doubting it. They reached the parkway just past the National Arboretum, and the driver sped up across the Anacostia River, merging smoothly with the traffic that had thinned out. Most people were coming into the city at this hour, not leaving it.
They were in Maryland now, and a couple of minutes later as they passed over lLandover Road, three highway patrol cars, their lights flashing, their sirens blaring, raced beneath the parkway heading northwest toward Hyattsville and College Park.
Stephanie stiffened, but when the police cars did not take the entrance ramp onto the parkway, but instead continued northwest, she relaxed slightly.
McAllister watched out the rear window as the squad cars were lost in the distance, then he cranked down his window a couple of inches. At first he could hear nothing but the roar of the wind. The driver, feeling the sudden cold air, looked up. Then in the far distance, McAllister thought he could hear sirens. A lot of sirens.
An accident, he wondered. Or was it?
It was nearly nine by the time the cabbie dropped them off at the Eastern Airlines passenger departures entrance of the BaltimoreWashington International Airport in Ferndale just south of downtown Baltimore. After McAllister paid the driver, he and Stephanie hurried into the terminal, took the escalator downstairs to the baggage pickup area, and stowed their two overnight bags in a coin-operated locker.
Their driver had taken the down ramp around and was waiting in front for a fare back to Washington. It had begun to snow lightly again. Christmas music was playing on the overhead speakers. It wasfaintly depressing. A young couple climbed into the cab a few minutes later, and when it was gone, McAllister and Stephanie went outside and got a cab into Baltimore, Stephanie giving the driver an address a couple of blocks from her father’s house. Once again McAllister got the odd feeling that he was coming back on his life. That he was retracing old steps. That he was making no progress. Stephanie sat on the edge of the seat, her hands together in her lap, holding herself rigidly erect as if she were afraid she would break something if she moved.
If anything, downtown Baltimore was even more decorated for the holidays than was Washington. A tall Christmas tree stood in front of the Civic Center, and a few blocks south in the harbor, the USS Constellation on permanent display, was decked out with all her flags. At night she would be lit. The cabbie dropped them off in front of Union Station on Exeter Street. They waited just within the main entrance until the taxi had disappeared around the corner. McAllister took Stephanie’s arm. “Come on,” he said.
“Where are we going now?”
“To phone your father.”
They crossed the cavernous departure hall, angling to the left when McAllister spotted the bank of telephones along the far wall. Stephanie plugged a quarter in the phone and dialed her father’s number. When the connection was made she held the phone away from her ear so that McAllister could hear as well. After ten rings she looked at him and shook her head.
“Same as last night and early this morning,” she said, hanging up. “He should be there.”
“Has he got an assistant, maybe a secretary working with him?”
“Only in the summers when he sometimes takes a couple of interns from the college. The rest of the time he prefers to work alone. David, it’s never been a very large practice.”
“Is there anyplace else he might have gone last night? An emergency call, or something like that? Friends? Maybe a woman friend?”
“It’s Tuesday. He might go away for a weekend, he sometimes does that, but never on a weekday. Something has happened.”
McAllister glanced across the large hall. The station was fairlybusy at this hour. Across from the telephones were a few shops and a small snack bar. He felt for the gun at the small of his back. “Have you still got your gun?”
“Yes.”
He took her shoulders and looked into her eyes, wanting to impress her with the seriousness of what he was about to say. “This part is very important, Stephanie,” he said. “If we’re confronted or cornered, or anything like that, and they clearly identify themselves as FBI or the police or even the Agency, you won’t resist. You’ll put down your gun and surrender immediately.”
“They’ll kill us.”
“Maybe,” McAllister said grimly. “But we’re not going to start shooting innocent people. Not now, not ever. Clear?”
She nodded.
“Let’s get going,” he said. “Keep your eyes open Stephanie.”
Albright’s house was on Front Street about three blocks from Union Station in a neighborhood of similarly large houses that had at one time probably belonged to ship captains. For years the neighborhood had deteriorated, but over the past few years Baltimore had revitalized its harbor area and had gone on an inner-city cleanup and rebuilding campaign. Stephanie’s father, she’d told him, had weathered all the changes in the more than twenty years he had lived and worked in the neighborhood.
There was a fair amount of traffic this morning, all moving slowly because of the continuing snowfall that made the streets very slippery. A few BMWs, a Mercedes, and several American-made cars were parked along the curb, but none of them sported any extra antennae, nor were any of them occupied. There were no lingering taxis, wIndowless vans, or suspicious-looking trucks parked anywhere in the vicinity, and so far as McAllister could see there were no people on foot in the near vicinity of Albright’s house; no meter-readers or telephone repairmen, no newspaper delivery boys, no bakery or delivery people. Nothing or nobody who could be a cover for a surveillance team.
They passed a corner grocery store and crossed the street after a big Allied moving van rumbled by. McAllister watched it turn thecorner at Union Station and when it was gone he and Stephanie waited across the street for a full five minutes, half expecting the truck to come back around the block. When it did not reappear, they continued.
Coming up on the house, McAllister could see nothing out of the ordinary, nothing out of place at first, but Stephanie let out a little gasp and pulled up short.
“What is it?” he asked. “It’s my father’s car,” she said.
McAllister could just see the rear deck of a dark-brown station wagon parked in the back. “He doesn’t have another?”
“No,” she said softly.
They came up the walk and mounted the steps. McAllister turned and looked back to the street. No one was there. No one was watching this place. The neighborhood felt empty, somehow deserted to him.
A cardboard clock with the message WILL BE BACK AT was hung in the front-door window, the hands pointing to nine o’clock. It was well past that time now. But nine o’clock last night or this morning?
The door was locked, but Stephanie produced a key from her purse and opened it. She started inside, but McAllister held her back. He took out his pistol, switched off the safety and stepped just inside the vestibule.
A tall oak door with an etched-glass window leading into the main stairhall was half open. Today’s mail lay in a pile on the vestibule floor behind the outside door. McAllister moved on the balls of his feet to the partially open inner door and looked inside. Straight ahead, the stairs rose to the second floor. A corridor led back to the kitchen. On the left was Albright’s office, on the right, in what originally had been the living room and dining room were a small waiting room, a surgery, and a laboratory. The house smelled faintly of disinfectant and an odd, animal odor. From somewhere at the back of the house he thought he could hear a cat, or perhaps a small dog, whining softly.
Stephanie came the rest of the way into the vestibule. She closed and locked the door. She heard the whining. “It’s coming from the animal cages on the back porch,” she whispered. She was very pale and her nostrils were flared, her lips half parted, as if she were starting to hyperventilate. McAllister went the rest of the way into the house and looked into the waiting room. A half a dozen chairs were grouped around a low plastic coffee table on which several magazines lay in a disarrayed pile. The sound of the animal’s pitiful whining was a little louder now, and it set his teeth on edge.
Stephanie came up behind him.
“You take the upstairs,” he whispered to her. She had taken out her.32 automatic.
“Is someone still here?” she asked. “I don’t think so, but be careful.”
