The Zebra Network

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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.

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