“Yes,” he said, trying the English word.
“Yes.” She echoed him, still holding the money in her hand, offering it.
“Yes.” He reached for the cash, inspected the bills, then put them in his pocket.
Callie Grafton smiled and held out her hand.
He shook it. “Good-bye,” she said in English.
“Gude-by.” The archivist, Mikhail Goncharov, turned and walked away into the night, into the great city of New York, into the heart of America.
The second day after my operation, the hospital moved me from intensive care to a private room. I thumbed the television on and flipped channels until I found a baseball game. I was just drifting off to sleep when Jake Grafton came into the room and shut the door.
“Hey,” he said. “We almost waited too long to get you to a hospital. The doctors had some real nasty things to say to me.”
“It was worth it,” I said. “After all the shit I went through, I really wanted to see Reactor and Zooey take the fall.”
“Reactor?”
“Royston was a fast breeder.”
Jake Grafton nodded and lowered himself into a chair.
“That scene in Dorsey’s suite — I was really surprised when you trotted out the DNA results. I thought those tests were going to take a week.”
“That’s right. We still don’t have the results. Should have them tomorrow.”
It took a long ten seconds for me to get it, what with my delicate condition, generally honest nature, and low mental ability. “You mean you lied to them?”
“Yeah.”
“And that red folder. Was that really it?”
“Oh, no. That was just one we had at home. What the hell— none of those people could read Russian.”
” ‘Rollo’?”
He shrugged. “Goncharov couldn’t remember O’Shea’s code name, and I doubted if O’Shea ever knew it. I made that one up.”
I had to smile. Jake Grafton gave me a grin in return.
“How come I haven’t had every reporter in the free world in here today offering me millions for my story?”
‘The story the FBI gave the press was that Zooey and Royston were lovers. I don’t think the press understands who was in the suite or what was said. Perhaps that could have been explained better, but the FBI didn’t bother. Zooey has held three jailhouse press conferences, and the media is having a field day. The country is eating it up. Royston’s lawyer refuses to let his client say a word and refuses to say a word for him. The bail hearing isn’t until next week, and the prosecutors will oppose it, they say. Some opposition senators and representatives are promising an investigation. The president refuses to discuss the matter.”
“He’s a cold-hearted bastard,” I remarked, remembering his short conversation with Zooey. But perhaps that wasn’t fair — he knew her a lot better than 1 did.
“This election is going to become a circus,” Grafton predicted. “It’s going to make the California governor’s recall look like a tea party. Politics has become an afternoon soap opera. In an era when the country is deeply divided over complex issues without easy answers, perhaps that is inevitable.”
I took a deep breath and moved on to the most important question. “Am I going to be arrested?”
Grafton chuckled. “Apparently not. I am informed that you are still a valuable employee of the CIA.” “Long as I’m getting paid.”
We talked for a while about this and that, about Mikhail Gon-charov and Kelly Erlanger and Dorsey O’Shea and my former boss, Sal Pulzelli.
“Was Joe Billy really Stu Vine?” I asked.
“I think so,” Jake said. “The CIA holds little tidbits like that very tightly indeed.”
“How come he was assigned to my shop?” “I think the decision was made somewhere to bring him in-house. They just needed a place to stash him for a while. What the agency didn’t know was that he had agreed to do a job for Roys-ton. Do you remember? Pulzelli was told to send Dunn to be a guard at the safehouse. Since Dunn was scheduled to go to a training session, Pulzelli changed the assignment without telling anyone.”
“That was Sal… the horn administrator. He lived his life by the schedule and thought we should, too.”
We were still chatting when a nurse came in and told the admiral he would have to leave. “See you, Tommy,” he said.
“Thanks, Admiral, for everything.”
“Any time.”
“You and Callie going flying?”
“All over the country. We’ll call you when we get hack.”
Then he was gone. Just like that.
Maybe it was really over. God, I hoped so. If some wild man with murder in his eye came charging in here, I didn’t even have a pocketknife to defend myself with … if I could stay awake, which I couldn’t.
I drifted off while the nurse was working on my IVs.
The next day two guys from the agency and one from the FBI showed up with a cassette recorder. After reading me all the warnings, they wanted the whole story in my own words. I ran them out after half an hour. The next day they were back and we did two hours. Three hours the day after that, then for the next two days they asked questions, hundreds of them. I did the best I could, but when I got tired I told them to return tomorrow. They didn’t come the last day I was in the hospital. In midafternoon, after giving me a cursory exam and a new set of bandages, the hospital released me.
I was ready to go. I had channel surfed when the law wasn’t there and had had more than my fill of the made-for-TV political circus. I took a cab to Pennsylvania Station and then a train to Washington.
My apartment was a wreck. Someone had ransacked the place during my big adventure, maybe one of Royston’s thugs or perhaps Joe Billy Dunn.
It took courage to open the refrigerator. There was something green in there, and I didn’t think it was lettuce. I threw everything in a garbage bag and spent twenty minutes wrestling it down to the cans in the basement. I was weak as a cat. I wasn’t ready to tackle that mess the goons had made. I even thought about moving in with Willie … for ten whole seconds.
The agency guys had said my old Mercedes was parked in the lot, so I went looking for it. Found it finally, decorated with bird droppings, parked under a tree. It even started on the third attempt.
I called Jake Grafton on his cell.
“Hey, I’m out of the hospital. Where are you guys?”
“Wisconsin. Getting gas. We’ll be in Minnesota tonight. How are you doing, Tommy?”
“The agency gave me a couple weeks off, but I may never go back. I’m still thinking about taking a banana boat south.”
“It’s like that, huh? Why don’t you go over to my beach house, loaf there until you feel better?”
Now that was an idea! The beach.
“You wouldn’t mind?”
“Oh, heck no. Just make sure you buy your own beer.”
“Where did you hide the key?”
Grafton made a rude noise and hung up on me.
Well, why not? I put the Mercedes in gear and let ‘er rip. Stopped at a Wal-Mart on the Eastern Shore for the bare essentials — underwear, beer, swimsuit, and toothbrush.
At Grafton’s place I quickly settled into a routine. Every morning I walked all the way to the corner to buy a paper from the vending machine, read it as I poached a couple eggs and made toast, finished it over coffee, then walked to the beach and lay around on the towel frying in the sun.
Willie Varner had all his stitches out, he said, was getting laid again by his semiregular girlfriend, and was working in the lock shop. He gave me some grief over the phone, but not too much. Like me, he was very happy life was getting back to normal.
