Liars & Thieves

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

When I awoke Thursday morning I found myself alone on the couch with the breeze whipping through the screens. I opened an eye, looked out. The day was here, but the sun had not yet risen. Or maybe it had. There were a lot of clouds up there.

I heaved myself out, put on shorts and my tennis shoes, and went outside. No one sitting in cars, no one peering out a window. Only a few folks out and about at this hour, joggers and dog walkers. I trotted down the street and thundered over the boardwalk across the dune. Birds probed the surf runout, and a garbage truck with balloon tires drove along emptying trash barrels. Here and there people combed the beach for treasures that might have washed up during the night. There was more trash than treasures. Amazing how many plastic milk jugs find their way into the ocean, to drift for months until they wash up somewhere.

I puffed along watching the gulls and the solid gray clouds racing overhead. On the way back I stopped running and walked to cool down.

So what was next? Where should I go from here?

The only leads I had were the contents of the wallets and cell phones I had taken from the dead and injured thugs. Of necessity, the trail must start with those since there was nowhere else.

Should I leave the women here and hunt these people alone?

The women seemed to be sleeping when I got back, so I got a pot of coffee going and went out for doughnuts and a copy of every newspaper sold in this town. When I returned to the house thirty minutes later, I took a quick shower, then settled at the kitchen table drinking coffee, munching doughnuts, and scanning the papers. I could not find a single word about the massacre in West Virginia or the shootings yesterday in Washington. Nada.

I was on my second cup of coffee when Kelly came downstairs. She was dressed in shorts and one of my T-shirts. She poured herself coffee, snagged a doughnut, and sat down beside me to look at the paper.

“Good morning,” I ventured.

She grunted. Well, some women are like that B.C. Before Coffee.

I decided I wasn’t going to mention sharing the couch until she did.

“There’s nothing in here on the shootings yesterday,” she said when she finished with the Washington Post. She put that paper down and picked up the next one.

“I didn’t see anything,” I agreed.

“So it didn’t happen?”

“Apparently.”

When she had scanned the lot, she helped herself to more coffee. She took her time examining the doughnut possibilities before selecting her second victim.

“I’ve read about two-thirds of the files,” she said, “scanned them, anyway. Every one is on political double-crosses and murders and hounding dissidents and faking evidence for show trials of state enemies. The names are coded, but as near as I can tell, every person mentioned is a Soviet citizen or a prominent American or British traitor. I just can’t see anything there that would make anyone in Europe or America feel threatened.”

“Were all the files Goncharov copied about Soviet internal matters?”

“My understanding was that only some of them were. Apparently the only surviving files are on KGB dirty tricks.”

I finished my coffee and frowned into the cup. Put it on top of the newspapers and stretched.

“Can you finish the rest of the files today?”

“I think so.”

I took the magazine from the automatic and checked that the column of shells was full, then pushed it back in place.

“Where do we go from here?” Kelly asked. She was leaning against the counter, watching my face.

“I’ve got a couple wallets and cell phones.”

“What does it mean that none of this mess made the newspapers?”

I eyed her. She wasn’t innocent, naive, or ignorant. Or scared. She was smart and tough. And pretty decent looking. She had been a nice armful last night, but I suppose I shouldn’t be thinking things like that.

“It means that some really big weenie is keeping it out,” I said sourly. “That’s why the cops were cooperating with the killers. We are up to our eyes in a very large pile of shit.”

“I figured that out Tuesday.”

“We’re going to have to be very careful if we hope to keep breathing. No telephone calls, no e-mails, no nothing. We make the slightest noise, they’ll be after us like hounds after a rabbit. What we have to do is figure out who the hounds are.”

I broke the antennas off the two cell phones, then turned them on — neither had voice messages queued up, which was a shame — then got into the stored numbers. I wrote them down on a sheet of scratch paper and sat staring at the phones. Technology scares me. If the cops were cooperating with the killers, perhaps the cell phone people and the folks at the National Security Agency were, too. I turned the phones off, took out the batteries, and stored them in my overnight bag. The wizards were going to have to rewrite the laws of physics to find those cell phones without batteries in them.

I sat studying the numbers. Three numbers appeared on both phones. I made a tick beside them.

The contents of the wallets didn’t even cover the kitchen table when I spread them out. One guy had a hundred fifty-three dollars in currency, the other had forty-two. I examined each bill for notes or numbers and put them back in their respective wallets.

Driver’s licenses and credit cards made up the bulk of the remainder. Both guys had credit cards that looked as if they doubled as ATM cards. One of the guys had a bunch of dry-cleaning receipts. One of the guys belonged to AAA; one was a card-carrying member of the Harley Owners Group. In one wallet there were a few scraps of paper with telephone numbers on them — this was the dude who habitually didn’t let his main squeeze know his whereabouts. Women’s telephone numbers, I figured, but maybe I was being uncharitable. I added these numbers to my list.

That was the crop. I made sure I got the proper stuff back into the proper wallet.

The rain started about the time Dorsey O’Shea came downstairs. She looked disdainfully at the doughnuts and rooted through the pantry. She found a box of healthy cereal and ate a couple of dry handfuls between sips of coffee.

“That stuff has a lot of sugar in it,” I said, just to be nasty. She ignored my comment.

Kelly was out on the screened-in porch reading. Dorsey joined me at the kitchen table. “How long is this going to go on?” she asked.

I didn’t like that tone of voice, and we weren’t even living together. “What’s going to go on?”

“Hiding out like criminals?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. I’ve been waiting for Kelley to finish reading the files, hoping something promising would turn up.”

“We must go back to Washington, talk to the authorities.”

“What if they arrest us, accuse us of espionage and murder? Won’t be any bail for that. My main concern is that we’ll be killed before we can tell what we know. The people that tried to murder everyone in a CIA safe house can certainly reach into a city or county lockup.”

She helped herself to another handful of dry cereal, which she ate as she thought about the problem. I could tell from the expression on her face that she was remembering the fear as Johnson Dunlap came at her with a gun in his hand. Memories like that remain with you all your life. She was still scared. Hell, I was still scared. Which in a way was good. If you’re scared enough, maybe you’ll be careful enough to stay alive.

“How do you live like this?” she muttered.

“Well, I only hole up in hideouts a couple times a year, then only for a week or two.”

“Asshole.”

“Hey, kid. I know you’re scared. I am, too. So is Kelly.”

She broke into tears. She pulled away when I reached for her.

“I never had to deal with anything like this,” she sobbed, then headed for the stairs. After a while I heard water gurgling through the drain from the upstairs bathroom.

Outside the rain came down hard and smeared the windows. When it began blowing across the porch, Kelly brought her papers into the living room and settled on the couch.

The rain set in for the day, a nice steady early summer soaker. I read all of the newspapers I could stand and went from window to window, looking out.

I was fast running out of patience. Knowing they were out there looking for us made the forced inaction very difficult. I turned on the television, flipped through the channels, snapped it off. Ten minutes later I did it again.

At one point I found myself standing at the living room window with the pistol in my hand, out of sight below the sill, watching the occasional passerby. I would hate prison. They would probably carry me out in a straitjacket before the first month was over.

Augh!

I was cleaning the MP-5 on the kitchen table when I thought I heard a female voice upstairs. I glanced at the couch — Kelly Erlanger was asleep with papers heaped in piles on the floor and around her.

I picked up the telephone. Dorsey’s voice. I slammed it down, shot up the stairs two at a time. She was sitting cross-legged on one of the beds, a towel around her head, talking on the telephone. I grabbed it out of her hand and slammed it down.

“Are you crazy?” I snarled.

She was full of righteous indignation, which meant that she knew she had crossed the line. I knew her too well. “That was a friend of mine, I’ll have you know. What gives you the right to be my jailer?”

“Who was it? Gimme a name.”

“Zara Raja.”

“Gimme a break, goddamnit!”

“That isn’t her real name, of course — it’s her professional name. Her real name is Suzy Rollins.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She’s my spiritual adviser.”

I was shocked. “I didn’t know you were into religion,” I said. Dorsey O’Shea, of all people!

“She’s not a minister, not in the conventional sense — she’s in tune with the universe. Tommy, I need to touch base with someone who really cares.” She clouded up. “I feel so… icky. Helpless, defenseless.” Tears rolled down her cheeks.

Now I remembered why Dorsey and I broke up two years ago. Beneath that gorgeous, sophisticated exterior was the soul of a twit.

I gritted my teeth. “Hey, babe, those people found your house. To find you they can check your telephone records on the phone company computer, find out who you call, tap some of the most frequently called numbers, and simply wait. When you call a tapped number they trace it.”

“That’s illegal!” she said indignantly.

I couldn’t believe she was giving me this crap. “So is murder, Dorsey. Get a grip. These people aren’t playing by the rules. Stay off the damn phone.”

She dissolved in tears. I put an arm around her shoulder and tried to calm her down. She got clingy, but I wasn’t in the mood. I finally went downstairs and poured a stiff vodka tonic and made her drink it.

When Basil Jarrett went fishing he took Mikhail Goncharov along. The day was overcast, with low ceilings, not much wind. Goncharov was sitting outside on his chopping block when Jarrett came out of the cabin in his waders carrying two poles and the tackle box. He tugged at Goncharov’s sleeve to get his attention, showed him the rods, then made motions that he was to follow.

They walked to the road, then walked along it parallel to the river for a hundred yards or so until they came to a gravel bar that Jarrett was fond of. He rigged a fly on a line and handed it to the silent man beside him. Then he turned his back and selected a fly for his rod.

When he turned around, Goncharov was standing at the water’s edge whipping the fly into the eddies with an expert flip of his wrist. In and out, in and out, he made the line dance, then stopped and let the fly drift for a moment with the current.

Although Goncharov wasn’t wearing waders, he was soon in to his knees.

Basil Jarrett laid down his rod and stood watching. After a while he found a seat.

The Greenbrier was a fabulous trout stream, flowing swiftly over a wide, shallow bed as it snaked its way through the steep hills covered with forest, which came literally to the water’s edge.

A half hour after he began fishing, Goncharov caught a small trout. He held it up so that Jarrett could see it, then deftly took it off the hook and tossed it back. When Jarrett took the fly box to Goncharov to allow him to make his own selection, the man grinned.

Basil Jarrett slapped him on the shoulder and returned the grin. Then he picked up his own rod and waded into the stream.

That evening I flipped on the television to catch the news. I’m not a TV guy — an occasional ball game or movie and now and then the news takes all the time I am willing to devote to television, which is not much. That Thursday evening the network’s big stories were an earthquake in southern Russia, a flood in Bangladesh, another accounting scandal — this time at a big HMO — and lots of political news. This was an election year. The first convention was in ten days; the other one the week after that. According to the pundits the president had his party’s nomination locked up, so most of the coverage was of the opposition’s front-runner and his two closest rivals. When the broadcast was over I flipped off the idiot box.

It was merely a matter of time before the bad guys learned we were here and came for us — the only question was, how much time did we have? I wanted to boogie right now and get on with the business of tracking these guys down. What was I going to do with the women? Where would they be safe?

I was mulling over that question when I heard a car roll into the parking area near the front door. Ten seconds later I heard a door slam. I grabbed the pistol, went to the window, and took a fast look.

Thank God! It was the owner of the house. And his wife. And… an elderly, white-haired lady. I ran for the door and threw it wide.

“Admiral Grafton, am I glad to see you!”

Jake Grafton looked at me in amazement. “Carmellini! What on earth are you doing here?”

“It’s a long story. I needed a hideout and picked the lock. Hope you don’t mind.”

It took a lot to shake Jake Grafton; this was nowhere near enough. He grinned at me. “Good to see you.”

“Tommy, we were just talking about you the other day,” Callie Grafton said as she got out of the car on the passenger side. She smiled at me. “Come over here, meet my mother-in-law, Mother Grafton.”

The old lady couldn’t walk without help. “Goddamn hell to get old, young man,” she told me as I helped her up the stairs into the house, carrying her walker. “Jake said the house was empty. What are you doing here, anyway?”

“I brought a couple of girlfriends over for a long weekend. I knew the admiral wouldn’t mind.”

She gave me the eye to see if I was serious. “Only two?” she said. “In my day single men went around with as many as they could afford.”

“Two is about my limit,” I told her glumly. “These days everything costs more.” I introduced Kelly, then got Mrs. Grafton started off in her walker toward the downstairs bathroom.

Perhaps I should tell you about Jake Grafton before I go any further. I met him a few years back in Cuba when he was in charge of a carrier battle group. He had been mixed up in a few things since, and I had worked with him on several occasions. He was now retired from the Navy. About six feet tall, he had thinning hair, gray at the temples, which he combed straight back, and a nose that was a tad too large for his face. Without a doubt, he was the toughest, most capable man I had ever met. Having him here was a huge relief.

His wife, Callie, was one of the nicest people on the planet. She was tough as shoe leather, too, although you wouldn’t know it looking at her. She taught languages at Georgetown. She and Kelly Erlanger were soon engaged in an animated conversation — in Russian! Dorsey O’Shea came downstairs and I introduced everyone, then I took Admiral Grafton out onto the porch, closed the French doors, and told him how my week had gone.

I chattered away, trying to hit all the important facts, telling everything as fast as I could. As I was talking Dorsey came out, closed the door, and found a chair. She listened in silence.