The Innocents Club
The Innocents Club
Taylor Smith
Senior CIA analyst Mariah Bolt remembers her late father as the man who abandoned his family to run off to Europe with another woman. Ben Bolt's fans remember him somewhat differently, and revere him as a literary genius.
But like it or not, Mariah has become the reluctant guardian of his legacynever suspecting she has also inherited a ticking time bomb.
As she is about to depart on a much-needed vacation with her teenage daughter, Mariah is called in on an urgent assignmentto lure a man into betraying his country. There's only one hitchto get to this man she has to cross paths with her father's old lover. Suddenly the past is back with a vengeance.
One old friend will betray her and another will be murdered, as Mariah discovers how little she really knows about her father's lifeand his death. And when her fifteen-year-old daughter goes missing, Mariah will be reminded once more that there are no limits in the terrifying game of international espionage.
Praise for the novels of TAYLOR SMITH
“The Innocents Club is an exciting espionage thriller….”
—Midwest Book Review
“Fifteen rounds of sturdy international espionage-cum-detection….”
—Kirkus Reviews on The Innocents Club
Taylor Smith…John Grisham “…it’s a perfectly plausible comparison—though Smith’s a better prose stylist.”
—Publishers Weekly on Random Acts
“The mix of suspense, forensic science, romance and mystery make this a real page-turner.”
—Orange Coast on Random Acts
“The story line is fast-paced and filled with numerous twists…Taylor Smith…continues her amazing rapid climb to the top rung…”
—Painted Rock Reviews on Random Acts
“Sharp characterization and a tightly focused time frame…give this intrigue a spellbinding tone of immediacy.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Best of Enemies
“The pace is swift and the action is concentrated…making it a perfect summer read.”
—Orange Coast on The Best of Enemies
“In this absorbing tale…characters are engaging…”
—Publishers Weekly on Common Passions
Also available from MIRA Books and TAYLOR SMITH
GUILT BY SILENCE
COMMON PASSIONS
THE BEST OF ENEMIES
RANDOM ACTS
DEADLY GRACE
The Innocents Club
Taylor Smith
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
This book could only be for Amy Moore-Benson, with heartfelt gratitude for her insight, her perseverance and her unflagging grace. Here’s to the wonder of new beginnings.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
My deepest thanks to those who offered their expertise and encouragement throughout this project. If I played fast and loose with the facts, it’s through no fault of theirs. I am especially grateful to members of the Newport Beach Police Department, who have been extraordinarily kind and helpful, particularly Dale Johnson, Don Gage, Ken Cowell, Mike Jackson and Dave Sperling. Thanks, too, to Dr. Ed Uthman, Ken Keller, Gary Bale and Luis Hernandez for coming up with answers when I needed them. For unflagging moral support, I thank Patricia McFall, Philip Spitzer, the Fictionaires (Orange County’s finest fiction writers) and family members near and far (most especially my wonderful Richard, Kate and Anna, who make life a joy even on the darkest of days).
No one could be more thankful than I for the steadfast commitment and hard work of the talented people at MIRA, beginning with Editorial Director Dianne Moggy. My warmest thanks to them all, most particularly Randall Toye, Katherine Orr, Stacy Widdrington, Greg Sarney, Heather Locken, Krystyna de Duleba and her brilliant design team, and, last but never least, Alex Osuszek and his enthusiastic team, the folks who bring stories and readers together.
To forget one’s ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root.
—ancient Chinese proverb
Contents
Thursday, July 4 (#ue74ff59c-7a26-5a0d-b4c8-eb478e23286c)
Prologue (#uc8ff583e-12b3-5ed7-87f8-d7124862fb50)
Monday, July 1 (#u3f61bc9e-6d45-5e1b-ad46-8386307bb7ad)
Chapter One (#ufe710372-7a30-52ef-a62c-a1d115de85ae)
Tuesday, July 2 (#u92bcd3f8-5dab-50de-9f7f-bbc264c96e18)
Chapter Two (#ub19aac67-3bd3-5887-bb2c-707220a28ced)
Chapter Three (#ue367331e-5629-52bc-893c-1015f2defb85)
Chapter Four (#uade482b0-0976-51e1-802b-487ba72cf46e)
Chapter Five (#u6c033f66-5120-5a8f-b7ba-00bb7ac8fe1b)
Chapter Six (#u721b0a50-7327-50df-9775-4cb516230920)
Chapter Seven (#u9750e7c0-bcd5-56fb-a810-45aa38dc7b78)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Wednesday, July 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Thursday, July 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Friday, July 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Tuesday, July 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Thursday, July 4
Prologue
She was exhausted. Wounded, bleeding, swimming for her life. Lungs on fire. Thin arms and legs aching from cold and the effort of pumping against heavy surf. A silent cry arose inside her, fueled by equal measures of pain, fear and indignation: I can’t do this!
As a young woman, Renata thought, she might have had a chance. She’d been fit then, and strong, albeit more than a little spoiled—the indulged only child of one of the world’s wealthiest men. But she was sixty-one years old now, for heaven’s sake. She hadn’t the stamina she once had.
Her brain snapped an obvious response: Swim or die, you fool!
She glanced nervously over her shoulder as, behind her in the dark, deep voices sounded, exchanging terse, furious commands. Had they spotted her, a tiny form bobbing on the star-sparkled water? Were they following? They seemed so close.
No, she tried to reassure herself. Not that close. It was just an acoustic trick of the clear night air. They were far away, too far even to be seen very clearly, though the sweep of the searchlight told her they hadn’t yet abandoned the hunt for her.
Only her?
A flash of shame passed through her as she thought of the young girl she’d abandoned on deck. What kind of woman leaves a child in mortal danger while she flees to save her own skin? Was it true what her husband had once said about her? Renata wondered. That there was something unnatural about a woman without empathy?
Her stroke slowed. Keeping low and still, she peered back at the boat, trying to distinguish between the silhouettes on the deck, but her vision wasn’t what it had once been, either. If the girl was still on board, Renata couldn’t make her out.
Perhaps, she rationalized, Lindsay, too, had managed to escape, leaping overboard in the confusion that had followed her own break for freedom. The girl appeared delicate, but they said she was a competitive swimmer. So, if she had gotten away, she had as much a chance as Renata herself of making it to safety. Maybe even better. After all, Renata thought resentfully, the girl had youth on her side.
Renata felt another quiver of guilt run down her spine. And if Lindsay hadn’t escaped those thugs on the boat? There was little doubt what was in store for that lovely young thing.
Well, all the more reason to keep swimming. Renata turned back toward shore and paddled on with new resolve.
Her captors had miscalculated. All up and down the coast, from Dana Point to Long Beach, Chinese rockets, pinwheels and brilliant cascades were exploding in the blue-black sky, clamorous displays of Fourth of July patriotism. Dozens of other small craft bobbed on the water, observing the spectacle.
Those brutes may have counted on the noise and confusion to cover their escape, but they hadn’t counted on one of their victims jumping overboard, had they? Renata thought smugly. And the pyrotechnics, far from making her more visible, seemed to have camouflaged her amidst watery shadow and sparkle as she made a clean escape.
Almost. But not quite.
At first, she hadn’t even realized they’d fired on her, what with the noise of the fireworks. They had to have been shooting blindly, but one lucky shot had found its target. Renata winced at the caustic, burning sensation in her shoulder, but forced herself to ignore it. If she could just reach one of the small pleasure crafts lying in toward shore, she’d be home free. Then, she’d send back the authorities.
She slogged on, determined to get as far away as possible from the boat’s searchlights before the fireworks finale, when her predators’ eyes would readjust to the dark and have a better chance of picking her out. It would be a ridiculous way to die, flapping in the water like some wing-shot pelican. She wouldn’t have it. It was as simple as that.
But her strokes were becoming more ineffectual. It wasn’t just fatigue and the loss of blood. Her sodden dress was weighing her down. It would have to go, Renata decided. Her pumping legs kept her afloat while she wrestled out of it, wincing with pain. All she had on now were her sagging underthings, but her bra straps cut into her wounded shoulder. Her panties, too, drooped with the weight of the water they’d absorbed. In for a penny, in for a pound, she thought ruefully, slipping out of them, as well.
Then, she swam on, holding down rising anxiety by sheer force of her legendary indomitable will. It worked for a while, but between her injured shoulder and flagging strength, she made slow progress. Inevitably, panic began to creep up, and in spite of herself, Renata began to cry. She was so weary! She’d been paddling for what felt like hours toward the nearest boat, yet it never seemed to get any closer.
They must be moving off, leaving me all alone out here! Oh, God, I can’t do this!
Her father’s impatient voice rose from the deep recesses of her memory: Stop whining and get on with it, girl! We make our own fate. Don’t get mad, get even.
He was right. Terrible to be so weak, Renata thought, angry with herself now. She’d become too sedentary, that was the problem. Her self-indulgences had once included scuba diving in the Mediterranean, all-night dancing and many, many men, but now they ran to more sedate pleasures—the latest gallery opening, a very good cognac, dinners at the White House. Certainly nothing that would prepare her to leap off a boat and swim, bruised and bloodied, toward a shoreline that was—what? Miles off, it must be.
She breasted a rising swell, breathing hard through gritted teeth, but her waning strokes no longer carried her forward against the rolling sea. Renata paused to catch her ragged breath and give her aching arms a rest.
Just for a moment. I’m so tired.
She lay back, arms spread, a tiny, naked crucifix on the water’s surface. Something warm seeped over her right breast, a tepid rivulet trickling over her shoulder and down into her armpit. Her fingers probed the wound’s sticky edges. It should hurt, she thought, but it didn’t anymore. The narcotic effect of sheer adrenaline, she supposed. She closed her eyes, trying not to imagine how much blood she’d lost. How much was still ebbing away into the great, insatiable ocean.
From somewhere deep inside her head came another voice, low and drawling, offering stoic reassurance: Just a flesh wound, ma’am.
John Wayne, she thought, smiling. He used to have a big house just across the Newport inlet from their own summer place. Her father had been a stocky, barrel-chested little man, even in his elevator shoes, but his swaggering stride had always lengthened a little when he walked next to that famous, side-loping amble. In the last few years of their lives, the two men would often disappear together for a day of drinking and deep-sea fishing. The Duke and Daddy—what a couple of old bears.
Renata rocked on the waves, eyelids drooping, a profound lassitude spreading through her body. A sleepy yawn built inside her, but she stifled it, forcing her eyes open.
Stay awake!
Overhead, the sky arced like a great, speckled dome. It was beautiful this far out, away from the city lights. Lazily, she traced a constellation with her finger, her thoughts reaching into the past for names she’d learned from Nikolos, the white-haired Greek who’d crewed for so many years on her father’s yacht.
Look, Renata, there is Sagittarius, the archer. And, there, up high, next to Vega. Do you see him? It is Hercules, with his foot on the head of Draco, the dragon.
Good old Niko. So full of stories. Bunk, her father said. Had he perhaps been just a little jealous, Renata wondered, of her love for that kind old sailor with a thousand tales?
Listen! Do you hear it?
What, Niko?
The celestial symphony—music of the cosmos.
I don’t hear anything.
You must listen harder, little one. It is the music made by the turning of the stars. The music that the angels dance to.
Renata smiled, closing her eyes so she could concentrate. The warmth at her shoulder was Niko’s big, gentle hand, and she was a child again, lying on the smooth, rolling deck of her father’s yacht. So peaceful. So—
A rude bump interrupted her reverie. A surfboard? Out here? Then, another bump. And this time, a sharp, stabbing sensation in her ribs. Renata opened her eyes and looked around, irritated.
Get away! You’ve got the whole ocean, for heaven’s sake!
Another bump knocked her sideways. She righted herself in the water, but not before a thousand tiny razors sliced her left foot—a quick sensation, gone almost before her brain had time to register it.
Oh, for pity’s sake! Move on! Now, before I call the police!
That did the trick. The ruffians scattered, and Renata was left in peace, rocking on the waves. Good riddance.
She was so very tired. She needed to rest. And then, when she had her strength back, there was something else she’d been meaning to do. What was it?
She lay back on the water, eyes fluttering as she searched the stars for the answer. They were so beautiful. Her trembling hand reached up. Almost close enough to touch. And then—
Oh, Niko! I think I hear it. I do! I hear the symphony!
Monday, July 1
Chapter One
Renata Hunter Carr was not remotely dead when Mariah Bolt first laid eyes on her. Far from it. That condition was soon to change, of course, and Mariah would be the agent of that change. For those who believe in fate, the wheel was set inexorably in motion three days before Renata’s ill-fated swim.
Three days and nearly three thousand miles away…
Jack Geist, deputy director of Operations, acted as if there were nothing unusual about summoning Mariah to his office on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
His secretary turned the handle on the big wooden door leading to the inner sanctum, her other hand raised to Mariah, indicating she should wait. Through the crack between the door and the frame, Mariah saw the deputy at his desk, flipping through a stack of files. When the DDO didn’t look up, the other woman cleared her throat softly.
“She’s here, sir. Ms. Bolt? Who you asked me to call in?”
He raised his head slowly, looking distracted and irritated, and gave her a curt nod. She scuttled back out, nodding to Mariah, then pulling the door shut behind her as Mariah entered.
Geist’s demeanor went through a transformation. He got to his feet and came around his massive desk, hand extended, lips stretching wide in a smile. “Mariah Bolt! I don’t think we’ve ever had the pleasure. Jack Geist.”
The smile stopped well short of his pallid green eyes, she noticed, taking his hand. He fixed her with a long, piercing look that could have been interpreted in any number of ways, none of which put her at ease.
His skin had the leathery texture of a pack-a-day man. When he finally released her hand and waved toward the leather sofa and chairs on one side of his wood-lined office, Mariah caught the scent of stale cigarettes only partially masked. She tried to picture the deputy huddled in the center courtyard with the rest of the agency’s nicotine junkies, but the image refused to come. He didn’t look the type to mingle with the masses, for one thing. Also, in her experience, covert Ops people played by their own rules, so she found herself looking around the office for the ashtrays she knew had to be there, despite the building-wide smoking ban—certain he’d have dismantled the office smoke detectors.
“Thanks for stopping by,” Geist added, following her across the room.
“No problem.” Not that this was anything but a command performance. Mariah passed up the deep leather sofa for one of the armchairs sitting at right angles to it around a low mahogany table. “My secretary said it was urgent.”
In fact, Jane had pulled her out of an interdepartmental meeting to breathlessly pass on the DDO’s summons. It wasn’t every day analysts were called to the deep-cover side of the shop, not even specialists like Mariah, who supervised a weapons watchdog group.
Geist settled his own lank frame at the end of the sofa nearest her. His close-cropped hair was straw-colored, the kind that turns imperceptibly white with age. With his loosened tie and rumpled white cotton shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, he looked as though he might have spent the night on that couch, working on some unfolding international crisis. Did men like this have family lives? Mariah wondered.
Nestled in the corner between them was a low, intricately carved table topped with a hammered-brass platter. It looked like an acquisition from some Arab souk. Like the ruby Persian wool carpet beneath their feet, the water pipe on the credenza and the carved, mother-of-pearl-inlaid wooden boxes scattered around the room, the table was a souvenir, no doubt, of Geist’s travels on behalf of the Company. On a lower shelf of the small table, she spotted another hammered-brass item—a bowl, empty at the moment, but its concave inner surface black with soot. The predicted ashtray. Bingo.
“The Last Days of the Romanov Dynasty,” Geist said, getting straight to the point. “Ever hear of it?”
“Yes, of course,” she said, nodding. “Largest and most valuable collection of Russian royal artifacts ever assembled since Czar Nicholas II and his family were assassinated by the Bolsheviks in 1917. Co-curated by the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg and L.A.’s Arlen Hunter Museum. Starts a two-year North American tour this summer.”
“Tomorrow, matter of fact. At the Arlen Hunter.”
She resisted the temptation to say “So what?,” already dreading where this conversation was heading. Did he know about her vacation plans? And then, another stomach-sinking thought: Did Geist have any inkling about her connection to the Hunter family? As spectacular as the Romanov exhibit was reputed to be, the Arlen Hunter Museum was the last place on earth she’d voluntarily choose to set foot.
“We found out this morning that none other than Valery Zakharov is going to do the ribbon-cutting honors,” Geist said. “He arrives in exactly twenty-four hours.”
“The foreign minister himself? I know the exhibit’s an important revenue-generator for the Russian government, but that seems like overkill, doesn’t it?”
“My thoughts, too, although Zakharov was due in L.A. later this week, anyway. The conference of Pacific Rim states opens out there on the fifth. There’s going to be a big kick-off reception on board the Queen Mary the night of the fourth.”
“Nice timing. They’ll be able to see fireworks up and down the coast from there. The State Department should save a bundle on entertainment.”
“No kidding. Anyway, we’ve spotted several known intelligence figures on the list of names the Russians have submitted for diplomatic visas.”
“That’s not surprising, is it? Zakharov’s ex-KGB, after all. Well, ‘ex,”’ she amended. “Not precisely. It may be FSB now, but it’s not like they’ve gone out of business. It’s to be expected that Zakharov’s entourage would include some spooks, I would think.”
“No doubt. That’s why I want somebody there to keep an eye on things.”
“Isn’t that the FBI’s job?”
The deputy scowled. “Funny, that’s what our esteemed director said. Between you and me, Mariah, that man’s so pussy-whipped by the oversight committees he doesn’t take a piss without prenotifying Capitol Hill.”
Mariah said nothing. There was something tacky about a man bad-mouthing his boss to someone he’d never met before and who didn’t even work for him. Given that the director had appointed Geist to his current exalted position, it was also more than a little disloyal. So what was that all about? A bid to make her feel part of his inner circle of confidants?
Geist had held the deputy’s post only a few months. Like most covert operatives, he’d been little known inside the agency until his name had suddenly surfaced as the man who would take over the beleaguered Operations position. The press release announcing his appointment had said Geist was an eighteen-year veteran of the agency who’d served in a variety of positions, mostly in the Middle East. Only eighteen years, Mariah reflected—a relatively meteoric rise in a bureaucracy as large and byzantine as the CIA. It was safe to assume the man was both ambitious and ruthless.
“We have no mandate for operations on domestic soil,” she said, pointing out the obvious. Was that why she was here? So he could keep his hands technically clean by using a non-Ops employee for whatever scheme he was brewing?
“Who said anything about an operation? I’m talking observation. Simply keeping an eye on Company interests. The FBI’s worried about Russian moles and organized crime. Fair enough, but we’ve got bigger fish to fry. Zakharov’s making a big push for the presidency. He’s probably going to be the next man with his finger on the Russian arsenal. It’s not much direct threat to us these days, but the Russians have plenty of potential for mischief. You, of all people, are well aware of that, Mariah. Why, just the level of their arms shipments to sleazy customers is enough to turn my hair gray.”
She was tempted to point out that the Russians would have to quadruple their activity to begin to approach the level of American arms sales abroad, nor were U.S. clients any less unsavory, on the whole. But she let it slide. Her job was to monitor the other team, not her own. In any case, she was curious to know where this conversation was heading. Curious, and more than a little uneasy.
“Zakharov is a thug, but if he’s going to take over Russia, he’s going to be our thug,” Geist said. “We’re already working to ensure he’s in our pocket, but to be on the safe side, I’d like a little extra insurance. A reliable source in his inner circle would make me very happy.”
A source in Zakharov’s inner circle? That sounded suspiciously like co-opting a foreign agent—a covert operation if ever there was one. Mariah waited for the other shoe to drop. It didn’t take long.
“That’s why you’re going to attend the Romanov opening,” Geist said.
Bang. Just what she’d been afraid he was going to say. “Excuse me, sir—”
“Call me Jack.”
“—this doesn’t make any sense,” she went on, ignoring the invitation to familiarity, which, she suspected, could only breed contempt. “If you’re planning to mount a recruitment operation, you should send someone from your side of the shop with experience in this kind of thing.”
“I understand you’ve done some work for us in the past.”
Much to my everlasting regret. “Nothing of this order of magnitude,” she said. “I wouldn’t know where to begin identifying a susceptible target.”
“Ah, well! That’s the beauty of it, you see. The target has already identified himself. Someone you know. Yuri Belenko, Zakharov’s executive assistant.”
“Belenko? Really? I have met him,” she conceded.
“Twice in the last year, if I’m correctly informed. First, at last fall’s U.N. General Assembly session in New York. Then again in March, at the European security conference in Paris.”
She nodded. “I was seconded to the State Department to work with their disarmament delegation, but—”
Geist leaned forward, elbows on his knees, fixing her once more with that intense, thousand-yard stare. “Tell me about Belenko, Mariah.”
“I filed contact reports both times I met with him.” It sounded defensive, she knew, but what did Geist think had gone on between her and the Russian?
“I know you did, but I want to hear it from you. What’s he like?”
“He’s…nice,” she ventured, wincing internally. Oh, that’s brilliant, Mariah. What a wonderfully insightful analysis. She tried again. “Intelligent and personable. Well-educated, well-traveled. Forty-three. Divorced, apparently. Speaks excellent, idiomatic American English of the kind taught in KGB training courses—which we happen to know was his original stomping ground. We have to presume he still represents the FSB.”
“Personal quirks?”
“I’m not sure I know of any—unless you count the fact that he’s an avid collector of proverbs and American slang. It’s quite the running joke.”
“Proverbs, eh? What else does he collect?”
Mariah frowned. “I don’t follow your—Oh! Right. Well, yes, he is a bit of a ladies’ man, I suppose.”
“You suppose?”
“As I said, he can be charming, and he tends to turn it on around women.”
“Especially you.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m led to believe that our man Yuri’s somewhat smitten with you, Mariah. Is that true?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m just waiting to hear what you have to report.”
“There’s nothing to report,” she said. “Look, I don’t know what you’ve heard from your watchers, but there’s nothing between me and Belenko. The idea’s ridiculous, not least because I lost my husband a year and a half ago, and my hands are full doing my job here and raising a teenage daughter. I’m hardly in a position or mood to carry on a wild social life with the likes of Yuri Belenko or anyone else.”
“You do get around, though.”
“How do you mean?”
Geist sat back and studied her for a moment. Then he got to his feet, walked back to his desk and reached for one of the files he’d been reading when she walked in. With-drawing a piece of paper, he returned and stood over her, holding it up.
Mariah’s heart sank. It was a photocopy of a Washington Post article that had appeared a few weeks earlier. The photograph accompanying the piece hadn’t copied well, but she knew exactly who the two shadowy figures in it were.
“For someone who claims to be out of commission, you do lead a high-profile life,” Geist said. He turned the article back toward himself. “The National Press Club awards. My, my! And there you are, recognizable enough, even though this is a lousy copy, gracing the arm of one of our top TV newscasters.”
“Paul Chaney’s an old friend of my husband’s. And mine,” she conceded, realizing it was stupid to pretend otherwise, despite her own ambivalence on the subject. “He was getting an award that night. He needed a date and I went along as a favor.”
“This article’s not about Chaney, though, is it? It’s about you. And your father. There’ve been a couple of others since this one, too.”
“Unfortunately.” She exhaled heavily. “Look, the whole thing was an accident. Some reporter found out I was Ben Bolt’s daughter and latched onto a rumor that an unpublished novel of his had been found.”
She should never have gone to that dinner. Not for the first time, she cursed Paul for letting slip the information about her father and his papers. Not for the first time, either, she wondered whether his gaffe had been as accidental as he kept claiming.
“Your late father’s considered to be one of the biggies of American lit, I guess.” Geist pursed his lips and shrugged. “Not surprising news like that would create a stir.”
“I suppose, but I certainly never intended to get caught at the center of a controversy.”
“So? Is there a novel?”
She shrugged. “There’s a draft manuscript and some journals that showed up in an old storage locker. My father’s agent is wading through the mess now, trying to see whether it adds up to much. I’m planning to see him next week to discuss what, if anything, we should do with it. In any case,” she added, “that’s all beside the point. We were discussing Yuri Belenko, and I don’t want to hold you up, sir. I’m sure you’re very busy. Why would you think Belenko’s susceptible to working for us?”
“Ah, well,” Geist said, laying aside the Post article, “that’s what I was trying to get at before you went all coy on me, Mariah. I don’t know if he’s susceptible to us, but he certainly seems to be susceptible to you.”
“Why would you think that?”
“My people have been keeping an eye on him, and we’ve intercepted a couple of conversations where he’s mentioned you in a most wistful manner. Also, did you know that when you were in Paris in March, he followed you back to your hotel one night? We think he was planning to pay a social call, only I gather your daughter was there with you…?”
“The conference was only a one-day affair, and she had spring break, so…” Mariah felt a tremor run through her. “Belenko was following me? He saw her?”
It was her old nightmare, come back to haunt her again—her child in danger because of her work. Deskbound as she was, it wasn’t much of an issue these days. But when the March conference had come up, she and Lindsay had just gone through their second Christmas without David, followed by a rough winter. The appeal of springtime in Paris had overshadowed the risk of taking her daughter along on the short business trip.
Never again.
Geist leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “My watchers said Belenko seemed real disappointed. Guess he decided he wasn’t going to get to first base that night. We decided to start keeping an eye on him, though. Then, day before yesterday, we hit pay dirt.”
“Pay dirt?”
“He had dinner with his brother in Moscow. The guy’s a literary critic for Isvestia, did you know that? Belenko told him he’d met Ben Bolt’s daughter. I guess your father’s novels are popular over there, too?”
Mariah nodded. “Your people bugged their conversation?”
“Yup. Belenko mentioned he was heading back to the States this week, said he was hoping to see you again. Maybe he was just trying to impress big brother, but from the way he spoke, it didn’t seem like it was the finer points of modern fiction he was looking to pursue, if you know what I mean.”
Mariah sat back, momentarily stunned. Then she shook her head. “I don’t think you’re reading this correctly.”
“You never noticed Belenko had the hots for you? You’re a very attractive woman, Mariah.”
She passed on the flattery. “That’s not what this is about.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I’ve run into this kind of thing before. It’s not me that’s the draw, it’s my father.”
“I thought he was dead.”
“He is. He died when he was twenty-eight.” She sighed. “It’s hard to explain. It’s the phenomenon of being related to fame. There’s a look certain people get when they twig to the fact that Ben Bolt was my father.”
“Certain people?”
“Certain grasping, upwardly mobile characters. Or, I don’t know—maybe they’re just fans. People like that want to get close to their heroes, even if only indirectly. Given the way Russians lionize poets and writers, Belenko could be very susceptible. As I say, I’ve seen it before. You can be ugly as a post and stupid as dirt, but if you’re related to somebody famous, it never matters to those who are too easily impressed.” Even though she herself found more to regret than celebrate in her connection to Ben Bolt, Mariah thought grimly.
“Be that as it may,” Geist said, “it’s a hook. I’m still thinking it would be a good thing if you ran into Belenko again. In fact, I think you should get to know him much better.”
“Are you saying you want me to seduce the man? Because if you are, I’m sorry, the answer is no. I interpret satellite data and write depressing reports on arms shipments that nobody reads. I wasn’t recruited to be a swallow.”
His hand made solicitous “there-there” motions, patting the air. “I didn’t mean to offend you, Mariah. I’m not asking you to do anything you’re not comfortable with. I just want you to reestablish contact with Belenko, see where his long-term interests lie. Feel him out. Note I said ‘out,’ not ‘up,”’ Geist added, smirking at his own wit. “If you get any hint he might be interested in joining forces professionally as well as personally, you let me know. We’ll take it from there.”
“I’m not comfortable with this,” she said, head shaking.
“You’ll do fine. It’s only for a day or so.”
“A day or so? I thought you just wanted me to cover the Romanov opening.”
“That’s probably all. Foreign Minister Zakharov’s going to be in L.A. for a few days, as I said, but we’re not sure Belenko’s staying the whole time. One way or the other, though, it’s two days, tops. Promise. I know you’ve got a vacation coming.”
“What about the State Department? Secretary of State Kidd doesn’t like Ops officers on his delegations.”
“I know, but that’s the beauty of it. You’re not Ops.”
Aha! Just as she’d suspected. The fact that she’d read him right gave her little satisfaction.
Geist went on. “It’s already been cleared with Kidd’s office. Since you’ve worked with them before, he’ll go along with it now. State has no idea about your approach to Belenko, mind you. We’ve said we want to use you as a quick conduit for intelligence briefings of the secretary in case the crisis heats up between Russia and Turkey.” A small skirmish had been developing between NATO ally Turkey and the Russians over the latter’s support to Kurdish rebels in Turkey. It was hardly at the level of “crisis,” Mariah thought, but Geist must have oversold its potential to get Kidd’s approval.
“I suppose my own deputy has also agreed to this?” she asked, knowing full well that the well-meaning but ineffectual analysis chief was no match for a determined operator like Jack Geist.
“Naturally.” Geist leaned back into the sofa and laced his fingers over his flat stomach. “All I’m asking you to do is help us take advantage of an opportunity, Mariah. If Belenko agrees to come on the payroll, my people in Moscow will manage him. I have full confidence in you to handle this.”
Somehow, that was small comfort.
Mariah took her victories where she found them. The year and a half since David’s death was just a blur, a blind succession of days filled with all the textbook stages of grieving, save acceptance. But denial she knew. And anger. And bargaining with fate: Let this not have happened and I will live an exemplary life all the rest of my days.
Fate wouldn’t be bargained with, however, so the best she could do was allow herself a small sense of triumph at getting out of bed each morning—an act of sheer will, requiring a certain determined amnesia in order to ignore the losses strung like thorns along the beaded chain of her life.
This resolve to carry on was entirely for Lindsay’s benefit. If she could have, Mariah would have sheltered her precious daughter from every harsh and buffeting wind, but she’d been powerless to keep David’s life from slipping away on them. Lindsay had been robbed of a father’s unconditional support at the worst possible moment, poised on the brink of adolescence, that moment in life when young people are already beginning to suspect that they’ve been duped and that the safe haven of childhood is an illusion fostered by a vast parental conspiracy. All Mariah wanted now was for her daughter to hold on to faith in the possibility of happiness, the constancy of love and the notion that people are mostly good—even if these beliefs held only the shakiest of places in her own personal credo.
At fifteen, however, Lindsay seemed equally determined most days to reject her mother’s take on life, love and all other matters, great and small. This was one of those days when nothing Mariah did or said or wore or suggested was going to earn even the most grudging approval.
“Not the blue one, either?” Mariah asked, pulling yet another hanger from her closet. They were in her upstairs bedroom of the condominium town house Mariah had bought in McLean, Virginia, after it became clear David would never recover from the car crash that had ripped apart their family—a deliberate attack that had also injured her daughter, but missed its intended target: Mariah herself.
Lindsay picked up a magazine from the bedside table and began flipping through it, her beautiful, dark eyes avoiding both her mother and the dress. “Whatever,” she said grudgingly.
Her hands were again decorated with ink doodling, Mariah noted, her nails painted blue-black. She’d been forbidden to go to school looking like that, but with school out for the summer now, Lindsay was testing limits again. Between the skin drawing, the hammered-looking fingertips and the third earring in one ear, her beautiful little girl seemed determined to transform herself into something out of Edgar Allan Poe. Why?
Mariah turned back to the mirror, gritting her teeth. They would not fight tonight.
From outside the flung-wide windows, the sweet, heavy scent of magnolia blossoms in the park-like condominium complex wafted across the warm evening air. But underneath that, the air crackled with the static charge of a storm brewing. July had arrived with all the restless, humid promise to which hormone-wracked youth are susceptible. Other people, too, perhaps, but not her, Mariah thought. That way lay only grief. She looked past her own reflection to her daughter’s. It was going to be a long summer, and not all the storms would be outside.
Pulling her gaze away from Lindsay, she forced herself to concentrate on the task at hand. It was getting late, and she was damned if she’d stay up half the night agonizing over wardrobe choices for an assignment she’d been dragooned into. She should have said no, and not just because of the assignment. There was also the contact site: the Arlen Hunter Museum. Hunter himself had died several years back. Was his family still involved in the museum that bore his name?
The Hunter family. Mariah grimaced. It wasn’t the family she was worried about. It was Renata. Would she be there? Well, what if she was? Why should it matter? Renata couldn’t hurt her anymore. Had no power over her unless Mariah handed it to her, and why would she do that? Simple answer: she wouldn’t.
She studied the dress in her hand once more. It was sleeveless and front-buttoning, with a high, Chinese-mandarin collar. The shimmering cobalt silk made a striking contrast to her softly cropped blond hair and cast her smoky eyes in an unusual light. It seemed suitable enough, but living with a teenager was enough to shake anyone’s confidence in her own judgment.
“What’s wrong with it?” she asked.
Lindsay’s bare shoulder lifted in a dismissive shrug. She was wearing a black halter top over heavily frayed jeans. A full head taller than Mariah’s five-three, with impossibly long legs, she was fair-skinned and fine-boned, with the doe-eyed delicacy of a Walter Scott heroine that belied an increasingly headstrong nature.
“A little fancy, isn’t it?” Lindsay said without looking up. “I thought this was a work thing. Why don’t you wear one of your suits?”
“It is work, but it’s also a gala opening. I don’t want to look like one of the museum guards, do I?”
Again, the shrug. “Wear what you want, then.”
Lindsay tossed the magazine aside and flopped down onto the big four-poster bed, thick curls washing like copper-colored waves down the smooth expanse of her back. As she landed, the corner of Mariah’s eye picked up a tumbling dust bunny, expelled from under the bed by the exasperated whumphing of the mattress. She tried not to think how long it had been since the vacuum had made a house call under there. She wondered, too, how this maddeningly irritating girl could be the cornerstone of her happiness, her reason for living. Some days, motherhood felt like pure masochism.
Giving up all hope of approval, she lay the Chinese-silk dress on the bed, by the garment bag lying next to Lindsay. Her suitcase was on the floor, and it already held most of the things she’d need for their vacation to follow. Lindsay’s own bag was packed, zipped and standing by the door of her bedroom down the hall.
“I still don’t see why I can’t come with you tomorrow,” Lindsay grumbled. “I would have liked to see the Russian royal treasures, too, you know.”
“I’ll take you another time. The tour’s coming through D.C. We’ll see it at the Smithsonian.”
“Yeah, right. Next year. You could have wangled me into the grand opening.”
Mariah shuddered at the thought. It was bad enough she had to go herself. “The invitation list was tightly controlled,” she said. “With the secretary of state and Russian foreign minister coming, the security contingent alone will take up half the hall. Anyway, this is no social occasion for me.”
“I wouldn’t get in the way. I didn’t in Paris.”
“That was different.”
“Yeah, it was. Those were private meetings. This is a public opening. If I got dressed up, I’d blend right into the background. I look old enough. I don’t even get carded at R-rated movies anymore.”
Mariah frowned. “R-rated movies? I don’t remember approving that.”
“Mom,” she said, rolling her eyes, “everything’s R-rated these days except Big Bird. I’ve told you about every movie my friends and I have gone to.”
Her friends included a six-foot, tank-size junior named Brent who’d started hanging around lately. Drive-in theaters and boys with shiny new driver’s licenses were bad enough, Mariah thought. Now, add R-rated movies to the long list of subjects that she and Lindsay could argue about.
Not tonight, though.
“The point is,” Lindsay said, “I can almost pass for twenty-something if I get really done up.”
“That’s all I’d need,” Mariah said, rifling through her bureau, trying to find her travel makeup bag. She and David had bought the oak double dresser at a country estate auction not long after they were married. Now, for the first time in her life, she had more drawer space than she knew what to do with, and she could still never find anything. The bag finally appeared. “I don’t want to be worrying about some guy hitting on my baby girl while I’m supposed to be picking Russian brains.”
Lindsay’s mouth rounded in a mock-pitying pout. “Aw, poor Mom! Double-oh-seven never had to baby-sit while he was spying on Dr. No, did he?”
“Double-oh-seven, my foot. I’m just an old desk jockey who gets unchained from time to time for a closer look at the other side. Those visiting dignitaries, however, have roving eyes and hands. I’m not exactly going to blend into the background if I have to be beating them off you like some crazed fishwife, am I?”
Lindsay blushed, confirming the general wisdom that redheads look adorable in pink. “Get outta here. You’ll be beating them off yourself in that dress.”
Mariah was packing her toiletry kit, but she turned to her daughter with a look of mock astonishment. “Oh, my gosh, is that a vote of confidence I’m hearing? You do think the dress is okay?”
Lindsay flipped over onto her back. “It’s fine. You going without me tomorrow isn’t.”
“You’re coming right behind me! Honestly, Lins, I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss. It’s barely forty-eight hours.”
“Because it’s boring here. All right? And there’s a party tomorrow night, and I’m not going to get to go to that, either! And if I don’t—” She rolled off the bed and headed for the door. “It’s not fair!”
The walls vibrated with the stomping of her feet down the hall and the slamming of her bedroom door, and then, the stereo came on loud. Very loud. Too loud for open windows and even the most well-baffled condominium walls.
Mariah massaged her forehead, trying to loosen the vise that was in the process of clamping down on her skull. When did the age of roller-coaster hormones end? It couldn’t happen too soon.
She took a deep breath, willing herself to be calm. The neighbors were away. The music still had to be turned down, but she would not fight. Not tonight.
She zipped her makeup kit and tossed it on top of the open suitcase. Then, steeling herself, she went down the hall and knocked softly on Lindsay’s door. No answer. The second rap was a little louder. Not aggressive. Just loud enough to be heard.
“What?” Lindsay snapped from the other side.
Mariah opened her mouth to ask if she could come in, but what if the answer came back no? Better to take acknowledgment as invitation. When she walked in, Lindsay was stretched on her stomach across the unmade bed, arms hanging down as she flipped through a pile of plastic CD cases on the floor beside her.
“We need to turn the music down,” Mariah said. “The windows are open, and it’s getting late.”
“Fine,” Lindsay said, but didn’t move.
Mariah walked over to the desk and lowered the volume on the stereo. The chair, typically, was covered with clothes from the try-and-toss ritual Lindsay went through as she debated her image each day. Mariah made a move to start hanging them up, but if she did, she knew it would be interpreted as criticism—not that the mess didn’t warrant it, but there was a time and a place, and this wasn’t it. On the other hand, she wanted to sit down, and she couldn’t bring herself to sit on top of all those clean clothes. She compromised and draped the whole pile over the back of the desk chair, then settled and looked around.
The decor was in a constant process of transformation. Nothing was ever removed, but layer upon layer was added as Lindsay’s interests evolved. Between posters of rock bands and animals, new ones had been hung—book jackets and astronomical phenomena, two of the many passions of this difficult but incredibly bright daughter she was trying to raise. Images of the Milky Way and the Horsehead Nebula hung interspersed with others of writers as diverse as Jane Austen, George Orwell and Ken Kesey—and, Mariah noted, one whole wall of Ben Bolt, the grandfather Lindsay had never known.
Maybe it was just coincidence that she’d discovered her grandfather not long after losing her dad. Ben’s novel Cool Thunder had been on her freshman English curriculum, after all. But Lindsay had taken her Ben Bolt study well beyond school requirements, reading everything by and about him that she could get her hands on.
Not surprising, Mariah supposed. At a certain point, everyone wants to know who they are and where they came from, and she herself hadn’t provided much information over the years. Where Ben was concerned, she’d operated on the theory that if you can’t say something good about someone…
“Why couldn’t I stay at Chap’s while you’re working?” Lindsay asked sullenly.
Chap Korman was the literary agent who’d handled Ben’s work from the start of his career. His house in Newport Beach, California, was only a couple of blocks from the cottage where Lindsay and Mariah were spending their three-week vacation. Since her own mother’s death twenty years earlier, Mariah had become sole guardian of Ben’s estate, and it was a credit to Korman that she felt as close to him as she felt estranged from the memory of his former client.
“There really wasn’t time to arrange it with Chap and change your ticket—although, to be perfectly honest, Lins, I didn’t even think of it. Carol was the first person I thought of.” Carol Odell was the married daughter of Mariah’s old CIA mentor and boss, Frank Tucker. The families had always been close. “She and Michael are really looking forward to having you there for a couple of days. So is Alex. Apparently, he’s having sibling anxiety over the new baby. That little guy’s crazy about you, and you haven’t seen much of him lately.”
“It’s not my fault. I had exams and everything.”
“I know. But when this assignment got thrown at me and I tried to think how to work it, Carol’s just seemed like the best idea. I did try to call you,” Mariah added, “but the phone here was tied up all afternoon.”
“I was talking to Br—to my friends about the party at Stephanie’s tomorrow. It’s not fair I can’t go.”
“There’ll be other parties. This couldn’t be helped.”
“It won’t be the same! People won’t be around later.”
“People? Are we talking people like Brent?”
She nodded miserably. “He’s going to Connecticut to see his dad. I won’t see him again till school starts.”
Mariah said a quiet prayer of thanks for that. She didn’t think she was being overprotective. At eighteen, Brent was just too old and altogether too smooth. But she adopted what she hoped was an appropriately sympathetic expression and reminded herself not to let any dismissive platitudes pass her lips. The only safe recourse was to agree that this development was, indeed, as earth-shattering as it seemed from a fifteen-year-old perspective. “I know it’s the pits,” she said. September was a long way off, thank God.
Lindsay sighed, a real heartbreaker of a sigh. Mariah moved next to her on the bed and stroked that beautiful copper hair.
“Carol says Charlotte’s just started smiling,” she ventured. Lindsay smiled a little at that. Mariah put an arm around her daughter’s slim shoulders, bending to kiss her head. “I know how frustrated you are, Lins. Me, too. I’m so fed up with work these days, I could put a chair though the window. We really need this vacation.”
It seemed they’d been planning it forever. A beach holiday, they’d decided, in a rare instance of total accord—three weeks of relaxing, swimming, tanning, shopping. Long walks on the sand. Maybe a few sailing lessons. California wouldn’t have been Mariah’s first choice. She’d have opted for the Hamptons or the Carolinas, but there had been advantages to going west, not the least of which was the chance to spend some time with Chap Korman, who wasn’t getting any younger. That was certainly where Lindsay’s vote had gone, in any case, so California-bound they were—with this one small wrinkle.
“Just be patient? I’ll go do this job, and then we’ll have three whole weeks to veg in the sun.”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
Mariah hugged her again, too grateful for the diverted crisis to listen to the doubts gnawing in the back of her mind. Doubts that should have told her there was something altogether too coincidental, too pat about this sudden call to duty on an old enemy’s turf.
If she’d been less distracted, less weary, less defeated, she might have pulled her wits about her faster and found a way to turn Geist down flat. But she hadn’t. And sure enough, it wasn’t long before she felt an unseen hand clawing at the frayed threads of her life.
Tuesday, July 2
Chapter Two
Frank Tucker awoke in gloom and found himself crying. He froze, catching himself in mid-sob, and held his breath, ears straining. But the only sound he heard was a lonely summer rain pelting the roof like a sympathetic echo to his grief.
Though disoriented, his instincts were sufficiently honed to render him both wary and appalled at his lapse. He racked his brain to think where he was. His first thought was Moscow. Room 714, Intourist Hotel. Surveillance devices embedded in every wall.
Horrified to think the listeners might have heard him crying, he wondered if he’d been drugged to induce this sense of utter desolation. A dead weight of despair seemed to be bearing down on him, crushing his chest. He inhaled deeply, trying to cast it off, and as he did, the piney scent of wet juniper tickled his nostrils. This wasn’t the typical Russian urban perfume of diesel, must and cooked cabbage, he realized. It was the smell of his own yard, drifting in through the open window.
Then he remembered flying back that morning. The unmarked aircraft had taken off from Moscow before dawn, Tucker the sole passenger. The only cargo had been one wooden crate. Picking up eight hours on the westbound journey, overtaking the rising sun, the plane had landed at Andrews Air Force Base just in time for the morning capital commute.
The driver who met the plane on the tarmac had taken Tucker’s suit bag and put it in the trunk of a dark sedan, watching while Tucker himself loaded the wooden crate. They exchanged hardly a word on the drive from suburban Maryland to McLean, Virginia, a chase car trailing close behind. Wending its way along the beltway, the convoy had turned off at the road leading through the Langley Wood, entering the CIA complex through a subterranean passage.
There, Tucker had carted the box to his sub-basement office. Prying it open with a crowbar, he’d flipped quickly though the moldering files inside before depositing the whole bunch in his heavy steel safe. After a quick call upstairs to confirm his return, he’d slammed the safe door and spun the dial, heading home to catch up on some of the sleep that had eluded him for the two days he’d been gone.
Now, with a warm summer rain splashing on the windowsill and the damp, earthy scent around him of a world washed clean, he was back in his own wide, empty bed in suburban Alexandria, fully dressed, only his shoes kicked off before he’d crashed on top of the covers.
How long ago?
The heavy curtains were drawn tight to shut out the light of day. Tucker glanced at the digital clock next to the bed: 11:33 a.m. He’d slept less than two hours before snapping awake to the sound of his own mournful cry.
The mattress dipped as he rolled onto his side, feet dropping with a thud to the carpeted floor. He exhaled a long, shuddering sigh, and the blade of his big hands scraped the tears from his cheeks—denying even this familiar room the pathetic sight of a middle-aged man reduced to tears. He had no recollection of the dream that had moved him to this state. All he knew was that it had left him with a profound sense of loss and longing.
He knew, too, that he was ludicrous—a brooding, barrel-chested hulk whose ferocious, black-eyed scowl had once struck terror in the hearts of fools and his more timid underlings. Now, here he was, reduced to whimpering in his bed like some self-pitying boy with a complaint about the unfairness of life.
He got to his feet and walked to the window, throwing back the drapes. The cloud-shrouded day cast a gentle light across the back lawn rolling down to the creek at the bottom of his property. The grass, dry and yellowing when he’d left forty-eight hours earlier, had already been transformed to lush green. On the borders of his lot, red hibiscus, white daylilies and blue hydrangeas were all in bloom—a patriotic display in time for the Fourth of July. The long fronds of the big willow by the creek swayed in the summer rainstorm, a slow, easy dance.
No automobile horns, no loud voices, no pounding jack-hammers. After the noise and bustle of Moscow, the quiet was deafening.
Tucker passed a hand over his head, feeling stubble on a dome normally shaved bowling-ball smooth. He debated his next move. He was bone-tired, but even if jet lag was insisting it was evening, sleep wasn’t an option. His dreams, obviously, weren’t to be trusted. Anyway, he’d only meant to grab forty winks. If he went back to bed now, he’d be left to struggle with his bleak thoughts through the long, dark night to come.
He could get moving, he supposed. Shower, shave, see if he had any clean clothes. Drive back into work and tackle those old KGB files.
But what was the point? Nothing and no one depended on him. Now that he’d gotten his hands on them and spirited them out of Moscow, anyone could take over dissecting the files, for whatever they were worth. From here on in, it would be solitary grunt work, the kind meted out to old operatives who’ve lost the ability or the heart to wade through the secret jungles, waging covert war.
Tucker knew he’d been written off as a casualty of that war—wounded, though not quite slain. He’d toyed with the idea of early retirement, but at the last minute, he’d backed away from the abyss of empty years stretching before him. He was in disgustingly good health. If statistics were to be believed, he had a third of his life yet ahead of him. What he did with that time mattered to no one but himself.
His wife had been dead sixteen long years, although there were days when he still half imagined Joanne would be there when he walked in the front door. He’d lost his only son, Stephen, a year and a half earlier. What family he had left needed little from him. His daughter Carol, and her husband, Michael, were a loving couple, hardworking, good parents to their two children. Sufficient unto themselves. All they required from him was that he put in an appearance at the occasional Sunday or holiday dinner.
Until recently, there’d been a woman in his life, helping to fill the empty hours and days, but that relationship had foundered and run aground like everything else. The extra-curricular involvement with his secretary had started one night a few years back, when Patty had marched into his office after the rest of his section had gone home and demanded he take her to dinner after working her like a slave until all hours. Then she had invited him to her apartment. They’d kept on in a low-key way ever after, and when his son had died, she’d pretty much moved in, nursing Tucker through months of guilt and self-loathing.
Finally, though, understandably, she’d grown tired of the uneven arrangement, knowing there were prior claims on his heart and mind that she’d never dislodge. As the previous winter had settled in, Patty had announced one evening, with resignation but no rancor, that she was quitting the Company and moving to Florida. Tucker hadn’t been invited to go along.
“It’s not that I don’t care about you,” she’d said, her voice dusky as she busied herself with packing the suitcase on his bed. “Fact is, I love you. Always will, I guess, fool that I am.”
Tucker was standing in the doorway, arms hanging stupidly at his sides, watching her and trying to get his mind around the prospect of her absence. “Then why are you leaving?”
She’d been part of his daily existence for nearly twenty years—at first, just sitting outside his office, running interference, holding back fools and whiners, keeping his expense accounts balanced and his files straight. Lately, he’d grown even more dependent on her.
She folded a sweater in a couple of brusque movements and laid it across the suitcase. Her hairdresser had taken to putting platinum streaks in Patty’s tawny hair to camouflage the increasing gray, and they sparkled as she moved. Straightening slowly, she turned to face him. “I’m not leaving because I’m mad, Frank. Honest. I just can’t live on a one-way street anymore.”
He nodded. “I haven’t been there for you. You stood by me these last months. You’ve done for me and done for me—”
“I was glad to.”
“I don’t know why.”
She came over to him, smiling sadly, running a hand up his arm. “I do.”
He cupped her cheek, thumb tracing the deep lines around her smiling mouth and hazel eyes. Her face was well lived in, but in the soft, forgiving glow of lamplight, he saw the pretty girl she must once have been, full of hopes and dreams that wouldn’t have passed her by, if life were in any way fair. Her body, too, had lost the firmness of youth, but had acquired in its place the warmth and uninhibited generosity that comes to the best of women in middle age. “I haven’t taken care of you,” he said.
“It’s not that. You take care of me just fine. You remember my birthday. You make me chicken soup when I get a cold. You sit beside me when I watch my stupid shows and never make fun when I blubber. You check the oil in my car, keep my brakes tuned and my tires aligned. There’s not much you wouldn’t do for me, Frank, I know that. Except the one thing I really want, and that’s not your fault. You can’t make yourself be in love with me.”
He started to reply, but she put her fingers on his lips, saving them both the embarrassment of an empty protest.
“No, it’s okay. That’s just the way it is. I knew going in how things were with you. I guess I hoped it might change. Or, if not, that what we had would be enough.” She shook her head. “But it’s not. Not for either of us.”
In his heart, Tucker knew she was right. She needed more than he was capable of giving her, and cutting her losses was probably the best thing for her to do. Knowing that didn’t make it any easier, though.
She kissed him then, and he wrapped her in his arms, holding on just a little longer. The next thing he knew, they were pushing her suitcase off the bed. And it might very well have been the best lovemaking they’d ever had, but it didn’t change the fact that afterward, Patty had finished her packing, loaded her Toyota and driven away.
Sighing heavily, now, Tucker stared at the big oak bed. His and Joanne’s twins had been conceived there. She’d nursed them in the chintz-covered rocker next to it. Years later, Tucker had sat in that same chair, watching her life slip away. The Moroccan carpet beneath the chair was worn thin from the long hours of rocking.
His father had picked up the carpet in North Africa during World War II. A Marine gunnery sergeant, he’d somehow managed to cart the thing around for eight months before he was finally shipped home with a uniform full of campaign ribbons, a stump in place of his left arm and his stupid rug. He’d gone on to marry the hometown girl he’d left behind and raise six kids, of whom Frank was the eldest, all on a one-armed printer’s wage—never, to the end of his days, uttering a word of complaint about his fate.
Tucker turned abruptly and headed for the bathroom, determined to shake off the sluggishness that enveloped him like a thick, syrupy mantle. Clean yourself up, for God’s sake. Give Carol a call, let her know you’re home.
But when he dialed his daughter’s number a short while later, it was neither Carol nor Michael who picked up. It was Lindsay.
“Hi, Uncle Frank! You’re home?”
“Just got in a little while ago.” Taken aback at hearing Lindsay’s voice, he fell into an awkward silence. She was the one who finally broke it. At fifteen, she had more polish than he did, Tucker thought ruefully.
“Carol’s upstairs feeding the baby. I just read Alex a story and tucked him in for his afternoon nap. Actually, three stories. Four, if you count the one he made me read twice. I’d probably still be up there, except he fell asleep on the second reading.”
Tucker smiled. His grandson was two, a whirling dervish.
“How was your trip?” Lindsay asked.
He hesitated. She had no idea where he’d been, of course. Neither did Carol, nor anyone else for that matter. It had been a tiny group inside the agency that had studied the cryptic message that had prompted his sudden trip to Moscow. Not even the director had been briefed, so that if Tucker got himself arrested over there, or worse, the front office—and the White House, if it came to that—could claim he was a rogue operative who’d slipped the chain of command to settle some personal score. A burnout case, pushed over the edge by family problems that had nothing to do with official American policy toward its new Russian friends. Tucker had simply told Carol he’d be out of town for a while so she wouldn’t worry if she didn’t hear from him.
“Trip was fine,” he said. “Dull. Is Carol going out? You baby-sitting this afternoon?”
“No, I’m staying here for a couple of days. Mom left early this morning for Los Angeles.”
Tucker’s pulse increased a notch. He’d recruited her mother himself. Mariah had worked with him for years in the old Soviet analysis unit, but their office partnership had ended when his career self-destructed. Since then, she’d moved on to bigger and better things, while he puttered on the sidelines, out of the field of action.
“I thought the two of you were going out there together,” he said to Lindsay.
“I leave Thursday morning. There’s an exhibit opening in L.A. tonight that she has to cover. The Russian foreign minister’s going to be there.”
“Oh, right, the Romanov treasures,” Tucker said more casually than he felt. Why would Mariah be assigned to cover Zakharov’s visit? That kind of thing wasn’t in her bailiwick.
He had another sudden, uneasy thought. How coincidental was it that she’d been pulled into action just after he himself had received a mysterious summons to Moscow?
Tucker had started out in Operations, but had moved behind the lines when his wife first got sick. All these years, both he and Mariah had labored in the background, cranking out their intelligence assessments. But if there was one thing he’d come to realize on this Moscow trip, it was how much personal information the opposition had on him. And if on him, why not on her, too?
“Listen,” he said to Lindsay, “tell Carol I called and I’m back, okay? I’ll talk to her later.”
“Okay. Will we see you soon?”
“You bet,” Tucker said firmly.
He hung up the phone and went to find his car keys. Suddenly, it was no longer enough to let someone else examine what he’d thought were just musty records, selectively chosen and leaked to sway American thinking on the current power struggle in Moscow. He’d suspected, given his Russian contact’s cryptic comments, that there was dirt on Foreign Minister Zakharov in there. Now he wondered if there was more to it than that.
He needed to know before anyone else saw those files.
Chapter Three
As her plane touched down at Los Angeles International Airport, Mariah tried to tell herself that her only objective here was to do the job she’d been sent to do, and do it fast. Make contact with Yuri Belenko, see where his interests lay and file her contact report. If he seemed amenable to doing a little freelance work on the side, Ops would assign him a handler. Or not. Their call. As for her, she’d be free to pick up her rental car and the keys to the beach house, meet Lindsay’s plane and get on with a much-needed vacation. End of story.
That’s what she told herself. The truth was a little more complex, as truth tends to be.
They say time heals all wounds, but it’s not entirely true. Some never really heal. On the surface, recovery may seem complete, but certain traumas leave a residual weakness that lurks in a troubled soul like a subterranean fault line, prone to unexpected eruption. There was such a susceptibility inside Mariah, unknown even to herself—a deep, dark place where resentment simmered and bubbled like hot, sulfurous magma. Until now, it had never percolated up to that place where liquid rage hardens into cold calculated action. But it’s the nature of such fault lines to give way without warning, and the explosive results are nearly always devastating—even to innocent bystanders.
She checked into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel around noon, with an hour or so to kill before she had to head over to get the lay of the land at the Arlen Hunter Museum. The Romanov exhibit was set to open at six.
While she waited, Mariah decided to give Chap Korman a call. She tipped the bellboy who’d delivered her bag to her suite, then settled into a deeply upholstered wing chair, propping her feet on the bed’s quilted floral spread, and dialed Korman’s number from memory. In the twenty years since her mother’s death, when Mariah had become the reluctant guardian of Ben Bolt’s prolific output, she’d gotten to know the literary agent well.
“Mariah! I wasn’t expecting you for another couple of days.”
She smiled at the sound of his voice, although it sounded more wavery each time they spoke, Mariah thought sadly, anticipating the day when this last, best link to her past would be gone. Chap was alternately coy and grumpy about his age, but he’d been older than Ben by several years, so she calculated that he had to be at least in his mid-seventies by now. He’d long since left the bustle of New York to nurse his arthritic joints in the warmer climes of southern California, but he continued to represent a roster of long-time clients, even championing the occasional new one when he found a writer he believed in.
“I just got in. I’m staying at the Beverly Wilshire,” she told him. “I was drafted for a short-term assignment, so I had to come early.”
“Aha! A secret mission,” he said delightedly. “Can’t tell me what it is, right, or else you’d have to kill me?”
She rolled her eyes. “You read too many spy novels, Chap.”
“Hey, this is exciting. You’re the only spook I know.”
“Big thrill. I could introduce you to twenty thousand other grunts who toil away in the same obscurity I do.”
“So, is Lindsay with you on this covert job?”
“No, she’s staying with friends. She flies in Thursday.”
“Any chance you’ll take me up on my offer? I’m just rattling around this big old place, you know. There’s plenty of room.”
Chap had retired to a lovely, bougainvillea-covered house in Newport Beach, of all places—an irony that never escaped her, since she tended to think of Newport as “the scene of the crime,” having spent a fairly miserable youth there. Since she hadn’t returned to the place in twenty years, she’d never actually seen Chap’s house, except in photos. But his wife of fifty years had passed away the previous year, and Mariah knew he was lonely. She felt a twinge of guilt for not accepting the invitation.
“I really appreciate the offer. This cottage we’ve got is right around the corner. We’ll practically be neighbors. That’s the main reason I jumped on the place when the offer came up. I need some one-on-one with Lins, though. You know, kind of a mother-daughter-bonding-healing thing.”
“I thought as much,” he conceded, “otherwise I’d have gone all cantankerous on you. How’s that little copper-haired honey of mine doing these days?”
“Oh, Lord! She’s fifteen. Need I say more?”
“No, I guess not.” Chap had raised sons, not daughters, but he had a good imagination. “What about Mom?”
“Day by day. Isn’t that the conventional wisdom?” Mariah hesitated before confiding, “You know that assignment I mentioned? It’s at the Arlen Hunter Museum—the opening of the Romanov exhibit. I’m supposed to help baby-sit the Russian delegation.”
His heavy exhalation whistled down the line. “Oh, boy. I’ve been seeing ads for that show, and I thought of you. So? Is Renata going to be there?”
“I’m not sure. I imagine it’s a strong possibility, though, don’t you?”
“Probably. How do you feel about that?”
Good question. “Hard to say,” she said truthfully. “I was under a lot of pressure to take this thing on. In the back of my mind, it occurred to me there was a good chance I’d run into Renata there, so I thought about digging in my heels and refusing. But you know what? Somehow I couldn’t muster up the will. It’s like morbid fascination with a car wreck or something. Part of me, I admit, is sick at the thought of seeing her after all these years. But another part of me is dying to get a look at the old witch.”
“Facing your demons, huh?”
“Maybe. Either that or pure masochism.”
Chap fell silent for a long moment. “Talk about timing,” he said finally. “Did you get the package I sent you?”
“Package?”
“I overnighted it. I wanted you to see it as soon as possible. It should have gotten there today.”
“I’d probably left by the time it arrived. What was it about?”
“Your dad’s manuscript. You know,” the old man said thoughtfully, “it’s a shame the press found out about those papers so soon.”
“I know. I’m really sorry about that. God knows, I didn’t mean for it to get out. I was at a dinner with Paul Chaney. He was the only other person in the world besides you, me and Lindsay who knew they existed. He let it slip. We were in a roomful of reporters, so needless to say, the word spread like wildfire.”
“This Chaney—I’ve never met him, but he seems like a pretty savvy guy, at least on TV. And I thought the two of you were pretty close. Seems odd he’d do something so indiscreet, doesn’t it?”
Mariah’s free hand twisted the phone cord around her fingers until it began to cut off her circulation. “Funny you should say that. In my charitable moments, I try to convince myself it was an inadvertent blunder, but there are times when I think he did it on purpose. He had to know what a feeding frenzy the news would set off, and that I’d be forced to acknowledge the manuscript and journals existed.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Strangely enough, to try to be helpful. He thinks I should be making more effort to come to terms with Ben’s memory. And I have, to some extent, Chap, mostly to satisfy Lindsay’s curiosity. We went to visit Ben’s grave in Paris, after all. I’d never done that before. But Paul thinks it would be therapeutic if I went further—got involved in promoting this new stuff, for example. I’ve tried to explain that there’s a limit to how far I’m prepared to go with this father-daughter reconciliation, but he just doesn’t get it.”
“I’ve been getting nipped by this media feeding frenzy myself,” Chap said.
“I noticed you’d been quoted a few places. You seem to be holding them at bay pretty well.”
“I thought it best not say anything publicly until you and I had a chance to talk. But I got a letter from a prof out here at UCLA not long after the press reports started. His name’s Louis Urquhart. He’s working on a biography of your dad that’s supposed to come out in time for Ben’s sixtieth-birthday celebrations next year. By the way, I told you what the publisher’s planning for the occasion, didn’t I?”
“Repackaging and reissuing his whole collection?”
“Exactly. This Urquhart’s not the only one interested in Ben’s work these days. Might as well brace yourself, kiddo, because we’re going to see a spate of books and articles about Ben over the next little while. He seems to be in vogue all over again with a new generation of readers.”
“I know,” Mariah said. “Lindsay’s English class studied Cool Thunder this year. So, what did this Urquhart have to say for himself?”
“It’s a little complicated to go into over the phone, but he’s making some pretty serious allegations. That’s why I decided you’d better see his letter.”
“You’re making me a little uneasy here, Chap.”
“Did you really not go through these papers of Ben’s yourself, Mariah?”
“Not really. Skimmed a couple of chapters of the manuscript to see if it was something new or just an earlier draft of a book that had already been published. I told you, the only reason I even opened the box is that the rental locker where I’ve been storing my excess junk since I sold the house got flooded during the heavy rains this spring. I’ve been carting those papers around for years. When I realized they’d gotten damp, it was either chuck the whole lot or see if you thought anything should be done with them. I didn’t have time to do it myself.”
Or the inclination, she could have added. She’d looked just closely enough to see that there was some sort of work in progress there, as well as more personal papers. She hadn’t the competence to judge the fiction, she’d decided, and she certainly hadn’t the stomach to read Ben’s self-absorbed journal ramblings.
“I appreciate the trust it took for you to send these to me, Mariah,” Chap said quietly.
She felt her eyes tearing up, and hated herself for it. “I know you’ll do the right thing with them. Whatever you decide is fine with me.”
“Thank you, sweetie. But I’m afraid it’s not that simple. We may have a bit of a problem on our hands.”
“How so?”
“Look, maybe the best thing would be for us to get together with Louis Urquhart while you’re out here.”
“Oh, Chap, no. Lindsay and I are supposed to be on vacation. I don’t want to waste it hanging out with Ben’s adoring public.”
“I know how you feel, but this is not something we can ignore.”
There was something in his voice, graver than Mariah had ever heard. “Okay, now I am worried. What could possibly be so all-fired important that—”
“Urquhart thinks the manuscript of the novel was stolen from someone else, Mariah. And he thinks Ben was murdered.”
She answered with stunned silence.
“Now, I’m not saying I buy it,” Korman added quickly. “I admit, there were a few surprises in those journals of Ben’s, and the novel is unlike anything else he wrote. But it’s a big leap from there to what Urquhart is alleging. Bottom line, though? Urquhart could have blindsided us by taking his allegations public, but he didn’t. So I think it’s only fair to hear the guy out, and then we’ll decide together where to go from there. Okay?”
“But this is crazy, Chap! Murdered? We know how he died. At least, I always thought we did. Don’t we? Wasn’t my mother told that the French authorities did an autopsy when his body was found, and that he’d died of hepatitis?”
“She was, yes.”
“So how did we get from hepatitis to murder?”
“I’m not sure. That’s obviously one question we need to put to Urquhart—what evidence has he got to support his allegations?”
Mariah studied the nubbly, butter-colored wallpaper over the bed. “I don’t know. This sure smells like a muckraking publicity stunt to me. Like this Urquhart’s looking for a bestseller.”
“If it were anybody else, I’d agree. But Louis Urquhart’s one of the most respected literary academics in this country. His biography of Jack Kerouac won a Pulitzer Prize. I don’t think he’d be building this murder theory if he didn’t have some facts to back it up. Plus, he came to me first, remember, not the press.”
She exhaled heavily and glanced at her watch. “All right. If you think it’s really necessary, we’ll talk to him. I have to head off to the museum now. How about if I call you again when my work’s done? With any luck, I might have a free day tomorrow. Maybe we can get this out of the way before Lindsay arrives.”
“Sounds good. Meantime, I’ll let Urquhart know we’re willing to meet with him. And Mariah?”
“Mmm?”
“As far as Renata’s concerned? I know you and your mom and sister got a raw deal when Ben took off to Paris with her like he did. But Renata didn’t last long, did she? He tired of her pretty fast. People who know her say she never got over him, though.”
“Gee, that’s really tough.”
“Yeah, I don’t feel too much pity for her, either. Your mom always believed Ben was going to come back to you guys, only he died before he could make it. But whatever happened over there, one thing is sure: in the end, Renata lost. Remember that if you see her, honey.”
“No, Chap,” Mariah said wearily. “We all lost.”
Chapter Four
Frank Tucker sat in his windowless office, feet on his desk, reading files that were mildewed and yellow with age. He’d been at it three hours, and his eyes felt scoured. His nose had long since blocked in protest over the barrage of mold spores, and his head ached from lack of sleep and the concentrated effort of reading the musty Russian documents. But his brain was racing.
He set down the file in his hand. As he stretched, the worn, cloth-covered swivel chair under him shrieked in protest at the shift of his great frame. Hands clasped behind his head, he stared at the random punctures on the ceiling’s gray acoustic tiles, pondering again how it was that he, personally, had been selected to receive this carefully selected record of KGB mischief and misdeeds.
History is a moth-eaten fabric, full of holes—a vast tapestry of change whose underlying pattern is obscured by official secrecy and necessary lies. A thousand untimely ends and unaccountable triumphs are doomed to remain mysteries forever, their solutions locked away in the memories of shadowy operators who die unconfessed.
Some clues lie buried in the dusty files of the world’s great clandestine agencies, where the harsh light of public scrutiny never falls. But as each regime gives way to the next, furnaces are lit and burn bags are consumed by flame—incriminating evidence lost forever.
Most, but not all, Tucker thought, glancing at the tattered files around him.
Of all the secret agencies, none hid more mysteries than the yellow and gray stone walls of the KGB’s old Moscow headquarters. It was from behind the heavy steel doors of Lubyanka that a message had originated in late June, marked for delivery to one semi-burned-out official of the American CIA. It was that message, delivered late one night, a week earlier, that had sparked Tucker’s quick, clandestine trip to the Russian capital.
He’d been driving home by a circuitous route along quiet back roads. It was nearly midnight, but day and night tended to lose meaning in his underground office, where not much happened and few people dropped by. Tucker spent his time these days poring over old agency files, responding to Freedom of Information requests from historians, journalists and the generally curious. He culled cover names, sources and other sensitive data from the files, deciding which could safely be declassified and released, and which had to remain closed to protect ongoing operations.
He had no clock to punch, no strenuous deadlines to meet. He simply worked alone until his eyes grew too bleary to read any longer. Then he returned to his empty house and prayed for sleep. Taking the longest possible route was his way of decompressing, releasing tension like a ball of string unwinding on the road behind him.
On that particular cool, starlit June night, the suburban back roads of Virginia were deserted when Tucker brought his Ford Explorer to a stop at an intersection in McLean, just a couple of miles from the agency. As he waited for the light to change from red to green, a dark sedan materialized out of nowhere, pulling alongside him. The driver got out and knocked at his passenger-side window.
Instantly on alert, Tucker sized him up—medium height and build, sandy hair. Fit-looking under his dark wind-breaker. Young—thirty, tops, he decided.
Tucker pressed a button on his armrest to lower the opposite window. With his other hand, he reached down between the seats and came up with a nine-millimeter surprise. If the stranger was a cop or a fed, Tucker could produce a carry permit for the gun. If this was a hit, the guy might as well know right off Tucker wasn’t going down without a fight.
The blue eyes in the window widened. “I mean you no harm, Mr. Tucker,” he said. His tongue was tripping on the words in his rush to get them out. The vowels were clipped, the consonants weighted with a heavy Slavic burr.
“You know my name,” Tucker said. “I should know yours.”
“It is not important.”
“That’s a matter of opinion.”
“I am only a courier.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I have a message for you. Please?” The man raised a brown manila envelope in his trembling hand.
“Who’s it from?”
“I cannot say. You take it, please?” He started to pass the envelope through the window, but Tucker raised the gun until it was aimed right between the young man’s eyes.
“Hold it right there,” he said. “I don’t want that.”
Obviously, this wasn’t the anticipated response. “But…but, it is for you!” the courier sputtered.
“Do I look like I was born yesterday?”
“No.”
“Then you’ll believe me when I say I know a blackmail play when I see one. Where’s the camera?” Tucker glanced around. The road was dark and quiet as death. If there were professional watchers out there, they were good. Still, the whole thing stank to high heaven. If he accepted the envelope, he was damn sure the next visit he got would be from this fellow’s friends, threatening to expose him as a double agent. Then, another wary thought occurred to him. His own side? Could CIA security or the FBI be looking to jam him up for some reason?
“There is no camera. I swear it,” the messenger said fervently.
“Just the same, I don’t want that thing.”
“It is important. I am instructed to give it to no one but you.”
“You know where I work?”
“I am guessing you are employed at the C-I-A in Lan-ge-ley, Virginia,” the stranger said with heavily accented precision. “Am I correct?”
“Deliver it to me there, then.”
“Are you mad? I cannot walk into that place!”
Tucker considered the situation, then nodded toward the intersection. The light had changed from red to green, then back again. “There’s a 7-Eleven store up ahead. Follow me, and you can hand it over inside.” In front of a witness, he thought, and the store security cameras.
The courier shook his head. “If I do that, I am a dead man.”
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
The other man sniffed, as if such a threat was beneath his dignity to ponder now that he’d recovered from the initial shock of having the gun thrust in his face. “It is not you I am worried about, Mr. Tucker, nor your colleagues. My own people are another matter.”
Tucker frowned. “Your own people? Oh, I see. You want to defect, is that it? Or are you just in sales?”
“I am a patriot!” the other man said indignantly. “It is why I do this. But perhaps my colleagues are mistaken. Perhaps you are not the man they take you for. In which case, Mr. Tucker, I will bid you good-night.”
“Hold it right there.”
Tucker studied him for a moment, as well as the thin envelope. Then, he reached into his pocket, withdrew a penknife, pausing to wipe the handle on his shirtsleeve before handing the knife over by the key ring attached to one end.
“Open this and use the blade to lift the flap. But do it carefully, hear? You’re going to reseal the envelope afterward.”
“I must not open it.”
“Why? Some danger in that?”
“No, but—”
“Do it.”
The young man hesitated, then sighed heavily. Opening the penknife, he inserted the blade under the flap, separating it gingerly, leaving just enough gum in place to allow it to be closed once more.
“Now, spread the edges and show me what’s inside,” Tucker said.
No money. No fat wad of smuggled documents. Just a single sheet of paper that seemed to be covered with handwriting.
Tucker nodded. “Okay. Seal it back up again.”
The other man licked the flap and pressed it shut. “You will take it now?”
“I want my knife back first.”
The courier handed it through the window. Tucker took it with his handkerchief, transferring both to his left hand. Then, as the Russian started to pass in the envelope, Tucker’s right hand clamped around his wrist.
“What are you doing?” the courier protested.
Tucker jabbed the other man’s thumb with the tip of the knife. Not much—a pinprick, really, just enough to draw blood. Hardly enough to justify the stream of Russian obscenities that exploded from the other man’s mouth. Yanking the man’s arm downward, Tucker pressed the bloody thumb firmly against the flap, making a seal across the re-closed edges. Then, he released him.
The Russian jammed his thumb into his mouth. “What the hell you are doing that for?” he cried, grammar failing him in his fury.
Tucker closed the knife carefully, wrapped it in the handkerchief and dropped them both into the door pocket beside him. Only then did he take the envelope. “Sorry,” he said. “Personal insurance. Now I have your fingerprints on my knife and your DNA on the envelope.”
“If my people find out—”
“As long as you don’t try playing games with me, your people will never know. You have my word on that. Now, what else? Do I need to get in touch with you again?”
“No, I have done my part. The next step is up to you.”
“Meaning…?”
“Read the letter. You will know what you are to do. Good evening, Mr. Tucker.”
With that, the Russian turned away in a huff, still nursing his injured thumb, climbed back in his car, jumped a red light and sped away through the empty intersection. Tucker took note of the red diplomatic plates as the car disappeared into the night. Curiouser and curiouser.
His eyes dropped to the blank brown envelope. He turned it around in his hand, then laid it on the seat beside him, keeping the blood-smeared flap on top, away from the upholstery.
As the light at the intersection changed from red to green once more, Tucker punched in a number on his console-mounted cell phone, picked it up and made a U-turn, heading back toward Langley.
A fingerprint on the knife allowed them to identify the courier from visa files. His name was Gennady Yefimov, a recently arrived third secretary at the Russian embassy in Washington—a junior flunky, albeit one already suspected of being part of the embassy’s intelligence Rezidentura. His late-night rendezvous with Tucker pretty much confirmed it.
The source of the message was another kettle of fish altogether. The note was in Russian, but the signature was a single English word: “Navigator.” It was a taunt, this use of the secret code name given to the Russian spymaster by his own adversaries in tribute to the man’s ability to navigate Moscow’s treacherous political waters. Even after the fall of communism, the Navigator had remained in place, thriving, by all accounts, when so many others had foundered and sunk.
That he knew and used his own Western code name was a galling reminder of the mole the Navigator had run for years inside Langley, a disgruntled petty functionary in the counterintelligence division. The mole had finally been caught, but not before his betrayals had cost the lives of dozens of Company assets in Russia.
Tucker had never seen the Navigator’s face, except in one grainy, long-range surveillance photograph, nor had he ever heard the man’s voice. Just the same, he knew his real name as well as he knew his own. For as long as Tucker had been in the business, Georgi Deriabin, aka the Navigator, had been the dream target of the entire Western intelligence alliance. As head of the KGB—later FSB—First Chief Directorate, he’d held overall responsibility, both before and after the Soviet breakup, for every aspect of Moscow’s intelligence activities abroad. Compared to other sources of information on Russian agents, operations and long-term strategies, Deriabin was the frigging motherlode.
Or would have been, until recently. He’d be in his late seventies now, and rumors of ill health had begun to surface. Recently, the CIA’s Moscow Station had floated the possibility that the Navigator had finally been shuffled out. Like J. Edgar Hoover in his day, however, the Navigator was said to possess incriminating files on everyone who might be a threat to him. When rumors began to spread of his eclipse at long last, there were those in Moscow Station who suspected he’d been arrested, possibly even executed. But if the Navigator really was the source of the note delivered to Tucker by the nervous courier, it had obviously been a mistake to write the man off too early.
The note said Deriabin wanted to meet with Tucker in Moscow—nobody but Frank Tucker—and it said he would make the meeting well worth the trouble. And so, after a small committee had vetted the plan and decided there was little to lose—except, Tucker knew they were calculating, one jaded officer whose best years seemed behind him—he’d flown to Moscow. If the operation had blown up in his face, they’d have simply written him off, issued some plausible cover story and saved the price of his pension.
But Tucker had come back, alive, well and carrying a crate of files whose contents remained to be determined. Not to mention the reason why the Navigator had decided to hand them over in the first place.
Chapter Five
Mariah had her hotel-room key card in one hand and the other on the door handle, ready to leave. She was wearing her serviceable, goes-anywhere-but-a-gala-opening black Donna Karan suit. Her plan was to run over to the Arlen Hunter Museum, get the lay of the land and meet with the rest of the security contingent for the Romanov opening, chase back, change into the Chinese-mandarin silk number, then return in time for the 6:00 p.m. ribbon-cutting and reception.
But she hesitated at the door, her conversation with Chap Korman spinning through her mind. The bizarre allegation that her father had been murdered was patent, provable nonsense. But what about the claim that the manuscript she’d found had been stolen?
From whom? And why would Ben steal someone else’s work? Writer’s block? Not likely. In the nine short years before his death at the age of twenty-eight, her father had produced five novels, dozens of short stories and countless poems, not to mention several volumes of personal journals. You couldn’t have shut the man up if you’d tried.
So why was this Professor Urquhart claiming the manuscript she’d found in the storage locker, the one Ben had titled Man in the Middle, was stolen? And, more to the point, Mariah thought, why did she know that it couldn’t be?
Something niggled at the back of her brain, telling her the manuscript had to be Ben’s work. She just couldn’t think what it was. The harder she tried to zero in on it, the more elusive it became, like trying to pick up mercury.
This was ridiculous. She had no time for this nonsense. God knew she had more pressing problems to think about. A teenage daughter on the verge of rebellion. This awkward role she’d been cast in, playing temptress to lure a possible double agent. The prospect of meeting her father’s former lover.
Just the same, Urquhart’s claims would drive her crazy until she knew the basis for them.
She did a quick mental calculation, cutting her afternoon turnaround times even tighter. Spinning on her heel, she rushed back into the room, tossed her purse and key card on the bed, then rummaged in drawers and closets until she found a Los Angeles telephone book. After a quick call to Courier Express, she pulled out her personal address book, picked up the phone and dialed out again.
It took three tries before she located someone at Langley who could tell her where Frank Tucker was hanging his hat these days. Every time she looked, he seemed to have retreated farther and farther away from the mainstream of agency operations. She was relieved to finally hear his gruff voice pick up.
“Tucker.”
“Frank! You’re there! I thought I was going to have to send out a search party.”
“Mariah? Where are you? Lindsay said you’d gone to L.A.”
“I did. I am—there, I mean. That’s where I am. In Los Angeles.” She paused to quell the fluster that had suddenly turned her into a stammering fool, then started again. “You’ve been talking to Lindsay?”
“A little while ago. I called to let Carol know I was back.”
“Back from where?”
“I was away for a couple of days.”
A non-answer if ever she’d heard one. It was like pulling teeth, talking to him sometimes. “You’ve changed offices again. What’s going on?”
“They needed my cubbyhole upstairs for some summer intern, so they gave me a broom closet down in the basement.”
“The basement? Good Lord! Why do you let them do that to you? With your service—”
“I’ve got no complaints. Suits me fine.”
Mariah slumped down onto a chair and leaned forward, elbow on the round glass table next to the bed, forehead in the palm of her hand. “Frank,” she said wearily, “it’s time.”
“Time for what?”
“To come out from that rock you’ve been hiding under.”
He said nothing for a moment, and she sensed she’d crossed an invisible line. She had known this man for eighteen years, ever since he’d first recruited her. There was no question they were bound to one another by something beyond mentoring, beyond professionalism, beyond friendship. They’d been through good times together, and sad. She’d known his wife; he’d known her husband. Once, she might have been able to talk to Frank about anything. Now, there was that invisible line.
Beyond this point there be dragons.
When he finally did respond, it was only to change the subject. “What’s this about you covering the Zakharov visit? How did you get dragged into that?”
“Oh, no you don’t,” she said. Why should he always get to define the placement of the line? “You first. This trip of yours—where did you go?”
“That’s a long story.”
“I see. Holding out on me? You didn’t happen to go to Florida by any chance, did you?” she asked playfully, trying to draw him out of the tight, defensive corner in which he seemed to live full-time these days.
“No,” he said curtly.
Oops. She’d hit a nerve. Not surprising. Patty Bonelli had been at his side a long time, after all, and without her now, he seemed totally adrift, his last tether cut. It wasn’t right or fair. He was solid, hardworking, capable. A good man, who looked as though he could carry the weight of the world on those broad shoulders of his—and had, professionally and personally, for years and without complaint. She was one of the few who knew the full price Frank had paid for that blind, stoic fidelity. Now he seemed to have closed himself off completely, to her, and maybe to everyone else, too.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to pry.”
The line fell silent, but when Frank spoke again, she was relieved to hear a little of her old friend in his voice. “It’s okay. The trip was business. That other, with Patty—it’s just not happening, that’s all.”
“Have you spoken to her lately?”
“A couple of weeks ago. She called to say hi.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Seems happy enough down there. Got a cocker spaniel, apparently.”
Poor Frank, Mariah thought. Replaced by a dog.
“Now tell me,” he said, “what are you doing out there? I thought you and Lindsay were supposed to be on vacation.”
“Day after tomorrow.”
“Uh-huh. And explain to me why you, of all people, got dragged into covering the Zakharov visit?”
“That, too, is a long story, if you know what I mean.”
“All right, not on the phone,” he conceded. “Just tell me this—whose idea was it?”
“Hmm…well, remember Wanetta’s old buddy?” Wanetta Walker had been a secretary in Frank’s old Soviet section, rescued by him from the clutches of a certain Jack Geist from Operations, who’d been making her life miserable.
“He sent you? Son of a bitch.” Tucker muttered. “You don’t work for him, Mariah. You should have said no.”
“I tried, but he pulled an end run on me. By the time he called me up to his office, he’d cleared it six ways to Sunday and it was pretty much a fait accompli. Anyway, not to worry. Job’s just a twenty-four-hour deal. I’m heading out shortly, in fact. But, Frank? On an altogether different matter, I need a favor.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s kind of a hassle. It involves running over to the Courier Express distribution center in Falls Church. If you don’t have time for this, I want you to tell me, okay?”
“No problem. What’s the deal?”
“They tried to deliver a letter to my house this morning, but I’d already left for the airport. Apparently, it had to be signed for, so they couldn’t leave it. I called Courier Express and they said I could sign a release allowing a third party to collect it. There’s an office just down the street from my hotel. I was going to stop in on my way out of here and do the paperwork. I wanted to give them your name, if that’s okay.”
“Sure,” he said. “What’s this about?”
“It’s from my father’s old agent, Chap Korman.”
“Korman,” he repeated, and Mariah had the impression he was writing down the name. “You want me to hold the letter till you get back, or ship it to you out there?”
“I was going to ask you to send it with Lindsay, but now that I think about it, I’d rather you open the envelope as soon as you get it. I want to know what the hell’s inside.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
She exhaled heavily. “Chap Korman sent me a copy of a letter he received from some professor at UCLA who’s working on a biography of my father. Apparently, this guy’s come up with some kind of cockamamy theory that this manuscript I found—” She paused. “Maybe you didn’t hear about that? I came upon an unpublished novel and some other personal papers of my father’s a couple of months ago.”
“Yeah, I read about it in the paper.”
Mariah felt a tremor of guilt at the thought of Frank getting his news of her out of the newspaper. And seeing her photographed on Paul Chaney’s arm. Damn. “Right,” she said. “Anyway, this professor is apparently of the view that the manuscript was something my father stole. And it gets weirder. He’s also suggesting Ben was murdered.”
She expected derision or blunt dismissal of such an obviously stupid claim. A few pointed questions, at least. But all Frank said was, “I’ll check it out.”
“I just want to know where he’s coming from before I see him while I’m out here. I’m sorry to be such a nuisance.”
“You’re not. I’m glad you called.”
She’d called because there was no one else she trusted more, Mariah thought, struck by the realization of how much she’d missed Frank these past months. The line went quiet again, but this time it was one of those comfortable silences between kindred spirits, like an easy hand on the shoulder—more like the way things used to be before everything had gone so sour for them both.
She wished he weren’t so far away and she weren’t so pressed for time. Now that they’d reconnected, she wanted to talk—about a lot of things, including the worst part of this assignment Jack Geist had dumped in her lap—the possibility that it would bring her face-to-face with her father’s old lover. But that, too, was a long story, and she had to get going to the museum. It was enough for now to know Frank was there.
“Thanks for doing this,” she said. “I knew I could count on you.”
His reply was almost inaudible. “Always.”
Chap Korman had a fourteen-carat heart and a steel-trap mind, even at the ripe old age of seventy-seven. But his knees seemed made of pure chalk, screeching when he hoisted himself unsteadily to his feet. Wincing, he leaned against the low brick wall between his front courtyard and his neighbor’s, and he waited for the pain to pass.
Since Mariah’s call, he’d been busy planting a border of colorful impatiens along the wall. Thick, green gardener’s pads Velcro-strapped over his khaki trousers helped a little to relieve the agony of working on his knees, but getting up again was another matter. There was no escaping that gravity works, and that his old joints just didn’t support the weight of his body as well as they once had.
When he could finally move again, he knocked his trowel against the brick wall to dislodge clumps of loam, then slapped the dirt off his hands, viewing his handiwork with satisfaction. It was worth a few aches and pains. Emma’s garden was looking good again. He’d never really appreciated how much work it took to keep it up.
Seventeen years ago, when they’d first moved out from New York, it was the location of this property that had appealed to them. The two-story clapboard house fronted on Newport Harbor, with only a pedestrian walkway between the front yard and the boat slips opposite running the length of the peninsula. The view was of anchored sailboats, Balboa Island and the rolling hills of mainland Orange County beyond, rising above the masts.
Automobile access for the houses was via a nondescript lane at the back, a canyon of ugly garages at street level. But even that side of the house had had its secret potential—a spacious flat roof over the garage with a pristine and uninterrupted view west toward the Pacific Ocean, only a couple of blocks away. Just the place to add a deck to sit on in the evening and watch the setting sun.
The house had been run-down after years of hard use by summer renters, the front courtyard an arid wasteland of dead plants and broken flagstones. Chap and Emma had had the interior remodeled, consolidating two of the four bedrooms to provide a large library/office for Chap’s wheeling and dealing on behalf of his clients. They’d also had a spa and gazebo added to the new back deck off the master bedroom.
Em, meantime, had single-handedly transformed the courtyard into a lush and brilliant oasis. It had been her greatest pleasure, a work-in-progress right to the end of her life. Chap, a night owl, would wake each day at midmorning to the soothing sound of her off-key humming under the window and know she’d been at it since sunup. In the end, it was the wilting garden, not the doctors, that told him how sick she really was.
At first, after she died, he’d let the yard go. When weeds threatened to overtake her beloved roses, and the blue Cape plumbago grew so leggy it started pushing over the low picket fence along the front walkway, he hired somebody to bring it under control and keep it tidy. But the day he came home to find Emma’s roses butchered, Chap fired the gardener, dragged Em’s tools out of the garage and took over the job himself. Lately, he was enjoying it more and more, despite his arthritic knees. He even found himself humming Sinatra as he worked, just as Em had done—although he liked to flatter himself that his pitch was better.
“Hey, Chap! Looking good,” a voice behind him called.
Chap turned to see his neighbor being dragged out his front gate by a fat basset hound. At the other end of the leash, Kermit’s big feet scrabbled under his saggy, low-slung body, tripping over his necktie ears, following his massive nose in headlong pursuit of whatever thrilling quarry it was he’d scented this time.
Chap grinned as he lifted the trowel in a wave. “’lo, Doug! See Kermit’s taking you for your daily constitutional.”
Doug Porter grimaced. “No kidding.” He paused to wipe a fine sheen of sweat that was already forming on his bare scalp, close-shorn on the sides, bullet-smooth on top. “Listen, Chap, I’m glad I caught you out here. I was going to ask if your roses could be pruned back where they’re coming through the fence.”
Chap peered over. Sure enough, the climbers were beginning to wend their way into his yard. “Sorry about that. I never even noticed it,” he said, reaching for the pruning shears hooked over his back pocket. “I’ll cut ‘em back right now.”
“I hate to be a nuisance—”
“It’s no trouble.”
Chap started to reach over, but the hound rammed the gate and snorted his way through with a happy, basso profundo “Woof!” Chap turned and gave Kermit’s tricolor head a pat, while Porter strained to keep him from climbing up the old man’s frame. In his mid-forties, Porter was tanned and extremely fit, but the basset’s powerful leg muscles and low center of gravity made the daily contest between them an uneven match that the dog inevitably won.
“Your friends arrive yet?” Porter asked breathlessly. He was dressed in his habitual black silk shirt and black pants—his signature look, Chap thought, though it seemed a ridiculous outfit for dog-walking on a hot day.
“Mariah did. She’s up in L.A. Her daughter’s coming behind. They should both be here tomorrow.”
“So, what do you think? Would they like to come along and watch the fireworks from offshore?”
Porter had moved in a couple of months earlier, and this was the third or fourth time he’d held out an invitation to join him on his sloop, anchored in the harbor. Up to now, Chap had always found reasons to decline. Felt guilty about it, though. He had a sneaking suspicion his single neighbor was gay, and while his personal philosophy was a liberal live-and-let-live, a little knee-jerk anxiety always kicked in at the prospect of finding himself alone on a boat with the guy. But what did he think? That an overweight, arthritic senior citizen was in danger of being cast as a boy-toy du jour?
Porter seemed like a good guy, a gregarious architect who entertained all kinds of interesting people, from what Chap had seen. It would probably be a nice evening out there on the water, and Lindsay might get a real kick out of seeing the fireworks from that vantage point.
“I haven’t had a chance to put it to them yet,” he said. “I just talked to Mariah a while ago, but to be honest, I forgot to mention it. I hate to keep you on hold.”
“It’s no problem. I have to confess, I’d really love to meet them. I’m a huge Ben Bolt fan.”
Chap paused, momentarily taken aback at that bit of news. A curious offshoot of the Ben Bolt legacy was the almost cultlike following inside the gay community, despite Ben’s solid reputation as a ladies’ man. Sounded like Porter was one of those devotees.
“I have to tell you,” Chap said, “Mariah’s not—a fan, I mean. She was only seven years old when Ben walked out on the family. Doesn’t make for a lot of warm fuzzy memories on her part.”
The dog had turned back toward the gate, and his claws scratched the sidewalk in his anxiety to move on. “Kermit, sit, dammit!” Porter commanded.
A waste of breath if ever there was. The dog seemed deaf as well as single-minded. The tug-of-war continued.
“Incorrigible mutt. Thanks for the warning, Chap. I’d have spent the whole evening blathering on like some star-struck teenager if you hadn’t told me. I’d still love to have you all on board, though.”
“It sounds like something they might enjoy,” Chap admitted. “Can I ask them and get back to you?”
“You bet.” The other man finally conceded defeat and gave the scrabbling mutt his head. “Catch you later!” he called over his shoulder, breaking into a loping jog.
Chap waved after them, grinning, then turned back to the roses and started pruning the few that were encroaching on the Zen-like tidiness of Porter’s courtyard. He grunted as his short arms reached over the top of the pickets. If he had any brains, he’d walk around to the other side of the fence to do this, but he was tired, and he wanted to pack it in.
“Ouch! Damn!” he bellowed, nearly losing his balance as his bare fingers closed on a stem full of thorns. Now he knew why Em had always worn gardening gloves. He’d always thought it was just to protect her manicure.
When he’d finally cut back the last of the stragglers, he dumped them in the green waste recycling bin he’d rolled out to the courtyard, then gathered up the rest of the garden tools. His body was a mass of aching joints and muscles. He could do with a nap, he decided, dragging the bin and tools back to the side of the house. Then he had another thought—a wee drink, a nice soak in the Jacuzzi to ease his weary bones and then a nap.
He parked the bin in the narrow, shady passage between his house and Porter’s, then entered the garage through the side door. Brilliant light assaulted his eyes, bouncing off the concrete lane and gleaming white stucco of his neighbors’ high walls across the way.
Idiot. You left the garage door open.
He berated his absentmindedness. The neighborhood was virtually crime-free most of the year, but summer always brought a spate of burglaries—opportunistic crimes, petty thieves slipping through unlocked back doors, stealing wallets and purses while residents sat in their waterfront courtyards.
Chap walked out, glancing up and down the lane. Not a soul in sight. With its astronomical real estate prices and postage-stamp yards, the area attracted mostly professional singles and empty nesters, so there were no kids out riding bikes. Nor, with its narrow sidewalk and blinding, foliage-free glare, did the lane encourage strolling.
Satisfied the coast was clear, he went back in, rounding his old, silver-gray Jaguar to Emma’s worktable. He wiped down the tools with an old rag, then gave them a coat of oil, just as she’d always been careful to do, and replaced them in her red wicker gardening basket. He unstrapped the Velcro kneepads and hung them on their pegboard hook, then traded his old, mud-spattered Topsiders for the soft kid slippers he’d left by the inside door. His hand hit the button to close the garage door as he walked into the house.
Next item on the agenda: two or three fingers of scotch.
He carried the glass and bottle upstairs, setting the bottle on the nightstand. After a couple of sips from the glass, he set it on the rim of the spa and hit the controls to turn on the jets. He stripped out of his clothes on his way back across the bedroom to the bathroom, then showered off the garden dirt.
He was wrapping a towel around his waist when he heard a click. A door latch?
Chap stepped cautiously into the bedroom. Nothing. He padded out to the hall. His office next door was cluttered, as always, with manuscripts waiting to be read. He slid open the closet door. The space inside had been fitted with shelves to hold some of the overflow. There, on the bottom shelf, sat the cardboard box containing the trove of Ben Bolt papers Mariah had sent him.
Not for the first time, it occurred to him that he really needed an office safe. There wasn’t much of irreplaceable value in the room, but those papers were one of a kind. There were people who’d give a pretty penny to get their hands on an unpublished Bolt manuscript or his private journals.
No more procrastinating, Korman. Right after the Fourth, you call a contractor and get a safe installed.
Another noise interrupted his resolution-making. He stepped back into the hall, peering over the banister to the open area below. Mr. Rochester, the old black tomcat Em had adopted from the local animal shelter, was sprawled in a sunbeam on Emma’s favorite blue chintz chair, one rear leg raised high as he washed himself.
“Keep the noise down, will ya?” Chap grumbled.
Rochester peered up, blinked disdainfully, then went back to licking his rear end. The cat had stopped coming upstairs altogether. Too bloody fat to make the climb, Chap decided. During the months Em was sick, though, the animal never left her bedside except to eat or use the litter box. After she died, the cat had walked around the house yowling plaintively for days. Now, man and feline cohabited like some interspecies Odd Couple. Rochester lived on Em’s chair, ignoring Chap entirely except at mealtimes. Even then, the Fancy Feast got a suspicious sniff before he deigned to bolt it down.
“Stupid cat,” Chap muttered, returning through his room to the deck. He’d overdone it in the garden. His joints felt as if they were swelling. He should take a pill, but he was too damn tired to walk back to the bathroom cabinet.
Instead, he dropped his towel and climbed naked into the churning spa, as he habitually did now that Em was no longer there to fret about peeping Toms with binoculars. The nearest building high enough to see down onto his second-story deck had to be half a mile away. Odds were, nobody out there was looking, but if they were, his round, sagging, hairy-ape body made for pretty poor voyeuristic pickings. Anybody that hard up was welcome to the thrill.
Reaching for his drink, he took another long sip, then set it back on the edge of the tub and leaned into the molded seat and cushioned neck rest. Soothing amber comfort slid down to his center core. Chap closed his eyes, one hand lazily raking his matted chest. The warmth of the scotch, the sun and the Jacuzzi melted his aches and lulled him. This was as close to perfect as it got, he thought, lacking only Em to share it.
Suddenly, he felt a distinct vibration under his butt, like the tread of a nearby foot. His eyes opened to the brilliant blue sky, and he looked around. Em’s red geraniums swayed in the breeze, potted in the old whiskey cask she’d transformed into a dual-purpose planter and base for the green market umbrella that shaded their his-and-hers rattan lounge chairs. Except for chirping birds and the dull rumble of distant beach traffic, the afternoon was sunny, hot and blessedly silent.
Had he locked all the downstairs doors before coming up? The garage he’d closed—that much he knew. But the side door? And the front, leading to the courtyard and the walkway beyond? Must have. He hadn’t lived in New York for nearly sixty years without acquiring a few security tics, after all.
He strained to mentally retrace his steps. Hadn’t even used the front door today, he realized. Mariah had called just as he was getting ready to put the impatiens in the front bed. He’d taken the call in the kitchen, then gone out through the garage to collect the tools, the flat of plants and the recycling bin.
The side door of the garage was on a spring. Had he reset the lock?
He took another sip of his drink and settled back into the gently pulsing water. Check it later. He was a New Yorker. A onetime amateur boxer with a 17–0 record. Never lived timidly before. Wasn’t about to start now. Too tired to sweat it, anyway.
The churning of the Jacuzzi lulled him like rolling waves. Like being on a boat, he thought, drifting. Porter’s boat. Mariah. And Lindsay…fifteen, already! Last time he’d seen her? Her dad’s funeral. A heartbreaker even then. Like her mother. Grandmother, too. Incredible Ben would abandon his pretty wife, Andrea, for a man-eater like Renata Hunter. Human nature, Chap thought…no accounting for it.
He reached for his drink. Misjudged the distance. His perspective was all wonky, he realized idly. Fingers only brushed the glass. It tumbled in slow motion to the deck, each amber drop distinct as it splashed on the wooden planks.
Chap felt his butt slide a little on the smooth plastic bottom. So tired. His head lolled on the cushioned rest. He looked back toward the bedroom. Squinted, then frowned. Was that someone in the doorway?
“Hey, you,” he called. Thought he did.
Did he?
Figure in the doorway never moved. Half hidden in shadow. Just a grim smile. Teeth gleaming like a goddam Pepsodent commercial.
Well, let him stand there, Chap thought grumpily. Guy wasn’t going to make the effort to be sociable, neither would he.
He lay back and closed his eyes. So comfortable.
He felt himself slipping a little more. Opened his eyes. Guy in the doorway still watching him. Why? he wanted to ask, but he felt a little dizzy. Short of air. Inhaled deeply and slipped again on the slick plastic, his body pivoting. Almost on his side now, shoulders underwater.
Be up in a minute, Em. Just gonna grab forty winks here, okay?
So sleepy. A deep sigh. Another long slip on the smooth bottom, his head bumping on the hard plastic edge as Chap Korman sank beneath the churning bubbles.
Chapter Six
The quiet was beginning to get on Tucker’s nerves. When he started hearing the building breathe, he knew he was losing it.
Logically, he knew the deep thrum permeating his office walls was the reverberation of massive air conditioners. Their primary function was to cool—not people but a vast array of supercomputers, satellite receivers and transmission devices—sensitive equipment that bristled day and night, processing the agency’s sensory input and outgoing commands.
Once aware of the pulsing rhythm, though, Tucker couldn’t shake the sense he’d been swallowed alive by some huge beast of prey.
He glanced at his watch, wondering if he had time to run out and pick up Mariah’s letter from the Courier Express distribution center in Falls Church. The place was open till 10:00 p.m. He had plenty of time. What he didn’t have was patience. Geist’s secretary had phoned down over four hours ago to tell him to stand by to be summoned upstairs for a debriefing on his Moscow trip. Now he was itching to walk out.
It would have been premature to tell Mariah this Urquhart character might not be as far off base as she thought. Better to find out what the professor knew, then decide what to do about it. This should have been ancient history by now, Tucker thought grimly. She had enough on her plate. Damn them all to hell, anyway.
One file sat on his desk a little apart from the others he’d pulled from the Navigator’s crate. He’d stumbled across it not long after talking to Mariah. Finally, the pieces were falling together. His late-night message from the courier. His cryptic conversation with the Navigator in Moscow. And the reason why he, in particular, had been chosen to receive this loaded gift.
Tucker had met with Georgi Deriabin late at night in a modest dacha on the outskirts of Moscow—although recognizing the infamous Navigator had required a leap of imagination on his part.
Deriabin was tall and skeletally thin, with weathered skin the color of mustard. His wispy white hair was shorn to a stubble, leaving his head almost as smooth as Tucker’s own. On closer examination, Tucker saw the ravages of chemotherapy. When the old man reached out to shake hands, Tucker was afraid he’d crush those birdlike bones.
“I’m glad you could come, Mr. Tucker.”
“Hard to turn down such an intriguing invitation.”
The wizened figure just smiled and shuffled ahead of him into the cottage. Most of the ground floor seemed to consist of a small sitting and dining room. A cloth-covered table had been set for two, a bottle of vodka nestled in an ice bucket alongside.
Since Tucker’s arrival that morning, he’d spent the entire day at the Intourist Hotel, waiting, as directed, for further instructions. The smell of onions, sausage and other good things now was a painful reminder he’d eaten nothing all day except a protein bar he’d taken from the emergency-rations stock of the Company plane that had flown him in.
“You will join me for dinner, yes?” Deriabin said.
Tucker considered refusing for about a millisecond, then nodded.
As soon as they sat down, a portly woman he took to be the housekeeper started carrying in food, generous platters of herring, black bread, sausages and sauerkraut, blinis and piroshki. Hearty but simple fare.
Tucker glanced around. The cottage, too, was comfortable but modest, with white plastered walls, exposed rough beams and sturdy country furnishings. A KGB safe house? he wondered. Or a sign of the Navigator’s reduced fortunes? Yet how diminished could Deriabin’s position be when he’d been able to arrange not only to get a message out, but also for the CIA plane to over-fly and land in Russian territory?
The old man poured a glass of vodka for each of them. The toast, the first of many that night, was perfunctory enough, if ironic.
“To your good health, Mr. Tucker.”
Tucker considered reciprocating, but in the other man’s case, the wish seemed a little belated and beside the point. He lifted his glass and nodded, then followed the old man as he threw it back.
They directed their attention to the food, but Deriabin ate little, picking at it for a few minutes before setting his fork aside and lighting a cigarette. “You will excuse me, please. The food, I assure you, is excellent. And perfectly safe,” he added, reading Tucker’s mind. “Unfortunately, my appetites are no longer what they once were. Liver cancer, my doctors tell me. I gather I have a few weeks. Three months, at best. But we must live for the moment, no?” He refilled their glasses, raised his briefly, then downed it in one gulp.
Over the next few hours, Tucker watched the bottle slowly drain, doing his part to keep up with the old man. Deriabin seemed coherent, despite his obvious illness and the amount of drink he’d consumed. Like most men with unfettered power, he seemed to have lost the art of two-way conversation, requiring only an audience. Tucker was content to give him one, and Deriabin rambled on about myriad subjects both philosophical and trivial without ever zeroing in on the heart of the matter—why he had made contact. Tucker decided to let the hand play itself out. Having taken up the dare and come, he was at the old man’s disposition. All he had to do was keep his cool and see where things went.
When the dishes had been cleared away, they sat alone and uninterrupted. For a while, a television droned in another room, where, it seemed, the housekeeper and driver were watching a dubbed version of Jurassic Park. Pretty appropriate, Tucker thought as he listened to the dinosaur across the table from him rehash the good old days, when the struggle between the Soviet and American empires had dominated the international landscape.
The bottle was nearly empty when Deriabin threw out what seemed at first to be no more than a drunkard’s complaint. “Women!” he grumbled. “Why is it so impossible to put a good mind and a good ass in one package, eh? Tell me that.”
No reply was expected. Tucker let the man rant.
“Every woman with half a brain they ever sent up to me had a face like a potato and legs like tree stumps! And the decent-looking ones? The mental capacity of pickled herring—although,” Deriabin added, arching a grizzled eyebrow, “there’s good eating in that, just the same, eh?”
He chuckled at his own humor, but it quickly turned into a strangled cough. His yellowed skin grew darker as he gasped and pulled a handkerchief from his sleeve. He was wearing a heavy hand-knit sweater, despite the warmth of the summer night. Tucker averted his gaze as he spit into the phlegm-stained square.
When he finally recovered, Deriabin squinted at him through a blue haze of smoke. “Anyway, this has been my problem. But you,” he said, waggling a bent, tobacco-stained finger, “you have been very lucky, eh, you sly wolf? How did you manage this?”
“Manage what?”
“To keep that woman at your side all those years. What was her name?”
Tucker frowned. Patty? Why would he—
“You know,” Deriabin insisted, “the blonde. Small, very attractive, from the pictures I saw. Clever, too, I’m told.” He snapped his fingers impatiently, struggling for a name. “The lovely widow.”
Tucker’s blood froze. Mariah. He forced his gaze to remain steady on the old man. “Can’t think which one you mean. Got a few good-looking ones kicking around the place,” he added wryly, tilting his glass.
The Navigator’s jaundiced eyes narrowed. Then he tipped back his own glass. Tucker watched it drain. How a man with a diseased liver could consume that much vodka defied all logic.
The tumbler dropped back to the table. “It only proves my point,” Deriabin rasped. “You get more beautiful women than you can even remember, while my people never send me one who doesn’t look like she was suckled on lemons instead of mother’s milk.”
Nothing more was said on the subject as they worked their way through what remained of the bottle and the night. At 2:00 a.m. the driver knocked on the door to let them know it was time to leave for the uncharted airstrip on the outskirts of Moscow where the Company plane had been cleared to land and wait for Tucker’s predawn departure.
Deriabin went along for the ride. As soon as they pulled onto the tarmac, the driver jumped out, but the Navigator remained in place behind the car’s opaque tinted windows. Tucker felt the rear of the car dip and rise as the driver opened the trunk and removed something. His guard went up, but when the lid of the trunk slammed, he saw through the rear window that the driver had only unloaded a wooden crate.
“I am giving you some files for safekeeping,” the Navigator said.
The driver opened the back door of the car on Tucker’s side and lifted the lid of the box for inspection.
“What’s in them?” Tucker asked.
“Not a bomb, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Wasn’t worried about that,” he replied truthfully. The aircraft crew would pass the crate through metal and chemical scanners before they would agree to load it. He could see them through Deriabin’s window, watching the car. Wondering what the hell was going on, obviously.
“At least, not a bomb of the traditional variety,” Deriabin added, striking a match and cupping his hands to light another cigarette. He straightened creakily, inhaling the smoke deeply, as if the predawn breeze coming in through Tucker’s open door was too rich a mixture for his compromised system to handle. “You will find they make interesting reading.” He nodded to the driver, who closed the crate and walked over to the plane, handing it off to one of the American crewmen.
“Why are you turning these papers over to us?” Tucker asked.
“Not ‘us,’ Mr. Tucker. I am turning them over to you.”
“Fine. Me. Why?”
“Because you have time to give them the attention they deserve. You are underused these days, I’m told.”
“If you know that, then you know they could easily be taken off my hands the minute I get back.”
“That would be a great pity and a great mistake. Take my word on this, my friend, even if you are disinclined to believe most of what I say. No one else will have as much interest in these files as you. No one else will ensure that what they contain is properly handled.”
Deriabin extended his emaciated hand. Again, Tucker worried about crushing the brittle bones under that transparent skin, but the old man’s grip was firm.
“This will be goodbye for me,” Deriabin said. “Only remember this, my friend—no man on earth desires as passionately as a Russian. Beware the one who desires too much.”
On the flight back, Tucker had been too exhausted and too drunk to give that or anything else much thought. It was only the next day, picking through the files, that he recalled the Navigator’s words. Who was “the one who desires too much”? he wondered.
Foreign Minister Zakharov, he presumed now. It seemed clear from the content of the files that Deriabin was determined for some reason to derail the man’s ambition by any means necessary—even treason. Zakharov’s rise to power had been nearly as ruthless as Deriabin’s own, but Tucker was aware of no evidence the two men had ever been rivals before now. So what had changed?
Then there was the old man’s apparently drunken commentary on women. His pointed reference to Mariah had been anything but haphazard, Tucker knew. It was to demonstrate the man knew where Tucker was most vulnerable. That, however debilitated the Navigator might seem, he had no compunction about manipulating that vulnerability for his own purposes. And that he was confident Tucker would act on the information in the files.
Well, maybe, Tucker thought grimly. But not necessarily in the way Deriabin expected. Because the linchpin in the Navigator’s scheming, he now knew, was the death in Paris nearly thirty years earlier of an impoverished American author. And if it were up to Tucker, that episode could bloody well remain shrouded in lies.
But it wasn’t up to him.
After Mariah’s call from Los Angeles, he realized the decision might already be out of his hands. Although fame had eluded Ben Bolt in life, it had grown exponentially in the years since his death, pretty much guaranteeing that someone, sooner or later, would stumble on the truth. If not this Urquhart character, then someone else.
Now it was time for damage control.
Still shaken by the eerie timeliness of Mariah’s call, and by hearing her voice for the first time in weeks, Tucker gathered the musty folders abruptly and got to his feet. If they hadn’t called him upstairs by now, to hell with them. He’d go and collect her letter.
Or not.
A rap sounded on his door and the Operations deputy strode in without waiting for a response. “Hey there, Frank,” Jack Geist said breezily.
Tucker nodded. “Jack.”
“Don’t get up on my account.” Geist dropped his lanky frame into a chair on the other side of the desk, giving the cramped office a smug once-over as his legs sprawled out in front of him. “See you got back safe and sound from your trip. Would’ve called you up first thing, but things have been a little wild today.”
“I figured.”
“You heard about this Kurdish business?”
Tucker nodded and sat down again. He was out of the loop, but he wasn’t brain-dead. He’d been in the game long enough to know that any situation making headlines would have the front office running to stay ahead of the breaking-news wave. The morning papers said the Turkish crisis had heated up overnight, with rebel Kurds massing for imminent confrontation with government forces.
“I gather the Russians have sent forces southward through Armenia,” he said.
The deputy grimaced. “Bastards just can’t resist mixing into it, can they?”
“They’ll say they’re looking to protect the country’s soft underbelly in case the situation spills across borders.”
“That’s what they’re saying, all right. Situation’s turning into a bloody circus. The Russians, Iran, Iraq, Greece, Cyprus—all getting their knickers in a twist. And, of course, the usual charges that we’re behind everything, orchestrating the situation for our own nefarious ends.”
Tucker nodded. The truth was less tidy than anybody’s simplistic explanations would have it, but it didn’t change the fact that once again, policy wonks like Geist here had gotten themselves caught on the horns of their own short-sightedness. It had probably seemed like a good idea after the Gulf War to enforce a no-fly zone to protect Saddam Hussein’s Kurdish opponents in northern Iraq. Except now that they no longer had Baghdad to worry about, the Iraqi Kurds were free to come to the aid of their unhappy brethren living across the border in Turkey, launching a full-scale assault on the weakest link in the NATO chain.
“Kind of makes you long for the good old black hat– white hat days of the cold war, doesn’t it, Jack?”
“No kidding. Look, I gotta get back upstairs real quick. National Security Council’s meeting this afternoon, and we’re trying to come up with a position that doesn’t absolve the bloody Turks, who are anything but blameless, but doesn’t piss them off so much they take their ball and go home.” Geist laced his fingers across his flat belly and tipped his chair back on two legs. “So where are we on this Navigator business? Learn anything useful over there?”
He fixed Tucker with the dramatic, piercing stare that was infamous inside the agency for setting younger, less experienced operatives off on uncontrollable fits of stammering. The effect was lost on Tucker, who could out-glower anyone—although he did consider pointing out that the furniture in this crummy office was strictly ancient government surplus and probably not up to the physics of two-legged rocking.
He decided against it. Geist was an ambitious hotshot looking for quick glory, the first to claim credit when an operation went right, and to distance himself when one went sour. If he ended up ass-over-teakettle, it’d be nice payback for the open cynicism he’d shown when he heard that a has-been like Tucker had been handed a personal message from the Navigator.
It was no surprise that, rather than call a meeting of the small committee that had vetted Tucker’s trip to meet the Navigator, Geist had nominated himself to drop in alone for a debriefing. He was hedging his bets—still downplaying the business internally, but determined to stay on top of things in case there was any chance of a major payoff.
“We’ve got about fifteen hundred pages’ worth of what looks to be the genuine article,” Tucker said carefully. “Originals, not copies. I can do the initial examination myself. Eventually, I’ll need a couple of computer people, Russian-language capable, to log it all in and create a secure database I can cross-reference and run against our own files.”
One of Geist’s eyebrows rose. “That all? Sure you don’t want us to take one of the Crays offline and dedicate it to this little assignment?”
Tucker ignored the sarcasm. “I could do it manually, but it would take time. I get the sense we don’t have that long. There’s a reason the Navigator chose to give us these particular documents out of all the millions inside Moscow Center. Sooner we know what all’s in them, sooner we’ll know why.”
“Did he give any hint where they’re coming down on support to Iraq or the Kurds?”
Bloody Geist, right on schedule, Tucker thought. Man suffered from chronic, extreme tunnel vision, never seeing past his immediate interests.
“He never mentioned the Kurds,” he said evenly, walking a fine line between overplaying or underplaying his hand. He didn’t want anyone he couldn’t control looking over his shoulder until he knew how much damaging information was in the files.
The key, he realized as he studied the deputy’s rumpled shirt and the bags under his sleep-deprived eyes, was to reinforce the notion there was nothing here that bore on Geist’s current problem. Once Geist was satisfied of that, he’d be out the door, hurrying to put himself back at the center of the high-profile crisis du jour. Jack Geist wasn’t the type to let a little thing like a door opening into an old enemy’s inner sanctum distract him from those areas in which he felt he could shine.
Still balancing on the chair’s rear legs, Geist two-fingered the mottled yellow manila file Tucker had set apart from the others. It was a nice fake from a guy who, Tucker happened to know, didn’t read a word of Russian. A good thing, too, since the name spelled out on the spine, albeit phonetically and in Cyrillic script, was “Benjamin Bolt.”
“Have you got the slightest reason to believe there’s anything important here?” Geist inquired, flipping disdainfully through the pages.
Tucker suppressed the urge to yank the file out of his hands, but there was little chance Geist would recognize what he was looking at. Geist had come up the ranks through a series of mostly Middle East–station assignments. The Soviet collapse, combined with the recent agitation of tin-pot dictatorships like Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya, had fallen on his career like manna from heaven.
“I’ve done a preliminary flip-through,” he said. “It’s a mixed bag of old KGB operations—external agents, a few internal dissidents who were ‘disappeared’ into the Gulag.”
“Sounds like ancient history. KGB’s dead.”
“Not dead. Not even dying. Regimes come and go in Russia, but the security service is forever. New guys come to power, think they’ve lopped off its head, but it just grows two more. Been that way for centuries. The Navigator, more than anyone, knows that. That’s how he managed to survive as long as he did.”
“No doubt. But I think we’ve got the situation pretty much in hand these days, Frank. There’ve been a lot of changes since you were on the old Soviet desk—operations you’re not aware of, new sources we’re running over there. Hell, we’ve even got some cooperative bilateral programs going with our new Russian friends.”
Watching the deputy’s smug self-assurance, Tucker’s thoughts flashed on the Navigator sitting across from him, the dwindling bottle of vodka between them. Lifting his glass at one point, Deriabin had offered a raspy toast. “To friendship between nations. Of course,” he added, “there are no friendly intelligence agencies, are there, my friend? After all, where would we be without our enemies?”
Geist closed the manila folder. “You say these are old ops?”
“Pretty much. Doesn’t mean some of the players aren’t still in place.”
“You saying he gave us active sources? Now, why the hell would he do that?” The deputy’s voice dripped disbelief, and he pushed the file away. “I’m having a lot of trouble buying that this isn’t some whopping disinformation ploy designed to waste our time. What do you want to bet this Navigator character wants us looking the other way while his people are busy on some new scheme?”
“No argument.”
“You agree?” Geist sounded surprised.
“That this could be nothing but a bunch of irrelevant junk, manufactured to distract us for God knows what purpose? It’s possible. Unlikely, though.”
“Why unlikely?”
“Because of the source.”
“The source is Georgi goddamn Deriabin. Right? You did meet him? He’s not dead, like Moscow Station was thinking?”
“Met him face-to-face for five hours.”
“Guy’s got cheek, I’ll give him that,” Geist said, shaking his head and leaning back on his precarious perch again. “Forty years he’s worked against us, now I’m supposed to believe he wants to make nice? Give me a break.”
“I’m just telling you how I read it.”
“How you read it?”
Tucker found himself once more the object of that practiced, thousand-yard stare. Seconds ticked by, the silence broken only by the drumming of the deputy’s fingers. He had the impression he was supposed to be quaking in his boots, worrying about whether his own loyalty was suspect.
He waited it out, knowing that if Geist sniffed any hint of anxiety, he’d take the files away and either bury them or pass them over to someone else. Tucker couldn’t let that happen. He needed to maintain control. Impress Geist with the files’ potential so he’d get the time he needed, but not get him so worked up that he’d panic and set up some kind of task force.
“So, what’s the deal?” Geist said finally. “Deriabin looking to walk? Cold war glory days are over, so now he wants us to set him up in a Miami Beach mansion?”
“Nope.”
“Then what?”
What, indeed? Tucker frowned, wishing he had an easy answer. “He wants to leave a legacy, I think. I don’t know exactly what, but I can tell you this—he’s dying.”
The chair legs finally dropped to the floor. “Say what? He tell you that?”
“Yeah, but even if he hadn’t, I would’ve known. His skin’s the color of that folder there.”
The deputy’s eyes strayed back to the mottled yellow file on the desk. “No kidding.”
“Liver cancer, apparently. He says they’ve given him three months, max.”
Geist’s right hand rotated in an impatient, forward-rolling notion. “And so—?”
“I think he’s looking to settle a score before he kicks off.”
“And he wants us to help him to do it?”
“That’s my guess.”
“So, what’s in it for us?”
Tucker hesitated. This was the tricky part. He was pretty sure part of the Navigator’s plan was to undermine the presidential ambitions of Foreign Minister Zakharov. But who stood to benefit from that? Russia? America? International peace and stability? Some unknown protégé to whom the dying old man was preparing to hand his torch of secret power?
Tucker didn’t know. He only knew who had the most to lose if this wasn’t handled carefully. But how could he tell the deputy director of the CIA that he’d burn these files and the evidence they contained before he’d let any harm from them rain down on the woman whose name the bloody Navigator had known would be the key to forcing his cooperation?
“Just give me a little more time, Jack. I’ll do you up a full report.”
“How much time are we talking?”
“Twenty-four hours.”
“Done,” Geist said abruptly. He got to his feet.
Tucker watched him head for the door. He knew he should leave well enough alone, but he couldn’t. “One more thing,” he said. “Why was Mariah Bolt assigned to cover the Zakharov visit?”
Geist paused at the door, frowning. “That’s pretty much ‘need to know,’ buddy. She doesn’t work for you anymore.”
“I know that.”
“And so? You got some proprietary interest there? That’d be tough, since I hear she’s seeing that hotshot TV anchorman…what’s his name?”
“Paul Chaney.”
“Right, Chaney. So…?”
Tucker shrugged. “I’m just curious why an analyst gets sent out in the field.”
“I had a little job needed doing, and she was the best person for it. Anyway,” the deputy said briskly, pulling open the door, “this is awesome work, Frank, getting your hands on this stuff. Truly awesome. I’ll need that memorandum on my desk soon as possible, though. You’ll get right on it, won’t you, big guy?”
He winked and pointed his finger in a stagy “you-the-man!” gesture, then was gone before Tucker had a chance to respond with the contempt the performance deserved.
Chapter Seven
So, how exactly did one go about luring a man into betraying his country? Mariah wondered. Bat her eyelashes? Show a little leg? Offer to meet him at the Casbah?
Really. This was hardly her area. As femmes fatales went, she felt about as lethal as a librarian.
One thing was certain. Even if the DDO’s sources were right and Yuri Belenko was carrying some sort of torch for her—something she highly doubted, since their previous meetings had been pretty innocuous as far as she was concerned—she would not sleep with the man. Once again, she cursed herself for not having turned Geist down flat.
She hovered at the edge of an upper-level courtyard of the Arlen Hunter Museum, her second visit of the afternoon. By the time she’d arrived earlier, after stopping at Courier Express to arrange for Frank to collect Chap Korman’s package in Virginia, the security detail had already finished their sweep of the site. She’d had just enough time to show her credentials, walk around and get the lay of the land, and run over the program for the Romanov opening, before heading back to the hotel to change into what she was coming to think of as her Tokyo Rose dress.
Now, after all her scrambling, the guests of honor were running late. Typical Murphy’s Law. It was already after six, and the early-evening sun was casting a magical, luminescent glow over the restless crowd waiting for Secretary of State Kidd and his Russian counterpart to show up.
It was nearly twenty years since she’d last set foot in California, and she’d forgotten this strange quality of the light, Mariah realized—the way it cast a magical glow on everything it touched, lulling with seductive promises it had no intention of keeping. Like a smiling thief, the place could rip out your heart in an instant and leave you too stunned to do anything but offer up your soul as well.
A warm Pacific breeze wafted over the balcony walls, and potted palms and crimson hibiscus rustled softly. The air was thick with expensive perfume and the ripe, masculine scent of the cigars in which one or two of the guests were indulging while they waited to see the Russian imperial treasures.
The irony was not lost on Mariah that the Last Days of the Romanov Dynasty tour should kick off here in the capital of American glitz and materialism. On display were the lavish worldly possessions of that family whose bloody murder had set in motion decades of deadly struggle between Moscow and the West, bringing the planet several times to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe unimaginable in the Romanovs’ day. But eighty years after their massacre at the hands of the Bolsheviks—shot, stabbed, their bodies acid-drenched, burned, then dumped down a mineshaft in an orgy of overkill—the last czar and his family were finally going to be buried in a St. Petersburg royal crypt with appropriate, if tardy, pomp and circumstance. The niceties taken care of, Russia’s cash-strapped regime could get on with the profitable business of exploiting the luckless royals in a manner that would have seemed hypocritical coming from previous communist governments. America, for its part, seemed willing to let bygones be bygones.
Looking over the list of dignitaries expected at the opening, Mariah’s heart had sunk to discover Renata Hunter Carr’s name near the top, just as she’d feared. Well, no matter. The woman was ancient history, and she herself was a long way from the confused little girl whose daddy had run off with the rich man’s daughter.
Sure she was.
She glanced up, feeling dwarfed by the eight-foot-high letters of Arlen Hunter’s name deeply carved into the pearl-gray marble walls of this monument he’d built to himself on Santa Monica Boulevard. So why did suborning treason feel like a piece of cake compared to the prospect of meeting the late magnate’s home wrecker of a daughter?
Were her masters at Langley even aware of the grudge she bore Renata? she wondered. Did Geist know? Doubtful. It was conceivable that the woman’s name was lodged somewhere in her personnel record, a gossipy detail on her famous, philandering parent, noted in passing, then filed away by whatever spit-polished security specialist had done her recruitment background check—an insignificant detail by now, surely, after eighteen spotless years of service. If Jack Geist had realized how much that bit of personal history still rankled, though, he might have thought twice about sending her out on this ridiculous assignment. Then again, knowing Geist, maybe not.
She patted her hair self-consciously. It felt too fluffy. She’d amped up her cosmetics for the occasion, too, and her skin felt plaster-coated. An extra coat of mascara had her feeling as though she was peering out at the world from under lacy awnings.
Ah, well, she thought wryly, the spy, to be truly effective, must be an expert at camouflage, possessed of that subtle capacity to seem neither out of place nor conspicuous. With the bevy of California beauties gracing the arms of the assembled rich and powerful here, her own overdone look no doubt blended right in.
Several well-known figures dotted the patio. The mayor of Los Angeles had already arrived, as well as both of California’s senators and several politically connected Hollywood types. The guest list also included representatives of foreign governments who maintained consulates in Los Angeles, and business people dutifully networking on behalf of their multinational corporations.
Mariah sighed. And then there were the bureaucrats. A considerable number of them, from the State Department, FBI and Secret Service, plus at least one representative of the CIA—though, for all she knew, Geist could have sent others. All attempting, with greater or lesser success, to blend into the party scene. The Secret Service agents were hopeless at it, conspicuous by their stern expressions, coiled collar wires, and plastic earpieces carrying a subaudible stream of clipped commands and sitreps—situation reports—on the movements of and potential threats to Secretary of State Kidd and Russian Foreign Minister Zakharov. Dressed in almost identical dark suits, they also had a distracting tendency to mutter, Dick Tracy–style, into their shirt cuffs.
A flutter of wings sounded behind her as two doves landed nearby on the half wall lining two sides of the terrace. A third dove settled a little apart from the pair, cooing plaintively, keeping a lonely watch. Gossamer violet feathers shimmered as the bird craned her head this way and that.
“Where’s your fella, pretty girl?” Mariah murmured.
Black pearl eyes cast a baleful glance her way. Mourning doves were monogamous, she recalled, mating for life, slow to accept a new partner at the death of a mate. This one’s mate must have fallen prey to some urban catastrophe, dooming her to follow behind the other pairs in the flock, permitted to observe but never join their comfortable circle.
Mariah felt her own loss thrum like an arrhythmia of the heart, a dull, aching reminder of David’s absence and the permanent empty spaces his death had created inside and around her. The sense of isolation. She felt like someone stuck at the top of a broken Ferris wheel—rocking and waiting, looking at the world from a distance. Half the time, she ached for the wheel to start turning again. The rest of the time, she lived in terror of the next, inevitable downward plunge.
The melancholy cooing of the doves sounded a counter-point to the hum of traffic moving up and down Santa Monica Boulevard. Long shadows drifted like pale purple gauze across the courtyard walls. She glanced once more at her watch. Six-fifteen. Nine-fifteen, back in Virginia. Lindsay would be up for a while yet. Like most teenagers, she prowled late at the best of times, and it would only get worse now that she was on summer vacation. If she got back to the hotel in the next couple of hours, Mariah calculated, she could still call without disturbing anyone at Carol’s house.
Then she had another thought. Frank. Before this afternoon, she hadn’t heard his voice in weeks. Now, the prospect of hearing it again brought a smile to her lips.
She leaned over the balcony’s edge to see if the VIPs were in sight. The solitary dove followed her gaze, peering down at the steady stream of cars still pulling up, disgorging high-powered passengers into the building’s maw. A small crowd had gathered on either side of the entryway. In Los Angeles, apparently, all it took to assemble an audience was to string a barrier, roll out a red carpet and wait for the celebrity-seekers to materialize like ants at a picnic.
Suddenly, the doves scattered on a flutter of wings as a strong hand gripped Mariah’s elbow. In her ear, a low voice murmured, “Don’t jump!”
She swung around to find a pair of crystal-blue eyes grinning down at her. “Paul! What are you doing here?”
Chaney kissed her cheek, as eyes had turned in their direction. Paul tended to have that effect on crowded rooms. So much for blending.
“Thought I’d surprise you,” he said. “You look gorgeous.”
“Thank you. I am surprised, but I’m confused, too. How—?”
“I got an invitation to this shindig weeks ago. I wasn’t going to come until you mentioned yesterday that you were. Decided I’d deliver your keys in person.”
Based in Washington, Paul had friends everywhere he’d ever stood in front of a camera. The only reason Mariah had called to tell him she’d be in L.A. early was that the beach cottage near Chap Korman’s house where she and Lindsay were planning to spend their vacation belonged to some friend of Paul’s. He’d been making arrangements to get the keys to her that week.
His appearance always set off mixed reactions in her, but right now, it was mostly dismay Mariah felt. “You shouldn’t have come all this way,” she said, meaning it.
“I know, but I wanted to. I thought it might be a little tricky for you tonight, what with Renata Hunter Carr being here and all. I came to offer moral support.”
Oh, Lord, Mariah thought, I am an ungrateful wretch.
“I was running late, though. Thought I’d miss the whole shebang,” Paul said, glancing around. “I gather Zakharov’s plane was late arriving?”
Mariah nodded.
He settled on the low balcony wall, long legs crossing at the ankles. His charcoal suit—Armani, no doubt—draped his athletic body with an elegant ease that most mere mortals could only envy. He had also been blessed with the even, agreeable bone structure camera lenses favored. He was fair-haired, with just a little gray and white intermingling at the temples. His face, classically good-looking, was also slightly weathered, adding a patina of maturity to an appearance that might otherwise have been too boyish to carry the weight of the award-winning television news-magazine he anchored.
“Have you seen her yet?” he asked.
“No. Apparently, she’s part of the ribbon-cutting detail, so I imagine she’ll make her entrance with Zakharov and Kidd.”
“How are you holding up?”
“Just fine,” she lied. “It was sweet of you to do this, Paul, but it’s really not that big a deal. I’ve seen her picture in the paper dozens of times. I’m hardly going to have a nervous breakdown just because we happen to be in the same room.”
“What if you have to talk to her?”
“No reason I should. She doesn’t know me, and I’m obviously not going to go out of my way to introduce myself.”
Chaney studied her for a moment, then turned back to the crowd. “There’s Nolan,” he said.
“Nolan?”
“Nolan Carr, her son. The young Robert Redford clone over there with Mayor Riordan and the senators.”
Mariah followed his gaze across the courtyard to where an attractive, self-assured young man was locked in close conversation with the three politicians.
“Looks like he’s lobbying,” Paul said.
“For what?”
He shrugged. “Who knows? Rumor has it his mother’s got political ambitions for her only child.”
Mariah studied the would-be politician. “He looks barely old enough to be out of school.”
“He’s pushing thirty, I think. As for school, he attended Princeton for a while, his late father’s alma mater. I don’t think he ever graduated from anywhere except Playboy U, though. Like I said, politics seems to be his mother’s idea.”
“His father was Jacob Carr, the former state attorney general, right?”
“Mmm…Plus, of course, Mrs. Hunter Carr’s a major contributor in her own right. When the time comes, I’m sure Nolan will have the backing he needs.”
Mariah gave Paul a curious look. “How do you know all this?”
“I interviewed Arlen Hunter not long before he died,” Paul said. “I met both Renata and Nolan, though he was just a kid at the time. Pretty rambunctious, at that. I’ve run into the mother once or twice since.”
“You never told me that,” Mariah said, frowning.
“Well, I knew it was a touchy subject. Frankly, there’s never really been a time before now when I thought it needed to be mentioned.”
“Hmm….” Mariah said. How very politically correct of him.
The director of the Arlen Hunter Museum, who’d been pointed out to Mariah when she’d passed through that afternoon, walked over and whispered something in Nolan Carr’s ear. Carr smiled and nodded without missing a beat, then shook hands with Mayor Riordan and the senators and headed off for the elevators. Along the way, he stopped and shook a few more hands, ever the dutiful host in his grandfather’s establishment. Preternaturally adept at the glad-handing game, Mariah thought. Clearly, the boy had a future.
“So, what exactly does he do for a living?” she asked Paul. “Not that he has to worry about where his next meal is coming from, I suppose.”
“Hard to say, exactly. He’s on the board of the various Hunter corporations and trusts. Dabbles in a little land development, I think. Skis. Sails. The usual.”
“Nice work if you can get it.”
“N’est-ce pas?” Paul said wryly.
A sudden change in the pitch of street noises set off a murmur on the terrace, and people began to gravitate toward the edge of the balcony. The distinct growl of high-powered, armor-encased motors and the deep, throaty whine of motorcycle outriders announced the arrival of the official cavalcade at the front of the building.
Chaney peeked over the edge, then got to his feet. As he took her arm, Mariah felt his fingertips lightly brushing the sensitive place at the inside of her elbow. “Here we go,” he said. “Ready?”
She glanced around, but jaded gazes used to celebrity-spotting had already shifted away from them, anticipating the arrival of bigger fish. “Paul, I don’t know how to put this delicately,” she murmured, “but I’m working here.”
He slipped his hand out of her arm. “Oops, sorry.” He knew what she did for a living. He’d been David’s friend first, but when he’d decided to investigate the suspicious car accident that had led up to David’s death, Paul’s and her professional paths had tangled. “I’ll stay out of your way,” he said. “But it had occurred to me, even if you were tied up for the evening, there’s always a window of opportunity between sunset and sunrise.” He flicked an imaginary cigar, his eyebrows doing a mischievous Groucho Marx bounce.
In spite of herself, Mariah smiled. “Where are you staying?”
His expression shifted to sheepish, and he fingered the almost imperceptible scar on his chin, an old hockey injury. Mariah had been drawn on more than one occasion to slowly trace that small, welcome imperfection. “With you?” he suggested.
“Oh, I don’t know about that. I have no idea what time I’ll be done tonight, and—”
“I have a confession to make. My bag’s already in your room.”
“What? How did you get into my hotel room?”
“I know the manager at the Beverly Wilshire. Stayed there a dozen times. I know it’s presumptuous, but you and I get so few opportunities to be together, I didn’t want to let this one pass. I told the manager we needed to keep it real low-key. In this town, believe me, it’s not the strangest request he’s ever had. He’s totally discreet, I swear.”
She studied those wide-open features, wondering how many times Paul had relied on that discretion in the past. Wondering, too, how thrilled the DDO would be to find out they were sharing quarters here. But there wasn’t time to argue the point now. In any case, when the chips were down, Paul had proven more loyal than the CIA brass. There were plenty of reasons for their relationship to go slow, but at this point, she couldn’t care less what Jack Geist thought about it.
The elevators pinged, doors opening on a rush of air. Several Secret Service men stepped off first, taking up positions at either side of the opening. Three or four of their beefy Russian security counterparts followed. Multiple pairs of dark glasses panned the room as they, too, fanned out, the Russians forming an inner cordon, the Security Service, like tugs around an ocean liner, keeping the dignitaries and Zakharov’s bodyguards in a containment pattern as they moved forward.
“All right,” she conceded. “I’ll catch up to you later. But right now—”
“I’m outta here. I’ll leave you to your spying, Janey Bond.”
She scolded softly, “I’m State Department here, buster, and don’t you forget it.”
Chaney grinned and walked off. She watched as he made his way to the front of the room. At least a hundred and fifty people separated him from the red velvet ribbon strung before the main gallery, but Paul Chaney was one of those people with a God-given gift for putting himself at the center of the action. As he threaded his way forward, faces in the crowd glanced up at him, temporarily distracted from the main attraction. Then, like the Red Sea at the approach of Moses, they parted to let him pass.
Turning back toward the elevator, Mariah recognized the cropped, silvery head of the secretary of state. Next to him was a short, chunky man in an expensive suit, the top of whose head barely cleared Shelby Kidd’s shoulder. Zakharov’s golden cuff links glittered as he lifted his hands to smooth the sides of his thick, snow-white hair. He looked almost cherubic, Mariah thought—Santa Claus in Savile Row—but Zakharov had been a KGB colonel with a reputation for unparalleled ruthlessness before making the transition to politician. She doubted the old leopard had changed his spots at this late date.
Why was it that the most ferocious characters were so often such stumpy little men? she wondered. There had to be a psychology thesis in there somewhere.
As the two ministers started toward the gallery, accompanied by their translators, Mariah spotted Yuri Belenko, Zakharov’s right-hand man and her main reason for being here. Belenko’s back was to her as he paused at the elevator threshold, reaching back to offer his arm to the last occupant, hidden till now.
Almost against her will, Mariah craned to see, but caught only the briefest glimpse of blond hair and a flash of earring before the small figure of a woman disappeared in the thicket of sturdy, protective bodies sweeping en masse toward the red velvet rope.
Suddenly, an awful memory flooded over her: her mother crying on the sofa, one arm curled protectively around the curve of her belly.
“Mommy? Where’s Daddy?”
“He’s gone.”
“Gone where? When’s he coming home?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart. I don’t know.”
Damn it to hell, Mariah thought, swallowing hard. She circled the wall, settling in a nook off to the side of the main gallery entrance, where her view was relatively unobstructed.
And there she was.
Heiress and culture maven Renata Hunter Carr was busy introducing the two ministers to her son and to the museum director. The woman obviously gloried in being the center of attraction—and in her triumph. Both the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art had vied to host the inaugural stop on the Russian imperial treasures tour, but with deft lobbying in two capitals, Renata had done a run up the middle and scored the coup for the Los Angeles– based institute founded by her father.
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Taylor Smith
Senior CIA analyst Mariah Bolt remembers her late father as the man who abandoned his family to run off to Europe with another woman. Ben Bolt's fans remember him somewhat differently, and revere him as a literary genius.
But like it or not, Mariah has become the reluctant guardian of his legacynever suspecting she has also inherited a ticking time bomb.
As she is about to depart on a much-needed vacation with her teenage daughter, Mariah is called in on an urgent assignmentto lure a man into betraying his country. There's only one hitchto get to this man she has to cross paths with her father's old lover. Suddenly the past is back with a vengeance.
One old friend will betray her and another will be murdered, as Mariah discovers how little she really knows about her father's lifeand his death. And when her fifteen-year-old daughter goes missing, Mariah will be reminded once more that there are no limits in the terrifying game of international espionage.
Praise for the novels of TAYLOR SMITH
“The Innocents Club is an exciting espionage thriller….”
—Midwest Book Review
“Fifteen rounds of sturdy international espionage-cum-detection….”
—Kirkus Reviews on The Innocents Club
Taylor Smith…John Grisham “…it’s a perfectly plausible comparison—though Smith’s a better prose stylist.”
—Publishers Weekly on Random Acts
“The mix of suspense, forensic science, romance and mystery make this a real page-turner.”
—Orange Coast on Random Acts
“The story line is fast-paced and filled with numerous twists…Taylor Smith…continues her amazing rapid climb to the top rung…”
—Painted Rock Reviews on Random Acts
“Sharp characterization and a tightly focused time frame…give this intrigue a spellbinding tone of immediacy.”
—Publishers Weekly on The Best of Enemies
“The pace is swift and the action is concentrated…making it a perfect summer read.”
—Orange Coast on The Best of Enemies
“In this absorbing tale…characters are engaging…”
—Publishers Weekly on Common Passions
Also available from MIRA Books and TAYLOR SMITH
GUILT BY SILENCE
COMMON PASSIONS
THE BEST OF ENEMIES
RANDOM ACTS
DEADLY GRACE
The Innocents Club
Taylor Smith
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
This book could only be for Amy Moore-Benson, with heartfelt gratitude for her insight, her perseverance and her unflagging grace. Here’s to the wonder of new beginnings.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
My deepest thanks to those who offered their expertise and encouragement throughout this project. If I played fast and loose with the facts, it’s through no fault of theirs. I am especially grateful to members of the Newport Beach Police Department, who have been extraordinarily kind and helpful, particularly Dale Johnson, Don Gage, Ken Cowell, Mike Jackson and Dave Sperling. Thanks, too, to Dr. Ed Uthman, Ken Keller, Gary Bale and Luis Hernandez for coming up with answers when I needed them. For unflagging moral support, I thank Patricia McFall, Philip Spitzer, the Fictionaires (Orange County’s finest fiction writers) and family members near and far (most especially my wonderful Richard, Kate and Anna, who make life a joy even on the darkest of days).
No one could be more thankful than I for the steadfast commitment and hard work of the talented people at MIRA, beginning with Editorial Director Dianne Moggy. My warmest thanks to them all, most particularly Randall Toye, Katherine Orr, Stacy Widdrington, Greg Sarney, Heather Locken, Krystyna de Duleba and her brilliant design team, and, last but never least, Alex Osuszek and his enthusiastic team, the folks who bring stories and readers together.
To forget one’s ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root.
—ancient Chinese proverb
Contents
Thursday, July 4 (#ue74ff59c-7a26-5a0d-b4c8-eb478e23286c)
Prologue (#uc8ff583e-12b3-5ed7-87f8-d7124862fb50)
Monday, July 1 (#u3f61bc9e-6d45-5e1b-ad46-8386307bb7ad)
Chapter One (#ufe710372-7a30-52ef-a62c-a1d115de85ae)
Tuesday, July 2 (#u92bcd3f8-5dab-50de-9f7f-bbc264c96e18)
Chapter Two (#ub19aac67-3bd3-5887-bb2c-707220a28ced)
Chapter Three (#ue367331e-5629-52bc-893c-1015f2defb85)
Chapter Four (#uade482b0-0976-51e1-802b-487ba72cf46e)
Chapter Five (#u6c033f66-5120-5a8f-b7ba-00bb7ac8fe1b)
Chapter Six (#u721b0a50-7327-50df-9775-4cb516230920)
Chapter Seven (#u9750e7c0-bcd5-56fb-a810-45aa38dc7b78)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Wednesday, July 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Thursday, July 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Friday, July 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Tuesday, July 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Thursday, July 4
Prologue
She was exhausted. Wounded, bleeding, swimming for her life. Lungs on fire. Thin arms and legs aching from cold and the effort of pumping against heavy surf. A silent cry arose inside her, fueled by equal measures of pain, fear and indignation: I can’t do this!
As a young woman, Renata thought, she might have had a chance. She’d been fit then, and strong, albeit more than a little spoiled—the indulged only child of one of the world’s wealthiest men. But she was sixty-one years old now, for heaven’s sake. She hadn’t the stamina she once had.
Her brain snapped an obvious response: Swim or die, you fool!
She glanced nervously over her shoulder as, behind her in the dark, deep voices sounded, exchanging terse, furious commands. Had they spotted her, a tiny form bobbing on the star-sparkled water? Were they following? They seemed so close.
No, she tried to reassure herself. Not that close. It was just an acoustic trick of the clear night air. They were far away, too far even to be seen very clearly, though the sweep of the searchlight told her they hadn’t yet abandoned the hunt for her.
Only her?
A flash of shame passed through her as she thought of the young girl she’d abandoned on deck. What kind of woman leaves a child in mortal danger while she flees to save her own skin? Was it true what her husband had once said about her? Renata wondered. That there was something unnatural about a woman without empathy?
Her stroke slowed. Keeping low and still, she peered back at the boat, trying to distinguish between the silhouettes on the deck, but her vision wasn’t what it had once been, either. If the girl was still on board, Renata couldn’t make her out.
Perhaps, she rationalized, Lindsay, too, had managed to escape, leaping overboard in the confusion that had followed her own break for freedom. The girl appeared delicate, but they said she was a competitive swimmer. So, if she had gotten away, she had as much a chance as Renata herself of making it to safety. Maybe even better. After all, Renata thought resentfully, the girl had youth on her side.
Renata felt another quiver of guilt run down her spine. And if Lindsay hadn’t escaped those thugs on the boat? There was little doubt what was in store for that lovely young thing.
Well, all the more reason to keep swimming. Renata turned back toward shore and paddled on with new resolve.
Her captors had miscalculated. All up and down the coast, from Dana Point to Long Beach, Chinese rockets, pinwheels and brilliant cascades were exploding in the blue-black sky, clamorous displays of Fourth of July patriotism. Dozens of other small craft bobbed on the water, observing the spectacle.
Those brutes may have counted on the noise and confusion to cover their escape, but they hadn’t counted on one of their victims jumping overboard, had they? Renata thought smugly. And the pyrotechnics, far from making her more visible, seemed to have camouflaged her amidst watery shadow and sparkle as she made a clean escape.
Almost. But not quite.
At first, she hadn’t even realized they’d fired on her, what with the noise of the fireworks. They had to have been shooting blindly, but one lucky shot had found its target. Renata winced at the caustic, burning sensation in her shoulder, but forced herself to ignore it. If she could just reach one of the small pleasure crafts lying in toward shore, she’d be home free. Then, she’d send back the authorities.
She slogged on, determined to get as far away as possible from the boat’s searchlights before the fireworks finale, when her predators’ eyes would readjust to the dark and have a better chance of picking her out. It would be a ridiculous way to die, flapping in the water like some wing-shot pelican. She wouldn’t have it. It was as simple as that.
But her strokes were becoming more ineffectual. It wasn’t just fatigue and the loss of blood. Her sodden dress was weighing her down. It would have to go, Renata decided. Her pumping legs kept her afloat while she wrestled out of it, wincing with pain. All she had on now were her sagging underthings, but her bra straps cut into her wounded shoulder. Her panties, too, drooped with the weight of the water they’d absorbed. In for a penny, in for a pound, she thought ruefully, slipping out of them, as well.
Then, she swam on, holding down rising anxiety by sheer force of her legendary indomitable will. It worked for a while, but between her injured shoulder and flagging strength, she made slow progress. Inevitably, panic began to creep up, and in spite of herself, Renata began to cry. She was so weary! She’d been paddling for what felt like hours toward the nearest boat, yet it never seemed to get any closer.
They must be moving off, leaving me all alone out here! Oh, God, I can’t do this!
Her father’s impatient voice rose from the deep recesses of her memory: Stop whining and get on with it, girl! We make our own fate. Don’t get mad, get even.
He was right. Terrible to be so weak, Renata thought, angry with herself now. She’d become too sedentary, that was the problem. Her self-indulgences had once included scuba diving in the Mediterranean, all-night dancing and many, many men, but now they ran to more sedate pleasures—the latest gallery opening, a very good cognac, dinners at the White House. Certainly nothing that would prepare her to leap off a boat and swim, bruised and bloodied, toward a shoreline that was—what? Miles off, it must be.
She breasted a rising swell, breathing hard through gritted teeth, but her waning strokes no longer carried her forward against the rolling sea. Renata paused to catch her ragged breath and give her aching arms a rest.
Just for a moment. I’m so tired.
She lay back, arms spread, a tiny, naked crucifix on the water’s surface. Something warm seeped over her right breast, a tepid rivulet trickling over her shoulder and down into her armpit. Her fingers probed the wound’s sticky edges. It should hurt, she thought, but it didn’t anymore. The narcotic effect of sheer adrenaline, she supposed. She closed her eyes, trying not to imagine how much blood she’d lost. How much was still ebbing away into the great, insatiable ocean.
From somewhere deep inside her head came another voice, low and drawling, offering stoic reassurance: Just a flesh wound, ma’am.
John Wayne, she thought, smiling. He used to have a big house just across the Newport inlet from their own summer place. Her father had been a stocky, barrel-chested little man, even in his elevator shoes, but his swaggering stride had always lengthened a little when he walked next to that famous, side-loping amble. In the last few years of their lives, the two men would often disappear together for a day of drinking and deep-sea fishing. The Duke and Daddy—what a couple of old bears.
Renata rocked on the waves, eyelids drooping, a profound lassitude spreading through her body. A sleepy yawn built inside her, but she stifled it, forcing her eyes open.
Stay awake!
Overhead, the sky arced like a great, speckled dome. It was beautiful this far out, away from the city lights. Lazily, she traced a constellation with her finger, her thoughts reaching into the past for names she’d learned from Nikolos, the white-haired Greek who’d crewed for so many years on her father’s yacht.
Look, Renata, there is Sagittarius, the archer. And, there, up high, next to Vega. Do you see him? It is Hercules, with his foot on the head of Draco, the dragon.
Good old Niko. So full of stories. Bunk, her father said. Had he perhaps been just a little jealous, Renata wondered, of her love for that kind old sailor with a thousand tales?
Listen! Do you hear it?
What, Niko?
The celestial symphony—music of the cosmos.
I don’t hear anything.
You must listen harder, little one. It is the music made by the turning of the stars. The music that the angels dance to.
Renata smiled, closing her eyes so she could concentrate. The warmth at her shoulder was Niko’s big, gentle hand, and she was a child again, lying on the smooth, rolling deck of her father’s yacht. So peaceful. So—
A rude bump interrupted her reverie. A surfboard? Out here? Then, another bump. And this time, a sharp, stabbing sensation in her ribs. Renata opened her eyes and looked around, irritated.
Get away! You’ve got the whole ocean, for heaven’s sake!
Another bump knocked her sideways. She righted herself in the water, but not before a thousand tiny razors sliced her left foot—a quick sensation, gone almost before her brain had time to register it.
Oh, for pity’s sake! Move on! Now, before I call the police!
That did the trick. The ruffians scattered, and Renata was left in peace, rocking on the waves. Good riddance.
She was so very tired. She needed to rest. And then, when she had her strength back, there was something else she’d been meaning to do. What was it?
She lay back on the water, eyes fluttering as she searched the stars for the answer. They were so beautiful. Her trembling hand reached up. Almost close enough to touch. And then—
Oh, Niko! I think I hear it. I do! I hear the symphony!
Monday, July 1
Chapter One
Renata Hunter Carr was not remotely dead when Mariah Bolt first laid eyes on her. Far from it. That condition was soon to change, of course, and Mariah would be the agent of that change. For those who believe in fate, the wheel was set inexorably in motion three days before Renata’s ill-fated swim.
Three days and nearly three thousand miles away…
Jack Geist, deputy director of Operations, acted as if there were nothing unusual about summoning Mariah to his office on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
His secretary turned the handle on the big wooden door leading to the inner sanctum, her other hand raised to Mariah, indicating she should wait. Through the crack between the door and the frame, Mariah saw the deputy at his desk, flipping through a stack of files. When the DDO didn’t look up, the other woman cleared her throat softly.
“She’s here, sir. Ms. Bolt? Who you asked me to call in?”
He raised his head slowly, looking distracted and irritated, and gave her a curt nod. She scuttled back out, nodding to Mariah, then pulling the door shut behind her as Mariah entered.
Geist’s demeanor went through a transformation. He got to his feet and came around his massive desk, hand extended, lips stretching wide in a smile. “Mariah Bolt! I don’t think we’ve ever had the pleasure. Jack Geist.”
The smile stopped well short of his pallid green eyes, she noticed, taking his hand. He fixed her with a long, piercing look that could have been interpreted in any number of ways, none of which put her at ease.
His skin had the leathery texture of a pack-a-day man. When he finally released her hand and waved toward the leather sofa and chairs on one side of his wood-lined office, Mariah caught the scent of stale cigarettes only partially masked. She tried to picture the deputy huddled in the center courtyard with the rest of the agency’s nicotine junkies, but the image refused to come. He didn’t look the type to mingle with the masses, for one thing. Also, in her experience, covert Ops people played by their own rules, so she found herself looking around the office for the ashtrays she knew had to be there, despite the building-wide smoking ban—certain he’d have dismantled the office smoke detectors.
“Thanks for stopping by,” Geist added, following her across the room.
“No problem.” Not that this was anything but a command performance. Mariah passed up the deep leather sofa for one of the armchairs sitting at right angles to it around a low mahogany table. “My secretary said it was urgent.”
In fact, Jane had pulled her out of an interdepartmental meeting to breathlessly pass on the DDO’s summons. It wasn’t every day analysts were called to the deep-cover side of the shop, not even specialists like Mariah, who supervised a weapons watchdog group.
Geist settled his own lank frame at the end of the sofa nearest her. His close-cropped hair was straw-colored, the kind that turns imperceptibly white with age. With his loosened tie and rumpled white cotton shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, he looked as though he might have spent the night on that couch, working on some unfolding international crisis. Did men like this have family lives? Mariah wondered.
Nestled in the corner between them was a low, intricately carved table topped with a hammered-brass platter. It looked like an acquisition from some Arab souk. Like the ruby Persian wool carpet beneath their feet, the water pipe on the credenza and the carved, mother-of-pearl-inlaid wooden boxes scattered around the room, the table was a souvenir, no doubt, of Geist’s travels on behalf of the Company. On a lower shelf of the small table, she spotted another hammered-brass item—a bowl, empty at the moment, but its concave inner surface black with soot. The predicted ashtray. Bingo.
“The Last Days of the Romanov Dynasty,” Geist said, getting straight to the point. “Ever hear of it?”
“Yes, of course,” she said, nodding. “Largest and most valuable collection of Russian royal artifacts ever assembled since Czar Nicholas II and his family were assassinated by the Bolsheviks in 1917. Co-curated by the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg and L.A.’s Arlen Hunter Museum. Starts a two-year North American tour this summer.”
“Tomorrow, matter of fact. At the Arlen Hunter.”
She resisted the temptation to say “So what?,” already dreading where this conversation was heading. Did he know about her vacation plans? And then, another stomach-sinking thought: Did Geist have any inkling about her connection to the Hunter family? As spectacular as the Romanov exhibit was reputed to be, the Arlen Hunter Museum was the last place on earth she’d voluntarily choose to set foot.
“We found out this morning that none other than Valery Zakharov is going to do the ribbon-cutting honors,” Geist said. “He arrives in exactly twenty-four hours.”
“The foreign minister himself? I know the exhibit’s an important revenue-generator for the Russian government, but that seems like overkill, doesn’t it?”
“My thoughts, too, although Zakharov was due in L.A. later this week, anyway. The conference of Pacific Rim states opens out there on the fifth. There’s going to be a big kick-off reception on board the Queen Mary the night of the fourth.”
“Nice timing. They’ll be able to see fireworks up and down the coast from there. The State Department should save a bundle on entertainment.”
“No kidding. Anyway, we’ve spotted several known intelligence figures on the list of names the Russians have submitted for diplomatic visas.”
“That’s not surprising, is it? Zakharov’s ex-KGB, after all. Well, ‘ex,”’ she amended. “Not precisely. It may be FSB now, but it’s not like they’ve gone out of business. It’s to be expected that Zakharov’s entourage would include some spooks, I would think.”
“No doubt. That’s why I want somebody there to keep an eye on things.”
“Isn’t that the FBI’s job?”
The deputy scowled. “Funny, that’s what our esteemed director said. Between you and me, Mariah, that man’s so pussy-whipped by the oversight committees he doesn’t take a piss without prenotifying Capitol Hill.”
Mariah said nothing. There was something tacky about a man bad-mouthing his boss to someone he’d never met before and who didn’t even work for him. Given that the director had appointed Geist to his current exalted position, it was also more than a little disloyal. So what was that all about? A bid to make her feel part of his inner circle of confidants?
Geist had held the deputy’s post only a few months. Like most covert operatives, he’d been little known inside the agency until his name had suddenly surfaced as the man who would take over the beleaguered Operations position. The press release announcing his appointment had said Geist was an eighteen-year veteran of the agency who’d served in a variety of positions, mostly in the Middle East. Only eighteen years, Mariah reflected—a relatively meteoric rise in a bureaucracy as large and byzantine as the CIA. It was safe to assume the man was both ambitious and ruthless.
“We have no mandate for operations on domestic soil,” she said, pointing out the obvious. Was that why she was here? So he could keep his hands technically clean by using a non-Ops employee for whatever scheme he was brewing?
“Who said anything about an operation? I’m talking observation. Simply keeping an eye on Company interests. The FBI’s worried about Russian moles and organized crime. Fair enough, but we’ve got bigger fish to fry. Zakharov’s making a big push for the presidency. He’s probably going to be the next man with his finger on the Russian arsenal. It’s not much direct threat to us these days, but the Russians have plenty of potential for mischief. You, of all people, are well aware of that, Mariah. Why, just the level of their arms shipments to sleazy customers is enough to turn my hair gray.”
She was tempted to point out that the Russians would have to quadruple their activity to begin to approach the level of American arms sales abroad, nor were U.S. clients any less unsavory, on the whole. But she let it slide. Her job was to monitor the other team, not her own. In any case, she was curious to know where this conversation was heading. Curious, and more than a little uneasy.
“Zakharov is a thug, but if he’s going to take over Russia, he’s going to be our thug,” Geist said. “We’re already working to ensure he’s in our pocket, but to be on the safe side, I’d like a little extra insurance. A reliable source in his inner circle would make me very happy.”
A source in Zakharov’s inner circle? That sounded suspiciously like co-opting a foreign agent—a covert operation if ever there was one. Mariah waited for the other shoe to drop. It didn’t take long.
“That’s why you’re going to attend the Romanov opening,” Geist said.
Bang. Just what she’d been afraid he was going to say. “Excuse me, sir—”
“Call me Jack.”
“—this doesn’t make any sense,” she went on, ignoring the invitation to familiarity, which, she suspected, could only breed contempt. “If you’re planning to mount a recruitment operation, you should send someone from your side of the shop with experience in this kind of thing.”
“I understand you’ve done some work for us in the past.”
Much to my everlasting regret. “Nothing of this order of magnitude,” she said. “I wouldn’t know where to begin identifying a susceptible target.”
“Ah, well! That’s the beauty of it, you see. The target has already identified himself. Someone you know. Yuri Belenko, Zakharov’s executive assistant.”
“Belenko? Really? I have met him,” she conceded.
“Twice in the last year, if I’m correctly informed. First, at last fall’s U.N. General Assembly session in New York. Then again in March, at the European security conference in Paris.”
She nodded. “I was seconded to the State Department to work with their disarmament delegation, but—”
Geist leaned forward, elbows on his knees, fixing her once more with that intense, thousand-yard stare. “Tell me about Belenko, Mariah.”
“I filed contact reports both times I met with him.” It sounded defensive, she knew, but what did Geist think had gone on between her and the Russian?
“I know you did, but I want to hear it from you. What’s he like?”
“He’s…nice,” she ventured, wincing internally. Oh, that’s brilliant, Mariah. What a wonderfully insightful analysis. She tried again. “Intelligent and personable. Well-educated, well-traveled. Forty-three. Divorced, apparently. Speaks excellent, idiomatic American English of the kind taught in KGB training courses—which we happen to know was his original stomping ground. We have to presume he still represents the FSB.”
“Personal quirks?”
“I’m not sure I know of any—unless you count the fact that he’s an avid collector of proverbs and American slang. It’s quite the running joke.”
“Proverbs, eh? What else does he collect?”
Mariah frowned. “I don’t follow your—Oh! Right. Well, yes, he is a bit of a ladies’ man, I suppose.”
“You suppose?”
“As I said, he can be charming, and he tends to turn it on around women.”
“Especially you.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m led to believe that our man Yuri’s somewhat smitten with you, Mariah. Is that true?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“I’m not suggesting anything. I’m just waiting to hear what you have to report.”
“There’s nothing to report,” she said. “Look, I don’t know what you’ve heard from your watchers, but there’s nothing between me and Belenko. The idea’s ridiculous, not least because I lost my husband a year and a half ago, and my hands are full doing my job here and raising a teenage daughter. I’m hardly in a position or mood to carry on a wild social life with the likes of Yuri Belenko or anyone else.”
“You do get around, though.”
“How do you mean?”
Geist sat back and studied her for a moment. Then he got to his feet, walked back to his desk and reached for one of the files he’d been reading when she walked in. With-drawing a piece of paper, he returned and stood over her, holding it up.
Mariah’s heart sank. It was a photocopy of a Washington Post article that had appeared a few weeks earlier. The photograph accompanying the piece hadn’t copied well, but she knew exactly who the two shadowy figures in it were.
“For someone who claims to be out of commission, you do lead a high-profile life,” Geist said. He turned the article back toward himself. “The National Press Club awards. My, my! And there you are, recognizable enough, even though this is a lousy copy, gracing the arm of one of our top TV newscasters.”
“Paul Chaney’s an old friend of my husband’s. And mine,” she conceded, realizing it was stupid to pretend otherwise, despite her own ambivalence on the subject. “He was getting an award that night. He needed a date and I went along as a favor.”
“This article’s not about Chaney, though, is it? It’s about you. And your father. There’ve been a couple of others since this one, too.”
“Unfortunately.” She exhaled heavily. “Look, the whole thing was an accident. Some reporter found out I was Ben Bolt’s daughter and latched onto a rumor that an unpublished novel of his had been found.”
She should never have gone to that dinner. Not for the first time, she cursed Paul for letting slip the information about her father and his papers. Not for the first time, either, she wondered whether his gaffe had been as accidental as he kept claiming.
“Your late father’s considered to be one of the biggies of American lit, I guess.” Geist pursed his lips and shrugged. “Not surprising news like that would create a stir.”
“I suppose, but I certainly never intended to get caught at the center of a controversy.”
“So? Is there a novel?”
She shrugged. “There’s a draft manuscript and some journals that showed up in an old storage locker. My father’s agent is wading through the mess now, trying to see whether it adds up to much. I’m planning to see him next week to discuss what, if anything, we should do with it. In any case,” she added, “that’s all beside the point. We were discussing Yuri Belenko, and I don’t want to hold you up, sir. I’m sure you’re very busy. Why would you think Belenko’s susceptible to working for us?”
“Ah, well,” Geist said, laying aside the Post article, “that’s what I was trying to get at before you went all coy on me, Mariah. I don’t know if he’s susceptible to us, but he certainly seems to be susceptible to you.”
“Why would you think that?”
“My people have been keeping an eye on him, and we’ve intercepted a couple of conversations where he’s mentioned you in a most wistful manner. Also, did you know that when you were in Paris in March, he followed you back to your hotel one night? We think he was planning to pay a social call, only I gather your daughter was there with you…?”
“The conference was only a one-day affair, and she had spring break, so…” Mariah felt a tremor run through her. “Belenko was following me? He saw her?”
It was her old nightmare, come back to haunt her again—her child in danger because of her work. Deskbound as she was, it wasn’t much of an issue these days. But when the March conference had come up, she and Lindsay had just gone through their second Christmas without David, followed by a rough winter. The appeal of springtime in Paris had overshadowed the risk of taking her daughter along on the short business trip.
Never again.
Geist leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “My watchers said Belenko seemed real disappointed. Guess he decided he wasn’t going to get to first base that night. We decided to start keeping an eye on him, though. Then, day before yesterday, we hit pay dirt.”
“Pay dirt?”
“He had dinner with his brother in Moscow. The guy’s a literary critic for Isvestia, did you know that? Belenko told him he’d met Ben Bolt’s daughter. I guess your father’s novels are popular over there, too?”
Mariah nodded. “Your people bugged their conversation?”
“Yup. Belenko mentioned he was heading back to the States this week, said he was hoping to see you again. Maybe he was just trying to impress big brother, but from the way he spoke, it didn’t seem like it was the finer points of modern fiction he was looking to pursue, if you know what I mean.”
Mariah sat back, momentarily stunned. Then she shook her head. “I don’t think you’re reading this correctly.”
“You never noticed Belenko had the hots for you? You’re a very attractive woman, Mariah.”
She passed on the flattery. “That’s not what this is about.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I’ve run into this kind of thing before. It’s not me that’s the draw, it’s my father.”
“I thought he was dead.”
“He is. He died when he was twenty-eight.” She sighed. “It’s hard to explain. It’s the phenomenon of being related to fame. There’s a look certain people get when they twig to the fact that Ben Bolt was my father.”
“Certain people?”
“Certain grasping, upwardly mobile characters. Or, I don’t know—maybe they’re just fans. People like that want to get close to their heroes, even if only indirectly. Given the way Russians lionize poets and writers, Belenko could be very susceptible. As I say, I’ve seen it before. You can be ugly as a post and stupid as dirt, but if you’re related to somebody famous, it never matters to those who are too easily impressed.” Even though she herself found more to regret than celebrate in her connection to Ben Bolt, Mariah thought grimly.
“Be that as it may,” Geist said, “it’s a hook. I’m still thinking it would be a good thing if you ran into Belenko again. In fact, I think you should get to know him much better.”
“Are you saying you want me to seduce the man? Because if you are, I’m sorry, the answer is no. I interpret satellite data and write depressing reports on arms shipments that nobody reads. I wasn’t recruited to be a swallow.”
His hand made solicitous “there-there” motions, patting the air. “I didn’t mean to offend you, Mariah. I’m not asking you to do anything you’re not comfortable with. I just want you to reestablish contact with Belenko, see where his long-term interests lie. Feel him out. Note I said ‘out,’ not ‘up,”’ Geist added, smirking at his own wit. “If you get any hint he might be interested in joining forces professionally as well as personally, you let me know. We’ll take it from there.”
“I’m not comfortable with this,” she said, head shaking.
“You’ll do fine. It’s only for a day or so.”
“A day or so? I thought you just wanted me to cover the Romanov opening.”
“That’s probably all. Foreign Minister Zakharov’s going to be in L.A. for a few days, as I said, but we’re not sure Belenko’s staying the whole time. One way or the other, though, it’s two days, tops. Promise. I know you’ve got a vacation coming.”
“What about the State Department? Secretary of State Kidd doesn’t like Ops officers on his delegations.”
“I know, but that’s the beauty of it. You’re not Ops.”
Aha! Just as she’d suspected. The fact that she’d read him right gave her little satisfaction.
Geist went on. “It’s already been cleared with Kidd’s office. Since you’ve worked with them before, he’ll go along with it now. State has no idea about your approach to Belenko, mind you. We’ve said we want to use you as a quick conduit for intelligence briefings of the secretary in case the crisis heats up between Russia and Turkey.” A small skirmish had been developing between NATO ally Turkey and the Russians over the latter’s support to Kurdish rebels in Turkey. It was hardly at the level of “crisis,” Mariah thought, but Geist must have oversold its potential to get Kidd’s approval.
“I suppose my own deputy has also agreed to this?” she asked, knowing full well that the well-meaning but ineffectual analysis chief was no match for a determined operator like Jack Geist.
“Naturally.” Geist leaned back into the sofa and laced his fingers over his flat stomach. “All I’m asking you to do is help us take advantage of an opportunity, Mariah. If Belenko agrees to come on the payroll, my people in Moscow will manage him. I have full confidence in you to handle this.”
Somehow, that was small comfort.
Mariah took her victories where she found them. The year and a half since David’s death was just a blur, a blind succession of days filled with all the textbook stages of grieving, save acceptance. But denial she knew. And anger. And bargaining with fate: Let this not have happened and I will live an exemplary life all the rest of my days.
Fate wouldn’t be bargained with, however, so the best she could do was allow herself a small sense of triumph at getting out of bed each morning—an act of sheer will, requiring a certain determined amnesia in order to ignore the losses strung like thorns along the beaded chain of her life.
This resolve to carry on was entirely for Lindsay’s benefit. If she could have, Mariah would have sheltered her precious daughter from every harsh and buffeting wind, but she’d been powerless to keep David’s life from slipping away on them. Lindsay had been robbed of a father’s unconditional support at the worst possible moment, poised on the brink of adolescence, that moment in life when young people are already beginning to suspect that they’ve been duped and that the safe haven of childhood is an illusion fostered by a vast parental conspiracy. All Mariah wanted now was for her daughter to hold on to faith in the possibility of happiness, the constancy of love and the notion that people are mostly good—even if these beliefs held only the shakiest of places in her own personal credo.
At fifteen, however, Lindsay seemed equally determined most days to reject her mother’s take on life, love and all other matters, great and small. This was one of those days when nothing Mariah did or said or wore or suggested was going to earn even the most grudging approval.
“Not the blue one, either?” Mariah asked, pulling yet another hanger from her closet. They were in her upstairs bedroom of the condominium town house Mariah had bought in McLean, Virginia, after it became clear David would never recover from the car crash that had ripped apart their family—a deliberate attack that had also injured her daughter, but missed its intended target: Mariah herself.
Lindsay picked up a magazine from the bedside table and began flipping through it, her beautiful, dark eyes avoiding both her mother and the dress. “Whatever,” she said grudgingly.
Her hands were again decorated with ink doodling, Mariah noted, her nails painted blue-black. She’d been forbidden to go to school looking like that, but with school out for the summer now, Lindsay was testing limits again. Between the skin drawing, the hammered-looking fingertips and the third earring in one ear, her beautiful little girl seemed determined to transform herself into something out of Edgar Allan Poe. Why?
Mariah turned back to the mirror, gritting her teeth. They would not fight tonight.
From outside the flung-wide windows, the sweet, heavy scent of magnolia blossoms in the park-like condominium complex wafted across the warm evening air. But underneath that, the air crackled with the static charge of a storm brewing. July had arrived with all the restless, humid promise to which hormone-wracked youth are susceptible. Other people, too, perhaps, but not her, Mariah thought. That way lay only grief. She looked past her own reflection to her daughter’s. It was going to be a long summer, and not all the storms would be outside.
Pulling her gaze away from Lindsay, she forced herself to concentrate on the task at hand. It was getting late, and she was damned if she’d stay up half the night agonizing over wardrobe choices for an assignment she’d been dragooned into. She should have said no, and not just because of the assignment. There was also the contact site: the Arlen Hunter Museum. Hunter himself had died several years back. Was his family still involved in the museum that bore his name?
The Hunter family. Mariah grimaced. It wasn’t the family she was worried about. It was Renata. Would she be there? Well, what if she was? Why should it matter? Renata couldn’t hurt her anymore. Had no power over her unless Mariah handed it to her, and why would she do that? Simple answer: she wouldn’t.
She studied the dress in her hand once more. It was sleeveless and front-buttoning, with a high, Chinese-mandarin collar. The shimmering cobalt silk made a striking contrast to her softly cropped blond hair and cast her smoky eyes in an unusual light. It seemed suitable enough, but living with a teenager was enough to shake anyone’s confidence in her own judgment.
“What’s wrong with it?” she asked.
Lindsay’s bare shoulder lifted in a dismissive shrug. She was wearing a black halter top over heavily frayed jeans. A full head taller than Mariah’s five-three, with impossibly long legs, she was fair-skinned and fine-boned, with the doe-eyed delicacy of a Walter Scott heroine that belied an increasingly headstrong nature.
“A little fancy, isn’t it?” Lindsay said without looking up. “I thought this was a work thing. Why don’t you wear one of your suits?”
“It is work, but it’s also a gala opening. I don’t want to look like one of the museum guards, do I?”
Again, the shrug. “Wear what you want, then.”
Lindsay tossed the magazine aside and flopped down onto the big four-poster bed, thick curls washing like copper-colored waves down the smooth expanse of her back. As she landed, the corner of Mariah’s eye picked up a tumbling dust bunny, expelled from under the bed by the exasperated whumphing of the mattress. She tried not to think how long it had been since the vacuum had made a house call under there. She wondered, too, how this maddeningly irritating girl could be the cornerstone of her happiness, her reason for living. Some days, motherhood felt like pure masochism.
Giving up all hope of approval, she lay the Chinese-silk dress on the bed, by the garment bag lying next to Lindsay. Her suitcase was on the floor, and it already held most of the things she’d need for their vacation to follow. Lindsay’s own bag was packed, zipped and standing by the door of her bedroom down the hall.
“I still don’t see why I can’t come with you tomorrow,” Lindsay grumbled. “I would have liked to see the Russian royal treasures, too, you know.”
“I’ll take you another time. The tour’s coming through D.C. We’ll see it at the Smithsonian.”
“Yeah, right. Next year. You could have wangled me into the grand opening.”
Mariah shuddered at the thought. It was bad enough she had to go herself. “The invitation list was tightly controlled,” she said. “With the secretary of state and Russian foreign minister coming, the security contingent alone will take up half the hall. Anyway, this is no social occasion for me.”
“I wouldn’t get in the way. I didn’t in Paris.”
“That was different.”
“Yeah, it was. Those were private meetings. This is a public opening. If I got dressed up, I’d blend right into the background. I look old enough. I don’t even get carded at R-rated movies anymore.”
Mariah frowned. “R-rated movies? I don’t remember approving that.”
“Mom,” she said, rolling her eyes, “everything’s R-rated these days except Big Bird. I’ve told you about every movie my friends and I have gone to.”
Her friends included a six-foot, tank-size junior named Brent who’d started hanging around lately. Drive-in theaters and boys with shiny new driver’s licenses were bad enough, Mariah thought. Now, add R-rated movies to the long list of subjects that she and Lindsay could argue about.
Not tonight, though.
“The point is,” Lindsay said, “I can almost pass for twenty-something if I get really done up.”
“That’s all I’d need,” Mariah said, rifling through her bureau, trying to find her travel makeup bag. She and David had bought the oak double dresser at a country estate auction not long after they were married. Now, for the first time in her life, she had more drawer space than she knew what to do with, and she could still never find anything. The bag finally appeared. “I don’t want to be worrying about some guy hitting on my baby girl while I’m supposed to be picking Russian brains.”
Lindsay’s mouth rounded in a mock-pitying pout. “Aw, poor Mom! Double-oh-seven never had to baby-sit while he was spying on Dr. No, did he?”
“Double-oh-seven, my foot. I’m just an old desk jockey who gets unchained from time to time for a closer look at the other side. Those visiting dignitaries, however, have roving eyes and hands. I’m not exactly going to blend into the background if I have to be beating them off you like some crazed fishwife, am I?”
Lindsay blushed, confirming the general wisdom that redheads look adorable in pink. “Get outta here. You’ll be beating them off yourself in that dress.”
Mariah was packing her toiletry kit, but she turned to her daughter with a look of mock astonishment. “Oh, my gosh, is that a vote of confidence I’m hearing? You do think the dress is okay?”
Lindsay flipped over onto her back. “It’s fine. You going without me tomorrow isn’t.”
“You’re coming right behind me! Honestly, Lins, I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss. It’s barely forty-eight hours.”
“Because it’s boring here. All right? And there’s a party tomorrow night, and I’m not going to get to go to that, either! And if I don’t—” She rolled off the bed and headed for the door. “It’s not fair!”
The walls vibrated with the stomping of her feet down the hall and the slamming of her bedroom door, and then, the stereo came on loud. Very loud. Too loud for open windows and even the most well-baffled condominium walls.
Mariah massaged her forehead, trying to loosen the vise that was in the process of clamping down on her skull. When did the age of roller-coaster hormones end? It couldn’t happen too soon.
She took a deep breath, willing herself to be calm. The neighbors were away. The music still had to be turned down, but she would not fight. Not tonight.
She zipped her makeup kit and tossed it on top of the open suitcase. Then, steeling herself, she went down the hall and knocked softly on Lindsay’s door. No answer. The second rap was a little louder. Not aggressive. Just loud enough to be heard.
“What?” Lindsay snapped from the other side.
Mariah opened her mouth to ask if she could come in, but what if the answer came back no? Better to take acknowledgment as invitation. When she walked in, Lindsay was stretched on her stomach across the unmade bed, arms hanging down as she flipped through a pile of plastic CD cases on the floor beside her.
“We need to turn the music down,” Mariah said. “The windows are open, and it’s getting late.”
“Fine,” Lindsay said, but didn’t move.
Mariah walked over to the desk and lowered the volume on the stereo. The chair, typically, was covered with clothes from the try-and-toss ritual Lindsay went through as she debated her image each day. Mariah made a move to start hanging them up, but if she did, she knew it would be interpreted as criticism—not that the mess didn’t warrant it, but there was a time and a place, and this wasn’t it. On the other hand, she wanted to sit down, and she couldn’t bring herself to sit on top of all those clean clothes. She compromised and draped the whole pile over the back of the desk chair, then settled and looked around.
The decor was in a constant process of transformation. Nothing was ever removed, but layer upon layer was added as Lindsay’s interests evolved. Between posters of rock bands and animals, new ones had been hung—book jackets and astronomical phenomena, two of the many passions of this difficult but incredibly bright daughter she was trying to raise. Images of the Milky Way and the Horsehead Nebula hung interspersed with others of writers as diverse as Jane Austen, George Orwell and Ken Kesey—and, Mariah noted, one whole wall of Ben Bolt, the grandfather Lindsay had never known.
Maybe it was just coincidence that she’d discovered her grandfather not long after losing her dad. Ben’s novel Cool Thunder had been on her freshman English curriculum, after all. But Lindsay had taken her Ben Bolt study well beyond school requirements, reading everything by and about him that she could get her hands on.
Not surprising, Mariah supposed. At a certain point, everyone wants to know who they are and where they came from, and she herself hadn’t provided much information over the years. Where Ben was concerned, she’d operated on the theory that if you can’t say something good about someone…
“Why couldn’t I stay at Chap’s while you’re working?” Lindsay asked sullenly.
Chap Korman was the literary agent who’d handled Ben’s work from the start of his career. His house in Newport Beach, California, was only a couple of blocks from the cottage where Lindsay and Mariah were spending their three-week vacation. Since her own mother’s death twenty years earlier, Mariah had become sole guardian of Ben’s estate, and it was a credit to Korman that she felt as close to him as she felt estranged from the memory of his former client.
“There really wasn’t time to arrange it with Chap and change your ticket—although, to be perfectly honest, Lins, I didn’t even think of it. Carol was the first person I thought of.” Carol Odell was the married daughter of Mariah’s old CIA mentor and boss, Frank Tucker. The families had always been close. “She and Michael are really looking forward to having you there for a couple of days. So is Alex. Apparently, he’s having sibling anxiety over the new baby. That little guy’s crazy about you, and you haven’t seen much of him lately.”
“It’s not my fault. I had exams and everything.”
“I know. But when this assignment got thrown at me and I tried to think how to work it, Carol’s just seemed like the best idea. I did try to call you,” Mariah added, “but the phone here was tied up all afternoon.”
“I was talking to Br—to my friends about the party at Stephanie’s tomorrow. It’s not fair I can’t go.”
“There’ll be other parties. This couldn’t be helped.”
“It won’t be the same! People won’t be around later.”
“People? Are we talking people like Brent?”
She nodded miserably. “He’s going to Connecticut to see his dad. I won’t see him again till school starts.”
Mariah said a quiet prayer of thanks for that. She didn’t think she was being overprotective. At eighteen, Brent was just too old and altogether too smooth. But she adopted what she hoped was an appropriately sympathetic expression and reminded herself not to let any dismissive platitudes pass her lips. The only safe recourse was to agree that this development was, indeed, as earth-shattering as it seemed from a fifteen-year-old perspective. “I know it’s the pits,” she said. September was a long way off, thank God.
Lindsay sighed, a real heartbreaker of a sigh. Mariah moved next to her on the bed and stroked that beautiful copper hair.
“Carol says Charlotte’s just started smiling,” she ventured. Lindsay smiled a little at that. Mariah put an arm around her daughter’s slim shoulders, bending to kiss her head. “I know how frustrated you are, Lins. Me, too. I’m so fed up with work these days, I could put a chair though the window. We really need this vacation.”
It seemed they’d been planning it forever. A beach holiday, they’d decided, in a rare instance of total accord—three weeks of relaxing, swimming, tanning, shopping. Long walks on the sand. Maybe a few sailing lessons. California wouldn’t have been Mariah’s first choice. She’d have opted for the Hamptons or the Carolinas, but there had been advantages to going west, not the least of which was the chance to spend some time with Chap Korman, who wasn’t getting any younger. That was certainly where Lindsay’s vote had gone, in any case, so California-bound they were—with this one small wrinkle.
“Just be patient? I’ll go do this job, and then we’ll have three whole weeks to veg in the sun.”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
Mariah hugged her again, too grateful for the diverted crisis to listen to the doubts gnawing in the back of her mind. Doubts that should have told her there was something altogether too coincidental, too pat about this sudden call to duty on an old enemy’s turf.
If she’d been less distracted, less weary, less defeated, she might have pulled her wits about her faster and found a way to turn Geist down flat. But she hadn’t. And sure enough, it wasn’t long before she felt an unseen hand clawing at the frayed threads of her life.
Tuesday, July 2
Chapter Two
Frank Tucker awoke in gloom and found himself crying. He froze, catching himself in mid-sob, and held his breath, ears straining. But the only sound he heard was a lonely summer rain pelting the roof like a sympathetic echo to his grief.
Though disoriented, his instincts were sufficiently honed to render him both wary and appalled at his lapse. He racked his brain to think where he was. His first thought was Moscow. Room 714, Intourist Hotel. Surveillance devices embedded in every wall.
Horrified to think the listeners might have heard him crying, he wondered if he’d been drugged to induce this sense of utter desolation. A dead weight of despair seemed to be bearing down on him, crushing his chest. He inhaled deeply, trying to cast it off, and as he did, the piney scent of wet juniper tickled his nostrils. This wasn’t the typical Russian urban perfume of diesel, must and cooked cabbage, he realized. It was the smell of his own yard, drifting in through the open window.
Then he remembered flying back that morning. The unmarked aircraft had taken off from Moscow before dawn, Tucker the sole passenger. The only cargo had been one wooden crate. Picking up eight hours on the westbound journey, overtaking the rising sun, the plane had landed at Andrews Air Force Base just in time for the morning capital commute.
The driver who met the plane on the tarmac had taken Tucker’s suit bag and put it in the trunk of a dark sedan, watching while Tucker himself loaded the wooden crate. They exchanged hardly a word on the drive from suburban Maryland to McLean, Virginia, a chase car trailing close behind. Wending its way along the beltway, the convoy had turned off at the road leading through the Langley Wood, entering the CIA complex through a subterranean passage.
There, Tucker had carted the box to his sub-basement office. Prying it open with a crowbar, he’d flipped quickly though the moldering files inside before depositing the whole bunch in his heavy steel safe. After a quick call upstairs to confirm his return, he’d slammed the safe door and spun the dial, heading home to catch up on some of the sleep that had eluded him for the two days he’d been gone.
Now, with a warm summer rain splashing on the windowsill and the damp, earthy scent around him of a world washed clean, he was back in his own wide, empty bed in suburban Alexandria, fully dressed, only his shoes kicked off before he’d crashed on top of the covers.
How long ago?
The heavy curtains were drawn tight to shut out the light of day. Tucker glanced at the digital clock next to the bed: 11:33 a.m. He’d slept less than two hours before snapping awake to the sound of his own mournful cry.
The mattress dipped as he rolled onto his side, feet dropping with a thud to the carpeted floor. He exhaled a long, shuddering sigh, and the blade of his big hands scraped the tears from his cheeks—denying even this familiar room the pathetic sight of a middle-aged man reduced to tears. He had no recollection of the dream that had moved him to this state. All he knew was that it had left him with a profound sense of loss and longing.
He knew, too, that he was ludicrous—a brooding, barrel-chested hulk whose ferocious, black-eyed scowl had once struck terror in the hearts of fools and his more timid underlings. Now, here he was, reduced to whimpering in his bed like some self-pitying boy with a complaint about the unfairness of life.
He got to his feet and walked to the window, throwing back the drapes. The cloud-shrouded day cast a gentle light across the back lawn rolling down to the creek at the bottom of his property. The grass, dry and yellowing when he’d left forty-eight hours earlier, had already been transformed to lush green. On the borders of his lot, red hibiscus, white daylilies and blue hydrangeas were all in bloom—a patriotic display in time for the Fourth of July. The long fronds of the big willow by the creek swayed in the summer rainstorm, a slow, easy dance.
No automobile horns, no loud voices, no pounding jack-hammers. After the noise and bustle of Moscow, the quiet was deafening.
Tucker passed a hand over his head, feeling stubble on a dome normally shaved bowling-ball smooth. He debated his next move. He was bone-tired, but even if jet lag was insisting it was evening, sleep wasn’t an option. His dreams, obviously, weren’t to be trusted. Anyway, he’d only meant to grab forty winks. If he went back to bed now, he’d be left to struggle with his bleak thoughts through the long, dark night to come.
He could get moving, he supposed. Shower, shave, see if he had any clean clothes. Drive back into work and tackle those old KGB files.
But what was the point? Nothing and no one depended on him. Now that he’d gotten his hands on them and spirited them out of Moscow, anyone could take over dissecting the files, for whatever they were worth. From here on in, it would be solitary grunt work, the kind meted out to old operatives who’ve lost the ability or the heart to wade through the secret jungles, waging covert war.
Tucker knew he’d been written off as a casualty of that war—wounded, though not quite slain. He’d toyed with the idea of early retirement, but at the last minute, he’d backed away from the abyss of empty years stretching before him. He was in disgustingly good health. If statistics were to be believed, he had a third of his life yet ahead of him. What he did with that time mattered to no one but himself.
His wife had been dead sixteen long years, although there were days when he still half imagined Joanne would be there when he walked in the front door. He’d lost his only son, Stephen, a year and a half earlier. What family he had left needed little from him. His daughter Carol, and her husband, Michael, were a loving couple, hardworking, good parents to their two children. Sufficient unto themselves. All they required from him was that he put in an appearance at the occasional Sunday or holiday dinner.
Until recently, there’d been a woman in his life, helping to fill the empty hours and days, but that relationship had foundered and run aground like everything else. The extra-curricular involvement with his secretary had started one night a few years back, when Patty had marched into his office after the rest of his section had gone home and demanded he take her to dinner after working her like a slave until all hours. Then she had invited him to her apartment. They’d kept on in a low-key way ever after, and when his son had died, she’d pretty much moved in, nursing Tucker through months of guilt and self-loathing.
Finally, though, understandably, she’d grown tired of the uneven arrangement, knowing there were prior claims on his heart and mind that she’d never dislodge. As the previous winter had settled in, Patty had announced one evening, with resignation but no rancor, that she was quitting the Company and moving to Florida. Tucker hadn’t been invited to go along.
“It’s not that I don’t care about you,” she’d said, her voice dusky as she busied herself with packing the suitcase on his bed. “Fact is, I love you. Always will, I guess, fool that I am.”
Tucker was standing in the doorway, arms hanging stupidly at his sides, watching her and trying to get his mind around the prospect of her absence. “Then why are you leaving?”
She’d been part of his daily existence for nearly twenty years—at first, just sitting outside his office, running interference, holding back fools and whiners, keeping his expense accounts balanced and his files straight. Lately, he’d grown even more dependent on her.
She folded a sweater in a couple of brusque movements and laid it across the suitcase. Her hairdresser had taken to putting platinum streaks in Patty’s tawny hair to camouflage the increasing gray, and they sparkled as she moved. Straightening slowly, she turned to face him. “I’m not leaving because I’m mad, Frank. Honest. I just can’t live on a one-way street anymore.”
He nodded. “I haven’t been there for you. You stood by me these last months. You’ve done for me and done for me—”
“I was glad to.”
“I don’t know why.”
She came over to him, smiling sadly, running a hand up his arm. “I do.”
He cupped her cheek, thumb tracing the deep lines around her smiling mouth and hazel eyes. Her face was well lived in, but in the soft, forgiving glow of lamplight, he saw the pretty girl she must once have been, full of hopes and dreams that wouldn’t have passed her by, if life were in any way fair. Her body, too, had lost the firmness of youth, but had acquired in its place the warmth and uninhibited generosity that comes to the best of women in middle age. “I haven’t taken care of you,” he said.
“It’s not that. You take care of me just fine. You remember my birthday. You make me chicken soup when I get a cold. You sit beside me when I watch my stupid shows and never make fun when I blubber. You check the oil in my car, keep my brakes tuned and my tires aligned. There’s not much you wouldn’t do for me, Frank, I know that. Except the one thing I really want, and that’s not your fault. You can’t make yourself be in love with me.”
He started to reply, but she put her fingers on his lips, saving them both the embarrassment of an empty protest.
“No, it’s okay. That’s just the way it is. I knew going in how things were with you. I guess I hoped it might change. Or, if not, that what we had would be enough.” She shook her head. “But it’s not. Not for either of us.”
In his heart, Tucker knew she was right. She needed more than he was capable of giving her, and cutting her losses was probably the best thing for her to do. Knowing that didn’t make it any easier, though.
She kissed him then, and he wrapped her in his arms, holding on just a little longer. The next thing he knew, they were pushing her suitcase off the bed. And it might very well have been the best lovemaking they’d ever had, but it didn’t change the fact that afterward, Patty had finished her packing, loaded her Toyota and driven away.
Sighing heavily, now, Tucker stared at the big oak bed. His and Joanne’s twins had been conceived there. She’d nursed them in the chintz-covered rocker next to it. Years later, Tucker had sat in that same chair, watching her life slip away. The Moroccan carpet beneath the chair was worn thin from the long hours of rocking.
His father had picked up the carpet in North Africa during World War II. A Marine gunnery sergeant, he’d somehow managed to cart the thing around for eight months before he was finally shipped home with a uniform full of campaign ribbons, a stump in place of his left arm and his stupid rug. He’d gone on to marry the hometown girl he’d left behind and raise six kids, of whom Frank was the eldest, all on a one-armed printer’s wage—never, to the end of his days, uttering a word of complaint about his fate.
Tucker turned abruptly and headed for the bathroom, determined to shake off the sluggishness that enveloped him like a thick, syrupy mantle. Clean yourself up, for God’s sake. Give Carol a call, let her know you’re home.
But when he dialed his daughter’s number a short while later, it was neither Carol nor Michael who picked up. It was Lindsay.
“Hi, Uncle Frank! You’re home?”
“Just got in a little while ago.” Taken aback at hearing Lindsay’s voice, he fell into an awkward silence. She was the one who finally broke it. At fifteen, she had more polish than he did, Tucker thought ruefully.
“Carol’s upstairs feeding the baby. I just read Alex a story and tucked him in for his afternoon nap. Actually, three stories. Four, if you count the one he made me read twice. I’d probably still be up there, except he fell asleep on the second reading.”
Tucker smiled. His grandson was two, a whirling dervish.
“How was your trip?” Lindsay asked.
He hesitated. She had no idea where he’d been, of course. Neither did Carol, nor anyone else for that matter. It had been a tiny group inside the agency that had studied the cryptic message that had prompted his sudden trip to Moscow. Not even the director had been briefed, so that if Tucker got himself arrested over there, or worse, the front office—and the White House, if it came to that—could claim he was a rogue operative who’d slipped the chain of command to settle some personal score. A burnout case, pushed over the edge by family problems that had nothing to do with official American policy toward its new Russian friends. Tucker had simply told Carol he’d be out of town for a while so she wouldn’t worry if she didn’t hear from him.
“Trip was fine,” he said. “Dull. Is Carol going out? You baby-sitting this afternoon?”
“No, I’m staying here for a couple of days. Mom left early this morning for Los Angeles.”
Tucker’s pulse increased a notch. He’d recruited her mother himself. Mariah had worked with him for years in the old Soviet analysis unit, but their office partnership had ended when his career self-destructed. Since then, she’d moved on to bigger and better things, while he puttered on the sidelines, out of the field of action.
“I thought the two of you were going out there together,” he said to Lindsay.
“I leave Thursday morning. There’s an exhibit opening in L.A. tonight that she has to cover. The Russian foreign minister’s going to be there.”
“Oh, right, the Romanov treasures,” Tucker said more casually than he felt. Why would Mariah be assigned to cover Zakharov’s visit? That kind of thing wasn’t in her bailiwick.
He had another sudden, uneasy thought. How coincidental was it that she’d been pulled into action just after he himself had received a mysterious summons to Moscow?
Tucker had started out in Operations, but had moved behind the lines when his wife first got sick. All these years, both he and Mariah had labored in the background, cranking out their intelligence assessments. But if there was one thing he’d come to realize on this Moscow trip, it was how much personal information the opposition had on him. And if on him, why not on her, too?
“Listen,” he said to Lindsay, “tell Carol I called and I’m back, okay? I’ll talk to her later.”
“Okay. Will we see you soon?”
“You bet,” Tucker said firmly.
He hung up the phone and went to find his car keys. Suddenly, it was no longer enough to let someone else examine what he’d thought were just musty records, selectively chosen and leaked to sway American thinking on the current power struggle in Moscow. He’d suspected, given his Russian contact’s cryptic comments, that there was dirt on Foreign Minister Zakharov in there. Now he wondered if there was more to it than that.
He needed to know before anyone else saw those files.
Chapter Three
As her plane touched down at Los Angeles International Airport, Mariah tried to tell herself that her only objective here was to do the job she’d been sent to do, and do it fast. Make contact with Yuri Belenko, see where his interests lay and file her contact report. If he seemed amenable to doing a little freelance work on the side, Ops would assign him a handler. Or not. Their call. As for her, she’d be free to pick up her rental car and the keys to the beach house, meet Lindsay’s plane and get on with a much-needed vacation. End of story.
That’s what she told herself. The truth was a little more complex, as truth tends to be.
They say time heals all wounds, but it’s not entirely true. Some never really heal. On the surface, recovery may seem complete, but certain traumas leave a residual weakness that lurks in a troubled soul like a subterranean fault line, prone to unexpected eruption. There was such a susceptibility inside Mariah, unknown even to herself—a deep, dark place where resentment simmered and bubbled like hot, sulfurous magma. Until now, it had never percolated up to that place where liquid rage hardens into cold calculated action. But it’s the nature of such fault lines to give way without warning, and the explosive results are nearly always devastating—even to innocent bystanders.
She checked into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel around noon, with an hour or so to kill before she had to head over to get the lay of the land at the Arlen Hunter Museum. The Romanov exhibit was set to open at six.
While she waited, Mariah decided to give Chap Korman a call. She tipped the bellboy who’d delivered her bag to her suite, then settled into a deeply upholstered wing chair, propping her feet on the bed’s quilted floral spread, and dialed Korman’s number from memory. In the twenty years since her mother’s death, when Mariah had become the reluctant guardian of Ben Bolt’s prolific output, she’d gotten to know the literary agent well.
“Mariah! I wasn’t expecting you for another couple of days.”
She smiled at the sound of his voice, although it sounded more wavery each time they spoke, Mariah thought sadly, anticipating the day when this last, best link to her past would be gone. Chap was alternately coy and grumpy about his age, but he’d been older than Ben by several years, so she calculated that he had to be at least in his mid-seventies by now. He’d long since left the bustle of New York to nurse his arthritic joints in the warmer climes of southern California, but he continued to represent a roster of long-time clients, even championing the occasional new one when he found a writer he believed in.
“I just got in. I’m staying at the Beverly Wilshire,” she told him. “I was drafted for a short-term assignment, so I had to come early.”
“Aha! A secret mission,” he said delightedly. “Can’t tell me what it is, right, or else you’d have to kill me?”
She rolled her eyes. “You read too many spy novels, Chap.”
“Hey, this is exciting. You’re the only spook I know.”
“Big thrill. I could introduce you to twenty thousand other grunts who toil away in the same obscurity I do.”
“So, is Lindsay with you on this covert job?”
“No, she’s staying with friends. She flies in Thursday.”
“Any chance you’ll take me up on my offer? I’m just rattling around this big old place, you know. There’s plenty of room.”
Chap had retired to a lovely, bougainvillea-covered house in Newport Beach, of all places—an irony that never escaped her, since she tended to think of Newport as “the scene of the crime,” having spent a fairly miserable youth there. Since she hadn’t returned to the place in twenty years, she’d never actually seen Chap’s house, except in photos. But his wife of fifty years had passed away the previous year, and Mariah knew he was lonely. She felt a twinge of guilt for not accepting the invitation.
“I really appreciate the offer. This cottage we’ve got is right around the corner. We’ll practically be neighbors. That’s the main reason I jumped on the place when the offer came up. I need some one-on-one with Lins, though. You know, kind of a mother-daughter-bonding-healing thing.”
“I thought as much,” he conceded, “otherwise I’d have gone all cantankerous on you. How’s that little copper-haired honey of mine doing these days?”
“Oh, Lord! She’s fifteen. Need I say more?”
“No, I guess not.” Chap had raised sons, not daughters, but he had a good imagination. “What about Mom?”
“Day by day. Isn’t that the conventional wisdom?” Mariah hesitated before confiding, “You know that assignment I mentioned? It’s at the Arlen Hunter Museum—the opening of the Romanov exhibit. I’m supposed to help baby-sit the Russian delegation.”
His heavy exhalation whistled down the line. “Oh, boy. I’ve been seeing ads for that show, and I thought of you. So? Is Renata going to be there?”
“I’m not sure. I imagine it’s a strong possibility, though, don’t you?”
“Probably. How do you feel about that?”
Good question. “Hard to say,” she said truthfully. “I was under a lot of pressure to take this thing on. In the back of my mind, it occurred to me there was a good chance I’d run into Renata there, so I thought about digging in my heels and refusing. But you know what? Somehow I couldn’t muster up the will. It’s like morbid fascination with a car wreck or something. Part of me, I admit, is sick at the thought of seeing her after all these years. But another part of me is dying to get a look at the old witch.”
“Facing your demons, huh?”
“Maybe. Either that or pure masochism.”
Chap fell silent for a long moment. “Talk about timing,” he said finally. “Did you get the package I sent you?”
“Package?”
“I overnighted it. I wanted you to see it as soon as possible. It should have gotten there today.”
“I’d probably left by the time it arrived. What was it about?”
“Your dad’s manuscript. You know,” the old man said thoughtfully, “it’s a shame the press found out about those papers so soon.”
“I know. I’m really sorry about that. God knows, I didn’t mean for it to get out. I was at a dinner with Paul Chaney. He was the only other person in the world besides you, me and Lindsay who knew they existed. He let it slip. We were in a roomful of reporters, so needless to say, the word spread like wildfire.”
“This Chaney—I’ve never met him, but he seems like a pretty savvy guy, at least on TV. And I thought the two of you were pretty close. Seems odd he’d do something so indiscreet, doesn’t it?”
Mariah’s free hand twisted the phone cord around her fingers until it began to cut off her circulation. “Funny you should say that. In my charitable moments, I try to convince myself it was an inadvertent blunder, but there are times when I think he did it on purpose. He had to know what a feeding frenzy the news would set off, and that I’d be forced to acknowledge the manuscript and journals existed.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Strangely enough, to try to be helpful. He thinks I should be making more effort to come to terms with Ben’s memory. And I have, to some extent, Chap, mostly to satisfy Lindsay’s curiosity. We went to visit Ben’s grave in Paris, after all. I’d never done that before. But Paul thinks it would be therapeutic if I went further—got involved in promoting this new stuff, for example. I’ve tried to explain that there’s a limit to how far I’m prepared to go with this father-daughter reconciliation, but he just doesn’t get it.”
“I’ve been getting nipped by this media feeding frenzy myself,” Chap said.
“I noticed you’d been quoted a few places. You seem to be holding them at bay pretty well.”
“I thought it best not say anything publicly until you and I had a chance to talk. But I got a letter from a prof out here at UCLA not long after the press reports started. His name’s Louis Urquhart. He’s working on a biography of your dad that’s supposed to come out in time for Ben’s sixtieth-birthday celebrations next year. By the way, I told you what the publisher’s planning for the occasion, didn’t I?”
“Repackaging and reissuing his whole collection?”
“Exactly. This Urquhart’s not the only one interested in Ben’s work these days. Might as well brace yourself, kiddo, because we’re going to see a spate of books and articles about Ben over the next little while. He seems to be in vogue all over again with a new generation of readers.”
“I know,” Mariah said. “Lindsay’s English class studied Cool Thunder this year. So, what did this Urquhart have to say for himself?”
“It’s a little complicated to go into over the phone, but he’s making some pretty serious allegations. That’s why I decided you’d better see his letter.”
“You’re making me a little uneasy here, Chap.”
“Did you really not go through these papers of Ben’s yourself, Mariah?”
“Not really. Skimmed a couple of chapters of the manuscript to see if it was something new or just an earlier draft of a book that had already been published. I told you, the only reason I even opened the box is that the rental locker where I’ve been storing my excess junk since I sold the house got flooded during the heavy rains this spring. I’ve been carting those papers around for years. When I realized they’d gotten damp, it was either chuck the whole lot or see if you thought anything should be done with them. I didn’t have time to do it myself.”
Or the inclination, she could have added. She’d looked just closely enough to see that there was some sort of work in progress there, as well as more personal papers. She hadn’t the competence to judge the fiction, she’d decided, and she certainly hadn’t the stomach to read Ben’s self-absorbed journal ramblings.
“I appreciate the trust it took for you to send these to me, Mariah,” Chap said quietly.
She felt her eyes tearing up, and hated herself for it. “I know you’ll do the right thing with them. Whatever you decide is fine with me.”
“Thank you, sweetie. But I’m afraid it’s not that simple. We may have a bit of a problem on our hands.”
“How so?”
“Look, maybe the best thing would be for us to get together with Louis Urquhart while you’re out here.”
“Oh, Chap, no. Lindsay and I are supposed to be on vacation. I don’t want to waste it hanging out with Ben’s adoring public.”
“I know how you feel, but this is not something we can ignore.”
There was something in his voice, graver than Mariah had ever heard. “Okay, now I am worried. What could possibly be so all-fired important that—”
“Urquhart thinks the manuscript of the novel was stolen from someone else, Mariah. And he thinks Ben was murdered.”
She answered with stunned silence.
“Now, I’m not saying I buy it,” Korman added quickly. “I admit, there were a few surprises in those journals of Ben’s, and the novel is unlike anything else he wrote. But it’s a big leap from there to what Urquhart is alleging. Bottom line, though? Urquhart could have blindsided us by taking his allegations public, but he didn’t. So I think it’s only fair to hear the guy out, and then we’ll decide together where to go from there. Okay?”
“But this is crazy, Chap! Murdered? We know how he died. At least, I always thought we did. Don’t we? Wasn’t my mother told that the French authorities did an autopsy when his body was found, and that he’d died of hepatitis?”
“She was, yes.”
“So how did we get from hepatitis to murder?”
“I’m not sure. That’s obviously one question we need to put to Urquhart—what evidence has he got to support his allegations?”
Mariah studied the nubbly, butter-colored wallpaper over the bed. “I don’t know. This sure smells like a muckraking publicity stunt to me. Like this Urquhart’s looking for a bestseller.”
“If it were anybody else, I’d agree. But Louis Urquhart’s one of the most respected literary academics in this country. His biography of Jack Kerouac won a Pulitzer Prize. I don’t think he’d be building this murder theory if he didn’t have some facts to back it up. Plus, he came to me first, remember, not the press.”
She exhaled heavily and glanced at her watch. “All right. If you think it’s really necessary, we’ll talk to him. I have to head off to the museum now. How about if I call you again when my work’s done? With any luck, I might have a free day tomorrow. Maybe we can get this out of the way before Lindsay arrives.”
“Sounds good. Meantime, I’ll let Urquhart know we’re willing to meet with him. And Mariah?”
“Mmm?”
“As far as Renata’s concerned? I know you and your mom and sister got a raw deal when Ben took off to Paris with her like he did. But Renata didn’t last long, did she? He tired of her pretty fast. People who know her say she never got over him, though.”
“Gee, that’s really tough.”
“Yeah, I don’t feel too much pity for her, either. Your mom always believed Ben was going to come back to you guys, only he died before he could make it. But whatever happened over there, one thing is sure: in the end, Renata lost. Remember that if you see her, honey.”
“No, Chap,” Mariah said wearily. “We all lost.”
Chapter Four
Frank Tucker sat in his windowless office, feet on his desk, reading files that were mildewed and yellow with age. He’d been at it three hours, and his eyes felt scoured. His nose had long since blocked in protest over the barrage of mold spores, and his head ached from lack of sleep and the concentrated effort of reading the musty Russian documents. But his brain was racing.
He set down the file in his hand. As he stretched, the worn, cloth-covered swivel chair under him shrieked in protest at the shift of his great frame. Hands clasped behind his head, he stared at the random punctures on the ceiling’s gray acoustic tiles, pondering again how it was that he, personally, had been selected to receive this carefully selected record of KGB mischief and misdeeds.
History is a moth-eaten fabric, full of holes—a vast tapestry of change whose underlying pattern is obscured by official secrecy and necessary lies. A thousand untimely ends and unaccountable triumphs are doomed to remain mysteries forever, their solutions locked away in the memories of shadowy operators who die unconfessed.
Some clues lie buried in the dusty files of the world’s great clandestine agencies, where the harsh light of public scrutiny never falls. But as each regime gives way to the next, furnaces are lit and burn bags are consumed by flame—incriminating evidence lost forever.
Most, but not all, Tucker thought, glancing at the tattered files around him.
Of all the secret agencies, none hid more mysteries than the yellow and gray stone walls of the KGB’s old Moscow headquarters. It was from behind the heavy steel doors of Lubyanka that a message had originated in late June, marked for delivery to one semi-burned-out official of the American CIA. It was that message, delivered late one night, a week earlier, that had sparked Tucker’s quick, clandestine trip to the Russian capital.
He’d been driving home by a circuitous route along quiet back roads. It was nearly midnight, but day and night tended to lose meaning in his underground office, where not much happened and few people dropped by. Tucker spent his time these days poring over old agency files, responding to Freedom of Information requests from historians, journalists and the generally curious. He culled cover names, sources and other sensitive data from the files, deciding which could safely be declassified and released, and which had to remain closed to protect ongoing operations.
He had no clock to punch, no strenuous deadlines to meet. He simply worked alone until his eyes grew too bleary to read any longer. Then he returned to his empty house and prayed for sleep. Taking the longest possible route was his way of decompressing, releasing tension like a ball of string unwinding on the road behind him.
On that particular cool, starlit June night, the suburban back roads of Virginia were deserted when Tucker brought his Ford Explorer to a stop at an intersection in McLean, just a couple of miles from the agency. As he waited for the light to change from red to green, a dark sedan materialized out of nowhere, pulling alongside him. The driver got out and knocked at his passenger-side window.
Instantly on alert, Tucker sized him up—medium height and build, sandy hair. Fit-looking under his dark wind-breaker. Young—thirty, tops, he decided.
Tucker pressed a button on his armrest to lower the opposite window. With his other hand, he reached down between the seats and came up with a nine-millimeter surprise. If the stranger was a cop or a fed, Tucker could produce a carry permit for the gun. If this was a hit, the guy might as well know right off Tucker wasn’t going down without a fight.
The blue eyes in the window widened. “I mean you no harm, Mr. Tucker,” he said. His tongue was tripping on the words in his rush to get them out. The vowels were clipped, the consonants weighted with a heavy Slavic burr.
“You know my name,” Tucker said. “I should know yours.”
“It is not important.”
“That’s a matter of opinion.”
“I am only a courier.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I have a message for you. Please?” The man raised a brown manila envelope in his trembling hand.
“Who’s it from?”
“I cannot say. You take it, please?” He started to pass the envelope through the window, but Tucker raised the gun until it was aimed right between the young man’s eyes.
“Hold it right there,” he said. “I don’t want that.”
Obviously, this wasn’t the anticipated response. “But…but, it is for you!” the courier sputtered.
“Do I look like I was born yesterday?”
“No.”
“Then you’ll believe me when I say I know a blackmail play when I see one. Where’s the camera?” Tucker glanced around. The road was dark and quiet as death. If there were professional watchers out there, they were good. Still, the whole thing stank to high heaven. If he accepted the envelope, he was damn sure the next visit he got would be from this fellow’s friends, threatening to expose him as a double agent. Then, another wary thought occurred to him. His own side? Could CIA security or the FBI be looking to jam him up for some reason?
“There is no camera. I swear it,” the messenger said fervently.
“Just the same, I don’t want that thing.”
“It is important. I am instructed to give it to no one but you.”
“You know where I work?”
“I am guessing you are employed at the C-I-A in Lan-ge-ley, Virginia,” the stranger said with heavily accented precision. “Am I correct?”
“Deliver it to me there, then.”
“Are you mad? I cannot walk into that place!”
Tucker considered the situation, then nodded toward the intersection. The light had changed from red to green, then back again. “There’s a 7-Eleven store up ahead. Follow me, and you can hand it over inside.” In front of a witness, he thought, and the store security cameras.
The courier shook his head. “If I do that, I am a dead man.”
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
The other man sniffed, as if such a threat was beneath his dignity to ponder now that he’d recovered from the initial shock of having the gun thrust in his face. “It is not you I am worried about, Mr. Tucker, nor your colleagues. My own people are another matter.”
Tucker frowned. “Your own people? Oh, I see. You want to defect, is that it? Or are you just in sales?”
“I am a patriot!” the other man said indignantly. “It is why I do this. But perhaps my colleagues are mistaken. Perhaps you are not the man they take you for. In which case, Mr. Tucker, I will bid you good-night.”
“Hold it right there.”
Tucker studied him for a moment, as well as the thin envelope. Then, he reached into his pocket, withdrew a penknife, pausing to wipe the handle on his shirtsleeve before handing the knife over by the key ring attached to one end.
“Open this and use the blade to lift the flap. But do it carefully, hear? You’re going to reseal the envelope afterward.”
“I must not open it.”
“Why? Some danger in that?”
“No, but—”
“Do it.”
The young man hesitated, then sighed heavily. Opening the penknife, he inserted the blade under the flap, separating it gingerly, leaving just enough gum in place to allow it to be closed once more.
“Now, spread the edges and show me what’s inside,” Tucker said.
No money. No fat wad of smuggled documents. Just a single sheet of paper that seemed to be covered with handwriting.
Tucker nodded. “Okay. Seal it back up again.”
The other man licked the flap and pressed it shut. “You will take it now?”
“I want my knife back first.”
The courier handed it through the window. Tucker took it with his handkerchief, transferring both to his left hand. Then, as the Russian started to pass in the envelope, Tucker’s right hand clamped around his wrist.
“What are you doing?” the courier protested.
Tucker jabbed the other man’s thumb with the tip of the knife. Not much—a pinprick, really, just enough to draw blood. Hardly enough to justify the stream of Russian obscenities that exploded from the other man’s mouth. Yanking the man’s arm downward, Tucker pressed the bloody thumb firmly against the flap, making a seal across the re-closed edges. Then, he released him.
The Russian jammed his thumb into his mouth. “What the hell you are doing that for?” he cried, grammar failing him in his fury.
Tucker closed the knife carefully, wrapped it in the handkerchief and dropped them both into the door pocket beside him. Only then did he take the envelope. “Sorry,” he said. “Personal insurance. Now I have your fingerprints on my knife and your DNA on the envelope.”
“If my people find out—”
“As long as you don’t try playing games with me, your people will never know. You have my word on that. Now, what else? Do I need to get in touch with you again?”
“No, I have done my part. The next step is up to you.”
“Meaning…?”
“Read the letter. You will know what you are to do. Good evening, Mr. Tucker.”
With that, the Russian turned away in a huff, still nursing his injured thumb, climbed back in his car, jumped a red light and sped away through the empty intersection. Tucker took note of the red diplomatic plates as the car disappeared into the night. Curiouser and curiouser.
His eyes dropped to the blank brown envelope. He turned it around in his hand, then laid it on the seat beside him, keeping the blood-smeared flap on top, away from the upholstery.
As the light at the intersection changed from red to green once more, Tucker punched in a number on his console-mounted cell phone, picked it up and made a U-turn, heading back toward Langley.
A fingerprint on the knife allowed them to identify the courier from visa files. His name was Gennady Yefimov, a recently arrived third secretary at the Russian embassy in Washington—a junior flunky, albeit one already suspected of being part of the embassy’s intelligence Rezidentura. His late-night rendezvous with Tucker pretty much confirmed it.
The source of the message was another kettle of fish altogether. The note was in Russian, but the signature was a single English word: “Navigator.” It was a taunt, this use of the secret code name given to the Russian spymaster by his own adversaries in tribute to the man’s ability to navigate Moscow’s treacherous political waters. Even after the fall of communism, the Navigator had remained in place, thriving, by all accounts, when so many others had foundered and sunk.
That he knew and used his own Western code name was a galling reminder of the mole the Navigator had run for years inside Langley, a disgruntled petty functionary in the counterintelligence division. The mole had finally been caught, but not before his betrayals had cost the lives of dozens of Company assets in Russia.
Tucker had never seen the Navigator’s face, except in one grainy, long-range surveillance photograph, nor had he ever heard the man’s voice. Just the same, he knew his real name as well as he knew his own. For as long as Tucker had been in the business, Georgi Deriabin, aka the Navigator, had been the dream target of the entire Western intelligence alliance. As head of the KGB—later FSB—First Chief Directorate, he’d held overall responsibility, both before and after the Soviet breakup, for every aspect of Moscow’s intelligence activities abroad. Compared to other sources of information on Russian agents, operations and long-term strategies, Deriabin was the frigging motherlode.
Or would have been, until recently. He’d be in his late seventies now, and rumors of ill health had begun to surface. Recently, the CIA’s Moscow Station had floated the possibility that the Navigator had finally been shuffled out. Like J. Edgar Hoover in his day, however, the Navigator was said to possess incriminating files on everyone who might be a threat to him. When rumors began to spread of his eclipse at long last, there were those in Moscow Station who suspected he’d been arrested, possibly even executed. But if the Navigator really was the source of the note delivered to Tucker by the nervous courier, it had obviously been a mistake to write the man off too early.
The note said Deriabin wanted to meet with Tucker in Moscow—nobody but Frank Tucker—and it said he would make the meeting well worth the trouble. And so, after a small committee had vetted the plan and decided there was little to lose—except, Tucker knew they were calculating, one jaded officer whose best years seemed behind him—he’d flown to Moscow. If the operation had blown up in his face, they’d have simply written him off, issued some plausible cover story and saved the price of his pension.
But Tucker had come back, alive, well and carrying a crate of files whose contents remained to be determined. Not to mention the reason why the Navigator had decided to hand them over in the first place.
Chapter Five
Mariah had her hotel-room key card in one hand and the other on the door handle, ready to leave. She was wearing her serviceable, goes-anywhere-but-a-gala-opening black Donna Karan suit. Her plan was to run over to the Arlen Hunter Museum, get the lay of the land and meet with the rest of the security contingent for the Romanov opening, chase back, change into the Chinese-mandarin silk number, then return in time for the 6:00 p.m. ribbon-cutting and reception.
But she hesitated at the door, her conversation with Chap Korman spinning through her mind. The bizarre allegation that her father had been murdered was patent, provable nonsense. But what about the claim that the manuscript she’d found had been stolen?
From whom? And why would Ben steal someone else’s work? Writer’s block? Not likely. In the nine short years before his death at the age of twenty-eight, her father had produced five novels, dozens of short stories and countless poems, not to mention several volumes of personal journals. You couldn’t have shut the man up if you’d tried.
So why was this Professor Urquhart claiming the manuscript she’d found in the storage locker, the one Ben had titled Man in the Middle, was stolen? And, more to the point, Mariah thought, why did she know that it couldn’t be?
Something niggled at the back of her brain, telling her the manuscript had to be Ben’s work. She just couldn’t think what it was. The harder she tried to zero in on it, the more elusive it became, like trying to pick up mercury.
This was ridiculous. She had no time for this nonsense. God knew she had more pressing problems to think about. A teenage daughter on the verge of rebellion. This awkward role she’d been cast in, playing temptress to lure a possible double agent. The prospect of meeting her father’s former lover.
Just the same, Urquhart’s claims would drive her crazy until she knew the basis for them.
She did a quick mental calculation, cutting her afternoon turnaround times even tighter. Spinning on her heel, she rushed back into the room, tossed her purse and key card on the bed, then rummaged in drawers and closets until she found a Los Angeles telephone book. After a quick call to Courier Express, she pulled out her personal address book, picked up the phone and dialed out again.
It took three tries before she located someone at Langley who could tell her where Frank Tucker was hanging his hat these days. Every time she looked, he seemed to have retreated farther and farther away from the mainstream of agency operations. She was relieved to finally hear his gruff voice pick up.
“Tucker.”
“Frank! You’re there! I thought I was going to have to send out a search party.”
“Mariah? Where are you? Lindsay said you’d gone to L.A.”
“I did. I am—there, I mean. That’s where I am. In Los Angeles.” She paused to quell the fluster that had suddenly turned her into a stammering fool, then started again. “You’ve been talking to Lindsay?”
“A little while ago. I called to let Carol know I was back.”
“Back from where?”
“I was away for a couple of days.”
A non-answer if ever she’d heard one. It was like pulling teeth, talking to him sometimes. “You’ve changed offices again. What’s going on?”
“They needed my cubbyhole upstairs for some summer intern, so they gave me a broom closet down in the basement.”
“The basement? Good Lord! Why do you let them do that to you? With your service—”
“I’ve got no complaints. Suits me fine.”
Mariah slumped down onto a chair and leaned forward, elbow on the round glass table next to the bed, forehead in the palm of her hand. “Frank,” she said wearily, “it’s time.”
“Time for what?”
“To come out from that rock you’ve been hiding under.”
He said nothing for a moment, and she sensed she’d crossed an invisible line. She had known this man for eighteen years, ever since he’d first recruited her. There was no question they were bound to one another by something beyond mentoring, beyond professionalism, beyond friendship. They’d been through good times together, and sad. She’d known his wife; he’d known her husband. Once, she might have been able to talk to Frank about anything. Now, there was that invisible line.
Beyond this point there be dragons.
When he finally did respond, it was only to change the subject. “What’s this about you covering the Zakharov visit? How did you get dragged into that?”
“Oh, no you don’t,” she said. Why should he always get to define the placement of the line? “You first. This trip of yours—where did you go?”
“That’s a long story.”
“I see. Holding out on me? You didn’t happen to go to Florida by any chance, did you?” she asked playfully, trying to draw him out of the tight, defensive corner in which he seemed to live full-time these days.
“No,” he said curtly.
Oops. She’d hit a nerve. Not surprising. Patty Bonelli had been at his side a long time, after all, and without her now, he seemed totally adrift, his last tether cut. It wasn’t right or fair. He was solid, hardworking, capable. A good man, who looked as though he could carry the weight of the world on those broad shoulders of his—and had, professionally and personally, for years and without complaint. She was one of the few who knew the full price Frank had paid for that blind, stoic fidelity. Now he seemed to have closed himself off completely, to her, and maybe to everyone else, too.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to pry.”
The line fell silent, but when Frank spoke again, she was relieved to hear a little of her old friend in his voice. “It’s okay. The trip was business. That other, with Patty—it’s just not happening, that’s all.”
“Have you spoken to her lately?”
“A couple of weeks ago. She called to say hi.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Seems happy enough down there. Got a cocker spaniel, apparently.”
Poor Frank, Mariah thought. Replaced by a dog.
“Now tell me,” he said, “what are you doing out there? I thought you and Lindsay were supposed to be on vacation.”
“Day after tomorrow.”
“Uh-huh. And explain to me why you, of all people, got dragged into covering the Zakharov visit?”
“That, too, is a long story, if you know what I mean.”
“All right, not on the phone,” he conceded. “Just tell me this—whose idea was it?”
“Hmm…well, remember Wanetta’s old buddy?” Wanetta Walker had been a secretary in Frank’s old Soviet section, rescued by him from the clutches of a certain Jack Geist from Operations, who’d been making her life miserable.
“He sent you? Son of a bitch.” Tucker muttered. “You don’t work for him, Mariah. You should have said no.”
“I tried, but he pulled an end run on me. By the time he called me up to his office, he’d cleared it six ways to Sunday and it was pretty much a fait accompli. Anyway, not to worry. Job’s just a twenty-four-hour deal. I’m heading out shortly, in fact. But, Frank? On an altogether different matter, I need a favor.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s kind of a hassle. It involves running over to the Courier Express distribution center in Falls Church. If you don’t have time for this, I want you to tell me, okay?”
“No problem. What’s the deal?”
“They tried to deliver a letter to my house this morning, but I’d already left for the airport. Apparently, it had to be signed for, so they couldn’t leave it. I called Courier Express and they said I could sign a release allowing a third party to collect it. There’s an office just down the street from my hotel. I was going to stop in on my way out of here and do the paperwork. I wanted to give them your name, if that’s okay.”
“Sure,” he said. “What’s this about?”
“It’s from my father’s old agent, Chap Korman.”
“Korman,” he repeated, and Mariah had the impression he was writing down the name. “You want me to hold the letter till you get back, or ship it to you out there?”
“I was going to ask you to send it with Lindsay, but now that I think about it, I’d rather you open the envelope as soon as you get it. I want to know what the hell’s inside.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
She exhaled heavily. “Chap Korman sent me a copy of a letter he received from some professor at UCLA who’s working on a biography of my father. Apparently, this guy’s come up with some kind of cockamamy theory that this manuscript I found—” She paused. “Maybe you didn’t hear about that? I came upon an unpublished novel and some other personal papers of my father’s a couple of months ago.”
“Yeah, I read about it in the paper.”
Mariah felt a tremor of guilt at the thought of Frank getting his news of her out of the newspaper. And seeing her photographed on Paul Chaney’s arm. Damn. “Right,” she said. “Anyway, this professor is apparently of the view that the manuscript was something my father stole. And it gets weirder. He’s also suggesting Ben was murdered.”
She expected derision or blunt dismissal of such an obviously stupid claim. A few pointed questions, at least. But all Frank said was, “I’ll check it out.”
“I just want to know where he’s coming from before I see him while I’m out here. I’m sorry to be such a nuisance.”
“You’re not. I’m glad you called.”
She’d called because there was no one else she trusted more, Mariah thought, struck by the realization of how much she’d missed Frank these past months. The line went quiet again, but this time it was one of those comfortable silences between kindred spirits, like an easy hand on the shoulder—more like the way things used to be before everything had gone so sour for them both.
She wished he weren’t so far away and she weren’t so pressed for time. Now that they’d reconnected, she wanted to talk—about a lot of things, including the worst part of this assignment Jack Geist had dumped in her lap—the possibility that it would bring her face-to-face with her father’s old lover. But that, too, was a long story, and she had to get going to the museum. It was enough for now to know Frank was there.
“Thanks for doing this,” she said. “I knew I could count on you.”
His reply was almost inaudible. “Always.”
Chap Korman had a fourteen-carat heart and a steel-trap mind, even at the ripe old age of seventy-seven. But his knees seemed made of pure chalk, screeching when he hoisted himself unsteadily to his feet. Wincing, he leaned against the low brick wall between his front courtyard and his neighbor’s, and he waited for the pain to pass.
Since Mariah’s call, he’d been busy planting a border of colorful impatiens along the wall. Thick, green gardener’s pads Velcro-strapped over his khaki trousers helped a little to relieve the agony of working on his knees, but getting up again was another matter. There was no escaping that gravity works, and that his old joints just didn’t support the weight of his body as well as they once had.
When he could finally move again, he knocked his trowel against the brick wall to dislodge clumps of loam, then slapped the dirt off his hands, viewing his handiwork with satisfaction. It was worth a few aches and pains. Emma’s garden was looking good again. He’d never really appreciated how much work it took to keep it up.
Seventeen years ago, when they’d first moved out from New York, it was the location of this property that had appealed to them. The two-story clapboard house fronted on Newport Harbor, with only a pedestrian walkway between the front yard and the boat slips opposite running the length of the peninsula. The view was of anchored sailboats, Balboa Island and the rolling hills of mainland Orange County beyond, rising above the masts.
Automobile access for the houses was via a nondescript lane at the back, a canyon of ugly garages at street level. But even that side of the house had had its secret potential—a spacious flat roof over the garage with a pristine and uninterrupted view west toward the Pacific Ocean, only a couple of blocks away. Just the place to add a deck to sit on in the evening and watch the setting sun.
The house had been run-down after years of hard use by summer renters, the front courtyard an arid wasteland of dead plants and broken flagstones. Chap and Emma had had the interior remodeled, consolidating two of the four bedrooms to provide a large library/office for Chap’s wheeling and dealing on behalf of his clients. They’d also had a spa and gazebo added to the new back deck off the master bedroom.
Em, meantime, had single-handedly transformed the courtyard into a lush and brilliant oasis. It had been her greatest pleasure, a work-in-progress right to the end of her life. Chap, a night owl, would wake each day at midmorning to the soothing sound of her off-key humming under the window and know she’d been at it since sunup. In the end, it was the wilting garden, not the doctors, that told him how sick she really was.
At first, after she died, he’d let the yard go. When weeds threatened to overtake her beloved roses, and the blue Cape plumbago grew so leggy it started pushing over the low picket fence along the front walkway, he hired somebody to bring it under control and keep it tidy. But the day he came home to find Emma’s roses butchered, Chap fired the gardener, dragged Em’s tools out of the garage and took over the job himself. Lately, he was enjoying it more and more, despite his arthritic knees. He even found himself humming Sinatra as he worked, just as Em had done—although he liked to flatter himself that his pitch was better.
“Hey, Chap! Looking good,” a voice behind him called.
Chap turned to see his neighbor being dragged out his front gate by a fat basset hound. At the other end of the leash, Kermit’s big feet scrabbled under his saggy, low-slung body, tripping over his necktie ears, following his massive nose in headlong pursuit of whatever thrilling quarry it was he’d scented this time.
Chap grinned as he lifted the trowel in a wave. “’lo, Doug! See Kermit’s taking you for your daily constitutional.”
Doug Porter grimaced. “No kidding.” He paused to wipe a fine sheen of sweat that was already forming on his bare scalp, close-shorn on the sides, bullet-smooth on top. “Listen, Chap, I’m glad I caught you out here. I was going to ask if your roses could be pruned back where they’re coming through the fence.”
Chap peered over. Sure enough, the climbers were beginning to wend their way into his yard. “Sorry about that. I never even noticed it,” he said, reaching for the pruning shears hooked over his back pocket. “I’ll cut ‘em back right now.”
“I hate to be a nuisance—”
“It’s no trouble.”
Chap started to reach over, but the hound rammed the gate and snorted his way through with a happy, basso profundo “Woof!” Chap turned and gave Kermit’s tricolor head a pat, while Porter strained to keep him from climbing up the old man’s frame. In his mid-forties, Porter was tanned and extremely fit, but the basset’s powerful leg muscles and low center of gravity made the daily contest between them an uneven match that the dog inevitably won.
“Your friends arrive yet?” Porter asked breathlessly. He was dressed in his habitual black silk shirt and black pants—his signature look, Chap thought, though it seemed a ridiculous outfit for dog-walking on a hot day.
“Mariah did. She’s up in L.A. Her daughter’s coming behind. They should both be here tomorrow.”
“So, what do you think? Would they like to come along and watch the fireworks from offshore?”
Porter had moved in a couple of months earlier, and this was the third or fourth time he’d held out an invitation to join him on his sloop, anchored in the harbor. Up to now, Chap had always found reasons to decline. Felt guilty about it, though. He had a sneaking suspicion his single neighbor was gay, and while his personal philosophy was a liberal live-and-let-live, a little knee-jerk anxiety always kicked in at the prospect of finding himself alone on a boat with the guy. But what did he think? That an overweight, arthritic senior citizen was in danger of being cast as a boy-toy du jour?
Porter seemed like a good guy, a gregarious architect who entertained all kinds of interesting people, from what Chap had seen. It would probably be a nice evening out there on the water, and Lindsay might get a real kick out of seeing the fireworks from that vantage point.
“I haven’t had a chance to put it to them yet,” he said. “I just talked to Mariah a while ago, but to be honest, I forgot to mention it. I hate to keep you on hold.”
“It’s no problem. I have to confess, I’d really love to meet them. I’m a huge Ben Bolt fan.”
Chap paused, momentarily taken aback at that bit of news. A curious offshoot of the Ben Bolt legacy was the almost cultlike following inside the gay community, despite Ben’s solid reputation as a ladies’ man. Sounded like Porter was one of those devotees.
“I have to tell you,” Chap said, “Mariah’s not—a fan, I mean. She was only seven years old when Ben walked out on the family. Doesn’t make for a lot of warm fuzzy memories on her part.”
The dog had turned back toward the gate, and his claws scratched the sidewalk in his anxiety to move on. “Kermit, sit, dammit!” Porter commanded.
A waste of breath if ever there was. The dog seemed deaf as well as single-minded. The tug-of-war continued.
“Incorrigible mutt. Thanks for the warning, Chap. I’d have spent the whole evening blathering on like some star-struck teenager if you hadn’t told me. I’d still love to have you all on board, though.”
“It sounds like something they might enjoy,” Chap admitted. “Can I ask them and get back to you?”
“You bet.” The other man finally conceded defeat and gave the scrabbling mutt his head. “Catch you later!” he called over his shoulder, breaking into a loping jog.
Chap waved after them, grinning, then turned back to the roses and started pruning the few that were encroaching on the Zen-like tidiness of Porter’s courtyard. He grunted as his short arms reached over the top of the pickets. If he had any brains, he’d walk around to the other side of the fence to do this, but he was tired, and he wanted to pack it in.
“Ouch! Damn!” he bellowed, nearly losing his balance as his bare fingers closed on a stem full of thorns. Now he knew why Em had always worn gardening gloves. He’d always thought it was just to protect her manicure.
When he’d finally cut back the last of the stragglers, he dumped them in the green waste recycling bin he’d rolled out to the courtyard, then gathered up the rest of the garden tools. His body was a mass of aching joints and muscles. He could do with a nap, he decided, dragging the bin and tools back to the side of the house. Then he had another thought—a wee drink, a nice soak in the Jacuzzi to ease his weary bones and then a nap.
He parked the bin in the narrow, shady passage between his house and Porter’s, then entered the garage through the side door. Brilliant light assaulted his eyes, bouncing off the concrete lane and gleaming white stucco of his neighbors’ high walls across the way.
Idiot. You left the garage door open.
He berated his absentmindedness. The neighborhood was virtually crime-free most of the year, but summer always brought a spate of burglaries—opportunistic crimes, petty thieves slipping through unlocked back doors, stealing wallets and purses while residents sat in their waterfront courtyards.
Chap walked out, glancing up and down the lane. Not a soul in sight. With its astronomical real estate prices and postage-stamp yards, the area attracted mostly professional singles and empty nesters, so there were no kids out riding bikes. Nor, with its narrow sidewalk and blinding, foliage-free glare, did the lane encourage strolling.
Satisfied the coast was clear, he went back in, rounding his old, silver-gray Jaguar to Emma’s worktable. He wiped down the tools with an old rag, then gave them a coat of oil, just as she’d always been careful to do, and replaced them in her red wicker gardening basket. He unstrapped the Velcro kneepads and hung them on their pegboard hook, then traded his old, mud-spattered Topsiders for the soft kid slippers he’d left by the inside door. His hand hit the button to close the garage door as he walked into the house.
Next item on the agenda: two or three fingers of scotch.
He carried the glass and bottle upstairs, setting the bottle on the nightstand. After a couple of sips from the glass, he set it on the rim of the spa and hit the controls to turn on the jets. He stripped out of his clothes on his way back across the bedroom to the bathroom, then showered off the garden dirt.
He was wrapping a towel around his waist when he heard a click. A door latch?
Chap stepped cautiously into the bedroom. Nothing. He padded out to the hall. His office next door was cluttered, as always, with manuscripts waiting to be read. He slid open the closet door. The space inside had been fitted with shelves to hold some of the overflow. There, on the bottom shelf, sat the cardboard box containing the trove of Ben Bolt papers Mariah had sent him.
Not for the first time, it occurred to him that he really needed an office safe. There wasn’t much of irreplaceable value in the room, but those papers were one of a kind. There were people who’d give a pretty penny to get their hands on an unpublished Bolt manuscript or his private journals.
No more procrastinating, Korman. Right after the Fourth, you call a contractor and get a safe installed.
Another noise interrupted his resolution-making. He stepped back into the hall, peering over the banister to the open area below. Mr. Rochester, the old black tomcat Em had adopted from the local animal shelter, was sprawled in a sunbeam on Emma’s favorite blue chintz chair, one rear leg raised high as he washed himself.
“Keep the noise down, will ya?” Chap grumbled.
Rochester peered up, blinked disdainfully, then went back to licking his rear end. The cat had stopped coming upstairs altogether. Too bloody fat to make the climb, Chap decided. During the months Em was sick, though, the animal never left her bedside except to eat or use the litter box. After she died, the cat had walked around the house yowling plaintively for days. Now, man and feline cohabited like some interspecies Odd Couple. Rochester lived on Em’s chair, ignoring Chap entirely except at mealtimes. Even then, the Fancy Feast got a suspicious sniff before he deigned to bolt it down.
“Stupid cat,” Chap muttered, returning through his room to the deck. He’d overdone it in the garden. His joints felt as if they were swelling. He should take a pill, but he was too damn tired to walk back to the bathroom cabinet.
Instead, he dropped his towel and climbed naked into the churning spa, as he habitually did now that Em was no longer there to fret about peeping Toms with binoculars. The nearest building high enough to see down onto his second-story deck had to be half a mile away. Odds were, nobody out there was looking, but if they were, his round, sagging, hairy-ape body made for pretty poor voyeuristic pickings. Anybody that hard up was welcome to the thrill.
Reaching for his drink, he took another long sip, then set it back on the edge of the tub and leaned into the molded seat and cushioned neck rest. Soothing amber comfort slid down to his center core. Chap closed his eyes, one hand lazily raking his matted chest. The warmth of the scotch, the sun and the Jacuzzi melted his aches and lulled him. This was as close to perfect as it got, he thought, lacking only Em to share it.
Suddenly, he felt a distinct vibration under his butt, like the tread of a nearby foot. His eyes opened to the brilliant blue sky, and he looked around. Em’s red geraniums swayed in the breeze, potted in the old whiskey cask she’d transformed into a dual-purpose planter and base for the green market umbrella that shaded their his-and-hers rattan lounge chairs. Except for chirping birds and the dull rumble of distant beach traffic, the afternoon was sunny, hot and blessedly silent.
Had he locked all the downstairs doors before coming up? The garage he’d closed—that much he knew. But the side door? And the front, leading to the courtyard and the walkway beyond? Must have. He hadn’t lived in New York for nearly sixty years without acquiring a few security tics, after all.
He strained to mentally retrace his steps. Hadn’t even used the front door today, he realized. Mariah had called just as he was getting ready to put the impatiens in the front bed. He’d taken the call in the kitchen, then gone out through the garage to collect the tools, the flat of plants and the recycling bin.
The side door of the garage was on a spring. Had he reset the lock?
He took another sip of his drink and settled back into the gently pulsing water. Check it later. He was a New Yorker. A onetime amateur boxer with a 17–0 record. Never lived timidly before. Wasn’t about to start now. Too tired to sweat it, anyway.
The churning of the Jacuzzi lulled him like rolling waves. Like being on a boat, he thought, drifting. Porter’s boat. Mariah. And Lindsay…fifteen, already! Last time he’d seen her? Her dad’s funeral. A heartbreaker even then. Like her mother. Grandmother, too. Incredible Ben would abandon his pretty wife, Andrea, for a man-eater like Renata Hunter. Human nature, Chap thought…no accounting for it.
He reached for his drink. Misjudged the distance. His perspective was all wonky, he realized idly. Fingers only brushed the glass. It tumbled in slow motion to the deck, each amber drop distinct as it splashed on the wooden planks.
Chap felt his butt slide a little on the smooth plastic bottom. So tired. His head lolled on the cushioned rest. He looked back toward the bedroom. Squinted, then frowned. Was that someone in the doorway?
“Hey, you,” he called. Thought he did.
Did he?
Figure in the doorway never moved. Half hidden in shadow. Just a grim smile. Teeth gleaming like a goddam Pepsodent commercial.
Well, let him stand there, Chap thought grumpily. Guy wasn’t going to make the effort to be sociable, neither would he.
He lay back and closed his eyes. So comfortable.
He felt himself slipping a little more. Opened his eyes. Guy in the doorway still watching him. Why? he wanted to ask, but he felt a little dizzy. Short of air. Inhaled deeply and slipped again on the slick plastic, his body pivoting. Almost on his side now, shoulders underwater.
Be up in a minute, Em. Just gonna grab forty winks here, okay?
So sleepy. A deep sigh. Another long slip on the smooth bottom, his head bumping on the hard plastic edge as Chap Korman sank beneath the churning bubbles.
Chapter Six
The quiet was beginning to get on Tucker’s nerves. When he started hearing the building breathe, he knew he was losing it.
Logically, he knew the deep thrum permeating his office walls was the reverberation of massive air conditioners. Their primary function was to cool—not people but a vast array of supercomputers, satellite receivers and transmission devices—sensitive equipment that bristled day and night, processing the agency’s sensory input and outgoing commands.
Once aware of the pulsing rhythm, though, Tucker couldn’t shake the sense he’d been swallowed alive by some huge beast of prey.
He glanced at his watch, wondering if he had time to run out and pick up Mariah’s letter from the Courier Express distribution center in Falls Church. The place was open till 10:00 p.m. He had plenty of time. What he didn’t have was patience. Geist’s secretary had phoned down over four hours ago to tell him to stand by to be summoned upstairs for a debriefing on his Moscow trip. Now he was itching to walk out.
It would have been premature to tell Mariah this Urquhart character might not be as far off base as she thought. Better to find out what the professor knew, then decide what to do about it. This should have been ancient history by now, Tucker thought grimly. She had enough on her plate. Damn them all to hell, anyway.
One file sat on his desk a little apart from the others he’d pulled from the Navigator’s crate. He’d stumbled across it not long after talking to Mariah. Finally, the pieces were falling together. His late-night message from the courier. His cryptic conversation with the Navigator in Moscow. And the reason why he, in particular, had been chosen to receive this loaded gift.
Tucker had met with Georgi Deriabin late at night in a modest dacha on the outskirts of Moscow—although recognizing the infamous Navigator had required a leap of imagination on his part.
Deriabin was tall and skeletally thin, with weathered skin the color of mustard. His wispy white hair was shorn to a stubble, leaving his head almost as smooth as Tucker’s own. On closer examination, Tucker saw the ravages of chemotherapy. When the old man reached out to shake hands, Tucker was afraid he’d crush those birdlike bones.
“I’m glad you could come, Mr. Tucker.”
“Hard to turn down such an intriguing invitation.”
The wizened figure just smiled and shuffled ahead of him into the cottage. Most of the ground floor seemed to consist of a small sitting and dining room. A cloth-covered table had been set for two, a bottle of vodka nestled in an ice bucket alongside.
Since Tucker’s arrival that morning, he’d spent the entire day at the Intourist Hotel, waiting, as directed, for further instructions. The smell of onions, sausage and other good things now was a painful reminder he’d eaten nothing all day except a protein bar he’d taken from the emergency-rations stock of the Company plane that had flown him in.
“You will join me for dinner, yes?” Deriabin said.
Tucker considered refusing for about a millisecond, then nodded.
As soon as they sat down, a portly woman he took to be the housekeeper started carrying in food, generous platters of herring, black bread, sausages and sauerkraut, blinis and piroshki. Hearty but simple fare.
Tucker glanced around. The cottage, too, was comfortable but modest, with white plastered walls, exposed rough beams and sturdy country furnishings. A KGB safe house? he wondered. Or a sign of the Navigator’s reduced fortunes? Yet how diminished could Deriabin’s position be when he’d been able to arrange not only to get a message out, but also for the CIA plane to over-fly and land in Russian territory?
The old man poured a glass of vodka for each of them. The toast, the first of many that night, was perfunctory enough, if ironic.
“To your good health, Mr. Tucker.”
Tucker considered reciprocating, but in the other man’s case, the wish seemed a little belated and beside the point. He lifted his glass and nodded, then followed the old man as he threw it back.
They directed their attention to the food, but Deriabin ate little, picking at it for a few minutes before setting his fork aside and lighting a cigarette. “You will excuse me, please. The food, I assure you, is excellent. And perfectly safe,” he added, reading Tucker’s mind. “Unfortunately, my appetites are no longer what they once were. Liver cancer, my doctors tell me. I gather I have a few weeks. Three months, at best. But we must live for the moment, no?” He refilled their glasses, raised his briefly, then downed it in one gulp.
Over the next few hours, Tucker watched the bottle slowly drain, doing his part to keep up with the old man. Deriabin seemed coherent, despite his obvious illness and the amount of drink he’d consumed. Like most men with unfettered power, he seemed to have lost the art of two-way conversation, requiring only an audience. Tucker was content to give him one, and Deriabin rambled on about myriad subjects both philosophical and trivial without ever zeroing in on the heart of the matter—why he had made contact. Tucker decided to let the hand play itself out. Having taken up the dare and come, he was at the old man’s disposition. All he had to do was keep his cool and see where things went.
When the dishes had been cleared away, they sat alone and uninterrupted. For a while, a television droned in another room, where, it seemed, the housekeeper and driver were watching a dubbed version of Jurassic Park. Pretty appropriate, Tucker thought as he listened to the dinosaur across the table from him rehash the good old days, when the struggle between the Soviet and American empires had dominated the international landscape.
The bottle was nearly empty when Deriabin threw out what seemed at first to be no more than a drunkard’s complaint. “Women!” he grumbled. “Why is it so impossible to put a good mind and a good ass in one package, eh? Tell me that.”
No reply was expected. Tucker let the man rant.
“Every woman with half a brain they ever sent up to me had a face like a potato and legs like tree stumps! And the decent-looking ones? The mental capacity of pickled herring—although,” Deriabin added, arching a grizzled eyebrow, “there’s good eating in that, just the same, eh?”
He chuckled at his own humor, but it quickly turned into a strangled cough. His yellowed skin grew darker as he gasped and pulled a handkerchief from his sleeve. He was wearing a heavy hand-knit sweater, despite the warmth of the summer night. Tucker averted his gaze as he spit into the phlegm-stained square.
When he finally recovered, Deriabin squinted at him through a blue haze of smoke. “Anyway, this has been my problem. But you,” he said, waggling a bent, tobacco-stained finger, “you have been very lucky, eh, you sly wolf? How did you manage this?”
“Manage what?”
“To keep that woman at your side all those years. What was her name?”
Tucker frowned. Patty? Why would he—
“You know,” Deriabin insisted, “the blonde. Small, very attractive, from the pictures I saw. Clever, too, I’m told.” He snapped his fingers impatiently, struggling for a name. “The lovely widow.”
Tucker’s blood froze. Mariah. He forced his gaze to remain steady on the old man. “Can’t think which one you mean. Got a few good-looking ones kicking around the place,” he added wryly, tilting his glass.
The Navigator’s jaundiced eyes narrowed. Then he tipped back his own glass. Tucker watched it drain. How a man with a diseased liver could consume that much vodka defied all logic.
The tumbler dropped back to the table. “It only proves my point,” Deriabin rasped. “You get more beautiful women than you can even remember, while my people never send me one who doesn’t look like she was suckled on lemons instead of mother’s milk.”
Nothing more was said on the subject as they worked their way through what remained of the bottle and the night. At 2:00 a.m. the driver knocked on the door to let them know it was time to leave for the uncharted airstrip on the outskirts of Moscow where the Company plane had been cleared to land and wait for Tucker’s predawn departure.
Deriabin went along for the ride. As soon as they pulled onto the tarmac, the driver jumped out, but the Navigator remained in place behind the car’s opaque tinted windows. Tucker felt the rear of the car dip and rise as the driver opened the trunk and removed something. His guard went up, but when the lid of the trunk slammed, he saw through the rear window that the driver had only unloaded a wooden crate.
“I am giving you some files for safekeeping,” the Navigator said.
The driver opened the back door of the car on Tucker’s side and lifted the lid of the box for inspection.
“What’s in them?” Tucker asked.
“Not a bomb, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Wasn’t worried about that,” he replied truthfully. The aircraft crew would pass the crate through metal and chemical scanners before they would agree to load it. He could see them through Deriabin’s window, watching the car. Wondering what the hell was going on, obviously.
“At least, not a bomb of the traditional variety,” Deriabin added, striking a match and cupping his hands to light another cigarette. He straightened creakily, inhaling the smoke deeply, as if the predawn breeze coming in through Tucker’s open door was too rich a mixture for his compromised system to handle. “You will find they make interesting reading.” He nodded to the driver, who closed the crate and walked over to the plane, handing it off to one of the American crewmen.
“Why are you turning these papers over to us?” Tucker asked.
“Not ‘us,’ Mr. Tucker. I am turning them over to you.”
“Fine. Me. Why?”
“Because you have time to give them the attention they deserve. You are underused these days, I’m told.”
“If you know that, then you know they could easily be taken off my hands the minute I get back.”
“That would be a great pity and a great mistake. Take my word on this, my friend, even if you are disinclined to believe most of what I say. No one else will have as much interest in these files as you. No one else will ensure that what they contain is properly handled.”
Deriabin extended his emaciated hand. Again, Tucker worried about crushing the brittle bones under that transparent skin, but the old man’s grip was firm.
“This will be goodbye for me,” Deriabin said. “Only remember this, my friend—no man on earth desires as passionately as a Russian. Beware the one who desires too much.”
On the flight back, Tucker had been too exhausted and too drunk to give that or anything else much thought. It was only the next day, picking through the files, that he recalled the Navigator’s words. Who was “the one who desires too much”? he wondered.
Foreign Minister Zakharov, he presumed now. It seemed clear from the content of the files that Deriabin was determined for some reason to derail the man’s ambition by any means necessary—even treason. Zakharov’s rise to power had been nearly as ruthless as Deriabin’s own, but Tucker was aware of no evidence the two men had ever been rivals before now. So what had changed?
Then there was the old man’s apparently drunken commentary on women. His pointed reference to Mariah had been anything but haphazard, Tucker knew. It was to demonstrate the man knew where Tucker was most vulnerable. That, however debilitated the Navigator might seem, he had no compunction about manipulating that vulnerability for his own purposes. And that he was confident Tucker would act on the information in the files.
Well, maybe, Tucker thought grimly. But not necessarily in the way Deriabin expected. Because the linchpin in the Navigator’s scheming, he now knew, was the death in Paris nearly thirty years earlier of an impoverished American author. And if it were up to Tucker, that episode could bloody well remain shrouded in lies.
But it wasn’t up to him.
After Mariah’s call from Los Angeles, he realized the decision might already be out of his hands. Although fame had eluded Ben Bolt in life, it had grown exponentially in the years since his death, pretty much guaranteeing that someone, sooner or later, would stumble on the truth. If not this Urquhart character, then someone else.
Now it was time for damage control.
Still shaken by the eerie timeliness of Mariah’s call, and by hearing her voice for the first time in weeks, Tucker gathered the musty folders abruptly and got to his feet. If they hadn’t called him upstairs by now, to hell with them. He’d go and collect her letter.
Or not.
A rap sounded on his door and the Operations deputy strode in without waiting for a response. “Hey there, Frank,” Jack Geist said breezily.
Tucker nodded. “Jack.”
“Don’t get up on my account.” Geist dropped his lanky frame into a chair on the other side of the desk, giving the cramped office a smug once-over as his legs sprawled out in front of him. “See you got back safe and sound from your trip. Would’ve called you up first thing, but things have been a little wild today.”
“I figured.”
“You heard about this Kurdish business?”
Tucker nodded and sat down again. He was out of the loop, but he wasn’t brain-dead. He’d been in the game long enough to know that any situation making headlines would have the front office running to stay ahead of the breaking-news wave. The morning papers said the Turkish crisis had heated up overnight, with rebel Kurds massing for imminent confrontation with government forces.
“I gather the Russians have sent forces southward through Armenia,” he said.
The deputy grimaced. “Bastards just can’t resist mixing into it, can they?”
“They’ll say they’re looking to protect the country’s soft underbelly in case the situation spills across borders.”
“That’s what they’re saying, all right. Situation’s turning into a bloody circus. The Russians, Iran, Iraq, Greece, Cyprus—all getting their knickers in a twist. And, of course, the usual charges that we’re behind everything, orchestrating the situation for our own nefarious ends.”
Tucker nodded. The truth was less tidy than anybody’s simplistic explanations would have it, but it didn’t change the fact that once again, policy wonks like Geist here had gotten themselves caught on the horns of their own short-sightedness. It had probably seemed like a good idea after the Gulf War to enforce a no-fly zone to protect Saddam Hussein’s Kurdish opponents in northern Iraq. Except now that they no longer had Baghdad to worry about, the Iraqi Kurds were free to come to the aid of their unhappy brethren living across the border in Turkey, launching a full-scale assault on the weakest link in the NATO chain.
“Kind of makes you long for the good old black hat– white hat days of the cold war, doesn’t it, Jack?”
“No kidding. Look, I gotta get back upstairs real quick. National Security Council’s meeting this afternoon, and we’re trying to come up with a position that doesn’t absolve the bloody Turks, who are anything but blameless, but doesn’t piss them off so much they take their ball and go home.” Geist laced his fingers across his flat belly and tipped his chair back on two legs. “So where are we on this Navigator business? Learn anything useful over there?”
He fixed Tucker with the dramatic, piercing stare that was infamous inside the agency for setting younger, less experienced operatives off on uncontrollable fits of stammering. The effect was lost on Tucker, who could out-glower anyone—although he did consider pointing out that the furniture in this crummy office was strictly ancient government surplus and probably not up to the physics of two-legged rocking.
He decided against it. Geist was an ambitious hotshot looking for quick glory, the first to claim credit when an operation went right, and to distance himself when one went sour. If he ended up ass-over-teakettle, it’d be nice payback for the open cynicism he’d shown when he heard that a has-been like Tucker had been handed a personal message from the Navigator.
It was no surprise that, rather than call a meeting of the small committee that had vetted Tucker’s trip to meet the Navigator, Geist had nominated himself to drop in alone for a debriefing. He was hedging his bets—still downplaying the business internally, but determined to stay on top of things in case there was any chance of a major payoff.
“We’ve got about fifteen hundred pages’ worth of what looks to be the genuine article,” Tucker said carefully. “Originals, not copies. I can do the initial examination myself. Eventually, I’ll need a couple of computer people, Russian-language capable, to log it all in and create a secure database I can cross-reference and run against our own files.”
One of Geist’s eyebrows rose. “That all? Sure you don’t want us to take one of the Crays offline and dedicate it to this little assignment?”
Tucker ignored the sarcasm. “I could do it manually, but it would take time. I get the sense we don’t have that long. There’s a reason the Navigator chose to give us these particular documents out of all the millions inside Moscow Center. Sooner we know what all’s in them, sooner we’ll know why.”
“Did he give any hint where they’re coming down on support to Iraq or the Kurds?”
Bloody Geist, right on schedule, Tucker thought. Man suffered from chronic, extreme tunnel vision, never seeing past his immediate interests.
“He never mentioned the Kurds,” he said evenly, walking a fine line between overplaying or underplaying his hand. He didn’t want anyone he couldn’t control looking over his shoulder until he knew how much damaging information was in the files.
The key, he realized as he studied the deputy’s rumpled shirt and the bags under his sleep-deprived eyes, was to reinforce the notion there was nothing here that bore on Geist’s current problem. Once Geist was satisfied of that, he’d be out the door, hurrying to put himself back at the center of the high-profile crisis du jour. Jack Geist wasn’t the type to let a little thing like a door opening into an old enemy’s inner sanctum distract him from those areas in which he felt he could shine.
Still balancing on the chair’s rear legs, Geist two-fingered the mottled yellow manila file Tucker had set apart from the others. It was a nice fake from a guy who, Tucker happened to know, didn’t read a word of Russian. A good thing, too, since the name spelled out on the spine, albeit phonetically and in Cyrillic script, was “Benjamin Bolt.”
“Have you got the slightest reason to believe there’s anything important here?” Geist inquired, flipping disdainfully through the pages.
Tucker suppressed the urge to yank the file out of his hands, but there was little chance Geist would recognize what he was looking at. Geist had come up the ranks through a series of mostly Middle East–station assignments. The Soviet collapse, combined with the recent agitation of tin-pot dictatorships like Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya, had fallen on his career like manna from heaven.
“I’ve done a preliminary flip-through,” he said. “It’s a mixed bag of old KGB operations—external agents, a few internal dissidents who were ‘disappeared’ into the Gulag.”
“Sounds like ancient history. KGB’s dead.”
“Not dead. Not even dying. Regimes come and go in Russia, but the security service is forever. New guys come to power, think they’ve lopped off its head, but it just grows two more. Been that way for centuries. The Navigator, more than anyone, knows that. That’s how he managed to survive as long as he did.”
“No doubt. But I think we’ve got the situation pretty much in hand these days, Frank. There’ve been a lot of changes since you were on the old Soviet desk—operations you’re not aware of, new sources we’re running over there. Hell, we’ve even got some cooperative bilateral programs going with our new Russian friends.”
Watching the deputy’s smug self-assurance, Tucker’s thoughts flashed on the Navigator sitting across from him, the dwindling bottle of vodka between them. Lifting his glass at one point, Deriabin had offered a raspy toast. “To friendship between nations. Of course,” he added, “there are no friendly intelligence agencies, are there, my friend? After all, where would we be without our enemies?”
Geist closed the manila folder. “You say these are old ops?”
“Pretty much. Doesn’t mean some of the players aren’t still in place.”
“You saying he gave us active sources? Now, why the hell would he do that?” The deputy’s voice dripped disbelief, and he pushed the file away. “I’m having a lot of trouble buying that this isn’t some whopping disinformation ploy designed to waste our time. What do you want to bet this Navigator character wants us looking the other way while his people are busy on some new scheme?”
“No argument.”
“You agree?” Geist sounded surprised.
“That this could be nothing but a bunch of irrelevant junk, manufactured to distract us for God knows what purpose? It’s possible. Unlikely, though.”
“Why unlikely?”
“Because of the source.”
“The source is Georgi goddamn Deriabin. Right? You did meet him? He’s not dead, like Moscow Station was thinking?”
“Met him face-to-face for five hours.”
“Guy’s got cheek, I’ll give him that,” Geist said, shaking his head and leaning back on his precarious perch again. “Forty years he’s worked against us, now I’m supposed to believe he wants to make nice? Give me a break.”
“I’m just telling you how I read it.”
“How you read it?”
Tucker found himself once more the object of that practiced, thousand-yard stare. Seconds ticked by, the silence broken only by the drumming of the deputy’s fingers. He had the impression he was supposed to be quaking in his boots, worrying about whether his own loyalty was suspect.
He waited it out, knowing that if Geist sniffed any hint of anxiety, he’d take the files away and either bury them or pass them over to someone else. Tucker couldn’t let that happen. He needed to maintain control. Impress Geist with the files’ potential so he’d get the time he needed, but not get him so worked up that he’d panic and set up some kind of task force.
“So, what’s the deal?” Geist said finally. “Deriabin looking to walk? Cold war glory days are over, so now he wants us to set him up in a Miami Beach mansion?”
“Nope.”
“Then what?”
What, indeed? Tucker frowned, wishing he had an easy answer. “He wants to leave a legacy, I think. I don’t know exactly what, but I can tell you this—he’s dying.”
The chair legs finally dropped to the floor. “Say what? He tell you that?”
“Yeah, but even if he hadn’t, I would’ve known. His skin’s the color of that folder there.”
The deputy’s eyes strayed back to the mottled yellow file on the desk. “No kidding.”
“Liver cancer, apparently. He says they’ve given him three months, max.”
Geist’s right hand rotated in an impatient, forward-rolling notion. “And so—?”
“I think he’s looking to settle a score before he kicks off.”
“And he wants us to help him to do it?”
“That’s my guess.”
“So, what’s in it for us?”
Tucker hesitated. This was the tricky part. He was pretty sure part of the Navigator’s plan was to undermine the presidential ambitions of Foreign Minister Zakharov. But who stood to benefit from that? Russia? America? International peace and stability? Some unknown protégé to whom the dying old man was preparing to hand his torch of secret power?
Tucker didn’t know. He only knew who had the most to lose if this wasn’t handled carefully. But how could he tell the deputy director of the CIA that he’d burn these files and the evidence they contained before he’d let any harm from them rain down on the woman whose name the bloody Navigator had known would be the key to forcing his cooperation?
“Just give me a little more time, Jack. I’ll do you up a full report.”
“How much time are we talking?”
“Twenty-four hours.”
“Done,” Geist said abruptly. He got to his feet.
Tucker watched him head for the door. He knew he should leave well enough alone, but he couldn’t. “One more thing,” he said. “Why was Mariah Bolt assigned to cover the Zakharov visit?”
Geist paused at the door, frowning. “That’s pretty much ‘need to know,’ buddy. She doesn’t work for you anymore.”
“I know that.”
“And so? You got some proprietary interest there? That’d be tough, since I hear she’s seeing that hotshot TV anchorman…what’s his name?”
“Paul Chaney.”
“Right, Chaney. So…?”
Tucker shrugged. “I’m just curious why an analyst gets sent out in the field.”
“I had a little job needed doing, and she was the best person for it. Anyway,” the deputy said briskly, pulling open the door, “this is awesome work, Frank, getting your hands on this stuff. Truly awesome. I’ll need that memorandum on my desk soon as possible, though. You’ll get right on it, won’t you, big guy?”
He winked and pointed his finger in a stagy “you-the-man!” gesture, then was gone before Tucker had a chance to respond with the contempt the performance deserved.
Chapter Seven
So, how exactly did one go about luring a man into betraying his country? Mariah wondered. Bat her eyelashes? Show a little leg? Offer to meet him at the Casbah?
Really. This was hardly her area. As femmes fatales went, she felt about as lethal as a librarian.
One thing was certain. Even if the DDO’s sources were right and Yuri Belenko was carrying some sort of torch for her—something she highly doubted, since their previous meetings had been pretty innocuous as far as she was concerned—she would not sleep with the man. Once again, she cursed herself for not having turned Geist down flat.
She hovered at the edge of an upper-level courtyard of the Arlen Hunter Museum, her second visit of the afternoon. By the time she’d arrived earlier, after stopping at Courier Express to arrange for Frank to collect Chap Korman’s package in Virginia, the security detail had already finished their sweep of the site. She’d had just enough time to show her credentials, walk around and get the lay of the land, and run over the program for the Romanov opening, before heading back to the hotel to change into what she was coming to think of as her Tokyo Rose dress.
Now, after all her scrambling, the guests of honor were running late. Typical Murphy’s Law. It was already after six, and the early-evening sun was casting a magical, luminescent glow over the restless crowd waiting for Secretary of State Kidd and his Russian counterpart to show up.
It was nearly twenty years since she’d last set foot in California, and she’d forgotten this strange quality of the light, Mariah realized—the way it cast a magical glow on everything it touched, lulling with seductive promises it had no intention of keeping. Like a smiling thief, the place could rip out your heart in an instant and leave you too stunned to do anything but offer up your soul as well.
A warm Pacific breeze wafted over the balcony walls, and potted palms and crimson hibiscus rustled softly. The air was thick with expensive perfume and the ripe, masculine scent of the cigars in which one or two of the guests were indulging while they waited to see the Russian imperial treasures.
The irony was not lost on Mariah that the Last Days of the Romanov Dynasty tour should kick off here in the capital of American glitz and materialism. On display were the lavish worldly possessions of that family whose bloody murder had set in motion decades of deadly struggle between Moscow and the West, bringing the planet several times to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe unimaginable in the Romanovs’ day. But eighty years after their massacre at the hands of the Bolsheviks—shot, stabbed, their bodies acid-drenched, burned, then dumped down a mineshaft in an orgy of overkill—the last czar and his family were finally going to be buried in a St. Petersburg royal crypt with appropriate, if tardy, pomp and circumstance. The niceties taken care of, Russia’s cash-strapped regime could get on with the profitable business of exploiting the luckless royals in a manner that would have seemed hypocritical coming from previous communist governments. America, for its part, seemed willing to let bygones be bygones.
Looking over the list of dignitaries expected at the opening, Mariah’s heart had sunk to discover Renata Hunter Carr’s name near the top, just as she’d feared. Well, no matter. The woman was ancient history, and she herself was a long way from the confused little girl whose daddy had run off with the rich man’s daughter.
Sure she was.
She glanced up, feeling dwarfed by the eight-foot-high letters of Arlen Hunter’s name deeply carved into the pearl-gray marble walls of this monument he’d built to himself on Santa Monica Boulevard. So why did suborning treason feel like a piece of cake compared to the prospect of meeting the late magnate’s home wrecker of a daughter?
Were her masters at Langley even aware of the grudge she bore Renata? she wondered. Did Geist know? Doubtful. It was conceivable that the woman’s name was lodged somewhere in her personnel record, a gossipy detail on her famous, philandering parent, noted in passing, then filed away by whatever spit-polished security specialist had done her recruitment background check—an insignificant detail by now, surely, after eighteen spotless years of service. If Jack Geist had realized how much that bit of personal history still rankled, though, he might have thought twice about sending her out on this ridiculous assignment. Then again, knowing Geist, maybe not.
She patted her hair self-consciously. It felt too fluffy. She’d amped up her cosmetics for the occasion, too, and her skin felt plaster-coated. An extra coat of mascara had her feeling as though she was peering out at the world from under lacy awnings.
Ah, well, she thought wryly, the spy, to be truly effective, must be an expert at camouflage, possessed of that subtle capacity to seem neither out of place nor conspicuous. With the bevy of California beauties gracing the arms of the assembled rich and powerful here, her own overdone look no doubt blended right in.
Several well-known figures dotted the patio. The mayor of Los Angeles had already arrived, as well as both of California’s senators and several politically connected Hollywood types. The guest list also included representatives of foreign governments who maintained consulates in Los Angeles, and business people dutifully networking on behalf of their multinational corporations.
Mariah sighed. And then there were the bureaucrats. A considerable number of them, from the State Department, FBI and Secret Service, plus at least one representative of the CIA—though, for all she knew, Geist could have sent others. All attempting, with greater or lesser success, to blend into the party scene. The Secret Service agents were hopeless at it, conspicuous by their stern expressions, coiled collar wires, and plastic earpieces carrying a subaudible stream of clipped commands and sitreps—situation reports—on the movements of and potential threats to Secretary of State Kidd and Russian Foreign Minister Zakharov. Dressed in almost identical dark suits, they also had a distracting tendency to mutter, Dick Tracy–style, into their shirt cuffs.
A flutter of wings sounded behind her as two doves landed nearby on the half wall lining two sides of the terrace. A third dove settled a little apart from the pair, cooing plaintively, keeping a lonely watch. Gossamer violet feathers shimmered as the bird craned her head this way and that.
“Where’s your fella, pretty girl?” Mariah murmured.
Black pearl eyes cast a baleful glance her way. Mourning doves were monogamous, she recalled, mating for life, slow to accept a new partner at the death of a mate. This one’s mate must have fallen prey to some urban catastrophe, dooming her to follow behind the other pairs in the flock, permitted to observe but never join their comfortable circle.
Mariah felt her own loss thrum like an arrhythmia of the heart, a dull, aching reminder of David’s absence and the permanent empty spaces his death had created inside and around her. The sense of isolation. She felt like someone stuck at the top of a broken Ferris wheel—rocking and waiting, looking at the world from a distance. Half the time, she ached for the wheel to start turning again. The rest of the time, she lived in terror of the next, inevitable downward plunge.
The melancholy cooing of the doves sounded a counter-point to the hum of traffic moving up and down Santa Monica Boulevard. Long shadows drifted like pale purple gauze across the courtyard walls. She glanced once more at her watch. Six-fifteen. Nine-fifteen, back in Virginia. Lindsay would be up for a while yet. Like most teenagers, she prowled late at the best of times, and it would only get worse now that she was on summer vacation. If she got back to the hotel in the next couple of hours, Mariah calculated, she could still call without disturbing anyone at Carol’s house.
Then she had another thought. Frank. Before this afternoon, she hadn’t heard his voice in weeks. Now, the prospect of hearing it again brought a smile to her lips.
She leaned over the balcony’s edge to see if the VIPs were in sight. The solitary dove followed her gaze, peering down at the steady stream of cars still pulling up, disgorging high-powered passengers into the building’s maw. A small crowd had gathered on either side of the entryway. In Los Angeles, apparently, all it took to assemble an audience was to string a barrier, roll out a red carpet and wait for the celebrity-seekers to materialize like ants at a picnic.
Suddenly, the doves scattered on a flutter of wings as a strong hand gripped Mariah’s elbow. In her ear, a low voice murmured, “Don’t jump!”
She swung around to find a pair of crystal-blue eyes grinning down at her. “Paul! What are you doing here?”
Chaney kissed her cheek, as eyes had turned in their direction. Paul tended to have that effect on crowded rooms. So much for blending.
“Thought I’d surprise you,” he said. “You look gorgeous.”
“Thank you. I am surprised, but I’m confused, too. How—?”
“I got an invitation to this shindig weeks ago. I wasn’t going to come until you mentioned yesterday that you were. Decided I’d deliver your keys in person.”
Based in Washington, Paul had friends everywhere he’d ever stood in front of a camera. The only reason Mariah had called to tell him she’d be in L.A. early was that the beach cottage near Chap Korman’s house where she and Lindsay were planning to spend their vacation belonged to some friend of Paul’s. He’d been making arrangements to get the keys to her that week.
His appearance always set off mixed reactions in her, but right now, it was mostly dismay Mariah felt. “You shouldn’t have come all this way,” she said, meaning it.
“I know, but I wanted to. I thought it might be a little tricky for you tonight, what with Renata Hunter Carr being here and all. I came to offer moral support.”
Oh, Lord, Mariah thought, I am an ungrateful wretch.
“I was running late, though. Thought I’d miss the whole shebang,” Paul said, glancing around. “I gather Zakharov’s plane was late arriving?”
Mariah nodded.
He settled on the low balcony wall, long legs crossing at the ankles. His charcoal suit—Armani, no doubt—draped his athletic body with an elegant ease that most mere mortals could only envy. He had also been blessed with the even, agreeable bone structure camera lenses favored. He was fair-haired, with just a little gray and white intermingling at the temples. His face, classically good-looking, was also slightly weathered, adding a patina of maturity to an appearance that might otherwise have been too boyish to carry the weight of the award-winning television news-magazine he anchored.
“Have you seen her yet?” he asked.
“No. Apparently, she’s part of the ribbon-cutting detail, so I imagine she’ll make her entrance with Zakharov and Kidd.”
“How are you holding up?”
“Just fine,” she lied. “It was sweet of you to do this, Paul, but it’s really not that big a deal. I’ve seen her picture in the paper dozens of times. I’m hardly going to have a nervous breakdown just because we happen to be in the same room.”
“What if you have to talk to her?”
“No reason I should. She doesn’t know me, and I’m obviously not going to go out of my way to introduce myself.”
Chaney studied her for a moment, then turned back to the crowd. “There’s Nolan,” he said.
“Nolan?”
“Nolan Carr, her son. The young Robert Redford clone over there with Mayor Riordan and the senators.”
Mariah followed his gaze across the courtyard to where an attractive, self-assured young man was locked in close conversation with the three politicians.
“Looks like he’s lobbying,” Paul said.
“For what?”
He shrugged. “Who knows? Rumor has it his mother’s got political ambitions for her only child.”
Mariah studied the would-be politician. “He looks barely old enough to be out of school.”
“He’s pushing thirty, I think. As for school, he attended Princeton for a while, his late father’s alma mater. I don’t think he ever graduated from anywhere except Playboy U, though. Like I said, politics seems to be his mother’s idea.”
“His father was Jacob Carr, the former state attorney general, right?”
“Mmm…Plus, of course, Mrs. Hunter Carr’s a major contributor in her own right. When the time comes, I’m sure Nolan will have the backing he needs.”
Mariah gave Paul a curious look. “How do you know all this?”
“I interviewed Arlen Hunter not long before he died,” Paul said. “I met both Renata and Nolan, though he was just a kid at the time. Pretty rambunctious, at that. I’ve run into the mother once or twice since.”
“You never told me that,” Mariah said, frowning.
“Well, I knew it was a touchy subject. Frankly, there’s never really been a time before now when I thought it needed to be mentioned.”
“Hmm….” Mariah said. How very politically correct of him.
The director of the Arlen Hunter Museum, who’d been pointed out to Mariah when she’d passed through that afternoon, walked over and whispered something in Nolan Carr’s ear. Carr smiled and nodded without missing a beat, then shook hands with Mayor Riordan and the senators and headed off for the elevators. Along the way, he stopped and shook a few more hands, ever the dutiful host in his grandfather’s establishment. Preternaturally adept at the glad-handing game, Mariah thought. Clearly, the boy had a future.
“So, what exactly does he do for a living?” she asked Paul. “Not that he has to worry about where his next meal is coming from, I suppose.”
“Hard to say, exactly. He’s on the board of the various Hunter corporations and trusts. Dabbles in a little land development, I think. Skis. Sails. The usual.”
“Nice work if you can get it.”
“N’est-ce pas?” Paul said wryly.
A sudden change in the pitch of street noises set off a murmur on the terrace, and people began to gravitate toward the edge of the balcony. The distinct growl of high-powered, armor-encased motors and the deep, throaty whine of motorcycle outriders announced the arrival of the official cavalcade at the front of the building.
Chaney peeked over the edge, then got to his feet. As he took her arm, Mariah felt his fingertips lightly brushing the sensitive place at the inside of her elbow. “Here we go,” he said. “Ready?”
She glanced around, but jaded gazes used to celebrity-spotting had already shifted away from them, anticipating the arrival of bigger fish. “Paul, I don’t know how to put this delicately,” she murmured, “but I’m working here.”
He slipped his hand out of her arm. “Oops, sorry.” He knew what she did for a living. He’d been David’s friend first, but when he’d decided to investigate the suspicious car accident that had led up to David’s death, Paul’s and her professional paths had tangled. “I’ll stay out of your way,” he said. “But it had occurred to me, even if you were tied up for the evening, there’s always a window of opportunity between sunset and sunrise.” He flicked an imaginary cigar, his eyebrows doing a mischievous Groucho Marx bounce.
In spite of herself, Mariah smiled. “Where are you staying?”
His expression shifted to sheepish, and he fingered the almost imperceptible scar on his chin, an old hockey injury. Mariah had been drawn on more than one occasion to slowly trace that small, welcome imperfection. “With you?” he suggested.
“Oh, I don’t know about that. I have no idea what time I’ll be done tonight, and—”
“I have a confession to make. My bag’s already in your room.”
“What? How did you get into my hotel room?”
“I know the manager at the Beverly Wilshire. Stayed there a dozen times. I know it’s presumptuous, but you and I get so few opportunities to be together, I didn’t want to let this one pass. I told the manager we needed to keep it real low-key. In this town, believe me, it’s not the strangest request he’s ever had. He’s totally discreet, I swear.”
She studied those wide-open features, wondering how many times Paul had relied on that discretion in the past. Wondering, too, how thrilled the DDO would be to find out they were sharing quarters here. But there wasn’t time to argue the point now. In any case, when the chips were down, Paul had proven more loyal than the CIA brass. There were plenty of reasons for their relationship to go slow, but at this point, she couldn’t care less what Jack Geist thought about it.
The elevators pinged, doors opening on a rush of air. Several Secret Service men stepped off first, taking up positions at either side of the opening. Three or four of their beefy Russian security counterparts followed. Multiple pairs of dark glasses panned the room as they, too, fanned out, the Russians forming an inner cordon, the Security Service, like tugs around an ocean liner, keeping the dignitaries and Zakharov’s bodyguards in a containment pattern as they moved forward.
“All right,” she conceded. “I’ll catch up to you later. But right now—”
“I’m outta here. I’ll leave you to your spying, Janey Bond.”
She scolded softly, “I’m State Department here, buster, and don’t you forget it.”
Chaney grinned and walked off. She watched as he made his way to the front of the room. At least a hundred and fifty people separated him from the red velvet ribbon strung before the main gallery, but Paul Chaney was one of those people with a God-given gift for putting himself at the center of the action. As he threaded his way forward, faces in the crowd glanced up at him, temporarily distracted from the main attraction. Then, like the Red Sea at the approach of Moses, they parted to let him pass.
Turning back toward the elevator, Mariah recognized the cropped, silvery head of the secretary of state. Next to him was a short, chunky man in an expensive suit, the top of whose head barely cleared Shelby Kidd’s shoulder. Zakharov’s golden cuff links glittered as he lifted his hands to smooth the sides of his thick, snow-white hair. He looked almost cherubic, Mariah thought—Santa Claus in Savile Row—but Zakharov had been a KGB colonel with a reputation for unparalleled ruthlessness before making the transition to politician. She doubted the old leopard had changed his spots at this late date.
Why was it that the most ferocious characters were so often such stumpy little men? she wondered. There had to be a psychology thesis in there somewhere.
As the two ministers started toward the gallery, accompanied by their translators, Mariah spotted Yuri Belenko, Zakharov’s right-hand man and her main reason for being here. Belenko’s back was to her as he paused at the elevator threshold, reaching back to offer his arm to the last occupant, hidden till now.
Almost against her will, Mariah craned to see, but caught only the briefest glimpse of blond hair and a flash of earring before the small figure of a woman disappeared in the thicket of sturdy, protective bodies sweeping en masse toward the red velvet rope.
Suddenly, an awful memory flooded over her: her mother crying on the sofa, one arm curled protectively around the curve of her belly.
“Mommy? Where’s Daddy?”
“He’s gone.”
“Gone where? When’s he coming home?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart. I don’t know.”
Damn it to hell, Mariah thought, swallowing hard. She circled the wall, settling in a nook off to the side of the main gallery entrance, where her view was relatively unobstructed.
And there she was.
Heiress and culture maven Renata Hunter Carr was busy introducing the two ministers to her son and to the museum director. The woman obviously gloried in being the center of attraction—and in her triumph. Both the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art had vied to host the inaugural stop on the Russian imperial treasures tour, but with deft lobbying in two capitals, Renata had done a run up the middle and scored the coup for the Los Angeles– based institute founded by her father.
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Taylor Smith
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Шпионские детективы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Senior CIA analyst Mariah Bolt remembers her late father as the man who abandoned his family to run off to Europe with another woman. Ben Bolt′s fans remember him somewhat differently, and revere him as a literary genius.