“I’m watching them roll down the runway right now,” George Mueler said. “I can have the flight recalled.”
“Where is he going?”
“Helsinki.”
“Oh, Christ,” Sanderson said, looking at Kingman. “Shall I stop him?” Mueller was asking. “Who is on that flight?” Kingman asked.
“Highnote,” Sanderson said. “Either McAllister and the Albright woman are in Helsinki, or Highnote is trying to make a run for the Soviet border.”
“What?” Mueller shouted. “What’d you say?”
“Don’t stop him,” Sanderson said. “I’ll call the Pentagon and arange another flight for you and Dexter Kingman. He’ll be on his way out there immediately.”
“We’ll never catch up with him.”
“Perhaps not, but we won’t be far behind,” Sanderson said. “Just stand by out there.” He hung up the telephone. “Will you help now?” he asked Kingman. “If McAllister and Stephanie believe that Highnote is there to help them, he’ll be able to kill them with no problem. They won’t be expecting it.”
“Will you help?” Sanderson repeated.
“Yes,” Kingman said numbly. “They could be warned. We could get a message to them somehow.”
“I’ll call Van Skike, and he can arrange something with the Agency in Helsinki, but they’re not to be warned.” Sudden understanding dawned on Kingman. “Mac and Stephanie they’re to be used as bait.”
Sanderson nodded. “What we have on Highnote is circumstantial. Do you still want to help?”
“I don’t have much of a choice, do I?” Kingman said, getting to his feet.
“None of us do,” Sanderson said.
Somehow, God help him, the night had passed. Lying fully clothed on his bed in the Berlin Hotel around the corner from the Lubyanka, McAllister tried to put everything into perspective as the sky outside of his window began to lighten with Monday’s dawn. He could still feel Stephanie’s touch, her body a dark warm secret enfolding him. They’d made love at their hotel in Helsinki before his afternoon flight left for Moscow. They’d been tender with each other until the end when she didn’t want to let go. He had been unable to ease her pain or his fear. “It’s crazy,” she had cried in anguish.
The last irrational act of an irrational man. But even now when he still had the ability to turn back, to check out of the hotel and take the next flight out to Helsinki, he could not do it. He was driven, there was no denying it. Even in the innermost recesses of his mind he understood that the acts he had set in motion had no basis in reality. At least in any reality that he could put into words so that he could understand. Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. Zebra one, Zebra Two. Washington was finished for him. Now it was time for Moscow so that he could complete the circle of insanity that had begun for him one evening late in October.
We have made progress together, you and I. I am so very proud of you, Mac, so very pleased.
His interrogator’s name had been Miroshnikov. He was a KGB colonel. That much McAllister knew, but very little else other than a vision of the man’s face overhead, his eyes small, narrow, close-set, but with no bottoms. He also could see Miroshnikov seated across from him in the interrogation room. He was a large man, his complexion almost yellow, an Oriental cast to his features.
You thought you could do more for your country with woros than bullets, is that it?… In the end you will talk to me, they all do.. You, my dear McAllister, are definitely a resource…. Believe me, we are going to have a splendid time together, you and I.. Bits and pieces of Miroshnikov’s words drifted through McAllister’s mind, but there was more. There had been much more between the time he had begun to disintegrate and the night his heart had stopped on the table. Wisps of something… snatches of conversations that he could not put words to… drifted just out of reach at the back of his head. Zebra One had evidently been Donald Harman, and Zebra Two was General Borodin. But who was Borodin? What was Borodin? How had he managed to get to a man such as Donald Harman and turn him? More important at this point, how was McAllister going to get to the general? He got up from the bed and walked across to the window where he looked out at Detsky Mir, the children’s department store, and beyond it toward Dzerzhinsky Square. It was past seven and traffic was beginning to pick up with the morning. It would be time to go soon, he thought.
They’d had no problem getting out of Munich Sunday morning. The passports were perfect as were the visa stamps in McAllister’s. Their first test came in Helsinki, but on the basis of their diplomatic status hey had been given preferential treatment and had been passed hrough customs without any of the usual checks. Sunday afternoon Stephanie had taken a cab out to the airport with him, and had watched him board the Aeroflot flight for Moscow. As the plane had taxied away from the terminal he had looked for her, but she had already gone.
If he failed, he had thought at that moment, so would she. Their lives had been inextricably intertwined from the moment she had fished him out of the Potomac River in Dumfries.
Thank you for saving my life, darling, but you should have turned your back on me while you still had the chance. Now there was absolutely nothing he could do for her.
At Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport his passport had received much more scrutiny than in Helsinki, but as with the Finns, the Russian officials treated him with respect, and within twenty minutes of his arrival in customs hall, he had been cleared through passport control and had taken a taxi into the city.
He turned away from the window and tiredly went into the tiny bathroom where he looked at his haggard reflection in the mirror. His hair was extremely short and dyed jet black. His skin all over his body had been made several shades darker than his normal coloring by a dye made from almond shells. His eyebrows had been thickened, he had been given an excellent mustache and once again he wore the clear-lensed glasses Stephanie had purchased for him in Baltimore what seemed like centuries ago.
He ran his fingers across the bristle of his hair, wiped the sweat off his forehead with a towel then walked back into the bedroom. He pulled on his sport coat and then a lined nylon jacket.
Run, he thought.
KGB Headquarters was housed in a complex of unmarked buildings on Dzerzhinsky Square a couple of blocks north of the Kremlin and barely a hundred yards from the Berlin Hotel. The main building of gray stone rose nine stories from street level. Behind it one of the older sections enclosed a courtyard on one side of which was the Lubyanka Prison. It was just eight o’clock and traffic was heavy as the first of the KGB officers and clerks began showing up for work at the six pedestrian gates. From where he stood, pretending to read Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper on display in a glass-enclosed bulletin board, McAllister could see all six of the gates. The entrance to the Lubyanka Prison gate was a dozen steps away. People streamed past him, all of them in a hurry, intent on getting to work. He had been inside. Even now the thought was chillingly unreal to him. They’d held him for more than a month, feeding him drugs, depriving him of proper food and rest, relentlessly questioning him, over and over, and finally the torture. Most of it was gray or even nonexistent in his memory, exept that the experience had fostered a deep, smoldering hate in him. Except for the highest Party and government officials, parking was a premium downtown. Miroshnikov was just an interrogator, he would not rate a parking space within the complex. The KGB maintained several lots within a block or so of the square, though most ower-grade clerks and officers could not afford to maintain an automobile, so took the subway or buses to work. Standing shivering in the intense cold, McAllister knew that he was on a fool’s mission. Miroshnikov might not be coming to work this morning. Perhaps not until later. Or perhaps he had come early. Or, perhaps there were other entrances, other ways of getting into the complex.
For a while, surreptitiously watching the people, he was afraid that even if Miroshnikov did show up this morning, he wouldn’t recognize the Russian. He searched that part of his memory, but the only thing that stood out besides the fact that the interrogator had been a large man, were his eyes. Looking at Miroshnikov, he remembered thinking from the first days of his interrogation, you only saw the eyes and nothing else.
It was also possible, McAllister worried, that Miroshnikov would be using the prison gate to enter the complex. He might use any of the other five pedestrian entrances. Perhaps his office was somewhere within the main building that housed most of the KGB directorates.
He stepped away from the newspaper display case and stared intently down the street. He could see the other gates from here, but at this distance he surely wouldn’t be able to pick one man out of the crowd; or even if he could, he wouldn’t be able to reach him before he entered the building. Once inside he would be untouchable for the remainder of the day. In despair, McAllister turned back, and Miroshnikov was there! Barely twenty feet away. Towering over most of the people around him, he walked with his head bent, a thick leather briefcase in his left
