CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
As we motored over the mountains toward the Shenandoah Valley, Kelly Erlanger sat in back chattering in Russian with Mikhail Goncharov. She was getting a lot of monosyllable answers, so I knew it wasn’t going well, though in truth I had other things on my mind and wasn’t paying much attention.
Unless I missed my guess, the sheriff was going to be mighty unhappy after talking with Basil Jarrett. He had a violent death on his hands, a mutilated corpse spread all over a county road, and the guy who did the killing and mutilating was leaving the jurisdiction as fast as he could reasonably go. Jarrett would probably tell the sheriff it had been self-defense all the way — the shot-up rental car sort of spoke for itself — but the sheriff would undoubtedly want to question me. Especially when he heard my real name and ran it on the crime computer. When you’re famous, everyone wants to talk with you.
My CIA pass had been enough for Jarrett, so he acquiesced in my “borrowing” his vehicle, but in truth he didn’t have a lot of choice. I had just intentionally run over one man and whanged away at another with a pistol. I hadn’t threatened him, though. Still if the sheriff started talking about Jarrett being an accessory after the fact, he might remember that he had been intimidated.
That was the way I reasoned it out, so I was on the back roads in case the sheriff called his Virginia colleagues. I planned to drive county roads only, no highways or interstates, all the way to Delaware. I planned to avoid Washington by crossing the mouth of the Chesapeake at Norfolk. I figured we would be lucky to get to Grafton’s by daylight tomorrow.
Then there was the little matter of how the killers learned Goncharov was at Jarrett’s. Perhaps the FBI fingerprint inquiry had come to their attention, but if so, why didn’t the sheriff mention that someone had called, asking the whereabouts of Kelly’s lost uncle?
No, something was out of kilter here. The killers weren’t far behind us, and that fact would have to be explained.
I glanced over my shoulder at Kelly.
Naw. She wouldn’t have called someone, would she?
She had been in that burning house, trying to save that suitcase full of files. The man Dorsey shot in her foyer had been after her.
So what was going on?
Grafton?
Or Sarah Houston? He had called her, asked for her help. She had been the source of the FBI fingerprint tip — I was certain of that. Who else had she told?
Houston. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure she was the leak.
She had never liked me, and she was too slippery by a bunch. When she was Zelda Hudson I had seduced and drugged her. We took fingerprints and eye prints and used them to get access to a place she claimed she worked in London. But she had conned us. She didn’t work there; she wanted me to get into that computer and see the names of top American military officers, which I did.
Then she stole a submarine and tried to get rich in the chaos that followed. After she went to prison she never liked me much, even when I helped get her out. Women are so ungrateful.
And she was slippery. Too smart, untrustworthy, greedy, and a little light in the ethics department.
Of course, people said the same about me. Still, I concluded, Sarah was probably the one who dropped the dime on us.
Ten minutes later I changed my mind. Grafton kept her out of prison after the warhead hunt, and she owed him. Somewhere, I thought, in that hard little heart of hers was a smidgen of loyalty.
By the time we reached the Shenandoah, I decided I was over-thinking this. Sarah Houston was the logical suspect.
After a while I noticed that there was no more conversation going on in the back seat. Kelly was watching the road, so she saw me looking at her in the rearview mirror.
“He doesn’t remember anything,” she said flatly.
“You’re kidding.”
“He doesn’t even know his name.”
“Amnesia?” beems so.
I adjusted the rearview mirror so I could observe Goncharov. He ignored my scrutiny, or perhaps he was unaware of it.
Amnesia? Or faking memory loss? After all, he had only seen Kelly for a few hours a week ago, and he didn’t know me from Adam. Maybe faking memory loss was a last-ditch ploy when he had no other weapons left.
Yet I didn’t believe he was faking. I’d seen the expression on his face a few hours ago as he rubbed blood on his hands.
I smeared a man all over the road, we’re running from the law — again! — and all we had to show for it was a Russian with amnesia who couldn’t remember his own name!
It had been dark for several hours when we rolled into Richmond. We were hungry, and the SUV was low on gas. I found a gas station with a pay phone on the wall and fueled the vehicle. While Goncharov and Erlanger were making pit stops, I used the phone to call Jake Grafton.
The telephone rang and rang. That spooked me. What if they got to Jake and Callie? Killed them? I broke out into a sweat.
I hung up after fifteen rings and got my quarters back, then fed them into the box again and dialed his cell phone.
On the third ring, he answered. The relief hit me like a hammer, and I found myself leaning against the wall to remain upright.
I explained what had happened in West Virginia as quickly as I could, all the while looking around to ensure I wasn’t overheard. Summing up, I said, “Kelly says this guy can’t remember anything. He doesn’t even know his own name. He might be faking, of course, though I doubt it. You should have seen him with his hands in blood — holy damn, that was scary.”
Jake Grafton was silent for a long moment before he said, “He’s been through a lot.”
“Who hasn’t?” I replied bitterly. I was thoroughly sick of the whole damned mess. Probably shouldn’t have been thinking of myself, but I was. At that point I was ready to jump a banana boat to Central America and never come back.
“And Sarah Houston probably sold us out,” I added savagely. “Somebody did, sure as hell.”
“Somebody,” he echoed.
“You and Callie had better clear out of your house. Those bastards may come for you, same as they did Sal Pulzelli and Willie Varner. I saw Pulzelli after they finished butchering him. Believe me, that is one tough way to go.”
“Seventy-five cents, please.” The female operator cut in.
I fed in more quarters.
“Do you have enough money for a motel room?” Grafton asked.
“Yeah.”
“Get one room with two beds. I’ll meet you tomorrow at the house around noon.”
“Okay.”
“Watch yourself, Tommy. There’re some real heavy people involved with this. And there are more guys out there with guns.”
I knew that. No matter how many cockroaches you kill, you never get them all. Still, it was nice of him to express his concern. “Yes, sir,” I said, and hung up.
We wound up with a room in a motel near the Norfolk airport, just a couple miles from the causeway that led across the Chesapeake to eastern Maryland and Delaware. It was nearly midnight by the time we got inside and locked the door.
While Kelly was in the bathroom, I got my first chance to observe Mikhail Goncharov closely. He was wearing old clothes a size too large; Linda Fiocchi said she had gotten the duds from a neighbor near Durbin. He was unshaven, balding, perhaps thirty pounds overweight, yet looked reasonably healthy. He looked tense, tired, wary. On those occasions when he met my eyes he didn’t smile, didn’t even acknowledge me.
