He whacked me again with the pistol and I passed out.
“He spoke to me today in Russian,” Basil Jarrett said to Linda Fiocchi as they ate dinner. They and Mikhail Goncharov were sitting at the small round dining table in the cabin by the Greenbrier eating trout fillets that Jarrett had cooked in a pan over an open fire. Goncharov held his knife and fork in the European manner and ate with gusto.
Goncharov’s glass was empty, so Jarrett poured him another glass of wine, then refilled his and Fiocchi’s glasses. That killed the bottle.
“He seems to have regained his appetite,” Fiocchi said wryly. Goncharov was working on his third fillet.
A few minutes later she said, “He never sleeps for more than an hour, then he wakes up talking and thrashing. Nightmares, I think. He wakes me up every time.”
“So how did a man who speaks only an eastern European language get out here in the heart of the Allegheny Mountains?”
“I don’t know.”
Jarrett helped himself to another fillet. He was hungry, too. “I’ve been thinking about it all afternoon. Your guess is as good as mine.”
Goncharov finished his fish and his wine, smiled at his hosts, then wrapped himself in his blanket and lay down near the stove. He went to sleep while Jarrett and Fiocchi sipped coffee. The first nightmare came fifteen minutes after he drifted off. The room he was in was afire, he was choking on smoke, men were shooting …
When I came to, the guy in the passenger seat was using a cell phone as we rolled along an interstate choked with traffic. I was leaning back against the seat, slumped toward the right door, with my hands cuffed in front of me. I took two deep breaths, waited a few seconds for my head to clear.
Nobody needed to tell me I was in real trouble. Obviously these guys had followed me from Dorsey’s to the airport. They must not have had enough men to follow both me and Grafton, so they had stayed on me. They were going to get Jake Grafton’s name and address from me one way or another, then they were going to kill me. I knew it and they knew it. They weren’t going to ask nicely or appeal to my better nature. Even if I managed to say nothing before they beat me senseless or shot me to death, I had Grafton’s telephone numbers written on my left hand in ink. They would find them eventually.
I thought about this, took one more deep breath, then reached forward, put my hands over the passenger’s head, and jerked backward with the cuffs against his neck while I rammed my head into the back of his. I used every ounce of strength I had … and heard his neck snap.
The driver glanced sideways at me, his eyes as big as saucers, the car swerving dangerously. I didn’t take the time to get my hands away from the dead man — I smashed the driver in the head with my left elbow as hard as I could.
The car caromed off a semi that was in the fast lane, then headed toward the right side of the highway. I managed to get my hands free of the corpse and got both hands around the driver’s neck as we shot off the highway, went up an embankment, and smashed head-on into a huge aluminum light pole. My death grip on the driver’s neck kept him from going through the windshield, because in the excitement he hadn’t put on his seat belt.
The seat back broke loose, and I wound up jammed against the dashboard, the driver half under me. I still had a good grip on his neck, so I used it. Strangled him like a chicken.
Every window in the car was broken; glass pebbles covered everything. In the silence that followed the crash I could hear imperious noises coming from the cell phone. It was on the floor. I could hear it but couldn’t see it. I jammed my hands down there, groped all over, and a miracle happened. I found it.
I said into it, “I’m coming to get you, motherfucker,” then snapped the mouthpiece shut and put it in my pocket. The car doors were too twisted to open, so I went out through a window and headed for the woods at a hell-bent trot. The thought that there was another car full of these dudes roaming around someplace had finally occurred to me. Mom always said I had a one-track mind.
Deep in the trees, well away from the lights of the cars whizzing by on the highway, I stopped to empty my stomach. When the spasms stopped, I leaned against a tree for a while. I couldn’t stop shaking. Too much adrenaline, I guess.
Personally, I think this James Bond gig is vastly overrated.
In the evening gloom under the trees I was temporarily safe. That calmed me down. When my stomach was under control and I had caught my breath, I managed to get a small pick set out of my pocket. It looked like a jackknife and contained three picks mounted as if they were blades and a torsion wrench that could be removed from the handle. I selected the pick I wanted by feel and inserted it like a shim under the teeth of the left cuff, jamming open the ratchet that held the cuff. Ten seconds later I had the right one off and tossed the cuffs away.
As the shock and adrenaline wore off, I realized I was oozing blood from the side of my face. Not from where the guy slugged me with the pistol, but from whacking my head on the dashboard when the car hit the pole.
I saw the flashing lights of a police car slow and stop by the wreck. Time to boogie. Ten minutes later I came out of the woods in a residential neighborhood. Walked between two houses and found myself on a paved street. Several cars passed me from time to time. An hour passed before I finally came to a convenience store with a pay telephone mounted on the outside wall of the building. I had been reading street signs, so I knew roughly where I was. I called Jake Grafton on his cell phone and told him what had happened in as few words as possible and gave him my location.
“Move down the street about fifty yards and wait for me,” he said.
I went inside the store, cleaned myself up in the men’s room, and bought a bottle of water. Fifty yards down the street was a hardware store with a van parked beside it. I sat down between the van and the building to wait. It was completely dark by then so I was difficult to see.
I was massaging my sore wrists six minutes later when a police cruiser drove by. The officer slowed to a crawl passing the convenience store, then turned right and went up the street into the subdivision I had walked out of a few minutes earlier.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
When Jake Grafton rolled up, I walked briskly to his car. As we left the area we passed another cop on the way in. I motormouthed, told Grafton everything I could think of about the death of the traffic cop and the two men I killed. When I ran down, he asked for the cell phone I had taken from the car. I passed it over and he pocketed it.
“They must have had a beacon in the car you were driving,” he mused. “When you went to the airport, they didn’t have enough people to keep you under constant observation. They must have been pulling in people while we put Dorsey on the plane.”
“If they had made you,” I remarked, “they would have left me dead beside that cop and be on their way to the beach house.”
“Or my apartment in Rosslyn,” Grafton muttered darkly.
I could tell by the way he gripped the wheel that he was really pissed. Which made me feel better. Honestly. I knew Jake Grarton. He had been the military’s go-to guy for a lot of years. I had seen him in action a couple of times myself, and let me tell you, he was the very first man I’d pick when we were choosing sides for anything, be it softball, hand grenades, or World War III.
I must have fallen asleep — in fact, I was exhausted — because I awoke with a start when the car stopped. We were sitting in front of his beach house.
“I want you to go inside and get something to eat, then get some sleep. I’ll keep an eye on things tonight.”
I opened the car door and lifted a leg out. It took effort. I was stiff and sore. “Aren’t you coming in?”
“In a little while. I have some telephone calls to make.”
