The Traitor: A Tommy Carmellini Novel

by Stephen Coonts

I wasn’t paying much attention to Willie, I’m afraid. I was looking for my Muslim friends as I drove and wondering why Grafton thought that Qasim was a false agent or, even worse, a double agent.

  Mrs. Grafton was also waiting on the sidewalk when I pulled up. Seeing her there, a target for anyone who wanted to get even with Grafton, brought me back to full alert. I was going to need all my brain cells to just keep myself, Mrs. Grafton and Willie alive. Grafton was going to have to do the thinking.

  “Hello, Willie. Tommy.” She climbed in and shut the door. I muttered a good morning as I watched for a hole in traffic. I got one and rolled as Callie and Willie chattered away like lifelong friends.

  When he was with me, Willie Varner didn’t show the slightest interest in Paris, France, Europe, the people, how they lived, any of that. As we rode out of the city he plied Callie with questions. By the time we had left the suburbs behind, they were talking art.

  As they visited I began worrying about Cliff Icahn, who was alone in the surveillance van near the Rodet estate. Oh, man, it would be a really bad scene if he were dead when we got there. I dug my cell phone out of my pocket, and as Willie discussed the Impressionists’ use of light and color—please, I am not making this up—I dialed Cliff. He answered on the third ring.

  “This is Cliff.”

  I relaxed a little. “Tommy. What’s happening?”

  “Slow morning. When are you going to get here?”

  “Twenty minutes or so.”

  “Gardener arrived a half hour or so ago, and a grocery delivery van came by. That’s it. For all I know the folks are still sound asleep.”

  “I doubt that. We’ll see you soon.” I slapped the phone shut.

  Willie knew more about art than I thought he did, but still, he couldn’t talk it for more than ten minutes. Mrs. Grafton deftly changed the subject, talked about Washington, the city where Willie Varner had spent his life, except when he was in prison. Between the two of them, they knew every nook and cranny of that town, let me tell you.

  The van was parked about a mile from the entrance to Rodet’s estate in a little public pull-off about fifty yards up from the three-way intersection on Rodet’s side of the Marne bridge. We could see anyone crossing the bridge and turning east toward Rodet’s. Of course, we couldn’t see traffic coming in from the other direction to Rodet’s entrance, but there was nothing out that way but some camps and old farms. Everyone going to or coming from Paris came this way.

  Cliff was sitting behind the wheel of the van wearing a headset when I drove up. He had the window down and was resting his elbow on it. He wriggled a finger at me. There were no other vehicles or people in sight. I parked the government sedan behind him, got my backpack from the back seat and walked over with my hand in my pocket holding the zapper. I had the battery switch on, so the capacitor was charging, just in case.

  I faced the door. “Hey.”

  Cliff yawned. I didn’t think he’d do that if there were someone behind him with a pistol in his neck, so I relaxed. Still…I leaned in just enough to look. Yep, the van was empty. I motioned to Willie and Callie Grafton, and they got out of the car.

  “What’s going on in the house?”

  “Not a damn thing,” he said, and opened the door to get out. “They’re listening to music. Classical. I dozed off a couple of times.” He yawned again, then said hi to Willie and nodded at Mrs. Grafton. I introduced him and they chatted a little bit. After I gave Cliff the key to the sedan, he flipped a hand and climbed into the thing, turned it around, crossed the bridge and turned left for Paris.

  Willie and Callie got into the back of the van and played with the equipment. I tossed my backpack onto the passenger seat, yet I didn’t want to get in. That thing last night with Elizabeth Conner…nothing else that had happened in Paris had hit me like that. The guy I threw through the clock, the assholes on the motorcycles—they sallied forth to commit mayhem or murder and they got smacked instead. Al and Rich—I felt sorry for them, sure, but…

  Conner, strangled…I couldn’t get her face out of my mind.

  I walked around the van taking deep breaths and looking at everything. A car came along the road from the northwest and crossed the bridge, then hung a left for Paris.

  Now isn’t the time to stress out, Tommy-boy. A few more days, then you can have your breakdown.

  It turned out I wasn’t going to make it a few more days. I started retching. I went over in the weeds and put my hands on my knees and heaved my breakfast and kept heaving until there was nothing in there to come up.

  When I got myself more or less under control, I went back to the van. I heard Willie and Callie in there talking, their voices just murmurs.

  Okay, Tommy, get it ratcheted up, guy.

  Okay. I’m okay!

  I took some more deep breaths and climbed behind the wheel. The headset that Cliff had been wearing was lying on the console, so I put it on. A symphony…I didn’t recognize the composer. Not that I know much about music. Truth is, there is a lot I don’t know about.

  The stuff I do know about isn’t the kind of stuff that any sane man really wants to know.

  Apparently the radio was automatically channel surfing, listening for five seconds or so on each set of bugs. Now it switched again; the symphony was faint. No voices.

  At the count of five, it switched again. Nothing on this set. Nor the next. The next was music, faintly, still the symphony.

  Then back to the symphony at full cry.

  There was a bottle of water in the cup holder on the dash that Cliff had apparently been drinking out of. Hoping he didn’t have anything contagious, I finished it off and felt a little better.

  Let’s see, I put those bugs in the office, the library, the two sitting rooms, and the dining room. If the music was in the library or one of the sitting rooms, where were the people?

  I turned around. “Can you get the video from the office?” I asked Willie.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, and played with the controls. He reached up and turned the small monitor above his head so I could see it. The little camera was looking at the desk and computer. No one was in the picture.

  “Got any more water back there?” I asked.

  Callie passed me another bottle. It was warm. I drained it anyway.

  Whew!

  The leaves were blowing, the branches swaying. The overcast was up high, but it obscured the sun.

  Two cars came across the bridge, but they went straight instead of turning toward Rodet’s. They passed the van and the people in the car ignored me; maybe they knew I was an American.

  “Something’s not right,” I said as Callie flipped through the audio channels another time. “We should hear some voices unless everyone’s asleep.”

  She looked at me, and I saw the guts and intelligence in that face as she asked, “Do you want to call Jake?” Not “Are you sure?” or any of that.

  I wasn’t sure, though. Maybe I should have been, but I wasn’t. I listened through another round of the channels and wondered if I was going to heave again. Apparently not.

  “Not yet,” I told Callie.

  But something was wrong. I had that feeling. Or I was breaking out in paranoia again. Is there a pill for that?

  Darn, I’ll bet those bastards swept for bugs and found them.

  “I’m going in there,” I announced. “Going to see what’s what.” I reached for my backpack, got out of the van and put it on. Willie handed me a radio headset. I turned on the batteries and put the thing on. “Testing, one, two, three.”

  “Works fine,” Willie said in my ear.

  “I have any trouble, I’ll scream,” I said.

  “You want one of those electromagnetic bangers to cut the power?” Willie asked.

  “We do that in the daytime, they’ll know I’m coming.”

  “Watch yourself, Tommy,” Callie Grafton said as I closed the door and latched it.

  Walking along the road felt good. I was wearing a light jacket, which wa
s enough coat if I didn’t do any serious sitting. The truth was, I didn’t have any more sitting in me. I wanted to be up, moving, doing something. I was being nervous and silly, I knew, but there was nothing I could do about it. I was out of patience. Didn’t have a drop left.

  I suppose I wasn’t thinking logically. For some reason Marisa Petrou was on my mind, and Henri Rodet. Jake Grafton didn’t want them dead, and I sure as hell didn’t want to find them in that condition.

  I took some deep breaths as I walked along, trying to think.

  There were three of them; they had Jean-Paul Arnaud tied to a chair in the room over the garage. They said nothing to him, merely tied him up with a rope they had with them and waited. They were armed. One of them was always at the window, looking out.

  He heard steps on the stairs. A head appeared, that of a grizzled old man. Yet he came up the stairs lightly, without much effort. The old man wore a threadbare coat and baggy trousers with visible stains. He spoke to the three in Arabic.

  While they were talking Arnaud heard someone else ascending the stairs. Henri Rodet!

  “You bastard,” Jean-Paul hissed. “You’re in with this scum.”

  The old man removed the pistol from one coat pocket and the silencer from another. In no hurry, he screwed the silencer into the barrel while Arnaud struggled against the ropes.

  When the silencer was tight against the barrel, the old man pulled the slide of the Beretta back until he saw the gleam of brass, then let it go forward. Rodet watched impassively.

  “This used to belong to a Mossad Kidon man. He used it to kill my son. Then I killed him. Now I use it to kill infidels.”

  “Killing infidels—will that bring my brother back from the dead?”

  The old man turned. Marisa was standing at the head of the stairs looking at him. He hadn’t heard her footsteps.

  “Bah, woman, what do you know?” the old man hissed. He drew himself erect.

  “You ask me to sell my soul—and I have obeyed because you are my father. I have a soul also, and you have never once thought of me. You think only of yourself, and vengeance. God sees! He knows.”

  “You think it was easy in that Egyptian prison?” the old man asked. “They tortured us, made us scream for mercy, and they showed no mercy. Still, I believed in civilization. With all my heart I knew that the world of the French—the world of ideas, grace, beauty—all of that was superior to the mud and dirt and squalor of the Arabs. God didn’t love the Arabs more—he loved the French. I, Abu Qasim, knew the truth. So I betrayed them. Betrayed their jihad. Gave their secrets to their deadly enemies, who used them to thwart and murder the men of the faith.

  “Yes, woman, I did that. I, your father. Covered my hands with the blood of the faithful, covered myself with sin that will never wash off. And God sent me a sign. He sent a Mossad killer who murdered your brother…my son. My only son, whom your mother died giving birth to. God spoke to me, and the message was blood. Evil for evil, wickedness for wickedness, betrayal for betrayal, drop by drop and dram by dram I was to suffer until the whole foul debt was paid in full!

  “At long last, I listened to God. Listened and thought again, for the thousandth time, of the men I had betrayed. And I saw God’s will. I, Abu Qasim, was to take up the sword and slay the infidels. And I have. I will. I swear it on the beard of the Prophet.”

  With that, he extended the pistol to arm’s length and pointed it at Jean-Paul Arnaud’s forehead.

  “Allah akbar,” he said, and pulled the trigger.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Going over the fence in broad daylight was a little different than doing it after midnight. For one thing, the night vision goggles weren’t going to do me a lot of good. On the other hand, my unassisted eyes might. The yin and the yang…

  I made sure the ray gun was on, with the capacitor charging, but left it in my pocket. If it went off accidentally I would never need a vasectomy.

  As I walked I kick-started the brain. They had surveillance cameras on trees, but was anyone watching the monitor? The bugs seemed to indicate that no one was in the main house. Maybe and maybe not. If they had discovered the bugs, they might have moved them to the basement and put a radio nearby. Or the people might be camped out in the attic. Or using another building on the property—as I recalled, there was an apartment over the garage, a barn or two, and a couple of outbuildings. Or they might be sleeping off a wild night of sex and alcohol, which wasn’t very likely.

  I got tired of weighing the ifs. When I came to the corner of Rodet’s property, I looked around for possible passersby or gawkers—and didn’t see any.

  “I’m going over,” I said to Willie.

  “Okay,” he replied. With Mrs. Grafton sitting beside him, he had apparently cleaned up his act.

  I climbed the fence and worked my way over the barbed wire on top, managing to rip my trousers on a barb and put a nasty groove in the back of my thigh. I silently cussed a little, but I didn’t really mean it; I figured things would probably get worse.

  I dropped onto the ground on the other side and hunkered down behind the nearest tree. “I’m over the fence.”

  “Okay.”

  I scanned the trees for cameras and the grounds for dogs while I probed my wound with my fingers. The dang thing stung. Fortunately I had a tetanus shot just last year. There was a camera in the tree, all right, but not a dog in sight. I twisted around for a look at the tear in my trousers and the hole in my hide, which was bleeding. Well, it wasn’t going to kill me and there was nothing I could do about it now.

  I got out my ray gun and checked it. A little green light glowed on the top. No use sneaking. Trying to ignore my smarting leg wound, I trotted for the main house.

  One thing was certain: If anyone was watching the video from the surveillance monitors, life was going to get interesting very quickly. I didn’t think Rodet or his hired hands would just shoot me, but they would undoubtedly loose the dogs and come looking.

  I got to the wall of the house. I froze against it, listening. “I’m against the house,” I reported to Willie, who merely clicked his mike twice in reply. He was learning.

  My head was on a swivel. I was in the field of view of the monitor on the corner of the house. If there was anyone watching he had to see me.

  Nothing moved except the bare limbs of the trees. The leaves on the ground hadn’t been raked; they were too wet to blow around.

  Where were the people?

  More to the point, where were the dogs?

  From where I stood I could see the main gate and portions of the long driveway that wound up through the trees and curved in behind the house. The barns, garage and dog pens were back there. I moved along the wall toward the rear of the house, detouring for shrubbery, listening…

  Not even the sound of a dog barking. The wind was carrying my scent away from the dog pens, thank heavens.

  In better days I would have enjoyed this. As a kid I always liked sneaking around, going places I wasn’t supposed to go, seeing things I wasn’t supposed to see, learning things that other people thought no one knew. No doubt shrinks would say I had a problem, and one did, by the way—a doc who worked for the agency. He had a serious ethical dilemma: He had to explain to the brass why I liked my work, then offer help to get my head on straight, yet not cure me so much I would be useless to his employer.

  I came to the rear of the house and eased over between the shrubs and the wall. Getting as low as I could and still see over the greenery, I eased my head around.

  The shrink’s solution, which I thought was sorta neat, was to declare me neurotic but not paranoid. Apparently there’s a very thin, crooked line in the dirt that separates the serious sickos from the rest of us twisted freaks, people like you and me, and mental health pros are the only people who know where that line is. In any event, they pretend to know. We amateurs—

  I saw something descending toward my head just in time and jerked it back. A machete! The man wielding it had tried t
o take my head off!

  The force of the downward blow carried the big blade to the ground. The man had swung it so hard he couldn’t stop it. I dropped the ray gun and grabbed at the wrist that held the weapon with my left hand while I drove my right at his neck.

  He rolled away and my knuckles smashed into his cheek.

  Before I could close, he rolled and came up with the machete ready for another swipe. He looked like an Arab, young, wiry, medium height. I outweighed him by at least thirty pounds and was four or five inches taller. Didn’t matter—with that machete he looked big as King Kong.

  He waggled it and stepped to his left to clear the house and shrubs.

  If I turned around to retrieve my ray gun, I was going to lose a few body parts. I reached up my sleeve and pulled out the fighting knife.

  When he saw it, he charged, swinging the big blade.

  That was the wrong move. I went over backward, under the arc of the singing machete, and let his momentum carry him onto the knife. It went up to the hilt in his solar plexus.

  Impaled, he tried to draw a breath as his eyes widened. He drew back the machete…and dropped it.

  I gave the knife a savage twist, then shoved him off it. He fell over backward, tried to rise, gasping, then fell back.

  I hunted around for my ray gun, wasting valuable seconds. Where was it?

  Under this juniper. Must have kicked it. I dropped to my knees and retrieved it.

  I didn’t know anything about knife wounds, didn’t know what my assailant’s prognosis might be. Was he going to get up, go for help, follow me for another try, or die quietly dreaming of the virgins that awaited him in paradise?

  Since I didn’t know, I helped him on his way. I stabbed him in the throat with the knife and jerked it upward, slashing, as I pulled it out. Blood shot all over the place—the sight and smell of it hit me like a hammer. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Probably have to answer for it at the Pearly Gates, if I ever get that far.

  I keyed the mike on my headset. “Better call the cavalry. I just got attacked by a raghead.”