Liars & Thieves (36 page)

I couldn’t read the muscle movements I saw in her face, around her eyes.

“Please go, Tommy,” she said, so I did.

I wondered if I would ever see her again.

Jake Grafton’s cell phone rang while he was fixing a late lunch for himself and Mikhail Goncharov. Callie had gone to the library. Standing in the kitchen amid the sandwich makings, he opened the phone. “Grafton.” It s the way we figured,” the man’s voice said. “The Brits say they can’t find anything along the lines we talked about. Everyone in the files has a code name, the dates are coded, some of the files are nearly incomprehensible. They really need the archivist to explain what they’re seeing.” I see.

“Jake, the bottom line is they can’t find it. If it’s there to be found.”

“Okay.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. How long do I have?”

“The FBI is chomping at the bit. They have bodies scattered from hell to breakfast, and they’ve been stonewalling Justice. I can’t hold these people off much longer.”

“I understand. I’ll call you back.”

He watched Goncharov eat his ham and Swiss on rye. Watched his face, his hands, his mannerisms. Wondered what he was thinking.

Callie returned as he rinsed the dishes. She came in, said hello to Goncharov in Russian, and handed Jake an envelope. He ripped it open, examined the faxed photograph. The quality wasn’t perfect, but the faces were recognizable.

“Ask Goncharov if he has ever seen this man or knows who he is.

Callie handed the Russian the page and translated the question.

Jake saw the recognition in his eyes.

Yes!

Words were gushing from the archivist when the telephone rang again. Jake glanced at the number, then opened it.

“Yes, Tommy.”

It was nearly five o’clock when I got back to the van. Willie gave me a long look but said nothing. That I found hard to take.

“What’s eating you?” I asked. He had the convention on the monitor, video without sound. Some politician I didn’t recognize was pounding the podium.

“You.”

“Right.”

“I thought I knew what was goin’ down, but then you have that little conversation with Dorsey this afternoon and the thought crosses my dishonest mind that I don’t know shit.”

“Who does? They say anything on TV about the president’s choice?”

“All this time I think you just gettin’ some nookie on the sly, and turns out you’re up to your ass in shit with that rich bitch. What’s this about going away?”

“You had anything to eat today?”

“Don’t brush me off, goddamnit! The feds are going to swarm us both and send us so far up the river we won’t get out for a hundred years. And I’m takin’ the ride not even knowin’ what the fuck went down. Shows you how fuckin’ smart I am! You keep tellin’ me I’m your friend and you don’t tell me shit.”

“What do you want me to say? There are two dozen bodies spread all over the East Coast, and we’re trying to figure out who and why. You think I know?”

“You know more than me, and that’s a fact. Goddamn, Carmellini, it was me those assholes carved up. I’m gonna carry the scars all my miserable life. Don’t all that blood buy me some truth?”

I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly before I answered.

“The truth is I don’t know what’s going down. I just pray to God that Jake Grafton does. If he doesn’t, we’ll share a cell someplace.”

‘I ain’t sharin’ nothin’ with you ever again,” Willie declared. ‘You in the same prison with me, you’re a dead man, Carmellini.”

He meant it, too—I could see that. “Maybe you should go home,” I suggested.

He didn’t say anything to that for at least a minute. I could see he was thinking it over. After a while he muttered, “I go home, they’ll arrest me before the goddamn sun sets. I’ll stay.”

I turned up the sound on the monitor. This guy thumping the podium was a fire-breather.

“And I don’t want to hear any more shit ’bout you savin’ my life,” Willie said, “like I owe you somethin’ and ain’t payin’. You’re the one sicced those assholes on me. You owe me, man, not the other way ’round.”

~~~~~~

The president will speak in about twenty minutes,” Callie told her husband, who was looking out the window. She was adding the final items to an overnight bag. “Do you want to stay to hear what he has to say?”

“No. Doesn’t matter.”

“Is going to New York really a good idea?”

“Maybe not, but it’s the best one we have—the only one we have—so we’re going to run with it.”

He glanced at the television. On this channel a panel of “experts” was debating why the president would or wouldn’t choose to run with his wife, Zooey Sonnenberg. In an upper corner of the picture was a smaller picture in which the governor of some Midwestern state was addressing the convention delegates, who weren’t paying any more attention to him than the panel of experts were.

A wry grin crossed Jake Grafton’s face; this was, he reflected, the Americans’ freedom of speech in full flower. Card-carrying members of the chattering class were talking, exercising their

constitutional right to say whatever they wished, and no one was listening.

He carried the overnight bag down the stairs and set it by the door.

He was about to ascend the stairs again to check on Goncharov when someone rapped on the front door.

He opened it and found a soldier in full camo wearing grease paint and carrying a short submachine gun on a strap over his shoulder. “Just thought I’d drop by, Admiral, and tell you we’re leaving now.”

“You are? Now?”

“Just got the orders, sir. They said you were leaving shortly so we were to pull out ASAP.”

“Thank you, major. We are indeed leaving shortly.”

“Any time, Admiral. It’s been good training. Sorry about that villain last week.”

“Right.” Jake stood in the doorway and watched the major go. His men sifted out of empty houses and hides and joined him as he walked under the streetlight toward the highway.

The sound of loud rock music drowned out the sounds of traffic and surf tonight. It seemed to be coming from a house three doors closer to the beach, on the south side of the street. Cars filled every parking place.

Jake closed the door as Callie and Goncharov came down the stairs. “I think something is about to happen here,” Jake said as he reached for the MP-5 Carmellini had stashed in a corner. “Come with me, now.”

They followed him out the door.

“What’s wrong?”

“Maybe nothing,” Jake said. “The helo is supposed to pick us up at midnight and take us to New York. The general didn’t mention that he was going to pull the security people away, but they all left. Called off, the major said.”

“Why don’t you call the general?”

“I will. In the meantime I think we should get out of the house.”

Moving quickly, they walked under the light past the party into the darkness beyond. Jake told Callie to hide with the archivist under the derelict building near the beach, the one in which Carmellini had killed the rifleman. They disappeared over the boardwalk. Jake lay down in the sand beside a fence on the yard of the last house on the north side of the street, which was empty just now.

Yesterday a pack of college-age youngsters had loaded the garbage cans in front of the party house, packed their cars, and departed. Another bunch had arrived today. Tonight they were settling in.

There was a shrub of some kind at the end of the fence. Jake shoved the nose of the silenced submachine gun between the shrub and the fence and pointed it at the junction of this dead-end street and the highway, then lay down to wait. Fortunately this yard was slightly elevated, so he could see over the hoods of the cars parked on the street.

There was not enough light to see the keys of his cell phone. Still, he managed to get the general on his second dialing attempt.

I watched the president’s acceptance speech on the monitor in mission control, surrounded by computers, radio and television receivers, and the remnants of sandwiches, potato salad, and pickles from a deli down the street. Willie had stopped his grousing and watched without comment. . The president wore a dark suit and burgundy power tie. He was carefully made up and used the TelePrompTer with obvious skill. He recited the accomplishments of his first term and laid out the goals for his second, the themes he wanted to run on. He de-

nounced the dogs in the other party who had impeded his legislative program and stymied some of his judicial nominations.

It was a tub-thumping political speech, just what the pundits and everyone else expected him to say. Made you wonder if there were any good movies on the cable channels. Near the end of the speech, he got around to the subject that had consumed the delegates all week, the identity of his vice-presidential running mate. “This party needs a woman on the ticket,” the president declared, “a competent, capable, highly intelligent woman. This nation wants a woman on the ticket who understands the goals and aspirations of the American people and is ready to assume the burdens of the presidency in an emergency.”

Apparently the prospect of his demise was merely “an emergency.” That wasn’t the word I would have chosen. Which is why he’s a politician and I’m a thief.

“This party and this nation,” he continued, “are ready to put behind us the tired, obsolete, bigoted ways of the past and step into the future, a future where all Americans, regardless of race, religion, national origin, or gender”—here he paused to thunderous applause—“have an equal opportunity. The time has come. We must carry the torch forward into the future, lighting the way for all the people of the earth. Our time has come . . .” “Get on with it,” Willie muttered impatiently. “Senator Heston will make a formal nomination tomorrow, yet tonight I wish to ask the delegates to this convention to put the most competent, capable, trusted woman politician and statesman in the country on the ticket with me.” Growing, swelling applause. “Tonight I ask you to nominate my wife, Zooey Sonnen-berg, to run with me for—“

The rest of the sentence was drowned out by cheering and applause. For a moment the president looked as if he were waiting until the applause died so he could finish his peroration, but then he gave up. He turned, stepped over to Zooey, who was beaming

broadly, took her hand, and led her to the podium. As a million camera flashes strobed continuously, the president and first lady stood before the nation and the world with hands clasped together over their heads while they waved to the crowd with their free hands.

I studied Zooey s face when the television cameras zoomed in for a close-up. She was one happy human, beaming at the audience, her husband, and the cameras as the world watched. It occurred to me that she and the president had both labored for most of their adult lives for this moment.

Power—the ultimate aphrodisiac.

They wanted it badly.

Then I remembered Dell Royston. I flipped switches to hear what was going on in his suite. Cheering and applause, an audio overload. Individual voices were indistinguishable. I tried the adjoining suites, right and left. More of the same, although in one they had the television audio cranked way up and I could hear the commentator’s voice-over.

I tried Dorsey’s room. Got her on the telephone, apparently, because I could only hear one side of the conversation.

“. . . Never seen her so happy . . . That’s right. . . Um-huh . . . Uh-huh, yes .. . Yes, I see that. She deserves it, but deserving or not, sometimes life doesn’t work out.”

Then Dorsey hung up, and I was stuck with the television commentator. I cranked the volume way down and called Sarah Houston, who, God willing, was still monitoring the hotel’s computer system.

“Hey,” I said when she answered. “You still on the job?”

“No, fool, I’m at Radio City getting in my seat to watch the Rockettes.”

That stunned me for a second, until I realized that was supposed to be a joke. Sarah has a rather sick sense of humor, which she trots out at the oddest times.

“Dorsey was just on the telephone. What can you tell me about that call?” “Very little.”

“Did it originate within the hotel?” “Yep.”

“Who made the call, damn it?”

“It came from Royston’s suite. As you know, I don’t have the capability to listen in. If a certain burglar had done a better job last week, we’d be able to monitor both sides of every telephone conversation made through the hotel’s switchboard.” “It’s hard to get competent help.” “Impossible, sometimes.”

“Thanks,” I said, and hung up. I used my cell phone to call Jake Grafton.

He listened to everything I had to say, then said, “We’ll be up there later tonight. I’ll bring Callie along to translate.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I mumbled something, I can’t remember what, and he said, “Someone set us up down here. The guards were called off, and the general who sent them here knows nothing about it. He’s checking now.” “You’d better clear the house,” I said.

Jake Grafton swatted my advice right back at me. “You have been a stationary target in that van for five days now,” he said. “I’d hate to come up there and find you dead.” ” Ahh… You don’t think—?”

“You know far too much. Tommy. So do I. So do Goncharov and Callie and Willie Varner.” “Where should I meet you?” “The hotel lobby at two or two-thirty.” I looked at my watch. Three hours from now. “Okay,” I said, and hung up. “Let’s go,” I said to Willie. “Go where?”

r

“Go get a drink. Take a leak. Go. Now. Come on.” “But who is going to listen to—?”

“No one.” I pushed him out of the seat and started him toward the door.

There was just enough moonlight for Callie to spot the two figures moving swiftly south along the beach, near the dune. They were apparently fit men in dark clothes that covered their arms and legs completely, trotting along carrying something in their hands.

She whispered to Goncharov, who moved even deeper into the shadow under the pilings that held up the abandoned house. Callie joined him there. Showing him by example, she lowered her face into her hands so her eyes wouldn’t reflect light. She also did not want the eyes of the hunters spotting the lightness of her face amid the darkness.