Liars & Thieves

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I headed for the Baltimore — Washington International Airport to meet Jake Grafton and Dorsey O’Shea. Traffic was heavy, as usual. Five million people in the metro area, and every one of them is out on the highway driving his own car when I want to get from here to there.

I was nervous — probably still tense from sneaking around the Rancho Dorsey trying to get shot. I didn’t think the police had hauled away those two bodies. If they had, they would have put up a mile of yellow crime scene tape and still be there taking pictures, lifting prints, and doing all that stuff the CSI dudes do on television.

Musing on these weighty matters, I became aware of a white sedan three cars back that was keeping pace with me as I rolled east on the interstate. The other cars darted in and out of traffic and occasionally peeled off to dart down an exit, but this guy stayed back, matching my speed.

Tommy, don’t be paranoid.

I allowed my speed to creep up another five mph, just for grins. The guy didn’t fall back.

I changed lanes, slid over behind a semi, which meant I had to slow down about five. The sedan changed lanes, too, yet he fell back a little when two cars cut in between us. They took the next exit, which left about fifty yards between me and the white sedan.

Just when I was starting to get worried, the white sedan dropped down the next exit, leaving me to motor along with my random companions. No one else seemed to be following.

It was late in the afternoon when I parked on the top deck of the close-in parking at BWI and rode the elevator down to the pedestrian bridge that led to the terminal. I was sitting in the lobby across from the airline counter when I saw them approaching. I handed Dorsey her passport.

“That’s all you brought?”

“I don’t believe in overpacking. That other stuff would just weigh you down.”

She bit her lip and tossed her hair. Grafton and I stood in line with her to present her passport and get her seat assignment. I told her that someone had removed the bodies from her house, and she nodded. I felt like the Roto-Rooter man telling her the drain was open.

After she did her business at the counter, Grafton and I escorted her to the security gate.

“You didn’t bring that thirty-eight along, did you?” I asked, trying to be casual. It would be just my luck for her to be arrested for smuggling a shooter through security. She would spill her guts in a heartbeat. Grafton and I wouldn’t make it out of the terminal.

“I left it at the admiral’s house,” she said distractedly.

She shook Grafton’s hand, then held out a hand to me. “Good-bye, Tommy.”

Well, what the hey! I wasn’t the guy for her, and she certainly wasn’t the gal for me. “So long, kid,” I told her, shaking her hand.

She went through the metal detector okay, but the security personnel decided to search her handbag. Probably thought they saw a nail clipper in there.

“Think they’ll send someone to Europe after her?” I said, referring to the hit men.

“Not a chance in a thousand,” Grafton said. “Don’t worry about it.”

The security guard finished stirring through Dorsey’s purse and returned it to her. She picked up her carry-on bag and joined the throng going down the concourse. She didn’t look back.

“Let’s get out of here,” Jake Grafton said, turning away.

As we walked I told him, “On the way over here I thought someone followed me from Dorsey’s, then they turned off.”

He walked on, didn’t say anything.

“Maybe I’m being an idiot.”

That’s when Grafton spoke. “If they’re any good they have three or four cars on you. No one follows along as if he’s on a leash.”

“If they were watching Dorsey’s place, they may be on me.”

“The bodies were gone from Dorsey’s?”

“Whoever took them away did a pretty good job cleaning up,” I told the admiral. “No visible blood inside and just traces on the lawn, which will wash away in the next rain shower.”

Grafton gave me his cell number and the telephone number at the beach house. I wrote them on my left hand. “We’ll go separately,” he added. “Don’t go to the beach house unless you are absolutely sure you are not being followed.”

As we rode up in the parking garage elevator, I asked, “What do you think, Admiral?” Perhaps I wanted some reassurance. If so, I didn’t get it.

“I think you and Kelly are in a hell of a tight spot,” Jake Grafton said, then got off the elevator on the fourth floor. The guy sugarcoats everything.

Up on the roof I stepped out of the elevator and hiked a foot up on the nearest trash can. While I worked on my shoelace I scanned the scene, looking for… I wasn’t sure what. People were getting into and out of cars, walking toward the elevator carrying and pulling luggage; several cars were cruising around looking for spaces near the elevator, even though the entire back row of the area was empty.

I plopped my foot down and headed for my car, trying to hike along as if I hadn’t a care in the world except crabgrass in the lawn.

It’s just that I had this itch between my shoulders, one I couldn’t reach to scratch. Maybe it was nothing, but it was there, this feeling that things were going badly wrong and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I wanted to shout, “I don’t know anything! Erlanger doesn’t know anything! Leave us alone.”

Leave us alone — isn’t that the prayer that defines our age? We ask it of the government, the people with causes, the addicted, the crazy, and the starving and oppressed in all those third-world sewers. Leave us alone! Let us live our comfortable little lives without your burdens. Please.

That’s the prayer, and no one ever listens.

I didn’t see Grafton’s car — I wasn’t really looking. I was trying to figure out if anyone was following me. Crazy how your mind works — it seemed as if everyone was following, everyone was looking at me, everyone was going where I wanted to go. When I changed lanes, the car behind me did, too. The guy or gal in front drifted over into the right lane for the off-ramp to Annapolis and the Bay Bridge.

Paranoid. I was paranoid. Relax, I told myself. Drive safely and normally and relax, for Christ’s sake.

So I was doing just that, motoring along at the speed limit like the good citizen I will never be, when a police cruiser changed lanes to get behind me. I glanced at him in the rear view mirror and saw that he was using his handheld mike.

Oh, great!

I checked the other mirrors, looked at the terrain, thought about flooring the accelerator to try to outrun the guy. In this heap?

After a minute and a half the dome light of the cruiser illuminated and began flashing. I drove for another twenty seconds or so, then put on the blinker and began slowing. I pulled off the road, stopped, put the car in park, and lowered the driver’s window.

I watched the cop walk toward me in the driver’s side window. Mid- to late twenties, cool wraparound shades, a buzz cut, wearing a bulletproof vest under his uniform shirt. I’d opened my mouth to ask him what the problem was when he drew his service pistol and said loudly, “Out of the car, slow and easy, hands where I can see them.”

“Officer, what—”

“Out! Now!”

I took my left hand off the wheel, unlatched the door. He backed off just enough to let me open it. I did so, then got out.

He had the pistol leveled in a two-handed combat stance. “Take two steps toward the front of the car, turn toward the hood, and put your hands on it. Now!”

This guy was spring-loaded to shoot. Since I had no choice, I did as he said. “What’s this all about, officer?”

“The computer says your car is stolen, sir. Please cooperate and we’ll get this all straightened out.”

He got too close and I could have knocked the pistol away and decked him, but I didn’t. Ten seconds later, when he kicked my feet aft and deftly pulled the automatic from behind my belt, I wished I had. My opportunity was gone by then, of course.

“On the ground. Lie on your face.”

If he got those cuffs on me, I was dead meat, with a life expectancy that could be measured in hours. The heck of it was I didn’t want to hurt or kill him.

As he snapped one of the cuffs around my left wrist, I rolled hard into him. He fell, grunted as he hit the ground.

I was all over him, fighting him for the pistol, which I knocked out of his hand. It went skidding under the car. He was young, strong, and desperate, probably sure I was going to kill him. All those years of rock climbing and working out had given me tremendous strength in the upper body, and believe me, I needed it then. We rolled around on the ground, grunting and cursing, each of us trying to subdue the other as traffic roared by on the interstate.

There was no way around it — at the first opportunity I popped him in the jaw as hard as I could hit. Stunned, semiconscious, he relaxed, and I leaped up.

The radio was squawking, something about backup help being minutes away. My young fool hadn’t waited; if I had been a killer he would more than likely be dead. He didn’t know that, though, and probably never would.

I couldn’t leave him lying beside the road to be run over, so I picked him up bodily and tossed him in the back seat of the cruiser. I threw his pistol in with him and retrieved mine from where he dropped it. Then I grabbed the key from the ignition and threw it as far as I could. I was sprinting for my car when two unmarked sedans skidded to a halt, one behind the cruiser and one in front of my heap. The drivers and passengers came boiling out of the cars. There were four of them in civilian clothes, and they came on a dead run with drawn weapons.

“Freeze!” the man in front roared, his weapon leveled at my belt buckle.

It wasn’t as if I had a lot of options. I lifted my hands. One of the men dashed in and snapped the dangling cuff around my other wrist, then two of them hustled me into their car. Behind me I heard a shot.

One of them got behind the wheel, and the other jumped into the passenger seat. In seconds we were rolling.

“You fucking assholes!” I roared. “For the love of fucking Christ! You people didn’t have to shoot that cop!”

The guy in the passenger seat turned and slapped me in the face with his pistol, which threw me sideways and stunned me.

When I managed to get back to a sitting position, he stuck his pistol in my face and snarled, “I want the address where Kelly Erlanger is hiding, and I want it now.”

“Or what? You’ll kill me like you did that cop? Stick it up your ass!”

He whacked me again with the pistol and I passed out.

“He spoke to me today in Russian,” Basil Jarrett said to Linda Fiocchi as they ate dinner. They and Mikhail Goncharov were sitting at the small round dining table in the cabin by the Greenbrier eating trout fillets that Jarrett had cooked in a pan over an open fire. Goncharov held his knife and fork in the European manner and ate with gusto.

Goncharov’s glass was empty, so Jarrett poured him another glass of wine, then refilled his and Fiocchi’s glasses. That killed the bottle.

“He seems to have regained his appetite,” Fiocchi said wryly. Goncharov was working on his third fillet.

A few minutes later she said, “He never sleeps for more than an hour, then he wakes up talking and thrashing. Nightmares, I think. He wakes me up every time.”

“So how did a man who speaks only an eastern European language get out here in the heart of the Allegheny Mountains?”

“I don’t know.”

Jarrett helped himself to another fillet. He was hungry, too. “I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon. Your guess is as good as mine.”

Goncharov finished his fish and his wine, smiled at his hosts, then wrapped himself in his blanket and lay down near the stove. He went to sleep while Jarrett and Fiocchi sipped coffee. The first nightmare came fifteen minutes after he drifted off. The room he was in was afire, he was choking on smoke, men were shooting…

When I came to, the guy in the passenger seat was using a cell phone as we rolled along an interstate choked with traffic. I was leaning back against the seat, slumped toward the right door, with my hands cuffed in front of me. I took two deep breaths, waited a few seconds for my head to clear.

Nobody needed to tell me I was in real trouble. Obviously these guys had followed me from Dorsey’s to the airport. They must not have had enough men to follow both me and Grafton, so they had stayed on me. They were going to get Jake Grafton’s name and address from me one way or another, then they were going to kill me. I knew it and they knew it. They weren’t going to ask nicely or appeal to my better nature. Even if I managed to say nothing before they beat me senseless or shot me to death, I had Grafton’s telephone numbers written on my left hand in ink. They would find them eventually.

I thought about this, took one more deep breath, then reached forward, put my hands over the passenger’s head, and jerked backward with the cuffs against his neck while I rammed my head into the back of his. I used every ounce of strength I had… and heard his neck snap.

The driver glanced sideways at me, his eyes as big as saucers, the car swerving dangerously. I didn’t take the time to get my hands away from the dead man — I smashed the driver in the head with my left elbow as hard as I could.

The car caromed off a semi that was in the fast lane, then headed toward the right side of the highway. I managed to get my hands free of the corpse and got both hands around the driver’s neck as we shot off the highway, went up an embankment, and smashed head-on into a huge aluminum light pole. My death grip on the driver’s neck kept him from going through the windshield, because in the excitement he hadn’t put on his seat belt.

The seat back broke loose, and I wound up jammed against the dashboard, the driver half under me. I still had a good grip on his neck, so I used it. Strangled him like a chicken.

Every window in the car was broken; glass pebbles covered everything. In the silence that followed the crash I could hear imperious noises coming from the cell phone. It was on the floor. I could hear it but couldn’t see it. I jammed my hands down there, groped all over, and a miracle happened. I found it.

I said into it, “I’m coming to get you, motherfucker,” then snapped the mouthpiece shut and put it in my pocket. The car doors were too twisted to open, so I went out through a window and headed for the woods at a hell-bent trot. The thought that there was another car full of these dudes roaming around someplace had finally occurred to me. Mom always said I had a one-track mind.

Deep in the trees, well away from the lights of the cars whizzing by on the highway, I stopped to empty my stomach. When the spasms stopped, I leaned against a tree for a while. I couldn’t stop shaking. Too much adrenaline, I guess.

Personally, I think this James Bond gig is vastly overrated.

In the evening gloom under the trees I was temporarily safe. That calmed me down. When my stomach was under control and I had caught my breath, I managed to get a small pick set out of my pocket. It looked like a jackknife and contained three picks mounted as if they were blades and a torsion wrench that could be removed from the handle. I selected the pick I wanted by feel and inserted it like a shim under the teeth of the left cuff, jamming open the ratchet that held the cuff. Ten seconds later I had the right one off and tossed the cuffs away.

As the shock and adrenaline wore off, I realized I was oozing blood from the side of my face. Not from where the guy slugged me with the pistol, but from whacking my head on the dashboard when the car hit the pole.

I saw the flashing lights of a police car slow and stop by the wreck. Time to boogie. Ten minutes later I came out of the woods in a residential neighborhood. Walked between two houses and found myself on a paved street. Several cars passed me from time to time. An hour passed before I finally came to a convenience store with a pay telephone mounted on the outside wall of the building. I had been reading street signs, so I knew roughly where I was. I called Jake Grafton on his cell phone and told him what had happened in as few words as possible and gave him my location.

“Move down the street about fifty yards and wait for me,” he said.

I went inside the store, cleaned myself up in the men’s room, and bought a bottle of water. Fifty yards down the street was a hardware store with a van parked beside it. I sat down between the van and the building to wait. It was completely dark by then so I was difficult to see.

I was massaging my sore wrists six minutes later when a police cruiser drove by. The officer slowed to a crawl passing the convenience store, then turned right and went up the street into the subdivision I had walked out of a few minutes earlier.