“You wanted to talk to me,” McAllister said. “I’m here. let’s go inside.”
“Send her back. It’s not her fight.”
“Nor was it mine, Bob. At least it wasn’t until people started shooting at me. A lot of them, Russians and Americans. I think it’s time that we talk about the Zebra Network.”
“Then you did break the access code,” Highnote said, his complexion suddenly pale in the outside lights.
“An inspired guess,” McAllister said. “Let’s go inside.” The supper club had once been a large house. To the right of the entry hall were the separate dining rooms, large windows looking down into a steep valley garden. To the left was the barroom. They took a leather booth at the back. Forties music was playing from the jukebox.
After the waiter brought them drinks, McAllister sat back with a cigarette and looked across at his old friend. Whom to trust. Always, always it came down to that in the end. The older he got the harder that question became to answer.
“How’s Gloria?” McAllister asked. “Confused,” Highnote said, sipping his martini. “We don’t have much time here tonight, I suspect, so let’s not bullshit each other. How is Gloria holding up?”
“She’s written you off,” Highnote said coldly. “If that’s what you really wanted to hear.”
Something clutched at McAllister’s heart, though the response had not come as a total surprise. Their marriage had been over years ago, he supposed. This now was merely a last excuse. Yet it hurt. “And you? Have you written me off as well?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” Highnote said. “I must say that you’ve done a lot better than I thought you would.”
“What’s going on?“ Highnote’s right eyebrow rose. “Exactly the question I want to put to you. We found poor Janos. Was that necessary?”
“I didn’t kill him,” McAllister said. “That should have been obvious. If you want an ID on those two bodies, I can give it to you.”
“What two bodies?” Highnote asked with a straight face. “One in the driveway, the other back up in the woods, about a hundred yards off the road.”
Highnote shook his head. “There was some blood beside the driveway; O-Positive, your blood type I believe, and some tire marks. No bodies other than Janos’s.”
McAllister closed his eyes. The Mafia had sent two hired guns out to question Sikorski. When they didn’t return someone else would have gone out to check on them. That was logical. But it still didn’t answer the question of who had tortured Sikorski if they hadn’t.
“Someone has set me up for the kill,” he said, opening his eyes. “The Russians.”
“Why?”
“Our best guess is that you are a project gone bad for them.”
“You know damned well that I did not work for the O’Haires,” McAllister said.
“They named you.”
“Then somebody got to them!”
“The whole world is wrong and you’re right, is that it?” Highnote asked, leaning forward. “I don’t know what happened to you in the Lubyanka, and I don’t think you do either, but I believe that you were set up-brainwashed, if you will-to come back here and wreak havoc.”
“Then why are the Russians trying to kill me?”
“Because I think they lost control of you. And if you were brought in, and the secrets that are locked inside your brain were released, you would prove to be a very large embarrassment.”
“Then I’m an innocent victim…?”
“No,” Highnote snapped. “I think you worked with the O’Haires all along, and when the network fell the Russians arrested you, hoping to throw off any suspicions about you. While they had you, they decided to play their little game. Nice friends.”
“You believe that, Bob?” McAllister asked. “I don’t know what else to believe.”
“Why? Where are my motives?”
Highnote lowered his eyes and shook his head. “That’s the damndest part of it all, Mac. I just don’t know.” He looked up. “Burn-out? Gloria told us that you’d been acting strangely ever since you’d been assigned to Moscow. Maybe you saw what you took to be the futility of the business. Maybe you thought your father had wasted his life. He did kill himself, after all. I don’t know, but it happens sometimes to the best of them.”
McAllister fought back the one memory of his father that he had never allowed into his consciousness. Shame? Fear? Whatever, he had avoided thinking about it for a very long time.
“Why was the message sent to me? That’s what the business with my name and false description was all about, wasn’t it?”
“It was Dexter Kingman’s idea. He thought it might flush you out. And it did.”
“Yes,” McAllister said. “It did. So here we are, talk to me.”
“Do you want it straight?” McAllister nodded.
“let Stephanie Albright come in. Nothing will happen to her, I promise you.”
“Then you’ll help me?”
“There is nothing I can do for you, Mac,” Highnote said, his voice low. “Put a bullet in your head. End it now. It would be for the best.”
McAllister shivered. “Is that your advice?”
“James O’Haire was Zebra One here in Washington, and you were Zebra Two in Moscow. It’s my guess Voronin was warning you that your identity had been discovered. I looked up his track. He had been in a position to know such things.”
“That’s how you see it?”
“Yes,” Highnote said. “You got into the computer to find out if we suspected you. Well, you know by now that we did not, although sooner or later we would have caught on to you.”
McAllister’s head was spinning. Nothing made any sense. Nothing was real. Yet there was an internal logic to what Highnote was telling him. Except that the Russians had arrested him and then inexplicablyreleased him after the trial to make the CIA believe that he indeed was the O’Haires’ control officer in an effort to protect the identity of the real man or men. Still there was one man in Moscow and one here in the United States.
“The last time we talked I asked you to consider the possibility that I was telling the truth, and that I had been set up.”
“I considered it, Mac, believe me. And I came to the conclusion that you are telling the truth so far as you know it. But can you tell me exactly what happened to you every moment you were being held in the Lubyanka?” Miroshnikov’s face swam into view. The barroom suddenly seemed very warm and close.
“I can see that you cannot. They are sophisticated, Mac. You know the drill. They had you for more than a month. They could have done anything to you. Anything at all. Turn you into anything they wanted. Turn you into their creature, even.”
“But what if that’s not the case?” McAllister insisted. “Give me that much at least. Give me that consideration, just for the sake of argument.
“Go on,” Highnote said after a moment.
McAllister ran a hand across his eyes. “I was a thorn in their side in Moscow so they arrested me and subjected me to a month of interrogation. And believe me, Bob, it is an experience that you would never forget.”
“Why were you released?”
“I think there are two possibilities. The first is that they had made their point. They’d caught an American spy, they’d tried him and found him guilty, and at that point he was of no further real value to them, so they simply released him.”
“They had your confession,” Highnote said. “You named all of your old network people. Times, places, operations. Everything.”
“The second is that it was a mistake. Whoever was in charge of my case hadn’t been given all the facts. Zebra One and Two meant nothing to my interrogator. But someone else could have listened to the tapes, read the manuscripts. Perhaps too late they realized that I was being released.”
“So, thinking that you knew more than you really did, this unknownRussian ordered your assassination in New York before you could cause any damage. Is that what you’re saying to me?”
“Either that or he told his American counterpart about me, and my assassination was ordered locally. And it
