Liars & Thieves (40 page)

“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.”

Royston made a rude noise. “I have never heard such a vile slander in all of American politics!” he said belligerently. “You haven’t a shred of proof of any of these accusations.”

You’ve got to give him credit—he was trying. His face glistened with perspiration.

Not a shred of proof,” he continued hoarsely. “Even if it’s true, it has nothing to do with us. Now get the hell out of here, and if I near a whisper about you being here tonight—from any of you people—the world is going to cave in on you.”

Dorsey continued to study Royston’s face. Sonnenberg put a hand on her arm to draw her away, and she brushed it off.

“I do have proof,” Jake Grafton said simply. “In the last few days we have done DNA testing. Michael O’Shea has living relatives. One of them is Jimmy O’Shea, a brother who lives in Brooklyn. With the help of his barber, we obtained samples of his hair. There is no doubt, Mr. Royston. You are Jimmy O’Shea’s brother and Dorsey O’Shea’s father. You, Ms. Sonnenberg, are Dorsey’s mother.”

Dorsey approached Zooey. “You never told me Dell was my father.”

Zooey couldn’t avoid those eyes.

“Your whole life has been a lie, Mom,” Dorsey continued, her voice cracking like old glass. “You helped him murder that woman! Everything you said, everything you did was a lie designed to get you elected to the presidency.”

“Dorsey, I—“

“Don’t touch me!” She backed up slowly, a step at a time. “All these years I thought my father was dead. You told me he was dead. But you never told me he murdered his wife and you helped him do it!”

She wheeled and slapped Dell Royston with a sound that cracked like a pistol shot.

“Royston,” said Myron Emerick, “you’re under arrest.”

“What’s the charge?”

“First degree murder of Kelly Erlanger. One of the admiral’s friends was listening to her cell phone conversations. That will do for starters, but I think by arraignment time we’ll have a couple dozen murders to charge you with. We picked up your executive assistant earlier this evening—he hasn’t stopped talking. Then two men broke into the admiral’s house tonight. They are now under arrest and are also telling everything they know.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather when Royston said, “Do you have a warrant?” I didn’t think he had any juice left at that point, but apparently he was tougher than I thought.

“As a matter of fact, I do.” Emerick removed a document from a coat pocket and passed it to Royston. He glanced at Sonnenberg. “I have one for you, too, Ms. Sonnenberg, charging you as an accessory.”

Zooey turned on Royston. “You could take care of it, you said. The presidency of the United States was—.” She held out both hands and closed them into fists. “You!” I had never in my life heard such venom in just one word.

She turned and stalked into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

I was hanging on to the bar by this time. My trousers were sodden with blood, the room was spinning, the faces were going in and out of focus. I knew it was loss of blood, not the cognac— which was mighty tasty—so I had another gulp.

On the bar beside me was a phone. I saw one of the two lines illuminate. I waited a decent interval—like maybe thirty seconds while Dorsey sobbed and one of the agents installed a set of handcuffs on Royston—then I picked up the phone and punched that line.

Zooey was talking. “. . . Emerick arrested Dell and—who is listening on this line?”

Of course they could hear the commotion going on around me. “Uh, Tommy Carmellini, Ms. Sonnenberg. Eavesdropping’s a bad habit, I know. Hope you don’t mind.”

Apparently the president didn’t care who else was listening. Before she could tell me to hang up and go to hell, he said, “Zooey, the attorney general is here along with the chief of staff. They tell me that if you are alive when Emerick is ready to leave that suite you’re in, he intends to arrest you as an accessory to murder. He has a warrant in his pocket. Tomorrow morning I am announcing a new choice for vice president. You decide how you want the headlines to read.”

“Those are my only choices?”

“Those two.”

“You bastard! All these years holding your hand and smiling while you tomcatted around and made me a laughingstock! This is what I get for all those years of humiliation! Well, I’m not going silently in a box so you can weep at the funeral and march bravely on. Oh, no! I’m going to tell the press everything—everythingF Her voice rose to a shriek. “When I get through you won’t be able to win an election for constable in any county in the country.”

“Good-bye, Zooey,” he said tightly, and broke the connection.

I cradled the telephone and drained the last of the cognac.

Emerick jerked his head at one of his agents. “Get him out of here,” he said, pointing at Royston.

They cuffed Royston’s hands in front of him. “Listen, Emerick—” he began.

“Can it,” the director shot back. “They’ll read you your rights down in the car.”

“For God’s sake—my wife! My kids!”

“You’ll get your telephone call after they book you.” Emerick again jerked his head at the agents, and they hustled Royston out of the room.

Dorsey shrank into a fetal position in one corner. I wondered if I ought to try to say something comforting, but the truth was I was in no condition to even walk over to her. Time passed—I don’t know how much—while everyone in the room stood around waiting . . . waiting for Zooey to slit her wrists in the tub or come strutting out of the bedroom dressed for a press conference, I guess.

How long they stood there looking at each other I don’t know. I remember thinking I should have said something to the president—I had missed my only chance to talk to a head of state. Somewhere in there the evening ended for me. I passed out about that time and did a header off the stool. Never did have much of a head for liquor.

The ambulance crew was still in the suite loading Carmellini on a stretcher when Mikhail Goncharov whispered to Callie, “May I leave now?”

“Certainly.” Callie didn’t know what the CIA or FBI hon-chos would think of Goncharov’s departure, but she didn’t intended to ask them. They were huddled in the corner with Jake Grafton.

After catching her husband’s eye, Callie followed Goncharov out into the corridor and through the crowd in the hallway to the elevator. Secret Service, police, FBI agents, paramedics, and hotel executives—the crowd was beginning to thin now that the first lady and Royston had been taken away in handcuffs. Callie and Goncharov boarded the elevator, watched the door close. No one made any move to stop them.

They made their way through the lobby. People were whispering, watching the paramedics and police hustling about, speculating on what had happened.

Outside the main entrance on the Avenue of the Americas, un-

der the awning, Goncharov told Callie, “I don’t want to go back to the CIA or British intelligence.”

“I don’t think they really need you,” she said. “The British copied your files.”

Goncharov snorted. “I suppose I knew they would.” He laughed without humor. “I was very naive.”

Callie ignored that comment. “Where do you want to go?” she asked.

Goncharov took a deep breath as he considered it. He looked right, then left, looked up at the buildings, then back at Callie. “I don’t know. Somewhere. I don’t speak a word of the language, I have no money, but this is what I want. This—.” He gestured grandly with his hand.

Callie opened her purse, took out all her cash, and held it out to him. “Here.”

“No.”

“Yes.” She said the word in English. “Yes.” Then in Russian, “This isn’t much, but it will feed you for a while. Tens of millions of people have come to America and started over—thousands do it every day—and you can, too. A little money will help.”

“Yes,” he said, trying the English word.

“Yes.” She echoed him, still holding the money in her hand, offering it.

“Yes.” He reached for the cash, inspected the bills, then put them in his pocket.

Callie Grafton smiled and held out her hand.

He shook it. “Good-bye,” she said in English.

“Gude-by.” The archivist, Mikhail Goncharov, turned and walked away into the night, into the great city of New York, into the heart of America.

The second day after my operation, the hospital moved me from intensive care to a private room. I thumbed the television on and flipped channels until I found a baseball game. I was just drifting off to sleep when Jake Grafton came into the room and shut the door.

“Hey,” he said. “We almost waited too long to get you to a hospital. The doctors had some real nasty things to say to me.”

“It was worth it,” I said. “After all the shit I went through, I really wanted to see Reactor and Zooey take the fall.”

“Reactor?”

“Royston was a fast breeder.”

Jake Grafton nodded and lowered himself into a chair.

“That scene in Dorsey’s suite—I was really surprised when you trotted out the DNA results. I thought those tests were going to take a week.”

“That’s right. We still don’t have the results. Should have them tomorrow.”

It took a long ten seconds for me to get it, what with my delicate condition, generally honest nature, and low mental ability. “You mean you lied to them?”

“Yeah.”

“And that red folder. Was that really it?”

“Oh, no. That was just one we had at home. What the hell— none of those people could read Russian.”

” ‘Rollo’?”

He shrugged. “Goncharov couldn’t remember O’Shea’s code name, and I doubted if O’Shea ever knew it. I made that one up.”

I had to smile. Jake Grafton gave me a grin in return.

“How come I haven’t had every reporter in the free world in here today offering me millions for my story?”

‘The story the FBI gave the press was that Zooey and Royston were lovers. I don’t think the press understands who was in the

suite or what was said. Perhaps that could have been explained better, but the FBI didn’t bother. Zooey has held three jailhouse press conferences, and the media is having a field day. The country is eating it up. Royston’s lawyer refuses to let his client say a word and refuses to say a word for him. The bail hearing isn’t until next week, and the prosecutors will oppose it, they say. Some opposition senators and representatives are promising an investigation. The president refuses to discuss the matter.”

“He’s a cold-hearted bastard,” I remarked, remembering his short conversation with Zooey. But perhaps that wasn’t fair—he knew her a lot better than 1 did.

“This election is going to become a circus,” Grafton predicted. “It’s going to make the California governor’s recall look like a tea party. Politics has become an afternoon soap opera. In an era when the country is deeply divided over complex issues without easy answers, perhaps that is inevitable.”

I took a deep breath and moved on to the most important question. “Am I going to be arrested?”

Grafton chuckled. “Apparently not. I am informed that you are still a valuable employee of the CIA.” “Long as I’m getting paid.”

We talked for a while about this and that, about Mikhail Gon-charov and Kelly Erlanger and Dorsey O’Shea and my former boss, Sal Pulzelli.

“Was Joe Billy really Stu Vine?” I asked.

“I think so,” Jake said. “The CIA holds little tidbits like that very tightly indeed.”

“How come he was assigned to my shop?” “I think the decision was made somewhere to bring him in-house. They just needed a place to stash him for a while. What the agency didn’t know was that he had agreed to do a job for Roys-ton. Do you remember? Pulzelli was told to send Dunn to be a guard at the safehouse. Since Dunn was scheduled to go to a

training session, Pulzelli changed the assignment without telling anyone.”

“That was Sal . . . the horn administrator. He lived his life by the schedule and thought we should, too.”

We were still chatting when a nurse came in and told the admiral he would have to leave. “See you, Tommy,” he said.

“Thanks, Admiral, for everything.”

“Any time.”

“You and Callie going flying?”

“All over the country. We’ll call you when we get hack.”

Then he was gone. Just like that.

Maybe it was really over. God, I hoped so. If some wild man with murder in his eye came charging in here, I didn’t even have a pocketknife to defend myself with … if I could stay awake, which I couldn’t.

I drifted off while the nurse was working on my IVs.

The next day two guys from the agency and one from the FBI showed up with a cassette recorder. After reading me all the warnings, they wanted the whole story in my own words. I ran them out after half an hour. The next day they were back and we did two hours. Three hours the day after that, then for the next two days they asked questions, hundreds of them. I did the best I could, but when I got tired I told them to return tomorrow. They didn’t come the last day I was in the hospital. In midafternoon, after giving me a cursory exam and a new set of bandages, the hospital released me.