Liars & Thieves: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  “You fucking assholes!” I roared. “For the love of fucking Christ! You people didn’t have to shoot that cop!”

  The guy in the passenger seat turned and slapped me in the face with his pistol, which threw me sideways and stunned me.

  When I managed to get back to a sitting position, he stuck his pistol in my face and snarled, “I want the address where Kelly Erlanger is hiding, and I want it now.”

  “Or what? You’ll kill me like you did that cop? Stick it up your ass!”

  He whacked me again with the pistol and I passed out.

  “He spoke to me today in Russian,” Basil Jarrett said to Linda Fiocchi as they ate dinner. They and Mikhail Goncharov were sitting at the small round dining table in the cabin by the Greenbrier eating trout fillets that Jarrett had cooked in a pan over an open fire. Goncharov held his knife and fork in the European manner and ate with gusto.

  Goncharov’s glass was empty, so Jarrett poured him another glass of wine, then refilled his and Fiocchi’s glasses. That killed the bottle.

  “He seems to have regained his appetite,” Fiocchi said wryly. Goncharov was working on his third fillet.

  A few minutes later she said, “He never sleeps for more than an hour, then he wakes up talking and thrashing. Nightmares, I think. He wakes me up every time.”

  “So how did a man who speaks only an eastern European language get out here in the heart of the Allegheny Mountains?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jarrett helped himself to another fillet. He was hungry, too. “I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon. Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Goncharov finished his fish and his wine, smiled at his hosts, then wrapped himself in his blanket and lay down near the stove. He went to sleep while Jarrett and Fiocchi sipped coffee. The first nightmare came fifteen minutes after he drifted off. The room he was in was afire, he was choking on smoke, men were shooting …

  When I came to, the guy in the passenger seat was using a cell phone as we rolled along an interstate choked with traffic. I was leaning back against the seat, slumped toward the right door, with my hands cuffed in front of me. I took two deep breaths, waited a few seconds for my head to clear.

  Nobody needed to tell me I was in real trouble. Obviously these guys had followed me from Dorsey’s to the airport. They must not have had enough men to follow both me and Grafton, so they had stayed on me. They were going to get Jake Grafton’s name and address from me one way or another, then they were going to kill me. I knew it and they knew it. They weren’t going to ask nicely or appeal to my better nature. Even if I managed to say nothing before they beat me senseless or shot me to death, I had Grafton’s telephone numbers written on my left hand in ink. They would find them eventually.

  I thought about this, took one more deep breath, then reached forward, put my hands over the passenger’s head, and jerked backward with the cuffs against his neck while I rammed my head into the back of his. I used every ounce of strength I had … and heard his neck snap.

  The driver glanced sideways at me, his eyes as big as saucers, the car swerving dangerously. I didn’t take the time to get my hands away from the dead man—I smashed the driver in the head with my left elbow as hard as I could.

  The car caromed off a semi that was in the fast lane, then headed toward the right side of the highway. I managed to get my hands free of the corpse and got both hands around the driver’s neck as we shot off the highway, went up an embankment, and smashed head-on into a huge aluminum light pole. My death grip on the driver’s neck kept him from going through the windshield, because in the excitement he hadn’t put on his seat belt.

  The seat back broke loose, and I wound up jammed against the dashboard, the driver half under me. I still had a good grip on his neck, so I used it. Strangled him like a chicken.

  Every window in the car was broken; glass pebbles covered everything. In the silence that followed the crash I could hear imperious noises coming from the cell phone. It was on the floor. I could hear it but couldn’t see it. I jammed my hands down there, groped all over, and a miracle happened. I found it.

  I said into it, “I’m coming to get you, motherfucker,” then snapped the mouthpiece shut and put it in my pocket. The car doors were too twisted to open, so I went out through a window and headed for the woods at a hell-bent trot. The thought that there was another car full of these dudes roaming around someplace had finally occurred to me. Mom always said I had a one-track mind.

  Deep in the trees, well away from the lights of the cars whizzing by on the highway, I stopped to empty my stomach. When the spasms stopped, I leaned against a tree for a while. I couldn’t stop shaking. Too much adrenaline, I guess.

  Personally, I think this James Bond gig is vastly overrated.

  In the evening gloom under the trees I was temporarily safe. That calmed me down. When my stomach was under control and I had caught my breath, I managed to get a small pick set out of my pocket. It looked like a jackknife and contained three picks mounted as if they were blades and a torsion wrench that could be removed from the handle. I selected the pick I wanted by feel and inserted it like a shim under the teeth of the left cuff, jamming open the ratchet that held the cuff. Ten seconds later I had the right one off and tossed the cuffs away.

  As the shock and adrenaline wore off, I realized I was oozing blood from the side of my face. Not from where the guy slugged me with the pistol, but from whacking my head on the dashboard when the car hit the pole.

  I saw the flashing lights of a police car slow and stop by the wreck. Time to boogie. Ten minutes later I came out of the woods in a residential neighborhood. Walked between two houses and found myself on a paved street. Several cars passed me from time to time. An hour passed before I finally came to a convenience store with a pay telephone mounted on the outside wall of the building. I had been reading street signs, so I knew roughly where I was. I called Jake Grafton on his cell phone and told him what had happened in as few words as possible and gave him my location.

  “Move down the street about fifty yards and wait for me,” he said.

  I went inside the store, cleaned myself up in the men’s room, and bought a bottle of water. Fifty yards down the street was a hardware store with a van parked beside it. I sat down between the van and the building to wait. It was completely dark by then so I was difficult to see.

  I was massaging my sore wrists six minutes later when a police cruiser drove by. The officer slowed to a crawl passing the convenience store, then turned right and went up the street into the subdivision I had walked out of a few minutes earlier.

  CHAPTER SIX TEEN

  When Jake Grafton rolled up, I walked briskly to his car. As we left the area we passed another cop on the way in. I motormouthed, told Grafton everything I could think of about the death of the traffic cop and the two men I killed. When I ran down, he asked for the cell phone I had taken from the car. I passed it over and he pocketed it.

  “They must have had a beacon in the car you were driving,” he mused. “When you went to the airport, they didn’t have enough people to keep you under constant observation. They must have been pulling in people while we put Dorsey on the plane.”

  “If they had made you,” I remarked, “they would have left me dead beside that cop and be on their way to the beach house.”

  “Or my apartment in Rosslyn,” Grafton muttered darkly.

  I could tell by the way he gripped the wheel that he was really pissed. Which made me feel better. Honestly. I knew Jake Grafton. He had been the military’s go-to guy for a lot of years. I had seen him in action a couple of times myself, and let me tell you, he was the very first man I’d pick when we were choosing sides for anything, be it softball, hand grenades, or World War III.

  I must have fallen asleep—in fact, I was exhausted—because I awoke with a start when the car stopped. We were sitting in front of his beach house.

  “I want you to go inside and get something to eat, then get some
sleep. I’ll keep an eye on things tonight.”

  I opened the car door and lifted a leg out. It took effort. I was stiff and sore. “Aren’t you coming in?”

  “In a little while. I have some telephone calls to make.”

  He drove off while I climbed the steps.

  Callie Grafton and Kelly Erlanger looked shocked when they saw me. They were alone in the house—the admiral had dropped his mother at the nursing home where she resided on his way to the airport with Dorsey. Tonight Callie made me a bowl of soup and a sandwich while I took a shower. When I undressed, glass pebbles cascaded onto the floor.

  Looking in the mirror, I had to admit, I was a sight. I had two red, swollen, inflamed welts on my face where that guy had smacked me with his pistol. The one along my jaw had bled some. My hands, face, and neck were scratched in dozens of places from flying glass. I also raked some tiny glass fragments from my hair. No wonder I had itched.

  Erlanger sat beside me while I ate. Callie hovered nearby. I summarized my adventures, omitting the parts I didn’t even want to think about.

  The admiral returned later and took the downstairs couch. He had an old 1911 Colt, which he put on the floor by the couch. The MP-5 was gone—it was in the trunk of the car I had abandoned on the freeway. I inherited the little .38 Dorsey had used to defend her castle. I made sure it was loaded and put it in my pocket. I was getting stiffer by the minute and had to work to climb the stairs to the guest room.

  Erlanger was already in the bed with the lights out.

  I undressed and crawled between the sheets. She snuggled right up to me. She was warm, smelled good, and settled right in with her head on my shoulder.

  I thought the romantic side of our relationship could use some work, but I was too tired that evening. That must have been the last thought I had before I dropped off to sleep.

  When I awoke the next morning the sky was gray. Kelly was still asleep, curled up against me, so I started to get out of bed. She wrapped her arms around me and gave me a big hug, then let me go.

  I wasn’t sure what it all meant. Maybe we were working up to something, or maybe I was a substitute for the teddy bear she had left at home.

  Jake Grafton already had coffee made when I came downstairs. He was sitting at the kitchen table, his Colt lying beside his coffee cup, watching a cable news show.

  “You’re making quite a splash in law enforcement circles,” he said, eyeing me to gauge my reaction. “Somehow you’re the bad guy who killed all those folks at the safe house, murdered those guys at Willie Varner’s, and, I have no doubt, killed that cop and those two other guys last night.”

  What a way to start a morning! “Well, I figured that,” I admitted. “Death row, here I come. I’m going to have to get a hobby, something I can do in a small room.” At least the coffee was hot. “Sarah Houston tell you all that?”

  He nodded. “She was full of information. One of the tidbits I thought would interest you is the fact that Mikhail Goncharov may still be alive.”

  I decided the coffee needed milk and got some from the refrigerator. Then I sat down across the table from him.

  “The safe house is in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. The county sheriff passed a set of prints to the FBI that they have been unable to identify,” he continued. “The powers that be haven’t made the connection between these prints and the people at the CIA safe house, but Sarah thought it curious. The prints of every person the CIA had there last Monday were on file. Goncharov’s prints weren’t, of course, because he has never been fingerprinted by any American agency.”

  “Where is this person?”

  “You’ll need to see the sheriff.”

  “Have they put me in the crime computer?”

  “Yes. On a national security warrant, arrest and hold. No charges listed.”

  “Terrific.” I thought about that for a moment, then said, “If it is Goncharov, he only speaks Russian.”

  “Take Erlanger with you.”

  We discussed it. He agreed to rent a car this morning for me so it wouldn’t appear in my name if anyone ran a computer check at the car rental companies.

  “What about the phone number on that cell phone I gave you last night?”

  “Belongs to a Dell Royston.”

  I wasn’t as stiff this morning as I was last night, but I still felt as if I had been run over by something big. I worked on the soreness in my shoulders as I tried to recall where I had heard Royston’s name.

  “Wasn’t he some big weenie at the White House?”

  Grafton nodded a fraction of a millimeter. “He was chief of staff,” he said. “Left three months ago. He’s running the president’s reelection campaign, I think.”

  “He was the asshole I shouted at on the telephone last night?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Those numbers I gave you from those other two phones?”

  “Don’t think you’d recognize the names. Sarah is working them.”

  “So what’s going down?”

  Grafton got up and went to the window. He looked out, then turned to face me and leaned against the sink. “Something was in those files. Six of the seven suitcases may be ashes, yet Goncharov may remember something.”

  “Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m not quite following you.”

  “Something that connects someone at the White House with the KGB or the foreign intelligence service.”

  I stared. “Naw.”

  “Someone really high up in government,” Jake Grafton said, tugging at his nose. “Someone with the power to make things happen.”

  “Erlanger translated some of the stuff in the intact suitcase for me,” I told him. “The files she saw have code names for every agent, every contact. The code names are rarely identified, and they are always in capital letters, BLUE, FOREST, MAX, something like that.”

  “Callie translated several files for me last night,” he replied. “I doubt that any of these files on domestic dirty tricks by the KGB are what we are after. The file we want would have been a First Chief Directorate file, foreign intelligence. If we had the file, even with code names, if we knew the time and place well enough, we could make a shrewd guess who the agent might be.”

  He threw up his hands. “But we don’t have the file. I want you to find Goncharov, talk to him, see what he knows. There may have been a foreign intelligence file that piqued his interest.”

  “Kelly said he hasn’t had access to KGB files since he retired, like four years ago,” I objected. “This administration wasn’t in office when he made his notes.”

  Grafton shrugged.

  “What should I do with him when I find him?”

  “Talk to him, then call me. I may have an epiphany or two by then.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I don’t know why, but that word “sir” often slips out when I am talking to Grafton. My mind was elsewhere. The president of the United States. Holy … ! I hadn’t fallen in a hole, I’d fallen in the Grand Canyon.

  I poured a cup of coffee for Kelly and took it upstairs. I kissed her cheek, and she rolled over and kissed me back. When she smelled the coffee her eyes popped open.

  “We’re going to West Virginia this morning,” I told her as she sipped. “Mikhail Goncharov may be alive.”

  Her eyes widened and she stared at me.

  “I’ll need you to translate.”

  “Alive? How could that be?”

  “I don’t know. The county sheriff sent an unidentified person’s prints to the FBI. The prints may be from Goncharov. We’re going to see if we can beat the crowd, interview him first.”

  “How did you learn about this?” she said, and had another sip of coffee.

  “Jake Grafton knows people.” I wasn’t about to tell her about Zelda Hudson/Sarah Houston, who was supposed to be in prison. “They tell him things.”

  “Let’s hope his friends are right,” she said. She put the coffee cup on the bedside table and moved my hand under her pajama top.r />
  When we got downstairs Callie was fixing breakfast while watching Good Morning America, which was doing a segment on the political convention that was starting a week from Monday in New York. The president had the nomination sewed up, of course, but had yet to name his vice-presidential running mate. The current VP had decided for health reasons not to run again. The reporters had an inside tip, they said, that the VP nominee would be a woman.

  By the time Callie and Kelly had had their breakfast, the admiral was back with the rental car. He tossed me the keys, and Kelly and I were soon on our way. Just to be on the safe side, he passed me the Colt .45.

  Jake Grafton stood on the porch of the beach house and watched Tommy Carmellini and Kelly Erlanger disappear around the corner onto the highway. He went back into the house and climbed the stairs. Carmellini’s and Erlanger’s bags, such as they were, were still in the guest room. He searched everything in both bags, then spent an hour going through the room and adjoining bath.

  When he finished he found Callie—she was on the screened-in porch reading files—and asked her to accompany him.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “The library. I need something to read.”

  The first place I stopped was a bank in suburban Virginia. I left Erlanger in the car. Even though we made love that morning, I took the ignition key with me—maybe I’m not as good in bed as I hope I am. Inside, I visited a safe deposit box I kept at that bank under another name. I won’t bore you with details, but back when I was in the burglary business, I opened a couple boxes in the metro area under fake names and kept IDs and cash in them, just in case. We live in interesting times. I also had boxes in Los Angeles and New York, but that’s another story.

  When I walked out of the bank, my new name was Zack Robert Winston Jr., and I had a driver’s license and a couple credit cards to prove it. The credit cards were no good, but they looked nice. I also had three thousand in cash in my pocket.

  I told Kelly about my new name. She looked at me sort of funny. “Who are you, anyway?”

  “A civil servant, the same as you.”