Perhaps he had already waited too long…
The basement had not yet filled with smoke. There had to be an exit door… somewhere! He ran from room to room, fighting back the panic. There was a furnace in one room, several storerooms full of canned food and large freezers… and at the end of the hallway, a door.
It was locked with a massive dead bolt, one that could be opened from the inside. The man opened it, and found himself in a stairwell. He went up it slowly, trying to see, as the fire raged in the house above him.
No one in sight. Scraggly grass covered with autumn leaves for forty yards, then the forest.
The man ran toward the forest.
Safely behind a large tree, he paused and looked back at the house, which was engulfed in flames.
The blood pounded in his temples.
Biting his lip, trying to contain his emotions, he turned his back on the burning house and walked into the dark dripping forest.
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 made the turn and fell into trail behind us. It wasn’t the one I had parked when we transferred to this car — it had come from the wrong direction, and besides, I had the keys to that one in my pocket.
“Those bastards,” Kelly Erlanger said hoarsely. “Goncharov and the others didn’t have a chance. They were slaughtered like steers. Murdered. Gunned down.”
I glanced at her. Tears were leaking from her eyes. She was staring straight ahead at nothing at all, remembering…
The SUV was still in trail, back there eight or ten car lengths. I was making fifty-five along the narrow, straight, wet highway, charging up the valley. A plume of road spray rose behind me. I slowed to fifty. The SUV stayed the same distance behind.
Shit!
“His wife defected with him. I don’t know what happened to her.”
“There were two dead women in the kitchen,” I said. “One of them was in her late fifties maybe. Perhaps early sixties, gray hair, sorta plump. The other was maybe thirty, tall.”
“Bronislava Goncharova was the older one. She didn’t speak any English. The tall woman was Natasha Romerstein. She was a translator, too — she and I worked together at the agency. Her parents were Ukranian; she was born in America. She had a two-year-old son.”
We were approaching a Y intersection. The road to the right was the one I had always driven to and from this valley — it was the only one I knew — so I took it. The SUV followed me.
We were still in a narrow valley. The stream meandered back and forth, but the road ran straight for almost a mile, crossing the stream several times on small bridges. Then it went into a long sweeping left turn and continued for another mile. Only at the head of the valley did the road began to wind and twist as it climbed Allegheny Mountain. I checked to see that Kelly had her seat belt on. She didn’t.
“Put the belt on,” I said over the growl of the engine.
She snapped herself in, then looked behind us. The SUV was not falling back. I kept the car at fifty.
“They’ve been behind us since Bartow, keeping their distance,” I told her. “If we can’t outrun them going up the mountain, this is going to get messy. Can you shoot an MP-5?”
“No.”
She pulled a cell phone from her pocket, looked at it, then announced, “No service.”
“Who you gonna call?” I asked.
“Why… the agency! My supervisor.”
“Those guys weren’t Russians. They were Americans. I listened to them talk.”
“What are you saying?”
“Don’t jump to conclusions. Yeah, the Russians may have hired some Americans to assault that house to kill Goncharov and burn the notes, but how did they know he was there?”
While she was mulling that over, we reached the head of the valley and started climbing the mountain. I downshifted and put the hammer down. Although the road was wet, the Mercedes had good rubber.