Liars & Thieves: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  Royston made a rude noise. “I have never heard such a vile slander in all of American politics!” he said belligerently. “You haven’t a shred of proof of any of these accusations.”

  You’ve got to give him credit—he was trying. His face glistened with perspiration.

  “Not a shred of proof,” he continued hoarsely. “Even if it’s true, it has nothing to do with us. Now get the hell out of here, and if I hear a whisper about you being here tonight—from any of you people—the world is going to cave in on you.”

  Dorsey continued to study Royston’s face. Sonnenberg put a hand on her arm to draw her away, and she brushed it off.

  “I do have proof,” Jake Grafton said simply. “In the last few days we have done DNA testing. Michael O’Shea has living relatives. One of them is Jimmy O’Shea, a brother who lives in Brooklyn. With the help of his barber, we obtained samples of his hair. There is no doubt, Mr. Royston. You are Jimmy O’Shea’s brother and Dorsey O’Shea’s father. You, Ms. Sonnenberg, are Dorsey’s mother.”

  Dorsey approached Zooey. “You never told me Dell was my father.”

  Zooey couldn’t avoid those eyes.

  “Your whole life has been a lie, Mom,” Dorsey continued, her voice cracking like old glass. “You helped him murder that woman! Everything you said, everything you did was a lie designed to get you elected to the presidency.”

  “Dorsey, I—”

  “Don’t touch me!” She backed up slowly, a step at a time. “All these years I thought my father was dead. You told me he was dead. But you never told me he murdered his wife and you helped him do it!”

  She wheeled and slapped Dell Royston with a sound that cracked like a pistol shot.

  “Royston,” said Myron Emerick, “you’re under arrest.”

  “What’s the charge?”

  “First degree murder of Kelly Erlanger. One of the admiral’s friends was listening to her cell phone conversations. That will do for starters, but I think by arraignment time we’ll have a couple dozen murders to charge you with. We picked up your executive assistant earlier this evening—he hasn’t stopped talking. Then two men broke into the admiral’s house tonight. They are now under arrest and are also telling everything they know.”

  You could have knocked me over with a feather when Royston said, “Do you have a warrant?” I didn’t think he had any juice left at that point, but apparently he was tougher than I thought.

  “As a matter of fact, I do.” Emerick removed a document from a coat pocket and passed it to Royston. He glanced at Sonnenberg. “I have one for you, too, Ms. Sonnenberg, charging you as an accessory.”

  Zooey turned on Royston. “You could take care of it, you said. The presidency of the United States was—.” She held out both hands and closed them into fists. “You!” I had never in my life heard such venom in just one word.

  She turned and stalked into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

  I was hanging on to the bar by this time. My trousers were sodden with blood, the room was spinning, the faces were going in and out of focus. I knew it was loss of blood, not the cognac—which was mighty tasty—so I had another gulp.

  On the bar beside me was a phone. I saw one of the two lines illuminate. I waited a decent interval—like maybe thirty seconds while Dorsey sobbed and one of the agents installed a set of handcuffs on Royston—then I picked up the phone and punched that line.

  Zooey was talking. “ … Emerick arrested Dell and—who is listening on this line?”

  Of course they could hear the commotion going on around me. “Uh, Tommy Carmellini, Ms. Sonnenberg. Eavesdropping’s a bad habit, I know. Hope you don’t mind.”

  Apparently the president didn’t care who else was listening. Before she could tell me to hang up and go to hell, he said, “Zooey, the attorney general is here along with the chief of staff. They tell me that if you are alive when Emerick is ready to leave that suite you’re in, he intends to arrest you as an accessory to murder. He has a warrant in his pocket. Tomorrow morning I am announcing a new choice for vice president. You decide how you want the headlines to read.”

  “Those are my only choices?”

  “Those two.”

  “You bastard! All these years holding your hand and smiling while you tomcatted around and made me a laughingstock ! This is what I get for all those years of humiliation! Well, I’m not going silently in a box so you can weep at the funeral and march bravely on. Oh, no! I’m going to tell the press everything—everything!” Her voice rose to a shriek. “When I get through you won’t be able to win an election for constable in any county in the country.”

  “Good-bye, Zooey,” he said tightly, and broke the connection.

  I cradled the telephone and drained the last of the cognac.

  Emerick jerked his head at one of his agents. “Get him out of here,” he said, pointing at Royston.

  They cuffed Royston’s hands in front of him. “Listen, Emerick—” he began.

  “Can it,” the director shot back. “They’ll read you your rights down in the car.”

  “For God’s sake—my wife! My kids!”

  “You’ll get your telephone call after they book you.” Emerick again jerked his head at the agents, and they hustled Royston out of the room.

  Dorsey shrank into a fetal position in one corner. I wondered if I ought to try to say something comforting, but the truth was I was in no condition to even walk over to her. Time passed—I don’t know how much—while everyone in the room stood around waiting … waiting for Zooey to slit her wrists in the tub or come strutting out of the bedroom dressed for a press conference, I guess.

  How long they stood there looking at each other I don’t know. I remember thinking I should have said something to the president—I had missed my only chance to talk to a head of state. Somewhere in there the evening ended for me. I passed out about that time and did a header off the stool. Never did have much of a head for liquor.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The ambulance crew was still in the suite loading Carmellini on a stretcher when Mikhail Goncharov whispered to Callie, “May I leave now?”

  “Certainly.” Callie didn’t know what the CIA or FBI honchos would think of Goncharov’s departure, but she didn’t intended to ask them. They were huddled in the corner with Jake Grafton.

  After catching her husband’s eye, Callie followed Goncharov out into the corridor and through the crowd in the hallway to the elevator. Secret Service, police, FBI agents, paramedics, and hotel executives—the crowd was beginning to thin now that the first lady and Royston had been taken away in handcuffs. Callie and Goncharov boarded the elevator, watched the door close. No one made any move to stop them.

  They made their way through the lobby. People were whispering, watching the paramedics and police hustling about, speculating on what had happened.

  Outside the main entrance on the Avenue of the Americas, under the awning, Goncharov told Callie, “I don’t want to go back to the CIA or British intelligence.”

  “I don’t think they really need you,” she said. “The British copied your files.”

  Goncharov snorted. “I suppose I knew they would.” He laughed without humor. “I was very naive.”

  Callie ignored that comment. “Where do you want to go?” she asked.

  Goncharov took a deep breath as he considered it. He looked right, then left, looked up at the buildings, then back at Callie. “I don’t know. Somewhere. I don’t speak a word of the language, I have no money, but this is what I want. This—.” He gestured grandly with his hand.

  Callie opened her purse, took out all her cash, and held it out to him. “Here.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.” She said the word in English. “Yes.” Then in Russian, “This isn’t much, but it will feed you for a while. Tens of millions of people have come to America and started over—thousands do it every day—and you can, too. A little money will help.”

  “Yes,” he said, trying the
English word.

  “Yes.” She echoed him, still holding the money in her hand, offering it.

  “Yes.” He reached for the cash, inspected the bills, then put them in his pocket.

  Callie Grafton smiled and held out her hand.

  He shook it. “Good-bye,” she said in English.

  “Gude-by.” The archivist, Mikhail Goncharov, turned and walked away into the night, into the great city of New York, into the heart of America.

  The second day after my operation, the hospital moved me from intensive care to a private room. I thumbed the television on and flipped channels until I found a baseball game. I was just drifting off to sleep when Jake Grafton came into the room and shut the door.

  “Hey,” he said. “We almost waited too long to get you to a hospital. The doctors had some real nasty things to say to me.”

  “It was worth it,” I said. “After all the shit I went through, I really wanted to see Reactor and Zooey take the fall.”

  “Reactor?”

  “Royston was a fast breeder.”

  Jake Grafton nodded and lowered himself into a chair.

  “That scene in Dorsey’s suite—I was really surprised when you trotted out the DNA results. I thought those tests were going to take a week.”

  “That’s right. We still don’t have the results. Should have them tomorrow.”

  It took a long ten seconds for me to get it, what with my delicate condition, generally honest nature, and low mental ability. “You mean you lied to them?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And that red folder. Was that really it?”

  “Oh, no. That was just one we had at home. What the hell—none of those people could read Russian.”

  “‘Rollo’?”

  He shrugged. “Goncharov couldn’t remember O’Shea’s code name, and I doubted if O’Shea ever knew it. I made that one up.”

  I had to smile. Jake Grafton gave me a grin in return.

  “How come I haven’t had every reporter in the free world in here today offering me millions for my story?”

  “The story the FBI gave the press was that Zooey and Royston were lovers. I don’t think the press understands who was in the suite or what was said. Perhaps that could have been explained better, but the FBI didn’t bother. Zooey has held three jailhouse press conferences, and the media is having a field day. The country is eating it up. Royston’s lawyer refuses to let his client say a word and refuses to say a word for him. The bail hearing isn’t until next week, and the prosecutors will oppose it, they say. Some opposition senators and representatives are promising an investigation. The president refuses to discuss the matter.”

  “He’s a cold-hearted bastard,” I remarked, remembering his short conversation with Zooey. But perhaps that wasn’t fair—he knew her a lot better than I did.

  “This election is going to become a circus,” Grafton predicted. “It’s going to make the California governor’s recall look like a tea party. Politics has become an afternoon soap opera. In an era when the country is deeply divided over complex issues without easy answers, perhaps that is inevitable.”

  I took a deep breath and moved on to the most important question. “Am I going to be arrested?”

  Grafton chuckled. “Apparently not. I am informed that you are still a valuable employee of the CIA.”

  “Long as I’m getting paid.”

  We talked for a while about this and that, about Mikhail Goncharov and Kelly Erlanger and Dorsey O’Shea and my former boss, Sal Pulzelli.

  “Was Joe Billy really Stu Vine?” I asked.

  “I think so,” Jake said. “The CIA holds little tidbits like that very tightly indeed.”

  “How come he was assigned to my shop?”

  “I think the decision was made somewhere to bring him inhouse. They just needed a place to stash him for a while. What the agency didn’t know was that he had agreed to do a job for Royston. Do you remember? Pulzelli was told to send Dunn to be a guard at the safehouse. Since Dunn was scheduled to go to a training session, Pulzelli changed the assignment without telling anyone.”

  “That was Sal … the born administrator. He lived his life by the schedule and thought we should, too.”

  We were still chatting when a nurse came in and told the admiral he would have to leave. “See you, Tommy,” he said.

  “Thanks, Admiral, for everything.”

  “Any time.”

  “You and Callie going flying?”

  “All over the country. We’ll call you when we get back.”

  Then he was gone. Just like that.

  Maybe it was really over. God, I hoped so. If some wild man with murder in his eye came charging in here, I didn’t even have a pocketknife to defend myself with … if I could stay awake, which I couldn’t.

  I drifted off while the nurse was working on my IVs.

  The next day two guys from the agency and one from the FBI showed up with a cassette recorder. After reading me all the warnings, they wanted the whole story in my own words. I ran them out after half an hour. The next day they were back and we did two hours. Three hours the day after that, then for the next two days they asked questions, hundreds of them. I did the best I could, but when I got tired I told them to return tomorrow. They didn’t come the last day I was in the hospital. In midafternoon, after giving me a cursory exam and a new set of bandages, the hospital released me.

  I was ready to go. I had channel surfed when the law wasn’t there and had had more than my fill of the made-for-TV political circus. I took a cab to Pennsylvania Station and then a train to Washington.

  My apartment was a wreck. Someone had ransacked the place during my big adventure, maybe one of Royston’s thugs or perhaps Joe Billy Dunn.

  It took courage to open the refrigerator. There was something green in there, and I didn’t think it was lettuce. I threw everything in a garbage bag and spent twenty minutes wrestling it down to the cans in the basement. I was weak as a cat. I wasn’t ready to tackle that mess the goons had made. I even thought about moving in with Willie … for ten whole seconds.

  The agency guys had said my old Mercedes was parked in the lot, so I went looking for it. Found it finally, decorated with bird droppings, parked under a tree. It even started on the third attempt.

  I called Jake Grafton on his cell.

  “Hey, I’m out of the hospital. Where are you guys?”

  “Wisconsin. Getting gas. We’ll be in Minnesota tonight. How are you doing, Tommy?”

  “The agency gave me a couple weeks off, but I may never go back. I’m still thinking about taking a banana boat south.”

  “It’s like that, huh? Why don’t you go over to my beach house, loaf there until you feel better?”

  Now that was an idea! The beach.

  “You wouldn’t mind ?”

  “Oh, heck no. Just make sure you buy your own beer.”

  “Where did you hide the key?”

  Grafton made a rude noise and hung up on me.

  Well, why not? I put the Mercedes in gear and let ’er rip. Stopped at a Wal-Mart on the Eastern Shore for the bare essentials—underwear, beer, swimsuit, and toothbrush.

  At Grafton’s place I quickly settled into a routine. Every morning I walked all the way to the corner to buy a paper from the vending machine, read it as I poached a couple eggs and made toast, finished it over coffee, then walked to the beach and lay around on the towel frying in the sun.

  Willie Varner had all his stitches out, he said, was getting laid again by his semiregular girlfriend, and was working in the lock shop. He gave me some grief over the phone, but not too much. Like me, he was very happy life was getting back to normal.

  The papers were full of the political news. I thought Zooey was in danger of overplaying her hand, but she was fulfilling her promise to her husband. She accused him of a dozen infidelities, cheating on his income tax for eight years, and screwing a couple million out of two former business partners. I thought the president would have a huge p
olitical problem with all this, but no. Apparently in the post-Clinton age the public was becoming inured to personal scandal. The party’s honchos picked a new vice-presidential candidate, a woman the president recommended, and the president refused to discuss any of his wife’s jailhouse revelations, declaring that the issues were more important than the personal life of any candidate.

  The president played it like a harp and actually gained in the polls. It turned out he had the ability to work a little quaver into his voice when the reporters hounded him about his wife and Royston. People actually felt sorry for the S.O.B.

  The world is full of wackos—what can I say? I figured that in a few weeks the president would probably file for a divorce and in a year people would be asking, Zooey who? One of the pundits suggested that he get a dog to help him through this difficult time.

  The guy who owned the house three doors closer to the beach on Grafton’s side of the street stopped me on the second day I was there. He wanted to chat.

  “I see you’re staying in that retired admiral’s house.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know him?”

  “Enough to get permission to use the place. Why’d you ask?”

  “Oh, man! About ten days ago we had the goddamnest shootout you ever heard of right here on this street. That admiral killed two guys”—he pointed—“right there and there. A busload of military guys surrounded his house and dragged two more men out of it.”

  “Wow! Sounds like a movie or something. But it was real, huh?”

  “I was having a party. Had a house full of guests. Normally this house is rented out to whoever, but that was the first night of my summer vacation—take a month every year. Had lots of people here from the office. Goddamnest thing you’ve ever seen. Submachine guns blasting, bodies all over, blood, soldiers with weapons, enough cops to arrest the Capone mob, all right here on this street about midnight.”

  I shook my head. “Sorry I missed it.”

  “You know anything about it?”

  I shrugged. “This is the first I’ve heard.”

  He scrutinized my face. “Who is that admiral, anyway?”

  “Some retired ship driver. Name’s Grafton.”