Highnote once again sat back in his chair. “Why wasn’t I told about this?” he asked. “We agreed to liaise on all aspects of this investigation.”
“The reports have been sent over to Dexter Kingman in your Office of Security,” Reisberg said. “We’re holding nothing back. His reports come to us as well, including the complete dossier on Ms. Albright.”
“We appreciate that you and McAllister are friends,” Innes said, his tone conciliatory. “We honestly do. But you must understand, Bob, what we’re dealing with here.”
“I don’t,” Highnote said angrily. “And I’m still waiting for someone in this room to explain it to me.”
“How do you see it?” Reisberg asked.
Highnote turned on him. “McAllister is a good man, one of the best.”
“I think we all agree with that statement,” the FBI cop said, his voice very soft.
“I think he was brainwashed in Moscow. I think they altered him and then sent him back here to do as much damage as he possibly could. And he’s done just that. But it’s not his fault, none of it is.”
“What is your recommendation?”
“We bring him in, of course, there’s no question of that. We must.”
“To help him?”
“Yes.”
Reisberg glanced at Innes and Quarmby, then spoke. “We’ve come to much the same conclusion, in that he must be brought in and helped, which is why the President has offered him amnesty. But we think the evidence shows something else may be occurring here. Something that has us… disturbed.”
“Go on,” Highnote said.
“First let’s go back to the beginning, if we may. To Moscow. What exactly was McAllister working on for you?”
“There were a number of ongoing projects,” Highnote said. “There always are. McAllister was a network man. His specialty has been setting up lines of stringers from scratch and then working them.”
“He is a people person,” Reisberg pressed.
“If you want to call it that, yes. He deals with personalities. With motivations.”
“What specifically was he doing the night of his arrest? What I mean to ask is, who was he seeing that night?”
“I don’t know,” Highnote said. “There was nothing on his day sheets, and of course he was never given a chance to tell us afterward.”
“Anything in his confession to the Russians that would indicate to you whom he had seen that night?”
“No,” Highnote said.
“Didn’t it strike you as odd that the Russians made no mention of why he was arrested on that particular night?”
“Yes, Alvan, it struck me as odd. It struck all of us as odd, but again, as I’ve said, Mac never had the chance afterward to tell us.”
“It never came up in the two conversations you had with him?” Highnote bridled. “I resent the implication. You’ve seen my reports.
“Nobody is implying anything here, Bob,” Innes broke in gently. “We’re trying to get at the truth, that’s all.”
“He’s a driven man.”
“Yes, we all agree with that. But the fact of the matter is, someone is trying to kill him. Not only the Russians, but the Mafia as well. The question is: If the Russians wanted him dead, why did they release him in the first place? And who has hired the Mafia to go after him, and why?”
“More to the point,” Reisberg interrupted, “what were the Mafia doing at Sikorski’s place… assuming we’re correct in our guess that they got there first?”
“If they were after McAllister, it would be logical that they would go after his old friends. People they might think he would try to contact.”
“Exactly,” Reisberg said. “Where are they getting their information?”
Highnote’s breath caught in his throat. “I see,” he said. “They also made the connection between you and McAllister,” Reisberg continued. “The Russians were at your house, waiting for him. And then when he ran to your boat in Dumfries they went after him there… someone did… and shot him and left him for dead. The blood we found was his type. And there was a lot of it.”
“You’re saying that whoever is after Mac is getting inside information?”
“It would appear so,” Reisberg said.
“We’re getting ahead of ourselves now,” Innes said, filling the sudden silence.
“Yes?” Highnote said, holding his temper in check.“When we first began to put this together, we came up with four areas of concern.”
“Who is we?”
“I approached Paul with this just yesterday,” Alvan Reisberg said. “Because you had questions for which there were no answers?”
“Yes.”
“The first, of course, was McAllister’s arrest and subsequent release by the Russians,” Innes said. “Naturally we weren’t involved in that business until the incident in New York.”
“Naturally,” Highnote said.
Innes ignored the sarcasm. “The second was the disturbing possibility that not only were the Russians trying to kill him, but that someone had hired the Mafia to stop him as well. In each case it appeared that someone was feeding them inside information about McAllister. The third was the apparent connection between McAllister and the O’Haires. In the first place your own people were told that McAllister had worked with them as their Russian pipeline. And in the second place, NSA intercepted the burst transmission within hours of which the O’Haires were murdered.”
“We can go two ways with this,” Reisberg interjected. “Whoever is trying to silence McAllister set up the O’Haires to implicate him on the hope that we would do their job for them. In other words, if we believed that McAllister had been the O’Haires’ control officer all along, we might not hesitate to shoot to kill when the opportunity arose. The O’Haires, of course, were then silenced so that they would have no chance to recant. Either that, or we can believe that McAllister indeed was their control officer, and still is very much in charge of the network, and had to silence them himself… or at least arrange for them to be killed.”
“Not the act of a desperate, driven man,” Highnote said. Innes shook his head. “Which brings us to Stephanie Albright, who apparently has agreed to help him.”
“I don’t think that has been established with any degree of certainty,” Highnote said.
“Forgive my skepticism,” Reisberg countered, “but I think there can be no question that she is willingly helping him. In fact it would be my guess that it was she who helped him in Dumfries.”
“What?”
“She apparently visited McAllister’s home in Georgetown on the night she managed to escape from him at Sikorski’s. It’s possible that she saw a photograph in the living room which showed McAllister and his wife aboard your sailboat. The Dumfries Yacht Haven sign is clearly visible in the background.”
“That’s quite a leap,” Highnote said. “But assuming that was the case, why would she have done such a thing? I’ve looked at her file. She is totally above suspicion.”
“Yes,” Reisberg said. “My thought exactly. She is a woman totally beyond reproach. We went up to Baltimore to interview her father, who told us that she is a headstrong girl, but that she is an idealist; very much in love with her country, which is why she sought employment with the CIA.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Just that we were doing a routine, prepromotion background check.”
“Had he heard from her?”
“Not for months,” Reisberg said. “But it strikes me as curious that such a patriot as Stephanie Albright should be so actively helping McAllister, that she was willing to lie to her own boss about setting up a meeting between him and McAllister, which of course gave McAllister the opportunity to break into CIA headquarters.”
“What’s your point?”
“Our point, Bob, is that Stephanie Albright wouldn’t be helping McAllister unless she believed in him,” Innes said.