Liars & Thieves by Stephen Coonts Page A

themselves and each other that everyone did it. He wasn’t one of those people.
    It wasn’t that he was better than everyone else. He was no stronger or weaker than most. He, too, suffered the ravages of regret, the torture of remorse. Yet he refused to surrender to evil, even for a moment, even to preserve his life. He had lived in intimate proximity to it all his life and thought he knew all its faces. He had never surrendered, had fought it, tried never to give in to the constant fear, the terror of being discovered, the panic as he contemplated their revenge.
    His wife understood. She had stood beside him, shared the risks, and . . . paid with her life.
    He walked on through the forest, wet, shivering, remembering . . .
    ***
    The old man talked all the way to Staunton, and I tried to hold up my end of the conversation, with dismal results. 1 had too much on my mind to pay much attention to the details of his life story and that of his children, of whom he had five or six … I got a little confused there in the middle.
    He dropped me at the Wal-Mart in Staunton, and I shook his hand gratefully. An offer of money might have insulted him, so I didn’t risk it.
    After he drove off I went into the store and bought a new outfit from the skin out, then went to the men’s room and changed into it. I dumped my wet, muddy clothes in the trash. At the snack bar I downed two hot dogs and two cups of hot, foul, black coffee while I sat thinking about things.
    Mikhail Goncharov … the archivist for the KGB, a man who copied top secret files, lots of them, seven suitcases worth. Secrets from the cold war, buried where no one would ever see them, were now about to be exposed to the light of day. I was sure that many people all over the world would find the prospect horrifying, if they only knew. Obviously someone did know and was extremely unhappy.
    I wondered who that someone was. Some people in the CIA knew of the Goncharov collection, probably some folks in British intelligence. And, perhaps, in Russia.
    It seemed improbable to me that the Russians figured out where the agency was going to debrief their note-taking ex-archivist and managed to arrange a hit squad in less than a week. More likely, I thought, someone at the agency told someone … somewhere … something. The location perhaps, and obviously the need for haste.
    Whoever wanted Goncharov silenced and the files destroyed had almost succeeded, at a terrible cost. That person wouldn’t quit now, not when he learned that some of the files had escaped destruction—and that one of the people who had read the files was still very much alive.
    I left a tip for the waitress and strolled out of Wal-Mart. A bank of pay phones stood near the front entrance. I went back in the store and got ten dollars’ worth of quarters, then returned to the phones. Pulzelli was still at the office.
    “Tommy Carmellini, Sal. I have some bad—“
    His voice dropped to a hiss. “Where are you, Carmellini? The FBI has been here with a search warrant and gone through your desk.”
    “My desk?”
    “They want you for questioning. Someone took out the Greenbrier safe house this morning, killed everyone there. They think you may have been involved.”
    Jesus H. Christ!” I exclaimed, even though this was Pulzelli and he hated coarse language. “You just told me to go up there yesterday. Do they think I went off my nut or what?”
    “They want to ask you some questions. Tell them everything and they’ll go away. Where are you?”
    “You answer a question for me. When you were told to send someone to Greenbrier for guard duty, did they ask for me specifically, or did you just choose me?”
    “I chose you. The FBI knows that. Now tell me where you are.”
    “Sal, you’ve always played straight with me, so I’m going to level with you. The killers were there when I got there, and one of the translators escaped them. From what she told me, it appears that there has been a leak at the