“I would have been dead by now.”
Highnote shook his head sadly, and he glanced toward the door. McAllister followed his gaze.
“Is someone coming?” he asked. Highnote looked away guiltily.
“You said Dexter Kingman had the idea to flush me out. Are his people on the way out here now? Did you call them from your car?”
“Something is going on, Mac. I don’t know what it is… “You did call someone,” McAllister said, and he got up abruptly. Highnote’s eyes were round. “Run,” he whispered. “I’ll do what I can for you.”
McAllister reached into his coat pocket for his gun as he went to the entry hall. In the short space of time he and Highnote had been here the place had filled up considerably. A number of people were waiting to be seated. He came around the corner at the same moment the front door opened and two men walked in. One of them was Dexter Kingman.
“McAllister,” Kingman shouted.
McAllister pulled out his gun and fired a shot over everyone’s head, the bullet smacking into the wall above the door. Kingman and the other man fell back out the door. A woman screamed as McAllister turned on his heel and raced into the dining room, threading his way through the tables, pandemonium spreading in his wake.
A waitress, balancing a large tray of food in her right hand, was just coming through the swinging doors from the kitchen. McAllister slammed into her, sending her flying, plates crashing everywhere.
“Some maniac is out there with a gun,” he shouted, racing through the kitchen, concealing his own weapon.
“What’s going on?” one of the chefs screamed. Someone was shouting into a telephone.
McAllister reached the rear door and outside, leaped down off the delivery platform, as a panel van was pulling up. He yanked open the passenger door and jumped in even before the van had come to a complete halt. He pointed the gun at the young man’s head. “Drive away from here! Now!”
“Is this a stickup?” the frightened kid stammered. “Get us out of here, goddamnit! Move it!“ The driver slammed the van into reverse, pulled away from the loading dock, then spun around in the slippery driveway and headed out to the highway.
McAllister cranked down the window and turned the big wing mirror so that he could see the rear door of the restaurant. No one had appeared by the time they turned the corner and reached the highway, accelerating back toward Washington, sirens finally sounding in the distance.
James Franklin O’Haire had not slept well from the moment he and his brother Liam had been transferred to the federal penitentiary at Marion, Illinois. The judge, out of some perverse sense of patriotism, had specified the generalpopulation prison, knowing that the O’Haires would not be well received by their fellow prisoners. “No country club incarceration for these two,” he’d said at the sentencing. Rape, murder, and bank robbery were acceptable crimes, not spying. Even criminals should feel a sense of national loyalty.
Jim O’Haire raised his left arm and looked at his watch. It was a few minutes before midnight. Something had awakened him; a noise, a metallic click. He didn’t know what it was. He sat up in his cot, shoved the covers back and swinging his legs over the edge. He was a husky man with graying hair and violently blue eyes. His roommate was sound asleep in the upper bunk. The lights from the main tier hall cast shadows in the narrow cell. From somewhere he could hear music. He ‘figured one of the guards was listening to a radio.
A large black figure, dressed in prison dungarees, appeared at the cell door. “O’Haire,” the man called softly.
Jim O’Haire recognized him as George Hanks, one of the trustees from downstairs. He got up, but remained uncertainly by his bunk. Something was wrong here, drastically wrong. All the inmates were supposed to be locked down at this hour.
“let’s go,” Hanks said. He glanced over his shoulder, then eased the cell door open, taking care to make as little noise as possible.
“What is it?” O’Haire asked. “What do you want?”
“You’re getting’ out of here, that’s what it is,” Hanks said. “Now move your honky ass and fix up your bunk, we’re runnin’ out of time.“The sound he had heard was the electronic door lock. Somehow Hanks had gotten to the control board, or one of the guards was in on this. O’Haire didn’t want to get his hopes up, not this soon after talking with the two Agency pricks who had come out here the other day. Besides, this simply didn’t feel right to him. Hanks and the other prisoners had given him a lot of shit over the past week.
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“Shit, I’m not going to stand here all fuckin’ night waitin’ on you. We got word from the man that you’re getting’ out of here. Tonight.”
Christ, was it possible? “What about my brother?”
“He’s on his way. Now move your ass!” Hanks whispered urgently. O’Haire hesitated only a moment longer before he turned and stuffed his pillow beneath his blanket so that from the cell door a passing guard might be fooled at first glance into believing that someone was in the bunk. There was no way he was going to sit rotting in this place when there was a chance of immediate escape. No way in hell.
At the barred door, O’Haire slipped out onto the walkway three tiers up from the main floor. Hanks, his powerful muscles rippling beneath his thin prison shirt, eased the door shut, the lock snapping home, then turned and nodded silently for O’Haire to follow him.
At the end of the walkway they took the stairs down to the main floor where Hanks produced a key and opened the steel door, admitting them to a holding vestibule. On the far side was another steel door, a small square window at eye level. Hanks unlocked this door, and O’Haire followed him out into the access corridor which ran the length of the main building. A guard should have been stationed here, but his desk was empty, the corridor completely deserted. Hanks had a plan, and the organization and contacts to carry it out. They were attributes that O’Haire admired, and he allowed a faint smile as he followed the big man down the corridor and outside into the bitter-cold night.
They held up in the shadows as a light-gray station wagon crossed the prison yard from the laundry plant.
“What’s the plan?” O’Haire whispered.
Hanks looked back at him, the expression on his face unreadable. “You and your brother are getting out in the morning garbage run.”
“What about outside?”
“Somebody will be waitin’ on you. It’s all set up.”
“How about clothes?”
“Man, quit raggin’ my ass. You’ll be taken care of.”
“I want to know,” O’Haire demanded, grabbing the man’s arm and pulling him around.
Hanks shoved him up against the brick wall, his eyes suddenly wild, his muscles bunched up. “Don’t mess with me, motherfucker! I said you were going to be taken care of, and I meant it!” O’Haire spread his hands. “Sorry. My ass is hanging out here.”
“Yeah, so is mine,” Hanks said, backing off. The car was gone, and they hurried to the far end of the building, passed through a tunnel, crossed a broad courtyard and driveway, then entered the garbage-collection facility through a side door, the sudden odor of rotting food and an open grease trap assailing their nostrils.
The prison garbage was separated here into recyclable items such as cans and glass bottles which were crushed and shipped out, and paper and plastic products that were dried, shredded, and sent over to the electrical generating plant for burning. Everything else was loaded aboard trucks each morning and taken out to the country dump off prison grounds. Four big garbage trucks were parked in the main garage. Hanks led the way behind the trucks and through another steel door into the big separation room adjacent to the prison kitchen.
Jim O’Haire’s younger brother, Liam, stood leaning up against a table, his arms folded over his chest. He straightened up when he spotted his brother.
“We’re getting out of here,” he said.
“Right…” Jim O’Haire started to reply when Hanks
suddenly swiveled on him, grabbed a handful of his shirt and bodily threw him up against the table. “Motherfucker,” Hanks swore.
“What the hell,” Jim O’Haire shouted, regaining his balance and spinning around.
Six black men had appeared out of the shadows, each of them armed with a knife. Hanks pulled out a switchblade and thumbed it open with a soft click.“Mother of God, what’s going on here?” Jim O’Haire shouted. “Go ahead and scream, boy, nobody’s going to hear you,” Hanks said, he and the others advancing.
“We did our part,” Jim O’Haire shouted. “Goddamnit, we did as we were told.”
Chapter 17
The number at her father’s house in Baltimore rang ten times before Stephanie finally hung up. She’d used the pay phone in the corridor between the cocktail lounge and the lobby.
Calls from their room could be too easily monitored by the hotel operator. Mac had told her that. She believed in him. God in heaven, she’d done everything he’d told her.
She glanced down the darkly paneled corridor toward the cocktail lounge. A couple of men sat at the bar talking with the woman bartender. Other than that the hotel was quiet at this hour.
Where is my father? she asked herself. It was a Monday night. He should have been home asleep in his bed unless there had been an emergency call to the practice. But he never got emergency calls.
And where was Mac? He had been gone nearly seven hours now. Where was he? What was happening? She had a vision of his bulletriddled body lying beside a dark road somewhere in the country.
She didn’t think she could take much more of this. Sitting alone, waiting. She’d never been very good at that. Highnote was somehow at the center of this business. In at least that much she and Mac were now in total agreement. But where he was blinded by past friendships, previous loyalties, she was able to see with an unprejudiced eye. Mac had been set up from the moment he’d been arrested in Moscow. Highnote was the logical man behind it all. He was Zebra One. He was the man in Washington who had controlled the O’Haire network… and probably still controlled whatever was left of the organization. Mac, by going to see him, had been walking into a trap.
So write him off. Turn around and get out. Run. But to where? Mac had not returned and her father did not answer her call. She was alone, and she was frightened. She walked back to the elevator and took it up to their third-floor room where she went to the window. It was snowing quite hard now.
I can’t stand by and watch you commit suicide…. It’s been Highnote all along. It has to be!
Then I’ll find that out. It’s the only way. Everything else would be meaningless. I must know.
“Must know what?” she cried to herself, laying her forehead against the cool glass. “What is driving you, my darling? What are you seeking? Who are you looking for?”
She closed her eyes and grabbed a handful of the thick drapes. Her stomach felt hollow and her legs were suddenly so weak they were barely able to support her. She’d known that she was being told lies from the moment she’d been assigned to McAllister’s house and had talked with his wife. The woman had seemed frightened… but not for her husband, rather for herself. Stephanie had not understood it at the time. It wasn’t until Mac had shown up and had confronted his wife on the steps that Stephanie had been able to give voice in her own mind to what she had instinctively felt. Gloria McAllister wanted her husband dead not because she thought he was a traitor, but because she herself was hiding something, or she no longer cared for him. She’d gone off with Highnote. Were the two of them somehow working together?
“Oh, father,” she cried softly. “I need you now. I don’t know what to do.”
McAllister parked the delivery van in front of the FBI headquarters building in the same place he had left the Thunderbird and walked back to the Best Western. It was going to drive them crazy finding the van this way. Before long they would begin searching all the hotels in an ever-expanding radius downtown. Sooner or later they would get lucky. It was time to move.
He had let the young driver off in the country between Highview Park and Cherrydale hours ago, but instead of driving directly back into the city and ditching the van, he had driven over to Arlington Cemetery where he had lingered alone with his thoughts. It was a dangerous game he’d been playing. It couldn’t have taken the driververy long to get to a telephone and report what had happened. They’d be looking for the van by now. He’d increased his risk of being taken by his delay, yet he found that he wasn’t ready to face Stephanie. For a while, sitting in the darkness smoking a cigarette, he thought about leaving her. Simply turning around and running away. But in the end he knew that was impossible. She was a part of this thing now, no matter what he did or didn’t do. Whoever wanted him dead would also be gunning for her.
As he had done the night before, he was careful with his tradecraft, making absolutely certain that he wasn’t being followed. Across the street from the hotel he held up in the darkness for a full five minutes, making sure that the place had not been staked out.
Highnote had done exactly what any good and loyal government servant should have done. The moment he had spotted McAllister he had telephoned Security. Mac had forgotten about his car phone. It had been a mistake on his part that had very nearly cost him his life.
But in the end Highnote had listened. He had admitted the possibility that something more than met the eye was going on. And in the end he had told Mac to run. He had warned him.
Run where? To whom? To what? Where else could he turn? He went around the corner and entered the hotel through the parking garage, taking the stairs up to the third floor where again he held up, studying the empty corridor before continuing. There weren’t too many options left open to them. But Highnote, he was fully convinced now, was on his side; reluctantly perhaps, and understandably so, but on his side. Stephanie would have to be made to understand that it was time for her to get clear. Not back to the Agency, of course, but she would have to go into hiding now. Somewhere out of harm’s way.
She opened the door for him, slipping the security chain and then stepping back. Her eyes were wide and shining, she’d obviously been crying. Her hand shook badly when she reached up and touched his cheek.
“I didn’t think you were coming back,” she said, her voice tremulous.
“Are you all right?” he asked, taking her into his arms, and realizingthat somehow over the past few days he had begun to care for her. “Did something happen here?”
“No,” she said. “Not really
“What do you mean by that? Stephanie, what happened?” She shook her head. “Did you see Highnote? Did you actually get to talk to him?”
“Tell me what’s going on.”
“Goddamnit, David, talk to me!” she snapped. “You’ve been gone seven hours, leaving me to sit here imagining all sorts of things.”
Tears had come to her eyes again, and her entire body was trembling.
“Easy,” McAllister said soothingly, holding her close. “I saw him and we talked. There’s not much he can do for us, but he is on our side.”
Stephanie pulled away and looked up into his eyes. “Oh, David, how can you believe that after everything that’s happened?”
“He listened to me. At first he was skeptical, but in the end he believed me. He warned me. Told me to run in the end. It saved my life.”
“Run from what?”
“He called Dexter Kingman from his car phone. It was something I hadn’t counted on. They were just showing up when I got out.”
“It would have been convenient if you’d been shot and killed trying to escape,” Stephanie said. “My darling, can’t you see what’s happening? How he’s maneuvered you? He’s given you the same advice each time you’ve talked to him. He can’t help you and he tells you to run. David, only guilty men run. How else could Dexter have seen it?”
“He could have said nothing. Kept me busy. I would have been trapped.”
“There would have been a shootout.
You would have been killed.”
“That might have been the plan in the beginning, but he changed his mind.”
“What did he say?”
“They think I was working for the Russians all along, running the O’Haire network. He said they named me as their control officer.”
“Why were you arrested in Moscow? Did he have an explanation for that?”
“To throw suspicion off me, at first. But then I was brainwashed in the Lubyanka. I supposedly became one of them. But something went wrong, and they lost control of me. They decided in the end I would be better off dead.”
“All wrapped up in a neat little package,” she said disdainfully. “Too neat.” She shook her head in irritation. “That explains only why the Russians want you dead. What about the Mafia? What have they got to do with it?”
“There were no bodies at Sikorski’s,” McAllister said. “Someone cleaned up the mess out there before the FBI showed up.”
“Then they think that you killed Sikorski?”
“Yes.”
“Highnote told you that?” Stephanie asked, watching his eyes. “I convinced him otherwise. At least I got him thinking that there was another possibility.”
“Which is?”
“That there is a penetration agent in the CIA. Someone at high levels who is working with a counterpart in the KGB.”
“Zebra One and Two.”
“That’s right.”
“Your release from the Lubyanka, then, was nothing more than an administrative mistake. Crossed signals.”
McAllister nodded.
“And Highnote accepted that?”
“Only after I told him the one thing that doesn’t fit anywhere. The one thing that makes absolutely no sense. The two men I stopped at Sikorski’s hadn’t killed Janos. They found him like that. He’d been dead for at least a day and a half. So who killed him and why?”
“If not the Mafia, then the Russians,” Stephanie answered. “Can’t you see it? Zebra Two is the Russian. He has his own people working for him, probably out of their embassy right here in Washington. But Zebra One, the American, can’t use CIA people for his dirty work, so he hires professional hit men. It all still points back to Highnote.”
The Zebra Network Page 21