The attorney looked again at the bulky files he had brought in with him.” Those charges may be dropped, Mr. McAllister, but it depends upon you.
“On my cooperation.”
“Yes, exactly.”
McAllister thought about the chief interrogator and their sessions together. Never once had Voronin been mentioned. Most of their time had been spent going over the Scorpius Network, and Tom Murdock’s whereabouts these days. Evidently the Russians were still feeling the effects of the Bulgarian operation. For that, at least, he was thankful. He sat forward. “Then what evidence is there against me?”
The attorney’s eyes were round. “Your confession, of course. We wouldn’t have dreamed of going to trial without it.”
“May I see it?”
“There is no need, believe me, it is very complete. You spelled out in very complete detail how you, at the orders of your government of course, operated a successful nest of spies in Sofia in the late seventies. Really, Mr. McAllister, there can be no doubt in anyone’s mind.”
“I don’t remember making any such confession…. of my own free will, that is.”
The attorney’s lips compressed. “You signed the transcript.”
“Under duress.”
“Please, Mr. McAllister, believe me when I advise you to plead simply guilty before the judges. It will be much better for you, much better indeed.”
“Thanks for the advice,” McAllister said.” I suppose I’ll get your bill in the morning.”
It took a moment for Tarasenko to realize that McAllister had made a joke, and then his face split into a wide grin. “Very good,” he said, gathering up his papers and rising. “Yes, very good, Mr. McAllister. My bill in the morning.”
With lunch they brought him a blue pin-striped suit, a white shirt and tie, underwear and socks, and freshly polished black shoes, all of which fit well, though the cut wasn’t very good by Western standards.
He had been here for a long time. Certainly weeks, possibly more than a month, yet his memories were hazy and indistinct, partly because of the drugs he had been given and partly because of the lack of sleep and proper food. Yet he didn’t feel terrible. There was no real pain, only a weakness and the slight feeling that he was floating. When he stood up too suddenly sometimes, he would experience a little nausea and light-headedness, but even those feelings had slowly begun to pass, over the past few days.
After he got dressed he began pacing his cell, five steps to the steel door, turn, five steps back. If indeed Bill Lacey had been contacted at the embassy the wheels in Washington would be in motion. At the very least they would stave off any possibility of a death penalty. It was likely that he would be sentenced to a few years imprisonment, probably even here in Moscow. But even Francis Gary Powers had been quickly released. Spies were exchanged on a regular basis.
It could be months, or possibly even a couple of years, but he was definitely going home to the desk, because from this point on he would present too high a profile for fieldwork. Langley had many such men forever denied sensitive foreign postings.
He stopped. They had his confession, according to the attorney, which meant they had broken him. Or had they? Was it all a big ploy? Was this just another of Miroshnikov’s little tricks? Was this simply another of the interrogator’s phases? Perhaps there wasn’t going to be a trial just yet. Perhaps he would be taken instead back to Miroshnikov, or perhaps back to the torture chamber.
The Scorpius Network was a long time ago. The information by now was outdated. What was of more immediate importance was Voronin, and yet his name had never come up. He searched his memory, but he could not recall being asked, other than in a superficial manner, exactly what he had been doing so late out on the streets the night of his arrest. Had they operated with blinders on, so excited by the prospect of catching an American spy, that they had missed the obvious? Or had he missed the obvious?
Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. Zebra One, Zebra Two. What the hell did it mean? Thinking about it now, he was no longer certain that those words had simply been the ravings of a man gone finally mad. They were cryptic, yes, but they had cadence, they hinted at some abbreviated message, there was meaning. Some sort of a connection between Washington and Moscow? How was that possible, he wondered. And what was or were Zebra One and Two? Obviously code words. Zebra One, a man in Washington and Zebra Two, a man in Moscow? Or was he chasing a will-o’-the-wisp after all? He began his pacing again, five steps to the steel door, turn, and five steps back again, as he tried to get himself ready for whatever would be coming next.
The two armed guards came for him early in the afternoon, and he fell in between them as they marched wordlessly down the broad, stone-walled corridor. At the end they entered an elevator. On the way up both guards stared at McAllister as if he were a wild animal who at any moment might try to run. The flaps of their holsters were undone. One of them rested his hand on the butt of his pistol.
It was to be a trial after all.
He was in the Lubyanka, that much he knew, which was located on Dzerzhinsky Square downtown. In the old days, before the war, this building had housed the All-Russian Insurance Company. Nazi POWs had been made to build a big new addition to the building which was then used to house the NKGB and NKVD which were the forerunners of the modern-day Soviet Secret Service.The elevator opened onto another corridor, this one like the one below, deserted. They turned right, marched to the end and suddenly they were outside in a narrow lane that led up from a broad courtyard. It was very cold. A black windowless van was waiting for them, and McAllister was hustled inside, and the doors slammed shut before he had a chance to savor the frigid air and bright afternoon sun, his first for a very long time. As on the elevator, his guards carefully watched him as the van lurched forward, turned, slowed, turned again, and then accelerated, the driver crashing through the gears.
He hadn’t really expected to stand trial at the Lubyanka. It would have been like holding a trial for an accused Russian spy at CIA headquarters in Langley. Where exactly he would be tried, however, would depend upon how important they thought he was, and how out of the eyes of the foreign press they wanted to keep it. His answer came fifteen minutes later when they finally stopped and the back doors were opened. McAllister instantly recognized the place from his briefings. It was the Lefortovsky Military Prison in Moscow’s northeastern district. The most ominous of any trial location for him. Security was tight here, and in the rear courtyard they executed people.
Here, he realized, his life could very well end. They entered through a back door, walked down a short narrow corridor and took one flight of stairs up, where they were made to wait in a large office at which a half a dozen military clerks were busy at their desks. None of them bothered to look up. McAllister watched the secondhand on the clock above the door, suddenly fascinated with time. It had been weeks since he had had any notion of the hour or minute. It was a few minutes before three now. In the afternoon. He tried to imagine what was happening at the embassy, and what Gloria would be doing.
The door opened and Tarasenko, his attorney, beckoned to them. McAllister’s guard accompanied him inside. At the head of the large room was the raised bench for the three judges, called tribunals in the Soviet judicial system, flanked by the Soviet flag and the State Prosecutor’s flag, and backed by a photograph of Lenin. The Moscow District Prosecutor was seated on the right with Chief Interrogator Miroshnikov and General Suslev, the man who had arrested him. William Lacey, the American charge d’affaires, was the only person in the gallery. When McAllister was ushered in he jumped up. “You have just a moment or two before it begins,” Tarasenko said. Lacey was a tall, slightly built, angular-faced man, with thinning gray hair, who always dressed impeccably in three-piece suits. His overcoat and Russian fur hat were lying on the bench beside him. He made no move to come over. McAllister tried to read something in the man’s expression, but he could not. Tarasenko moved off to the defense attorney’s table to the left of the bench, and McAllister stepped over to where Lacey was waiting.
“Christ, am I glad to see you, Bill,” McAllister said, keeping his voice low.
“How are you, are you all right?” Lacey asked, searching McAllister’s face.
“I’ve been better. How about getting me out of here?”
“We’re working on it, Mac. But listen, Langley says for you to plead guilty to whatever you’re charged with.”
McAllister stiffened. This wasn’t what he had expected at all. “Listen to me, goddamnit. Plead guilty, and you’ll probably be sentenced to immediate expulsion from the Soviet Union. We grabbed one of their people two weeks ago in New York. He was operating out of the UN, and they’ve been making all the right noises to get him
