Highnote insisted that someone from Operations be included, and in fact it had been Norris who’d asked most of the questions. It was terribly odd, Jaffe thought, this particular piece of information surfacing now. But as Norris had said in his sardonic way, they were looking for a deal… when no deals were possible. “So we send them a life jacket. We don’t have to tell them it’s full of holes.”
Jaffe opened his eyes and switched on his pocket tape recorder, the voices in the earpiece distorted but understandable.
the name McAllister mean to you?” Norris’s voice.
There was a scraping sound and a sudden loud hiss as James O’Haire lit a match and put it to his cigarette. “As in David Stewart?” he asked, his Irish accent pronounced. “You tell me,” Norris said.
“The bastard. He was playing both ends against the middle there at the end. Last I heard he was still playing it close in Moscow. Probably skipped by now, though, if I know my man.”
“David McAllister was part of your network?” Jaffe heard himself ask.
“From the beginning.”
Jaffe ran the tape forward.”… had his network people over there who’d pump him the questions that needed answering. You know, hardware, technical data, that sort of sport.”
“And here in this country, who was your control officer?” Norris asked.
O’Haire laughed, the noise roaring in Jaffe’s ear. “You’ve been watching too many spy movies.”
Jaffe ran the tape forward again. “… telling you all this now because my brother and I want a deal. Not so hard to understand, is it?”
“Do you want to go live with your pals in Moscow?” Norris asked. “Hell no,” O’Haire exploded, laughing again. “We’d be willing to tough it out here, say for a year maybe two. Until the dust settles. Then you could quietly let us out. Might go to Spain, perhaps France. Somewhere in Europe. We’re not greedy.”
“Would you be willing to testify in court about McAllister’s involvement…?” Jaffe had asked, but O’Haire cut him off.
“You play ball with us, Mr. Jaffe, and we’ll play ball with you. I’ll tell you this much, though, watch out for McAllister. He’s one tough sonofabitch. I always admired that one, I did.”
Chapter 14
“They’re lying,” Robert Highnote said, looking across the conference table at the other three men gathered for the early morning meeting at CIA headquarters. “Besides, as I understand the laws of evidentiary procedure, the word of a conspirator would not be valid in a court of law.” Dennis Foster, the agency’s general counsel, nodded. “We’re not talking about a court of law here, Bob. But considering everything that McAllister has allegedly done over the past week or so, it gives one pause, wouldn’t you agree?” He was a slightly built but patricianlooking man with white hair and wire-rimmed glasses that gave his face a pinched expression. His voice was soft, cultured.
“Hell, at the very least the man is a killer,” Dexter Kingman said. He was just the opposite of Foster; raw- boned, large, at times loud. More than one person had underestimated his intelligence, however, because of his outward appearance. Oftentimes to their regret. He was angry just now.
“And he was here last night,” Adam French, the director of the Soviet Russian Division added. “You can’t deny that.”
“No,” Highnote said. “But so far, all the evidence that we’ve gathered has been contradictory. You can’t deny that.”
“The man is trying to save his own ass,” Kingman said. There was a deep scowl on his face. “Now he’s snatched one of my people.” Highnote glanced at the written report in front of him. “From what I’ve read here, she could have been a willing victim.”
“Probably had a gun to her head,” Kingman growled. “She’s still alive. And so are those two guards last night. He could have pulled the trigger. He didn’t.”
“What are you trying to do, defend the bastard?” Kingman said, his voice rising. “You were friends, but let’s not carry this so far we become blinded.”
“What the O’Haires told our people does fit,” Dennis Foster interjected. “If you think about it, it does make some sense.”
“Not from where I sit,” Highnote said heavily. “None of this makes any sense. I saw him, remember? I spoke with him face-to-face the night he came out to my house. He’s confused, he’s running for his life, I’ll grant you that, but we trained him to do that. And he’s doing it well.”
“At the Russians’ behest,” Foster said.
“Is that what you think, Dennis?” Highnote asked seriously. He looked at the others. “Is that the consensus here this morning? Because if it is, I’m telling you that I just can’t go along with you.”
Kingman threw up his hands in frustration. “Then what the hell are we doing here, Bob? What do you want from us? Do we let the bastard go, let him do whatever he wants? Offer him amnesty? Forget everything that’s happened?”
“On the contrary. He has to be stopped.”
“Fine…” Kingman started to say, but Highnote held him off. “Hear me out, Dexter. All of you. We’re dealing with a highly trained operative who is obviously motivated. Simply put, McAllister is looking for something. And looking hard. I think it would be wise to find out what that might be. He didn’t have to return here to Washington. He could have taken off, hidden himself, and it would have taken us years to dig him out, if we ever did. Why has he come back? What does he want?”
“Revenge,” Kingman said simply. “For what?”
“The failure of his network.”
“We’ve not agreed that he actually worked with the O’Haires.”
“It fits,” Kingman said. “The Russians arrested him to throw off suspicion, and then they released him on the hope that he would be allowed back into the fold. When we obviously wouldn’t buy that, he ran amok. You saw the ballistics report from New York. Carrick was killed with his own gun. So was Maas. McAllister’s fingerprints were all over it.”
“What about the three Russians outside my front door?” Highnote asked.“I don’t know. A deal gone bad, perhaps?”
“And the blood all over my sailboat? McAllister was there. We found the Walther he took from my study. Who tried to kill him?”
“Again I don’t have the answers, Bob. But my guess would be the Russians themselves. Maybe they’d realized they had made a big mistake releasing him. Maybe they’re trying to stop him.”
“Now you’re trying to say that McAllister is an independent?” Highnote asked. “Trained by us and molded by the Russians? With drugs, perhaps torture? He’s a tool?”
“Gone bad,” Kingman said. “I think the man has gone over the edge. I think he is insane.”
“If that’s the case,” Highnote said sitting back in his seat, “we’re all in trouble, gentlemen. Very big trouble.”
“We trained him, it’s up to us to stop him.” Kingman replied, only the smallest look of satisfaction on his face. “The question is, how? The bastard is smart.”
“If we knew what he was looking for, it might give us a clue as to his next moves,” Dennis Foster said. “If we assume that what the O’Haires told us is true, we could start there…
“No assumptions, Dennis,” Kingman said. “I don’t think we can afford the luxury. Besides, if McAllister’s brain was altered by drugs, he wouldn’t be the same person as before. No, we’ve got to start from the beginning. From his beginning. If he has come back here for revenge… we’ve got to find the object of his revenge.” He turned to Adam French. “He broke into your office and used your computer terminal. Was there any record of what he was looking for?”
“It could have been almost anything,” French said. “All that we do know for sure was that once he got into the division archives, he evidently called for a restricted-access file, and failed three times with the password.”
“Did he get it right on the fourth try?”
“Possibly,” French said. “Tom Watson said he printed out a hard copy of something.”
