Liars & Thieves: A Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  I wondered if Joe Billy Dunn was Stu Vine. Probably should have asked him that, but I didn’t think of it. Don’t guess it really mattered.

  A wino staggered over. “Hey man, can you spare a dollar?”

  “No.”

  “How about some change, a quarter or two? Ain’t much. I need it bad.”

  “No.”

  “You’re bleedin’, dude. What happened?”

  “Fell down.”

  “Better get that looked at.” He turned and retreated to the store entrance that he was homesteading.

  A young couple in expensive, fashionable clothes came along the street from the direction of the Hilton. They studiously avoided looking at me and passed on by.

  I was leaning against a building, taking stock, when my cell phone went off. Took me a while to dig it out of my pocket. It was still buzzing.

  “Yeah.”

  “Where are you, Tommy?” It was Jake Grafton. I’d know that voice anywhere.

  “Holding up a building. Had a little run-in with Joe Billy Dunn. He blew up the van and got a bullet in me.”

  “Where are you precisely?”

  I looked around, saw a street sign and read it off.

  “The driver says we’re two minutes away. Stay right there.”

  If I was going to get a ride, there was no reason to continue to stand. I staggered over and seated myself on the curb.

  Sure enough, a couple minutes later a stretch limo pulled to the curb and Jake Grafton got out. He looked at my head and back, helped me into the car.

  Callie was sitting beside Goncharov, and there were two men in suits who I didn’t recognize.

  “What happened?” Jake asked as he inspected the hole in my back.

  I told it as plainly as I could, about leaving the van and sitting in the bar, hearing the explosion, and rushing outside. I told him about the cop and her bulletproof vest, and I told him about Joe Billy.

  Grafton felt my pockets, got the pistols out with my help, and passed them to one of the men in the car, who inspected them and slipped them into his jacket pockets. “The police officer is going to be okay. They took her to the hospital. She’s shaken up and badly bruised.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt her, but there was no other way. He’d have killed me where I stood.”

  Callie went to work on my head with a hand towel that the limo driver passed back. “We should take him to a hospital,” she said.

  Jake Grafton looked at me with those cold gray eyes. “We can take you to an emergency room now or after we visit Dell Royston in his penthouse suite. Which do you prefer?”

  “You got it, huh?”

  Grafton grinned. He had a wicked grin when he was fighting mad, and he was that way now—I could see it in him.

  “What about Willie?” I asked.

  “Some of my friends picked him up and took him back to Jersey.”

  “I want to be there.”

  Callie made a last swipe at my forehead. “You may be bleeding internally, Tommy. Delay could be really bad. It could even kill you.”

  “You only die once. Let’s go see the man.” Okay, I was being an idiot, but that son of a bitch owed me. I intended to collect.

  Jake Grafton nodded at the driver and the limo got under way.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The limo wheeled up to the main entrance of the Hilton and stopped with the rear passenger door precisely centered on the red carpet. The suits got out first, and when I followed them two more suits showed up to assist me, one on each arm.

  “Who are you guys?” I muttered to the one on my left.

  “FBI,” he replied in an almost inaudible whisper, as if it were a big secret.

  That’s when the importance of the moment hit me between the eyes. If Grafton didn’t have Royston in the bag, the next ten to twenty years of my life were going to be spent in a very small place communing with rodents. Of course, I wasn’t really guilty of any crime except stupidity—and prosecutions for that are thankfully rare—but it wouldn’t go down that way. Too many bodies. Someone would have to take the fall. There wasn’t a shadow of doubt in my crooked mind that I was the prime candidate.

  At two in the morning there were only a few stragglers loafing in the lobby. Pretending to be someone they should know, I ignored them. As our little parade marched through the ornate, cavernous lobby, I was surprised to see it was growing rapidly. Over a dozen of us gathered at the elevators.

  One of the FBI guys beside me flashed credentials at the two cops on duty. The plainclothes guy wanted to know about the rest of us, but the federal agent announced, “They’re with me,” in a don’t-screw-with-me tone that moved the cops out of the way. It was heartening to see such deference paid to a federal wage slave.

  I looked at the plainclothes cop and said, “I’m with the government, too.”

  If he was impressed he hid it well. He must have thought that with a burly escort latched on to each arm as I dripped blood on the carpet, I was under arrest. I sorta thought he might be right.

  Admiral and Mrs. Grafton, Goncharov, and the suits from the limo got on the first elevator. My escorts and I got on the second along with the flotsam we had picked up in our voyage through the lobby. “Who are those guys with the Graftons?” I asked.

  “Myron Emerick, director of the FBI, and Special Agent in Charge Harry Estep.”

  “What’s Estep in charge of?”

  “New York.”

  In the tight quarters of the elevator I could smell myself. At least I assumed it was me, reeking of stale sweat and old fear. Yeah, I was really scared back there in that subway station. That was perhaps as close as I’ve yet come to being launched into eternity. We all must make that journey sooner or later, but like most folks, I’m not anxious to be on my way.

  When we got to the penthouse level of the Hilton, my two agents marched me out of the elevator and down the hall. I could see that three of the agents had two guys who must have been Secret Service backed against the wall. The Secret Service types were examining credentials and talking into their lapels. I expected that; bad news travels fast. The only question in my mind was how many minutes would pass before the president and his Secret Service entourage showed up. He was spending the night someplace in town—where, I didn’t know.

  My escorts stopped twenty feet from Royston’s suite. A minute slowly passed. I could hear someone rapping on a door.

  I was close enough to hear voices. “They aren’t here.” Darn if that didn’t sound like Dorsey.

  It must have been, because a moment later Dorsey O’Shea walked past me. She didn’t even notice me. Her eyes were focused on infinity as she walked past the crowd and led the way toward the elevator.

  Grafton paused in front of me. “They’re apparently down in Dorsey’s suite on twelve.”

  I figured as much. I handed him my plastic-card skeleton key. “This will open the door if Dorsey doesn’t have a key. Unless the hotel management has changed the code.”

  We trooped back to the elevator, waited for it to reappear, then climbed aboard. Dorsey went aboard the first one with the admiral and the big FBI bananas.

  My back was hurting like hell, I was getting light-headed, and my scalp was still leaking. One of the FBI guys passed me a hankie, which I pressed against the scalp wound. As long as I was upright, I wasn’t going to complain. The next few minutes would have a huge impact on the rest of my life. I wanted to be there.

  To tell the truth, I was also hoping against hope that I would get a chance to lay some hurt on Royston, who I figured was behind everything. Maybe one of the FBI guys would loan me his pistol. Strangling the bastard would have been fun, but I doubted if I was capable of it in my delicate condition. Weak as I was, I’d be lucky if I could bite him on the ankle.

  I don’t know if Grafton or Emerick, the FBI honcho, pounded on the door, or if Grafton just used the master key I gave him, but everyone was piling into the suite when my escorts and I got there, so we followed the cr
owd.

  It was a crowd. Dorsey’s sitting room was smaller than Royston’s upstairs. I guess Dorsey went back to the bedroom. In a moment she came back. “They’re getting dressed,” she said, not too chipper. She perched on the arm of a soft chair.

  Then she saw me—my face actually registered on her consciousness. Her eyes widened, then she averted them.

  Callie Grafton went behind the wet bar and found a towel. She motioned me to sit on a bar stool. She wet the towel and went to work cleaning my scalp. I noticed idly that I had left a trail of tiny blood drops behind me on the carpet as I came into the room.

  The room swirled around. I grasped the bar to steady myself. That was when I saw the bottle of cognac and two glasses, neither completely empty. I pointed at the bottle, and Callie shook her head no.

  “Medicine,” I said with all the command I could muster. “Gimme.”

  She rolled her eyes, then shoved the bottle and one of the glasses my way. I drained it and poured myself some more. Ahh …

  Dell Royston came out in shirt, trousers, and shoes. Zooey Sonnenberg was right behind him, wrapped in a bathrobe with the Hilton New York logo on the left chest area.

  “What in hell is going on?” Royston demanded hotly. He looked from face to face. The only one he recognized besides Dorsey was probably Emerick, because he addressed his next question to him. “What are you doing here?”

  “Dell, Ms. Sonnenberg, I’d like you to meet Rear Admiral Jake Grafton.” Just polite as could be. “He has some things he wants to say.”

  They looked at Grafton, but I looked at them. Zooey’s hair was messy, she wasn’t wearing makeup, and she looked ten years older than her photos. Royston also had a case of bed head and needed a shave. I wished I had a camera in my pocket—a photo of them now would be worth a year’s pay.

  “On Tuesday, two weeks and two days ago,” Jake said conversationally, “a gang of assassins attacked a CIA safe house in the Allegheny Mountains. They killed everyone there except for two people, Mikhail Goncharov”—he gestured toward the Russian —“and a young woman, a CIA translator named Kelly Erlanger. Ms. Erlanger is now deceased; her floating body was recovered from the Chesapeake the day before yesterday and has been tentatively identified. The killers would have probably made a clean sweep of the safe house if Tommy Carmellini, an officer in the CIA, hadn’t shown up to do a week of guard duty. He killed several of the assassins and rescued Ms. Erlanger and a suitcase full of notes that Mr. Goncharov, the retired archivist for the KGB, had spent twenty years painstakingly assembling. Mr. Goncharov escaped the burning house after the assassins were driven off. He isn’t sure how he did that, but he doesn’t remember seeing Carmellini or Erlanger. They might have already escaped, or he might have exited in another direction—it doesn’t matter.”

  All eyes in the room were on him except mine. I was watching Royston, who was standing with his back to the bedroom door, and Sonnenberg, who was immediately behind him, yet slightly to one side. She had her hands jammed into the pockets of her robe. I wondered if she had a pistol in there. She and Royston looked very pale.

  From the inside pocket of his sports coat, Jake Grafton removed a folder with a red cover. He had had it folded double in his pocket. Now he unfolded it and bent it the other way to minimize the damage the folding had caused.

  “This is the file the assassins wanted,” Grafton said simply, unfolding it and smoothing it. “Mr. Goncharov and his files were extracted from Russia by MI-5 after he visited a British consulate in Lithuania and asked to defect. After a cursory debriefing, he came to the U.S. to be extensively debriefed by both British and CIA personnel. Unfortunately, the assassins showed up before that could be accomplished.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Royston declared, and made a show of looking at his watch. Apparently he had decided to go on the attack. “Why are we discussing this in a New York hotel room in the middle of the night?”

  “That will become apparent in just a few moments,” Grafton said smoothly. He opened the red folder and passed around the five or six sheets of handwritten notes it contained. I had seen hundred of pages like that, with the tiny, cramped, Cyrillic handwriting. “This is a file on an American turncoat with the code name of ‘Rollo.’ Don’t ask me why this code name was assigned—I don’t know.

  “In any event, Rollo was an American who was recruited by the KGB while he was in college. He was politically progressive, very much so—so much so that he willingly went to work for the KGB to attempt to derail American military efforts in Vietnam. He joined antiwar movements, made speeches, wrote pamphlets, donated money to the antiwar movement—oh, yes, he had money. None of his own, you understand, because he came from a modest, lower-middle-class background, but that of his wife. He married an heiress to a large automobile dealership fortune while he was in college, an only child who received a very healthy allowance from her parents.”

  “Cut to the chase,” Royston said impatiently. “I am embarrassed and humiliated that you people burst in here tonight, and I want an explanation damned quick. And by God, it had better be good.”

  “It will be,” Jake said. “Let me meander on.” He collected the papers and returned them to the folder, then put the folder under his left armpit and crossed his arms over his chest. “Rollo’s duties for the KGB took him to California, the hotbed of the antiwar movement. There he continued to do everything within his power to further the KGB’s goal of helping the various groups who were against the war influence American foreign policy. While he was in California, he met a woman, a brilliant, dynamic, ambitious young woman who was passionately against the war. One thing led to another, and they became lovers.”

  “I don’t think you can prove a solitary word of this,” Royston snarled.

  Grafton smiled gently. “Oh, but I can. Then the woman became pregnant with Rollo’s child. The couple calmly assessed the situation. He had no money of his own, yet she did, and she loved him. They were both extremely ambitious. They realized that their experience at the cutting edge of the antiwar movement could provide them—or one of them—with a start in politics, an entry to a political career that could take them in the fullness of time to a very high place. If only she weren’t pregnant—remember, this was the early 1970s. And if only he hadn’t agreed to work for the KGB.

  “Ah, yes, they had finally grasped the enormity of that foolish mistake, the truth of which he had shared with her. The KGB had a marvelous blackmail tool to force him to obey their orders all the days of his life. If he refused, they could ruin him at any time by revealing the Soviet connection.

  “So Rollo and his lover concocted a plan. The woman dropped out of sight before her pregnancy began to show. A few days after she delivered, Rollo and his wife adopted the infant. The adoption was highly irregular, but since everyone involved had plenty of money, certain regulations were bent or ignored in the interest of the unfortunate lady’s good name.

  “In any event, a month or so after the adoption, the new parents were in a fatal automobile accident on the Pacific Coast Highway. The car went off a cliff into the ocean and was swept away. The wife’s parents were called and informed their daughter and her husband were dead. They rushed to California and took the baby home to Maryland.”

  During Grafton’s explanation I had been keeping an eye on Dorsey while I worked on the cognac, which was damned good. She was having difficulty looking at anything except the red folder under the admiral’s arm. She was pale, licking her lips and swallowing repeatedly. I thought she might be on the verge of throwing up.

  “Of course, Rollo wasn’t really dead. His wife was—he killed her.”

  A gasp came from Dorsey. She got off the arm of her chair, walked over to Royston, and confronted him from a distance of six inches. “Say it isn’t so.”

  “I have no idea why he’s telling us this tale,” Dell Royston said, and put a hand on his daughter’s shoulder. “Nor if there is a word of truth in it.”

  She pushed his hand o
ff, glanced back at Grafton. “Go on,” she ordered.

  “Rollo had made preparations. He had already equipped himself with a false name and legend, complete with a birth certificate, driver’s license, and all the other sheets of paper that memorialize our past. He cut off the fashionable mop of hair, shaved, went back east and ditched the hippie clothes, gained a fast thirty pounds, and entered law school.

  “The risk was that someone would recognize him as Michael O’Shea. It was not a very large risk—he had switched coasts, lifestyles, and social circles, and significantly altered his appearance. If anyone noticed the resemblance, they were probably aware that Michael O’Shea was dead and dismissed the fading resemblance as a coincidence. And so the years rolled by, everyone aged, and Michael O’Shea slipped further and further into the past in a world that rapidly changed. The risk of someone realizing he was O’Shea dropped toward zero. Only the KGB was interested in O’Shea, and it had lost him.

  “In fact, O’Shea and his girlfriend had done such a good job of faking his death in the car wreck, the Soviets thought he was dead. The file on Rollo at KGB headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow was closed.” Jake gestured with the red file, then patted it against his leg.

  “Michael O’Shea and his girlfriend believed they had pulled it off. Their ambition brought them together again. They resumed their journey toward that high, windswept place they had glimpsed when they were young. And they had the presidency in sight when Mikhail Goncharov defected with his treasure-trove of notes from the KGB archives. The worm of suspicion began to gnaw relentlessly on them. What if the KGB knew? What if evidence of treason and murder was contained in those files?” The file was in the admiral’s right hand; every eye in the room went to it.

  “O’Shea and his lover decided they couldn’t live with the risk,” he said softly. “The notes must be destroyed. Anyone who had read them must die.”