Virginia countryside, traffic almost nonexistent now. He drove with the window down, and at one point he thought he could hear the sound of sirens, a lot of sirens, in the distance to the southeast toward Washington. He pulled over to the side of the road, shut off the truck’s engine and lights, and stepped out, cocking his ear. It was there again, faintly on the night breeze. Sirens. And low in the sky toward the east, he thought he could pick out slow- moving lights, though it was hard for him to focus his eyes. Probably helicopters. They wanted him in a very big way, and once they understood he was gone the search would fan out.
He looked at his watch: It was nearly eleven. He had been running continously since early this morning when the insanity had begun at JFK Airport in New York. There was nothing much left inside of him. He needed a place to hole up; a first-aid kit, food, and sleep, in that order. He climbed back into the truck, started the engine, flipped on the headlights and pulled up onto the highway.
He could see the glow of Washington to his left, fifteen miles away. The Potomac was between him and the city. That fact stuck in his mind. The river flowing south past Alexandria and Woodbridge and a dozen quaint little towns all the way down to the Chesapeake Bay had some significance for him at this moment.
Look for the anomalies. The irregularities. The bits and pieces that don’t seem to fit the mold. Down those avenues you willfind the answers.
The Potomac. A first-aid kit. Food. Rest. The river. He was free-associating again. Each time, his thoughts came back to the river. Something about it, something remembered from a time past.
An afternoon of warmth in the sun. Drinks, food, good company. Gloria had scraped her knee on a deck fitting. They’d been on a boat, sailing down the river. Her knee had been inexpertly bandaged. They’d all laughed about it… especially Bob Highnote. She was called the Merrilee, and she was docked at a small marina somewhere south of the city.
In Dumfries. He remembered the name of the town now, because of the jokes they’d made about it, and about Gloria’s silly accident. By your tradecrafi you shall be known. Do the unexpected. Run inward when they expect you to run away. It’s the principle of the children’s game: hide-the-thimble.
He desperately needed to rest. Even more important, he needed time to think, to reason it out. Sikorski’s reaction to Voronin’s cryptic words had been immediate and swift, lending a terrible credence to the message. At this point, he knew that his only hope for survival would be in unraveling its meaning. But it was only a slim hope.
A damp cold wind was blowing directly across the river raising whitecaps in the narrow bay that fronted the tiny town of Dumfries. McAllister had left the truck in a public parking lot a block from the Marina. He’d taken the tire iron from behind the seat, stuffed it in his belt beneath his coat, and walked back along the quay to the half- empty yacht haven. At this time of the year many of the owners had pulled their boats out of the water until spring, but there were still at least fifty vessels of all sizes and descriptions left. Halyards slapping in the wind against the aluminum masts of the sailboats set up a tinkling, almost musical racket. All the boats bobbed in the wavelets crossing the harbor.
The town was very quiet. He kept to the shadows as much as possible, and the occasional car that passed paid him no attention.
There was no security guard in the marina, and the dockmaster’s office was closed. It took him less than five minutes to find Highnote’s forty-five-foot sailboat securely tied between a pair of finger piers twothirds of the way out the main dock. He clambered silently aboard and huddled out of the wind at the main hatch, waiting for an alarm to be raised, for someone to come out of the darkness and demand to know what he was doing aboard. But no one came. The marina was deserted. He pulled the tire iron out of his belt, inserted it in the loop of the combination lock and yanked down with all of his strength, putting his weight into it. The lock held, but the hasp broke with a loud snap, the entire mechanism falling to the fiberglass deck with a huge clatter.
Again McAllister crouched in the darkness waiting for someone to investigate the commotion, but after a full minute he was satisfied that he had not been heard simply because there wasn’t another soul in the place. Below, he closed the hatch, made sure the curtains were tightly drawn over the windows, and searched for the electrical panel, finding it after a couple of minutes by feel. He turned on the battery switch, the cabin lights breaker, and then the small gooseneck light over the chart table, the interior of the big sailboat’s salon suddenly bathed in a soft red glow. His knees were shaking from fatigue. He had to hold on to the chart table for support until he could catch his breath. The simple action of walking one block and forcing his entry in here had completely drained what little strength he had left.
After a minute or so, he went looking for the first-aid kit, finding it in a cabinet in the forward head. It took him another ten minutes to find the valves for the propane stove one of which was outside in a locker with the tanks), and put on some water to boil. Laying Highnote’s Walther and Stephanie Albright’s.32 automatic on the salon table, he took off his jacket and peeled off his blood-soaked shirt. The handkerchief had stuck to the wound in his chest, and he had to yank it off, blood oozing again out of the angry-looking hole. A huge bruise had formed on his shoulder and down his side, but he understood that he had been very lucky. Again. If he’d been hit just an inch farther to the right he would have been dead. He soaked a big wad of paper towels with hydrogen peroxide from the first-aid kit and gingerly daubed both the entry and exit wounds in his side, and then the gash on his forehead. Working carefully and deliberately because he could move no faster in his present condition, he pulled off long strips of adhesive tape from the roll, sticking them to the edge of the table, and then folded up two big squares of gauze from one of the sterile packets. When the water was nearly at a boil, he soaked a clean towel and carefully washed both wounds, and then the rest of his side and chest, cleaning off as much of the crusted blood as he could reach.
When he’d dried off, the wounds were seeping quite a lot of blood, and it took him nearly a half an hour to daub disinfectant cream on the gauze pads and tape them in place, his fingers thick and numb, and his side so stiff and painful that when he moved wrong, he nearly passed out.
He began to hallucinate then as he forced himself to fix a packet of dried soup. His father helped him find a can of beer in the locker, and a package of crackers in another. He also found one of Highnote’s old sailing sweaters.
The old man had not aged very much. He was still dressed in a natty houndstooth hunting jacket with a sweater vest beneath it and a silk cravat around his neck. But sitting across the table from him, McAllister could see that his mustache had begun to turn gray, and he wondered why his father wasn’t wearing his uniform. He loved wearing its and he loved being called the general.
He told a story while McAllister ate his soup. “Back in the late forties we hosted a high-ranking British intelligence service officer in Washington. He was an expert on the Soviets and was a natural to set up the lines of liaison between the CIA and FBI on this side of the Atlantic, and the OSI and MI5 in England. We were just getting started in the business and he was a godsend. You know how it was, you read the histories. There was so much going on in those days none of us could understand, that the one hand didn’t know what the other was doing. It was like drowning, let me tell you. The chap tossing out the life ring was the one to rally ‘round. Problem was, of course, that this fellow was a hard one to fathom. Rather like the blind Indians and the elephant. The man cut a damned dashing figure in a tuxedo, flitting here and there to every Washington function. He was a socialite. But he also was a one-man blizzard with the paperwork and organization. He had our sections humming within six months of his arrival. He was a genius at administration. He was a friend of the U.S., too. Used to drop in on you any time of the day or night with one of his brainstorms for makingwhatever it was you happened to be doing, easier. He was sort of a repayment for all the years of lendlease. But finally he was a Russian spy. Sold us and the British down the river. For years this went on. And even up to the end his own people convinced Hoover to back down, close the files. Wasn’t till he disappeared from his posting in Beirut in sixty-three and turned up big as life in Moscow, that we knew that side of him. But don’t you see, Philby was all of those things… all at the same time… and more. He was just a man, though. Put his trousers on one leg at a time every morning just like the rest of us. Don’t be blind, boyo, see it all, this time.”
“Thank you,” McAllister said out loud, but his father wasn’t there. He got up weaker than he imagined he was, and stumbled into the forward cabin where he fell into bed, his eyes closing immediately.
Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. Zebra One, Zebra Two. Voronin’s words.
Traitor!
All the way back into town from Janos Sikorski’s hilltop cabin, Stephanie Albright had been troubled by something. By words spoken.. or, rather by a phrase not repeated. “Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. Zebra One, Zebra Two.” McAllister’s words, spoken in a pained whisper, almost as if he had been in a trance. She had
