McAllister. “But of course you couldn’t.”
A narrow road, barely a track through the snow, led back up into the trees. Miroshnikov downshifted and the little car bumped its way up a shallow hill, then down the other side around a steep curve. When he stopped the car they were completely out of sight of the highway. Only the trees were visible in any direction. Not a single sign of human habitation marred the desolate landscape.
“You won’t kill me, I don’t think,” Miroshnikov said. McAllister raised the automatic. Little spots of light danced in his eyes, like flickering embers from a campfire.
“I’m going to help you, as I have from the beginning, Mac. Believe me, I will turn out to be a good friend. Your only friend.”
The interrogator opened the car door and got out. “Where are you going?” McAllister shouted, suddenly rousing himself.
“For a smoke, nothing more. We will talk, and in the end you will see that together we can kill this general of yours, and together we will run to the West. We will be heroes, you and I. Believe me, we are going to have a splendid time.”
McAllister got out of the car as Miroshnikov was lighting a cigarette. The interrogator offered it across the hood of the car, but McAllister refused. The extremely cold wind bit at his face and ears, and his bare hands began to turn numb, but his head was clearing.
“We’ll do it tonight,” Miroshnikov said. “He is a difficult man. But with you I think it will be possible. Anything is possible.”
“He’s one of yours, why would you want to kill him?” Miroshnikov scowled. “He’s Russian, not one of mine.”
“And you?”
“Siberian. There is a big and very important difference, Mac. I will explain it to you someday.”
With Miroshnikov distanced across the car, and with the cold windcontinuing to clear his head, McAllister could begin to think again. He was no longer mesmerized by the interrogator… who after all was nothing more than a man.
“What did you do to me in the Lubyanka?” Miroshnikov had started to raise the cigarette to his lips, but his hand stopped halfway. “I saved your life.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You were a spy. You had been caught with a weapon in your possession. You should have gotten the death penalty. I prevented it.”
“How?”
“By convincing General Suslev, the head of my division, that you would be of more use to us in the States than in a Gulag, or two meters down.”
McAllister could feel his finger tightening on the Makarov’s trigger. He had no idea how much pressure it would take before the gun fired.
Miroshnikov saw it. “What did you do to me?”
“I convinced Suslev that I had turned you into an agent for us. The chances that it would work, that you could convince your people you were legitimate, were slight. But even a small chance is better than none.”
“What did you do?” McAllister shouted into the wind. “You son-of-a-bitch, what happened?”
Miroshnikov let the cigarette fall to the ground. “I gave you. motivation.”
“What else?”
“I gave you my… hate. I gave you.. “They were waiting to kill me in New York. Who ordered that?”
“I don’t know.”
McAllister cocked the Makarov’s hammer. “Who told them I would be coming in on that flight?”
“Potemkin,” Miroshnikov cried. “How did he know?” Miroshnikov said nothing.“How?”
“I told him that someone ordered your release, and that you knew about the O’Haire network.”
“You set me up.”
“I knew he would fail. He was a fool, like the others. Not like you!
I knew that you would survive. I recognized it in your eyes the first time I saw you.”
“Why?” McAllister shouted. “Why did you do this?”
“I knew that if you survived New York you wouldn’t stop until you had found out who tried to kill you. I knew that you would discover our CIA agent.”
“Harman wasn’t CIA.”
“I didn’t know about him. I’m talking about Robert Highnote. Your friend.”
All the air seemed to be gone. McAllister couldn’t catch his breath. His hands began to shake.
“You didn’t know?” Miroshnikov cried in alarm. “Highnote?”
“He and Potemkin worked together. Have for years. I wanted to strike back.”
Highnote. The years of their friendship, their mutual trust, their assignments together, all of it came as a whole to McAllister. A huge, hurtful, impossibly heavy weight on his shoulders. He was Atlas. Only his burden was overwhelming.
“And you did it,” Miroshnikov said. “You struck back. You ruined them.”
McAllister was shaking his head. He lowered the pistol and turned away. He remembered an evening in particular; he and Highnote had gone out on Berlin’s Ku-Damm and had gotten stinking drunk. They’d been celebrating something…. He couldn’t quite remember just what. When they got back to the apartment, Merrilee and Gloria were waiting up for them, angry at first, but they’d all ended up laughing so hard that Merrilee had actually wet her pants. Good memories. Fine times.
“Now we’ll finish it, Mac. You and I. We’ve come so far together…
“It was you all along,” McAllister said, amazed.“Borodin is the last of it. We’ll kill him and then get out.”
“You,” McAllister said, his voice rising as he started to turn, bringing the gun up.
“I saved your life,” Miroshnikov screamed.
“But you took my soul,” McAllister shouted, and he fired, the shot catching Miroshnikov in the center of his forehead, and he seemed to fall backward into the snow forever.
Chapter 32
Stephanie Albright paid her lunch bill and walked across the crowded restaurant to the elevator. After twenty-four hours alone in her hotel room she had been unable to stand the isolation any longer and had left. For an hour she had wandered around Helsinki’s beautiful downtown area, passing the ornately designed opera house and the old church on Lonnrotinkatu, but the weather was so bitterly cold that she had finally ducked into the Hotel Torni with its tower restaurant that afforded a view of the entire city. Alone, as she had often been in her life, she had done a great deal of thinking about David, about the insanity they had somehow lived through over the past weeks. Something was driving him. That had been obvious from the first moment she’d laid eyes on him.
Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. Zebra One, Zebra Two. Janos Sikorski had known what those words meant. And his reaction when David had spoken them had been immediate and violent.
“Who else have you spoken those words to?” Sikorski had demanded.
Picturing the scene, she remembered that by then she had been out of the kitchen. But just before the shot had been fired, she heard the old man scream: “Traitor! They’ll give me a medal for your body!”
It hadn’t made sense then, and it made less sense now. Sikorski had been long out of the business, retired to his cabin outside of Reston, and yet he had known and understood the meaning of Zebra One, Zebra Two. Whoever those two were-if they were real-they had evidently been in place for a long time. All the way back to when Sikorski was still active.
But he had called David a traitor. Why? What did it mean? She’d waited only twenty-four hours. David had asked for forty-eightbefore she was to begin making noises. But she couldn’t stand it any longer. It had gone too far. In fact it had gone too far the moment she’d allowed him to board the plane for Moscow.
Oh, God, David, she cried to herself riding the elevator down, where are you? What is happening to you? It was time now, she decided, for the insanity to finally end. Time to get him out of Russia.
