Liars & Thieves: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

“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 paperpusher. 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.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The sheriff’s office was in a substantial, three-story cut-stone courthouse with oak floors. There wasn’t a soul in sight that Saturday. Our footsteps echoed on the wide staircase and in the empty hallways. When we found the door labeled SHERIFF, I half expected the door to be locked and was relieved when the knob turned in my hand.

  The sheriff was a pleasantly plump fellow pushing sixty. He had his feet under his desk and was working on a report when the receptionist showed us into his office. I stuck out my hand. “Zack Winston, Sheriff, like the cigarettes. Sorry to bother you, but we’re looking for my girlfriend’s uncle, who might be lost in this county.”

  The sheriff looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “You lost him?”

  “He wandered away from our camper when we made a pit stop in the northern part of the county last week.” I looked at Kelly. “It was last Tuesday, wasn’t it?”

  She nodded.

  “And you waited until now to report a missing person.”

  I looked sheepish. “We’ve been looking, believe me, and just haven’t found him. We didn’t even know he was missing until we got to Staunton and stopped for gas. He must have got out of the back of the camper at one of our stops.”

  “He got a name?”

  “Mikhail Goncharov.” We had to give his real name. He might have given it to someone, although if the sheriff knew it when he sent in the prints for an ID, it seemed to me he would have said so.

  “That sounds Russian.”

  I nodded. “He’s a refugee. Russian is the only language he speaks. He’s here visiting Kelly.” I introduced her to the sheriff.

  “You both look like Americans to me,” the sheriff said dubiously. “Either of you speak Russian?”

  Kelly reeled off a sentence or two. It sounded Russian as hell to me, and it must have to the sheriff, too, because he relaxed and smiled.

  “We may have found him. Something wrong with him?”

  “Alzheimer’s,” I said, nodding.

  “Well, he’s staying with a couple up in the northern end of the county at a fishing camp along the river, fellow named Jarrett. Go to Durbin and take the river road south about six miles. His name is on the mailbox.”

  “Thanks,” I said enthusiastically. “We’ve been so damned worried, let me tell you.” I pulled out a hankie and mopped my brow. “I feel like such a fool.”

  “Glad to be of service. But the person you should thank is Linda Fiocchi, Jarrett’s girlfriend. She took him in, wanted him to remain as their guest while we tried to identify him. Aren’t many people that kind in this world.”

  We talked about that for a bit. The sheriff really admired Jarrett’s girlfriend. “Fiocchi’s a class act. I think she thought he might be an illegal,” the sheriff said, watching my face.

  Kelly laid her hand on my arm. “Let’s go get him now,” she said to me, and smiled warmly at the sheriff. “I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Wish you had put in a missing persons report,” the sheriff s
aid.

  “He’s scared to death of the police,” I explained. “Living in Russia … perhaps you can understand. We were afraid that if he saw a policeman …”

  “Seemed fine to me when I saw him,” the sheriff said gruffly, giving me the eye. If he wanted to think Goncharov was an illegal, that was okay with me. In the abstract everyone wants the immigration laws enforced, but when the problem is reduced to real people, few people are ready to send them back to whatever they fled to get here. This county sheriff in the heart of the Alleghenies had not called the INS, and I doubted that he would.

  We thanked him profusely and made a hasty departure.

  I stopped at a filling station to call Jake Grafton. As I was using the pay phone, Kelly went to the ladies’.

  “The sheriff says he’s staying at a fishing camp on the river, near the facility,” I told the admiral when he answered. “Sounds to me as if he’s no more than five or six miles from it.”

  The admiral grunted. “Dell Royston has been busy today. He’s made over a half dozen calls in the last two hours, a couple of them to numbers that you gave me. Something’s up. Don’t know what.”

  “Okay.”

  “Better find Goncharov and get him out of there.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Be careful, Tommy.”

  “I will,” I said, and hung up. Kelly was still in the ladies’ when I went into the men’s.

  It seemed to me that there was no time to lose. Whatever Royston might be up to, it couldn’t be good. And the sheriff might just decide to drive up for a visit with Goncharov and his niece; I wanted to be gone before he arrived.

  I waited in the car for Kelly. Why do women always take so long in the john?

  At least now we had a name for Mr. Big. That was an accomplishment in itself. I remember reading about Royston these last few years. He had become a public personality while on the White House staff. I seemed to recall that he had spent most of his career as a political consultant, one of those professional cynics who creates an image for whatever politician signs up to foot the bill. The president was Royston’s horse.

  How in the world had Royston gotten into the KGB’s files, if indeed he had? Did he analyze American politics for them or write op-ed pieces for Pravda? Perhaps the KGB paid him to write op-ed pieces for the New York Times and Washington Post. The second possibility seemed more likely, but I was just guessing. Or had the Russians paid him to kill Goncharov before he could talk?

  Kelly came out of the restroom and plopped herself into the passenger seat of the rental car, and I fed gas.

  “You did good in the sheriff’s office,” I said as we rolled out of town.

  “Hope he bought it,” she muttered, and half turned in her seat to look behind us. I glanced in the rearview mirror. No cruiser yet.

  Durbin was almost forty miles from the county seat along curvy two-lane roads. The state highway department was busy, and that delayed us, and we got stuck behind several logging trucks that we had to follow for miles before we found places to pass. The drive took over an hour.

  The river road out of Durbin was well marked. After I had gone a couple of miles along it, I began slowing at every mailbox, reading the names. It’s been my experience that most folks aren’t very good with distance estimations. Four-point-two miles south of Durbin, there it was. Basil Jarrett. I drove up the driveway, turned the car, and parked it pointing toward the exit.

  “Same story?” Kelly asked.

  “More or less. Let me do the talking.”

  A woman opened the door before I had a chance to knock. “I heard you drive up,” she said.

  “We’re looking for my girlfriend’s Russian uncle. The sheriff said he might be here.”

  “Oh, my God! I’m so glad you came! I’m Linda Fiocchi. Please come in, please! I think he’s here.” She held out a hand to Kelly, who took it. “You must have been so worried!”

  “We’ve been frantic. He walked away from our camper on Tuesday, and we didn’t know where he left us.”

  “We haven’t been able to talk to him.”

  “He speaks only Russian.”

  “He’s only spoken once, just a few words that we didn’t understand. He seems … ill.”

  Kelly nodded knowingly, released Fiocchi’s hand and used a finger to swab a tear.

  I was surprised. Kelly Erlanger was an excellent actress. It was something to think about.

  This sob scene would go on for quite a while if I didn’t move things along, so I gestured toward the overhead loft and asked, “Is Unc taking a nap?”

  “Oh, no. He and Basil are fishing.”

  “Ahh …”

  “He loves to fish. He took a rod and went out at first light.”

  “He always loved it,” Kelly said, nodding.

  “We came downriver from Durbin and didn’t see them,” I said. “Are they farther down the river?”

  “I don’t know which way they went.”

  “I’ll go look for them,” I said. Kelly took a step toward the door, but Fiocchi wanted to talk about her houseguest. “He’s such a nice man, but he’s having severe nightmares. I thought he might have amnesia.”

  I left Kelly to keep Fiocchi occupied and took the car. The road ran right along the river, so the car should be quicker than walking. For some reason that I couldn’t put my finger on, I had this nagging suspicion that time was running out.

  I found the two men several miles down the river. They were wearing hip boots and working the shallows with fly rods. From Erlanger’s description of Goncharov, I recognized him immediately. The other man, Basil Jarrett, was about forty, and he, too, knew how to fish. I watched them from the bank for several minutes before Jarrett looked in my direction. I waved for him to come over to the bank. He continued to cast while he worked his way toward me.

  When he was twenty feet or so away, I said, loudly enough to be heard over the gurgle of the river, “Having any luck?”

  “Did pretty well this morning. We released them all, of course. Slow right now. They’ll start biting again when the sun goes behind the mountain.”

  “My name is Winston,” I said. “I’m here to talk to your guest.”

  Jarrett began cranking in his line. “Do you know him?” he asked, glancing at me.

  “Yes.”

  “He doesn’t seem to speak English.”

  “He’s Russian.”

  “How did you know where to find him?”

  “The sheriff told us. I brought his niece. She speaks Russian.”

  Jarrett waded ashore. He shook my hand, sized me up. “You’re not Russian.”

  “I’m as American as Freedom Fries. His niece is my girlfriend.”

  He handed me his rod, then waded out to where Goncharov was standing. He pointed at me, made gestures that Goncharov should come in. Goncharov reeled in his line, then waded over and climbed the bank. He was agile enough and surefooted. However, his face reflected little curiosity.

  “Do you speak Russian?” Jarrett asked.

  “Not a word. Jump in the car and we’ll run up to your place.”

  After I turned the car around, I gave Jarrett the spiel I gave the sheriff, about losing the uncle from a camper last week. Jarrett listened in silence, asked no questions. “We were certainly worried,” I said, summing up. “The sheriff said we owed you and Ms. Fiocchi a real debt for taking him in.”

  “Forget it. He’s obviously a sick man. Least we could do.”

  As we drove he asked me where I lived, what I did, etc. I was chattering along, all lies, of course, when we rounded the curve just below the entrance to his cabin. There was a car turning into the driveway. I applied the brakes, stopped the car.

  “Who is that?” Jarrett asked. “Someone with you?”

  “No.” Even as I said it, the car stopped, backed out onto the road, and started toward us. Then it stopped.

  Oh, shit. I had been lucky as hell against these guys up to now, but there is a limit.

  A man
got out of the passenger’s side, then reached back into the car. He pulled out a weapon, then began walking toward us. He was about fifty yards or so away, but even at that range I recognized the gun. MP-5. He kept walking, apparently trying to make up his mind.

  The weapon held me mesmerized. If he lifted it, though, we were out of options.

  “Get down,” I shouted at Jarrett, and jammed the accelerator to the floor. As I did I reached over, grabbed his head, and pulled him down toward me.

  The dude with the submachine gun leveled it, then hesitated as he faced the car rocketing toward him, faster and faster.

  He squeezed off a burst that shattered the windshield—the glass just exploded—then he tried to jump out of the way. Too late.

  I hit him a hell of a lick; he flew backward through the air and landed in the road.

  I felt two thumps as I ran over him. I jammed on the brakes. The car slid toward the other car, coming to rest parallel to it, with the right front fenders almost touching. I slammed the transmission into park and bailed as I jerked Grafton’s Colt from behind my back.

  The other car shot backward, its tires screaming. The driver opened his door, stuck his head out, and spun the rear end into Jarrett’s drive. I squeezed one off and missed him. The car ripped forward before I could get off another shot. It accelerated away toward Durbin, its engine howling.

  I glanced behind me at the guy I had run over. He wasn’t moving.

  But was that the only car? Or had another vehicle preceded it up the driveway?

  I ran to the driveway and looked. Couldn’t see the cabin. Ran up the road fifty yards until I could. No other cars.

  I lowered the hammer on the Colt and put it back behind my belt, then walked down the drive to my car. Jarrett was kneeling beside the man on the road.

  He looked up at me as I approached, his face drained of color. “He’s dead,” he said.

  “I hope so,” I replied curtly. I didn’t have any juice to waste on one of those sons of bitches. I looked in the car. Goncharov was sitting in the back seat, carefully picking pebbles of glass from his clothes.

  I walked around to the dead man. He was a mess. The car had rolled across his abdomen, bursting it. I intended to search him, but when I saw the corpse I lost interest.