The Zebra Network

by Sean Flannery

  “Don’t stop him,” Sanderson said. “I’ll call the Pentagon and arange another flight for you and Dexter Kingman. He’ll be on his way out there immediately.”

  “We’ll never catch up with him.”

  “Perhaps not, but we won’t be far behind,” Sanderson said. “Just stand by out there.” He hung up the telephone. “Will you help now?” he asked Kingman. “If McAllister and Stephanie believe that Highnote is there to help them, he’ll be able to kill them with no problem. They won’t be expecting it.”

  “Will you help?” Sanderson repeated.

  “Yes,” Kingman said numbly. “They could be warned. We could get a message to them somehow.”

  “I’ll call Van Skike, and he can arrange something with the Agency in Helsinki, but they’re not to be warned.” Sudden understanding dawned on Kingman. “Mac and Stephanie they’re to be used as bait.”

  Sanderson nodded. “What we have on Highnote is circumstantial. Do you still want to help?”

  “I don’t have much of a choice, do I?” Kingman said, getting to his feet.

  “None of us do,” Sanderson said.

  Somehow, God help him, the night had passed. Lying fully clothed on his bed in the Berlin Hotel around the corner from the Lubyanka, McAllister tried to put everything into perspective as the sky outside of his window began to lighten with Monday’s dawn. He could still feel Stephanie’s touch, her body a dark warm secret enfolding him. They’d made love at their hotel in Helsinki before his afternoon flight left for Moscow. They’d been tender with each other until the end when she didn’t want to let go. He had been unable to ease her pain or his fear. “It’s crazy,” she had cried in anguish.

  The last irrational act of an irrational man. But even now when he still had the ability to turn back, to check out of the hotel and take the next flight out to Helsinki, he could not do it. He was driven, there was no denying it. Even in the innermost recesses of his mind he understood that the acts he had set in motion had no basis in reality. At least in any reality that he could put into words so that he could understand. Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. Zebra one, Zebra Two. Washington was finished for him. Now it was time for Moscow so that he could complete the circle of insanity that had begun for him one evening late in October.

  We have made progress together, you and I. I am so very proud of you, Mac, so very pleased.

  His interrogator’s name had been Miroshnikov. He was a KGB colonel. That much McAllister knew, but very little else other than a vision of the man’s face overhead, his eyes small, narrow, close-set, but with no bottoms. He also could see Miroshnikov seated across from him in the interrogation room. He was a large man, his complexion almost yellow, an Oriental cast to his features.

  You thought you could do more for your country with woros than bullets, is that it?… In the end you will talk to me, they all do.. You, my dear McAllister, are definitely a resource…. Believe me, we are going to have a splendid time together, you and I.. Bits and pieces of Miroshnikov’s words drifted through McAllister’s mind, but there was more. There had been much more between the time he had begun to disintegrate and the night his heart had stopped on the table. Wisps of something… snatches of conversations that he could not put words to… drifted just out of reach at the back of his head. Zebra One had evidently been Donald Harman, and Zebra Two was General Borodin. But who was Borodin? What was Borodin? How had he managed to get to a man such as Donald Harman and turn him? More important at this point, how was McAllister going to get to the general? He got up from the bed and walked across to the window where he looked out at Detsky Mir, the children’s department store, and beyond it toward Dzerzhinsky Square. It was past seven and traffic was beginning to pick up with the morning. It would be time to go soon, he thought.

  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 ot
her 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?”

  Surprise spread across the interrogator’s face. “What?”

  “Borodin. I need an address.”

  “I don’t understand. I thought you had come here for.. McAllister raised the pistol and jammed it into Miroshnikov’s side. “I don’t have time. I want an address now, or you’ll die. Simple.”

  Miroshnikov shook his head. “He has an apartment here in the city on Kalinina Prospekt, but his wife normally stays there. The general prefers his dacha.”

  “Where? Exactly,” McAllister demanded. Being this close again to Miroshnikov was different than he thought it would be. He felt like a fool, or more accurately like a schoolboy who had done something naughty. Turn the gun over to him, he is your friend. Hadn’t that already been established? We are making such great progress together, you and I, Mac. Miroshnikov was watching him closely. “It’s on the Istra River. About fifty kilometers from here. Not so difficult to find.”

  McAllister knew most of the area around Moscow. He’d been to the Istra River region with its Museum of Wooden Architecture onseveral occasions. An entire replica community of churches, peasant cottages, granaries, and windmills had been brought there from all over Russia.

  “Is it near the village?”

  “Yes,” Miroshnikov said, still puzzled. “Just a few kilometers to the north. There is a covered bridge across the river. He is first on the right.”

  The parking lot was protected by a tall wire-mesh fence. One of the attendants had come out of his hut and was watching them. McAllister looked up.

  “Start the car and drive out of here,” he said.

  Miroshnikov saw the attendant as well. “To the general’s dacha?”

  “No. Someplace private. Anyplace. Just get us out of here. Now.” Miroshnikov started the car and pulled out.

  McAllister lowered the pistol so that it was out of sight as they passed the attendant who watched them leave the parking lot and disappear down the street.

  Traffic was heavier than before, and for the next few minutes the interrogator concentrated on his driving. He turned right on Zhdanova Street past the Ministry of Higher and Special Education, and one block later had to stop for a red light. He refused to look at McAllister, his eyes straight ahead on the bumper of the car ahead of them. When the light changed, he pulled forward.

  Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. Voronin’s words were so clearly etched in McAllister’s brain that he might always have known them. But there was something else. Still something that nagged.

  “What is this general to you?” Miroshnikov asked, breaking their silence.

  “Zebra Two,” McAllister said. It no longer mattered who knew. “What?”

  “A spy.”

  “Of course

  “He was Donald Harman’s control officer. He and his people have been trying to kill me ever since I was sent home. Well, they’re all dead now, and Borodin is the only one left.“Miroshnikov was looking at him, a very strange expression on his face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Zebra One was Donald Harman, an adviser to the President. General Borodin is Zebra Two, his control officer.”

  “You’ve come here to kill him?” Miroshnikov asked in wonder. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  McAllister started to reply, but no words came. His heart was racing now.

  They crossed the Sadovaya Ring with the light, and continued north away from the city center. A banner was stretched above the broad boulevard. LONG LIVE THE SOVIET PEOPLE, BUILDERS OF COMMUNISM. McAllister struggled to maintain his control.

  “Why?” Miroshnikov repeated. “You came back here at great risk. Kidnapped an officer of the KGB right in front of headquarters, and I suspect you weren’t even armed. And now you are saying that you mean to kill a very important general. I ask you again, why?”

  “Because of… what he has done.”

  “To you? To your country?”

  “Yes.”

  “You say this Donald Harman is dead. I read it in the newspapers. And so are some other very important men in Washington. You have done your job, Mac, and done it well. I am proud of you.”

  “Americans,” McAllister whispered.

  “And some Russians too, I think. I have seen reports. Gennadi Potemkin is missing. Presumed dead.”

  “I killed him.”

  “There, you see? And there have been others.” The traffic thinned out the farther they got from downtown. They passed the Riga Train Station and Dzerzhinsky Park, a big textile plant on the right after they passed beneath a railroad viaduct. Believe me, we are going to have a splendid time together, you and I. The interrogator’s words flowed around McAllister. The voice then as now, it was hard for him to distinguish which. They had left the city behind. Birch forests spread away to theundulating horizon, the highway rising and falling like swells on a vast ocean. The sky was overcast, and a wind had begun to blow snow across the road. The countryside seemed alien
, as if it belonged on another planet. “You don’t understand, do you, Mac?” Miroshnikov’s patient voice came to McAllister. “But of course you couldn’t.”

  A narrow road, barely a track through the snow, led back up into the trees. Miroshnikov downshifted and the little car bumped its way up a shallow hill, then down the other side around a steep curve. When he stopped the car they were completely out of sight of the highway. Only the trees were visible in any direction. Not a single sign of human habitation marred the desolate landscape.

  “You won’t kill me, I don’t think,” Miroshnikov said. McAllister raised the automatic. Little spots of light danced in his eyes, like flickering embers from a campfire.

  “I’m going to help you, as I have from the beginning, Mac. Believe me, I will turn out to be a good friend. Your only friend.”

  The interrogator opened the car door and got out. “Where are you going?” McAllister shouted, suddenly rousing himself.

  “For a smoke, nothing more. We will talk, and in the end you will see that together we can kill this general of yours, and together we will run to the West. We will be heroes, you and I. Believe me, we are going to have a splendid time.”

  McAllister got out of the car as Miroshnikov was lighting a cigarette. The interrogator offered it across the hood of the car, but McAllister refused. The extremely cold wind bit at his face and ears, and his bare hands began to turn numb, but his head was clearing.

  “We’ll do it tonight,” Miroshnikov said. “He is a difficult man. But with you I think it will be possible. Anything is possible.”

  “He’s one of yours, why would you want to kill him?” Miroshnikov scowled. “He’s Russian, not one of mine.”

  “And you?”

  “Siberian. There is a big and very important difference, Mac. I will explain it to you someday.”

  With Miroshnikov distanced across the car, and with the cold windcontinuing to clear his head, McAllister could begin to think again. He was no longer mesmerized by the interrogator… who after all was nothing more than a man.

  “What did you do to me in the Lubyanka?” Miroshnikov had started to raise the cigarette to his lips, but his hand stopped halfway. “I saved your life.”