Liars & Thieves (5 page)

“The suitcase,” she shrieked, pointing back toward the closet.

“We ain’t got time for your fuckin’ clothes. The goddamn house is burning—“

“That’s what they came for! That’s what they wanted!”

I jerked the suitcase from the closet—it must have weighed fifty pounds—and pushed it at her.

“Get down the stairs and out of the house, right now, while I check to see if anyone else is alive up here.”

She disappeared into the smoke dragging the suitcase—it was just a bit too heavy to carry.

I ran from room to room, looking in closets and under beds, coughing and shouting. I didn’t find anyone; not that I searched everywhere, but I just ran out of time. The smoke was bad and getting worse. I could feel the heat in the floor and walls. I charged for the stairs hoping that I hadn’t waited too long. The staircase was like a chimney, funneling smoke and heat to the second and third floors. I held my breath and went down blind.

At the bottom of the stairs I tripped on something and went sprawling. She had collapsed coming down the stairs and lay in a heap beside the suitcase.

The fire was raging by then and the heat was unbelievable, but there was a little clear area near the floor, maybe two feet high. I crawled over to her, grabbed her by the arm, and began pulling. I couldn’t manage both girl and gun, so I abandoned the weapon.

When we reached the porch I half carried, half dragged her down the steps into the yard.

Then I lost my footing and dropped her. I went to my knees, gagging and retching and trying desperately to get some air. I stayed down until my head cleared somewhat. She was breathing shallowly. I put her on the grass, turned her over on her chest, and began pushing and pulling on her arms. After about thirty seconds of that she gagged, then gasped, “The suitcase! For Christ’s sake, get the suitcase!”

Okay, she was going to make it.

Figuring she knew more than I did, I went spider-walking back into the house for the damned suitcase and the MP-5. I wanted the gun more than the suitcase. The guys who iced these people and set the house afire might come back; if they did, I wanted that shooter. In our uncertain age, you must do unto others before they do it unto you.

Going back into that burning building was one of the dumber things I have done since I got out of diapers and stopped eating mud. The heat and smoke were damn near intolerable.

Miracle of miracles, I found the gun and suitcase and reversed course for the door. Got lost and started getting dizzy again from the smoke, then found the door just in time. I tossed the case into the yard and fell beside it on the grass.

While I gagged and coughed, she loaded the suitcase into the SUV.

Finally I got my breathing under control. I struggled to my feet and almost fell on my face. After thirty more seconds of hands on knees, I stood. She was bent over the dead man in the ghillie suit. She had pulled off his headpiece and had it in her hand.

“You know him?” I managed.

“No,” she said, and tossed his head rag on the ground. She turned back toward me.

“Name’s Carmellini, lady. Who the hell are you?”

“Kelly.” She said her last name, but I didn’t catch it. She was about medium height, had short dark hair and large brown eyes, and was in her late twenties, maybe a few years older. She might even have been pretty; it was hard to tell. Her face and clothes were covered with soot and grime. Behind us the fire was roaring. The heat was getting worse, and I found myself moving away from it. She did, too. Although she glanced at the fire from time to time, most of the time she kept her eyes on me.

“Well, Kel, this is how it is. Those assholes shot everyone they could find and set the goddamn house on fire. The worst of it is that they may come back. I suggest that we borrow this fine vehicle and get the hell outta here.”

I managed to stagger over to the SUV and look in. The key was still in the ignition. I picked up the MP-5 and put it in the rear seat, then got behind the wheel. Kelly got into the passenger seat.

We were sitting ducks if the killers elected to stay around to ambush us, but I was praying they hadn’t. Still, Fred’s pistol felt good in my lap. As the wipers smeared the water on the windshield, I got the SUV going and turned it around.

The guy in the ghillie suit looked like a small brush pile in the lawn.

I put the transmission in park, leaped out, and ran over to him. I turned his head and took a good look. Nope. Never saw him before. And he had an MP-5 lying beside him. I had forgotten about it. Hell, I could have left the other one in the house and just taken his.

His weapon sported a double banana clip in it that might come in handy later, so I jerked it out. I left the weapon.

“Where did you get your submachine gun?” she asked, her eyes on my face.

“The guy carrying it left it to me in his will.”

She glanced back at the house, then at the suitcase on the rear seat.

As we were going down the drive, I asked Kelly, “What happened back there?”

“They came this morning. I was upstairs, heard the shooting, went to the top of the stairs. There’s a place where you can look over the balcony into the main room downstairs, and I saw they had shot Mikhail. That’s when I grabbed the suitcase in his room and hid.”

“Who is Mikhail? What’s in the suitcase?”

She took a deep breath before she answered. “Mikhail Goncharov was the chief archivist for SVR, the successor to the KGB. He was like . . . their librarian, in charge of the central records depository. He defected last week. We had just started to debrief him. He spent the last twenty years making notes from the case files of the Soviet foreign intelligence service, and then Russia’s after the breakup. He had seven suitcases full of notes that he brought with him when we extracted him.”

She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “That’s the last one.”

***

He knew his wife was probably dead. He had heard the ripping of the silenced submachine guns—still loud —and knew precisely what it was. She had been in the kitchen eating when he came into the bathroom, just moments ago.

He held his hands to his ears, trying to stop the sounds. Oh, God, all his nightmares were becoming reality!

He was completely unarmed, knew nothing of unarmed combat, knew it would be suicide to leave the bathroom. As the staccato bursts sounded closer, he surveyed the small room. There was a chute for towels … he opened it, wormed his way into it. And fell.

He landed in a pile of towels and sheets on a hard concrete floor. The basement.

He looked around, desperate for a place to hide. Oversized laundry machines were mounted against the wall—two washers, two dryers.

He had always had the ability to think quickly and function flawlessly under pressure; he had been doing it for twenty-five years under the noses of the paranoid professionals of the KGB. He used that ability now. Without wasting a second, he opened a dryer and crawled in amid the sheets and pillowcases, then pulled the door shut after him.

With the house on fire, the man hiding in the washing machine in the basement decided he could wait no longer. He could smell the smoke, hear the roar of the fire, and knew if he waited much longer, he would never get out of the building.

Perhaps he had already waited too long . . .

The basement had not yet filled with smoke. There had to be an exit door . . . somewhere! He ran from room to room, fighting back the panic. There was a furnace in one room, several storerooms full of canned food and large freezers . . . and at the end of the hallway, a door.

It was locked with a massive dead bolt, one that could be opened from the inside. The man opened it, and found himself in a stairwell. He went up it slowly, trying to see, as the fire raged in the house above him.

No one in sight. Scraggly grass covered with autumn leaves for forty yards, then the forest.

The man ran toward the forest.

Safely behind a large tree, he paused and looked back at the house, which was engulfed in flames.

The blood pounded in his temples.

Biting his lip, trying to contain his emotions, he turned his back on the burning house and walked into the dark dripping forest.

When we reached my car, I ran the SUV off the road and parked it. There was just room enough to turn my car around.

“Why did you park here?” Kelly asked as I put the suitcase full of paper into the trunk.

“There’s a guard shack up the hill. The agency sent me to do a week of guard detail, so I wanted to check in with the guys before I went up to the house. They were both dead. Shot with an automatic weapon, it looked like.” I didn’t think I’d need it, but I put the MP-5 on the ledge behind the coupe’s seats.

After I got the car turned around and we were headed for the hard road, she said, “Say your name again.”

“Tommy Carmellini. Why were you here?”

“I’m a Russian translator. All the notes are in Russian. That was the only language Goncharov spoke.”

“The suitcase contains his notes?”

“Yes.”

“So you saved them,” I mused, and glanced at her. She didn’t look like the toughest broad on the block, but she had backbone. Of course, one wondered how much. Those dudes with the camouflage and automatic weapons were supposed to kill everyone at the safe house and destroy all the notes. They were the A-team, but whose A-team?

Someone was going to be very peeved when he heard that there were two survivors. I glanced at her, wondered if that thought had occurred to her yet.

We crossed the bridge and took the graveled road across the meadow and airstrip and past the hangar. I felt naked. We had just turned onto the paved road when the first fire truck rounded the curve from Bartow. Fortunately no one in the truck could have seen our car come across the meadow … I hoped. As the truck went by, I slowed and looked back into the low hills. Although the rain was still coming down steadily, the ceiling had lifted enough so that I could see a column of smoke rising above the trees and merging with the clouds.

I eased the clutch out and got the car in motion again. Three cars with small flashing lights on the roofs, driven by volunteer firemen probably, went racing by us and turned into the gravel road, following the fire truck. They roared across the meadow, over the bridge, and disappeared up the road into the forest.

“I missed your last name, Kelly. What did you say it was?”

“Erlanger.”

“So what’s in the notes?”

“Everything. Goncharov summarized or copied verbatim every KGB file he thought significant during the twenty-some years that he was the head archivist, then smuggled the notes out of the building every evening when he went home. The collection filled seven suitcases—a mountain of material. We were just starting to dig into it. I’m guessing, but I would say roughly half the material deals with Soviet internal politics. The foreign intel files I saw were about recruiting and running agents—mercenary and ideological—illegal residents, assassinations, disinformation, payoffs, subversion of foreign regimes, support for indigenous Communists around the globe, running arms … you name it. Think of every dirty thing the KGB did before the collapse of Communism and every dirty thing it did since then, and you got it.”

“How far back do the files go?”

“Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Stalin, the purges .. . Goncharov had access to every file in the archives until he retired four years ago. He was fascinated by the way the party used the NKVD and KGB to eliminate opposition and maintain its hold on power, then lied about it. His superiors or high-placed members of the government periodically ordered files destroyed—getting rid of the evidence—so he copied them before they went to the shredder and furnace.”

We came to the bridge at Bartow and turned right, toward Staunton and the Shenandoah, which was seventy-five miles and seven mountains away. As we accelerated away from the intersection, I glanced in the rearview mirror. A large SUV coming from the north made the turn and fell into trail behind us. It wasn’t the one I had parked when we transferred to this car—it had come from the wrong direction, and besides, I had the keys to that one in my pocket.

“Those bastards,” Kelly Erlanger said hoarsely. “Goncharov and the others didn’t have a chance. They were slaughtered like steers. Murdered. Gunned down.”

I glanced at her. Tears were leaking from her eyes. She was staring straight ahead at nothing at all, remembering …

The SUV was still in trail, back there eight or ten car lengths. I was making fifty-five along the narrow, straight, wet highway, charging up the valley. A plume of road spray rose behind me. I slowed to fifty. The SUV stayed the same distance behind.

Shit!

“His wife defected with him. I don’t know what happened to her.”

“There were two dead women in the kitchen,” I said. “One of them was in her late fifties maybe. Perhaps early sixties, gray hair, sorta plump. The other was maybe thirty, tall.”

“Bronislava Goncharova was the older one. She didn’t speak any English. The tall woman was Natasha Romerstein. She was a translator, too—she and I worked together at the agency. Her parents were Ukranian; she was born in America. She had a two-year-old son.”

We were approaching a Y intersection. The road to the right was the one I had always driven to and from this valley—it was the only one I knew—so I took it. The SUV followed me.

We were still in a narrow valley. The stream meandered back and forth, but the road ran straight for almost a mile, crossing the stream several times on small bridges. Then it went into a long sweeping left turn and continued for another mile. Only at the head of the valley did the road began to wind and twist as it climbed Allegheny Mountain. I checked to see that Kelly had her seat belt on. She didn’t.

“Put the belt on,” I said over the growl of the engine.

She snapped herself in, then looked behind us. The SUV was not falling back. I kept the car at fifty.

“They’ve been behind us since Bartow, keeping their distance,” I told her. “If we can’t outrun them going up the mountain, this is going to get messy. Can you shoot an MP-5?”