Liars & Thieves

CHAPTER TWO

On the first Tuesday in July I found myself driving west from Washington on I-66 under a huge warm front that was stalled over the mid-Atlantic region. It was a gray, rainy day. The wipers squished monotonously on the windshield of my old red Mercedes coupe. A leak between the windshield and the hardtop that I had fought for years dribbled on the passenger’s seat. Apparently the weeks the car had spent this winter alternately baking and freezing outside my apartment building had been too much for the goo and do-it-yourself rubber seals that I used to plug the leak last summer.

I had only been back in the States a week, which I had spent writing reports, cleaning up routine paperwork at the office, replacing the leaking water heater in my apartment, and putting a new battery in my car. The mindless routine and endless rain had me in a gloomy mood on Monday when my boss, Pulzelli, called me into his office.

Pulzelli was a bureaucrat to his fingertips, a man who loved the thrust and parry of interoffice politics. He was famous in the agency for his habit of picking his teeth with a pen, which left his enamel splotched with whatever ink color happened to be his current favorite. He was also a bit prissy about saying “damn” and “hell” at the office; I could clean up my act when around quality folk, so that didn’t bother me much. The thing I liked best about Pulzelli was his willingness to do battle to protect the people who worked for him. All in all, he was a good guy to have on your side when the fan was splattering the smelly stuff all over, as happened at the agency a couple times a day. It seemed that we lurched from crisis to crisis, but perhaps that was only my perception.

“The chief wants me to provide someone for a week at the Greenbrier River facility,” he said. “How about driving up tomorrow morning?”

The “facility” was really a safe house deep in the heart of the Allegheny Mountains surrounded on three sides by national forest. The cover was that the estate belonged to a wealthy novelist who was rarely there and was paranoid about his privacy when he was. A grass airstrip and a hangar were visible from the highway; the rest of the structures were completely out of sight of the motoring public and could only be reached by a mile-long gravel road. Although the property was fenced and continuously patrolled, the agency beefed up the security detail when the use of the facility warranted it. Apparently this was one of those times.

On two prior occasions I had spent a week there assigned to the security detail while Russian defectors were being interrogated. If the facility was used for anything other than defector interrogations, I didn’t know about it.

“From the French Riviera to the Allegheny Mountains,” I said to Pulzelli. “Talk about culture shock — I don’t know if my heart can stand the strain.”

He grinned, and I saw several stains on his teeth that could have only been blue ink.

“Another defector?”

“No one said anything to me.”

We batted the breeze for a few minutes. He didn’t mention what the security detail was guarding at the safe house, nor did I ask again. He couldn’t tell me what he didn’t know, which was precisely the rationale for classifying information and restricting access to those with a need to know.

Four people worked for me. Just now one was in the Mideast, one in Japan, and one in China. The only one currently in town was Joe Billy Dunn, the new guy who had just arrived from Delta Force. He strolled in after lunch that Monday, fresh from a training session for new recruits.

“You’re in charge for the rest of the week,” I told him. “I’m going to be out of the office on assignment. I’ll call you from time to time, see how things are going.”

Dunn was thirty-two, a few inches short of six feet, wedge shaped, and hard as a brick. He threw himself into his chair, plopped his feet on his desk, laced his fingers behind his head, and sighed contentedly. “Three weeks in headquarters and already I’m in charge. Cream always rises to the top, my mama used to say.”

“Right.”

“’Course my ol’ daddy said that shit floats.”

“Philosophers, both of them.”

“The rate I’m going up, about Christmas they’re gonna put me in charge of this-here outfit.”

Dunn wasn’t a yokel, although he liked to play the role. He had a trace of southern accent in his voice, which he exaggerated from time to time. He struck me as one of those people who are best taken in small doses.

“Don’t start World War III while I’m gone,” I told him.

Why the powers that be assigned Dunn to my section was a bureaucratic mystery. The people in my section traveled the world breaking and entering, planting bugs, tapping lines, and running wireless surveillance equipment. We didn’t do it all by ourselves, of course; we were merely the experts called in when the local station chief needed more expertise than he had available.

Dunn’s field was counterterrorism operations. He could jump out of planes in the dead of night, handle and repair any weapon in the army arsenal, speak Arabic and French, and survive indefinitely on mice and snakes in places I wouldn’t even want to fly over. He was quite adept at unarmed combat. Armed combat, too, for that matter. He knew very little about clandestine surveillance. Maybe they expected me to train him. Oh, well.

So here I was on Tuesday morning, watching rain fall from a slate sky and stream across the windshield, thinking about the problems at the office. I wasn’t in the mood for the radio. The monotonous sounds, endless traffic, and subdued light all had their way with me, so I stopped at a McDonald’s near Front Royal in the Shenandoah for coffee. The hot java and the pit stop helped and I soon felt better.

I took I-81 southeast down the valley. Sandwiched between trucks, trying to avoid the spray from their tires at seventy-five miles per hour, I rolled by the towns of Strasburg, New Market, and Harrisonburg. I was relieved when I saw the exit I was looking for near Staunton and got off the interstate.

Another stop, this time for gas as well as coffee, and a handful of paper towels to wipe off the water from the passenger seat of the car. On through the rain I went, westward along a twisty two-lane highway into the mountains. The road attacked the grain of the mountains at right angles, so soon I was downshifting and working my way through switchbacks and blind curves. Over the top and through switchbacks and blind curves down the other side. Across a small stream and up the next one.

The clouds came down, shrouding the mountaintops in dense fog as the rain grew even heavier. The road ran through a great hardwood forest; in the rain all that could usually be seen was vivid wet, dripping green. The road was so slick I didn’t have time to do much looking. After creeping over three mountains I went through the village of McDowell. A mountain later, Monterey. Three more mountains and I found myself driving through a widening valley toward Bartow. At the bridge across the Greenbrier River I turned south.

Five miles later I entered another wide, open valley, the largest I’d seen since leaving the Shenandoah. When I saw the barn and hangar in the huge meadow on the right side of the road, I turned in at the gate and drove slowly along. I knew that the security gang was watching me on cameras mounted on the barn, so I took my time, even stopped alongside the hangar, got out and stretched my legs in the rain so that they got a good look at my face and had time to do a computer check of my license plate. I didn’t want anyone jumping from behind a bush, sticking a submachine gun in my face — shocks like that were hard on my adrenal system.

I was dressed for the hinterlands today: hiking boots, jeans, and a dark green Gore-Tex windbreaker that shed the rain nicely. I pulled the collar tight to keep water from trickling down my neck.

A half dozen deer grazing in the meadow a hundred yards or so away lifted their heads and watched me, more curious than afraid. I stared right back. One of them was a buck growing a decent rack of antlers. They ignored the cold rain. Finally they tired of watching me and went back to munching grass, which reminded me that I, too, was hungry. And cold.

It was cooler here than in Washington… at least fifteen degrees cooler. If the air cooled off much more, I thought, this rain could turn to snow. Wouldn’t that be the icing on the cake? From the tanned bikini babes of the French Riviera to an early summer snowstorm in these old mountains! I shivered at the thought, turned up my collar, and got back into the car.

Speaking of babes, I had a date for this coming Friday night. I had forgotten to cancel it. I removed my cell phone from my coat pocket and looked at it. No service.

Of course not. Now I remembered! We were only a few miles north of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, smack in the middle of a huge radio quiet zone.

I put the cell phone back in my pocket and made a mental note to call the lady on a landline.

I drove on, crossed over a narrow bridge with no guardrails, then followed the road into the wet, dark, dripping forest.

The road came to a four-way intersection, and I took the road to the left, which was hard-packed gravel. The road paralleled the valley for several hundred yards, then turned to follow a creek into the hills. Two hundred yards after the turn there was a wide place, a pullout barely large enough for one car. I parked, got out, and stretched, sucking in a deep lungful of cool air smelling of wet earth and fragrant blossoms.

The woods were quiet, the treetops enshrouded in clouds, the leaves glistening.

There was a dim pathway up the slope to the right. It was difficult to see, but I knew it was there and didn’t have to search for it. The forest floor squished under my feet.

Fifty yards up the hill was a small one-story security cabin made of logs. It was surrounded by laurel and difficult to see from more than ten yards away. This was the security post that monitored the surveillance cameras trained on the barn and hangar and mounted high in trees at various places. The people here could use a radio to summon armed guards in four-wheel-drive vehicles to intercept intruders.

The door to the cabin was ajar. I climbed the steps, crossed the small covered porch, and went in.

“Hey, guys, don’t you—”

There were two men in the single room, both dead. One sat slumped in a chair facing the bank of monitors; the other lay on the floor in the middle of the room. Both had been shot numerous times. There was little blood. Several dozen spent 9 mm cartridges lay scattered on the floor.

I froze. There was a small restroom in one corner of the building; the door was closed. It was unlikely the shooter was in there answering nature’s call, but…

I turned the man on the floor just enough to pull the pistol from his shoulder holster. It was a 9 mm auto. I thumbed off the safety, tiptoed to the restroom door and opened it with my foot. Empty.

I knew the man in the chair from my prior tours here. His name was Fred. I touched his cheek. Still warm. Very warm. His hand was limp and supple. He had at least eight bullet holes in him that I could see, and none of them had bled much. I fingered one of the wounds. The blood was still fresh and oozing.

These men hadn’t been dead long. Just a few minutes.

I had seen no traffic on the road. Now that I thought about it, the pathway up here showed no footprints. I glanced at the radio — it had a half dozen bullet holes in it. The telephone… I picked it up, didn’t get a dial tone. I put it back on its cradle.

Something was going down, but what?

I stepped to the door and looked at the porch. I could see other wet footprints. I slipped out onto the porch, walked along it to the end. Depressions in the leafy forest detritus were visible, at least two trails. One coming, one leaving? Perhaps the shooter had come this way, along the side of the hill through the forest, parallel to the road below. Then he retraced his path leaving. I knew what lay in that direction — the main complex.

I went back in the cabin and looked at the surveillance camera monitors. They were still working. The killers must have shot these men immediately before I pulled up at the hangar or after I left it. Or perhaps they were so busy drilling these guys they didn’t notice me on the monitors. If they had seen me, they would have met me down on the road or here at the cabin and killed me, too.

Later on I realized that this would have been an excellent time to jog down the hill to my car and beat a tactical retreat to the safety of the nearest village, where I could have called Washington with the news. There was nothing I could do for the men in the cabin. Unfortunately that thought didn’t occur to me then.

I checked the pistol. There was a round in the chamber and the magazine was full. I put the safety on and, with the pistol in my hand, started off through the forest following the tracks.

He knew his wife was probably dead. He had heard the ripping of the silenced submachine guns — still loud — and knew precisely what it was. She had been in the kitchen eating when he came into the bathroom, just moments ago.

He held his hands to his ears, trying to stop the sounds. Oh, God, all his nightmares were becoming reality!

He was completely unarmed, knew nothing of unarmed combat, knew it would be suicide to leave the bathroom. As the staccato bursts sounded closer, he surveyed the small room. There was a chute for towels… he opened it, wormed his way into it. And fell.

He landed in a pile of towels and sheets on a hard concrete floor. The basement.

He looked around, desperate for a place to hide. Oversized laundry machines were mounted against the wall — two washers, two dryers.

He had always had the ability to think quickly and function flawlessly under pressure; he had been doing it for twenty-five years under the noses of the paranoid professionals of the KGB. He used that ability now. Without wasting a second, he opened a dryer and crawled in amid the sheets and pillowcases, then pulled the door shut after him.

The thought occurred to me that if I wasn’t real careful, I could end up like Fred and his colleague. Whoever shot them used an automatic weapon, and I was carrying a peashooter.

I’m no hero — far from it. I’ve been around long enough to know I’m not bulletproof. I also know that revenge is something people only get in movies — not in America in this day and age. I kept going anyway. I wanted this guy. Wanted to shoot him my very own self… as long as I could do it safely, without doing any serious bleeding. I liked Fred, but friendship has its limits.

I took my time walking through the woods, pausing frequently to look and listen. The sound of rain hitting the leaves and big drops falling off the trees masked all other sounds. With the leaves on the trees and brushy plants and the reduced visibility from fog, I couldn’t see far. Still, the depressions in the wet leaves were easy to follow — even for a city boy like me.

It took about twenty minutes at my slow pace to get to the edge of the main complex clearing. Using the trees as cover, I sneaked to a spot where I could see, right behind a large tree. Flat on my face, I inched my head around the trunk. The main complex consisted of a two-story log structure that functioned as a dormitory, a garage for vehicles, and the main building itself, a huge, two-story log house with a covered porch that wrapped all the way around it. There were no vehicles in the gravel driveway.

A body lay on the front porch. From the way he was sprawled I knew he was dead.

A muffled ripping reached me, a second or so of sound, then another burst. The sounds seemed to be coming from the main house. I knew what those sounds were — bursts from a silenced submachine gun. The killers were still hard at it, slaughtering people.

Killers. There had to be more than one. The pistol felt useless in my hand.

Only a suicidal fool would charge in there with a pistol to face an unknown number of men armed with submachine guns. I’d certainly played the fool on numerous occasions in my life, but I sure as hell wasn’t suicidal. Lying behind that tree on wet, soaking leaves, I knew there was simply nothing I could do. I checked my watch. It was seventeen minutes after twelve.

Several minutes passed. The shooting seemed to be over. After those two bursts I heard, there had been nothing else. Now black smoke began to waft from the chimney.

I had been in the main room of the house on several occasions and remembered the huge, cut-stone fireplace.

The smoke became a column.

Maybe the bastards were setting the place on fire.

At twenty-nine past the hour a man wearing a camo outfit came out onto the porch. He had a submachine gun cradled in his arms. He walked to the end of the porch and, facing in my direction, made a come-here motion with his arm.

I froze, holding my breath. Certainly he couldn’t be motioning to me!

That was when I had a bad shock. A bush near a solitary tree twenty yards in front of me suddenly stood up and began walking toward the porch! It was a man in a ghillie suit, a web of cord and leaves and strips of rag that covered him completely and allowed him to sink to the ground and mold himself into the landscape. I could see the round sausage-shaped silencer on his weapon protruding from the suit.

If I had moved in any direction from this tree, he would have spotted me and killed me.

Every Tom, Dick, and Harry wore camouflage clothes these days, but silenced submachine guns and a ghillie suit? These men had the look of professionals. Military snipers, perhaps. Uh-oh! Right then I thanked my stars that I was wearing a dark green jacket, not my yellow one. The air went out of me, and I seemed to sink into the earth in my attempt to disappear from view.

I was also doing some hard thinking. When I saw the man in the camo clothes glance at his watch and take a two-way radio from a holster on his belt, I knew I was in deep and serious shit. They might have hiked across the hills through the national forest to get here, but I was willing to bet my pension these dudes were now waiting for a ride. Someone was going to drive a vehicle up the only road, and that someone was going to see my car — and call these guys on their handheld radios, which would cause them to come looking hard for little old me.

Even as that thought shot across my synapses, I heard the radio in his hand come to life. In that still air the sound carried, although I could not distinguish the words. Yep, both of them took a quick glance around.

Uh-oh!

That was when I realized I should have taken the car to the village to telephone the cavalry.

The inadequacy of my hiding place also hit me hard. Stretched out behind a tree, I was invisible to these two as they stood in the yard, but if they began circling the perimeter of the clearing, they would see me easily.

I backed straight up, keeping the tree between them and me. When the ground permitted, I rose to a crouch and began waddling back the way I had come as fast as I could. They would see my tracks, of course, but I had a few minutes before they found them. I intended to see if I could get back to my car before they did.

Fifty yards into the woods I began jogging toward the guard cabin. I didn’t jog far — the tree trunks, dead limbs, fallen trees, rocks, and uneven ground made it impossible. The best I could manage was a fast walk, going over, under, and around obstacles, just as I had coming from the cabin. The heel marks and boot prints in the sodden forest carpet were nearly a path by now, plainly visible. And here I was trucking along this little highway, begging for someone to shoot me.

After about four minutes of this, I stopped and shucked my hiking boots, tied them together with the strings, and put them around my neck. The wetness went through my socks instantly, nearly freezing my feet.

Trying to disturb the leaves and dirt as little as possible, I climbed up the hill away from the path at right angles. When I had gone forty feet or so, I sat down to put my boots back on. My feet were already cold — there was no way I could walk very far without the boots.

I was tying the lace on the second one when I caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye. A rotten log partially concealed me on that side — the side toward the guard cabin. I ducked down, huddled against it, and waited.

Perhaps a minute went by. Then he came, following the tracks. He was wearing camo clothes and carried a silenced submachine gun in his hands, the butt braced against his right hip. I could see a slender boom mike across his face; the headset was under his camo hat. He moved slowly and steadily, scanning alternately the trail, then the woods right and left.

He must have had a lot of experience in the woods, because when he came to the place where I left the trail, he recognized the footprints going away and turned toward me, still scanning. I held the pistol sights dead center on his chest as I squeezed the trigger.