Liars & Thieves

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

As we motored over the mountains toward the Shenandoah Valley, Kelly Erlanger sat in back chattering in Russian with Mikhail Goncharov. She was getting a lot of monosyllable answers, so I knew it wasn’t going well, though in truth I had other things on my mind and wasn’t paying much attention.

Unless I missed my guess, the sheriff was going to be mighty unhappy after talking with Basil Jarrett. He had a violent death on his hands, a mutilated corpse spread all over a county road, and the guy who did the killing and mutilating was leaving the jurisdiction as fast as he could reasonably go. Jarrett would probably tell the sheriff it had been self-defense all the way — the shot-up rental car sort of spoke for itself — but the sheriff would undoubtedly want to question me. Especially when he heard my real name and ran it on the crime computer. When you’re famous, everyone wants to talk with you.

My CIA pass had been enough for Jarrett, so he acquiesced in my “borrowing” his vehicle, but in truth he didn’t have a lot of choice. I had just intentionally run over one man and whanged away at another with a pistol. I hadn’t threatened him, though. Still if the sheriff started talking about Jarrett being an accessory after the fact, he might remember that he had been intimidated.

That was the way I reasoned it out, so I was on the back roads in case the sheriff called his Virginia colleagues. I planned to drive county roads only, no highways or interstates, all the way to Delaware. I planned to avoid Washington by crossing the mouth of the Chesapeake at Norfolk. I figured we would be lucky to get to Grafton’s by daylight tomorrow.

Then there was the little matter of how the killers learned Goncharov was at Jarrett’s. Perhaps the FBI fingerprint inquiry had come to their attention, but if so, why didn’t the sheriff mention that someone had called, asking the whereabouts of Kelly’s lost uncle?

No, something was out of kilter here. The killers weren’t far behind us, and that fact would have to be explained.

I glanced over my shoulder at Kelly.

Naw. She wouldn’t have called someone, would she?

She had been in that burning house, trying to save that suitcase full of files. The man Dorsey shot in her foyer had been after her.

So what was going on?

Grafton?

Or Sarah Houston? He had called her, asked for her help. She had been the source of the FBI fingerprint tip — I was certain of that. Who else had she told?

Houston. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure she was the leak.

She had never liked me, and she was too slippery by a bunch. When she was Zelda Hudson I had seduced and drugged her. We took fingerprints and eye prints and used them to get access to a place she claimed she worked in London. But she had conned us. She didn’t work there; she wanted me to get into that computer and see the names of top American military officers, which I did.

Then she stole a submarine and tried to get rich in the chaos that followed. After she went to prison she never liked me much, even when I helped get her out. Women are so ungrateful.

And she was slippery. Too smart, untrustworthy, greedy, and a little light in the ethics department.

Of course, people said the same about me. Still, I concluded, Sarah was probably the one who dropped the dime on us.

Ten minutes later I changed my mind. Grafton kept her out of prison after the warhead hunt, and she owed him. Somewhere, I thought, in that hard little heart of hers was a smidgen of loyalty.

By the time we reached the Shenandoah, I decided I was overthinking this. Sarah Houston was the logical suspect.

After a while I noticed that there was no more conversation going on in the back seat. Kelly was watching the road, so she saw me looking at her in the rearview mirror.

“He doesn’t remember anything,” she said flatly.

“You’re kidding.”

“He doesn’t even know his name.”

“Amnesia?”

“Seems so.”

I adjusted the rearview mirror so I could observe Goncharov. He ignored my scrutiny, or perhaps he was unaware of it.

Amnesia? Or faking memory loss? After all, he had only seen Kelly for a few hours a week ago, and he didn’t know me from Adam. Maybe faking memory loss was a last-ditch ploy when he had no other weapons left.

Yet I didn’t believe he was faking. I’d seen the expression on his face a few hours ago as he rubbed blood on his hands.

I smeared a man all over the road, we’re running from the law — again! — and all we had to show for it was a Russian with amnesia who couldn’t remember his own name!

It had been dark for several hours when we rolled into Richmond. We were hungry, and the SUV was low on gas. I found a gas station with a pay phone on the wall and fueled the vehicle. While Goncharov and Erlanger were making pit stops, I used the phone to call Jake Grafton.

The telephone rang and rang. That spooked me. What if they got to Jake and Callie? Killed them? I broke out into a sweat.

I hung up after fifteen rings and got my quarters back, then fed them into the box again and dialed his cell phone.

On the third ring, he answered. The relief hit me like a hammer, and I found myself leaning against the wall to remain upright.

I explained what had happened in West Virginia as quickly as I could, all the while looking around to ensure I wasn’t overheard. Summing up, I said, “Kelly says this guy can’t remember anything. He doesn’t even know his own name. He might be faking, of course, though I doubt it. You should have seen him with his hands in blood — holy damn, that was scary.”

Jake Grafton was silent for a long moment before he said, “He’s been through a lot.”

“Who hasn’t?” I replied bitterly. I was thoroughly sick of the whole damned mess. Probably shouldn’t have been thinking of myself, but I was. At that point I was ready to jump a banana boat to Central America and never come back.

“And Sarah Houston probably sold us out,” I added savagely. “Somebody did, sure as hell.”

“Somebody,” he echoed.

“You and Callie had better clear out of your house. Those bastards may come for you, same as they did Sal Pulzelli and Willie Varner. I saw Pulzelli after they finished butchering him. Believe me, that is one tough way to go.”

“Seventy-five cents, please.” The female operator cut in.

I fed in more quarters.

“Do you have enough money for a motel room?” Grafton asked.

“Yeah.”

“Get one room with two beds. I’ll meet you tomorrow at the house around noon.”

“Okay.”

“Watch yourself, Tommy. There’re some real heavy people involved with this. And there are more guys out there with guns.”

I knew that. No matter how many cockroaches you kill, you never get them all. Still, it was nice of him to express his concern. “Yes, sir,” I said, and hung up.

We wound up with a room in a motel near the Norfolk airport, just a couple miles from the causeway that led across the Chesapeake to eastern Maryland and Delaware. It was nearly midnight by the time we got inside and locked the door.

While Kelly was in the bathroom, I got my first chance to observe Mikhail Goncharov closely. He was wearing old clothes a size too large; Linda Fiocchi said she had gotten the duds from a neighbor near Durbin. He was unshaven, balding, perhaps thirty pounds overweight, yet looked reasonably healthy. He looked tense, tired, wary. On those occasions when he met my eyes he didn’t smile, didn’t even acknowledge me.

The former KGB archivist must know as much as any man alive about the evil that men do to one another. Considering all he had been through — somehow evading the assassins who came to murder him, the assassins who did murder his wife — he must be aware that someone important wanted him completely, totally dead. After a career in the KGB, he well knew how ruthlessly efficient merciless men can be — he had been reading their reports for twenty-plus years. The thought that that someone also wanted my worthless hide tacked up on the wall certainly gave me goose bumps. If he really had amnesia he wouldn’t be worried about that. Perhaps he just felt lost in a world where nothing was familiar.

After we had all done our evening ablutions and I turned the lights out, Kelly crawled into bed with me.

“What do you think?” I asked, referring to our roommate.

“I think he’s a sick man,” she said, and pushed her bottom into my side. “And I think I’m damned tired of chasing around the country with you playing hide-and-seek with every scumbag on the East Coast.”

“Does get old after a while.”

“I think we ought to hold a press conference and tell the world everything we know. Then we’ll be off their list.”

“Sure,” I said. If only life were so simple.

Goncharov began snoring. Before long Kelly relaxed completely and also began breathing deeply. I lay there a while longer tossing and turning, thinking about how that guy looked lying in the road with his guts smeared all over. Before the sons of bitches got me, I would sure like to get even with whomever sold us out. Torture would be good, something that made them really suffer.

I was past torture and pondering some real iffy stuff to do to them when Goncharov stopped snoring. I heard his teeth grinding, then he said something. He was talking in Russian, I believe, but his words were just sounds to me. I could hear him tossing in the bed, flailing around. He awoke with a start.

Kelly also woke up.

“What’s wrong?” she whispered.

“Goncharov was having a nightmare.”

It was a long night. He woke up four more times that night with nightmares. Once he was awake for two hours before he drifted off again. I couldn’t sleep either. The image of the car rushing toward the man shooting at us played itself over and over in my mind. The image of his face in that split second before the car hit him wouldn’t go away. I tried to think of other things and couldn’t.

At one point during the night I found myself in the bathroom staring at my face in the mirror. The overhead light threw the planes of my face and my eyes into deep shadow. The man in the mirror looked as if he had been dead for weeks.

I was more than a little worried the next morning, which was Sunday, as we motored north toward Delaware. We had breakfast at a truck stop, and I called Grafton again from the pay phone on the wall by the register.

“Your passenger still have amnesia?” he asked.

“So Kelly says. He isn’t sleeping well. Nightmares kept him awake last night.”

“We’ll see you for lunch.”

“Admiral, what if those dudes show up at your place?”

“I don’t think they will.”

“Sir, I don’t mean to sound paranoid, but—”

“Come on up here, Tommy. Callie wants to talk to your passenger.” He said it in a way that didn’t leave much room for discussion. That’s what happens when you spend too many years wearing a uniform.

“Yes, sir,” I said cheerfully. As if I had a choice.

Sipping coffee and watching trucks come and go through the window, I wondered if maybe the bad guys were already at Grafton’s. What if they were holding the admiral and his wife as hostages at gunpoint, waiting for me to bring Goncharov to them so they could make his loss of memory permanent?

Seated across from me in the booth, the archivist picked at an omelet. He had maybe four real bites before he quit. I wasn’t hungry either. Kelly Erlanger was doing all right by a couple of eggs, though.

I sort of eyed her as she ate, wondered where she and I were going with this sleeping-together thing. You’d think if she had the hots for me she would show it a little more. Except for that one passionate moment — which had been terrific, by the way — our relationship was more like sister and brother than boy-girl. I confess, I felt as if I was eight years old, sleeping with a neighborhood kid in a tent in the back yard.

I wondered if indeed she did have a boyfriend. Would that explain it?

When we were fed and coffeed, I paid the bill and we rolled north. No one followed us that I could see.

As we drove along, I explored my options. Should I park somewhere and sneak over to Grafton’s, just to see who was really there? Or should I drive in bold as brass and hope no one started shooting?

His voice sounded tired, yet… confident. In control.

I knew that voice. Jake Grafton was a fierce, determined warrior. If he had been held at gunpoint, I decided, he wouldn’t have told me to come there, even if it cost him his life. After they shot Goncharov, they would kill him and Callie, and he knew that. Jake Grafton would spit in their faces.

Kelly’s thoughts were running in the same vein mine were, but she didn’t know Jake Grafton. “What if someone is waiting at Grafton’s for us?” she asked.

“I know the admiral pretty well. They aren’t. Trust me.”

She didn’t say anything else. Mikhail Goncharov sat in the rear seat looking out the window. His face was a study. I wished I could read his thoughts!

I drove into Grafton’s parking area and parked beside his vehicle. His car was there; no one else’s. We got out, walked up on the porch, and rang the bell. He opened the door, held it wide. “Come in.” He didn’t smile.

I let Kelly go first, then Goncharov. Callie was right there. She spoke to Goncharov in Russian, then led him into the kitchen.

I plopped down on the admiral’s couch. “Hell of a trip,” I said. Kelly sat down beside me.

Jake pulled a pistol from his pocket and sat in a chair opposite. He laid the pistol in his lap. “Ms. Erlanger, why do you think those men showed up at Jarrett’s cabin a half hour after you did?”

Kelly shook her head. “I have no idea.”

“Surely you’ve thought about it.”

“Obviously they learned where he was. Perhaps they are monitoring telephone calls, perhaps the FBI called the sheriff and he told them where Goncharov could be found, perhaps the sheriff called the FBI and told them we were there inquiring for Goncharov. Those are the possibilities. I don’t know how it went down.”

“There’s another possibility,” Grafton said. “You called someone after you learned where Goncharov was.”

She stared at him.

“She has a telephone, Tommy. Find it.”

I held out my hand in front of her. She didn’t take her eyes off Grafton.

“The easy way or the hard way,” I said.

She turned to me. “You don’t believe him, do you? You and I have been together for days. I didn’t make any telephone calls.”

“You went to the bathroom alone. Give me the phone.”

She leaped from the couch and bounded for the front door. I tackled her. She tried to scratch my eyes out and managed to draw blood on a cheek.

After a bit of a scuffle, I had her under control. She had taken her purse with her as she charged the door, so I passed it to Grafton, then patted her down.

“I’ve got it,” Grafton said, removing her cell phone from the purse.

Erlanger ceased to struggle.

“Get off me,” she said through gritted teeth.

“Right.” I picked her up, threw her onto the couch.

She ignored me. She was watching Grafton like a hawk as he pushed buttons on the telephone. “She called Royston,” he said, then lowered the phone and leveled his gaze at Erlanger.

“Want to tell me about it?”

“What’s there to tell?”

“You help us get Royston and whoever is behind him, the prosecutors may go easy on you. Multiple counts of murder could put you in prison for a long, long time. For all I know, they still have the death penalty in West Virginia.”

“You can’t prove anything.”

“I’m beginning to see it,” I said softly, not taking my eyes off her. “I’ve been wondering how they learned Goncharov was at the safe house.”

“Erlanger was the leak,” Grafton said. He sounded tired. “She told them as soon as she received the translation assignment.”

The scene at the safe house replayed itself in my mind. “When I went into that burning house, she was busy burning the files, not trying to save them,” I said, thinking aloud.

“Your presence was an unexpected complication,” Grafton mused. “You were a witness they couldn’t seem to kill. Worse, you shot back. They didn’t expect that. Erlanger didn’t want to die, so she went along until she could steal your car. When you showed up at her house that night, she was going through the only surviving files, trying to determine if the important one was there.” He addressed her. “Were you thinking of blackmailing someone?”

She didn’t turn a hair. “You can’t prove anything.”

Jake Grafton pulled a file from the bookcase behind him. “You didn’t look hard enough.”

Now an expression crossed her face, and it was ugly.

“You can’t prove anything,” she insisted.

Grafton tucked the file back in the bookcase between two books. “Tell Royston I have it,” he said.

“You’re letting me go?”

Grafton shrugged. “It’s your choice. Cooperate for a reduced sentence or rabbit off to Royston and take the consequences.”

She stood. I stepped aside. She walked to the door, opened it and went out without even glancing at me.

Okay, okay. So I don’t know shit about women.

“She’ll tell them you have that file.”

He grunted.

“What’s in it?”

He pulled it out of the bookcase again, passed it to me. I opened it. Inside was a section of the Washington Post.

“There’s nothing here.” That comment just slipped out.

Grafton shrugged. “Royston will suspect that’s the case. But he won’t know, will he?”

“Is that why you let her go, to tell them about the file?”

“They’ll listen to what she has to say, then kill her.”

That comment stunned me. He said it without sorrow or remorse. And he was right. Kelly Erlanger had to die.

“Why didn’t you tell her that?”

He levered himself from his chair. When he was upright he looked straight into my eyes. “I made her an offer — cooperate or suffer the consequences. Death is the consequence. She won’t believe it, though, until they point a pistol at her head and pull the trigger.”