Liars & Thieves

CHAPTER SIX TEEN

When Jake Grafton rolled up, I walked briskly to his car. As we left the area we passed another cop on the way in. I motormouthed, told Grafton everything I could think of about the death of the traffic cop and the two men I killed. When I ran down, he asked for the cell phone I had taken from the car. I passed it over and he pocketed it.

“They must have had a beacon in the car you were driving,” he mused. “When you went to the airport, they didn’t have enough people to keep you under constant observation. They must have been pulling in people while we put Dorsey on the plane.”

“If they had made you,” I remarked, “they would have left me dead beside that cop and be on their way to the beach house.”

“Or my apartment in Rosslyn,” Grafton muttered darkly.

I could tell by the way he gripped the wheel that he was really pissed. Which made me feel better. Honestly. I knew Jake Grafton. He had been the military’s go-to guy for a lot of years. I had seen him in action a couple of times myself, and let me tell you, he was the very first man I’d pick when we were choosing sides for anything, be it softball, hand grenades, or World War III.

I must have fallen asleep — in fact, I was exhausted — because I awoke with a start when the car stopped. We were sitting in front of his beach house.

“I want you to go inside and get something to eat, then get some sleep. I’ll keep an eye on things tonight.”

I opened the car door and lifted a leg out. It took effort. I was stiff and sore. “Aren’t you coming in?”

“In a little while. I have some telephone calls to make.”

He drove off while I climbed the steps.

Callie Grafton and Kelly Erlanger looked shocked when they saw me. They were alone in the house — the admiral had dropped his mother at the nursing home where she resided on his way to the airport with Dorsey. Tonight Callie made me a bowl of soup and a sandwich while I took a shower. When I undressed, glass pebbles cascaded onto the floor.

Looking in the mirror, I had to admit, I was a sight. I had two red, swollen, inflamed welts on my face where that guy had smacked me with his pistol. The one along my jaw had bled some. My hands, face, and neck were scratched in dozens of places from flying glass. I also raked some tiny glass fragments from my hair. No wonder I had itched.

Erlanger sat beside me while I ate. Callie hovered nearby. I summarized my adventures, omitting the parts I didn’t even want to think about.

The admiral returned later and took the downstairs couch. He had an old 1911 Colt, which he put on the floor by the couch. The MP-5 was gone — it was in the trunk of the car I had abandoned on the freeway. I inherited the little .38 Dorsey had used to defend her castle. I made sure it was loaded and put it in my pocket. I was getting stiffer by the minute and had to work to climb the stairs to the guest room.

Erlanger was already in the bed with the lights out.

I undressed and crawled between the sheets. She snuggled right up to me. She was warm, smelled good, and settled right in with her head on my shoulder.

I thought the romantic side of our relationship could use some work, but I was too tired that evening. That must have been the last thought I had before I dropped off to sleep.

When I awoke the next morning the sky was gray. Kelly was still asleep, curled up against me, so I started to get out of bed. She wrapped her arms around me and gave me a big hug, then let me go.

I wasn’t sure what it all meant. Maybe we were working up to something, or maybe I was a substitute for the teddy bear she had left at home.

Jake Grafton already had coffee made when I came downstairs. He was sitting at the kitchen table, his Colt lying beside his coffee cup, watching a cable news show.

“You’re making quite a splash in law enforcement circles,” he said, eyeing me to gauge my reaction. “Somehow you’re the bad guy who killed all those folks at the safe house, murdered those guys at Willie Varner’s, and, I have no doubt, killed that cop and those two other guys last night.”

What a way to start a morning! “Well, I figured that,” I admitted. “Death row, here I come. I’m going to have to get a hobby, something I can do in a small room.” At least the coffee was hot. “Sarah Houston tell you all that?”

He nodded. “She was full of information. One of the tidbits I thought would interest you is the fact that Mikhail Goncharov may still be alive.”

I decided the coffee needed milk and got some from the refrigerator. Then I sat down across the table from him.

“The safe house is in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. The county sheriff passed a set of prints to the FBI that they have been unable to identify,” he continued. “The powers that be haven’t made the connection between these prints and the people at the CIA safe house, but Sarah thought it curious. The prints of every person the CIA had there last Monday were on file. Goncharov’s prints weren’t, of course, because he has never been fingerprinted by any American agency.”

“Where is this person?”

“You’ll need to see the sheriff.”

“Have they put me in the crime computer?”

“Yes. On a national security warrant, arrest and hold. No charges listed.”

“Terrific.” I thought about that for a moment, then said, “If it is Goncharov, he only speaks Russian.”

“Take Erlanger with you.”

We discussed it. He agreed to rent a car this morning for me so it wouldn’t appear in my name if anyone ran a computer check at the car rental companies.

“What about the phone number on that cell phone I gave you last night?”

“Belongs to a Dell Royston.”

I wasn’t as stiff this morning as I was last night, but I still felt as if I had been run over by something big. I worked on the soreness in my shoulders as I tried to recall where I had heard Royston’s name.

“Wasn’t he some big weenie at the White House?”

Grafton nodded a fraction of a millimeter. “He was chief of staff,” he said. “Left three months ago. He’s running the president’s reelection campaign, I think.”

“He was the asshole I shouted at on the telephone last night?”

“Perhaps.”

“Those numbers I gave you from those other two phones?”

“Don’t think you’d recognize the names. Sarah is working them.”

“So what’s going down?”

Grafton got up and went to the window. He looked out, then turned to face me and leaned against the sink. “Something was in those files. Six of the seven suitcases may be ashes, yet Goncharov may remember something.”

“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m not quite following you.”

“Something that connects someone at the White House with the KGB or the foreign intelligence service.”

I stared. “Naw.”

“Someone really high up in government,” Jake Grafton said, tugging at his nose. “Someone with the power to make things happen.”

“Erlanger translated some of the stuff in the intact suitcase for me,” I told him. “The files she saw have code names for every agent, every contact. The code names are rarely identified, and they are always in capital letters, BLUE, FOREST, MAX, something like that.”

“Callie translated several files for me last night,” he replied. “I doubt that any of these files on domestic dirty tricks by the KGB are what we are after. The file we want would have been a First Chief Directorate file, foreign intelligence. If we had the file, even with code names, if we knew the time and place well enough, we could make a shrewd guess who the agent might be.”

He threw up his hands. “But we don’t have the file. I want you to find Goncharov, talk to him, see what he knows. There may have been a foreign intelligence file that piqued his interest.”

“Kelly said he hasn’t had access to KGB files since he retired, like four years ago,” I objected. “This administration wasn’t in office when he made his notes.”

Grafton shrugged.

“What should I do with him when I find him?”

“Talk to him, then call me. I may have an epiphany or two by then.”

“Yes, sir.”

I don’t know why, but that word “sir” often slips out when I am talking to Grafton. My mind was elsewhere. The president of the United States. Holy…! I hadn’t fallen in a hole, I’d fallen in the Grand Canyon.

I poured a cup of coffee for Kelly and took it upstairs. I kissed her cheek, and she rolled over and kissed me back. When she smelled the coffee her eyes popped open.

“We’re going to West Virginia this morning,” I told her as she sipped. “Mikhail Goncharov may be alive.”

Her eyes widened and she stared at me.

“I’ll need you to translate.”

“Alive? How could that be?”

“I don’t know. The county sheriff sent an unidentified person’s prints to the FBI. The prints may be from Goncharov. We’re going to see if we can beat the crowd, interview him first.”

“How did you learn about this?” she said, and had another sip of coffee.

“Jake Grafton knows people.” I wasn’t about to tell her about Zelda Hudson/Sarah Houston, who was supposed to be in prison. “They tell him things.”

“Let’s hope his friends are right,” she said. She put the coffee cup on the bedside table and moved my hand under her pajama top.

When we got downstairs Callie was fixing breakfast while watching Good Morning America, which was doing a segment on the political convention that was starting a week from Monday in New York. The president had the nomination sewed up, of course, but had yet to name his vice-presidential running mate. The current VP had decided for health reasons not to run again. The reporters had an inside tip, they said, that the VP nominee would be a woman.

By the time Callie and Kelly had had their breakfast, the admiral was back with the rental car. He tossed me the keys, and Kelly and I were soon on our way. Just to be on the safe side, he passed me the Colt .45.

Jake Grafton stood on the porch of the beach house and watched Tommy Carmellini and Kelly Erlanger disappear around the corner onto the highway. He went back into the house and climbed the stairs. Carmellini’s and Erlanger’s bags, such as they were, were still in the guest room. He searched everything in both bags, then spent an hour going through the room and adjoining bath.

When he finished he found Callie — she was on the screened-in porch reading files — and asked her to accompany him.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“The library. I need something to read.”

The first place I stopped was a bank in suburban Virginia. I left Erlanger in the car. Even though we made love that morning, I took the ignition key with me — maybe I’m not as good in bed as I hope I am. Inside, I visited a safe deposit box I kept at that bank under another name. I won’t bore you with details, but back when I was in the burglary business, I opened a couple boxes in the metro area under fake names and kept IDs and cash in them, just in case. We live in interesting times. I also had boxes in Los Angeles and New York, but that’s another story.

When I walked out of the bank, my new name was Zack Robert Winston Jr., and I had a driver’s license and a couple credit cards to prove it. The credit cards were no good, but they looked nice. I also had three thousand in cash in my pocket.

I told Kelly about my new name. She looked at me sort of funny. “Who are you, anyway?”

“A civil servant, the same as you.”

“Right.”

She eyed me one more time, then got busy with the radio. By the time we hit I-66 westbound, she had a jazz station tuned in.

I rolled down my window and stuck my elbow out. After all that had happened, who would have believed I made this same drive this past Tuesday? Erlanger apparently felt the same way. She didn’t say much, merely listened to the music, lost in her own thoughts.

To tell the truth, I was kinda hoping she was thinking about our romantic interlude earlier that morning. I sure was. I liked the way she kissed. Some girls sort of peck at you, but Kelly opened her mouth and glued herself to you. Just thinking about her kisses made me sigh. I glanced at her from time to time, but she was looking out her window. She had mentioned a boyfriend at one time; I drove along wondering about the state of that relationship. Was I merely a warm body who happened to be available?

By the time we reached Strasburg it was nearly one o’clock, and we both needed a pit stop. I parked in front of the Hotel Strasburg, a ramshackle white Victorian building that looked as if it predated the Civil War. We used the facilities, then ate lunch in a period dining room with real tablecloths. The food was delicious. Kelly wasn’t very talkative, so I asked about her past to get her mind off the mess we were in.

She grew up in Illinois, she said, attended Vassar and majored in Russian. She was recruited by the CIA while she was still in college, decided that she could make more money working for the government than she could in a company trying to do business in Russia, and took the plunge. That was six years ago.

“Was it a good decision?” I asked.

“Well, if I was working in the private sector I would probably be doing a lot of traveling, translating, negotiating, and whatnot. With airline travel being what it is these days, I’d just as soon stay home. With the agency I don’t travel at all except on vacations. I also work on more interesting material, I suspect, than I would in the private sector.”

“Going to stay with the agency?”

“My sister has been after me to resign and move to Santa Barbara. She owns a bakery. Right now that looks pretty good. Maybe, if I get out of this fix alive…” She gave me a wry grin. “I’m just a paper-pusher. People killing each other — I hate it. It’s against everything I believe.”

“Yeah,” I said.

The grin disappeared and she said with conviction, “The world shouldn’t be like this.”

Platitudes usually stop a conversation, and that one did. Some of the air leaked out of my romantic balloon.

We skipped dessert, slurped down coffee, and hit the road again.

Sarah Houston — her name was prominently displayed on the access pass that hung on a chain around her neck — was one of the upper-level wizards at the NSA. She spent most of her days with mathematicians creating codes for the U.S. government and military and breaking foreign government and military codes, and those of corporations, criminals, terrorists, and private citizens around the world who thought their communications should remain private. It was heady, cerebral stuff, and the people engaged in it were among the smartest in the world. Mental chess was a common office pastime, with moves being shouted across the room or exchanged in the corridors or break room. The former Zelda Hudson fit right in — she usually had three or four games going at any one time and won her share.

Yet her specialty was computers, so she regularly consulted with people who were designing state-of-the art software for data-mining other people’s networks. She paid a call that Saturday morning on a man in one of those offices and flirted with him a little while they discussed the problem he was currently working on. He had designs on Sarah’s body and was campaigning for a weeklong vacation together in August on Fire Island. When he mentioned the trip again this morning, she told him she was thinking about it.

As it happened, they were sitting in his secure space when the telephone rang and a colleague asked him to come to his office for a minute. He said sure, hung up the phone, and glanced at Sarah, who was looking at a printout of software code.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, and left her alone in the office with his computer logged onto the network. It was a violation of the security regs, but what the hey, they were friends, with a relationship that he wanted to go someplace special. And it was Saturday, with only a few people in the office.

The instant the door closed behind him, Sarah attacked the keyboard. Two minutes later she was back reading the printout, and she was still at it when her friend returned, five and a half minutes after he departed.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “He needed the help now.”

“No problem,” Sarah Houston said, and smiled.

When she got back to her office after lunch she logged onto the network. She now had access to the deepest data-mining and surveillance capabilities of the NSA network, which she had granted herself. She began tapping in telephone numbers. The first three numbers she typed belonged to Dell Royston: his home, office, and cell.