Liars & Thieves (41 page)

I was ready to go. I had channel surfed when the law wasn’t there and had had more than my fill of the made-for-TV political circus. I took a cab to Pennsylvania Station and then a train to Washington.

My apartment was a wreck. Someone had ransacked the place during my big adventure, maybe one of Royston’s thugs or perhaps Joe Billy Dunn.

It took courage to open the refrigerator. There was something green in there, and I didn’t think it was lettuce. I threw everything in a garbage bag and spent twenty minutes wrestling it down to the cans in the basement. I was weak as a cat. I wasn’t ready to tackle that mess the goons had made. I even thought about moving in with Willie … for ten whole seconds.

The agency guys had said my old Mercedes was parked in the lot, so I went looking for it. Found it finally, decorated with bird droppings, parked under a tree. It even started on the third attempt.

I called Jake Grafton on his cell.

“Hey, I’m out of the hospital. Where are you guys?”

“Wisconsin. Getting gas. We’ll be in Minnesota tonight. How are you doing, Tommy?”

“The agency gave me a couple weeks off, but I may never go back. I’m still thinking about taking a banana boat south.”

“It’s like that, huh? Why don’t you go over to my beach house, loaf there until you feel better?”

Now that was an idea! The beach.

“You wouldn’t mind?”

“Oh, heck no. Just make sure you buy your own beer.”

“Where did you hide the key?”

Grafton made a rude noise and hung up on me.

Well, why not? I put the Mercedes in gear and let ‘er rip. Stopped at a Wal-Mart on the Eastern Shore for the bare essentials—underwear, beer, swimsuit, and toothbrush.

At Grafton’s place I quickly settled into a routine. Every morning I walked all the way to the corner to buy a paper from the vending machine, read it as I poached a couple eggs and made toast, finished it over coffee, then walked to the beach and lay around on the towel frying in the sun.

Willie Varner had all his stitches out, he said, was getting laid again by his semiregular girlfriend, and was working in the lock

shop. He gave me some grief over the phone, but not too much. Like me, he was very happy life was getting back to normal.

The papers were full of the political news. I thought Zooey was in danger of overplaying her hand, but she was fulfilling her promise to her husband. She accused him of a dozen infidelities, cheating on his income tax for eight years, and screwing a couple million out of two former business partners. I thought the president would have a huge political problem with all this, but no. Apparently in the post-Clinton age the public was becoming inured to personal scandal. The party’s honchos picked a new vice-presidential candidate, a woman the president recommended, and the president refused to discuss any of his wife’s jailhouse revelations, declaring that the issues were more important than the personal life of any candidate.

The president played it like a harp and actually gained in the polls. It turned out he had the ability to work a little quaver into his voice when the reporters hounded him about his wife and Royston. People actually felt sorry for the S.O.B.

The world is full of wackos—what can I say? I figured that in a few weeks the president would probably file for a divorce and in a year people would be asking, Zooey who? One of the pundits suggested that he get a dog to help him through this difficult time.

The guy who owned the house three doors closer to the beach on Grafton’s side of the street stopped me on the second day I was there. He wanted to chat.

“I see you’re staying in that retired admiral’s house.”

“Yeah.”

“You know him?”

“Enough to get permission to use the place. Why’d you ask?”

“Oh, man! About ten days ago we had the goddamnest shootout you ever heard of right here on this street. That admiral killed two guys”—he pointed—“right there and there. A busload

of military guys surrounded his house and dragged two more men out of it.”

“Wow! Sounds like a movie or something. But it was real, huh?”

“I was having a party. Had a house full of guests. Normally this house is rented out to whoever, but that was the first night of my summer vacation—take a month every year. Had lots of people here from the office. Goddamnest thing you’ve ever seen. Submachine guns blasting, bodies all over, blood, soldiers with weapons, enough cops to arrest the Capone mob, all right here on this street about midnight.”

I shook my head. “Sorry I missed it.”

“You know anything about it?”

I shrugged. “This is the first I’ve heard.”

He scrutinized my face. “Who is that admiral, anyway?”

“Some retired ship driver. Name’s Grafton.”

“Well, here is the amazing part. I’ve got a couple dozen people here partying, and we all see and hear this shootout and watch the police and ambulance people clean up, and they wouldn’t tell us a goddamn thing.”

“They wouldn’t?”

“Nothing. The next morning we check the television and newspapers to see what in hell the shootout was all about, and you know what? There wasn’t a word in the paper or on television. I even called the local paper and talked to the editor.”

“‘Zat right?”

“He listened to what I had to say, said his reporters would look into it. . . and he printed zilch. Nada! Not a single word on the air or in print. Like it never happened. All the television and papers are full of the political mess—there isn’t room for anything else. But I’ll tell you, if I read or hear another word about Zooey Son-nenberg I think I’m going to puke.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Thought you might know something about the shootout.”

“Naw. Not a thing. By the way, you gonna have any more parties?”

“Next Saturday. Wanta come?”

So Jake had some explaining to do with his neighbors. I made a mental note to tell him so when I talked to him again.

Try as I might to think of something else, the events of the last few weeks occupied most of my thoughts. Joe Billy Dunn, Roys-ton, Zooey Sonnenberg . . . the guy who had tried to kill me from the abandoned house with the little Ruger ride—I carefully inspected that house every time I passed it.

Of course I wondered about the president and Zooey. I thought about that conversation I had overheard. Did he know that Zooey was cheating on him with Dell? Did he care? Did he ever care for her, or was theirs a political union, a marriage in name only?

Someday some idiot publisher would pay the president millions for his memoir, and the public would read what he chose to say— just that and nothing more. I decided there are some rocks no one will ever see under.

One morning I climbed in the car and headed for the Bethesda Naval Hospital to get checked for infections and have the last of the stitches removed. Dorsey O’Shea was on my mind. The way I figured it, she wanted to marry me and take me away in order to save my life. She knew or suspected Royston was going to have me hit. She may have thought that if I were her husband, he’d lay off. Perhaps Dorsey had fallen in love with me … a little teeny tiny bit. Loved someone besides her mother, Zooey Sonnenberg. Maybe she cared.

That’s what love is, isn’t it? Caring.

I cared for a woman who was somewhere out there in the big wide world and might never return.

Was I capable of loving another person, one who was physically here?

The thing about Dorsey . ..

What if she called? She had my cell phone number. What would I say to her?

I thought about that, about the murders and Zooey and all that stuff. As I drove over the Bay Bridge, I threw the phone out the window into the Chesapeake.

On Saturday morning I was basting in the sun, reading a novel and enjoying a stiff breeze, when a shadow fell across my book. I looked up.

Sarah Houston. In a huge, floppy sun hat and a skimpy two-piece suit that didn’t hide anything. I don’t know why they even bother to wear those things. She spread a huge beach towel beside mine and handed me a tube of suntan lotion while the wind whipped at the brim of her hat. “Do me, will you?”

“Did you just happen by?”

“I hike the beach from Maine to Florida every summer. Saw you lying there and decided I could use a break.”

“Going to be here long?”

“As a matter of fact, Admiral Grafton called me. He said you were staying at his beach house and asked if I would like to use it, too. Said he had a couple of bedrooms and plenty of toilet paper.”

I turned on my side and looked her over while she settled herself on her towel and told me this tale. I wondered if Grafton really called her or she called him. I sat up and went to work with the lotion.

“So,” she continued as I slathered her, “I thought, I’m due for some vacation, and why not?”

“Indeed! Why not?”

“Give me a chance to get the real inside scoop on Zooey and Royston. Grafton said you were in the suite when they were arrested.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t discuss it. I’m saving it for my autobiography.”

“Darn. I’ll just have to wheedle it out of you. A project like that will help fill the long evenings.”

“Heck, yeah. As a matter of fact, I have a party invite for tonight. Want to go?”

“If we can leave the party early. There’s a certain man I’m looking forward to making love to.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather. Sarah Houston ! Who would have ever suspected ?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The very real defection of Vasili Mitrokhin, the retired archivist for the KGB, to Great Britain in 1992 was the inspiration for this tale. He left Russia with six suitcases full of notes that he had taken from classified KGB files over a period of twelve years. (See The Sword and The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, Basic Books, 1999.) I have wanted to write this tale since I read that book. My editor, Charles Spicer, and his colleagues at St. Martin’s Press offered me the opportunity, for which I am extremely grateful.

My wife, Deborah Coonts, had a large creative input to the plot of the novel as it developed. Engineer and physicist Gilbert “Gil” Pascal read the manuscript and offered technical suggestions, as he has been kind enough to do many times in the past. A heartfelt Thank You to both of them.

This story is a work of fiction. As usual, the author is solely responsible for the plot, characters, incidents, and dialogue contained herein.