She hesitated a moment, but then nodded and turned away. McAllister watched her go up the stairs, the gun at her side, then he went across the waiting room to the swinging door that led into the surgery, careful to avoid stepping in the narrow puddle of blood that had seeped under the door and had dried to a hard black crust. She had not come far enough into the waiting room to see it. But he had. And he knew exactly what it meant, and what he would find inside.
Steeling himself, McAllister pushed open the surgery door and went inside. The room wasn’t very large, perhaps ten feet by fifteen feet overall. On two sides were glass-fronted cabinets that had contained medical supplies. On a third side was a long Formica-topped counter which ran the length of the room. On the fourth were shelves containing medicines, and a doorway that led into the laboratory. Nicholas Albright’s nude body was trussed on the stainless steel examining table in the middle of the room. He had lost a lot of blood before he died, some of it pooling up beside him on the tabletop, more of it running down onto the floor where it had gathered and trickled along the white tile floor to the waiting room door.
McAllister looked away from the corpse, his stomach rising up into his throat. The room had been thoroughly searched. The glass on the cabinet fronts had been smashed, and most of the instruments and medicines had been pulled down and scattered all over the room.
Outwardly it appeared as if someone had come here looking for drugs. When they hadn’t found any they had tied Albright to theexamining table and had tortured him for the information. But McAllister saw beyond that. The overhead light fixtures had been taken apart, the cabinets had been moved away from the walls, and even the heating vents had been uncovered. Whoever had done this were professionals. They had come here to find something; something hidden in this room. He could see through into the laboratory. Nothing had been disturbed in there, nor had anything been touched in the waiting room. It was here in Albright’s surgery that the search had been concentrated.
Still careful not to step in any of the blood, McAllister crossed around behind the examining table to the long counter on the opposite wall. A small cabinet had been left partially open. Using his thumbnail, he eased the door open all the way. The cabinet was empty except for several electrical wires leading from inside the wall. McAllister stared at them for a long time. One of the wires carried power, another was a ground connection, and the third obviously led to an antenna, the barrel of the coaxial plug dangling. A transmitter. Why?
He turned again to look at Albright’s body. The scalpel they had used to cut him with was jutting from his left eye socket. His arms were tied behind him beneath the table, as were his legs. They had cut long strips of flesh from his abdomen, from his arms, and from the sensitive areas around his nipples and his inner thighs. His mouth was filled with gauze pads to stop him from screaming while they tortured him.
His penis had been slit lengthwise, his scrotum had been opened and he had been castrated, and in the end they had cut the main arteries high on his legs near his groin so that he had bled to death.
The scalpel thrust into his eye had probably been done out of frustration. It was possible that they had got nothing from him.
He had to look away from the body again, his stomach rolling, the disinfectant smell of the surgery suddenly clawing at the back of his tongue. Stephanie could not be allowed to see this.
They had come looking for something. A transmitter, perhaps. Still, he was missing something. He knew that much, but for the life of him he could not think it out. They’d come for more than a clue as to Stephanie’s whereabouts. In the first few minutes it would have become evident that the man didn’t know anything. Unless he had been working for them. The thought was chilling. They had stuffed his mouth full of gauze so that he couldn’t make enough noise to rouse the neighbors. But he could not talk either. This was a warning. The brutality of it struck him. The Russianness of it. He had seen things like this before. A mokrie dela. A wet affair. Blood will be spilled as a warning to all other spies.
The animal at the back of the house had stopped whining, and Stephanie’s sudden scream at the surgery door shattered the eerie silence.
Chapter 21
The limousine of Howard Van Skike, director of central intelligence, was admitted without ceremony at the west gate past the executive offices onto the grounds of the White House. His car drew up beneath the overhang and a uniformed guard came down and opened the door for him. He got out and sniffed the air; tall, imperious in his immaculately tailored suit and top coat. He was a presence on the American political scene, and even more of a presence in the intelligence community.
This noon hour he was preoccupied, even angry. He strode up the steps and into the west wing, taking the elevator to the President’s second-floor office, a thin alligator briefcase under his left arm.
Up to this moment he had remained relatively aloof from the business of David McAllister. He had known the man’s father, and in fact had modeled much of his intelligence career after the grandfather, Stewart Alvin, who by the time Van Skike had known him was already one of the holy cows of Whitehall who’d been to Moscow in the early days and who knew the Soviet mentality inside and out.
“Speak softly and carry a big stick,” the elder McAllister maintained was the only decent quote ever to have come out of the Americas. But good Lord he had known the business inside and out. They were still writing books about him.
McAllister’s father had been a power in the OSS and the early days of the CIA as well, and the son, by all accounts had been the natural extension, continuing the long family tradition that had stretched back to the First World War. Now, as hard as it was to believe, the tradition had fallen apart somehow, giving Van Skike pause to consider in the deepest recesses of his mind just what sort of a star he had hitched his wagon to. Van Skike entered the President’s study, the door closing softly behind him, and crossed the room to the massive desk. John Sanderson, director of the FBI, had been speaking with the President. They both looked up.
“You’ve heard?” the President asked, his voice as always, no matter the circumstances, soft. Some years ago he had been DCI, so he well understood what Van Skike was faced with at this moment.
“Yes, Mr. President, I have, though I’ve not yet seen any of the details.”
“Well look at these,” Sanderson said, stepping away from the President’s desk, and indicating a half a dozen photographs spread out there.
Van Skike laid his briefcase on a chair and bent over the black and white photos.
“Two of my people were killed in the driveway,” Sanderson said. “They used twenty-two-caliber silenced automatics. Highly accurate. One at point-blank range, the other at ten to fifteen feet; whoever was doing the shooting knew what they were doing.”
The first photographs showed the FBI agents lying in the driveway, blood staining the snow.
“They got Paul Innes’s wife on the stairs, Reisberg at the study door, Paul at the telephone… he was talking to our desk-duty operator… Quarmby at the end of the table in the breakfast room… and Highnote outside in the backyard.” The other photographs showed a woman in a print dress sprawled on a stairway, Reisberg’s body crumpled in a doorway, and Innes half sitting up against a glass buffet.
“Quarmby is in critical condition,” Sanderson was saying. “And Bob Highnote is in serious condition, but he’ll probably make it. The bullet hit half an inch from his spinal column.”
“The others?” Van Skike asked, looking up. “Dead,” Sanderson replied. He pulled out his pipe and tobacco, and turned away. “He was your boy, Van.”
Van Skike looked to the President. “Was it McAllister?” he asked. “Has that been established?”
The President nodded. “The Albright woman was with him. His car was spotted leaving Paul Innes’s place. From what I understand, the tire prints match.”
Sanderson turned back. “We interviewed McAllister’s neighbors. He and the Albright woman were spotted at the house. Around seven they definitely saw his Peugeot leaving his garage. They saw him and a small dark-haired woman leaving together.”
“Why?” Van Skike asked. “Bob Highnote was his friend. And how could he have known that Paul had called such a meeting?”
Sanderson and the President exchanged glances, which secretly infuriated Van Skike.
“There’s more,” Sanderson said. “McAllister and Albright were at the house. We’re definite about that. But
