“find out everything he can remember on American agents, American moles, anything American. Take your time, make notes. Talk as long as you can, take breaks, resume where you left off.”
Grafton paused. “Until we find that guilty secret, Goncharov’s life isn’t safe. Someone has risked everything — spent money, compromised himself, put himself in mortal peril — to destroy the files and kill the archivist. And he isn’t going to stop now.”
As he walked from the room he placed a hand in passing on Goncharov’s shoulder. The Russian glanced at his retreating back, and a shadow of a smile crossed his face.
Jake walked out to the screened-in porch and absentmindedly flipped though the stack of newspapers. Dell Royston had been the chief of staff until six months ago, when he became head of the president’s reelection efforts. He wouldn’t have been in that select circle that heard the glad tidings of Goncharov’s defection, would he?
Ah, here it was. A Sunday supplement piece on Dell Royston in the Post. He had recalled seeing it a month or so ago. Fortunately he and Callie had been at the beach that weekend.
He dropped into a stuffed chair to read the article again. It was about what he expected, a puff piece by a political admirer. Dell Royston was the son of two American expatriates who were living in Spain when they were killed in a highway accident. He had two kids, one in college and one just graduated from law school. Royston had attended Harvard Law after the war, married, worked for a few years at a firm in Washington where he had been bitten by the political bug, then left for the hinterland and allied himself with a rising political star who later became president.
Jake tossed the paper back on the pile and stretched. The sun was out and the wind smelled of the sea. Over the muted sounds oi traffic on the highway he could hear snatches of Russian coming from the kitchen.
He went inside, turned on the television in the living room, and flipped to the Weather Channel. He glanced at his watch — had he missed the weekly planner again? Ads, more ads, the Weather Channel seemed to have more advertisements than weather these days.
There was a box on the coffee table. He opened it, pawed through the aviation sectional charts it contained, glanced at a couple, then tossed them back in the box.
Back on the porch, he removed his new cell phone from his pocket and made a call. Callie and Goncharov were still in the kitchen talking an hour later when the telephone buzzed. “Grafton.”
“He insisted his files should not be copied, but of course they were. The Brits worked every night frantically duplicating everything while he and his wife slept.”
“You know what I want.”
“We’ll do our best.”
“As soon as possible.”
“Jake, it will take years to assess what’s in those files, which as you probably can guess are incomplete. The notes are cryptic, made hurriedly.”
“Do the best you can. Please. And please call me the moment you know anything.”
“So is it the president?”
“I don’t know. I think — well, it’s too early to say. I wish there were some way to read all those files.”
“There isn’t.”
“I suppose not.”
A sigh came over the phone. “The man Tommy shot was named Joliffe. He was a retired cop, just went through a nasty divorce and a bankruptcy.”
“Any possibility he was Stu Vine?”
“No. He was on the Washington police force when Stu Vine was reputed to be cleaning up the Middle East. Someone wired ten thousand dollars to his checking account day before yesterday from a bank in the Caymans.”
“An amateur.”
“Lucky for you.”
“We need some more guys around this place.”
“I’ve got people on the way. You had enough of retirement yet?”
“No. Callie and I are going flying. The summer weather pattern is setting in, and there is a lot of this country we haven’t seen.”
“Going to be aerial gypsies, eh?”
“Yes, sir. For a while, anyway.”
Grafton snapped the telephone shut. He was reading a newspaper when Callie came into the living room. “Let’s go shopping. We’ll take Mikhail along.”
An expedition should be safe enough, Jake decided. “Okay.”
The first place they stopped was the supermarket nearest the beach house. As they walked through the entrance, Jake heard Goncharov’s sharp intake of breath. He muttered something in Russian to Callie, who nodded. Jake pulled a shopping cart from the stack and followed along behind them.
A minute later Jake became aware that Callie wasn’t really shopping. She was wandering along, pointing out this and that to the Russian, who was handling everything. He picked up vegetables and sniffed them, squeezed fruit, inspected meat, opened the doors of coolers and poked his head inside, strolled up and down the aisles examining the pictures on the cans and the contents of various shoppers’ carts. He seemed intrigued by the selections the shoppers made.
Every few minutes he stopped to take a deep breath. “The food stores in Russia stink of rotting food,” he told Callie. “The vegetables were never fresh unless you bought them on the black market. We had to wash them very carefully. Some of the vegetables were grown on radioactive soil.”
A few minutes later, Goncharov asked, “Do all Americans buy their food in places like this?”
“There are supermarkets in every city and town in the nation,” she replied.
“Are the items expensive?”
“In relative terms, no. Food is not a huge expense for most people.”
“My wife used to shop for hours every day. When she found something we needed she bought all she could carry. Cakes in boxes, baked goods in bags… there was nothing like that.”
He said no more, merely watched as Callie filled the cart with the items she wanted and they joined a line at a checkout counter.
“The mall,” Callie murmured to Jake as he piloted the car from the parking lot.
“We need to get this food in the refrigerator,” he objected.
“We won’t stay long,” she replied.
He thought he knew why she wanted to go there. They entered through one of the anchor tenants, a Sears store.
Goncharov was visibly shaken as Callie led him through the usual crowd of shoppers of all ages. He looked at the clothes, the appliances, the tools — he was fascinated by the tools, picking them up, fingering them, then parting with them reluctantly. The display of televisions filling one wall, all showing the same channel, mesmerized the Russian. Callie led him on, out into the mall past shop after shop filled with toys, clothes, electronic gadgets, more clothes, posters, stuffed animals, sporting goods, jewelry, watches, and still more clothes.
Goncharov came to a stop, finally, at the top of an escalator where one could see the crowds and stores on both levels of the building.
“If the Russian people had seen this in 1991, they would have murdered all the Communists,” he said to Callie. “Everything they said about the West was a lie. Everything!”
On the way back to the car the archivist said, “I lived in the prison that they ruled, watched them all my life, and one day I realized that they were in it only for themselves.”
“Isn’t that true of most rulers?” she asked gently.
“Perhaps,” he admitted grudgingly. “I copied the files because I wanted the world to know what the Communists did. I wanted their victims to know, so they could never do it again. And it cost my wife her life. Was I a fool?”
American political conventions today are built around television prime time, probably for historical reasons since the modern primary system has eliminated the drama of who will win the presidential nomination. Still, the politicians arrange the convention so that speeches by bigwigs take place in the prime viewing hours of the evening, when presumably the political faithful are home glued to the boob tube, waiting to cheer every carefully honed
