Reaching the lobby she crossed to the line of telephones and placed a call to the American Embassy on Itainen Puistotie. While she waited for the connection to be made, she tried to calm down. But it was difficult.
It rang, and she tightened her grip on the telephone. “This is Stephanie Albright, and I need some help.”
“Yes, ma’am,” a man with a pleasant voice answered. “Are you an American citizen?” Hadn’t he heard that along with McAllister she was wanted for murder? Was it possible? “Yes, I am,” she said.
“Are you presently here in Helsinki?”
“Listen to me,” Stephanie said. “I want you to tell someone upstairs that I’m here in the city. And I want a message sent to Dexter Kingman. He is chief of the CIA’s Office of Security in Langley. Do you have that?”
“Ma’am, I don’t know what you’re talking about. But if you are here in Helsinki I think it might be easier for you to get help if you came to the embassy. I’m sure that someone here..
“Goddamnit,” Stephanie shouted. “You’re not listening to me. Take my name upstairs and give them the message.”
“Upstairs?”
“He’ll be a special assistant to the ambassador.”
“Who will?”
“Your CIA bureau chief.”
“I don’t
“Just do it,” Stephanie snapped. “I’ll call back in exactly thirty minutes.” She hung up the phone and stood there shaking for a moment or two, until she got hold of herself, then she turned, crossed the lobby to the front doors and outside headed the few blocks to her hotel on Bulevardi. She and McAllister were registered under the names on their diplomatic passports. It would do the embassy no good to search for Stephanie Albright. Officially she wasn’t in Finland.
Time, she thought. It was crucial now. If she could convince someone in the embassy to patch her through to Dexter on a secure line, and if she could convince him of everything that had happened, it was just possible word could be sent to our embassy in Moscow. Someone there would know General Borodin, and would know how to reach David. They had to! It was just a few minutes past two by the time she reached the Klaus Kurki Hotel, and took the elevator up to her floor. She was thoroughly chilled. Walking outside she had thought again about David in Moscow. He too would be cold and frightened. But he wouldn’t be feeling the pain. His concentration would be on one man. For him there would be nothing else.
She unlocked her door and stepped into the room as a smiling Robert Highnote, his overcoat off and tossed casually on the bed, turned away from the window.
“Hello, Stephanie,” he said.
Shock mixed with an instant feeling of relief rebounded from her stomach, and her knees were suddenly weak. “Oh, God,” she said. “How did you find me?”
“I had your diplomatic passports flagged here in Helsinki. Mac’s artist in Munich did a fine job, from what I can gather.”
“He’s gone to Moscow,” Stephanie said, and she suddenly remembered the open door behind her. She turned and closed it.
“After General Borodin?” Highnote asked.
“Yes, and we’ve got to help him,” she said turning back. Her heart skipped a beat.
Highnote held a small, flat automatic in his hand, pointed at her, a wistful expression on his face, almost as if he were sorry for what he was doing. It all came to her now. The Russians waiting for Mac outside Highnote’s house. The killers coming for him at Highnote’s sailboat. Even the killers at Sikorski’s. Highnote knew Mac’s tradecraft well. He knew that Mac would be showing up there sooner or later. And Highnote was the only one who had survived the shooting in CollegePark. He had taken a terrible risk, but the prize had evidently been worth it to him.
“It wasn’t Harman,” she said, finding her voice. “It was you all along.”
“It was both of us, actually,” Highnote said. “Though at first I had no idea that Donald was in on the action as well. We never worked together.”
“Then which one of you was Zebra One?”
Highnote shook his head. “I have no idea what that means, Miss Albright. Of course you don’t have to believe me, but it’s the truth.”
“The O’Haire organization was called the Zebra Network.”
“That’s correct. But there never were any such code words as Zebra One or Zebra Two.”
“Who did you work with?”
“Poor Gennadi Potemkin,” Highnote said, his jaw tightening. “We had done good things together. And we would have done much more if Mac hadn’t come after us.”
“Why?”
Highnote managed his wan smile again. “A very large question,” he said. “Which I don’t have the time or patience to answer at this moment. Suffice it to say that in a world in which fingers are poised over tens of thousands of nuclear triggers, the only guarantee of safety is in knowing each other’s true intentions. It is the only way, I can assure you, that we can possibly avoid a nuclear confrontation.”
There was an old CIA acronym for why spies defected. She’d heard it during training at the Farm. MICE, which stood for Money, Ideology, compromise, and Ego. Highnote certainly hadn’t become a traitor for money. Ideology? Compromise, as he suggested now? Or had it simply been ego? He was the last bastion of hope for the survival of mankind. Had he become so egocentric that he believed that? “It wasn’t Mac and me at College Park.”
“I know that.”
“Who then?”
“I’m not one hundred percent sure, but I suspect Don Harman probably arranged it.”
“Why?”
“Again the very big question,” he said. “Because, my dear, noone believes any longer that you and Mac are traitors or killers. We were meeting to discuss a way in which to convince you of just that. We wanted to bring you in to safety so that we could find out what was going on.”
“But we would have been killed the moment we showed our faces.”
“Yes.”
Stephanie’s head was spinning again. “Then what has this entire thing been all about?”
“That is one question I cannot answer, because I don’t know. I’m just as much in the dark as everyone else. But it doesn’t matter any longer, you see, because Mac certainly won’t survive against General Borodin… I called him and warned him that Mac was coming. and you, unfortunately, won’t survive either.”
“No,” Stephanie screamed, and she dove to the left through the open bathroom door as Highnote fired, the shot plucking at her coat sleeve.
A tremendous crash shook the walls, and the corridor door burst inward, the door lock shattering, the entire frame splintering.
Highnote fired again, someone cried out, and a half a dozen other shots were fired from what sounded like at least three different weapons.
Stephanie was scrambling up and frantically trying to shove the bathroom door closed when Dexter Kingman appeared, blood leaking from his left arm, just below his shoulder.
“Dexter?” she cried.
“It’s all right, kid, we heard enough,” Kingman said, his southern drawl tinged with pain.
Others were crowding into the room past him. She picked herself up.
“It’s not all right, Mac is in Moscow! We’ve got to help him!” Kingman was shaking his head. “I don’t think that’s possible.”
General Aleksandr Ilyich Borodin got up from where he’d been kneeling in the snow fifty meters from the end of his driveway, and looked back through the trees toward the main road. It was late afternoon and already getting dark, but he could still make out the silhouette of the covered bridge that crossed the river. If McAllister came… when McAllister came… it would be from that direction. By car or on foot? Either, for the American, would be impossible. Yet McAllister had seemed to have done just that and more already.
Again Borodin struggled with the same questions that had been eating at him all along. Why was McAllister
