Liars & Thieves: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

Too fast … the rear end broke loose and we slid across the road, headed for the berm and the edge. Of course, on that curve the state had not gotten around to putting up a guardrail. The edge was right there, like the Grand Canyon. The added friction of the rocks saved us.

  With gravel flying, I threw the car back on the road and missed a shift, almost stalled the engine, then was accelerating hard again.

  In the rearview mirror I got a glimpse of the SUV sliding across the berm and going over the edge.

  I slammed on the brakes.

  “Why are we stopping?” Kelly shouted as the deceleration forces threw her against her shoulder belt.

  “They went off the road, over the edge,” I told her as the Benz slid to a halt and I slammed it into reverse. “This is our chance to find out who those dudes are and who the hell they’re working for.”

  I backed up at full throttle, the engine howling, then braked to a stop on the berm where they went over. I popped the shifter into neutral and jammed the parking brake on, then bailed out with Fred’s automatic in my right hand.

  No one was moving in the SUV, which was impaled on a large tree trunk thirty feet down the slope. It had slammed into the trunk of the tree just behind the driver’s door, and the tree had arrested it. The glass was gone; the vehicle was badly twisted from impact. I could see two heads—the driver’s and passenger’s—and they weren’t moving.

  I slid down the mud and gravel of the slope, struggling to keep my feet under me, until I reached the wreck.

  Three men were in the vehicle. The passenger and the man on the back seat were dressed in camo pants and shirts, while the man behind the wheel was wearing jeans and a pullover. At first glance, it looked as if the air bags had saved their asses. Not the guy in back, however. His neck was obviously broken. His corpse was partially on the floor, partially on the seat.

  I felt the passenger’s carotid artery. He was still alive. And out cold. He had a snub-nose .38 in a holster on his ankle and an MP-5 between his legs. A two-way radio lay at his feet. One of his legs was broken—apparently he fractured it on the weapon during the crash.

  I reached across and felt the driver’s artery. No pulse.

  I was struggling to get the passenger door open when I heard the Mercedes engine wind up. I started up the muddy slope, took two steps, and quit. Standing there in the rain, ankle deep in mud, leaves, and roadside trash, I listened to my Mercedes going down the mountain until the sound completely faded.

  What a hell of a day this turned out to be.

  I hadn’t been smart enough to pull the keys from the ignition, so ol’ Kelly what’s-her-name made like a jackrabbit, leaving me with two corpses and a comatose killer ready for intensive care. It was enough to piss off the pope.

  A common, coarse word seemed to fit the situation, so I said it aloud, then repeated it because I liked the sound of it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The injured man’s seat-belt buckle was jammed; I had to cut the belt with my pocket knife. I dragged him from the passenger seat and laid him out in the mud. I wasn’t too careful about how I handled him. If he croaked, so be it.

  He didn’t even twitch. No wallet, naturally. Not even a car key. I unstrapped his ankle holster and put it on.

  There was a Virginia car registration certificate and proof of insurance card in the glove box of the vehicle, which I pocketed.

  The driver had a wallet. I had a devil of a time getting it out of his pocket due to the way his corpse was jammed into the twisted seat. When I succeeded, I looked through it, found the driver’s license, and extracted it. Didn’t recognize the name. Address was Burke, Virginia. I put it in my pocket. Looked to see what else he had in there. Some credit cards and an AAA card, all in the name that appeared on the driver’s license. Maybe that was his real name. Then again …

  I heard a car or pickup coming, paused, and listened. It was climbing the mountain and didn’t slacken its pace. Went around the curve above me and continued upward.

  The corpse in the back with the broken neck was jammed down between the seats, and I wasn’t in the mood to try to get him out of there. I doubted if he had any more ID on him than the man lying in the mud.

  I was about to give up when I saw a bulge in the driver’s shirt pocket. Jackpot! A cell phone. I pocketed it and the two-way radio.

  The rest of it I left—corpses, weapons, ammo, and the comatose dude lying in the mud in the rain.

  Kelly hadn’t been gone three minutes when I finished and climbed the bank back up to the road. I was a royal mess, mud from the knees down, soot and fire filth from the knees up. And I was wet, tired, and pissed off.

  As I inspected the skid marks in the gravel, I put Fred’s pistol behind my belt in the small of my back and made sure my jacket covered it. Someone would see those skid marks and investigate, sooner or later.

  I set off down the mountain, plodding along. Two more vehicles passed, both descending the grade. The rain continued to fall.

  Twenty minutes after I left the wreck, when I was almost at the bottom of the grade, a farmer in an old pickup stopped and waited for me to catch up. He was white-haired, wearing well-worn overalls and a John Deere cap. And he was dry.

  “You look like you could use a ride,” he said when I opened the door.

  “Car slid off the road back up the mountain,” I told him. “I’m a real mess. If you don’t mind, I’ll ride in back.”

  “Hell, son, you won’t hurt this truck. It’s about as old as you are. Hop in and I’ll give you a ride to Staunton.”

  “Thanks,” I said gratefully. I climbed in and pulled the door shut.

  He walked through the dripping forest, around rotting logs and broken limbs, over boulders and piles of dirt where trees had been uprooted by some ancient wind. The going was hard in the wet, slippery leaves on the forest floor, last autumn’s rotting collection. And he wasn’t wearing enough clothes.

  His thoughts were all jumbled up, memories that flashed through his mind in no particular order. His wife’s face haunted him.

  She was dead—he was sure of it.

  Murdered.

  Like his mother and father. His very first memories as a toddler were of the night the NKVD came for them, took them away. He remembered the cold … and his mother sobbing, hysterically denying something. He had been but a tot. Lord, that was a long time ago … over sixty years. Stalin had purged the military and the party of his enemies, who were executed or sent to slave labor camps.

  He didn’t know what happened to his parents. They had disappeared into the great vastness of Soviet Russia and were never seen or heard from again … leaving only ghosts to haunt the thoughts of those who remembered them.

  Tears ran down his face as he worked his way aimlessly through the forest, scrambling over slick, rotting logs, avoiding thickets and steep places, going more or less in one direction … perhaps.

  In truth, he no longer cared.

  All his life he had known they would come for him eventually. Just as they came for his parents.

  He remembered sitting on the floor of the apartment crying after they took his parents. How long he had waited there for his parents to return he couldn’t recall—he had been too small and it happened too long ago. Years later the woman who took him in said that he had been without food or water for three days when she found him, huddled on the floor, nearly dead of dehydration and hypothermia. She had picked him up, wrapped him in a blanket, and taken him home with her … at the risk of her own life.

  Evil maims or kills, and good saves us. Sometimes. When he became a man he often contemplated the contrast between good and evil. The world was full of people who didn’t believe in moral absolutes, people who could rationalize whatever course of action they wished to pursue, usually one that benefited them. They cheated, stole, lied, temporized, apologized, explained, and assured themselves and each other that everyone did it. He wasn’t one of those people.

  It wasn’t that he was better than everyone el
se. He was no stronger or weaker than most. He, too, suffered the ravages of regret, the torture of remorse. Yet he refused to surrender to evil, even for a moment, even to preserve his life. He had lived in intimate proximity to it all his life and thought he knew all its faces. He had never surrendered, had fought it, tried never to give in to the constant fear, the terror of being discovered, the panic as he contemplated their revenge.

  His wife understood. She had stood beside him, shared the risks, and … paid with her life.

  He walked on through the forest, wet, shivering, remembering …

  The old man talked all the way to Staunton, and I tried to hold up my end of the conversation, with dismal results. I had too much on my mind to pay much attention to the details of his life story and that of his children, of whom he had five or six … I got a little confused there in the middle.

  He dropped me at the Wal-Mart in Staunton, and I shook his hand gratefully. An offer of money might have insulted him, so I didn’t risk it.

  After he drove off I went into the store and bought a new outfit from the skin out, then went to the men’s room and changed into it. I dumped my wet, muddy clothes in the trash. At the snack bar I downed two hot dogs and two cups of hot, foul, black coffee while I sat thinking about things.

  Mikhail Goncharov … the archivist for the KGB, a man who copied top secret files, lots of them, seven suitcases worth. Secrets from the cold war, buried where no one would ever see them, were now about to be exposed to the light of day. I was sure that many people all over the world would find the prospect horrifying, if they only knew. Obviously someone did know and was extremely unhappy.

  I wondered who that someone was. Some people in the CIA knew of the Goncharov collection, probably some folks in British intelligence. And, perhaps, in Russia.

  It seemed improbable to me that the Russians figured out where the agency was going to debrief their note-taking ex-archivist and managed to arrange a hit squad in less than a week. More likely, I thought, someone at the agency told someone … somewhere … something. The location perhaps, and obviously the need for haste.

  Whoever wanted Goncharov silenced and the files destroyed had almost succeeded, at a terrible cost. That person wouldn’t quit now, not when he learned that some of the files had escaped destruction—and that one of the people who had read the files was still very much alive.

  I left a tip for the waitress and strolled out of Wal-Mart. A bank of pay phones stood near the front entrance. I went back in the store and got ten dollars’ worth of quarters, then returned to the phones. Pulzelli was still at the office.

  “Tommy Carmellini, Sal. I have some bad—”

  His voice dropped to a hiss. “Where are you, Carmellini? The FBI has been here with a search warrant and gone through your desk.”

  “My desk?”

  “They want you for questioning. Someone took out the Greenbrier safe house this morning, killed everyone there. They think you may have been involved.”

  “Jesus H. Christ!” I exclaimed, even though this was Pulzelli and he hated coarse language. “You just told me to go up there yesterday. Do they think I went off my nut or what?”

  “They want to ask you some questions. Tell them everything and they’ll go away. Where are you?”

  “You answer a question for me. When you were told to send someone to Greenbrier for guard duty, did they ask for me specifically, or did you just choose me?”

  “I chose you. The FBI knows that. Now tell me where you are.”

  “Sal, you’ve always played straight with me, so I’m going to level with you. The killers were there when I got there, and one of the translators escaped them. From what she told me, it appears that there has been a leak at the agency. These killers may even have been agency employees—I don’t know yet.”

  “Talk to the FBI.”

  “That’s probably good advice, but now I know too much. If there are some rotten apples at the agency, they could set me up to take this fall and there wouldn’t be much I could do about it. Watch your back, Sal, and stay out of the line of fire.”

  I severed the connection before he could reply.

  The rain outside had slackened to a gentle drizzle, almost a mist. Standing in the middle of the Wal-Mart parking lot with the cell phone in my hand, I got a little damp, but not wet. I stood there soaking up the liquid sunshine while I wondered how the FBI got onto me so quickly.

  I had been the unexpected glitch, the witness who sees too much and doesn’t drop dead on command.

  It seemed logical to assume that one of the killers must have given the license plate number from my car to that someone in the agency or the FBI, and that person had decided to frame me. Or permanently shut me up.

  Or, more than likely, do both. If you’ve murdered eight or ten people to hide guilty secrets, what’s one or two more?

  Sitting in an FBI office in Staunton jabbering into a tape recorder didn’t appeal to me much, not while there were still bad guys running around with silenced MP-5s.

  I put the cell phone back in my pocket and went back to the pay phones. My next call was to my lock shop partner, Willie the Wire. I dialed his cell number and got him on the third ring.

  “Hey, man, I need some help.”

  “I’ve been telling you that for years and you still haven’t been to see a shrink.”

  “A woman ripped off my wheels. I don’t want to call the cops, but I want the Mercedes back. Don’t you have a friend who works for LoJack?” LoJack was an antitheft system that allowed the police to locate stolen cars. I had had a LoJack beacon installed in my car when I acquired it.

  “Yeah. Been a while since I talked to him, so I don’t know if he’s still working there.”

  “Give him a call, will ya? Tell him I need to find the car and don’t want the police notified. A lover’s spat. See if he can turn on the beacon and get a location.”

  “Ain’t nobody love you, Carmellini.”

  “A lot you know. I’ve got hot women stashed in cities and towns, villages and farms, all across the length and breath of this great land.”

  “Right! Washington, you think?”

  “Somewhere in the suburbs, I’ll bet. Her name is Kelly Erlanger.” I spelled it for him. “The spelling is just a guess. See if she’s in the telephone book.”

  “Okay.”

  “One more thing. Today sorta went sour. The FBI is looking for me. If they show up at the shop we haven’t had this conversation and you have no idea where I am.”

  A low, dry chuckle. “What the hell you been into now, Tommy?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. As you know, I live a quiet, holy life, studying the scriptures and praying. My cell phone is off. I’ll call you this evening from a pay phone.”

  “Luck, fella.”

  My cell phone felt heavy in my pocket. I had it off so the feds couldn’t use the cellular network to locate it, once they figured out who I was and learned my cell phone number. Once the phone was turned on, it only took a few seconds for the phone to log on to the network, and then they would have me. With the power switch off, the telephone should be unable to talk to a network if queried. Theoretically. But with the techno-wizards marching bravely on to God knows where, who the hell knew? I ditched the phone in the trash can by the main entrance of Wal-Mart.

  Now to get to Washington. There was a car dealership a few hundred yards from where I stood, so I walked over and inquired about renting a car.

  An hour later I was on the way to Washington in a four-year-old sedan with seventy grand on the odometer that a local entrepreneur brought to the front door of the dealership. The only cool thing about the car was the bumper sticker: FREE THE FRENCH—WHACK CHIRAC!

  Thank heavens the wipers worked—the misty drizzle had turned to rain again.

  What a crummy day!

  CHAPTER SIX

  The miles flew by as I zipped north on I-81. Before I knew it, I was at the turnoff for I-66, which would take me into Was
hington’s western suburbs. A few miles later I got off the interstate at the Front Royal exit and went south about a hundred yards to the McDonald’s. There was a pay phone on a low mount beside the parking lot. Although the telephone book attached to it with a woven wire was ripped to shreds, I got a dial tone when I lifted the receiver. I went into the McDonald’s and traded a five-dollar bill for more quarters.

  Willie answered on the second ring.

  “Hey, pal. It’s me.”

  “They were here. Three of them came in about a half hour ago. Said you were wanted on a material witness warrant.”

  “FBI?”

  “Yeah. They wanted to search, but I wouldn’t let ’em. They’ll probably be back with a warrant in a little while.”

  There was nothing in the shop that I didn’t want the law to see, so that news didn’t worry me.

  “What about the woman, Kelly Erlanger?”

  “She’s got an unlisted number.” He read me the number and address. “Better hope the car is there. My friend at LoJack is out sick. I called his house, and his old lady says the son of a bitch is shacked up someplace or on a roaring drunk—she hasn’t seen him in two days.”

  “How’d you come up with Kelly’s address?”

  “Got a friend’s wife who works at the telephone company.”

  Willie’s circle of friends and acquaintances never ceased to amaze me. “Where in hell did you meet all these people?”

  “I met this woman’s old man in the joint, which is where you’re gonna wind up if you ain’t real careful.”

  “I’ve heard that song before. Can even hum it.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re into today, Tommy, but these were heavy federal dudes on a mission, not desk jockeys doin’ some damn background investigation. I figure they’ll have a tap on this line within an hour.”

  “Thanks, Willie. I’ll be talking to you.”

  Oh, boy. If the FBI was a bit quicker than Willie estimated, they now had Kelly’s number and home address.

  I needed money. I figured that the FBI would take a few hours to freeze my bank accounts, so I had better get some walking-around money fast. The convenience store next to McDonald’s had an ATM sign on its pole, so I went in and tagged it for three hundred from my checking account. I also bought a Coke and a bag of jerky.