Liars & Thieves: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  “Quiet, too. Played hell with my back.”

  He inspected the wound. “Just a gouge. Bleeding some.”

  “He got me facing one way, then tried to pop me in the back. Would have done better if he had been right side up.”

  We were outside on the deck looking at the ocean when a police vehicle, a Jeep Cherokee, drove up. The officer rolled down his window. “You people aren’t supposed to be in that house. Didn’t you see the sign?”

  Truly, I hadn’t. Would have ignored it if I had, but I didn’t tell him that.

  “Come on,” the officer said. “That building is condemned. Get down out of there before it collapses with you in it.”

  I jumped down facing him so he wouldn’t see the blood on my shirt or the pistol tucked into the small of my back. Grafton climbed down. When we were both on the sand the officer said, “Don’t let me catch you in there again.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jake Grafton said.

  Satisfied we were properly chastised, the officer drove on along the beach.

  We walked back to the Graftons’, where the admiral worked on my back with iodine and Band-Aids. He used at least a dozen. When he had me fixed up, he went to call some friends about the corpse. After he hung up, he told me they would come get the dead man tonight after dark.

  On that happy note we sat down on his porch to drink a beer even though it was only six in the morning. A bit later Callie called Grafton from three blocks away. He told her the coast was clear. The trooper had been shot twice, but he was on IVs and stable, Callie said. She told the people at the hospital she didn’t know him, didn’t know who shot him or where. A policeman came by the hospital and got her name, said he would call her later.

  “We aren’t doing so good in this war,” I remarked to the admiral.

  He didn’t deny it. He was always like that—upbeat, optimistic, bucking up the troops.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  We rolled into New York through the Lincoln Tunnel. With Sarah Houston, Willie Varner, and Joe Billy Dunn in the van, it had been a hell of a trip. Willie sat in the back telling Tommy Carmellini stories while he sipped beer. Houston was in the passenger seat beside me. She didn’t have much to say while Willie ran his mouth, but from time to time she gave me an appraising glance.

  Most of Willie’s tales were lies—for reasons too obvious to mention, I had long ago learned that the less said to people about my business the better. Didn’t matter to Willie. He told what he knew, what he suspected, and downright bald-faced lies, all with the same air of omniscient authority. To hear him tell it I was the worst desperado since Willie Sutton. There wasn’t a safe made that I couldn’t crack, a wall I couldn’t climb, a man alive I couldn’t con.

  Joe Billy egged him on, all the way across Delaware and New Jersey. Approaching New York I turned on the radio, found a jazz station, and cranked the volume up. Even then I could hear Willie talking loudly to Dunn, telling him whatever lies popped into his crooked head.

  The tunnel was a relief. I snapped the radio off and told the guys in back to shut up. Amazingly, they did. Wanted to see New York, I guess.

  The streets and avenues were packed, as usual. What all these millions of people do to make a living is one of the unsolved mysteries of the modern age, but make a living they do. There they were, scurrying along the sidewalks and crosswalks like a horde of ants or a biblical plague of locusts while trucks, taxis, and limos jammed the streets, honking, creeping, oozing along like thick mud flowing down a storm drain.

  We circled the New York Hilton once, looking for Secret Service agents and vehicles. True, the president wasn’t supposed to stay at this hotel, and the convention was being held at the Javits Center, but they just might be in there today anyway, which would complicate our lives. Didn’t see anything or anyone out of the ordinary, though.

  We dropped Sarah at the corner near the front of the joint. She could do her thing anyplace that had a telephone line, but the Hilton had a high-speed cable Internet connection, so why not?

  She marched away in her high heels and New York business suit, her laptop case dangling from a strap over her shoulder, pulling her overnight bag on its little wheels. With her head erect and hair stirring in the breeze, I had to admit, she was a fine-looking hunk of woman. Little twisted upstairs, but I didn’t regard that as a disqualifying disability, not in this day and age. And who was I to talk?

  What I found fascinating was the way her hips swayed with—

  The guy behind me beeped; the light had changed. Joe Billy—now in the passenger seat—gave him the finger, and we circled the block again. In that traffic, each circuit took about twelve minutes.

  We were halfway into the next one when my cell phone rang. “I’m in,” she said. That meant she had checked into her room and been shown upstairs. She was now on-line and had hacked into the Hilton’s central computer. That wasn’t as big a feat as you might imagine, since she had explored the security firewalls at her leisure at her office at the NSA facility at Fort Meade. Indeed, yesterday she had twice crashed the hotel’s video security system for ten seconds at a time. “And it’s down.” Down again, she meant, and couldn’t be resurrected until she fixed it.

  “Okay.” I hung up, put the phone in my shirt pocket.

  Actually, circling the hotel was sort of dumb. I headed up the avenue toward Central Park. We were rolling through the park when the telephone rang again.

  “They’ve called a service company. I’ve just called the company back and canceled the call. Give them about a half hour before you arrive.”

  “Okay.”

  I returned the telephone to my pocket and told the guys, “We’re a go.”

  Exactly thirty-two minutes later we rolled into the hotel’s service entrance and parked beside two trucks off-loading supplies—one food, one liquor. At the control console in back, Willie began the final check on our bugs. Joe Billy and I grabbed our tools and got out, locking the van behind us.

  “Security service company,” I told the guard. “We got an urgent call a little while ago and zipped on over.”

  “Wow! That was fast. They just had me put you guys on the list fifteen minutes ago.”

  “We were on a job just down the street. This shouldn’t take long. Service is our business.” That motto was embroidered on our shirts, just below the company name. I had gotten the shirts done yesterday at a custom shirt shop in suburban Washington.

  “I’ve heard that shit before,” the guard said wearily as he passed us the clipboard to sign our names on. I signed as Andy Jackson Jr., and Joe Billy signed as Henry Clay. The guard glanced at the board, handed us visitors’ passes to clip to our shirt pockets, and gave us directions to the security center.

  It was in a windowless room deep within the bowels of the hotel. The two uniformed guards on duty were pleased to see us, especially the woman, who looked Joe Billy over with interest. She was short and dumpy and talked with a Brooklyn accent as she explained how the video feeds had crapped out all at once. Computer still seemed to be working properly, though.

  He nodded sagely and began checking the cables leading to the machines and the connections. I scrutinized the bank of monitors, checked all the connections, made sure everything was getting power. This was all for show, of course. It helped that Joe Billy had actually taken a course in video security systems—completed it just a week ago, as a matter of fact. He tossed off enough phrases to convince the guards that we were indeed knowledgeable, if they had any doubts.

  He played with the computer while the guards and I watched. Shut it down, rebooted it, the whole drill. The female guard got as close to him as she dared. Finally he said, “It’s gotta be a problem in the camera circuit. Will you check, Junior?” I was Junior. The embroidered name on my shirt said so.

  On my way out of the room I whispered to the girl, “He’s single.” I went back to the truck for a bag full of bugs.

  “They’re ready to go,” Willie said. “How’s ever’thing going?
”

  “Piece of cake.” Indeed, the job was routine. I bugged four hotels in Europe earlier that spring using just this method, although with different personnel.

  “By the way,” I added, “I didn’t appreciate you making me the topic of conversation all the way up from Washington.”

  “Sarah likes you. She sopped up ever’ word.”

  “Don’t blow smoke. You were talking to Dunn. The other day I stuck a pistol in his face and threatened to shoot it off. All those lies you told will make him think I’m some kinda criminal.”

  “You worry too much about what other people think. The people who know you like I do are damn glad to have you around.”

  “Do me a favor, Willy. Don’t talk about me to anybody.”

  “Even Sarah?”

  “She doesn’t like me either.”

  “Like hell! She was all ears. Sometimes, boy, I think you’re dumber than a box of rocks.”

  I made a rude noise, hoisted the bag of bugs, and locked the vehicle door behind me. Yeah, right. Sarah Houston—the woman who once told me I was a farm animal.

  Keeping your mouth shut is a lost art. I used to think Willy knew how to do it. His injuries had affected his brain. Wouldn’t surprise me if he announced he was marrying his hospital nurse.

  I started at the security office and began checking security cameras. They were all fine, of course, but I set up a stepladder, climbed it, and gave the installation the once-over, checking the voltage in, the coaxial cable, and so forth. Two minutes sufficed for each camera. All these cameras sent their video by coaxial cable to the security center. The new units being installed in many commercial buildings broadcast the video, which made the problem of tapping them ridiculously simple. One merely moved a receiver within range and tuned in. To tap a hardwired video feed, one merely placed a collar with a transmitting device around the coaxial cable, and it broadcast the signal. As long as our receiver—which was in our borrowed FBI van—remained within range, we could see what each camera saw. I didn’t place these collars on every camera, just the ones in the public areas of the hotel.

  After I had gotten the cameras I wanted in the lobby and halls of the meeting areas, I was ready to ride up to the penthouse level, where Dell Royston had a suite reserved. I called Joe Billy on his cell phone and asked him to send a guard to key the elevator for me. Of course he sent the girl. She helped me get the stepladder onto the service elevator and used her passkey to enable it, then dashed back to the office. Apparently Joe Billy knew enough to flirt with her to keep her away from me, because I didn’t want an audience. I’ve worked with audiences before, but you have to devise a reason to go where you aren’t supposed to, and getting the bugs in place takes longer.

  I collared the two video cameras in the corridor of the penthouse floor. I had a magnetic card in my pocket that would open any room door in the hotel. We had an encoder in our lock shop, and I had brought it along and Sarah had supplied the codes—but I didn’t have to use it because the maid was cleaning the suite I wanted. The door was standing open. I marched in, set up my stepladder, and began placing the bugs.

  The maid was Puerto Rican, and I happen to be fluent in Spanish—which I learned for one of my very first CIA assignments—so we chattered away while I worked. I had my audience after all.

  She was a genuinely nice young woman, in her early twenties, and had been in New York for only six months. Her name was Isabel. She told me her life story, about the boy waiting in San Juan, about her hopes and dreams for the future, while I put bugs in light fixtures and on top of furniture and behind pictures.

  These bugs were battery operated and contained transmitters. To conserve battery power and prevent them from being detected by conventional sweep gear, they could be turned on and off via radio. Some of them were so tiny they were mounted on the head of a straight pin. I had them threaded through the cloth of my shirt pocket and pinned them in the top of the window drapes, near a hook that held the drape to the curtain rod.

  At one point Isabel asked what I was doing. I told her that I was placing the new high-tech insect repellers. I showed her a bug, one enclosed in a four-inch-square sheet of clear plastic. I placed it on top of a dresser and pressed it down so that it wouldn’t move, and it became almost invisible in ordinary light. I pressed another into place behind the headboard of the bed while Isabelle told me all about the cockroaches of San Juan, of which she, like all natives, was justly proud.

  After I had placed at least six bugs in each of the rooms of the suite, including two in each bath, I asked her to open the door to the adjoining suites on either side so I could also do them. No problem.

  She stuck right with me, chattering away in Spanish. I asked about the upcoming convention. The hotel would be full, she told me, completely full.

  “What do you think of a woman as vice president?” I asked, pretending I was Jack Yocke getting some deep background.

  “I have met her, you know,” Isabel solemly informed me. “Zooey. She shook my hand.” She held up her right hand so I could see it. Just looking, you wouldn’t know that it had touched the anointed one. “It was in this hotel, just three months ago. I think she will be vice-president, and then the next president.”

  “Would you vote for her?”

  “Oh, yes. She is very brave. She lights up the room. She will make life better for women everywhere.” Isabel chattered on as I placed the bugs.

  When I finished ten minutes later she was still talking politics. She pressed me for a promise to vote for Zooey. I refused, which made her adamant. Smiling, wishing I hadn’t brought up the subject, I thanked her, wished her luck, and made my escape.

  As I waited for the service elevator I called Sarah on my cell phone. “All done,” I reported.

  “Joe Billy has a pass for the truck.”

  “Any trouble?”

  “No. The management is worried about another failure next week. He told them we couldn’t come back next week if we were needed without a parking garage pass, so they gave him one.”

  “Terrific.” Getting a place to park the van during the convention had been one of our highest priorities. I was worried that we would have to steal a pass or counterfeit one, since the City Hall office where street parking passes were issued was reputed to be hopelessly inundated with requests this late in the game.

  “Guess who has a reservation at this hotel starting tomorrow?” Sarah said.

  “Your ex.”

  “I don’t have an ex, Carmellini. I’m still a virgin. How about Dorsey O’Shea?”

  The virgin fastball went zipping by and I never saw it. Dorsey? My Dorsey? Did the yacht sink? “You sure?” I asked, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “She must have heard you were going to be in town and couldn’t stay away.”

  “Turn on the system,” I said mechanically and slapped the phone shut.

  Dorsey O’Shea. Really!

  What in the world is going on, anyway?

  Willie Varner, Joe Billy Dunn, and I made our escape from the Hilton in the borrowed FBI van. We left Sarah Houston there to wallow in the lap of luxury for a whole night on her own dime. She had said that she was going to get a facial and massage in the spa. Whatever.

  Joe Billy was driving. I had him drop me at the New York Public Library on Fifth. He and Willie wanted to find a cold beer, but I had too much on my mind.

  I climbed the steps between the lions and stopped at the information desk. An hour later I was seated in a cubicle on the second floor with a stack of books in front of me. “Are you a student?” asked the lady who delivered the books.

  “Oh, yes,” I lied. “I’m working on my master’s.”

  “I thought so,” she said with the authority of one who knows everything, and wheeled her cart away.

  The books were all on the California antiwar movement in the late sixties, early seventies. That seemed a good place to start.

  I cut to the chase. I flipped to the back of each
book and scanned the indexes for familiar names. Since you’re smarter than I am, you probably know the names I was looking for.

  I found Zooey Sonnenberg in the first book I tried, a serious, poorly written tome published by an academic press somewhere. I flipped to the pages where her name appeared and read them carefully. She had made a splash in the antiwar movement, that was certain. Passionate and articulate, the daughter of a rich industrialist, she was a natural leader. She did outrageous things, got arrested once, twice, three times … no, five times, according to this author, picked targets for demonstrations, convinced everyone to follow her lead. She even demonstrated against her father’s company, accused them of war crimes. That got a lot of press.

  The fifth book in the pile went further into detail, had extensive quotes from manifestos she had written. She was in all the other books I looked at, from a few paragraphs to a chapter or two. I merely scanned the information.

  All in all, looking at it from the vantage point of thirty-plus years, it didn’t seem very earth-shattering. She had believed in a cause and fought for it. So? Isn’t that what America is all about?

  Then I found another name I was looking for, one Michael O’Shea. Yep, he was there, helping write those manifestos. I even found him in one of the photos standing beside Zooey, who was skinnier and had more hair then than she did now. She wore it long and frizzy in those days and sported a set of granny glasses.

  O’Shea was tall, skinny, and intense. Gawky. Had a scraggly mustache and hair down to his shoulders. He looked like your average hippie … until you looked at the eyes. That was a very smart guy. I wondered what he would have done with his life if he had lived. Sometimes life isn’t fair.

  Just for the heck of it I tore the photo from the book, folded it, and put it in my shirt pocket.

  O’Shea’s wife, the bootlegger’s granddaughter, wasn’t mentioned. Not in the index of any book I examined. Maybe she was there, but she wasn’t famous and didn’t write manifestos or big checks or do outrageous things, and she died soon afterward.