Liars & Thieves: A Novel Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIX TEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Also by

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Copyright Page

  To the archivist Vasili Mitrokhin

  Whatcha gonna do when they come for you, bad boy?

  —Ian Lewis “Bad Boys Theme”

  CHAPTER ONE

  When Dorsey O’Shea walked into the lock shop that morning in October, I was in the back room trying to figure out how to pick the new high-security Cooper locks. I saw her through the one-way glass that separated the workshop from the retail space.

  My partner, Willie the Wire, was waiting on a customer. I don’t think Willie recognized her at first—it had been two years since Dorsey and I were a number, she had changed her hair, and as I recall he had only met her on one or two occasions—but he remembered her as soon as she said his name and asked for me.

  Willie was noncommittal—he knew I was in the back room. “How long has it been, Dorsey?”

  “I really need to see Carmellini,” she said forcefully.

  “You’re the third hot woman this week who has told me that.”

  “I want his telephone number, Willie.”

  “Does he still have your phone number?”

  That was when I stepped through the shop door and she saw me. She was tall, with great bones, and skin like cream. “Hey, Dorsey.”

  “Tommy, I need to talk to you.”

  “Come on back.”

  She came around the counter and preceded me through the doorway to the shop. I confess, I watched. Even when she wasn’t trying, her hips and bottom moved in very interesting ways. But all that was past, I told myself with a sigh. She had ditched me, and truth be told, I didn’t want her back. Too much maintenance.

  In the shop she looked around curiously at the tools, locks, and junk strewn everywhere. Willie wasn’t a neat workman, and I confess, I’m also kinda messy. She fingered some of the locks, then focused her attention on me. “I remembered that you were a part owner in this place, so I thought Willie might know where to find you.”

  “Inducing him to tell you would have been the trick.”

  Obviously Dorsey had not considered the possibility that Willie might refuse to tell her whatever she asked. Few men ever had. She was young, beautiful, and rich, the modern trifecta for females. She came by her dough the old-fashioned way—she inherited it. Her parents died in a car wreck shortly after she was born. Her grandparents who raised her passed away while she was partying at college, trying to decide if growing up would be worth the effort. Now she lived in a monstrous old brick mansion on five hundred acres, all that remained of a colonial plantation, on the northern bank of the Potomac thirty miles upriver from Washington. It was a nice little getaway if you were worth a couple hundred million, and she was.

  When I met her she was whiling away her time doing the backstroke through Washington’s social circles. She once thought I was pretty good arm candy on the party circuit and a pleasant bed warmer on long winter nights, but after a while she changed her mind. Women are like that … fickle.

  I had the Cooper lock mounted on a board, which was held in a vise. I adjusted the torsion wrench and went back to work with the pick. The Cooper was brand-new to the market, a top-of-the-line exterior door lock that contractors were ordering installed in new custom homes. They were telling the owners that it was burglarproof, unpickable. I didn’t think there was a lock on the planet that couldn’t be opened without a key, but then, I had never before tried the Cooper. I would see one sooner or later on a door I wanted to go through, so why not learn now? I had already cut a Cooper in half—ruining several saw blades—so I knew what made it tick. I had had two pins aligned when Dorsey came in, and of course lost them when I released the tension on the wrench and walked around front to speak to her.

  She eyed me now as I manipulated the tools. “What are you doing?”

  “Learning how to open this lock.”

  “Why don’t you use a key?”

  “That would be cheating. Our public would be disappointed. What can I do for you today, anyway?”

  She looked around again in a distracted manner, then sat on the only uncluttered stool. “I need help, and the only person I could think of asking was you.”

  I got one of the pins up and felt around, trying to find which of the others was the tightest. The problem here, I decided, was the shape of my pick. I could barely reach the pins. I got a strip of flat stock from our cabinet and began working with the grinder.

  “That sounds very deep,” I said to keep her talking. “Have you discussed that insight with your analyst?”

  “I feel like such a fool, coming here like this. Don’t make it worse by talking down to me.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s not that I didn’t like you, Tommy, but I never understood you. Who are you? Why do you own part of a lock shop? What kind of work do you do for the government? You never told me anything about yourself. I always felt that there was this wall between us, that there was a whole side of you I didn’t know.”

  “You don’t owe me an explanation,” I said. “It was two years ago. We hadn’t made each other any promises.”

  She twisted her hands—I couldn’t help glancing at her from time to time.

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind?” I said as I inspected my new pick. I slipped it into the Cooper, put some tension on the torsion wrench, and went to work as she talked.

  “Every man I know wears a suit and tie and spends his days making money—the more the better—except you. It’s just that—oh, hell!” She watched me work the pick for a minute before she added, “I want you to get into an ex-boyfriend’s house and get something for me.”

  “There are dozens of lock shops listed in the yellow pages.”

  “Oh, Tommy, don’t be like that.” She slipped off the stool and walked around so that she could look into my eyes. She didn’t reach and she didn’t touch—just looked. “I feel like such a jerk, asking you for a favor after I broke up with you, but I don’t have a choice. Believe me, I am in trouble.”

  Truthfully, when she dumped me I was sort of subtly campaigning to get dumped. I wasn’t about to tell her that. And you don’t have to believe it if you don’t want to.

  I glanced at her. The tension showed on her face. “You’re going to have to tell me all of it,” I said, gently as I could. At heart Dorsey was a nice kid … for a multimillionaire, which wasn’t her fault.

  “His name is Kincaid, Carroll Kincaid. He has a couple of videotapes. He mad
e them without my knowledge when we were first dating. He’s threatening to show them to my fiancé if I don’t pay him a lot of money.”

  “I didn’t know you were engaged.”

  “We haven’t announced it yet.”

  “Who’s the lucky guy?”

  She said a name, pronounced it as if I was supposed to recognize it.

  “So why don’t you ask him for help?” I said.

  “I can’t. Tommy, even if I pay blackmail, there’s no guarantee Kincaid would give me the only copies of the tapes.”

  “So you want me to break into his house and get the tapes?”

  “It wouldn’t really be burglary. He made the tapes without my permission. They are really mine.”

  Amazingly enough, when we were dating the thought never crossed my little mind that she might have a stupid stunt like this in her. I made eye contact again, scrutinized every feature. I decided she might be telling the truth.

  I was trying to think of something appropriate to say when I felt the pick twitch and the lock rotated. It was open.

  I put the tools on the table and was reaching for a stool when she moved closer and laid a hand on my arm. “Oh, Tommy, please! Blackmail is ugly. I am really in love, and it could be something wonderful. Kincaid is trying to ruin my life.”

  I reflected that sometimes having money is really hard on a girl, or so I’ve heard. And the prospect of burglary always gets my juices flowing. She gave me Kincaid’s address. I made sure Dorsey understood that I wasn’t promising anything. “I’ll see what I can do.” She gave me her cell phone number, started to kiss me, thought better of it, and left.

  I sat wondering how that kiss would have tasted as I listened to her walk through the store. When the front door closed Willie came into the workshop.

  “I don’t know what you got, Carmellini, that drives all the chicks wild, but I’d sure like to have some of it. They’re troopin’ in here all the time wantin’ to know where you are, what you’re doin’—makes a man feel inadequate, y’know? Maybe you oughta open a school or somethin’. Sorta a public service deal. Whaddaya think ?”

  “I got the Cooper opened.”

  “How long it take you?”

  “I wasn’t timing it. I was—”

  “Three minutes for me,” Willie said with a touch of pride in his voice. “’Course I wasn’t looking at a dish like that when I did it. What does she want you to do—steal the silver at the White House?”

  “I can beat three minutes blindfolded,” I told Willie, and by God, I did. And I had to listen to a lot of his b.s. while I did it.

  I went into Kincaid’s place the following night. There was no one home and he forgot to lock the back door. When I found that the door was unlocked, I sat down at his backyard picnic table while I thought things over. For the life of me, I couldn’t see what Dorsey would gain by setting me up. She was waiting in my car halfway down the block with a cell phone to call me if Kincaid returned while I was in the house.

  If she was playing a game, it was too deep for me, I concluded. Even smart people forget to lock their doors.

  I opened Kincaid’s back door and went inside.

  After thirty minutes I was certain there were no homemade videotapes in the house, although I did find three high-end videocams and a dozen photographer’s floodlights in the bedroom, which had a huge round bed in the center of the room and electrical outlets every three feet around the walls. This guy was more than kinky—he was set up to make porno flicks.

  So where were they? There were boxes of videotape—all unopened, still wrapped in cellophane. Nothing that looked like it had been in a camera.

  I was going through his files at his desk in his den—he was reasonably well organized, I must say—when I found a receipt for a safe deposit box at a local bank. From the amount he paid, he must have rented a large box. The receipt was dated a month ago. The box key wasn’t in the desk, and I didn’t expect it to be.

  I couldn’t find a receipt or record that hinted that he owned a storage unit. He might have stashed a suitcase full of stuff at a friend’s house, but I doubted it. These days everyone had curious friends. His car was a possibility, though an unlikely one. If some kid took it for a joyride he could be ruined. Of course, he could have delivered the tapes to whatever lab processed them into movies. But if he did that with a tape of Dorsey and some porno kings, why try to blackmail her?

  Dorsey was chewing her lip when I got into the car. “No videotapes,” I said. “Has a nice little home movie setup, but no tapes.”

  “I could help you look. They must be there.”

  “They aren’t. He didn’t even lock the back door.” I started the car and got it rolling down the street. “He’s set up to film some hot porno action. The raw tapes would have to be digitized and edited, and the equipment for that isn’t in the house.”

  Her color wasn’t good. She didn’t meet my eyes.

  “When did he first approach you demanding money?”

  She thought about it. “Three weeks ago, I think. Labor Day weekend. I had some friends over for a small party, and he showed up unannounced.”

  The time frame seemed to fit. I decided the safe deposit box was a definite possibility.

  I didn’t make a habit of burgling houses for ex-girlfriends, even if they were beautiful and rich and being blackmailed. During the day I worked for the CIA. It wasn’t something agency employees talk about, and I had never mentioned it to Dorsey. I think I did once mention that I worked for the General Services Administration. She probably thought I was some kind of maintenance supervisor. Maybe that was the story I told her—I don’t quite remember.

  Usually I worked overseas, breaking and entering for Uncle Sam, planting bugs, stealing documents, that kind of thing. Every now and then I did a few black-bag jobs stateside for the FBI, strictly as a favor, you understand, one federal agency helping another. I sometimes heard rumors that the CIA asked the FBI to ask for my help on domestic matters, but being a loyal employee, I immediately discounted and forgot those ugly whispers. In those days I was just another civil servant beating in time, working toward that happy retirement on the old fifty-fifth birthday, followed by a life of golf and restaurant meals courtesy of future taxpayers.

  After my abortive inspection of Dorsey’s ex-flame’s house, I took her back to her car and dropped her. She was in a foul mood, chewing her lip.

  I waited until she got inside her vehicle, then drove away to find a bar. As I swilled beer I compared how I felt two years ago when she dumped me and how I felt walking through the porno guy’s digs.

  Oh, well.

  A few days later I had to leave work after lunch for my annual physical, so after the doc finished with the rubber glove I took the rest of the day off. I went by the neighborhood bank where Kincaid had his box, parked, went in and rented one for myself.

  It was a typical suburban branch bank, with a drive-through window and an interior lobby. A security door that had to be opened from the inside prevented people from entering the loan officers’ half of the building, and that was where the small safe deposit vault was. I filled out the form and was admitted to the vault. A bank of boxes formed each wall. The largest boxes were on the bottom row. Beside the door was a cabinet that contained envelopes holding keys for the empty boxes, and on top of the cabinet were two steel boxes containing the cards that each patron had to sign every time he wanted into his box. A single surveillance camera was mounted high on the wall opposite the door to the vault.

  My escort in the vault was a young woman named Harriet who was wearing a wedding ring and maternity clothes, although the baby wasn’t showing much. I commented on that, and she told me she had five more months to go. It was her first child. She and her husband were so excited.

  “You’re lucky we have a large box available. This is the only one. It became available last week when the lady who had it was transferred to Europe. She’s with the State Department.”

  She gave me my key, an
d we checked that it opened my new box. The locks for the individual boxes were lever tumbler locks, which is the universal standard in American safe deposit vaults. Each box had two keyways. As usual, she had to insert the master key, which she carried, into one keyway and my key into the other and turn them both simultaneously for the box to open. Fortunately Willie had a bank of four safe deposit boxes complete with their lever tumbler locks back at the shop.

  I confess, I was a little disappointed, although I tried not to show it. Some banks were getting in the habit of breaking off one of their master keys in the lock of each box in the vault, then admitting box holders to the vault without an escort. Needless to say, these boxes were a breeze for guys like me to pop. I had my hopes up, but it wasn’t to be. This bank was still doing it the safe, old-fashioned way.

  I told Harriet I might be back in a few days to put some stuff in my new box, thanked her for her time, and departed.

  Back in the shop Willie and I discussed lever tumbler locks and disassembled one from his safe deposit boxes. Lever tumbler locks require an L-shaped pick, the prong of which must be precisely the right length. I used my key to measure the length I needed and made myself three picks, each a slightly different length, just in case.

  I spent the weekend practicing on Willie’s locks. My best time was twenty-six seconds, but two minutes was the average, and if I hurried or wasn’t paying strict attention, I couldn’t get the lock to open. Willie spent some time watching me, and even opened one a few times himself.

  Willie the Wire was twenty years older than me, a slim, dapper black man who worked Washington hotels in his younger days as a bellboy. Finally he quit carrying bags into the hotel for guests and specialized in picking locks and carrying luggage out—sans tip. The last time he got out of prison he promised himself an honest job, but with his reputation, no one would hire him. A friend of mine knew him and mentioned his plight to me. We had dinner a few times, and he showed me a couple of things I didn’t know about locks, so I bankrolled this establishment and we became partners. He knew I worked for the CIA, but we never talked about it.