I got down on my belly and crawled back to my bush. Looked for Norris and didn’t see him.
Where…?
There he was, getting an ATV from the shed. I listened and heard the murmur of the engine, almost inaudible at this distance. He straddled the thing, held his rifle with his left hand, and used his right to steer and feed gas. When he got to the gate he opened it. One of the horses thought this would be a good time to check out the grass in the front lawn. Norris shooed it back, moved the ATV into the pasture, and closed the gate.
I was proud of him for remembering to close the gate. After you murder Sarah and me, you don’t want to be chasing horses all over the county.
He started the ATV up the hill, along the tracks of the pickup.
My cell phone buzzed. Who…?
It was Jake Grafton. I answered it.
“Tommy…” His voice was weak. “Where are you?”
“Out at Jack Norris’ place. I think the bastard shot you. He’s chasing Sarah and me with a rifle as we speak. Call you back later.” I broke the connection and turned the phone completely off, so it wouldn’t ring when I was getting ready to pot Norris, or he was getting ready to pot me, as the case might be.
Vaughn Conyers and Callie Grafton were sitting beside Jake Grafton’s bed. “He says that Jack Norris shot me, and he’s chasing them with a rifle right now.”
The president frowned. “Shouldn’t we…?”
“If Jack Norris is after Tommy Carmellini, he’s going to be dead pretty quick,” the admiral whispered.
“Do you think Norris shot you?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Grafton said, and closed his eyes. He was amazed at how little energy he had. He just wanted to sleep, and fought against it.
“When Tommy gets back, I’ll call you,” he told the president. “Thanks for coming.”
Conyers stood, shook Callie’s hand, and left.
She leaned over and kissed her husband. “Get well, husband of mine. We’ve got a lot of living left to do.”
“Amen to that,” he whispered, and went promptly to sleep.
There Jack Norris came, riding slowly up the hill toward the tree line. Obviously he didn’t think I had a rifle or he wouldn’t be doing that.
The thought was in my mind that I wanted him to shoot first. If he shot first, then I could claim self-defense. Really, it was stupid, but that’s how my mind was working just then. Maybe I was still in shock from learning that my rifle had no rear sight. Some days it doesn’t pay to get out of bed.
Then the thought crossed my devious little mind that perhaps he had a pal coming up the ridge from the other side. I crawled away and went over to a tree on the downslope of the western side and stood listening. All I could hear was that damn ATV burbling along.
Well, if Norris had a pal, he was going to get a free shot. I could only look in one direction at a time. I got low and crawled the last twenty feet to my bush beside the big rock.
He was only a hundred or so yards away.
Screw the first shot. I poked the old Winchester out around the roots and put the front sight on the ATV. With no rear sight, this was very iffy. I held the rifle tightly, cocked the hammer, and squeezed the trigger.
The report surprised me. It surprised the hell out of Jack Norris. He bailed off that ATV like the Luftwaffe was after him and sprawled out in the dirt, pointed more or less my way.
I worked the lever and lay on my back a bit, wondering where that bullet went.
After about a minute I turned over and peeked around the base of the bush. He was crawling my way. Still about a hundred yards out. The ATV was crawling off without him. He ignored it—he had other problems.
I ooched backwards, he saw something moving, and shot at it. I heard the bullet whiz by to my left.
I dove behind the big rock, climbed a little until I saw him. He saw me at the same time. I managed to get off the first shot, then I pushed myself backwards out of sight. Another bullet whizzed by. Damn things were supersonic, so there was that little sonic crack.
“Going to kill you, Carmellini,” he shouted.
I didn’t need to waste air on a reply. I ran along the ridge for twenty yards or so, found a nice tree that gave me a view of where he lay, and poked the Winchester out. I tried to guess if the bullets were going high or low.
Low, I decided. I lowered the rear of the rifle a smidgen and waited.
Saw his head bob up for a moment, then it was gone.
The next time, I told myself.
There! I fired.
Saw the dirt fly up on the rise between him and me. Needed a bit more front sight elevation.
Bang. A bullet slammed into the tree beside me, maybe three feet over my head. I wondered if Norris knew how badly he was missing. I hoped not. I worked the lever, chambered another round. Then I dug into my pocket and shoved two shells into the magazine.
That done, I boogied. Went down the ridge another fifty feet and eased my head around a tree, wondering where he had gone. Didn’t see him.
I lay perfectly still, as if I were already a corpse. If he didn’t see movement, he wouldn’t know where I was. That was my thinking, if you can call it that. Truth was, I was scared. Really scared. This bastard wanted to kill me, and after he got it done he would try to kill Sarah.
Then I heard him, some distance away. I rolled over. I thought he was working around to my right, trying to keep his distance.
I carefully turned until I was pointed that way. Had the old .30-30 cocked and ready.
Time seemed to drag. I could hear squirrels playing and a jet running high. Somewhere, maybe a mile away, a car horn honking.
Then I saw him out of the corner of my eye. He was about fifty feet to my right, stepping around a tree with the rifle up. I was pointed the wrong way. I was dead.
“Hi.” Sarah’s voice.
He spun towards her, and the pistol in her hand went off. He was knocked backwards.
I scrambled up and ran toward him.
Sarah just walked up, holding the pistol in both hands.
“Goodbye, Mr. Norris,” she said, and shot him four times as fast as she could pull the trigger.
I took another step closer and looked. He was extremely dead.
I took the pistol from her hand and put it in my shoulder holster.
“Let’s go call the law,” I said, put my arm around her shoulders and steered her toward the truck. We left Jack Norris and his .270 lying there in the leaves.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Senator Harlan Westfall got a ride to New York from Michael Hunt. He met the financier, son of the late Anton Hunt, in the private jet terminal at Reagan National Airport. They walked across the ramp together and went up the stairs into Hunt’s Gulfstream. The copilot followed them up the ladder and toggled the switch to raise it, sealing the plane, while the petite flight attendant seated the two gentlemen in the cabin. They were the only passengers.
“Do you have a charger I could use for my phone?” Senator Westfall asked the flight attendant. “Can’t keep the battery charged up,” he explained to his host.
Yes, indeed, the lady had a charger and plugged it in to the senator’s armrest. He plugged in the cell phone. She also took their orders for drinks, and as they taxied for take-off, she brought each man a tumbler of twenty-five-year-old single-malt Scotch.
“Really appreciate the ride, Michael,” the senator said.
“Glad I could do it,” Michael Hunt said. He was no spring chicken, a man in his sixties, but he had inherited the political proclivities of his father as well as his physical characteristics. Like Anton, who fell off an office building in New York just last year, Michael was dedicated to the new world order, a world without borders, and was willing to use his pocketbook to get what he wanted, regardless of what other people thought or wanted.
“You see how it’s going,” Westfall said as the plane took the runway and accelerated for takeoff. “Your father’s plan is working. Russian mone
y has had a corrosive effect on our enemies. It’s really amazing.”
Hunt nodded. “Dad would have been shocked at how the Russians also used it on our friends,” he said. “They are truly perfidious bastards.”
Westfall always enjoyed the way these executive jets maneuvered so effortlessly. The late evening sun was still above the horizon, firing the haze so badly that the city was almost invisible as the little jet climbed for altitude.
“We screwed the Republicans and the Russians screwed us,” Westfall said. “Perhaps it was inevitable. Yet we can still make something out of this mess. Conyers is in deep and serious trouble. Judy Mucci thinks the House will impeach him, and God willing, the Senate will fry him. It’ll be close, but I think it can be done.”
They discussed personalities as the jet leveled off at altitude and flew northeast: which senators would vote to remove Conyers from office and which ones wouldn’t. It was actually a short flight, so one drink was about all the flight attendant ever managed to serve before the jet began its descent into Teterboro. They discussed ways to pressure recalcitrant senators.
“We’ve got to get this done,” Westfall said, and Michael Hunt agreed. It was dark when the plane parked at the Jet Center in Teterboro and Hunt and Westfall transferred to a helicopter for the ride across the Hudson to Manhattan. A million lights below them, the city spread out in all its glory. The view was sublime.
It was nearly eleven o’clock when the county sheriff and FBI agents told Sarah Houston and me that we could go home. They were reluctant to let us go, but the 9mm pistol Jack Norris had on him was the clincher, that and the silencer in his trouser pocket. The law waited until the ballistics report came in on the pistol, which was one Norris had purchased several years ago. It had indeed fired the bullets that killed Jesse Hughes and Joe Leschetizky.
We drove back to Sarah’s place in my pickup. The Model 94 .30-30 was wrapped up in my blanket and back under the rear seat. Since I hadn’t managed to shoot anyone with the rifle, the law enforcers let me keep it, and when I was wrapping it up, the wedge for the rear sight fell out of the blanket. They kept the 9mm Beretta, however, which was government-issue. I’d have to fill out a report for the company, but as long as Grafton didn’t croak on me, I doubted if I would have to pay for it.
As we rode along Sarah checked in with Callie Grafton. The admiral was awake, so Sarah gave Callie a summary of our day to pass along. “There is no doubt, Mrs. Grafton. Jack Norris shot your husband.”
I thought Sarah overstated the case. Unless they found the intact bullet that had passed through Grafton’s body, there was no way to be absolutely certain Norris’ .270 was the guilty gun. Still, it probably was and the law dogs all knew it. I wasn’t going to keep looking.
They had kept us separate from Nora Norris, who came home about seven and found the law there with a flock of scientists. Later, an ambulance crew removed her husband’s body. The Norris son, the football player, came home about nine and didn’t say much, the sheriff said. I didn’t see him either, but I felt sorry for him. How would you like to come home after a movie and find your dad had murdered two people, tried to kill several others, and now was dead?
Sarah and I were famished, so we dropped in to a late-night bar I knew about and had drinks and dinner while listening to jazz. She said to me, “I’ll expect that report for Justice on my desk tomorrow.” We had a chuckle about that. Then she wanted to know if I were really serious about Idaho.
“Yes. Very soon.”
We talked and talked about Idaho. The music was Dave Brubeck, Kenny G., and Thelonious Monk. Yeah.
When we saw Jake Grafton, he had IVs in each arm, an oxygen cannula taped to his nose, a catheter in his dick, and drains in the surgical incisions. His wife hadn’t yet come to the hospital that morning, which was just as well. “She needs the sleep,” Grafton whispered. He was wired to a computer which sat beside the bed and displayed all his vital signs on a monitor. It was mesmerizing watching his heart beat, his blood pressure, oxygen saturation level, and whatever else they had. Grafton saw me looking at the thing and whispered, “I like to watch it. When the squiggles stop I’m dead.”
“You’ll be the first to know,” I agreed.
We were telling him about the shoot-out with Jack Norris when a doctor and nurse came in. Two orderlies were right behind. They fussed over him, rearranged him in the bed, checked the catheter, examined the IVs, asked how he was doing, and told us not to stay very long.
I followed the doctor into the hallway. One of the company’s covert operators was sitting in a chair beside the door, a guy named Harry Franklin. I knew Harry fairly well from adventures we shared in the Middle East. He was armed and competent.
I followed the doctor to the nurse’s station and said, “I’m one of Admiral Grafton’s executive assistants, Doctor.”
The doctor made an instant decision to tell me everything. “He should have died right there on that sidewalk where he was shot. Massive trauma, massive blood loss, shock, call it what you will. It’s a miracle. He’s lost part of a lung, yet I feel an incredible optimism. I think he’s actually going to survive and make an excellent recovery.”
“When?”
“It’s going to take time. And he’ll never get back to where he was before he was shot. Maybe a seventy or eighty percent recovery. But he’ll be back doing normal things, walking, driving, working, making decisions. And that will be flat miraculous. Man, they come in here in all kinds of conditions, and Mr. Grafton is about the worst I’ve seen to actually survive surgery and start back. When I first saw him I thought he’d die on the table.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“Don’t stay too long. He will tire very quickly; rest is the best medicine.”
I went back into the room. The medical personnel were gone and Sarah Houston was bent over the bed listening to Jake Grafton whisper. She kept mumbling, “Yes.”
He saw me, tried a smile, then Sarah grasped my arm and we left the room. Mrs. Grafton had texted Sarah that she was on her way, but we didn’t wait for her. “The boss wants Norris’ home computer,” she told me, and we headed for the parking lot.
When we whipped into the entrance to Norris’ drive, we found saw four cars there, one of which was the football player’s blue sports car. None of the others looked official.
“Think we should wait?” Sarah asked.
“If we do then the FBI will get around to asking for the thing, if they haven’t already.”
“Mrs. Norris and the son haven’t seen us, have they?”
“No, but they probably heard our names.” I wasn’t hopeful.
Thank heavens I wore a tie this morning. I checked that it was on straight, Sarah made sure she was properly put together, and we got out of her little BMW and climbed to the porch.
The kid answered the bell. He was a muscled-up, athletic specimen who could have played linebacker in better days. Today he looked as if he had been in a serious car wreck, and I didn’t blame him. I wondered about Jack Norris’ brains, if he had really had any.
Before we could say anything, the kid opened the door and let us in. “Mom’s in the kitchen,” he said, and beat it.
So we went that way.
It was easy to see which one was Nora Norris. She was in even worse shape than her son. Four women friends were gathered around the middle island, and they were all talking softly among themselves.
Sarah and I waited until Mrs. Norris noticed us, then Sarah went over, offered a hand and condolences. I could see them whispering but couldn’t hear what was being said.
In a moment, Mrs. Norris led Sarah toward the den. I followed. The desktop computer was sitting right there, still.
“Can you remember the passwords, Mrs. Norris?” Sarah asked.
“The main one is on the keyboard. I can never remember passwords.”
“We’ll bring the computer back as soon as possible, Mrs. Norris. Would you like a receipt?”
She shook her head
no and walked away, back toward the bedroom and master bath.
“Unplug the box and let’s get out of here,” Sarah whispered to me.
We did. Three minutes later we were in the car going down the drive.
“What did you tell her?” I asked my partner in crime.
“That the company had to check Mr. Norris’ computer to see if it held any classified material. She bought it. I never even told her my name.” She shuddered. “I feel slimy.”
“Your explanation is almost true,” I shot back, “which is a rarity in the spook business. And I wish to remind you that you’d feel a lot worse if you were shot up like Jake Grafton.”
“I know.”
“Or dead. But I don’t suppose the dead feel anything.”
The new acting director, Nanya Friend, called me into her office and asked for a complete briefing on what happened yesterday. I gave it to her straight. The color drained from her face as she listened.
But she was tough as Callie Grafton. With that behind her, she wanted a complete briefing on the Russian fake money fiasco. An hour later she was still asking questions.
“So where do you go from here?” she asked.
“After lunch I’m going back to the hospital to wait for Jake Grafton to wake up. Then I’m going to find out what Sarah Houston and I are going to do. If you want, you might come along.”
Nanya Friend took a deep breath and stirred through the phone message chits on her desk with a finger. “I’d better try to keep this agency functioning,” she said. “Give the director my warmest wishes.”
“I will,” I assured her, and headed for the hallway.
Senator Harland Westfall heard the news about Jack Norris, assistant director of the CIA, from his secret FBI friend, who had called him early that morning at home. That dumb bastard Norris apparently shot Jake Grafton, the director, his boss, in an attempt to derail the Russian money investigation. Then he killed the man who hired an ag pilot to kill Yegan Korjev. When Tommy Carmellini and a CIA female techie showed up at his house yesterday evening, he tried to kill them, and got killed himself. And by the way, Jake Grafton was alive and guarded around the clock. The doctor thought he would eventually make an excellent recovery.
The Russia Account Page 26