“Who the hell are you?” Jarrett asked.
That’s when I violated every security reg the agency had. “Name’s Tommy Carmellini, Mr. Jarrett. I’m with the CIA.” I pulled my Langley building pass from my hip pocket and handed it to him. My honest phiz and real name were encased in plastic.
Jarrett examined the plastic and matched the picture to my face. As he returned the pass he tittered nervously. “A spy for the CIA!”
“I work for the agency, but I am not a spy. Get a grip, Mr. Jarrett.”
He rubbed his face with both hands.
I nodded toward the car. “That is Mikhail Goncharov. He’s a Russian defector, used to work for the KGB.”
Jarrett gestured at the corpse. The Russian was squatting beside the body, examining the face. “Who’s he?”
“Some son of a bitch who came here to kill Goncharov and the rest of us. Tough shit for him. Come on, let’s go up to the house.”
Goncharov had managed to get his hands covered with blood. He stared at the blood, rubbed his fingers together to feel it, smelled it.
“Jesus Christ,” Jarrett said. “This man is coming apart.”
Jarrett took off his shirt, and we cleaned up Goncharov as best we could, then put him in the back seat of the car.
“You want to wait here at the cabin while I go get the sheriff?” Jarrett asked me as he inspected his bloody shirt.
“No. I’ve got to collect the translator and get the hell out of here with Goncharov before more of these guys come back. I strongly suggest you and Fiocchi do the same.”
“What about your car?”
I looked at the heap. No windshield and a pretty good dent in the grill and hood. Thank heaven Grafton was on the rental agreement — he was going to have to explain this one to the rental agency. I wondered if he had paid extra for the liability waiver.
“We’re going to have to trade cars, Mr. Jarrett. My agency will reimburse you for any loss. You drive this heap into town and call the sheriff. Maybe he can get you a ride home.”
That is what we did. Thirty minutes later Kelly Erlanger, Goncharov, and I were crossing Allegheny Mountain, heading east. I kept the MP-5.
We left the squashed guy lying in the road beside the river.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
As we motored over the mountains toward the Shenandoah Valley, Kelly Erlanger sat in back chattering in Russian with Mikhail Goncharov. She was getting a lot of monosyllable answers, so I knew it wasn’t going well, though in truth I had other things on my mind and wasn’t paying much attention.
Unless I missed my guess, the sheriff was going to be mighty unhappy after talking with Basil Jarrett. He had a violent death on his hands, a mutilated corpse spread all over a county road, and the guy who did the killing and mutilating was leaving the jurisdiction as fast as he could reasonably go. Jarrett would probably tell the sheriff it had been self-defense all the way — the shot-up rental car sort of spoke for itself — but the sheriff would undoubtedly want to question me. Especially when he heard my real name and ran it on the crime computer. When you’re famous, everyone wants to talk with you.
My CIA pass had been enough for Jarrett, so he acquiesced in my “borrowing” his vehicle, but in truth he didn’t have a lot of choice. I had just intentionally run over one man and whanged away at another with a pistol. I hadn’t threatened him, though. Still if the sheriff started talking about Jarrett being an accessory after the fact, he might remember that he had been intimidated.
That was the way I reasoned it out, so I was on the back roads in case the sheriff called his Virginia colleagues. I planned to drive county roads only, no highways or interstates, all the way to Delaware. I planned to avoid Washington by crossing the mouth of the Chesapeake at Norfolk. I figured we would be lucky to get to Grafton’s by daylight tomorrow.
Then there was the little matter of how the killers learned Goncharov was at Jarrett’s. Perhaps the FBI fingerprint inquiry had come to their attention, but if so, why didn’t the sheriff mention that someone had called, asking the whereabouts of Kelly’s lost uncle?
No, something was out of kilter here. The killers weren’t far behind us, and that fact would have to be explained.
I glanced over my shoulder at Kelly.
Naw. She wouldn’t have called someone, would she?
She had been in that burning house, trying to save that suitcase full of files. The man Dorsey shot in her foyer had been after her.
So what was going on?
Grafton?
Or Sarah Houston? He had called her, asked for her help. She had been the source of the FBI fingerprint tip — I was certain of that. Who else had she told?
Houston. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure she was the leak.
She had never liked me, and she was too slippery by a bunch. When she was Zelda Hudson I had seduced and drugged her. We took fingerprints and eye prints and used them to get access to a place she claimed she worked in London. But she had conned us. She didn’t work there; she wanted me to get into that computer and see the names of top American military officers, which I did.
Then she stole a submarine and tried to get rich in the chaos that followed. After she went to prison she never liked me much, even when I helped get her out. Women are so ungrateful.
And she was slippery. Too smart, untrustworthy, greedy, and a little light in the ethics department.
Of course, people said the same about me. Still, I concluded, Sarah was probably the one who dropped the dime on us.
Ten minutes later I changed my mind. Grafton kept her out of prison after the warhead hunt, and she owed him. Somewhere, I thought, in that hard little heart of hers was a smidgen of loyalty.
By the time we reached the Shenandoah, I decided I was overthinking this. Sarah Houston was the logical suspect.
After a while I noticed that there was no more conversation going on in the back seat. Kelly was watching the road, so she saw me looking at her in the rearview mirror.
“He doesn’t remember anything,” she said flatly.
“You’re kidding.”
“He doesn’t even know his name.”
“Amnesia?”
“Seems so.”
I adjusted the rearview mirror so I could observe Goncharov. He ignored my scrutiny, or perhaps he was unaware of it.
Amnesia? Or faking memory loss? After all, he had only seen Kelly for a few hours a week ago, and he didn’t know me from Adam. Maybe faking memory loss was a last-ditch ploy when he had no other weapons left.
Yet I didn’t believe he was faking. I’d seen the expression on his face a few hours ago as he rubbed blood on his hands.
I smeared a man all over the road, we’re running from the law — again! — and all we had to show for it was a Russian with amnesia who couldn’t remember his own name!
It had been dark for several hours when we rolled into Richmond. We were hungry, and the SUV was low on gas. I found a gas station with a pay phone on the wall and fueled the vehicle. While Goncharov and Erlanger were making pit stops, I used the phone to call Jake Grafton.
The telephone rang and rang. That spooked me. What if they got to Jake and Callie? Killed them? I broke out into a sweat.
I hung up after fifteen rings and got my quarters back, then fed them into the box again and dialed his cell phone.
On the third ring, he answered. The relief hit me like a hammer, and I found myself leaning against the wall to remain upright.
I explained what had happened in West Virginia as quickly as I could, all the while looking around to ensure I wasn’t overheard. Summing up, I said, “Kelly says this guy can’t remember anything. He doesn’t even know his own name. He might be faking, of course, though I doubt it. You should have seen him with his hands in blood — holy damn, that was scary.”