When we went outside to get in the car, I looked around casually. Didn’t see a soul. And there were, Grafton said, six people out there right now armed to the teeth and burrowed in. Just goes to show …
We drove south along the beach to Ocean City. Grafton backed into a space in front of a convenience store so that I had a good view of the parking area and the street beyond. No one seemed to pay us any attention. I glanced at Grafton in the rearview mirror. He made four calls from the pay phone mounted on the exterior wall of the building, taking his time on all of them.
An older car eased to a stop near the gas pump and a couple of Mexicans got out. One went inside for a bit, then came back out and began pumping gas. The other checked the oil. On the end of the row where I sat, some kid was listening to rap on his car radio; he liked it loud, and he had every window in the car down. The Mexicans were finished with the gas and washing their windshield when two large boys on skateboards came flying down the sidewalk and across the parking area. They sat on the sidewalk sipping soft drinks from cans. Jake Grafton finished with his telephone calls and went into the store. He came out in a few minutes with a couple of fountain drinks.
When he got behind the wheel, he passed me one. As I sipped he said, “Your buddy, Willie Varner, was released from the hospital today. Going to be all right, the doctors said. Two of my friends are baby-sitting. He’ll be okay, I think.”
The images of Willie and Pulzelli slashed and bleeding flashed through my mind, made me feel like I was going to puke. I put the pop in the cup holder and took a very deep breath.
What causes amnesia, anyway? Do too many bad memories overload the system, cause circuit breakers to pop, drives to crash?
How close was I to a massive brain fart?
Between sips of Coke, Grafton briefed me. Sarah Houston was his spy, and she was a good one. She was monitoring the telephone numbers I had supplied, he said.
The people at the upper levels of the FBI and CIA believed that the Greenbrier safe house had been hit by Americans in the pay of the Russian foreign intelligence service. They were convinced the Russians had learned of Goncharov’s defection, Grafton told me, and had moved swiftly and violently to plug the leak and minimize the damage. Someone had sold the boys in the corner office the theory that I was one of the American traitors. At the insistence of the White House, the incident was being treated as a national security matter, which was the reason nothing had leaked to the press. The relations between the Western world and Russia were too important to be jeopardized by the shenanigans of intelligence professionals — you could almost close your eyes and hear the White House advisers arguing that point in the Oval Office.
“The people at the top apparently don’t know about Royston, about his involvement,” Grafton said, thinking as he talked. “Sarah says he has five people still working for him that he talks to via cell phone on a regular basis. If Kelly confirms that Goncharov is at the beach house, he may send them to hit it.”
I already knew that, and he knew I did, but this was Jake Grafton, thinking aloud. He had that habit. Then everyone knew precisely what was on his mind and could predict the directions in which he might go. I thought it a solid leadership technique. All the listener had to do was keep his mouth shut. That’s what I was thinking when he asked conversationally, without a change of tone, “What do you want to do about Dell Royston?”
I glanced at him, wondered what was going through his mind.
“Cut his nuts off and feed ‘em to him,” I replied curtly.
Grafton drummed a few licks on the steering wheel with his fingers. “He’s going to be in New York next week for the convention. Could you bug the hotel where he’ll be staying?”
Apparently he was fishing to see if I still wanted to do the warrior thing. Well, I was good for a little while longer, I told myself, which was a real whopper. I never squander my best lies on other people — I tell them to myself.
“Sure,” I said aloud. We discussed it, the equipment I’d need, when and where I could get it, and when the best time would be to do the jobs.
“Hang loose,” he said, and got out of the vehicle to make some more telephone calls.
The dude who liked rap got his ride under way. In the relative silence that followed his departure I could hear a baseball game playing on the convenience store’s sound system.
Right then I would have traded a couple months’ pay to be sitting in a ballpark watching a game, smack in the middle of the American summer with nothing on my mind but the possibility of another beer. Oh well, a man can dream.
Mikhail Goncharov awoke from a nightmare bathed in sweat. He had been in one of the cells in the Lubyanka being interrogated by five experts. They wanted him to confess to something, though now, awake, he couldn’t remember exactly what it was. He lay in bed thinking about the dream as it slowly faded.
Finally he began to take notice of his surroundings. Nothing seemed familiar.
Then he remembered the lady who fixed the sandwiches and brought him to this room.
The window was open — he could feel a warm breeze. Hear traffic noises. And.. something rhythmical, a deep sound. He listened intently. The steady sound that repeated was.. surf! He was near the ocean. He could hear surf pounding on a beach.
Galvanized, he rose from the bed, realized he was not wearing shoes, and automatically searched until he found them, then put them on.
In the room downstairs he found the woman. She was wearing shorts and a blouse. “I can hear surf. Where is the beach?”
“Come,” she said. “We will go together.”
Before he saw the ocean, he could smell it, salty and clean. Crossing the dune on the boardwalk, he saw the sun glinting on the swells. He stopped and stared as the warm sea wind played with his shirt and trousers. Before him was the beach. Beyond it the great blue ocean stretched away until it met the sky.
The woman waited patiently, watching him. He was so absorbed in the scene before him that he was unaware of her scrutiny.
There had once been an ocean and a beach… and another woman. He could see her face, remember how her hand felt, how the cold water felt as it swirled about his feet. Her name — it was right there on the edge of his memory, just out of reach, but her face was plain, her smile, her eyes staring at him, her hand on his cheek.
The memory was there, but the specifics wouldn’t come. It was in the past, but not too long ago; he sensed that. And it was not here. Not this beach.
With a jolt he again became aware of the presence of the woman beside him. She was kind — he could see that. Very kind, with warm, intelligent eyes.
Despite the wind, the sun was warm on his skin. He took a deep breath, let the smell of the sea fill his lungs and head.
“Who—?”
He had to clear his throat, then he began again. “Who am I?”
At a kiosk in an Ocean City mall, I bought two cell phones and signed up for service while Jake Grafton watched from a bench fifty feet away. New phones on an account that couldn’t be tied to me or Grafton would allow us to communicate with each other and Sarah with more confidence. Sarah thought she had a handle on the telephones the CIA and FBI were monitoring, but…
I used my Zack Winston driver’s license as my ID and paid cash, gave the fake address on the driver’s license as the address for the account. They would close the account eventually, but I had a couple months to use the phones before that happened. “So you live in Virginia?” the girl manning the kiosk asked. She was a trim brunette with a great smile.
“Uh-huh.”
“Get down this way often?”
“Now and then.”
I got the impression that I could get a date with her if I worked at it a while. She whacked away on her computer for a minute, then put the telephones in a bag and handed them to me.
“You’re good to go,” she said, flashing that smile again. “You should charge the phones overnight before you use them. The batteries will last longer.”
I liked the way she grinned and brushed the hair back from her forehead. She didn’t look a bit like Kelly Erlanger. Or Dorsey O’Shea, come to think of it. I gave her my absolute best smile and strolled away with my
