Liars & Thieves by Stephen Coonts Read Free Book Online

his back on the burning house and walked into the dark dripping forest.

Liars And Thieves

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?
    Someone was going to be very peeved when he heard that there were two survivors. I glanced at her, wondered if that thought had occurred to her yet.
    We crossed the bridge and took the graveled road across the meadow and airstrip and past the hangar. I felt naked. We had just turned onto the paved road when the first fire truck rounded the curve from Bartow. Fortunately no one in the truck could have seen our car come across the meadow … I hoped. As the truck went by, I slowed and looked back into the low hills. Although the rain was still coming down steadily, the ceiling had lifted enough so that I could see a column of smoke rising above the trees and merging with the clouds.
    I eased the clutch out and got the car in motion again. Three cars with small flashing lights on the roofs, driven by volunteer firemen probably, went racing by us and turned into the gravel road, following the fire truck. They roared across the meadow, over the bridge, and disappeared up the road into the forest.
    “I missed your last name, Kelly. What did you say it was?”
    “Erlanger.”
    “So what’s in the notes?”
    “Everything. Goncharov summarized or copied verbatim every KGB file he thought significant during the twenty-some years that he was the head archivist, then smuggled the notes out of the building every evening when he went home. The collection filled seven suitcases—a mountain of material. We were just starting to dig into it. I’m guessing, but I would say roughly half the material deals with Soviet internal politics. The foreign intel files I saw were about recruiting and running agents—mercenary and ideological—illegal residents, assassinations, disinformation, payoffs, subversion of foreign regimes, support for indigenous Communists around the globe, running arms … you name it. Think of every dirty thing the KGB did before the collapse of Communism and every dirty thing it did since then, and you got it.”
    “How far back do the files go?”
    “Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Stalin, the purges .. . Goncharov had access to every file in the archives until he retired four years ago. He was fascinated by the way the party used the NKVD and KGB to eliminate opposition and maintain its hold on power, then lied about it. His superiors or high-placed members of the government periodically ordered files destroyed—getting rid of the evidence—so he copied them before they went to the shredder and furnace.”
    We came to the bridge at Bartow and turned right, toward Staunton and the Shenandoah, which was seventy-five miles and seven mountains away. As we accelerated away from the intersection, I glanced in the rearview mirror. A large SUV coming from the north