The Zebra Network Read online

  The Zebra Network

  Sean Flannery

  David MacAllister was the CIA's "golden boy," itstil his arrest. Dragged through the mind-bending torture chambers of the infamous Lubyanka, he is convicted of espionage and then set free. Now, both sides want him dead, and time is running out to prove his innocence.

  Sean Flannery

  The Zebra Network

  Preface

  WASHINGTON

  Accused Russian spy network kingpin James Franklin O’Haire, 42, pleaded guilty Monday to charges of espionage and income tax evasion.

  Along with his younger brother, U.S. Air Force Captain Liam Casey O’Haire, 37, who pleaded guilty to the same charges last week, James O’Haire will likely be sentenced to life imprisonment. Both brothers would be eligible for parole in 25 years.

  The O’Haires were indicted in July after a two-year investigation by the U.S. Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Investigators charge that James O’Haire headed the spy ring that included seven other men and women besides his brother to hand over U.S. technical and military secrets to the Soviet Union.

  The other seven, who also pleaded guilty, will be sentenced in U.S. District Court next month.

  Investigators say the full extent of the damage the O’Haire spy ring inflicted on U.S. interests may never be known. But they say it is extensive” and includes information about the so-called Star Wars, Strategic Defense Initiative.

  The last similar spy case in this country involved the Walker family in 1986.

  Chapter 1

  October had come early to Moscow. A few minutes after ten on an evening late in the month, the air was January-crisp. Snow lay everywhere in big dirty piles. Moscow was an eastern city; dark, brooding, mysterious. The onion domes of St. Basil’s on Red Square seemed a natural counterpoint to the Kremlin’s Spassky Tower. A trollybus rattled by. Two soldiers, drunk stupid on vodka, paused beneath a streetlight to pass their bottle. An official Zil limousine raced along the right-hand lane, ignoring the stoplights.

  A tall, well-built American stepped from the doorway of a dumpy apartment building on Yelizarovoy Street, just around the corner from the Embassy of Chad. He hunched up his coat collar, looked both ways up the deserted street, and started on foot to where he had parked his car two blocks away. He was just a little disgusted with himself, and nervous. From time to time he looked over his shoulder as if he knew that someone or something might be coming after him. At the end of the block he looked back once more to the secondstory apartment window still lit with a dull yellow glow. He was never going back. No reason for it. Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. Zebra One, Zebra Two. They were Voronin’s words. Cryptic. Spoken in a self-pitying drunken haze. Spittle had run down the cripple’s stubbled chin, his rheumy eyes hazed with cataracts, his fists pounding on his useless legs.

  This is the end then, the American thought turning once again and heading the last blocks to his car. “When they start talking claptrap, boyo, it’s time to get yourself free lest you get caught with your paws up some girl’s panties.” For six months he’d worked Viktor Voronin, who had until eighteen months ago been an officer in the KGB. A stupid, senseless automobile accident had crippled the man for life. The KGB had retired him, of course, and he’d begun drinking on the same evening he got religion. No more wars, he rambled. A world state in which everyone is equal. The perfect socialism. But Voronin had been a gold seam. The mother lode. Some of what he had provided them had been stunning, hadn’t it? Worth the risks. But tonight the clock had run down. Voronin had finally slipped into a fantasy world in which he began to mix the truth with his wild imaginings. He could no longer be considered reliable. Look to Washington. Look to Moscow. What the hell was it supposed to mean? Zebra One, Zebra Two.

  He decided that his final report could wait until morning. It would go out with the daily summaries to Langley by four in the afternoon, Moscow Civil Time. Operation Look Back was finished, and he was glad of it. From start to finish it hadn’t been his sort of project. “Listening to old bitter men vehemently denying their own countries, spewing out their hate and vindictiveness is like digging through someone’s rotting garbage looking for a decent meal,” he’d said.

  At thirty-nine, David McAllister-Mac to his wife and friends did not like hiding in closets, skulking around dark corners, opening other people’s mail, or listening to their personal telephone conversations. An unlikely combination for a spy, he supposed, but then he’d never known a spy who was-likely. He was a cautious man, which came from his Scots’ heritage, though the nearest he’d ever come to his distant past was an admitted enjoyment of bagpipe skirling and a pride in his grandfather, Stewart Alvin McAllister, who’d come down to London from Edinburgh to straighten out the fledgling British Secret Intelligence Service during the first world war. His father, who had immigrated to the States in the early twenties, had joined the U.S. Army, had risen to the rank of brigadier general, and had been one of the shakers and movers of the OSS during the second world war, and the CIA afterward. The military, spying, and tradecraft… all these things were in McAllister’s blood. Not babysitting old bitter men with an axe to grind.

  McAllister’s little Fiat was parked half up on the curb in the middle of a narrow, deserted block. He took out his car keys as he reached it at the same moment a pair of headlights appeared at the end of the street. He stopped and looked over his shoulder as another pair of headlights appeared from behind. Both vehicles stopped.

  They’d blocked off his only exits. McAllister forced himself to remain calm as he stepped back and put his hand in his coat pocket, his fingers curling around the grip of his Beretta 9 mm automatic. Carrying a gun around Moscow is madness, his station chief had argued. “Until you need it,” he countered.

  An amplified voice, speaking English, came from the end of the street. “Put your hands up, please, in very plain sight.”

  McAllister hesitated. Two men stepped out of the doorway of an apartment building across the sidewalk from his Fiat. They were dressed in civilian clothes, but they were armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles. In unison they drew back the ejector slides.

  Do not be foolish, Mr. McAllister. Do as you are told,” the amplified voice instructed.

  Two other men appeared on the opposite side of the street. There were no lights in any of the apartments. The streetlights were out as well. He should have noticed. Above, on the roofs on both sides of the street, he could make out the shadowy figures of at least a dozen marksmen. They’d gone through a lot of trouble to get him. Because of Voronin? He doubted it. They would have arrested him there. Slowly he took his hand out of his pocket and then raised both hands over his head.

  A short, very thin man dressed in a fur hat and bulky sheepskin coat came up the street. He was dark, in a Georgian sort of a way, and intense, his motions quick, birdlike. He stopped a couple of feet away.

  “David Stewart McAllister,” he said, his English thick with a Russian accent. He smiled. “At last. You are under arrest.”

  “Charged with what?” McAllister asked, keeping calm. He’d be reported missing within a couple of hours. Gloria would call the Embassy.

  “Spying against the Soviet Union,” the little man said.

  The morning came cold and dark gray as General Aleksandr Ilyich Borodin stepped from the elevator on the fourth floor of KGB’s Lubyanka Headquarters and charged down the corridor to his office, like a one-man freight train. He was a tall man, by Russian standards, thick of neck and broad of chest, with a nearly bald head and deep, penetrating eyes. Except for a certain overzealousness when it came to some of his projects, it was rumored that he could have risen to director of the Komitet. For the moment, it w
as said that wiser heads prevailed in the Kremlin which held him as director of the First Chief Directorate’s Special Counterintelligence Service II, charged with penetrating foreign secret intelligence operations.

  On the way in from his dacha on the Istra River outside of town, the general had run through the morning reports his driver had brought out. And now he was angry that he had not been included in last night’s operation.

  “Good morning, Comrade General,” his secretary said as Borodin charged through his outer office and into his own private domain with its view of Dzerzhinsky Square. “Get me General Suslev on the telephone,” Borodin bellowed, throwing off his great coat and lighting a cigarette.

  How could one hope to run an overseas operation without knowing what was happening in one’s own back yard? All the years of work could easily be escaping like a puff of smoke. Once it was away and dissipated no science in the world could reconstruct it. Like acid rain it could even spread destroying everything in its path. Coordination, was all he asked. Not so much. Even the CIA had its oversight committee to make certain their people didn’t step on each other’s toes. It made sense, damnit. He had argued until he was blue in the face, first with Andropov and then with that fool of a successor.

  He sat down, inhaling smoke deeply into his lungs, then closed his eyes. “With care, Aleksandr,” he told himself. “It is time to move with care.”

  His intercom buzzed. “It is General Suslev, sir,” his secretary said. Suslev was head of the First Chief Directorate, charged with watching Americans in Russia.

  Borodin picked up the telephone. “Nikolai, now what exactly was it you did last night?”

  “My job, Aleksandr Ilyich,” 5uslev said. “Arresting spies.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Come down and see for yourself, if you’re so anxious.”

  General Borodin rode the elevator down to the basement and strode through the broad stone-walled corridor to the interrogation center where he was immediately passed through to Chief Interrogator Miroshnikov’s office. General Suslev was already there. They were watching the American in the interrogation chamber through a one-way glass. He’d obviously been here since they’d arrested him shortly after ten last evening. His coat was off, his tie loose and at that moment he was seated in a straight-backed chair, smoking a cigarette as he faced his two preliminary interrogators.

  “Who is he?” General Borodin asked.

  “David McAllister,” General Suslev said, looking up. The general, who had changed his name from the Georgian Suslevili, was a small, intense man whom Borodin hated with a passion. Suslev, however, would probably become the KGB’s director one day. “He is a special assistant to the Ambassador.”

  “CIA?”

  “You’re particularly astute this morning, Aleksandr. Actually he’s deputy chief of station.”

  Borodin ignored the sarcasm. He stepped a little closer to the window so that he could get a better look. McAllister seemed weary, his complexion pale in the harsh white light reflecting sharply off the stark white tiles. He looked nervous, perhaps even concerned, but he did not seem like the sort of man who would give in easily. It was something about the American’s eyes that Borodin found fascinating. He could see in them, even from this distance, a hint of power, of raw strength. It was a look he saw in his own eyes each morning in the mirror. A look he admired. This one would be tough to break.

  “You have an interest in this case, Comrade General?” Chief Interrogator Miroshnikov asked. He was a big, oily man, nearly as large as Borodin. But his eyes were small and narrow and close set. They reminded his subordinates of pig eyes. No one liked him. Even his wife, it was said, waited for the day her husband would be struck down by a bus. But he was very good at his job, which was finding out things.“Is there a possibility of turning him?” Borodin asked, masking the real reason for his interest.

  “I do not believe so,” Miroshnikov said wistfully. “Perhaps, given the time.

  “You are on the wrong side of the ocean with this one, Aleksandr,” Suslev said. “Your job is penetrating the CIA in Washington, not Moscow.”

  “He will not remain in the Rodina forever, Nikolai,” Borodin said, gesturing toward McAllister. “Not unless you mean to kill him.” He looked at the American again. His eyes narrowed, as if he had thought of something else. “Where was he when you picked him up?”

  “Just off Lyalina Square,” Suslev answered. “What was he doing there at that hour of the night? Meeting someone? Passing secrets?”

  “We don’t know, yet. But he was armed,” Suslev said. “Perhaps we’ll find that out this morning, Comrade General,” Miroshnikov said.

  I Borodin looked at him, and then in at McAllister. He nodded.

  With Miroshnikov across the table from you, anything was possible. He shuddered inwardly. With Miroshnikov the coming days would not be very pleasant for McAllister.

  Colonel Petr Valentin Miroshnikov switched off the tape recorder and laid the headphones on his desk. He sat back and stretched, temporarily relieving the pressure on his lower spine. The day had not been entirely satisfactory. The American had refused to give them anything, anything at all, and General Suslev had called every hour wanting to know what progress had been made. Yet the interrogation was going as it should. As he expected it would. There was a certain symmetry to these things. First came the shock of arrest which led to a timidity between the prisoner and his interviewers. It was up to the good interrogator to make the prisoner understand, as soon as possible, that his very existence was no longer in his own hands. Someone else controlled his destiny. From that moment on, the prisoner would become the interrogator’s friend. They would become allies. Confidants in the end.

  Miroshnikov looked at the tape recorder, then glanced into the empty interrogation chamber: its stainless steel tables, its sturdy chairs, the instruments, the white tiled floor and walls gleaming like an operating theater beneath strong overhead lights, excited him. With McAllister the symmetry was there, but Miroshnikov knew that the process would be long and drawn out and painful. From the first moment he’d laid eyes on the American he’d instinctively sensed a strength in the man, well beyond the men who had passed this way before. And for that Miroshnikov was grateful. Breaking a man’s will, his spirit, was the real joy. If it was too easily accomplished, if it came too quickly, there was little or no satisfaction. “The world is my will and my idea.” It was bad 5chopenhauer philosophy, but one which Miroshnikov had embraced early as a young exile growing up in Irkutsk in Siberia. He was an outsider. The foreigner in a land of displaced persons, and he had to fight his way through school. His father had never learned to fight or even cope and he had died out there, as had Miroshnikov’s mother. But Petr had learned that the key to the domination of any man was in first understanding his will and then making it yours.

  The pitiful little Jews they sent to him who wanted to emigrate so badly to the West, or the poor farmer boy turned soldier who was guilty of nothing more than perhaps a moment’s indescretion were of no consequence. Boring actually. Just hauling them into the Lubyanka was often all the impetus they needed to spill their guts. For a few others, a few slihbas, Soviet political officers, who had become just a little too enamored of life in the West, the challenge was somewhat greater, though intelligence was not necessarily the mark of a man who could withstand an interrogation.

  With this one, however, Miroshnikov sensed the biggest challenge of all. McAllister was as intelligent as he was strong. Miroshnikov sensed in the American an extremely well-developed instinct for survival. Challenging. Challenging indeed.

  The interrogator got up and went into the tiny bathroom just off his office where he closed and locked the door. He looked at his face in the mirror over the sink and liked what he saw, because he could see beyond mere physical appearance. The eyes are windows into the soul. Looking into his own eyes he could see no soul. Nothing. Only a deep, smoldering hate for Great Russians. Hate for what the Soviet Union had
done to him, for what he had been made to endure as a boy, for what he had become. He took a bottle of cognac and a glass from his medicine cabinet, poured himself a stiff measure and drank it down, the liquor warming his insides, straightening out the knots in his stomach. He splashed some water on his face, then tipped his head back, stretching the muscles at the base of his neck, releasing some of the tension that had been building. He took a deep breath, held it for the count of five, and then let it out slowly, forcing all the air out of his lungs, before he turned and went back out to his office.

  They’d started with McAllister last night the moment he had been brought in, and had not let up until three this afternoon. Four interrogators, rotating on two teams, had begun the softening up process, the opening acts. McAllister had been allowed a few hours rest, and now it was time to begin in earnest.

  Miroshnikov took McAllister’s files, left his office and next door let himself into the interrogation chamber. The tape recorders and video cameras would run automatically. He allowed no one to watch his work. It was his way. And his staff respected his wishes.

  He smiled. He’d been waiting for this for a long time. A challenge that he intended savoring slowly, and with delicacy. He pressed the intercom button.

  “Bring him in now,” he said, his voice as soft as wind through a graveyard.

  McAllister was dressed in a pair of thin coveralls and paper slippers. His eyes were red from lack of sleep, but he seemed alert. He sat erect in the thick, unpadded steel chair.

  “Your name please,” Miroshnikov said, studying the open file on the steel table in front of him.

  “David McAllister.”

  “Your occupation, Mr. McAllister?”

  “I am employed by the United States Department of State. At present I am a Second Secretary under Ambassador Leland Smith.”