away.
“Who else knows?” Borodin shouted. “No one.”
“Miroshnikov must have heard you. He must have known. Did he end you?”
“He’s dead. I killed him. He didn’t know…. He didn’t have anyidea….” McAllister wanted to let go, to lie back in the snow and let the darkness envelop him. Just a little longer. “Then who sent you?”
“No one,” McAllister said with a supreme effort. “Harman’s dead. Potemkin is dead. I killed them all. There’s only my friend Highnote and you. Zebra One and Zebra Two. Traitors. Killers. No one else is left. Again Borodin was silent. McAllister managed to raise his head and look up at the man.
“Tell me,” he croaked.
“You incredible fool,” General Borodin said. “You’re telling me now that Robert Highnote is a Russian agent. We’d suspected that for some time. But even I didn’t know. He must have worked for Gennadi. I’m not God, I can’t know everything. Like you, we are compartmentalized. Terrible waste.” Borodin shook his head. “But it is true that my code name is Zebra Two. It has been for a long time. Too long a time.”
“Who is Zebra One, you sonofabitch? Who is the traitor in Washington?”
“There is no other traitor in Washington, don’t you understand, you poor bastard? I’m the traitor to my government. Zebra One is my control officer. I have been working for your government for nearly twenty years.”
Like another starburst in McAllister’s head, he suddenly could hear Janos Sikorski’s last words. “Traitor,” he had screamed that night. Janos had known. “Sikorski,” he said.
“Yes,” Borodin was saying. “He might have known. But no one else. It’s the reason we’ve survived all these years. We’ve managed to keep it contained. Voronin may have stumbled across the code names but he could have no idea who we were.”
“Christ,” McAllister said. “Oh, Christ.”
Borodin laid his rifle down, and he helped McAllister to his feet.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, but I can’t leave you out here to die. Not like this…
A rifle shot cracked from the end of the driveway, the bullet smacking into Borodin’s right shoulder, sending him stumbling forward, he and McAllister falling down in a heap.“Traitor,” someone shouted in Russian.
Borodin’s face was inches from McAllister’s. “Kiselev,” he said in pain. “My secretary. He’s come back.” He tried to reach in his coat pocket, but his arm was useless. “My gun,” he whispered. “In my pocket! McAllister!”
McAllister managed to get his right arm around, his numb hand fumbling in Borodin’s coat pocket, finding the pistol, his fingers curling around the grip.
A short, squat man suddenly appeared overhead, a rifle held loosely in his hands, his right eyebrow rising. “So,” he said. “It is a nest of spies.”
McAllister pulled the pistol out of Borodin’s pocket, thumbed off the safety and raised it over the general’s heavy body, his vision going double again, the world starting to spin.
Kiselev started to rear back, bringing the rifle up, when McAllister fired, the shot catching the man in the right eye, blowing off the back of his head and flinging him backward. McAllister was drifting then. He laid his head down on the soft, warm snow.
He was vaguely conscious of Borodin’s weight being off him, and he wanted to say something, but the general was gone. Someone else was coming. Lights… headlights, perhaps. And voices. Drifting, McAllister thought these new people were speaking English, but that wasn’t possible. This was Russia, the Istra river..
Stephanie’s face loomed into view above him, and he managed to smile. There was so much he wanted to tell her, but that opportunity was gone, lost forever, like so many other opportunities. She was speaking, saying something to him. He could hear the words as they flowed around him, but he could not make out the meaning, nor could he understand when strong hands were lifting him carrying him, helping him across the clearing, because the blackness had descended over him and he was safe.
Chapter 33
On the morning that David McAllister awoke from his coma, sat up, and asked the startled nurse for a glass of water in a very clear voice, the sun was streaming in his fourth-floor window.
She immediately rang for the doctor and then eased him back on his pillow. “Take it easy now, Mr. McAllister.”
Her voice was soothing, and he found that he was drifting and he really didn’t want the water after all. But he was vaguely aware of his body. There wasn’t much pain, only a detached feeling. At one point he nearly panicked; this was the Lubyanka all over again, his detachment was from the drugs they were feeding him, and he expected to see Miroshnikov come through the door at any moment. But then the chief interrogator was dead, as were so many others. So many.
Over the next few days, or was it weeks? — he would never be quite sure about this period of his life-the episodes of wakefulness came more and more often, and gradually the feeling of detachment began to leave him. At times, he was dully aware that there were people around him other than the doctors and nurses; talking, looking at him, but he was never able to put their faces into any semblance of recognizable order, though once or twice he thought Stephanie might have been there, but that too was unlikely unless the KGB had arrested her.
Still at other times he was running through a dark woods, the sounds of his pursuers not very far behind him. The border was just a few hundred meters to the west, but he didn’t think he was going to make it. Helicopters were searching for him, and they had sent the dogs to pick up his trail. Once he even cried out in the night, his bed soaked with sweat, and gentle hands were touching his body, a cool cloth on his forehead. Until one night when he woke from a deep, dreamless sleep and sat up in the bed. The door to the corridor was open. A nurse stood there looking at him.
“Hello,” he said.
“Well, hello to you, Mr. McAllister,” she said, smiling. “How do you feel?”
“Thirsty,” he said. “And damned hungry.”
The doctor came before he was fed and asked him a lot of questions about his legs, about his breathing and mostly about his memory which seemed intact. As he was being examined, he thought about everything that had happened to him up to the point of General Borodin’s revelation that night at the dacha. After that there was nothing, only the vaguest of feelings and impressions floating just at the back of his brain. General Borodin was Zebra Two, and he had been working for us through a control officer here in Washington. Was it possible? Or had it been another monstrous lie? He didn’t know what was going to happen to him now, only that somehow he was back in Washington. Alive.
Dexter Kingman showed up first thing in the morning, shooing the nurse away and closing the door. He drew up a chair next to McAllister’s bed.
“They say you’ll be playing tennis within two months,” the big chief of security said, his southern accent soft.
McAllister grinned. “I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “I was never able to play the game before.”
Kingman laughed. “Dexter Kingman,” he said, holding out his hand.
McAllister shook it. “I figured as much. What’s my status here?”
“You’re still on the payroll, if that’s what you mean.”
“Nobody’s gunning for me?”
“Not at the moment.”
McAllister lay back against his pillow. “It’s over?” he asked. “Except for the questions, and there’s going to be a whole lot of those in the coming weeks. Once you’re up to it.”
McAllister focused on him. “What the hell happened out there?“ Again Kingman smiled. “Stephanie Albright is what happened. She doesn’t give up so easily.” He hesitated for a moment. “I think some of this is going to come as quite a shock to you.”
“I’ve had quite a few over the past few…” McAllister glanced toward the window, but he couldn’t see much except for a clear blue sky and some other buildings in the distance. “What day is this?”
“Tuesday,” Kingman said. “April fifth.” McAllister’s heart skipped a beat. He couldn’t say anything. “Yeah,”
