Liars & Thieves (21 page)

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.”

What is your name?” Callie Grafton asked in Russian. The archivist sat silently at the kitchen table, apparently thinking about the question. “I don’t know,” he said at last.

“What kind of work do you do?”

“I don’t know,” he repeated hoarsely. A sheen of perspiration appeared on his forehead.

“Are you married?” Callie sat beside him and held his hand.

“I don’t know?” he said, obviously bewildered.

“You came to my house a few moments ago with two people. Do you remember their names?”

“Oh, yes. The woman is Kelly. The man is Carmellini—that’s an Italian name, I think.”

“Is he Italian?”

The Russian pondered it. “He might be,” he said at last. “But perhaps not.”

“If he is not an Italian, what nationality is he?”

Her questions didn’t trouble Mikhail Goncharov, but they obviously confused him. She thought it interesting that he was not curious about the answers to her questions, merely surprised and troubled that he didn’t know them.

“Are you thirsty or hungry?” she asked finally. And for the first time she got an affirmative answer.

After Kelly Erlanger took a powder, Jake Grafton wandered into the kitchen. I trailed along behind. Mikhail Goncharov was sitting at the small round table drinking soda pop and Callie was fixing sandwiches.

“Would you like a sandwich, Tommy?” she asked. “Ham and Swiss or tuna salad?” She didn’t remark on the commotion in the living room, nor did she ask if Kelly Erlanger was going to join us. The thought occurred to me that Callie Grafton was as tough as her husband.

“Ham and Swiss, please.” I dropped into a chair beside Goncharov. “Is it amnesia?”

“He doesn’t seem to remember anything,” she said without turning around.

“I’ve heard these hard-drive crashes are sometimes temporary,” I said, just to make conversation. “Of course, what I know about it wouldn’t fill a thimble.” There was a napkin dispenser on the table. I helped myself to one; I used it to swab at the scratch on my cheek, which was still burning. There was a trace of blood.

Jake Grafton pulled three beers from the fridge and handed me one. It tasted great. He opened another and put it in front of Goncharov, who abandoned the soda pop and took a long swig.

After I had a couple of slurps, I said to him, “Kelly must be making a beeline for a pay phone. She might have already told them about this house. They could be here in the next five minutes.”

Grafton savored a swig of beer, swallowed it, and nodded.

“Maybe I’m just a nervous Nellie, Admiral, but if they hit us here in this house, we’re dead.”

“I called some friends yesterday,” Jake said. “They arrived this morning.”

“Oh.”

Callie put a sandwich in front of Goncharov and one in front of me. She had even put mustard on mine. I took a bite and worked on it a while. “Who are they?”

“Snake-eaters. There are a half dozen of them out there.”

“I didn’t see anyone .. . and I was looking.”

“They’re hard to see,” he admitted. When Callie served his sandwich, he sat down beside me. “Tell me about yesterday, everything you can remember.”

I was still talking when Callie took Goncharov upstairs to the guest room for a nap. He had only eaten a few bites of his sandwich.

Telling Jake Grafton everything I knew made me feel better. He asked a few questions to clarify points, but other than that, he had little to say. When I had run down and he was out of questions, I asked one. “Do you really think they’ll kill her?”

“She called Dell Royston from every stop. Sarah Houston said it sounded like there was water running in the background every time. She said Goncharov had amnesia, told him where you were going, the name of the motel where you spent the night, my name, address, everything she could think of.”

“Why didn’t they hit us in the motel?”

“Too dangerous, too many witnesses, and Royston didn’t want you killing any more of his people. Apparently they signed up for murder, not combat.”

Dell Royston, a political operative at the White House. “Is Royston Mr. Big, you think?”

“That’s the question,” he muttered. “Let’s go make some telephone calls. I’ll drive. I want you to sit beside me with the MP-5 on your lap.”

When we went outside to get in the car, I looked around casually. Didn’t see a soul. And there were, Grafton said, six people out there right now armed to the teeth and burrowed in. Just goes to show …

We drove south along the beach to Ocean City. Grafton backed into a space in front of a convenience store so that I had a good view of the parking area and the street beyond. No one seemed to pay us any attention. I glanced at Grafton in the rearview mirror. He made four calls from the pay phone mounted on the exterior wall of the building, taking his time on all of them.

An older car eased to a stop near the gas pump and a couple of Mexicans got out. One went inside for a bit, then came back out and began pumping gas. The other checked the oil. On the end of the row where I sat, some kid was listening to rap on his car radio; he liked it loud, and he had every window in the car down. The Mexicans were finished with the gas and washing their windshield when two large boys on skateboards came flying down the sidewalk and across the parking area. They sat on the sidewalk sipping soft drinks from cans. Jake Grafton finished with his telephone calls and went into the store. He came out in a few minutes with a couple of fountain drinks.

When he got behind the wheel, he passed me one. As I sipped he said, “Your buddy, Willie Varner, was released from the hospital today. Going to be all right, the doctors said. Two of my friends are baby-sitting. He’ll be okay, I think.”

The images of Willie and Pulzelli slashed and bleeding flashed through my mind, made me feel like I was going to puke. I put the pop in the cup holder and took a very deep breath.

What causes amnesia, anyway? Do too many bad memories overload the system, cause circuit breakers to pop, drives to crash?

How close was I to a massive brain fart?

Between sips of Coke, Grafton briefed me. Sarah Houston was his spy, and she was a good one. She was monitoring the telephone numbers I had supplied, he said.

The people at the upper levels of the FBI and CIA believed that the Greenbrier safe house had been hit by Americans in the pay of the Russian foreign intelligence service. They were convinced the Russians had learned of Goncharov’s defection, Grafton told me, and had moved swiftly and violently to plug the leak and minimize the damage. Someone had sold the boys in the corner office the theory that I was one of the American traitors. At the insistence of the White House, the incident was being treated as a national security matter, which was the reason nothing had leaked to the press. The relations between the Western world and Russia were too important to be jeopardized by the shenanigans of intelligence professionals—you could almost close your eyes and hear the White House advisers arguing that point in the Oval Office.

“The people at the top apparently don’t know about Royston, about his involvement,” Grafton said, thinking as he talked. “Sarah says he has five people still working for him that he talks to via cell phone on a regular basis. If Kelly confirms that Goncharov is at the beach house, he may send them to hit it.”