was chillingly unreal to him. They’d held him for more than a month, feeding him drugs, depriving him of proper food and rest, relentlessly questioning him, over and over, and finally the torture. Most of it was gray or even nonexistent in his memory, exept that the experience had fostered a deep, smoldering hate in him. Except for the highest Party and government officials, parking was a premium downtown. Miroshnikov was just an interrogator, he would not rate a parking space within the complex. The KGB maintained several lots within a block or so of the square, though most ower-grade clerks and officers could not afford to maintain an automobile, so took the subway or buses to work. Standing shivering in the intense cold, McAllister knew that he was on a fool’s mission. Miroshnikov might not be coming to work this morning. Perhaps not until later. Or perhaps he had come early. Or, perhaps there were other entrances, other ways of getting into the complex.
For a while, surreptitiously watching the people, he was afraid that even if Miroshnikov did show up this morning, he wouldn’t recognize the Russian. He searched that part of his memory, but the only thing that stood out besides the fact that the interrogator had been a large man, were his eyes. Looking at Miroshnikov, he remembered thinking from the first days of his interrogation, you only saw the eyes and nothing else.
It was also possible, McAllister worried, that Miroshnikov would be using the prison gate to enter the complex. He might use any of the other five pedestrian entrances. Perhaps his office was somewhere within the main building that housed most of the KGB directorates.
He stepped away from the newspaper display case and stared intently down the street. He could see the other gates from here, but at this distance he surely wouldn’t be able to pick one man out of the crowd; or even if he could, he wouldn’t be able to reach him before he entered the building. Once inside he would be untouchable for the remainder of the day. In despair, McAllister turned back, and Miroshnikov was there! Barely twenty feet away. Towering over most of the people around him, he walked with his head bent, a thick leather briefcase in his left hand, a newspaper rolled up under his right arm.
McAllister was staggered into inaction for several long terrible moments. Miroshnikov’s was the one face in all the world he’d never thought he would see again. The interrogator and his subject come face-to-face at last. He suddenly remembered the satisfaction he had gotten that last night when he’d rammed his knee into the man’s groin and driven his fist into the interrogator’s throat.
Miroshnikov looked up at the last moment, his eyes sweeping past McAllister without recognition. But then he did a double take, his eyes finding and locking into McAllister’s, and suddenly he knew. He stopped short.
Two uniformed KGB officers passed, and McAllister stepped around them, reaching Miroshnikov before the man had a chance to move.
“You…” Miroshnikov breathed, his eyes wide. “How?” McAllister smiled, although his gut was churning and his head was spinning. He took Miroshnikov’s arm as if they were old friends. “We’re going for a walk,” McAllister said in Russian, his tone even. “If you refuse, or if you call out, I will kill you here and now.”
“Insanity.”
“Yes, it is,” McAllister agreed. So far they had attracted no undue attention, but it wouldn’t last.
“What do you want?”
“Information. Now, let’s go or you’ll die right here.”
“And so will you,” Miroshnikov said, starting to pull away. McAllister tightened his grip. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t have anything to lose.”
The interrogator’s expression changed all of a sudden from one of fear, to one of understanding, if not acceptance. “No, I don’t suppose you do,” he said softly.
“Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Your car. Then someplace to talk. Someplace private.” Still Miroshnikov hesitated for a beat. Finally he nodded. “As you wish,” he said.
“You are quite a remarkable man,” Miroshnikov said.
They sat together in the front seat of his black Moskvich sedan in a parking lot off Puschechnaya Street. McAllister reached inside Miroshnikov’s coat and pulled out his pistol; it was a Makarov automatic. Standard KGB issue.
“Do you mean to kill me now?” the interrogator asked. “For everything that was done to you while you were under my care?”
“That depends on you,” McAllister said. There was a constriction across his chest, and he was acutely conscious of his beating heart. He was sweating despite the cold.
“You have come all this way for an explanation?”
“I want to know about a KGB general. Aleksandr Borodin. I want you to tell me how I can find him. Where does he live?”