Liars & Thieves

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

“The president will speak in about twenty minutes,” Callie told her husband, who was looking out the window. She was adding the final items to an overnight bag. “Do you want to stay to hear what he has to say?”

“No. Doesn’t matter.”

“Is going to New York really a good idea?”

“Maybe not, but it’s the best one we have — the only one we have — so we’re going to run with it.”

He glanced at the television. On this channel a panel of “experts” was debating why the president would or wouldn’t choose to run with his wife, Zooey Sonnenberg. In an upper corner of the picture was a smaller picture in which the governor of some Midwestern state was addressing the convention delegates, who weren’t paying any more attention to him than the panel of experts were.

A wry grin crossed Jake Grafton’s face; this was, he reflected, the Americans’ freedom of speech in full flower. Card-carrying members of the chattering class were talking, exercising their constitutional right to say whatever they wished, and no one was listening.

He carried the overnight bag down the stairs and set it by the door.

He was about to ascend the stairs again to check on Goncharov when someone rapped on the front door.

He opened it and found a soldier in full camo wearing grease paint and carrying a short submachine gun on a strap over his shoulder. “Just thought I’d drop by, Admiral, and tell you we’re leaving now.”

“You are? Now?”

“Just got the orders, sir. They said you were leaving shortly so we were to pull out ASAP.”

“Thank you, major. We are indeed leaving shortly.”

“Any time, Admiral. It’s been good training. Sorry about that villain last week.”

“Right.” Jake stood in the doorway and watched the captain go. His men sifted out of empty houses and hides and joined him as he walked under the streetlight toward the highway.

The sound of loud rock music drowned out the sounds of traffic and surf tonight. It seemed to be coming from a house three doors closer to the beach, on the south side of the street. Cars filled every parking place.

Jake closed the door as Callie and Goncharov came down the stairs. “I think something is about to happen here,” Jake said as he reached for the MP-5 Carmellini had stashed in a corner. “Come with me, now.”

They followed him out the door.

“What’s wrong?”

“Maybe nothing,” Jake said. “The helo is supposed to pick us up at midnight and take us to New York. The general didn’t mention that he was going to pull the security people away, but they all left. Called off, the major said.”

“Why don’t you call the general?”

“I will. In the meantime I think we should get out of the house.”

Moving quickly, they walked under the light past the party into the darkness beyond. Jake told Callie to hide with the archivist under the derelict building near the beach, the one in which Carmellini had killed the rifleman. They disappeared over the boardwalk. Jake lay down in the sand beside a fence on the yard of the last house on the north side of the street, which was empty just now.

Yesterday a pack of college-age youngsters had loaded the garbage cans in front of the party house, packed their cars, and departed. Another bunch had arrived today. Tonight they were settling in.

There was a shrub of some kind at the end of the fence. Jake shoved the nose of the silenced submachine gun between the shrub and the fence and pointed it at the junction of this dead-end street and the highway, then lay down to wait. Fortunately this yard was slightly elevated, so he could see over the hoods of the cars parked on the street.

There was not enough light to see the keys of his cell phone. Still, he managed to get the general on his second dialing attempt.

I watched the president’s acceptance speech on the monitor in mission control, surrounded by computers, radio and television receivers, and the remnants of sandwiches, potato salad, and pickles from a deli down the street. Willie had stopped his grousing and watched without comment.

The president wore a dark suit and burgundy power tie. He was carefully made up and used the TelePrompTer with obvious skill. He recited the accomplishments of his first term and laid out the goals for his second, the themes he wanted to run on. He denounced the dogs in the other party who had impeded his legislative program and stymied some of his judicial nominations.

It was a tub-thumping political speech, just what the pundits and everyone else expected him to say. Made you wonder if there were any good movies on the cable channels. Near the end of the speech, he got around to the subject that had consumed the delegates all week, the identity of his vice-presidential running mate.

“This party needs a woman on the ticket,” the president declared, “a competent, capable, highly intelligent woman. This nation wants a woman on the ticket who understands the goals and aspirations of the American people and is ready to assume the burdens of the presidency in an emergency.”

Apparently the prospect of his demise was merely “an emergency.” That wasn’t the word I would have chosen. Which is why he’s a politician and I’m a thief.

“This party and this nation,” he continued, “are ready to put behind us the tired, obsolete, bigoted ways of the past and step into the future, a future where all Americans, regardless of race, religion, national origin, or gender”—here he paused to thunderous applause—“have an equal opportunity. The time has come. We must carry the torch forward into the future, lighting the way for all the people of the earth. Our time has come…”

“Get on with it,” Willie muttered impatiently.

“Senator Heston will make a formal nomination tomorrow, yet tonight I wish to ask the delegates to this convention to put the most competent, capable, trusted woman politician and statesman in the country on the ticket with me.” Growing, swelling applause. “Tonight I ask you to nominate my wife, Zooey Sonnenberg, to run with me for—”

The rest of the sentence was drowned out by cheering and applause. For a moment the president looked as if he were waiting until the applause died so he could finish his peroration, but then he gave up. He turned, stepped over to Zooey, who was beaming broadly, took her hand, and led her to the podium. As a million camera flashes strobed continuously, the president and first lady stood before the nation and the world with hands clasped together over their heads while they waved to the crowd with their free hands.

I studied Zooey’s face when the television cameras zoomed in for a close-up. She was one happy human, beaming at the audience, her husband, and the cameras as the world watched. It occurred to me that she and the president had both labored for most of their adult lives for this moment.

Power — the ultimate aphrodisiac.

They wanted it badly.

Then I remembered Dell Royston. I flipped switches to hear what was going on in his suite. Cheering and applause, an audio overload. Individual voices were indistinguishable. I tried the adjoining suites, right and left. More of the same, although in one they had the television audio cranked way up and I could hear the commentator’s voice-over.

I tried Dorsey’s room. Got her on the telephone, apparently, because I could only hear one side of the conversation.

“… Never seen her so happy… That’s right… Um-huh… Uh-huh, yes… Yes, I see that. She deserves it, but deserving or not, sometimes life doesn’t work out.”

Then Dorsey hung up, and I was stuck with the television commentator. I cranked the volume way down and called Sarah Houston, who, God willing, was still monitoring the hotel’s computer system.

“Hey,” I said when she answered. “You still on the job?”

“No, fool, I’m at Radio City getting in my seat to watch the Rockettes.”

That stunned me for a second, until I realized that was supposed to be a joke. Sarah has a rather sick sense of humor, which she trots out at the oddest times.

“Dorsey was just on the telephone. What can you tell me about that call?”

“Very little.”

“Did it originate within the hotel?”

“Yep.”

“Who made the call, damn it?”

“It came from Royston’s suite. As you know, I don’t have the capability to listen in. If a certain burglar had done a better job last week, we’d be able to monitor both sides of every telephone conversation made through the hotel’s switchboard.”

“It’s hard to get competent help.”

“Impossible, sometimes.”

“Thanks,” I said, and hung up. I used my cell phone to call Jake Grafton.

He listened to everything I had to say, then said, “We’ll be up there later tonight. I’ll bring Callie along to translate.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I mumbled something, I can’t remember what, and he said, “Someone set us up down here. The guards were called off, and the general who sent them here knows nothing about it. He’s checking now.”

“You’d better clear the house,” I said.

Jake Grafton swatted my advice right back at me. “You have been a stationary target in that van for five days now,” he said. “I’d hate to come up there and find you dead.”

“Ahh… You don’t think—?”

“You know far too much, Tommy. So do I. So do Goncharov and Callie and Willie Varner.”

“Where should I meet you?”

“The hotel lobby at two or two-thirty.”

I looked at my watch. Three hours from now.

“Okay,” I said, and hung up.

“Let’s go,” I said to Willie.

“Go where?”

“Go get a drink. Take a leak. Go. Now. Come on.”

“But who is going to listen to—?”

“No one.” I pushed him out of the seat and started him toward the door.

There was just enough moonlight for Callie to spot the two figures moving swiftly south along the beach, near the dune. They were apparently fit men in dark clothes that covered their arms and legs completely, trotting along carrying something in their hands.

She whispered to Goncharov, who moved even deeper into the shadow under the pilings that held up the abandoned house. Callie joined him there. Showing him by example, she lowered her face into her hands so her eyes wouldn’t reflect light. She also did not want the eyes of the hunters spotting the lightness of her face amid the darkness.

Head in her hands upon her knees, sitting in the darkness beside Goncharov, she waited.

Callie Grafton and the archivist were saved by the simple fact that the two men did not expect to find them here, so they weren’t looking. Their quarry, they thought, was still in the Graftons’ beach house, and the guards were gone. As a matter of fact, they had sat in a van parked along the highway to the south and watched the guards leave in a government bus.

Jake had just turned off his telephone so it wouldn’t ring when he saw the two black-clad figures come over the boardwalk. One took a position behind the porch of the rambling old house opposite Jake; the other dropped behind a car just in front of him. The man nearer Jake looked around quickly, scanned the houses and porches, then spoke into a small radio or cell phone.

It was a radio, Jake decided, because he heard the answering transmission end. Didn’t hear the words.

The man was no more than ten feet away from the admiral.

It was a small miracle the man hadn’t seen him. Perhaps he had seen Jake and, since he was not expecting to find a man there, had ignored the shape.

Whichever, if he turned his head ninety degrees to his right and took any look at all, he would see the admiral. This Jake knew. Needless to say, the MP-5 wasn’t pointed in the proper direction. If he tried to extract it from the bush and point it at the man near him, the man would probably be alerted by the movement. Alerted too soon.

Jake felt sweat begin to accumulate on his forehead.

Soon a young man came out onto the porch of the party house. Music and laughter poured out the screen door. Standing on the porch, he lit a cigarette. He was joined by a young woman in a snuggling mood. The young man tossed his butt toward the street. The couple leaned against the railing and wrapped their arms around each other.

The party made the man in front of Jake uneasy. He eyed the young lovers repeatedly, glanced at his watch, shifted his grip on his weapon. Apparently he had not anticipated witnesses at this hour.

Welcome to the beach, buddy, Jake said silently to himself.

A minute passed, then another. A second couple joined the first on the covered porch and settled into a recliner.

The man in front of Jake said something into his two-way radio. Even as he did a van rounded the corner onto the street and drove the thirty yards to Grafton’s house. It passed it, double-parked in front of the next one. Two men climbed out, the driver and one from the passenger door. The passenger went around the house while the driver walked up to Jake Grafton’s door and knocked.

Another vehicle, a convertible, careened around the corner from the highway and came barreling down the street. Slid to a stop beside the van. The passenger leaned out, shouted at the man in front of Grafton’s door. “Hey, buddy, you can’t leave that thing parked there in the street.”

Jake heard the reply. “I’ll move it.”

The convertible spun its tires getting under way, then braked hard and threaded its way between two parked cars onto the lawn of the party house. Four people climbed out. “Hey, Vinnie! We’re here. Where’s the beer?”

The man standing on Grafton’s porch must have been frustrated. The party was unexpected. The witnesses might be a fatal problem. And he still wasn’t in Grafton’s house.

He turned back to the door, worked on the lock.

Jake tried to remember if he had used the key to lock the dead bolt or merely pulled the door shut until it latched.

No dead bolt, apparently. Thirty seconds after he attacked the lock, the man on the stoop opened the door. And disappeared inside.

There were at least eight people on the porch of the house across the street, drinking beer, laughing, talking loudly over the music. There was an elderly lady who lived on this side of the street who routinely called the police when parties got loud. Jake wondered if she was there tonight. If she was, this situation could get interesting.

The man in front of Jake picked that moment to move to a position where he could get a better view of the party. When his back was completely turned, Jake extracted the muzzle of the submachine gun from the bush and leveled it.

“Freeze,” he said in a low, conversational tone, “or I am going to splatter you all over that car.”