Liars & Thieves: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  A plastic door key was required to activate the elevator. My master key worked like a charm. The door closed and I ascended.

  I met one matron on the penthouse level. She was dolled up, apparently heading for dinner. This being New York, she avoided eye contact with me. After all, we hadn’t been introduced.

  I knocked on the car dealer’s room door. Rapped several times, then used the master key.

  The place was empty. I scrambled around collecting bugs, which I tossed in an attaché case I had brought along for that purpose, and was finished in ninety-five seconds flat. Standing in front of the door, I called Willie. Who knew who would be standing out there when I opened this door? Years ago Willie had met the guest as he opened the door of a room he had just robbed—that twist of fate sent him up the river. He was supposed to call me if anyone showed up in the hallway, but I wasn’t willing to run on faith, not with him half potted.

  “Anyone out there?” I asked when he answered.

  “Hey, dude, I’ll call you.”

  “Right.”

  I took a squint through the security glass anyway, saw no one, and opened the door. Corridor was empty. Walked to the adjoining suite and repeated the procedure.

  When I had all the bugs, I used the phone by the wet bar in the third suite to dial Royston’s suite. No answer. I dialed each of the other two in turn. The telephone rang in each suite until the hotel’s automatic message system picked up.

  Without further ado I marched down the hall and proceeded to scatter the bugs through the three suites in places the maid and guests were unlikely to discover them. About the only rule was to avoid placing them by a television or radio speaker or near a water faucet or toilet. It didn’t really matter where in a particular room the tiny microphones and transmitters were—the computer would synchronize the audio if two or more bugs picked up the same conversation. The operator could filter out extraneous noise picked up by the bugs or be selective in which bugs he wanted to monitor. Unless we left them on continuously, the batteries in each unit would last about ten days, more than enough for our purposes. Our ability to turn the units on and off remotely made them impossible to sweep with conventional gear unless they were transmitting.

  Standing in front of the elevator twelve and a half minutes after I arrived on the floor, I called Sarah.

  “I’m on the red level. The bugs are in place. I have to ride the elevator back to the level above the lobby to catch a regular one. Give me one minute, then turn on the cameras on this level. Then call Dorsey’s room. See if she’s there.”

  “What will I say if she answers?”

  “Ask her to confirm her dinner reservation. I’ll call you from downstairs.”

  The elevator arrived and I stepped aboard for the trip down. Unfortunately Willie couldn’t monitor the surveillance camera on that floor, since I hadn’t put a tap on the coaxial cable. No time to do it now, even if I had another cable tap, and I didn’t.

  I bailed out on the so-called balcony level, which had its own lobby with meeting rooms leading off in various directions. My choice of floors was not a good one. This lobby was jammed with people, too, although they appeared somewhat more sober and subdued than the crowd around the bar on the floor below. Apparently many of the convention committees were meeting here, wrestling with things like credentials, the platform, and so forth.

  I stood by some sort of artificial potted plant that some of the conventioneers had watered with beer and called Sarah one more time.

  “She doesn’t answer her phone. Perhaps she’s in the shower.”

  “Did you do the cameras on twelve?”

  “No. I’ve lost my Internet connection. Do you want to wait?”

  “No.”

  Without a lookout on the floor, I was playing Russian roulette darting in and out of Dorsey’s suite. The sooner I was out of this building, the better.

  I took a regular elevator to twelve and marched along the hall to Dorsey’s room. Rapped three times loudly. No answer.

  “Room service,” I called in what I judged to be the proper volume.

  When I received no answer I took a deep breath and used the master key.

  The door opened, and I surveyed the room before I entered. Indeed, Dorsey had popped for a small suite, with a sitting room with wet bar, a bedroom with a king-sized bed, and a bath off the small hallway leading between them.

  I stepped in, pulled the door shut, and stood poised, ready for anything. When nothing happened, I did the tour. The place was empty.

  Wasting no time, I put a bug behind the head of Dorsey’s bed and one under the counter of the wet bar. I had to short Royston two bugs to have these for Dorsey. He would have felt slighted if he knew, but I hoped he never would.

  I had just placed the bug under the bar when someone knocked on the door. “Maid!”

  Before I could get to it the door clicked, then opened.

  Thank heavens it wasn’t Isabel from Puerto Rico. “Oh,” she said. “So sorry. Turndown service.”

  “I’m just leaving, thank you,” I said, and left carrying the attaché case.

  In the hallway I stole a chocolate chip cookie from her cart and pocketed it for later. We thieves have no morals.

  A couple was waiting by the elevator. I joined them, then followed them into the elevator for the trip down.

  “Where are you from?” the lady asked. She was in her sixties, a dried-up wizened thing wearing a choker of plastic pearls.

  “California, originally.” See, I can tell the truth on occasion.

  “We’re from Arkansas. My husband is a Southern Baptist minister.”

  He beamed at me. I smiled at him.

  “What religion are you, young man?” she asked seriously.

  The tone of her voice must have irritated me a little. As the door opened at the main lobby, I said, “I’m a nudist,” and made my escape.

  “A Buddhist!” she exclaimed. Behind me I heard her ask her husband, the Southern Baptist, “Did he say he was a Buddhist?”

  Scanning for Dorsey, walking confidently, assuredly, I headed for the side entrance where I had entered the building. I was five feet from the door and a clean getaway when who should come through it but Dorsey O’Shea! Through a side door, no less! What was the world coming to?

  “Tommy Carmellini! Of all people! My God, what are you doing here?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  A man followed Dorsey through the door. He was maybe mid-thirties, with collar-length blow-dried hair and wearing an expensive silk suit cut in the Italian style.

  I ignored her question and exclaimed, “I thought you were yachting in the Med!”

  “It didn’t work out, so I came home.”

  “I see.” I turned toward the man. “And you are?”

  “Just a friend,” Dorsey stated firmly. She turned to him. “Carlo, I’m so sorry, but I need to talk to Tommy. Perhaps later. Would that be okay?”

  Carlo was no fool. When you hang with rich girls you must get used to being brushed off when a better deal arrives unexpectedly. “Of course, darling. Call me.” He squeezed her hand and was out the door before I could blink twice.

  “One would think he did exits professionally,” I observed as Dorsey led me across the lobby to an empty couch far removed from the bar and piano player.

  She sat down as close to me as she could get—thigh to thigh—took my hand, and looked me straight in the eyes. “What are you doing here, Tommy?”

  I looked straight back into her deep brown orbs and said, “They’re having a political convention in New York in the age of terror to make a statement to the world. The feds have pulled in security people from all over.” Notice that I didn’t say that I was one of the security people, I merely implied it. For a spur-of-the-moment falsehood, I thought this was one of my better efforts.

  “But what about—?”

  “Over. Finished. Highly classified and buried.”

  “Oh.” She examined my hand as if seeing it fo
r the first time, then a knee, then the carpet. “Oh, my.”

  “These things happen.”

  “Then I’ll never be questioned about that man?”

  “I doubt it, but really, I wouldn’t know. If you are, I suspect that you’ll have to sign a secrecy agreement.”

  “I see. Very convenient for me.”

  “Yes. Isn’t it?”

  “Of course, it was strictly self-defense. You and that other woman were witnesses, and he was armed. After all, he had just broken into the house to do God knows what. I didn’t do anything illegal. And I would be delighted to tell anyone about it.”

  “As I said, the whole thing is classified. I suggest you not mention it to anyone or, indeed, you will be visited by the FBI.”

  “I certainly don’t need to tell anyone anything. That was one of those episodes best forgotten.”

  “You got that right.”

  “Difficult to forget, though.”

  This was my cue. She was still holding my hand, so I covered hers with my free hand and squeezed gently. “Have you had dinner?”

  “Why, no. Have you?”

  “I was just on my way. This place is packed. There’s no way we will get into one of these hotel restaurants without reservations.”

  “I have a reservation.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m sure they held it. It’s at Gallagher’s on West Fifty-second.” I had heard of it. Gallagher’s was a classy beanery where the political honchos liked to hang out. Getting a table at this hour was probably impossible unless you knew the maître d’ or were willing to slip him two or three photos of Jackson. “Would you like to eat there?” she continued. “Or perhaps someplace more intimate?”

  Uh-oh. That was an invitation if ever I heard one.

  She made the decision for us, as I knew she would. “I know a little neighborhood place in the Eighties that shouldn’t be crowded,” she said. “Not too many people know of it, but the food is delicious and we can visit and talk. Let’s go there.”

  Looked as if I was going to be the main course for Dorsey this evening. Too bad for Carlo.

  “So,” I said as we walked out the front entrance of the hotel, “why are you in New York?”

  “Haven’t you heard? The convention is going to nominate a woman for the vice presidency.”

  “I didn’t know you cared about politics.”

  “Tommy, I like to be where the action is, and this week that’s New York. Can’t you feel the electricity in the air? Nothing will ever be the same. No woman who could afford to be here would dare miss this.”

  That evening Callie Grafton joined her husband on the porch of their beach house after dinner. Jake put down the sectional aeronautical charts he had been annotating and slipped his pencil into his pocket. Their guest, Mikhail Goncharov, had gone upstairs to lie down. He and Callie had been talking all afternoon.

  “He is a very brave man,” Callie said forcefully.

  “I suspect so,” Jake murmured.

  “He was a Communist and got into the KGB through his uncle, who was a bigwig there. A major general, I think he said. He’d worked in the Fifth Directorate for eight years when he was picked for the archivist job. He didn’t get along with his boss, who campaigned hard to get rid of him. I think by that time he was disillusioned with the KGB and the Communists, but if he resigned from the organization he would have been unable to get other work.”

  “And he would have been a security risk.”

  “Yes. He was stuck and knew it. So he made the best of the archivist assignment. It was actually a very low-pressure, low-visibility job. He said that in effect he was merely the head clerk, overseeing the typists who transcribed handwritten notes, overseeing the clerks who logged the files in and out, preparing the department’s budget, supervising the guards who were on duty twenty-four hours a day, and so forth. The amazing thing is that the files for all the directorates were kept in his archives—all of them—for security purposes. Regulations forbid anyone, even the top people, from keeping files in their private safes.”

  “Why did he begin making notes?”

  “Disillusionment, he says. He doesn’t want to talk of that decision, but it is the key to his personality. He saw the reports and reviewed the files for completeness for every single activity the KGB engaged in—everything—from internal security to bugging foreign embassies in Moscow and overseas, running spy rings and counterintelligence operations, the campaigns against the dissidents, the show trials, covering up scandals among the party elite, all of it. And he had time to review the old files in the archives, the files from Lenin’s and Stalin’s time. Those files were sometimes incomplete, he says. In the past highly sensitive material was removed from the files. The example he gave me was of the arrest record of Stalin when he was a young man. The file was there because it was numbered and had to be accounted for, but the folder was empty.”

  “You like Goncharov, don’t you?”

  “I admire him, yes. The pressure he put himself under by betraying the state! Living with that day in and day out for all those years, living with the constant fear of being found out. He doesn’t say so, but I think they would have executed him if they had learned what he was doing.”

  “I have no doubt they would have,” Jake agreed.

  “His wife is now dead because of what he did.”

  “She must have known what he was doing. At some point all that paper accumulating in their small apartment had to be explained.”

  “Oh, she knew, all right. And shared his conviction that he was doing the right thing. Still, the guilt is hard to bear.” Callie fell silent, thinking about the afternoon’s conversations.

  Finally she passed her hand over her face, then said, “I asked him the questions you suggested. He can’t remember anything on any of those people.”

  Jake studied his toes. “Can’t or won’t?” he prompted.

  “I believe he can’t. He has nothing to hide. He risked his life and his wife’s life for all those years to make notes on the files and threw their fate to the wind to bring the information to the West.”

  Jake Grafton nodded.

  “But Jake, if he can’t remember, perhaps those files don’t exist. Perhaps they never existed.”

  “The copies are being reviewed. Quickly read, not analyzed. We’ll know more in a day or two. Perhaps three.”

  “Who knew the files had been copied?”

  “MI-5, of course, and probably a few senior people in the CIA. But no one else. British intelligence had secretly copied the files without permission, and the people who knew it didn’t want that fact leaking back to Goncharov. They wanted his cooperation.”

  “So whoever went after him thought the files had not been copied ?”

  “Apparently.”

  “But I don’t understand. If he can’t remember, perhaps the files they thought were there never existed at all.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Then why would any of those people want him dead and nonexistent files destroyed?”

  “That’s the nub of it.”

  They talked on, and even went on to other subjects, but after a while Callie came back to this one. “If it had been your decision and Goncharov refused to allow the files to be copied, would you have betrayed his trust and copied them against his wishes?”

  “In a heartbeat,” Jake said. “When Kelly Erlanger said he had been in Britain a week and a few days in America and there was only one copy of the files, his, I knew that couldn’t be true. No competent, responsible intelligence officer would take the chance that the most precious intelligence treasure of modern times might be lost in a plane crash or house fire. Not one. Those files were duplicated the instant they were out of his sight.”

  “So who ordered the files destroyed and Goncharov murdered ?”

  “Someone who isn’t an intelligence officer.”

  Dorsey O’Shea was as forthcoming about her reasons for being in New York as I had been. Baldly, she was evasive, but unli
ke me, she didn’t have the classified information laws to hide behind, not that she needed them. Over white wine at the restaurant on the Upper West Side, she told me that she and the yacht dude hadn’t hit it off, so she decided to come home.

  “I felt like a fugitive,” she said earnestly, leaning forward to give me a good view of her ample cleavage. “I wanted to come home so if anyone wanted to question me, they could see that I had nothing to hide.” The irony of that remark was not lost on me.

  “Been home yet?”

  “To Maryland? Not yet. I thought I’d spend a few days in New York and do some shopping, see some friends. The political theater is just a bonus. Tommy, I need something to take my mind off that—.” She made a gesture.

  Well, that certainly was plausible. Shopping and socializing was all Dorsey had ever done since she left college—without a degree, I might add. The educators had gotten stuffy about the difference between required courses and electives, according to her, so she packed her checkbook and told them good-bye. After all, people who know things can usually be hired by the hour. I suspected there was a young male involved in Dorsey’s college adventure, but I had never pressed her on it.

  Inevitably our conversation returned to the convention. “What do you think of the chances of having a woman vice-presidental candidate?”

  “The country is ready,” she said matter-of-factly. “I think it will happen this week. I hope it does. I meant it when I said the moment is historic. If it happens, life will be different for every woman in America.”

  I wasn’t about to argue that. “Think Zooey has a chance to be picked ?”

  “God, that would be awesome! She’s presidential timber. But whether the president has the guts to make the choice, I don’t know.”

  “You’ve given a lot of money to the president’s campaign,” I remarked, “so why don’t you tell Dell Royston what you think? He has to listen to big contributors.” Actually I didn’t know that she’d ever given a politician a dime, but I felt that this shot in the dark was likely to hit something.