Liars & Thieves: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  “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.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “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.”

  I already knew that, and he knew I did, but this was Jake Grafton, thinking aloud. He had that habit. Then everyone knew precisely what was on his mind and could predict the directions in which he might go. I thought it a solid leadership technique. All the listener had to do was keep his mouth shut. That’s what I was thinking when he asked conversationally, without a change of tone, “What do you want to do about Dell Royston?”

  I glanced at him, wondered what was going through his mind.

  “Cut his nuts off and feed ’em to him,” I replied curtly.

  Grafton drummed a few licks on the steering wheel with his fingers. “He’s going to be in New York next week for the convention. Could you bug the hotel where he’ll be staying?”

  Apparently he was fishing to see if I still wanted to do the warrior thing. Well, I was good for a little while longer, I told myself, which was a real whopper. I never squander my best lies on other people—I tell them to myself.

  “Sure,” I said aloud. We discussed it, the equipment I’d need, when and where I could get it, and when the best time would be to do the jobs.

  “Hang loose,” he said, and got out of the vehicle to make some more telephone calls.

  The dude who liked rap got his ride under way. In the relative silence that followed his departure I could hear a baseball game playing on the convenience store’s sound system.

  Right then I would have traded a couple months’ pay to be sitting in a ballpark watching a game, smack in the middle of the American summer with nothing on my mind but the possibility of another beer. Oh well, a man can dream.

  Mikhail Goncharov awoke from a nightmare bathed in sweat. He had been in one of the cells in the Lubyanka being interrogated by five experts. They wanted him to confess to something, though now, awake, he couldn’t remember exactly what it was. He lay in bed thinking about the dream as it slowly faded.

  Finally he began to take notice of his surroundings. Nothing seemed familiar.

  Then he remembered the lady who fixed the sandwiches and brought him to this room.

  The window was open—he could feel a warm breeze. Hear traffic noises. And … something rhythmical, a deep sound. He listened intently. The steady sound that repeated was … surf! He was near the ocean. He could hear surf pounding on a beach.

  Galvanized, he rose from the bed, realized he was not wearing shoes, and automatically searched until he found them, then put them on.

  In the room downstairs he found the woman. She was wearing shorts and a blouse. “I can hear surf. Where is the beach?”

  “Come,” she said. “We will go together.”

  Before he saw the ocean, he could smell it, salty and clean. Crossing the dune on the boardwalk, he saw the sun glinting on the swells. He stopped and stared as the warm sea wind played with his shirt and trousers. Before him was the beach. Beyond it the great blue ocean stretched away until it met the sky.

  The woman waited patiently, watching him. He was so absorbed in the scene before him that he was unaware of her scrutiny.

  There had once been an ocean and a beach … and another woman. He could see her face, remember how her hand felt, how the cold water felt as it swirled about his feet. Her name—it was right there on the edge of his memory, just out of reach, but her face was plain, her smile, her eyes staring at him, her hand on his cheek.

  The memory was there, but the specifics wouldn’t come. It was in the past, but not too long ago; he sensed that. And it was not here. Not this beach.

  With a jolt he again became aware of the presence of the woman beside him. She was kind—he could see that. Very kind, with warm, intelligent eyes.

  Despite the wind, the sun was warm on his skin. He took a deep breath, let the smell of the sea fill his lungs and head.

  “Who—?”

  He had to clear his throat, then he began again. “Who am I?”

  At a kiosk in an Ocean City mall, I bought two cell phones and signed up for service while Jake Grafton watched from a bench fifty feet away. New phones on an account that couldn’t be tied to me or Grafton would allow us to communicate with each other and Sarah with more confidence. Sarah thought she had a handle on the telephones the CIA and FBI were monitoring, but …

  I used my Zack Winston driver’s license as my ID and paid cash, gave the fake address on the driver’s license as the address for the account. They would close the account eventually, but I had a couple months to use the phones before that happened. “So you live in Virginia?” the girl manning the kiosk asked. She was a trim brunette with a great smile.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Get down this way often?”

  “Now and then.”

  I got the impression that I could get a date with her if I worked at it a while. She whacked away on her computer for a minute, then put the telephones in a bag and handed them to me.

  “You’re good to go,” she said, flashing that smile again. “You should charge the phones overnight before you use them. The batteries will last longer.”

  I liked the way she grinned and brushed the hair back from her forehead. She didn’t look a bit like Kelly Erlanger. Or Dorsey O’Shea, come to think of it. I gave her my absolute best smile and strolled away with my purchases in a bag.

  Callie was out on the beach with Mikhail Goncharov when we returned to Grafton’s beach house. I wandered upstairs and took a good look out each of the upstairs windows. Were the Russians pulling Royston’s strings? I knew a little about him, Grafton knew a little, and we talked about what we knew on the way home.

  Dell Royston was one of the president’s p
olitical loyalists who had been with him all the way. He was a Washington lawyer who had only practiced for a few years when he hitched his wagon to the future president’s—his new law partner’s—rising star. He campaigned, directed door-to-door canvassing efforts, shook hands, raised money, did it all on the president’s first run for statewide office, as the state’s attorney general. He had been there on the unsuccessful first run for governor, and the successful second one. The Senate had followed, then the first run for the presidential nomination—which had failed—and the second run, which won the nomination and the presidency.

  There were people who supposedly knew about these things who said Royston was the real political brains in the administration. Others said the president would never have won the White House without him. Who knew the truth of that? In any event, the president didn’t seem inclined to change horses at this date, which was why Royston had resigned as chief of staff and was now heading the reelection committee.

  Neither Grafton nor I had ever been in the same room with the man, much less met him. To me he was merely a figure on the evening news or a black-and-white photo in the newspaper. Looking out the windows of Grafton’s house, I tried to recall his image. Balding, with chiseled features and no extra fat.

  Personally I didn’t think the Russians were pulling Royston’s strings. His loyalties were on the public record for all to see.

  So, was it the president? Did he order the trigger pulled on all those people at the safe house, on Willie Varner and Sal Pulzelli?

  We were going to find out. One way or the other.

  I remembered how casually Grafton asked the question, “What do you want to do about Royston?” Royston might know politics and politicians, but he had never met a warrior like Jake Grafton. I would bet my bottom dollar on that. I was equally willing to wager that he was going to meet the admiral before he got a whole lot older.

  From the upstairs guest bedroom I saw Callie and Goncharov coming across the dune on the boardwalk. Callie had her sweater pulled around her, with strands of her hair adrift in the breeze. She was a fine figure of a woman, every bit as tough as Grafton. I wondered if I would ever meet a woman like that.