come back; if they did, I wanted that shooter. In our uncertain age, you must do unto others before they do it unto you.
Going back into that burning building was one of the dumber things I have done since I got out of diapers and stopped eating mud. The heat and smoke were damn near intolerable.
Miracle of miracles, I found the gun and suitcase and reversed course for the door. Got lost and started getting dizzy again from the smoke, then found the door just in time. I tossed the case into the yard and fell beside it on the grass.
While I gagged and coughed, she loaded the suitcase into the SUV.
Finally I got my breathing under control. I struggled to my feet and almost fell on my face. After thirty more seconds of hands on knees, I stood. She was bent over the dead man in the ghillie suit. She had pulled off his headpiece and had it in her hand.
“You know him?” I managed.
“No,” she said, and tossed his head rag on the ground. She turned back toward me.
“Name’s Carmellini, lady. Who the hell are you?”
“Kelly.” She said her last name, but I didn’t catch it. She was about medium height, had short dark hair and large brown eyes, and was in her late twenties, maybe a few years older. She might even have been pretty; it was hard to tell. Her face and clothes were covered with soot and grime. Behind us the fire was roaring. The heat was getting worse, and I found myself moving away from it. She did, too. Although she glanced at the fire from time to time, most of the time she kept her eyes on me.
“Well, Kel, this is how it is. Those assholes shot everyone they could find and set the goddamn house on fire. The worst of it is that they may come back. I suggest that we borrow this fine vehicle and get the hell outta here.”
I managed to stagger over to the SUV and look in. The key was still in the ignition. I picked up the MP-5 and put it in the rear seat, then got behind the wheel. Kelly got into the passenger seat.
We were sitting ducks if the killers elected to stay around to ambush us, but I was praying they hadn’t. Still, Fred’s pistol felt good in my lap. As the wipers smeared the water on the windshield, I got the SUV going and turned it around.
The guy in the ghillie suit looked like a small brush pile in the lawn.
I put the transmission in park, leaped out, and ran over to him. I turned his head and took a good look. Nope. Never saw him before. And he had an MP-5 lying beside him. I had forgotten about it. Hell, I could have left the other one in the house and just taken his.
His weapon sported a double banana clip in it that might come in handy later, so I jerked it out. I left the weapon.
“Where did you get your submachine gun?” she asked, her eyes on my face.
“The guy carrying it left it to me in his will.”
She glanced back at the house, then at the suitcase on the rear seat.
As we were going down the drive, I asked Kelly, “What happened back there?”
“They came this morning. I was upstairs, heard the shooting, went to the top of the stairs. There’s a place where you can look over the balcony into the main room downstairs, and I saw they had shot Mikhail. That’s when I grabbed the suitcase in his room and hid.”
“Who is Mikhail? What’s in the suitcase?”
She took a deep breath before she answered. “Mikhail Goncharov was the chief archivist for SVR, the successor to the KGB. He was like… their librarian, in charge of the central records depository. He defected last week. We had just started to debrief him. He spent the last twenty years making notes from the case files of the Soviet foreign intelligence service, and then Russia’s after the breakup. He had seven suitcases full of notes that he brought with him when we extracted him.”
She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “That’s the last one.”
He knew his wife was probably dead. He had heard the ripping of the silenced submachine guns — still loud — and knew precisely what it was. She had been in the kitchen eating when he came into the bathroom, just moments ago.
He held his hands to his ears, trying to stop the sounds. Oh, God, all his nightmares were becoming reality!
He was completely unarmed, knew nothing of unarmed combat, knew it would be suicide to leave the bathroom. As the staccato bursts sounded closer, he surveyed the small room. There was a chute for towels … he opened it, wormed his way into it. And fell.
He landed in a pile of towels and sheets on a hard concrete floor. The basement.
He looked around, desperate for a place to hide. Oversized laundry machines were mounted against the wall — two washers, two dryers.
He had always had the ability to think quickly and function flawlessly under pressure; he had been doing it for twenty-five years under the noses of the paranoid professionals of the KGB. He used that ability now. Without wasting a second, he opened a dryer and crawled in amid the sheets and pillowcases, then pulled the door shut after him.
With the house on fire, the man hiding in the washing machine in the basement decided he could wait no longer. He could smell the smoke, hear the roar of the fire, and knew if he waited much longer, he would never get out of the building.
Perhaps he had already waited too long…
The basement had not yet filled with smoke. There had to be an exit door… somewhere! He ran from room to room, fighting back the panic. There was a furnace in one room, several storerooms full of canned food and large freezers… and at the end of the hallway, a door.
It was locked with a massive dead bolt, one that could be opened from the inside. The man opened it, and found himself in a stairwell. He went up it slowly, trying to see, as the fire raged in the house above him.
No one in sight. Scraggly grass covered with autumn leaves for forty yards, then the forest.
The man ran toward the forest.
Safely behind a large tree, he paused and looked back at the house, which was engulfed in flames.
The blood pounded in his temples.
Biting his lip, trying to contain his emotions, he turned his back on the burning house and walked into the dark dripping forest.
CHAPTER FOUR
When we reached my car, I ran the SUV off the road and parked it. There was just room enough to turn my car around.
“Why did you park here?” Kelly asked as I put the suitcase full of paper into the trunk.
“There’s a guard shack up the hill. The agency sent me to do a week of guard detail, so I wanted to check in with the guys before I went up to the house. They were both dead. Shot with an automatic weapon, it looked like.” I didn’t think I’d need it, but I put the MP-5 on the ledge behind the coupe’s seats.
After I got the car turned around and we were headed for the hard road, she said, “Say your name again.”
“Tommy Carmellini. Why were you here?”
“I’m a Russian translator. All the notes are in Russian. That was the only language Goncharov spoke.”
“The suitcase contains his notes?”
“Yes.”
“So you saved them,” I mused, and glanced at her. She didn’t look like the toughest broad on the block, but she had backbone. Of course, one wondered how much. Those dudes with the camouflage and automatic weapons were supposed to kill everyone at the safe house and destroy all the notes. They were the A-team, but whose A- team?
