Liars & Thieves: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  None of the books mentioned O’Shea’s fatal car wreck.

  I wondered if I should check on that. All I knew about it was what Dorsey had told me.

  With the help of the desk clerk, I got into the microfiche files for the San Francisco Examiner. Found it finally, two paragraphs about O’Shea and his wife, a fatal car wreck in 1972 on the Pacific Coast Highway south of Big Sur.

  So what was the link that brought Dorsey to New York for the convention where Zooey Sonnenberg was going to be nominated for the office of vice president of the United States? Correction—might be nominated. I had never heard Dorsey mention Zooey. That might or might not mean anything, although Dorsey had a habit of dropping names left and right.

  I stopped in the periodical room and scanned that morning’s papers. Jack Yocke had stirred up a hornet’s nest. Today there was more speculation by a variety of pundits, who claimed the White House was leaking Zooey’s name, running it up the flagpole to see what happened. A number of politicos would welcome the nomination, they said. On the other hand, a lot of politicians of both parties thunderously denounced the possibility of Zooey’s candidacy, accusing the president of wanting to start a political dynasty and attempting to evade the constitutional limit on two terms by setting his wife up to run for president at the end of his second term. One of the Internet companies had done an unscientific poll; seventy-seven percent of the respondents thought Zooey would make a good candidate.

  It was raining when I came out of the library. I bought an umbrella from a street-corner vendor and walked ten blocks to a poolroom on the West Side, where I found Joe Billy and Willie Varner bent over a table. I took ten bucks off each of them before we hung up the sticks and went to find some dinner.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “I was the chief archivist for the SVR, the successor to the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. With the help of the British, I defected and brought seven suitcases full of notes with me to the West. I was to be debriefed by British intelligence and the CIA when the killers came.” The Russian paused and took a ragged breath. “They killed my wife, Bronislava. I saw her dead.”

  After Callie Grafton had translated for her husband, she waited for Goncharov to say more, but he did not.

  Jake asked, “When did you first approach the British about defecting?”

  “The second week of April. I had taken a train to Vilnius for a holiday. I walked into the British Embassy and asked to speak to an intelligence officer.”

  “Wasn’t that a serious risk?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you had no trouble leaving Russia?”

  “You know the bureaucratic mind. They do not watch those who are retired. Before my retirement from the SVR, traveling to the Baltic Republics would have been impossible.”

  “How did the British bring you out?”

  “It was very simple, really. My wife and I took another holiday to Vilnius, brought all the files with us. The afternoon of our arrival the British flew us to London.”

  “Did you come straight to America from London?”

  “No. We spent almost a week in Britain—just where I do not know—in intense discussions with intelligence officers. Then we came to America for a thorough, extensive debriefing.”

  “Were there any Americans in England during your debriefing there?”

  “Yes. At least two. One named Stephen and one named Bob.”

  “Did the British copy your notes?”

  “No. They wished to do so, but I refused to allow it. I thought that if I didn’t explain the notes, the files, innocent people might be injured by what was in them.”

  “You didn’t think the files spoke for themselves?”

  “Many did, yes. Many did not. You must understand the conditions under which I made my notes, snatching a few minutes here, a few there, scanning the actual files, trying to summarize what I had learned hours or days later when I had a few moments. The luxury of verbatim copying was not possible except in a few, rare instances when the fates gave me a quiet afternoon.”

  “I notice that some of the files are typewritten.”

  “After my retirement I finally had the time to attempt to organize my notes, to fill in details that in my original haste had been omitted—details that I still recalled—and to cross-reference them. But after so many years, with so much material, I feared the task would be unfinished at my death. And if my files remained in Russia, they would be destroyed soon after I died, as soon as the authorities learned of them.”

  “Who, besides yourself, ever studied the actual files in the archives?”

  “No one!” he said bluntly. “No one had the access I enjoyed. An intelligence agency is highly compartmentalized. True, the director of the agency could send for any file he chose, but directors came and went, and they had agendas. They had no time to sit and read. Only I did. The realization came upon me one day a few years after I was appointed archivist that only I was in a position to know the complete story, the awful, blood-soaked story of how the Communists ruled. Lenin, Stalin, Beria, Andropov, all of them. Only I could read every word, every jot and comma, of their crimes.

  “That is why my notes are so precious. No person has ever studied the archives as I have. No one else knows as much as I do about the activities of the Soviet intelligence services.”

  Goncharov searched the faces of his listeners. “Don’t you understand? The intelligence services kept the Communists in power. They were the right arm of the Communist state. They arrested, framed, betrayed, silenced, murdered, and discredited the state’s enemies, who were everyone who voiced the slightest doubt that the Communists were always right. They fought their enemies worldwide. My notes are the evidence against them. They must be studied and understood in the West. And they must be publicized, be made available to the Russian people, who must learn the truth.”

  “Only one box of files remains,” Jake gently remarked.

  “True, much has been lost. But the files that remain are the most precious. They detail the KGB’s operations against internal enemies.”

  “And you. You remain. You can write of what you know.”

  The pain in Goncharov’s face was difficult to look upon. “Without the files to refer to …” he whispered, his doubt palpable.

  Jake Grafton moved on. “Did any British intelligence officers accompany you to the American safe house?”

  “To the best of my knowledge, no. An Englishman named Nigel came to the United States with me, but I didn’t see him after the first day. I was told that specialists were coming from London to study the files and question me, yet they had not arrived.”

  When she had finished translating, Callie said to her husband, “You don’t really think the Russians attacked the safe house?”

  “No,” he replied softly. “It happened too soon, and the people who did it were Americans. The safe house strike was an American operation all the way.” He studied his toes. “Goncharov’s defection was a huge intelligence coup. No doubt his extraction from Russia received minute-by-minute attention from the very top. The British must have been ecstatic. A peek into the inner workings of their archrival, a chance to purge the traitors in their midst, uncover sleepers, plug leaks, ahh … ! This twist of fate was so wonderful they decided to share the good fortune with their allies, the Americans, who must have been equally ecstatic.

  “And yet, somewhere on this side of the Atlantic, the news must have been the last thing on earth someone wanted to hear. The archivist for the KGB was coming with seven suitcases full of meticulously copied notes, the labor of his life, his monument to the venal criminality of the Communist system. Someone heard that news with morbid dread.”

  “But wouldn’t Goncharov’s defection be a closely held secret?”

  “Oh, yes. Extremely closely held. A half dozen people in the CIA perhaps, the director of the FBI, the president, the national security adviser, the president’s chief of staff, perhaps the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, three or fou
r other highly placed, key people—you can make your own list. Yet someone in that circle felt mortal terror when he heard it.”

  “Which one?”

  “That is the question,” he said, and rose from his seat. “You need to question him, carefully, thoroughly,” he said to Callie, “find out everything he can remember on American agents, American moles, anything American. Take your time, make notes. Talk as long as you can, take breaks, resume where you left off.”

  Grafton paused. “Until we find that guilty secret, Goncharov’s life isn’t safe. Someone has risked everything—spent money, compromised himself, put himself in mortal peril—to destroy the files and kill the archivist. And he isn’t going to stop now.”

  As he walked from the room he placed a hand in passing on Goncharov’s shoulder. The Russian glanced at his retreating back, and a shadow of a smile crossed his face.

  Jake walked out to the screened-in porch and absentmindedly flipped though the stack of newspapers. Dell Royston had been the chief of staff until six months ago, when he became head of the president’s reelection efforts. He wouldn’t have been in that select circle that heard the glad tidings of Goncharov’s defection, would he?

  Ah, here it was. A Sunday supplement piece on Dell Royston in the Post. He had recalled seeing it a month or so ago. Fortunately he and Callie had been at the beach that weekend.

  He dropped into a stuffed chair to read the article again. It was about what he expected, a puff piece by a political admirer. Dell Royston was the son of two American expatriates who were living in Spain when they were killed in a highway accident. He had two kids, one in college and one just graduated from law school. Royston had attended Harvard Law after the war, married, worked for a few years at a firm in Washington where he had been bitten by the political bug, then left for the hinterland and allied himself with a rising political star who later became president.

  Jake tossed the paper back on the pile and stretched. The sun was out and the wind smelled of the sea. Over the muted sounds of traffic on the highway he could hear snatches of Russian coming from the kitchen.

  He went inside, turned on the television in the living room, and flipped to the Weather Channel. He glanced at his watch—had he missed the weekly planner again? Ads, more ads, the Weather Channel seemed to have more advertisements than weather these days.

  There was a box on the coffee table. He opened it, pawed through the aviation sectional charts it contained, glanced at a couple, then tossed them back in the box.

  Back on the porch, he removed his new cell phone from his pocket and made a call. Callie and Goncharov were still in the kitchen talking an hour later when the telephone buzzed. “Grafton.”

  “He insisted his files should not be copied, but of course they were. The Brits worked every night frantically duplicating everything while he and his wife slept.”

  “You know what I want.”

  “We’ll do our best.”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “Jake, it will take years to assess what’s in those files, which as you probably can guess are incomplete. The notes are cryptic, made hurriedly.”

  “Do the best you can. Please. And please call me the moment you know anything.”

  “So is it the president?”

  “I don’t know. I think—well, it’s too early to say. I wish there were some way to read all those files.”

  “There isn’t.”

  “I suppose not.”

  A sigh came over the phone. “The man Tommy shot was named Joliffe. He was a retired cop, just went through a nasty divorce and a bankruptcy.”

  “Any possibility he was Stu Vine?”

  “No. He was on the Washington police force when Stu Vine was reputed to be cleaning up the Middle East. Someone wired ten thousand dollars to his checking account day before yesterday from a bank in the Caymans.”

  “An amateur.”

  “Lucky for you.”

  “We need some more guys around this place.”

  “I’ve got people on the way. You had enough of retirement yet?”

  “No. Callie and I are going flying. The summer weather pattern is setting in, and there is a lot of this country we haven’t seen.”

  “Going to be aerial gypsies, eh?”

  “Yes, sir. For a while, anyway.”

  Grafton snapped the telephone shut. He was reading a newspaper when Callie came into the living room. “Let’s go shopping. We’ll take Mikhail along.”

  An expedition should be safe enough, Jake decided. “Okay.”

  The first place they stopped was the supermarket nearest the beach house. As they walked through the entrance, Jake heard Goncharov’s sharp intake of breath. He muttered something in Russian to Callie, who nodded. Jake pulled a shopping cart from the stack and followed along behind them.

  A minute later Jake became aware that Callie wasn’t really shopping. She was wandering along, pointing out this and that to the Russian, who was handling everything. He picked up vegetables and sniffed them, squeezed fruit, inspected meat, opened the doors of coolers and poked his head inside, strolled up and down the aisles examining the pictures on the cans and the contents of various shoppers’ carts. He seemed intrigued by the selections the shoppers made.

  Every few minutes he stopped to take a deep breath. “The food stores in Russia stink of rotting food,” he told Callie. “The vegetables were never fresh unless you bought them on the black market. We had to wash them very carefully. Some of the vegetables were grown on radioactive soil.”

  A few minutes later, Goncharov asked, “Do all Americans buy their food in places like this?”

  “There are supermarkets in every city and town in the nation,” she replied.

  “Are the items expensive?”

  “In relative terms, no. Food is not a huge expense for most people.”

  “My wife used to shop for hours every day. When she found something we needed she bought all she could carry. Cakes in boxes, baked goods in bags … there was nothing like that.”

  He said no more, merely watched as Callie filled the cart with the items she wanted and they joined a line at a checkout counter.

  “The mall,” Callie murmured to Jake as he piloted the car from the parking lot.

  “We need to get this food in the refrigerator,” he objected.

  “We won’t stay long,” she replied.

  He thought he knew why she wanted to go there. They entered through one of the anchor tenants, a Sears store.

  Goncharov was visibly shaken as Callie led him through the usual crowd of shoppers of all ages. He looked at the clothes, the appliances, the tools—he was fascinated by the tools, picking them up, fingering them, then parting with them reluctantly. The display of televisions filling one wall, all showing the same channel, mesmerized the Russian. Callie led him on, out into the mall past shop after shop filled with toys, clothes, electronic gadgets, more clothes, posters, stuffed animals, sporting goods, jewelry, watches, and still more clothes.

  Goncharov came to a stop, finally, at the top of an escalator where one could see the crowds and stores on both levels of the building.

  “If the Russian people had seen this in 1991, they would have murdered all the Communists,” he said to Callie. “Everything they said about the West was a lie. Everything!”

  On the way back to the car the archivist said, “I lived in the prison that they ruled, watched them all my life, and one day I realized that they were in it only for themselves.”

  “Isn’t that true of most rulers?” she asked gently.

  “Perhaps,” he admitted grudgingly. “I copied the files because I wanted the world to know what the Communists did. I wanted their victims to know, so they could never do it again. And it cost my wife her life. Was I a fool?”

  American political conventions today are built around television prime time, probably for historical reasons since the modern primary system has eliminated the drama of who will win the presidential nomination. S
till, the politicians arrange the convention so that speeches by bigwigs take place in the prime viewing hours of the evening, when presumably the political faithful are home glued to the boob tube, waiting to cheer every carefully honed syllable. The political groupies come to the convention to bond, cheer, and get interviewed, sure that somehow, in some way, it all matters. And maybe it does, although I doubt it.

  Watching partisan political speeches ranks on my list with watching paint dry and grass grow. The conventioneers who crammed every bar and restaurant in Manhattan that weekend seemed to share my opinion. They ignored the governors, congresspeople, and senators dropping ten-second sound bites on the televisions mounted high in the corners and lubricated their throats while indulging in loud conversation, handshaking, and backslapping.

  A weeklong party was under way, and the folks from the hinterlands were there to enjoy it. Renewed my faith in America, so it did. That Saturday night Willie Varner, Joe Billy Dunn, and I circulated through three Irish bars—we were seriously into Guinness—mixing and mingling. We met car dealers, doctors, lawyers, farmers, implement dealers, two guys who owned dry cleaners, and a bunch of teachers and state officeholders, all here to party and make their voices heard in the national arena. We also met a couple of hookers, one of them a high school teacher who normally worked Vegas in the summer but thought that this year she would try New York, and a working girl from Chicago who looked like she would be a lot of fun. Both of them knew how to party. They soon had a crowd of admirers buying them drinks, so we circulated on. The whole scene reminded me of a plumbers’ convention I stumbled on in Vegas a few years back, although the plumbers were more high-toned.

  We spent Saturday night at a motel in Jersey and drove back Sunday to check out the scene. Our New York Hilton parking garage pass worked like a charm. Dorsey checked out of the hotel at eleven that morning after a spa treatment; Joe Billy met her at the desk and took her luggage to the van, then Dorsey went shopping. While Dunn went back to the van to monitor the bugs I had planted, Willie Varner and I purchased a tube steak from a sidewalk vendor. I got kraut and mustard on mine.