Jake Grafton was silent for a long moment before he said, “He’s been through a lot.”
“Who hasn’t?” I replied bitterly. I was thoroughly sick of the whole damned mess. Probably shouldn’t have been thinking of myself, but I was. At that point I was ready to jump a banana boat to Central America and never come back.
“And Sarah Houston probably sold us out,” I added savagely. “Somebody did, sure as hell.”
“Somebody,” he echoed.
“You and Callie had better clear out of your house. Those bastards may come for you, same as they did Sal Pulzelli and Willie Varner. I saw Pulzelli after they finished butchering him. Believe me, that is one tough way to go.”
“Seventy-five cents, please.” The female operator cut in.
I fed in more quarters.
“Do you have enough money for a motel room?” Grafton asked.
“Yeah.”
“Get one room with two beds. I’ll meet you tomorrow at the house around noon.”
“Okay.”
“Watch yourself, Tommy. There’re some real heavy people involved with this. And there are more guys out there with guns.”
I knew that. No matter how many cockroaches you kill, you never get them all. Still, it was nice of him to express his concern. “Yes, sir,” I said, and hung up.
We wound up with a room in a motel near the Norfolk airport, just a couple miles from the causeway that led across the Chesapeake to eastern Maryland and Delaware. It was nearly midnight by the time we got inside and locked the door.
While Kelly was in the bathroom, I got my first chance to observe Mikhail Goncharov closely. He was wearing old clothes a size too large; Linda Fiocchi said she had gotten the duds from a neighbor near Durbin. He was unshaven, balding, perhaps thirty pounds overweight, yet looked reasonably healthy. He looked tense, tired, wary. On those occasions when he met my eyes he didn’t smile, didn’t even acknowledge me.
The former KGB archivist must know as much as any man alive about the evil that men do to one another. Considering all he had been through — somehow evading the assassins who came to murder him, the assassins who did murder his wife — he must be aware that someone important wanted him completely, totally dead. After a career in the KGB, he well knew how ruthlessly efficient merciless men can be — he had been reading their reports for twenty-plus years. The thought that that someone also wanted my worthless hide tacked up on the wall certainly gave me goose bumps. If he really had amnesia he wouldn’t be worried about that. Perhaps he just felt lost in a world where nothing was familiar.
After we had all done our evening ablutions and I turned the lights out, Kelly crawled into bed with me.
“What do you think?” I asked, referring to our roommate.
“I think he’s a sick man,” she said, and pushed her bottom into my side. “And I think I’m damned tired of chasing around the country with you playing hide-and-seek with every scumbag on the East Coast.”
“Does get old after a while.”
“I think we ought to hold a press conference and tell the world everything we know. Then we’ll be off their list.”
“Sure,” I said. If only life were so simple.
Goncharov began snoring. Before long Kelly relaxed completely and also began breathing deeply. I lay there a while longer tossing and turning, thinking about how that guy looked lying in the road with his guts smeared all over. Before the sons of bitches got me, I would sure like to get even with whomever sold us out. Torture would be good, something that made them really suffer.
I was past torture and pondering some real iffy stuff to do to them when Goncharov stopped snoring. I heard his teeth grinding, then he said something. He was talking in Russian, I believe, but his words were just sounds to me. I could hear him tossing in the bed, flailing around. He awoke with a start.
Kelly also woke up.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered.
“Goncharov was having a nightmare.”
It was a long night. He woke up four more times that night with nightmares. Once he was awake for two hours before he drifted off again. I couldn’t sleep either. The image of the car rushing toward the man shooting at us played itself over and over in my mind. The image of his face in that split second before the car hit him wouldn’t go away. I tried to think of other things and couldn’t.
At one point during the night I found myself in the bathroom staring at my face in the mirror. The overhead light threw the planes of my face and my eyes into deep shadow. The man in the mirror looked as if he had been dead for weeks.
I was more than a little worried the next morning, which was Sunday, as we motored north toward Delaware. We had breakfast at a truck stop, and I called Grafton again from the pay phone on the wall by the register.
“Your passenger still have amnesia?” he asked.
“So Kelly says. He isn’t sleeping well. Nightmares kept him awake last night.”
“We’ll see you for lunch.”
“Admiral, what if those dudes show up at your place?”
“I don’t think they will.”
“Sir, I don’t mean to sound paranoid, but—”
“Come on up here, Tommy. Callie wants to talk to your passenger.” He said it in a way that didn’t leave much room for discussion. That’s what happens when you spend too many years wearing a uniform.
“Yes, sir,” I said cheerfully. As if I had a choice.
Sipping coffee and watching trucks come and go through the window, I wondered if maybe the bad guys were already at Grafton’s. What if they were holding the admiral and his wife as hostages at gunpoint, waiting for me to bring Goncharov to them so they could make his loss of memory permanent?
Seated across from me in the booth, the archivist picked at an omelet. He had maybe four real bites before he quit. I wasn’t hungry either. Kelly Erlanger was doing all right by a couple of eggs, though.
I sort of eyed her as she ate, wondered where she and I were going with this sleeping-together thing. You’d think if she had the hots for me she would show it a little more. Except for that one passionate moment — which had been terrific, by the way — our relationship was more like sister and brother than boy-girl. I confess, I felt as if I was eight years old, sleeping with a neighborhood kid in a tent in the back yard.
I wondered if indeed she did have a boyfriend. Would that explain it?
When we were fed and coffeed, I paid the bill and we rolled north. No one followed us that I could see.
As we drove along, I explored my options. Should I park somewhere and sneak over to Grafton’s, just to see who was really there? Or should I drive in bold as brass and hope no one started shooting?
His voice sounded tired, yet… confident. In control.
I knew that voice. Jake Grafton was a fierce, determined warrior. If he had been held at gunpoint, I decided, he wouldn’t have told me to come there, even if it cost him his life. After they shot Goncharov, they would kill him and Callie, and he knew that. Jake Grafton would spit in their faces.
Kelly’s thoughts were running in the same vein mine were, but she didn’t know Jake Grafton. “What if someone is waiting at Grafton’s for us?” she asked.
“I know the admiral pretty well. They aren’t. Trust me.”
She didn’t say anything else. Mikhail Goncharov sat in the rear seat looking out the window. His face was a study. I wished I could read his thoughts!
I drove into Grafton’s parking area and parked beside his vehicle. His car was there; no one else’s. We got out, walked up on the porch, and rang the bell. He opened the door, held it wide. “Come in.” He didn’t smile.