He was not alone. He stood stock-still in the nearly absolute darkness waiting for a sound, a movement, anything to accompany the cigarette smoke that he could smell. Someone was here. Very close.
Gradually his eyes became accustomed to the darkness and he was able to distinguish shapes and outlines of walls, hanging wires, and pipes and piles of construction materials. He remained standing by the canvas-covered window opening listening and watching. He was in a large, unfinished room. Directly across from him was an open doorway into a broad corridor. A man in the corridor, somewhere tothe left, coughed. McAlIister pulled out his gun and crept forward, feeling ahead with his free hand so that he would not trip over something.
At the doorway he stopped again to listen. The smell of cigarette smoke was much stronger here and he could feel the warmth of a portable heater wafting back to him. It would be a guard on duty. The new building was attached to the old just here. There would be a door. Some access from the new into the old. Someone would have to guard it. One guard or two? How much further would his luck hold? Gripping his gun a little tighter, McAllister stepped around the corner. A lone guard sat at a small table in front of a plywood bulkhead into which a padlocked door was set. A portable heater was set up at his feet. He was reading a magazine, smoke curling up from a cigarette in an ashtray in front of him. A single light bulb dangled from the ceiling.
McAllister was halfway down the corridor before the guard realized that someone was coming, and looked up, his eyes growing wide in alarm, his mouth opening. He reached for his walkie-talkie lying on the desk.
“Don’t,” McAllister said raising his pistol.
The guard hesitated just long enough for McAllister to reach him and snatch the walkie-talkie, his initial surprise turning to anger.
“Here, who the hell do you think you are?” the man sputtered jumping to his feet.
“I don’t want to have to kill you, but I will if you force me to it,” McAllister said, keeping his voice low and menacing. He hadn’t wanted this at all. There was no way he was going to kill this man, no matter what happened. Getting what he had come here to get had suddenly become more than difficult.
In the next moment McAllister’s luck completely ran out. “Raise your hands very carefully, if you please, Mr. McAllister,” someone said behind him.
McAllister stood absolutely still. He knew the voice, remembered it from somewhere years ago. He wracked his brain trying to come up with a face and name. Someone from the last time he had done desk duty here at Langley.“I asked you to raise your hands, sir, and I’m not kidding now.”
“Who is that?” McAllister said, turning very slowly. The man was very short and well-built with thick graying hair and dark eyebrows over wide eyes. The face was vaguely familiar, still he couldn’t put a name to it. “Tom Watson, sir. We were told that you might be showing up here. Now if you please, raise your hands.”
McAllister remembered. Watson had been one of the front-door guards. They’d often bantered back and forth when McAllister had come to work. He was holding a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson in his right hand. He wasn’t carrying a walkie-talkie. McAllister raised both of his hands; in one he held the walkie-talkie, in the other his gun. “Now what, Tom?”
“Disarm you, then call for help,” Watson said warily. “Get his gun, Frank.”
The other guard came up behind McAllister and reached for the gun. It was a mistake on his part. McAllister turned as if he were going to hand his gun to the guard, but then continued to swivel around until he was completely behind the man, his left arm clamped over the man’s throat, his pistol at the man’s temple.
Tom Watson moved forward, raising his gun, a frightened, uncertain look of surprise on his face.
“I don’t want to shoot him, Tom, but I will if I must,” McAllister said.
Tom Watson stopped in his tracks. “Damn you,” he said. “Do as I say for the next five or ten minutes and I promise you that no one will get hurt.”
Chapter 13
Something had gone wrong. Stephanie watched from the seventh-floor room she’d taken in the Georgetown Holiday Inn as two men got out of a car parked on Observatory Place and rushed back into the woods. Moments later they returned in a hurry with two other men, got back into the car and raced out of sight around the main building.
She had checked in here around six o’clock after calling Kingman, who had been deeply upset, and had watched from her darkened room as the first of the surveillance units had begun to show up shortly before seven. It was ten after ten now.
Kingman had given his word that McAllister would not be taken by force. “I’ll talk with him, Stephanie, if that’s what you want,” he’d said coldly. “But I can’t guarantee anything else.”
“That’s all he wants. But if you come in there in force, he won’t show up.
“If I come alone, he’ll shoot me in cold blood just like he’s done the others.”
“The only people he has killed were three Russians outside Mr. Highnote’s house, and then only in self- defense.” She assumed the trouble at Sikorski’s had not yet been discovered.
“I’m not going to argue that point with you. I’ll meet with him, and I promise no force.”
“If it doesn’t work out, you’ll let him turn around and leave?”
“If he’s innocent, as you say he is, he won’t have to leave. We’ll work it out together. But Stephanie..
She’d hung up on him then, and driven directly over to the Holiday Inn, where she’d been waiting and watching ever since. She had counted at least eleven different units in and around the Naval Observatory grounds, and she figured there were twice as many she had been unable to see from her vantage point. A District of Columbia police car, its red lights flashing, raced up from Whitehaven Street, turned at Circle Drive and entered the observatory grounds from the southeast.
They’d all hidden themselves. But now they were out in the open. Stephanie turned away from the window and looked at the telephone on the nightstand between the twin beds. McAllister had not told her where he was going tonight, but she’d known just the same. There was only one place where he could get the information he sought. As crazy as it seemed, she had to admit the logic of what he was trying to do. Zebra One, Zebra Two, his contact in Moscow had told him. And the O’Haire organization had been known as the Zebra Network. If there was a connection between the two-and judging from Sikorski’s reaction that first night she strongly suspected there was-then any further information would be buried in the CIA’s archives. More specifically in the Soviet Russian Division’s computerized records. Fourth floor at headquarters. She knew the territory well because she’d been assigned temporary security duty on more than one occasion-watching suspected Soviet spies operating out of their embassy here in Washington when division chief Adam French didn’t want to involve the FBI.
She tried to envision just how he would have gotten himself into the building and then up to the fourth floor. He would have to find an office with a computer terminal. He would have to know the correct access codes. So much could have gone wrong.
Outside, two more District of Columbia squad cars, their lights flashing, their sirens blaring, emerged from the observatory grounds and raced south on Thirty-fourth Street. Moments later Dexter Kingman’s car came around the corner and sped off into the night.
The meeting had been aborted. But at this point, McAllister was barely ten minutes late. Too soon for Kingman to have shut down the operation. The prize was simply too great for him to have quit this early.
Four other cars and a windowless van came out of the observatory and hurried down Thirty-fourth Street toward the Key Bridge-across which was the parkway, CIA headquarters a scant eight miles to the northwest.***********
McAllister had pocketed the walkie-talkie, relieved both men of their handguns, and watched them as Tom Watson unlocked the bulkhead door into the old building. The corridor was long and broad, only dimly lit, deserted at this hour of a Sunday evening.
“What’s the night guard’s schedule for this floor?” McAllister asked, keeping his voice low.
“I don’t know,” Tom Watson said, and the other guard looked up sharply at him.
“You’ve got to believe me, Tom, when I tell you that I don’t want to hurt anybody. If you know the schedule, it would be best if you told me now. I don’t want a confrontation.”
“On the half hour,” Tom Watson said after a hesitation. McAllister glanced at his watch; it was a few minutes after ten, which gave them twenty minutes at the outside to get in and get out-and only that long if his entry onto
