here?”
“Dell, Ms. Sonnenberg, I’d like you to meet Rear Admiral Jake Grafton.” Just polite as could be. “He has some things he wants to say.
They looked at Grafton, but I looked at them. Zooey’s hair was messy, she wasn’t wearing makeup, and she looked ten years older than her photos. Royston also had a case of bed head and needed a shave. I wished I had a camera in my pocket — a photo of them now would be worth a year’s pay.
“On Tuesday, two weeks and two days ago,” Jake said conversationally, “a gang of assassins attacked a CIA safe house in the Allegheny Mountains. They killed everyone there except for two people, Mikhail Goncharov”— he gestured toward the Russian
__”and a young woman, a CIA translator named Kelly Erlanger.
Ms. Erlanger is now deceased; her floating body was recovered from the Chesapeake the day before yesterday and has been tentatively identified. The killers would have probably made a clean sweep of the safe house if Tommy Carmellini, an officer in the CIA, hadn’t shown up to do a week of guard duty. He killed several of the assassins and rescued Ms. Erlanger and a suitcase full of notes that Mr. Goncharov, the retired archivist for the KGB, had spent twenty years painstakingly assembling. Mr. Goncharov escaped the burning house after the assassins were driven off. He isn’t sure how he did that, but he doesn’t remember seeing Carmellini or Erlanger. They might have already escaped, or he might have exited in another direction — it doesn’t matter.”
All eyes in the room were on him except mine. I was watching Royston, who was standing with his back to the bedroom door, and Sonnenberg, who was immediately behind him, yet slightly to one side. She had her hands jammed into the pockets of her robe. I wondered if she had a pistol in there. She and Royston looked very pale.
From the inside pocket of his sports coat, Jake Grafton removed a folder with a red cover. He had had it folded double in his pocket. Now he unfolded it and bent it the other way to minimize the damage the folding had caused.
This is the file the assassins wanted,” Grafton said simply, unfolding it and smoothing it. “Mr. Goncharov and his files were extracted from Russia by MI-5 after he visited a British consulate in
Lithuania and asked to defect. After a cursory debriefing, he came to the U.S. to be extensively debriefed by both British and CIA personnel. Unfortunately, the assassins showed up before that could be accomplished.”
“This is ridiculous,” Royston declared, and made a show of looking at his watch. Apparently he had decided to go on the attack. “Why are we discussing this in a New York hotel room in the middle of the night?”
“That will become apparent in just a few moments,” Grafton said smoothly. He opened the red folder and passed around the five or six sheets of handwritten notes it contained. I had seen hundred of pages like that, with the tiny, cramped, Cyrillic handwriting. “This is a file on an American turncoat with the code name of ‘Rollo.’ Don’t ask me why this code name was assigned — I don’t know.
“In any event, Rollo was an American who was recruited by the KGB while he was in college. He was politically progressive, very much so — so much so that he willingly went to work for the KGB to attempt to derail American military efforts in Vietnam. He joined antiwar movements, made speeches, wrote pamphlets, donated money to the antiwar movement — oh, yes, he had money. None of his own, you understand, because he came from a modest, lower-middle-class background, but that of his wife. He married an heiress to a large automobile dealership fortune while he was in college, an only child who received a very healthy allowance from her parents.”
“Cut to the chase,” Royston said impatiently. “I am embarrassed and humiliated that you people burst in here tonight, and I want an explanation damned quick. And by God, it had better be good.”
“It will be,” Jake said. “Let me meander on.” He collected the papers and returned them to the folder, then put the folder under his left armpit and crossed his arms over his chest. “Rollo’s duties for the KGB took him to California, the hotbed of the antiwar movement. There he continued to do everything within his power to further the KGB’s goal of helping the various groups who were against the war influence American foreign policy. While he was in California, he met a woman, a brilliant, dynamic, ambitious young woman who was passionately against the war. One thing led to another, and they became lovers.”
“I don’t think you can prove a solitary word of this,” Royston snarled.
Grafton smiled gently. “Oh, but I can. Then the woman became pregnant with Rollo’s child. The couple calmly assessed the situation. He had no money of his own, yet she did, and she loved him. They were both extremely ambitious. They realized that their experience at the cutting edge of the antiwar movement could provide them — or one of them — with a start in politics, an entry to a political career that could take them in the fullness of time to a very high place. If only she weren’t pregnant — remember, this was the early 1970s. And if only he hadn’t agreed to work for the KGB.
“Ah, yes, they had finally grasped the enormity of that foolish mistake, the truth of which he had shared with her. The KGB had a marvelous blackmail tool to force him to obey their orders all the days of his life. If he refused, they could ruin him at any time by revealing the Soviet connection.
‘So Rollo and his lover concocted a plan. The woman dropped out of sight before her pregnancy began to show. A few days after she delivered, Rollo and his wife adopted the infant. The adoption was highly irregular, but since everyone involved had plenty of money, certain regulations were bent or ignored in the interest of the unfortunate lady’s good name.
In any event, a month or so after the adoption, the new parents were in a fatal automobile accident on the Pacific Coast Highway. 1 he car went off a cliff into the ocean and was swept away. The wife’s parents were called and informed their daughter and her husband were dead. They rushed to California and took the baby home to Maryland.”
During Grafton’s explanation I had been keeping an eye on Dorsey while I worked on the cognac, which was damned good. She was having difficulty looking at anything except the red folder under the admiral’s arm. She was pale, licking her lips and swallowing repeatedly. I thought she might be on the verge of throwing up.
“()f course, Rollo wasn’t really dead. His wife was — he killed her.”
A gasp came from Dorsey. She got off the arm of her chair, walked over to Royston, and confronted him from a distance of six inches. “Say it isn’t so.”
“I have no idea why he’s telling us this tale,” Dell Royston said, and put a hand on his daughter’s shoulder. “Nor if there is a word of truth in it.”
She pushed his hand off, glanced back at Grafton. “Go on,” she ordered.
“Rollo had made preparations. He had already equipped himself with a false name and legend, complete with a birth certificate, driver’s license, and all the other sheets of paper that memorialize our past. He cut off the fashionable mop of hair, shaved, went back east and ditched the hippie clothes, gained a fast thirty pounds, and entered law school.
“The risk was that someone would recognize him as Michael O’Shea. It was not a very large risk — he had switched coasts, lifestyles, and social circles, and significantly altered his appearance. If anyone noticed the resemblance, they were probably aware that Michael O’Shea was dead and dismissed the fading resemblance as a coincidence. And so the years rolled by, everyone aged, and Michael O’Shea slipped further and further into the past in a world that rapidly changed. The risk of someone realizing he was O’Shea dropped toward zero. Only the KGB was interested in O’Shea, and it had lost him.
“In fact, O’Shea and his girlfriend had done such a good job of faking his death in the car wreck, the Soviets thought he was dead. The file on Rollo at KGB headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow was closed.” Jake gestured with the red file, then patted it against his leg.
“Michael O’Shea and his girlfriend believed they had pulled it off. Their ambition brought them together again. They resumed their journey toward that high, windswept place they had glimpsed when they were young. And they had the presidency in sight when Mikhail Goncharov defected with his treasure-trove of notes from the KGB archives. The worm of suspicion began to gnaw relentlessly on them. What if the KGB knew? What if evidence of treason and murder was contained in those files?” The file was in the admiral’s right hand; every eye in the room went to it.
“O’Shea and his lover decided they couldn’t live with the risk,” he said softly. “The notes must be destroyed. Anyone who had read them must die.”
Royston made a rude noise. “I have never heard such a vile slander in all of American politics!” he said belligerently. “You haven’t a shred of proof of any of these accusations.”
