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.
CHAPTER FIVE
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
