Goncharov searched the faces of his listeners. “Don’t you understand? The intelligence services kept the Communists in power. They were the right arm of the Communist state. They arrested, framed, betrayed, silenced, murdered, and discredited the state’s enemies, who were everyone who voiced the slightest doubt that the Communists were always right. They fought their enemies worldwide. My notes are the evidence against them. They must be studied and understood in the West. And they must be publicized, be made available to the Russian people, who must learn the truth.”
“Only one box of files remains,” Jake gently remarked.
“True, much has been lost. But the files that remain are the most precious. They detail the KGB’s operations against internal enemies.”
“And you. You remain. You can write of what you know.”
The pain in Goncharov’s face was difficult to look upon. “Without the files to refer to…” he whispered, his doubt palpable.
Jake Grafton moved on. “Did any British intelligence officers accompany you to the American safe house?”
“To the best of my knowledge, no. An Englishman named Nigel came to the United States with me, but I didn’t see him after the first day. I was told that specialists were coming from London to study the files and question me, yet they had not arrived.”
When she had finished translating, Callie said to her husband, “You don’t really think the Russians attacked the safe house?”
“No,” he replied softly. “It happened too soon, and the people who did it were Americans. The safe house strike was an American operation all the way.” He studied his toes. “Goncharov’s defection was a huge intelligence coup. No doubt his extraction from Russia received minute-by-minute attention from the very top. The British must have been ecstatic. A peek into the inner workings of their archrival, a chance to purge the traitors in their midst, uncover sleepers, plug leaks, ahh…! This twist of fate was so wonderful they decided to share the good fortune with their allies, the Americans, who must have been equally ecstatic.
“And yet, somewhere on this side of the Atlantic, the news must have been the last thing on earth someone wanted to hear. The archivist for the KGB was coming with seven suitcases full of meticulously copied notes, the labor of his life, his monument to the venal criminality of the Communist system. Someone heard that news with morbid dread.”
“But wouldn’t Goncharov’s defection be a closely held secret?”
“Oh, yes. Extremely closely held. A half dozen people in the CIA perhaps, the director of the FBI, the president, the national security adviser, the president’s chief of staff, perhaps the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, three or four other highly placed, key people — you can make your own list. Yet someone in that circle felt mortal terror when he heard it.”
“Which one?”
“That is the question,” he said, and rose from his seat. “You need to question him, carefully, thoroughly,” he said to Callie, “find out everything he can remember on American agents, American moles, anything American. Take your time, make notes. Talk as long as you can, take breaks, resume where you left off.”
Grafton paused. “Until we find that guilty secret, Goncharov’s life isn’t safe. Someone has risked everything — spent money, compromised himself, put himself in mortal peril — to destroy the files and kill the archivist. And he isn’t going to stop now.”
As he walked from the room he placed a hand in passing on Goncharov’s shoulder. The Russian glanced at his retreating back, and a shadow of a smile crossed his face.
Jake walked out to the screened-in porch and absentmindedly flipped though the stack of newspapers. Dell Royston had been the chief of staff until six months ago, when he became head of the president’s reelection efforts. He wouldn’t have been in that select circle that heard the glad tidings of Goncharov’s defection, would he?
Ah, here it was. A Sunday supplement piece on Dell Royston in the Post. He had recalled seeing it a month or so ago. Fortunately he and Callie had been at the beach that weekend.
He dropped into a stuffed chair to read the article again. It was about what he expected, a puff piece by a political admirer. Dell Royston was the son of two American expatriates who were living in Spain when they were killed in a highway accident. He had two kids, one in college and one just graduated from law school. Royston had attended Harvard Law after the war, married, worked for a few years at a firm in Washington where he had been bitten by the political bug, then left for the hinterland and allied himself with a rising political star who later became president.
Jake tossed the paper back on the pile and stretched. The sun was out and the wind smelled of the sea. Over the muted sounds of traffic on the highway he could hear snatches of Russian coming from the kitchen.
He went inside, turned on the television in the living room, and flipped to the Weather Channel. He glanced at his watch — had he missed the weekly planner again? Ads, more ads, the Weather Channel seemed to have more advertisements than weather these days.
There was a box on the coffee table. He opened it, pawed through the aviation sectional charts it contained, glanced at a couple, then tossed them back in the box.
Back on the porch, he removed his new cell phone from his pocket and made a call. Callie and Goncharov were still in the kitchen talking an hour later when the telephone buzzed. “Grafton.”
“He insisted his files should not be copied, but of course they were. The Brits worked every night frantically duplicating everything while he and his wife slept.”
“You know what I want.”
“We’ll do our best.”
“As soon as possible.”
“Jake, it will take years to assess what’s in those files, which as you probably can guess are incomplete. The notes are cryptic, made hurriedly.”
“Do the best you can. Please. And please call me the moment you know anything.”
“So is it the president?”
“I don’t know. I think — well, it’s too early to say. I wish there were some way to read all those files.”
“There isn’t.”
“I suppose not.”
A sigh came over the phone. “The man Tommy shot was named Joliffe. He was a retired cop, just went through a nasty divorce and a bankruptcy.”
“Any possibility he was Stu Vine?”
“No. He was on the Washington police force when Stu Vine was reputed to be cleaning up the Middle East. Someone wired ten thousand dollars to his checking account day before yesterday from a bank in the Caymans.”
“An amateur.”
“Lucky for you.”
“We need some more guys around this place.”
“I’ve got people on the way. You had enough of retirement yet?”
“No. Callie and I are going flying. The summer weather pattern is setting in, and there is a lot of this country we haven’t seen.”
“Going to be aerial gypsies, eh?”
“Yes, sir. For a while, anyway.”
Grafton snapped the telephone shut. He was reading a newspaper when Callie came into the living room. “Let’s go shopping. We’ll take Mikhail along.”
An expedition should be safe enough, Jake decided. “Okay.”
The first place they stopped was the supermarket nearest the beach house. As they walked through the entrance, Jake heard Goncharov’s sharp intake of breath. He muttered something in Russian to Callie, who nodded. Jake pulled a shopping cart from the stack and followed along behind them.
A minute later Jake became aware that Callie wasn’t really shopping. She was wandering along, pointing out this and that to the Russian, who was handling everything. He picked up vegetables and sniffed them, squeezed fruit, inspected meat, opened the doors of coolers and poked his head inside, strolled up and down the aisles examining the pictures on the cans and the contents of various shoppers’ carts. He seemed intrigued by the selections the shoppers made.