“What did you do?” McAllister shouted into the wind. “You son-of-a-bitch, what happened?”
Miroshnikov let the cigarette fall to the ground. “I gave you. motivation.”
“What else?”
“I gave you my… hate. I gave you.. “They were waiting to kill me in New York. Who ordered that?”
“I don’t know.”
McAllister cocked the Makarov’s hammer. “Who told them I would be coming in on that flight?”
“Potemkin,” Miroshnikov cried. “How did he know?” Miroshnikov said nothing.“How?”
“I told him that someone ordered your release, and that you knew about the O’Haire network.”
“You set me up.”
“I knew he would fail. He was a fool, like the others. Not like you!
I knew that you would survive. I recognized it in your eyes the first time I saw you.”
“Why?” McAllister shouted. “Why did you do this?”
“I knew that if you survived New York you wouldn’t stop until you had found out who tried to kill you. I knew that you would discover our CIA agent.”
“Harman wasn’t CIA.”
“I didn’t know about him. I’m talking about Robert Highnote. Your friend.”
All the air seemed to be gone. McAllister couldn’t catch his breath. His hands began to shake.
“You didn’t know?” Miroshnikov cried in alarm. “Highnote?”
“He and Potemkin worked together. Have for years. I wanted to strike back.”
Highnote. The years of their friendship, their mutual trust, their assignments together, all of it came as a whole to McAllister. A huge, hurtful, impossibly heavy weight on his shoulders. He was Atlas. Only his burden was overwhelming.
“And you did it,” Miroshnikov said. “You struck back. You ruined them.”
McAllister was shaking his head. He lowered the pistol and turned away. He remembered an evening in particular; he and Highnote had gone out on Berlin’s Ku-Damm and had gotten stinking drunk. They’d been celebrating something…. He couldn’t quite remember just what. When they got back to the apartment, Merrilee and Gloria were waiting up for them, angry at first, but they’d all ended up laughing so hard that Merrilee had actually wet her pants. Good memories. Fine times.
“Now we’ll finish it, Mac. You and I. We’ve come so far together…
“It was you all along,” McAllister said, amazed.“Borodin is the last of it. We’ll kill him and then get out.”
“You,” McAllister said, his voice rising as he started to turn, bringing the gun up.
“I saved your life,” Miroshnikov screamed.
“But you took my soul,” McAllister shouted, and he fired, the shot catching Miroshnikov in the center of his forehead, and he seemed to fall backward into the snow forever.
Chapter 32
Stephanie Albright paid her lunch bill and walked across the crowded restaurant to the elevator. After twenty-four hours alone in her hotel room she had been unable to stand the isolation any longer and had left. For an hour she had wandered around Helsinki’s beautiful downtown area, passing the ornately designed opera house and the old church on Lonnrotinkatu, but the weather was so bitterly cold that she had finally ducked into the Hotel Torni with its tower restaurant that afforded a view of the entire city. Alone, as she had often been in her life, she had done a great deal of thinking about David, about the insanity they had somehow lived through over the past weeks. Something was driving him. That had been obvious from the first moment she’d laid eyes on him.
Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. Zebra One, Zebra Two. Janos Sikorski had known what those words meant. And his reaction when David had spoken them had been immediate and violent.
“Who else have you spoken those words to?” Sikorski had demanded.
Picturing the scene, she remembered that by then she had been out of the kitchen. But just before the shot had been fired, she heard the old man scream: “Traitor! They’ll give me a medal for your body!”
It hadn’t made sense then, and it made less sense now. Sikorski had been long out of the business, retired to his cabin outside of Reston, and yet he had known and understood the meaning of Zebra One, Zebra Two. Whoever those two were-if they were real-they had evidently been in place for a long time. All the way back to when Sikorski was still active.
But he had called David a traitor. Why? What did it mean? She’d waited only twenty-four hours. David had asked for forty-eightbefore she was to begin making noises. But she couldn’t stand it any longer. It had gone too far. In fact it had gone too far the moment she’d allowed him to board the plane for Moscow.
Oh, God, David, she cried to herself riding the elevator down, where are you? What is happening to you? It was time now, she decided, for the insanity to finally end. Time to get him out of Russia.
Reaching the lobby she crossed to the line of telephones and placed a call to the American Embassy on Itainen Puistotie. While she waited for the connection to be made, she tried to calm down. But it was difficult.
It rang, and she tightened her grip on the telephone. “This is Stephanie Albright, and I need some help.”
“Yes, ma’am,” a man with a pleasant voice answered. “Are you an American citizen?” Hadn’t he heard that along with McAllister she was wanted for murder? Was it possible? “Yes, I am,” she said.
“Are you presently here in Helsinki?”
“Listen to me,” Stephanie said. “I want you to tell someone upstairs that I’m here in the city. And I want a message sent to Dexter Kingman. He is chief of the CIA’s Office of Security in Langley. Do you have that?”
“Ma’am, I don’t know what you’re talking about. But if you are here in Helsinki I think it might be easier for you to get help if you came to the embassy. I’m sure that someone here..
“Goddamnit,” Stephanie shouted. “You’re not listening to me. Take my name upstairs and give them the message.”
“Upstairs?”
“He’ll be a special assistant to the ambassador.”
“Who will?”
“Your CIA bureau chief.”
“I don’t
“Just do it,” Stephanie snapped. “I’ll call back in exactly thirty minutes.” She hung up the phone and stood there shaking for a moment or two, until she got hold of herself, then she turned, crossed the lobby to the front doors and outside headed the few blocks to her hotel on Bulevardi. She and McAllister were registered under the names on their diplomatic passports. It would do the embassy no good to search for Stephanie Albright. Officially she wasn’t in Finland.
Time, she thought. It was crucial now. If she could convince someone in the embassy to patch her through to Dexter on a secure line, and if she could convince him of everything that had happened, it was just possible word could be sent to our embassy in Moscow. Someone there would know General Borodin, and would know how to reach David. They had to! It was just a few minutes past two by the time she reached the Klaus Kurki Hotel, and took the elevator up to her floor. She was thoroughly chilled. Walking outside she had thought again about David in Moscow. He too would be cold and frightened. But he wouldn’t be feeling the pain. His concentration would be on one man. For him there would be nothing else.
She unlocked her door and stepped into the room as a smiling Robert Highnote, his overcoat off and tossed casually on the bed, turned away from the window.
“Hello, Stephanie,” he said.
Shock mixed with an instant feeling of relief rebounded from her stomach, and her knees were suddenly weak. “Oh, God,” she said. “How did you find me?”
“I had your diplomatic passports flagged here in Helsinki. Mac’s artist in Munich did a fine job, from what I can gather.”