“He’s gone to Moscow,” Stephanie said, and she suddenly remembered the open door behind her. She turned and closed it.
“After General Borodin?” Highnote asked.
“Yes, and we’ve got to help him,” she said turning back. Her heart skipped a beat.
Highnote held a small, flat automatic in his hand, pointed at her, a wistful expression on his face, almost as if he were sorry for what he was doing. It all came to her now. The Russians waiting for Mac outside Highnote’s house. The killers coming for him at Highnote’s sailboat. Even the killers at Sikorski’s. Highnote knew Mac’s tradecraft well. He knew that Mac would be showing up there sooner or later. And Highnote was the only one who had survived the shooting in CollegePark. He had taken a terrible risk, but the prize had evidently been worth it to him.
“It wasn’t Harman,” she said, finding her voice. “It was you all along.”
“It was both of us, actually,” Highnote said. “Though at first I had no idea that Donald was in on the action as well. We never worked together.”
“Then which one of you was Zebra One?”
Highnote shook his head. “I have no idea what that means, Miss Albright. Of course you don’t have to believe me, but it’s the truth.”
“The O’Haire organization was called the Zebra Network.”
“That’s correct. But there never were any such code words as Zebra One or Zebra Two.”
“Who did you work with?”
“Poor Gennadi Potemkin,” Highnote said, his jaw tightening. “We had done good things together. And we would have done much more if Mac hadn’t come after us.”
“Why?”
Highnote managed his wan smile again. “A very large question,” he said. “Which I don’t have the time or patience to answer at this moment. Suffice it to say that in a world in which fingers are poised over tens of thousands of nuclear triggers, the only guarantee of safety is in knowing each other’s true intentions. It is the only way, I can assure you, that we can possibly avoid a nuclear confrontation.”
There was an old CIA acronym for why spies defected. She’d heard it during training at the Farm. MICE, which stood for Money, Ideology, compromise, and Ego. Highnote certainly hadn’t become a traitor for money. Ideology? Compromise, as he suggested now? Or had it simply been ego? He was the last bastion of hope for the survival of mankind. Had he become so egocentric that he believed that? “It wasn’t Mac and me at College Park.”
“I know that.”
“Who then?”
“I’m not one hundred percent sure, but I suspect Don Harman probably arranged it.”
“Why?”
“Again the very big question,” he said. “Because, my dear, noone believes any longer that you and Mac are traitors or killers. We were meeting to discuss a way in which to convince you of just that. We wanted to bring you in to safety so that we could find out what was going on.”
“But we would have been killed the moment we showed our faces.”
“Yes.”
Stephanie’s head was spinning again. “Then what has this entire thing been all about?”
“That is one question I cannot answer, because I don’t know. I’m just as much in the dark as everyone else. But it doesn’t matter any longer, you see, because Mac certainly won’t survive against General Borodin… I called him and warned him that Mac was coming. and you, unfortunately, won’t survive either.”
“No,” Stephanie screamed, and she dove to the left through the open bathroom door as Highnote fired, the shot plucking at her coat sleeve.
A tremendous crash shook the walls, and the corridor door burst inward, the door lock shattering, the entire frame splintering.
Highnote fired again, someone cried out, and a half a dozen other shots were fired from what sounded like at least three different weapons.
Stephanie was scrambling up and frantically trying to shove the bathroom door closed when Dexter Kingman appeared, blood leaking from his left arm, just below his shoulder.
“Dexter?” she cried.
“It’s all right, kid, we heard enough,” Kingman said, his southern drawl tinged with pain.
Others were crowding into the room past him. She picked herself up.
“It’s not all right, Mac is in Moscow! We’ve got to help him!” Kingman was shaking his head. “I don’t think that’s possible.”
General Aleksandr Ilyich Borodin got up from where he’d been kneeling in the snow fifty meters from the end of his driveway, and looked back through the trees toward the main road. It was late afternoon and already getting dark, but he could still make out the silhouette of the covered bridge that crossed the river. If McAllister came… when McAllister came… it would be from that direction. By car or on foot? Either, for the American, would be impossible. Yet McAllister had seemed to have done just that and more already.
Again Borodin struggled with the same questions that had been eating at him all along. Why was McAllister coming? Someone had to have been directing him. No one man was that good. To think otherwise would be to sink into insanity. But who? Suslev, who envisioned himself taking over the directorship one day? Or his own number two in command of the Directorate, Sergei Nemchin, who’d run that fool Harman for these past few years? Or someone on the other side of the Atlantic? Someone who had discovered.
He stepped back a pace from the antipersonnel mine he’d just buried in the snow. On foot McAllister would be dead. By car he might survive, though he’d probably be injured.
Picking up his shovel Borodin started back toward his dacha a half a kilometer along the ridge that separated the valley from the cliffs overlooking the river. His footprints from earlier that led left and right off the driveway, had already been covered over by the blowing snow. He stopped a moment and cocked his ear to listen, but there were no sounds other than the wind in the treetops. If McAllister survived the land mine, he might suspect the driveway was unsafe, and would take to the woods on either side of the road. Borodin had rigged a pair of Kalashnikov assault rifles, set on full automatic, to trip wires. The American would not survive those. possibly.
Borodin hurried the rest of the way back to his house, stopping a moment again as the driveway opened onto a narrow clearing. From here he could just make out a stray reflection from one of the closed-circuit television cameras mounted just beneath the eaves. There was one on each side of the house, covering each of the four possible approaches. They were the latest technology from the Surveillance directorate’s Seventh Department, capable of operating satisfactorily n minimal light. Inside, he stamped the snow off his boots, laid the shovel aside and hung up his coat. In his study he turned on the television monitors, each showing a different scene just outside the house. Nothing moved. Taking his pistol out of his pocket, he checked to make sure it was ready to fire, and laid it on the desk. Next, he checked the AK74 assault rifle with its night-spotting scope, leaning it up against the wall near the door, then poured himself a stiff measure of cognac which he drank down before cutting the lights all through the house.
He’d sent his secretary Mikhail away, and his wife Sasha was safely in place in town. Now there was only him and a lone American. Coming here, of all places.
But who was McAllister? What was McAllister? It was worrisome.
When McAllister reached the Istra River Museum Village, it was already very dark, and the wind had picked up considerably so that at times the little Moskvich was nearly blown off the slippery roads. It had been very difficult for him to concentrate through the interminably long afternoon. For several hours he had waited off the highway north of the city where Miroshnikov’s body lay stiffening in the snow. He’d run the car’s engine whenever he got too cold, but the heater did little more than raise the temperature inside the car by a few degrees, though being out of the wind helped. He’d wanted to get some rest. He desperately needed it. He hadn’t slept in more than forty-eight hours, nor had he eaten in nearly as long. But his brain wouldn’t shut down.