Liars & Thieves (6 page)

“No.”

She pulled a cell phone from her pocket, looked at it, then announced, “No service.”

“Who you gonna call?” I asked.

“Why .. . the agency! My supervisor.”

“Those guys weren’t Russians. They were Americans. I listened to them talk.”

“What are you saying?”

“Don’t jump to conclusions. Yeah, the Russians may have hired some Americans to assault that house to kill Goncharov and burn the notes, but how did they know he was there?”

While she was mulling that over, we reached the head of the valley and started climbing the mountain. I downshifted and put the hammer down. Although the road was wet, the Mercedes had good rubber.

The SUV wasn’t as agile in the curves as the coupe. They must have had a hell of a mill under the hood, because even with my maneuvering advantage the big SUV hung in there. I felt my back end start to break loose on one of the horseshoe turns halfway up … I managed to save it and kept the throttle on the floor as the SUV slid into the berm and gravel flew. The driver swiftly recovered without losing much momentum and stayed on my tail.

Right, left, higher and higher on the mountain, working the clutch and stick, I kept the Mercedes as near the adhesion limit as I could. Kelly used both hands to brace herself.

We didn’t pass a single car climbing the mountain. We topped the ridge—blew by the sign that read radar detectors were illegal in Virginia—and went into a long, descending sweeper down the eastern slope. I let the Mercedes accelerate . .. past sixty, seventy . . . the distance was opening … then braked hard for a blind right-hand turn.

Too fast. . . the rear end broke loose and we slid across the road, headed for the berm and the edge. Of course, on that curve the state had not gotten around to putting up a guardrail. The edge was right there, like the Grand Canyon. The added friction of the rocks saved us.

With gravel flying, I threw the car back on the road and missed a shift, almost stalled the engine, then was accelerating hard again.

In the rearview mirror I got a glimpse of the SUV sliding across the berm and going over the edge.

I slammed on the brakes.

“Why are we stopping?” Kelly shouted as the deceleration forces threw her against her shoulder belt.

“They went off the road, over the edge,” I told her as the Benz slid to a halt and I slammed it into reverse. “This is our chance to find out who those dudes are and who the hell they’re working for.”

I backed up at full throttle, the engine howling, then braked to a stop on the berm where they went over. I popped the shifter into neutral and jammed the parking brake on, then bailed out with Fred’s automatic in my right hand.

No one was moving in the SUV, which was impaled on a large tree trunk thirty feet down the slope. It had slammed into the trunk of the tree just behind the driver’s door, and the tree had arrested it. The glass was gone; the vehicle was badly twisted from impact. I could see two heads—the driver’s and passenger’s—and they weren’t moving.

I slid down the mud and gravel of the slope, struggling to keep my feet under me, until I reached the wreck.

Three men were in the vehicle. The passenger and the man on the back seat were dressed in camo pants and shirts, while the man behind the wheel was wearing jeans and a pullover. At first glance, it looked as if the air bags had saved their asses. Not the guy in back, however. His neck was obviously broken. His corpse was partially on the floor, partially on the seat.

I felt the passenger’s carotid artery. He was still alive. And out cold. He had a snub-nose .38 in a holster on his ankle and an MP-5 between his legs. A two-way radio lay at his feet. One of his legs was broken—apparently he fractured it on the weapon during the crash.

I reached across and felt the driver’s artery. No pulse.

I was struggling to get the passenger door open when I heard the Mercedes engine wind up. I started up the muddy slope, took two steps, and quit. Standing there in the rain, ankle deep in mud, leaves, and roadside trash, I listened to my Mercedes going down the mountain until the sound completely faded.

What a hell of a day this turned out to be.

I hadn’t been smart enough to pull the keys from the ignition, so ol’ Kelly what’s-her-name made like a jackrabbit, leaving me with two corpses and a comatose killer ready for intensive care. It was enough to piss off the pope.

A common, coarse word seemed to fit the situation, so I said it aloud, then repeated it because I liked the sound of it.

The injured man’s seat-belt buckle was jammed; I had to cut the belt with my pocket knife. I dragged him from the passenger seat and laid him out in the mud. I wasn’t too careful about how I handled him. If he croaked, so be it.

He didn’t even twitch. No wallet, naturally. Not even a car key. I unstrapped his ankle holster and put it on.

There was a Virginia car registration certificate and proof of insurance card in the glove box of the vehicle, which I pocketed.

The driver had a wallet. I had a devil of a time getting it out of his pocket due to the way his corpse was jammed into the twisted seat. When I succeeded, I looked through it, found the driver’s license, and extracted it. Didn’t recognize the name. Address was Burke, Virginia. I put it in my pocket. Looked to see what else he had in there. Some credit cards and an AAA card, all in the name that appeared on the driver’s license. Maybe that was his real name. Then again . . .

I heard a car or pickup coming, paused, and listened. It was climbing the mountain and didn’t slacken its pace. Went around the curve above me and continued upward.

The corpse in the back with the broken neck was jammed down between the seats, and I wasn’t in the mood to try to get him out of there. I doubted if he had any more ID on him than the man lying in the mud.

I was about to give up when I saw a bulge in the driver’s shirt pocket. Jackpot! A cell phone. I pocketed it and the two-way radio.

The rest of it I left—corpses, weapons, ammo, and the comatose dude lying in the mud in the rain.

Kelly hadn’t been gone three minutes when I finished and climbed the bank back up to the road. I was a royal mess, mud from the knees down, soot and fire filth from the knees up. And I was wet, tired, and pissed off.

As I inspected the skid marks in the gravel, I put Fred’s pistol behind my belt in the small of my back and made sure my jacket covered it. Someone would see those skid marks and investigate, sooner or later.

I set off down the mountain, plodding along. Two more vehicles passed, both descending the grade. The rain continued to fall.

Twenty minutes after I left the wreck, when I was almost at the bottom of the grade, a farmer in an old pickup stopped and waited for me to catch up. He was white-haired, wearing well-worn overalls and a John Deere cap. And he was dry.

“You look like you could use a ride,” he said when I opened the door.

“Car slid off the road back up the mountain,” I told him. “I’m a real mess. If you don’t mind, I’ll ride in back.”

“Hell, son, you won’t hurt this truck. It’s about as old as you are. Hop in and I’ll give you a ride to Staunton.”

“Thanks,” I said gratefully. I climbed in and pulled the door shut.

***

He walked through the dripping forest, around rotting logs and broken limbs, over boulders and piles of dirt where trees had been uprooted by some ancient wind. The going was hard in the wet, slippery leaves on the forest floor, last autumn’s rotting collection. And he wasn’t wearing enough clothes.

His thoughts were all jumbled up, memories that flashed through his mind in no particular order. His wife’s face haunted him.

She was dead —he was sure of it.

Murdered.

Like his mother and father. His very first memories as a toddler were of the night the NKVD came for them, took them away. He remembered the cold . . . and his mother sobbing, hysterically denying something. He had been but a tot. Lord, that was a long time ago . . . over sixty years. Stalin had purged the military and the party of his enemies, who were executed or sent to slave labor camps.

He didn’t know what happened to his parents. They had disappeared into the great vastness of Soviet Russia and were never seen or heard from again . . . leaving only ghosts to haunt the thoughts of those who remembered them.

Tears ran down his face as he worked his way aimlessly through the forest, scrambling over slick, rotting logs, avoiding thickets and steep places, going more or less in one direction . . . perhaps.

In truth, he no longer cared.

All his life he had known they would come for him eventually. Just as they came for his parents.

He remembered sitting on the floor of the apartment crying after they took his parents. How long he had waited there for his parents to return he couldn’t recall —he had been too small and it happened too long ago. Years later the woman who took him in said that he had been without food or water for three days when she found him, huddled on the floor, nearly dead of dehydration and hypothermia. She had picked him up, wrapped him in a blanket, and taken him home with her . . . at the risk of her own life.

Evil maims or kills, and good saves us. Sometimes. When he became a man he often contemplated the contrast between good and evil. The world was full of people who didn’t believe in moral absolutes, people who could rationalize whatever course of action they wished to pursue, usually one that benefited them. They cheated, stole, lied, temporized, apologized, explained, and assured themselves and each other that everyone did it. He wasn’t one of those people.

It wasn’t that he was better than everyone else. He was no stronger or weaker than most. He, too, suffered the ravages of regret, the torture of remorse. Yet he refused to surrender to evil, even for a moment, even to preserve his life. He had lived in intimate proximity to it all his life and thought he knew all its faces. He had never surrendered, had fought it, tried never to give in to the constant fear, the terror of being discovered, the panic as he contemplated their revenge.

His wife understood. She had stood beside him, shared the risks, and . . . paid with her life.

He walked on through the forest, wet, shivering, remembering . . .

***

The old man talked all the way to Staunton, and I tried to hold up my end of the conversation, with dismal results. 1 had too much on my mind to pay much attention to the details of his life story and that of his children, of whom he had five or six … I got a little confused there in the middle.

He dropped me at the Wal-Mart in Staunton, and I shook his hand gratefully. An offer of money might have insulted him, so I didn’t risk it.

After he drove off I went into the store and bought a new outfit from the skin out, then went to the men’s room and changed into it. I dumped my wet, muddy clothes in the trash. At the snack bar I downed two hot dogs and two cups of hot, foul, black coffee while I sat thinking about things.

Mikhail Goncharov … the archivist for the KGB, a man who copied top secret files, lots of them, seven suitcases worth. Secrets from the cold war, buried where no one would ever see them, were now about to be exposed to the light of day. I was sure that many people all over the world would find the prospect horrifying, if they only knew. Obviously someone did know and was extremely unhappy.

I wondered who that someone was. Some people in the CIA knew of the Goncharov collection, probably some folks in British intelligence. And, perhaps, in Russia.

It seemed improbable to me that the Russians figured out where the agency was going to debrief their note-taking ex-archivist and managed to arrange a hit squad in less than a week. More likely, I thought, someone at the agency told someone … somewhere … something. The location perhaps, and obviously the need for haste.

Whoever wanted Goncharov silenced and the files destroyed had almost succeeded, at a terrible cost. That person wouldn’t quit now, not when he learned that some of the files had escaped destruction—and that one of the people who had read the files was still very much alive.

I left a tip for the waitress and strolled out of Wal-Mart. A bank of pay phones stood near the front entrance. I went back in the store and got ten dollars’ worth of quarters, then returned to the phones. Pulzelli was still at the office.

“Tommy Carmellini, Sal. I have some bad—“

His voice dropped to a hiss. “Where are you, Carmellini? The FBI has been here with a search warrant and gone through your desk.”

“My desk?”

“They want you for questioning. Someone took out the Greenbrier safe house this morning, killed everyone there. They think you may have been involved.”

Jesus H. Christ!” I exclaimed, even though this was Pulzelli and he hated coarse language. “You just told me to go up there yesterday. Do they think I went off my nut or what?”

“They want to ask you some questions. Tell them everything and they’ll go away. Where are you?”

“You answer a question for me. When you were told to send someone to Greenbrier for guard duty, did they ask for me specifically, or did you just choose me?”

“I chose you. The FBI knows that. Now tell me where you are.”

“Sal, you’ve always played straight with me, so I’m going to level with you. The killers were there when I got there, and one of the translators escaped them. From what she told me, it appears that there has been a leak at the agency. These killers may even have been agency employees—I don’t know yet.”

“Talk to the FBI.”

“That’s probably good advice, but now I know too much. If there are some rotten apples at the agency, they could set me up to take this fall and there wouldn’t be much I could do about it. Watch your back, Sal, and stay out of the line of fire.”

I severed the connection before he could reply.

The rain outside had slackened to a gentle drizzle, almost a mist. Standing in the middle of the Wal-Mart parking lot with the cell phone in my hand, I got a little damp, but not wet. I stood there soaking up the liquid sunshine while I wondered how the FBI got onto me so quickly.