Liars & Thieves (12 page)

After consideration, I parked the car at the place where the driveway exited the trees, just before it widened out. There was no easy way for a vehicle to get around it, so if the villains came up the drive, they were going to have to park behind the heap and get out. If I was in the right place waiting . . .

I charged for the house, knocked on the door.

Dorsey opened it. She was wearing a robe and no makeup. I went in past her, pushed the door shut behind me.

She was certainly angry, but when she saw my face the anger gave way to fear.

“My God, Tommy, what is going on?”

“These guys were cutting on Willie the Wire when I showed up at his place. I think I got him to the hospital in time, but I’ll bet they’re still sewing him up.”

“They’re coming here?”

“They might. That’s a fact. Have you called anyone, anyone at all?”

“Yes. The maid and the cook. Told them not to come today.”

“Anyone called here?”

“You did. And the artist who was here last night.”

“No one else?”

“No.”

“Where’s Erlanger?” I strode for the stairs, carrying the submachine gun in my right hand.

“She’s in the kitchen.”

I changed course, went past the staircase and made a beeline for the kitchen. Kelly was sitting on a stool sipping coffee with a pile of Goncharov’s notes in front of her.

“Sleep okay?” I asked as I went by. The view of the back yard out the kitchen windows was excellent. There was about thirty yards of grass between the house and the forest. There was no way one man could cover every approach to this house. We could run, of course. But where?

I turned to face Erlanger. Dorsey was standing beside her. “These people cut up my partner, Willie Varner, this morning. He told them about you, Dorsey. They might have telephoned someone before I showed up—Willie didn’t know.”

“What do you think we should do?” Kelly asked.

I took a deep breath. “We can’t stay here long term, but I need some time to think about our next move.”

I opened the refrigerator and looked inside. I was hungry enough to eat a road-killed possum. Fortunately Dorsey had some gourmet cheese. I grabbed the whole package and a quart of milk.

“I’ll go outside and sit under a tree while the brain percolates. Kelly, it would help if you would read as much of Goncharov’s notes as possible. Dorsey, you could throw something in a suitcase, get ready to go. You and Kelly are about the same size—maybe you have something that might fit her.”

I took a swig of milk and a bite of cheese.

“Your arm is bleeding,” Dorsey said.

“Yeah.”

Dorsey’s face was a study. “Tommy, we have to call the police.”

“One of the guys who cut up Willie was ex-FBI. Willie thought the others were cops. If you call the cops, these are the dudes who will show up, just like they did last night at Kelly’s house.”

“My God, Tommy!”

“I need to do some thinking,” I insisted.

Kelly lifted the notes and said, “Everything I’ve looked at concerns KGB shenanigans in Russia. All these papers seem to be about the dirty tricks the KGB pulled to control the party.”

“Check everything in the suitcase,” I said to her, and headed for the door. Dorsey tagged along behind. At the front door I gave her the snub-nose .38 revolver I had liberated earlier that morning.

“There’re five shots in this thing. No safety. Hold the pistol in both hands at arm’s length, aim right at the dude’s belly button, and squeeze the trigger slowly.”

She took the pistol and held it against her breasts. “This isn’t supposed to happen in America.”

“Don’t I know it!”

I found a thick bush in the middle of a thicket at the corner of Dorsey’s garage and crawled under it. From there I could see the heap and the driveway and the east side of the house. I was completely blind behind me, and the garage blanked out everything on the west side of the house. This spot would have to do.

I lay there munching on cheese and wondering what I should do next. Staying alive was looking more and more difficult. And there were the women. Should we split up or stay together?

I stripped a few cartridges from the backup banana clip on the submachine gun and used them to fill up the magazine of the automatic. It wasn’t much, but it was all I could think to do.

***

Mikhail Goncharov spent the morning sitting beside the cabin in the sun, with his back against the chopping block. The day became hotter and the shadows shrank. Finally the sun slipped behind a large oak that shaded the area where he sat. He watched birds and chipmunks and listened to the gurgle of the distant river.

Sometime in late afternoon he was watching a chipmunk search the forest floor for nuts that had somehow escaped his attention this past winter when he heard a car. He sprang to his feet and hid behind the woodpile.

The car pulled into the parking area for the cabin, fifty feet or so down the hill.

A woman and a man got out of the car and began to load their arms with items to carry into the cabin.

The fear leaked out of him, leaving only lethargy. As they came up the path with their arms full of boxes, he stepped out from behind the woodpile and resumed his seat. Startled, the two people spoke to him in a language he didn’t recognize.

The Russian shook his head. After several attempts at conversation, the man went inside the cabin and looked around, then came back outside and spoke to the woman, who was still standing there with a box of groceries in her arms.

Goncharov ignored the people and turned his attention to the chipmunk, who seemed oblivious to the company.

After a while both the visitors went into the cabin. They eventually began making trips to and from their car, carrying bags and luggage. The archivist remained seated against the chopping block in the sun. He didn’t recognize these people, nor could he remember how he got to this place. Where was it? Why was he here?

It was all confusing, like something in a dream, fragments of reality that he couldn’t put into a familiar pattern. Perhaps he should try harder to remember . . .

He was getting tired.

Finally he arose, relieved himself behind the nearest tree, and lay down in a sunny spot near the woodpile. In minutes he was asleep.

This isn’t supposed to happen in America.” Isn’t that what Dorsey said? The words kept running through my mind as I lay under that bush waiting to find out if those dudes at Willie’s made their telephone call before I killed them.

At least it wasn’t raining.

Ah, me! What day is this, anyway?

Let’s see. Yesterday was Tuesday, so this must be Wednesday. Believe it or not, a mere twenty-four hours had passed since the shit hit the fan. I checked my watch. Twenty and a half hours, to be precise.

I lay there listening to the insects, watching a snail, thinking about the problem. I needed a place where these two women and I could drop out of sight for a few days while Kelly read the Gon-charov files. Of course, we only had one of the seven suitcases containing his notes, but still, there might be something in that mess that pointed the way.

An hour ticked away. I was proud of myself. I only looked at

my watch twenty-three times in that hour. I stopped glancing at it finally, and let the warmth of the air of that June day and the cool, moist earth on which I was lying sort of settle me down, put things in perspective. I must have dropped off. How long I slept I don’t know, but a movement to my far right brought me instantly awake.

I lay there under that bush like a dead man, with only my eyes moving. Something had alerted me, but what?

I was completely awake, totally alert. . . and couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. I listened. Birds, very distant traffic noises from the road beside the river . . . the droning of an airliner. The buzzing of a small plane, fading . . . and .. .

And . . .

I began moving my head to the right. Glacially, as slowly as I could make my muscles move. Of course, that would be the direction the threat would come from since I had thought it the least likely and the bush obscured my vision—and hid me—and I would have the devil of a time getting the MP-5 turned that way. I already had my eyes two-blocked that way, so as I moved my head I could see . . .

Limbs, leaves .. . more leaves . . . and a man.

No ghillie suit this time, just a head-to-toe camouflage outfit. He even wore a camo hat and had grease on his face. I spotted him initially only because he was moving. He hadn’t yet seen me because I wasn’t, and because I was embedded in vegetation.

I lay there motionless as a week-old corpse.

He had appeared from behind the house and was moving to my right, toward my rear. Every step he took put me at a larger disadvantage.

He was carrying some kind of assault rifle.

Oh, Jesus, I was up against the first team! This guy knew what he was doing and he was hard at it, sneaking along with every sense alert, looking for something to kill.

The stupidity of my choice of an ambush position became brutally obvious. I was hidden, all right, but 1 had no ability to change positions or engage the man. If I twitched a muscle, I was dead. I knew it and lay frozen with sweat popping from every pore. A few minutes of this and he would smell me.

He was sneaking out of my range of vision to my right. Since I couldn’t move, I looked around in the other direction.

If there were two of these camo guys out here I might as well shoot myself now and be done with it.

I didn’t see anyone else. That didn’t fill me with confidence— this guy was so good he didn’t need any help. I had a nearly overpowering urge to pee and restrained it with difficulty.

I was going to have to do something soon. He was moving behind me, and when he saw me he would finish me instantly, without remorse. Exactly the same way I’d shoot him.

My mind was going a hundred miles an hour and I couldn’t think of a goddamn thing!

He was going to finish me in just a few seconds. My whole life … and it was ending. Here! Now!

Whump. I heard the noise and for a second it didn’t register. Then I heard it again. Shots! Two of them. From inside the house.

I took a chance, turned my head another inch to my right.

He had turned and was surveying the windows of the house. Now he looked around, scanned everything quickly, then advanced toward the back of the house, back along the direction he had come. One of his buddies must have gone in the back door.

I lay there frozen until he passed behind the house, out of view. T hen I came out of that bush, as quickly and silently as I could, and got pointed in the right direction, the MP-5 in my hands.

I ran for the corner of the house, came up short, and eased an eye around.

He was standing outside the basement door, looking in the other direction, about to enter.

I snicked the safety off, shouldered the weapon as I rounded the corner and gave him a hell of a burst, at least half a clip. The bullets spun him, knocked him off his feet, hammered at him until I released the trigger. I ran toward him while looking around to see if there was anyone else.

Didn’t see another soul. The camo man lay sprawled out like he’d been hit by a Freightliner. I don’t think one of those 9 mm bullets missed. There wasn’t much blood. He looked unnaturally plump. I bent down, tugged at his shirt. He was wearing a bulletproof vest, which hadn’t saved him from the slugs that hit him in the head and neck, at least three of them.

I eased the door open with my left hand—the glass had been cut out and the lock opened from the inside—and passed through, the submachine gun at the ready.

Taking my time, I slipped through the basement, a room I had never been in, until I found the stairs up. I could hear a woman sobbing.

I climbed as silently as possible, then pushed the door at the head of the stairs open inch by inch and looked out. I was in the passageway just off the kitchen. The sobbing was louder now.

I moved toward it, the submachine gun at the ready.

Dorsey was sitting on the bottom stair, her face in her hands. She was sobbing. Kelly Erlanger was sitting beside her, her arms around Dorsey’s shoulders.

In front of them lay a man. He wasn’t moving. Blood was everywhere, a widening lake.

Keeping the gun on him, I walked over, stood in the blood, and turned him onto his back with one foot.

It was Baldy from this morning, Johnson Dunlap. He looked at me, tried to focus his eyes, and went limp, staring at nothing at all.

She had fired twice. The first bullet hit him in the body apparently—I could see the bullet hole in his shirt—doubling him up but not injuring him; he, too, was wearing a bulletproof vest. The second slug, however, whacked him on the inside of his right thigh. Severed the femoral artery. Johnson Dunlap had bled to death in Dorsey O’Shea’s hallway while she sat sobbing on the stairs.

I wouldn’t have tried to save the bastard either.

After running my fingers through Dorsey’s hair, I unlocked the front door and went out that way. I thought maybe I ought to make a circuit of the house, just to make sure there were only two men sneaking about. Undoubtedly there was a getaway car somewhere, but I had zero chance of tracking these guys back through the forest to find it.

On the bright side, maybe now Michelle would get herself a better fella.

***

Basil Jarrett and Linda Fiocchi stood on the porch of their vacation cabin on the bank of the Greenbrier River staring at the sleeping form of Mikhail Goncharov, stretched out in the sun by the woodpile. They knew nothing about him, not his name, nationality, age, or condition .. . nor, of course, were they aware of the previous day’s events at the CIA’s Greenbrier facility six miles from their cabin. Not only had the CIA not informed the press or local law enforcement agencies of the murders at the facility, the fact that the spy agency owned anything at all in this state was classified. Jarrett and Fiocchi had never even heard a CIA rumor. Basil Jarrett owned two sawmills that manufactured decorator fencing. His fences lined suburban lawns in thirty-seven states. riocchi, his cabin co-owner and live-in girlfriend of ten years, was an accountant. “He’s not a drunk or doper,” Jarrett said.