Liars & Thieves: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

That was when a bush off to my right began to move down the hill toward the house.

  The man on the porch went back inside. The driver of the SUV turned off the ignition and climbed out. He took the steps to the porch two at a time and disappeared inside.

  I waited until the walking bush was nearing the porch, then eased the red dot onto him. Bracing the gun against my shoulder, I thumbed the fire selector to full automatic, then squeezed the trigger. The noise was about as loud as a .22 rifle. The weapon walked off target and I muscled it back on, then released the trigger.

  The bush collapsed on the ground; his weapon fell several feet away.

  I had fired about a dozen rounds, I thought. A one-second burst or a little over. I pointed the MP-5 at the porch and waited, examining windows. Perhaps I should have moved, but I was betting they didn’t know where I was. Movement might give me away.

  A flicker of light showed in one of the ground-floor windows. The bastards had indeed fired the place. The fire grew quickly in intensity.

  They must have used thermal grenades!

  I snuggled the weapon in against my shoulder and waited. Anyone desiring to leave by SUV was going to get perforated.

  They went out the back.

  I didn’t see them go, but after a minute or so several of the lower windows shattered and smoke began puffing out of the upstairs windows. I didn’t think they were going to immolate themselves, so concluded they must have gone out the back and over the hill, precisely the way they had come in.

  I took a deep breath and sprinted for the cover of the SUV.

  That sprint would have gotten me a roster spot in the NFL. I have never run so fast in my life.

  No shots. As I huddled behind the SUV and listened to the fire in the house snap, crackle, and pop, the thought occurred to me that one of those dudes might have stayed behind just for the fun of icing me point-blank as I went up the porch stairs.

  If so, he was behind the door.

  I emptied the magazine into the door, put in a fresh magazine, then put a burst into each window.

  Feeling a tad bit better, I ran up the stairs and into the house, ready to shoot the first thing that moved.

  They had used thermal grenades. The heat and smoke were intense. Yet the fire looked worse than it was. Crouching, I could see that the main room was covered with paper, heaping piles of it. And three bodies.

  Two more bodies in the kitchen.

  The back door was standing open.

  I threw caution to the winds and hurried through the building, looking for anyone still alive. And sorta hoping I’d meet a bad guy, so I could have the fun of shooting him with the MP-5.

  I did find someone, hiding in an upstairs closet.

  She screamed as I jerked her out of there, screamed and went for my eyes with her fingernails.

  I pushed her roughly, and she fell to the floor. “Goddamn, lady, get a grip. I’m one of the good guys.” I must have shouted it, because I was pretty pumped.

  She stared at the submachine gun with eyes as big as saucers as the smoke roiled through the room. Her eyes rose to my face. I must have looked like something from the Black Lagoon standing there with that weapon in my hand, soaked to the skin, and covered with dirt and leaves.

  “Who are you?” she whispered, staring at the weapon, her eyes wide.

  “Let’s get the hell outta here, lady, and do the introductions some other time.” I jerked her off the floor and pushed her toward the door.

  “The suitcase,” she shrieked, pointing back toward the closet.

  “We ain’t got time for your fuckin’ clothes. The goddamn house is burning—”

  “That’s what they came for! That’s what they wanted!”

  I jerked the suitcase from the closet—it must have weighed fifty pounds—and pushed it at her.

  “Get down the stairs and out of the house, right now, while I check to see if anyone else is alive up here.”

  She disappeared into the smoke dragging the suitcase—it was just a bit too heavy to carry.

  I ran from room to room, looking in closets and under beds, coughing and shouting. I didn’t find anyone; not that I searched everywhere, but I just ran out of time. The smoke was bad and getting worse. I could feel the heat in the floor and walls. I charged for the stairs hoping that I hadn’t waited too long. The staircase was like a chimney, funneling smoke and heat to the second and third floors. I held my breath and went down blind.

  At the bottom of the stairs I tripped on something and went sprawling. She had collapsed coming down the stairs and lay in a heap beside the suitcase.

  The fire was raging by then and the heat was unbelievable, but there was a little clear area near the floor, maybe two feet high. I crawled over to her, grabbed her by the arm, and began pulling. I couldn’t manage both girl and gun, so I abandoned the weapon.

  When we reached the porch I half carried, half dragged her down the steps into the yard.

  Then I lost my footing and dropped her. I went to my knees, gagging and retching and trying desperately to get some air. I stayed down until my head cleared somewhat. She was breathing shallowly. I put her on the grass, turned her over on her chest, and began pushing and pulling on her arms. After about thirty seconds of that she gagged, then gasped, “The suitcase! For Christ’s sake, get the suitcase!”

  Okay, she was going to make it.

  Figuring she knew more than I did, I went spider-walking back into the house for the damned suitcase and the MP-5. I wanted the gun more than the suitcase. The guys who iced these people and set the house afire might come back; if they did, I wanted that shooter. In our uncertain age, you must do unto others before they do it unto you.

  Going back into that burning building was one of the dumber things I have done since I got out of diapers and stopped eating mud. The heat and smoke were damn near intolerable.

  Miracle of miracles, I found the gun and suitcase and reversed course for the door. Got lost and started getting dizzy again from the smoke, then found the door just in time. I tossed the case into the yard and fell beside it on the grass.

  While I gagged and coughed, she loaded the suitcase into the SUV.

  Finally I got my breathing under control. I struggled to my feet and almost fell on my face. After thirty more seconds of hands on knees, I stood. She was bent over the dead man in the ghillie suit. She had pulled off his headpiece and had it in her hand.

  “You know him?” I managed.

  “No,” she said, and tossed his head rag on the ground. She turned back toward me.

  “Name’s Carmellini, lady. Who the hell are you?”

  “Kelly.” She said her last name, but I didn’t catch it. She was about medium height, had short dark hair and large brown eyes, and was in her late twenties, maybe a few years older. She might even have been pretty; it was hard to tell. Her face and clothes were covered with soot and grime. Behind us the fire was roaring. The heat was getting worse, and I found myself moving away from it. She did, too. Although she glanced at the fire from time to time, most of the time she kept her eyes on me.

  “Well, Kel, this is how it is. Those assholes shot everyone they could find and set the goddamn house on fire. The worst of it is that they may come back. I suggest that we borrow this fine vehicle and get the hell outta here.”

  I managed to stagger over to the SUV and look in. The key was still in the ignition. I picked up the MP-5 and put it in the rear seat, then got behind the wheel. Kelly got into the passenger seat.

  We were sitting ducks if the killers elected to stay around to ambush us, but I was praying they hadn’t. Still, Fred’s pistol felt good in my lap. As the wipers smeared the water on the windshield, I got the SUV going and turned it around.

  The guy in the ghillie suit looked like a small brush pile in the lawn.

  I put the transmission in park, leaped out, and ran over to him. I turned his head and took a good look. Nope. Never saw him before. And he had an MP-5 lying beside him. I had forgotten about it
. Hell, I could have left the other one in the house and just taken his.

  His weapon sported a double banana clip in it that might come in handy later, so I jerked it out. I left the weapon.

  “Where did you get your submachine gun?” she asked, her eyes on my face.

  “The guy carrying it left it to me in his will.”

  She glanced back at the house, then at the suitcase on the rear seat.

  As we were going down the drive, I asked Kelly, “What happened back there?”

  “They came this morning. I was upstairs, heard the shooting, went to the top of the stairs. There’s a place where you can look over the balcony into the main room downstairs, and I saw they had shot Mikhail. That’s when I grabbed the suitcase in his room and hid.”

  “Who is Mikhail? What’s in the suitcase?”

  She took a deep breath before she answered. “Mikhail Goncharov was the chief archivist for SVR, the successor to the KGB. He was like … their librarian, in charge of the central records depository. He defected last week. We had just started to debrief him. He spent the last twenty years making notes from the case files of the Soviet foreign intelligence service, and then Russia’s after the breakup. He had seven suitcases full of notes that he brought with him when we extracted him.”

  She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “That’s the last one.”

  With the house on fire, the man hiding in the washing machine in the basement decided he could wait no longer. He could smell the smoke, hear the roar of the fire, and knew if he waited much longer, he would never get out of the building.

  Perhaps he had already waited too long …

  The basement had not yet filled with smoke. There had to be an exit door … somewhere! He ran from room to room, fighting back the panic. There was a furnace in one room, several storerooms full of canned food and large freezers … and at the end of the hallway, a door.

  It was locked with a massive dead bolt, one that could be opened from the inside. The man opened it, and found himself in a stairwell. He went up it slowly, trying to see, as the fire raged in the house above him.

  No one in sight. Scraggly grass covered with autumn leaves for forty yards, then the forest.

  The man ran toward the forest.

  Safely behind a large tree, he paused and looked back at the house, which was engulfed in flames.

  The blood pounded in his temples.

  Biting his lip, trying to contain his emotions, he turned his back on the burning house and walked into the dark dripping forest.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When we reached my car, I ran the SUV off the road and parked it. There was just room enough to turn my car around.

  “Why did you park here?” Kelly asked as I put the suitcase full of paper into the trunk.

  “There’s a guard shack up the hill. The agency sent me to do a week of guard detail, so I wanted to check in with the guys before I went up to the house. They were both dead. Shot with an automatic weapon, it looked like.” I didn’t think I’d need it, but I put the MP-5 on the ledge behind the coupe’s seats.

  After I got the car turned around and we were headed for the hard road, she said, “Say your name again.”

  “Tommy Carmellini. Why were you here?”

  “I’m a Russian translator. All the notes are in Russian. That was the only language Goncharov spoke.”

  “The suitcase contains his notes?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you saved them,” I mused, and glanced at her. She didn’t look like the toughest broad on the block, but she had backbone. Of course, one wondered how much. Those dudes with the camouflage and automatic weapons were supposed to kill everyone at the safe house and destroy all the notes. They were the A-team, but whose A-team?

  Someone was going to be very peeved when he heard that there were two survivors. I glanced at her, wondered if that thought had occurred to her yet.

  We crossed the bridge and took the graveled road across the meadow and airstrip and past the hangar. I felt naked. We had just turned onto the paved road when the first fire truck rounded the curve from Bartow. Fortunately no one in the truck could have seen our car come across the meadow … I hoped. As the truck went by, I slowed and looked back into the low hills. Although the rain was still coming down steadily, the ceiling had lifted enough so that I could see a column of smoke rising above the trees and merging with the clouds.

  I eased the clutch out and got the car in motion again. Three cars with small flashing lights on the roofs, driven by volunteer firemen probably, went racing by us and turned into the gravel road, following the fire truck. They roared across the meadow, over the bridge, and disappeared up the road into the forest.

  “I missed your last name, Kelly. What did you say it was?”

  “Erlanger.”

  “So what’s in the notes?”

  “Everything. Goncharov summarized or copied verbatim every KGB file he thought significant during the twenty-some years that he was the head archivist, then smuggled the notes out of the building every evening when he went home. The collection filled seven suitcases—a mountain of material. We were just starting to dig into it. I’m guessing, but I would say roughly half the material deals with Soviet internal politics. The foreign intel files I saw were about recruiting and running agents—mercenary and ideological—illegal residents, assassinations, disinformation, payoffs, subversion of foreign regimes, support for indigenous Communists around the globe, running arms … you name it. Think of every dirty thing the KGB did before the collapse of Communism and every dirty thing it did since then, and you got it.”

  “How far back do the files go?”

  “Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Stalin, the purges … Goncharov had access to every file in the archives until he retired four years ago. He was fascinated by the way the party used the NKVD and KGB to eliminate opposition and maintain its hold on power, then lied about it. His superiors or high-placed members of the government periodically ordered files destroyed—getting rid of the evidence—so he copied them before they went to the shredder and furnace.”

  We came to the bridge at Bartow and turned right, toward Staunton and the Shenandoah, which was seventy-five miles and seven mountains away. As we accelerated away from the intersection, I glanced in the rearview mirror. A large SUV coming from the north made the turn and fell into trail behind us. It wasn’t the one I had parked when we transferred to this car—it had come from the wrong direction, and besides, I had the keys to that one in my pocket.

  “Those bastards,” Kelly Erlanger said hoarsely. “Goncharov and the others didn’t have a chance. They were slaughtered like steers. Murdered. Gunned down.”

  I glanced at her. Tears were leaking from her eyes. She was staring straight ahead at nothing at all, remembering …

  The SUV was still in trail, back there eight or ten car lengths. I was making fifty-five along the narrow, straight, wet highway, charging up the valley. A plume of road spray rose behind me. I slowed to fifty. The SUV stayed the same distance behind.

  Shit!

  “His wife defected with him. I don’t know what happened to her.”

  “There were two dead women in the kitchen,” I said. “One of them was in her late fifties maybe. Perhaps early sixties, gray hair, sorta plump. The other was maybe thirty, tall.”

  “Bronislava Goncharova was the older one. She didn’t speak any English. The tall woman was Natasha Romerstein. She was a translator, too—she and I worked together at the agency. Her parents were Ukranian; she was born in America. She had a two-year-old son.”

  We were approaching a Y intersection. The road to the right was the one I had always driven to and from this valley—it was the only one I knew—so I took it. The SUV followed me.

  We were still in a narrow valley. The stream meandered back and forth, but the road ran straight for almost a mile, crossing the stream several times on small bridges. Then it went into a long sweeping left turn and continued for another mile. Only at the h
ead of the valley did the road began to wind and twist as it climbed Allegheny Mountain. I checked to see that Kelly had her seat belt on. She didn’t.

  “Put the belt on,” I said over the growl of the engine.

  She snapped herself in, then looked behind us. The SUV was not falling back. I kept the car at fifty.

  “They’ve been behind us since Bartow, keeping their distance,” I told her. “If we can’t outrun them going up the mountain, this is going to get messy. Can you shoot an MP-5?”

  “No.”

  She pulled a cell phone from her pocket, looked at it, then announced, “No service.”

  “Who you gonna call?” I asked.

  “Why … the agency! My supervisor.”

  “Those guys weren’t Russians. They were Americans. I listened to them talk.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Don’t jump to conclusions. Yeah, the Russians may have hired some Americans to assault that house to kill Goncharov and burn the notes, but how did they know he was there?”

  While she was mulling that over, we reached the head of the valley and started climbing the mountain. I downshifted and put the hammer down. Although the road was wet, the Mercedes had good rubber.

  The SUV wasn’t as agile in the curves as the coupe. They must have had a hell of a mill under the hood, because even with my maneuvering advantage the big SUV hung in there. I felt my back end start to break loose on one of the horseshoe turns halfway up … I managed to save it and kept the throttle on the floor as the SUV slid into the berm and gravel flew. The driver swiftly recovered without losing much momentum and stayed on my tail.

  Right, left, higher and higher on the mountain, working the clutch and stick, I kept the Mercedes as near the adhesion limit as I could. Kelly used both hands to brace herself.

  We didn’t pass a single car climbing the mountain. We topped the ridge—blew by the sign that read radar detectors were illegal in Virginia—and went into a long, descending sweeper down the eastern slope. I let the Mercedes accelerate … past sixty, seventy … the distance was opening … then braked hard for a blind right-hand turn.