When the black, hairy thing fell out of the envelope and landed on her outstretched hand, Mariah screamed and leapt back, dropping both the envelope and the creature. Nothing happened after a few seconds, and she slipped around the walls to the broom closet, her eyes never leaving the manila envelope. Pulling out the broom, she raised it to waist level, bringing it down hard, over and over. Then, cautiously, she used the handle to slide the envelope off the remains of what lay underneath. She expected a sticky mess, but the paper slid easily away from the black, hairy whorl.

It wasn’t a tarantula. It wasn’t a spider at all. It was hair—a few curls of familiar black hair flecked with gray. It was David’s hair, she was certain. She picked up the envelope to examine it more carefully. Inside were several stiff sheets of paper, which she withdrew. They were 8½-by-11-inch photographs of a man and a woman, naked, on a bed, in various positions of lovemaking. It was her husband, David, and Elsa.

Mariah fought down nausea, pushing away the pain and anger. Why had she been sent the envelope? Why now? It was a game of terror they were playing with her, teasing, threatening. But who? And what did they want her to do? Or not do, she suddenly thought. What are the rules here? How do I know how to play along if I don’t know the rules or the object of the game?

“Sharp characterization and a tightly focused time frame…give this intrigue a spellbinding tone of immediacy.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Best of Enemies

Also available from MIRA Books and
TAYLOR SMITH

COMMON PASSIONS

THE BEST OF ENEMIES

RANDOM ACTS

Book from TAYLOR SMITH

THE INNOCENTS CLUB

CIA analyst Mariah Bolt sets off a time bomb when she unearths a lost manuscript from her famous novelist father. Before long, her father’s former lover turns up dead, and Mariah and her daughter become pawns in a deadly game of international intrigue.

Guilt by Silence
Taylor Smith

www.mirabooks.co.uk

This book is dedicated with love to Richard,

who endures and encourages, and to Kate and Anna,

to whom the future belongs.

“Secret guilt by silence is betrayed.”

—John Dryden, All for Love

Acknowledgments

Although this work of fiction is meant to entertain, its writing was made a good deal easier by the many people who read part or all of the manuscript to verify the scientific facts it contains, and/or who answered my endless questions on their particular areas of expertise. It goes without saying that I owe to them the accuracy of the facts contained herein, while any errors that might stubbornly remain are no one’s fault but my own.

I would particularly like to thank: Jaye Orr, for checking my medical facts; Harv Pulford, for the computer stuff; Larry Butler of the Los Angeles Fire Department, for so much useful information on collision fires; Dan Young of the Orange County Fire Department, for the inspiration of gasoline explosions and tungsten pins; Marsha MacWillie, crime scene analyst with the Garden Grove Police Department, who let me hang around and watch her do what she does so well; J. L. Ragle, former Deputy Coroner of Orange County, and the host of forensic experts he brought to his seminars; Peter Ernest of the CIA Office of Public Relations, who kindly answered my questions on CIA career paths and the Agency’s priorities in a post-Cold War world; my writing friends, including Margaret Gerard, Roy Langsdon and Marjorie Leusebrink et al. at the UCI advanced fiction workshop, who read and advised; Elaine Shean, who proofread the manuscript and provided moral support and occasional baby-sitting services to get me through this; Pat Teal, agent and morale booster; and finally, my friend “C”—my inside source in the nuclear regulatory field, who verified the nuclear facts but asked, only half-jokingly, if I couldn’t please make the regulators’ lives easier by adding a footnote saying, “But really, folks, this could never happen here.” Well, I hope it couldn’t. With people of C’s dedication in the field, we could yet luck out.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Epilogue

1

Mariah circled the block three times. There were plenty of open spaces in the parking lot, but she wasn’t ready to face him yet. Shouldn’t this get easier at some point? she wondered. She should have begun adjusting by now. So why couldn’t she accept that this was the way things had to be?

Just once more around, she promised herself, passing the entrance. One more time, and then she would do it again—go in and pretend. Pretend that nothing had really changed—that they were still a family. That they could cope. Pretend that his being in here was just a minor inconvenience. Pretend that it didn’t matter that he would never hold her in his arms or make love to her again. Pretend that Lindsay didn’t miss his stupid jokes or his hockey lessons or the giggling conspiracies the two of them used to mount whenever Mariah tried to reprimand them about junk food and the rules about bedtime.

David was in there waiting, she knew—he had nothing to do but wait for her and Lindsay.

It was ten months since the accident in Vienna; six since she had brought him back home to Virginia. In the first weeks they were back, friends and family had come to visit wearing carefully crafted, upbeat smiles that never wavered. But their eyes, when they saw him, were shocked and frightened, even though Mariah had tried to prepare them for the devastating changes the accident had wrought. They would pat his arm bravely at first, but then Mariah would see them subtly withdraw, their fingers recoiling from his atrophied muscles and the bone-thinness of the flesh under his shirt. After that, they almost never touched him again, except perhaps for a quick squeeze of his gnarled hand as they left.

They would ramble on one-sidedly to him about things David probably wouldn’t have cared about even if he could have responded—and they knew it. But what else did you say to a genius whose mind, or what was left of it, was revealed only through an occasional flicker in his dark eyes?

The visitors would glance anxiously at Mariah, wondering whether David knew who they were and what they were talking about, but even she had no way of knowing for sure what registered with him and what didn’t. Sometimes he seemed to be taking in everything, his eyes reflecting something like amusement or interest, or narrowing, as if he was pondering some problem. But other times, he seemed lost in an inner world that she couldn’t reach. The eyes would fix momentarily on a face, then drift away, distracted by a curtain blowing at a window or a speck of dust dancing in a sunbeam.

These days, very few people came to see him anymore.

Finally pulling into a parking space, Mariah tilted the rearview mirror and gave her sandy hair a poke or two to fluff it up a little. The cut was soft but short—practical, hair for a woman with no time to fuss. She wore almost no makeup, except for a little mascara to darken her fair lashes. She ran her fingers absently under her eyes to erase the end-of-day smudges that turned her gray eyes smoky. Then she paused. The eyes watching her from the mirror were critical, asking her for the thousandth time if she couldn’t have arranged things differently. She had posed the same question every day since it became clear that David wasn’t going to recover from his injuries.

A runaway truck had plowed head-on into his car as he waited to pull into the driveway of the American International School in Vienna, climbing over the hood and crushing the passenger compartment. Everyone said it was a miracle that Mariah’s husband and daughter hadn’t been killed outright, but it was a qualified miracle at best: David’s skull had been fractured like an eggshell; Lindsay had come frighteningly close to losing her left leg.

But despite the reproachful gaze of the eyes staring back from the mirror, Mariah knew that she had had no choice. She couldn’t give him at home the extensive care he needed, especially with their daughter’s recovery to worry about, too, and a demanding job that provided the income and insurance to cover staggering medical bills—a State Department job, she always told people, the lie second nature by now.

She sighed and turned the mirror away. Grabbing a paper bag off the front seat and slinging her purse over her shoulder, she climbed out of the car.

Across the parking lot, another pair of eyes—a mismatched pair, one green, one ice blue—watched her lock the Volvo’s doors and start toward the building’s entrance.

Rollie Burton gnawed thoughtfully on the inside of his cheek while in his hand, a six-inch blade appeared and disappeared in a steady rhythm. The knife was one he had picked up years ago in Hong Kong—a beauty, with superior balance and a blade of fine Sheffield steel. Its intricately carved ivory handle depicted a Manchu dynasty garden of roses and ivy. There were rust-colored stains in the handle’s deep crevices, as if the roses themselves had bled as they were carved.

He flicked the catch on the ivory handle and the blade snapped open again, glinting under the parking-lot lights. Pushing the point against his gloved left hand, he retracted it, only to snap it open on the next heartbeat. Snap, retract. Snap, retract. Over and over.

He had her picture in the leather case on the seat beside him, as well as the down payment on the job—ten thousand dollars in small, used bills. There was also a loaded Sig-Sauer automatic and an extra clip of ammunition. But he preferred the blade—silent and swift, especially in his skilled hands.

She was prettier in person than in her picture, he thought. The overhead lights in the parking lot emphasized high cheekbones and a full mouth. He would have guessed her to be in her early thirties, but the voice on the phone had said she was thirty-nine. She was small but she moved fluidly, with a grace usually reserved for cats and dancers. Although it was impossible to make out her shape under the flowing trench coat she wore, he knew that a body had to be in superb condition to move that well. He wondered idly who would want to waste her—not that he cared, as long as he was paid for his work.

When the phone call had come the previous day, the voice had said they wanted it to look like a random act—one of the dozens of muggings that happen every day in the greater Washington area. The voice had had an eerie quality: flat, tinny. Burton was used to job offers from odd quarters, but there was something really creepy about that voice. Still, it wasn’t as if it had asked him to do anything unusual. Things were a little slow these days, but in his prime, Burton had handled dozens of wet jobs, most of them in tricky foreign environments. This one looked to be a piece of cake.

When he’d agreed to take on the job, the caller had directed him to a Dumpster behind Bloomingdale’s at Tyson’s Corner. There he had found the case of cash and the photo, as well as information on his target’s regular movements. Sure enough, Burton had picked her up just where he’d been informed she could usually be found each Wednesday evening—at the Montgomery Convalescent Care Home in McLean, Virginia.

There was no fixed deadline—just do it soon, the voice had said. The sooner the better, Burton thought, glancing around the quiet parking lot. He had expected to track her for a few days before making his move, but twenty-five years in the business had taught him that you don’t pass up a prime opportunity when it’s handed to you on a silver platter. No point in dragging these things out.

He had his hand on the door handle, ready to slip out of the car. She was almost halfway across the parking lot, but Burton knew he could be on her in a few quick strides. He was still wiry and fast when he shifted into high gear.

Waiting for precisely the right time to move, he considered his options. With a bigger target, he’d aim for the space between the second and third ribs—a neat slash to the heart, then out. If there was a struggle, an upward slice in the gut was effective but messy, and the target took longer to die. In this case, however, the best bet was the throat. Rollie Burton was a bantamweight, but she was smaller. It would be easy enough to grab her by the hair for the split second it would take to do the job. Cut and run, he decided, stepping out of the car and silently closing the door. He’d have to remember to take her purse, for appearance’ sake.

It was only a little past five, but a cold night had already set in, the lonely smell of an early winter rain in the air. Burton moved through the shadows of the old oak trees that dotted the lot, their dark, skeletal branches trembling overhead. He was coming up just behind her, the fingers of his left hand flexing in anticipation of the grab, his right thumb poised over the hair-trigger catch on the knife.

Suddenly, there was a bustle at the main entrance fifty yards away. He held back, crouching deeper into the shadows as the front door opened and three people came out—an elderly woman and two men who might have been her sons. The men huddled around her, supporting her by the elbows, murmuring as she cried softly.

Cursing under his breath, Burton pocketed the knife as his target walked from the parking lot along a short walkway to the entrance. She stepped out of the path of the family coming down the staircase, watched them for a moment, then ran up the front steps of the nursing home. Burton turned and headed back to his car, regretful but philosophical. No matter—he might still have a chance to get her on the way out. Besides, if this was too easy, he might feel he hadn’t earned his fee. That’d be a shame, he thought, snorting lightly. Guilt had never been his strong suit.

2

As she passed through the front doors, Mariah noticed that she was holding her breath. Sooner or later, though, you have to breathe. She made it past the receptionist and almost as far as the east-wing nursing station before drawing her first breath, hoping the delay would help—but it was futile, of course. Little sensors in her nose had been at work even as she nodded to the woman at the front desk, an early warning system for the incoming olfactory assault. And when she finally inhaled, her stomach plunged as always at the smell of medicine and antiseptic, starched linen and slowly dying flesh.

The young nurse at the station smiled brightly as she saw Mariah approach. “Hi, Mrs. Tardiff,” she said.

The nurses knew her well by now—knew she normally used Bolt, her own surname, not David’s, but she had told them she had no objection to being called Mrs. Tardiff, if they preferred. Most, especially the older nurses, seemed more comfortable with that, likely suspicious of her disregard for the proper order of things. David would have been more insistent than Mariah herself on her right to use her own name, but he was in no position to argue with anyone—on points of principle or anything else.

“He’s been looking forward to seeing you,” the nurse said. “The orderly rolled him into the hallway an hour ago.”

Mariah nodded and forced a smile. This nurse had a sweet disposition and meant no reproach, she knew, but she gave herself a mental lashing anyway. “Traffic,” she said. “It’s awful tonight.” The nurse smiled sympathetically.

Mariah turned the corner and headed down the hall. David’s was the last room on the right and she could see his wheelchair outside the door, past all the other lonely souls—ancients, most of them, waiting and watching with futile hope in their eyes each time a visitor entered the corridor. Mariah smiled at some of the old-timers as she walked by, pausing briefly to squeeze the hand of the old lady who always called her Thelma and asked about the boys.

“They’re fine, Mrs. Lake, just fine,” she answered, as she always did, now that she had given up trying to explain that she wasn’t Thelma—wondering, as she always did, who the real Thelma was and whether the boys were really fine

She turned once more toward David. She could see him clearly now, watching her every step—those deep brown eyes with irises so dark that the pupils were invisible. Large, innocent eyes that looked right into your soul. Who could resist them? Certainly she had never been able to.

She had met him in the mid-seventies, the year before the Central Intelligence Agency had recruited her. She was a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, a political science major specializing in the Soviet-American arms race. When her liberal arts background left her bogged down in the complexities of nuclear weapons, her thesis adviser sent her to the head of the physics department. He, in turn, introduced her to David Tardiff, one of the department’s youngest and brightest doctoral candidates.

But if physics brought Mariah and David together in the first place, biology took over pretty quickly thereafter. Mariah was taken by surprise. Her mother’s life had been ruined by Mariah’s father, a poet and novelist still lionized in literary circles, long after his death. He was no hero to Mariah. How could he be, after abandoning his young child and pregnant wife to pursue his own self-absorbed whims?

Buffeted by a cascade of losses that began with her father’s betrayal, Mariah had grown up determined to chart an independent course for her life—one that certainly didn’t include falling under the sway of some boy wonder from New Hampshire. David Tardiff was on the short side, barely five-eight. Compared to the strapping, blond, too-cool-for-words beach boys she had grown up with in southern California, Mariah found him a bit on the homely side, his nose a little too large, his mop of black curls a little too unruly. And he was cocky, she told herself—funny and bright, but awfully sure of himself.

Still, as she had listened to him wax enthusiastic about physics and hockey—his other driving passion—her longstanding defenses against emotional involvement crumbled. Within three months, they were living together in a tiny Berkeley apartment, making plans for the future. But then things changed—that was the first time she lost David.

The University of California ran a top-secret nuclear weapons research facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, on behalf of the federal government, and Berkeley’s physics department supplied many of the lab’s research staff. It came as no real surprise, then, when six months after they moved in together, David was offered a job at the Los Alamos weapons lab.

Mariah followed him into the desert to work in earnest on her graduate thesis. But if New Mexico provided a good working environment for the thesis, it was no place to nurture their relationship. The split finally came the day Mariah watched a military truck towing a canvas-draped missile through the center of town. She confronted David late that night when he came in from the lab.

“David, this isn’t the place for us.”

He was nuzzling her neck and missed the point. “How about the dining-room table?” he asked, wrapping his arms around her more tightly. “Don’t you just love all this space? So many options!”

Mariah poked him in the ribs with her elbow, laughing in spite of herself. “That’s not what I’m talking about! ” Her smile faded. “I mean Los Alamos.”

He held her at arm’s length, his twinkling dark eyes betraying the clever comeback he was formulating—but her own expression must have squelched the urge. “What’s wrong with it? You’ve got teaching prospects here. And it’s a clean, safe place to make babies and raise a family,” he added, pulling her close again.

“Safe? It’s a nuclear bomb factory! Don’t you ever think about what it is you do over at that lab?”

“We do science—good science, with equipment that any university researcher would kill to get his hands on.”

“Yeah, well, kill is definitely the operative word here. You guys design nuclear weapons.”

“We unlock the secrets of the atom. Come on, Mariah, lighten up. The lab does nonmilitary work, too, you know that. And this work is exciting. The atom holds the key to unlimited energy—not to mention incredible biomedical and industrial advances. Weapons are the least interesting part of it.”

“That’s just a cop-out. If there’s one thing this lab stands for, it’s the creation of the bomb.”

“You can’t blame scientists if the government perverts our work,” he said, a stubborn frown forming on his forehead. “We can’t be responsible for the ethics of the whole nation. The weapons work could be stopped, if people had the guts to say ‘no more.”’

“Oh, dammit, David,” Mariah said sadly. “I’m not stupid—or naïve. I know we won’t get rid of nuclear weapons tomorrow, now that the genie’s out of the bottle. But we design a new bomb, and then the Russians build one bigger than ours, and then we make ours even more deadly, and on and on and on. I just can’t watch you waste your talents by helping these guys develop the ultimate doomsday machine. Because that’s the real reason you’re all here, and you know it.”

They’d had the same argument a dozen times since David had accepted the Los Alamos job. The silence between them as they pulled away from each other that night had simply concluded the debate once and for all with a permanent agreement to disagree. In the end, she had left David and New Mexico and taken a job as an analyst at CIA headquarters in Virginia—telling herself that whatever she might do to help restrain the Soviet nuclear threat could also make the work of David and his Los Alamos colleagues superfluous.

For two years, their only contact was a diminishing trickle of letters and phone calls. Then one day, out of the blue, David had shown up on her doorstep, gaunt and distraught after an accident in the lab had claimed the life of one of his colleagues—a young technician who had died a gruesome, lingering death after accidental exposure to radioactive materials. David had become thoroughly disillusioned with weapons work and said he wanted only to build a career in teaching and to marry her.

They were never separated again. Lindsay was born nine months later and their lives had seemed charmed—until a careening truck in Vienna had brought it all crashing down.

As he watched her approach along the long hallway, David’s mouth lifted lopsidedly, the paralyzed left side drooping while the right struggled upward. Mariah smiled back at this man she had loved for so long—still loved, she reminded herself. Still loved but missed horribly even as she sat beside him during the few short hours she managed to snatch with him each week.

“Hi,” she said warmly, putting a hand around his neck and touching her forehead to his. She closed her eyes briefly, trying not to notice that faint aroma of decay that clung to his atrophied body, despite all the toiletries she brought in for him.

“How are you, lover?” She kissed his forehead and ran her fingers through his hair, giving the curls an encouraging nudge toward the frothy chaos that had once been their preferred arrangement. “Sorry I’m a little late. Traffic.”

He blinked. She dropped in his lap the paper sack she had brought in from the car, then moved behind the chair. “Let’s go sit. I’m beat.” She wheeled him into his room, where she kicked off her shoes and shrugged out of her trench coat, tossing it on the bed and pushing up the sleeves of her suit jacket. Then she moved him over to the computer table in the corner.

“Headstick?” she asked. One brown eye closed, opened, then closed—the signal for no. He seemed alert and Mariah berated herself again for having made him wait.

She put aside the headband with the attached stick that he used to tap the keyboard when his faltering right hand became exhausted. The left hand was useless, drawn into itself and held tightly against his chest by the constricted arm, perpetually reverted to a fetal position except when he was deeply asleep and his muscles finally relaxed.

Mariah removed the paper bag from his lap and pulled a rolling table over his thin legs. She lifted his right hand, bringing it to rest on the computer keyboard. His bony index finger reached out shakily and landed on a key. Mariah looked at the screen and saw the letter L—Lindsay.

“She’s at the swimming pool,” she said. “I’m picking her up on the way home.” Mariah leaned back against the windowsill and smiled. “She’s doing great in the water. The coach says she may even make the team next year. She’s such a fighter, David.”

His eyes regarded her intently.

“And the doctor says it’s doing wonders for her leg,” she went on. “It’s definitely growing and he thinks there’s a chance it might eventually catch up to the other one.” Mariah reached into the paper bag she had brought. “Lindsay couldn’t come, but she did bake cookies for you—chocolate chip.”

Slow, lopsided grin.

“She does this to irritate me, you know, just because I’m allergic to chocolate. I hope it gives you both zits.”

David watched her pull out one of the cookies. She put it in his hand and wrapped his fingers around it. The tendons on the back of his hand stretched taut like puppet strings as he lifted the cookie to his mouth with agonizing slowness. Mariah took some shirts out of the bag and walked over to the small wardrobe next to the bed. David’s eyes followed her every step as his jaw slowly worked on the cookie.

“I washed your flannel shirts for you. It’s getting frosty out there.” He didn’t go out much, of course, except when she and Lindsay took him for walks on the weekend or, once a month or so, home overnight. But it was a recognition that he was alive and the seasons were still turning.

Mariah came back and pulled up a chair next to him, wiping a line of chocolate drool that ran down from the corner of his mouth, then stroking his arm absently as she spoke to him. She talked about Lindsay and her new school, their evenings, office gossip, inconsequential stories of people, some of them old friends, some people he didn’t know. It didn’t matter, as long as she could make him feel that he was still part of their world.

As she rambled on, David’s eyes watched her and smiled. It was the only part of him that was recognizable anymore, Mariah thought. The orderlies always managed to do something peculiar with his curly black hair. Not their fault, really—they hadn’t spent years watching him step from the shower and give his head a distracted shake until each curl found its own equilibrium, had they? Now, the way they combed it, the curls were straightened and flattened, parted at the side, giving him a strangely organized air that he had never possessed when he was in charge of his own grooming. And he was getting grayer. In the ten months since the accident, he seemed to have aged a decade or more beyond his forty-one years. His frame, slight to begin with, had withered to a wispy frailty.

Only the eyes held the essence of the man David had once been. They were also the only part of him capable anymore of reflecting a familiar emotion. The emotions she saw there these days were fleeting and elemental—pleasure at her coming, sadness at her leaving, frustration during his rare attempts to communicate.

Once though, in Vienna, when he had fully emerged from the coma into which he had been plunged for several weeks after the accident, Mariah had seen in those eyes the terror of realization.

For several days previous, there had been times when he seemed to recognize her. In those moments of brief lucidity, he had struggled to reach out to her, but his body had become permanently contorted, twisted into an unnatural stiffness by the misfiring synapses in his brain. The effort exhausted him and he would lapse again into catatonia. One morning, however, Mariah had stepped off the hospital elevator to the sound of unearthly shrieks coming from the direction of his room. Heart pounding, she had raced down the corridor, the cries growing louder as she approached his door.

It was what she had most dreaded—the one thing she had prayed would never come. Multiple skull fractures from the accident had left irreversible brain damage. She had seen the X-rays and CAT scans herself, had had the damage explained in detail, and she knew that his life was over, even if his heart still beat and his lungs still drew breath. The only thing the Viennese doctors hadn’t been able to tell Mariah with any degree of certainty was what portion of his cognitive abilities would be left when—and if—he ever regained consciousness. She had found herself, incredibly, beginning to pray that he would die rather than understand what he had become.

But when she stepped into the room that morning, she knew that her worst fear had come true. David was screaming in inarticulate anguish, having awakened to discover that his body had become a tomb—and that he was buried alive.

Mariah shuddered now at the memory of his cries, guttural and incoherent, and of the terror in his eyes as he searched hers for a sign of hope that this was only a passing nightmare. She had sat next to him for hours, rubbing his back and stroking his hair and holding his twisted body until his screams had subsided to choking sobs and then faded altogether.

In that time, she had watched a light in those newly conscious eyes flicker and die. She never knew whether the calm that finally settled on him was madness or some kind of divinely inspired state of grace. It didn’t matter, she thought, as long as it gave him peace.

It gave her none, however. Most of what was left of her husband—Dr. David Tardiff, nuclear physicist and ex-boy wonder, harmonica player and Wayne Gretzky wannabe, love of her life and father of her only child—had died that day. All that remained now was this sad shell of a man—that, and a hard angry fist in the pit of her being that was perpetually raised in defiance of the God or the fates that had allowed such a thing to happen.

Mariah glanced at her watch. “I have to go soon, David. Lins will be almost done with her practice.”

His head lolled on the headrest as he turned his eyes to her, their expression sad, wistful as always. But he held her gaze fixedly and then his right hand reached out to hers, resting on the arm of his chair. He grappled for her wrist. Her hand followed his as he moved it shakily into his lap.

“Oh, David,” she said softly. She rested her head against his shoulder for a moment, then lifted it. “Just a minute,” she whispered. She rose and went to the door, closing it firmly, regretting the absence of a lock. The room was a private one, but institutional privacy was a contradiction in terms.

The first time this had happened was one Saturday when she and Lindsay had taken him home to their condo overnight. It had been late in the evening. Lindsay had gone up to bed after helping her get David settled on the sofa bed in the living room and Mariah had been lying beside him, outside the covers, reading to him while soft music played in the background. She wasn’t sure whether or not he followed the words, but her voice and the music seemed to relax him, and he’d looked almost like a gaunt version of his old self, lying there under the quilt.

Suddenly, Mariah had glanced up and seen him watching her with an expression of acute longing in his eyes and she had known what he was thinking about. It had taken her breath away. No one had ever mentioned it during his long hospital stays, even though she had discussed with the doctors every other conceivable aspect of the prognosis for his physical and mental recovery. But she had understood all at once that whatever else was to be denied him for the rest of his life, some basic needs had not disappeared.

That night, she had done what she had to do to give him the comfort that only a wife or lover can offer—she had made love to him as gently and delicately as she knew how. And although he was unable to reciprocate, she had comforted herself with the memory of the hundreds of times he had held her and loved her. Then she had crawled under the covers beside him, rocking him and crying silent tears, feeling in her arms the familiar and yet awkwardly unfamiliar outlines of his body.

Now, sitting close beside him in his nursing-home room, she gave him comfort again and then held him for a while before she had to go. His eyes were closed when she left him.

Mariah stood at the top of the steps outside the front door, inhaling deeply to clear her lungs of institutional air, forcing her mind to make the transition back to life beyond David’s world. She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again and started down the steps.

Preoccupied, she failed to notice the figure waiting under a tree next to the sidewalk. It was only when he said her name that she glanced up, startled out of her reverie. She narrowed her eyes to make him out in the shadows, then recoiled in surprise.

“Paul? Paul Chaney—what on earth are you doing here?” she asked, moving quickly from astonishment to instinctive wariness.

He came forward and they met at the bottom step. “Waiting for you.” He bent down and they exchanged busses on both cheeks, the European-style that transplanted Americans adopt awkwardly at first, then maintain as a lifelong habit as they come to appreciate the comfort of the ritual.

He pulled back and she studied him under the lamplight. He was tall, his lankiness emphasized by the soft, brown leather bomber jacket he habitually wore and was wearing now, the collar turned up. He had a full head of blond hair, graying at the temples, clear blue eyes and a photogenic face that could be earnest, penetrating or morally indignant as required in front of the television cameras. On air he dominated the screen, his presence imposing. Off camera, he also had what Mariah thought of as his helpless-but-comic puppy-dog shtick that he cultivated especially for the attractive and—preferably—rich and well-connected women that he seemed to attract like a magnet, all of whom seemed intent on nurturing him.

Based in Vienna, Chaney was senior foreign correspondent for CBN, the Cable Broadcast News network. In the three years she and David had known him there, Mariah had watched—appalled, amazed and ultimately amused—the succession of women he had trailed on his arm who had tried to sink their hooks into him. He had been too slippery for all of them, although an aggressive blonde who called herself Princess Elsa von Schleimann had looked for a while as if she might actually reel him in.

“What are you up to?” Mariah said. “I didn’t know you were back in the States.”

“Just got in yesterday. I’m working on a story.”

“What happened to the princess?” Mariah, anxious to mask her unease, hoped the question came across as mischievous.

Chaney seemed startled, then frowned. “Found herself a real prince, I guess.” They shuffled awkwardly, the old tension rising between them like a sudden fog. Finally, Chaney broke the silence. “How have you been, Mariah?”

She glanced away into the trees, her lips pressed tight. Then she sighed and turned back to him. “All right. My daughter’s doing better. She’s settled into a new school now, here in McLean, and she’s making a good recovery.”

“I’m glad.” Chaney glanced up at the front door of the nursing home. “And David? Is there any hope?”

Mariah shook her head slowly, watching the sidewalk as she crushed a dried leaf under the toe of her shoe. “If anything, he’s losing ground. He’s been having seizures from the scar tissue on his brain. For a while, he’d been able to type a few words on the computer, but now he seems to have lost even that.” She looked up as a sudden thought occurred to her. “Are you going in to see him, Paul? He’d like that—someone from the old days, from the team.”

Chaney smiled. He had been an honorary member of the Vienna Diplomats, the haphazard team of amateur foreign hockey players that played pickup games whenever they could find an opponent and get ice time on one of Vienna’s rinks.

“I already have. That’s how I knew you were coming—a nurse told me.” He moved closer, so close, she could smell the leather of his jacket. “Can we talk?”

How was it that Paul Chaney always managed to do this to her? Mariah wondered. Make her feel vulnerable and uneasy. On alert, her defenses aroused—against what, she was never quite sure. Something.

She mustered up an apologetic grimace. “Sorry, I can’t. I have to pick up Lindsay.” She glanced at her watch, half turning away already. “I’m late. She’s waiting for me. It’s been nice seeing you, and I’m grateful to you for visiting David, but—”

Chaney moved to block her path and put his hands on her shoulders. “Please. This is important. I need to talk to you about what really happened in Vienna. About the people who did this to David—and to your daughter.”

“What are you talking about? Nobody did this. It was an accident.”

“I don’t think it was. I think it was deliberate. I’m not sure about some of the details, but I’m trying to find out.”

“Oh, no,” she said, shaking herself free of his grip. “I know you. You’re trying to come up with some sensationalist news item—Chaney’s exposé of the week. Well, forget it. There’s no story here. What happened to David and Lindsay was nothing but a horrible, ugly traffic accident.”

“Give me a break, will you? David was my friend. I wouldn’t say something like this if I didn’t believe it was true.”

“Give me a break, Paul! Do you believe you’re the only person that this thought might have occurred to? I was working in the embassy. Don’t you think I insisted that every effort be made to find out exactly what happened? We had people breathing down the necks of the Vienna Police every step of the way during that investigation. But it was an accident—so drop it, please. We’ve been through enough.”

She started down the path to the parking lot. Chaney never actually raised his voice, but it seemed to ring through the night. “It wasn’t, Mariah. And I think you know it.”

Mariah turned her head slowly to look at him over her shoulder, fixing him coldly in her gaze. “Stay away from me, Chaney—and from my family. I’m warning you.”

Across the lot, Rollie Burton watched from his vehicle, his eyes narrowed. The woman drove off, tires squealing as she pulled out. Only then did the man walk over to another car—a new white Ford that looked like a rental—and disappear in the opposite direction.

Burton pocketed the ivory-handled blade, then drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. He knew who that guy was—couldn’t remember his name, but was sure he’d seen him on TV. The news, that was it. She obviously knew him, too, although she hadn’t looked thrilled to see him. Maybe there was more to this job than he’d thought. For sure, he wasn’t happy about doing his work under the nose of some media hack. He was going to have to tread carefully.

Burton flipped the key in the ignition and put the car in gear, turning his grungy Toyota right as he headed out of the parking lot, following in the direction she had taken.

3

Mariah spotted her daughter as soon as she pulled up in front of the school. Lindsay was sitting at the top of the wide staircase at the main entrance, her mass of hair a burning bush under the overhead lights. She was deep in conversation with another young girl, and the two of them were feigning indifference to the group of boys nearby. The boys, falling over themselves in their rush to impress the girls, were performing death-defying skateboard tricks up and down the staircase. Their only reward was, alas, two pairs of pretty thirteen-year-old eyes rolled heavenward each time one of them tripped over his own gangly legs. In spite of the dread that clung to her like soot, Mariah grinned. Some things never change.

When Lindsay spotted the Volvo, she stood and waved goodbye to her friend, then started carefully down the stairs. Her arms were laden with books, and her pace stopped and started as the damaged left leg followed the stronger right, one step at a time. Mariah gripped the wheel, suppressing the urge to jump out of the car and run to take the books and offer a supporting arm. But Lindsay had thrown away her crutches a few weeks earlier and reacted angrily on those rare occasions when Mariah forgot her determination not to hover and fret. The ache in her mothering heart was less easily suppressed, however.

She leaned over and opened the passenger door. Lindsay dropped heavily into the seat, weighted down by her books. Mariah took them from her and placed them on the back seat while the girl lifted her left leg with her hands and settled it into a comfortable position before pulling in the right and shutting the door. Mariah watched her buckle up, then passed her fingers gently over Lindsay’s damp red curls, pushing the perpetually unruly mass back over her shoulders. The color was a throwback to ancient Bolt and Tardiff ancestors, it seemed, but the curls were pure David.

“Hi, kiddo. Sorry I’m late. I got held up at the home.”

Lindsay’s head snapped toward her mother, her expression shifting instantly from adolescent lightheartedness to all-too-adult anxiety. “Is Daddy all right?”

Mariah was putting the car in gear, but she paused and patted her daughter’s arm. “He’s fine, Lins. He loved your cookies.” Lindsay settled back into her seat, a smile replacing the fear in her eyes. “I was running late, that’s all.”

Lindsay shrugged. “It’s okay. Our practice went a little over. I just got out.” Mariah pulled the Volvo into the road, turning right. “Mom? Where are we going?”

“Home, of course.”

“Why are we going this way?”

Mariah glanced around, noticing where she was and realizing with a start that she had made a wrong turn. “Oh, for—”

“Hello-o! Earth to Mom—come in, Mom. Are you with us?”

“All right, all right. Sorry. I’ll pull a U-turn at the next light.”

Lindsay shook her head and then promptly launched into a long and detailed report on recent developments in the ongoing drama of thirteen-year-old social politics. Today, it seemed, two girls had decided to ostracize a third for some perceived infraction of teenage standards of decorum.

Like anyone who read all the parenting books, Mariah knew that teenagers lived in a parallel universe of strange customs and even stranger preoccupations. Still, she hadn’t quite been prepared when Lindsay suddenly turned into one of those hormone-tossed creatures.

After observing her daughter’s friends, though, Mariah had concluded that Lindsay was different, old beyond her years, more given to sober reflection. Mariah put it down to the accident and its awful consequences. Most youngsters were certain that they were invulnerable. Lindsay had learned early—too early—what a fragile illusion that was. Under the circumstances, it was probably a good sign that Lindsay could get caught up in the same trivial issues as her friends.

“Isn’t that mean, Mom?”

Mariah had only been half listening, waiting for a break in the on-coming traffic so she could turn around, thrown off by meeting Chaney again.

“What? Oh—for sure,” Mariah said, snapping back into focus. “So what did you do about it?”

“I told Megan I thought she wasn’t being fair and that I didn’t care what she said, Jenna was still my friend. Boy! It makes me so mad!” Lindsay folded her arms across her chest, eyes flashing.

Mariah smiled. “Good for you, kiddo. You’re a loyal friend. Don’t let the mob mentality rule.”

“Yeah,” Lindsay said, her lower lip jutting out as she nodded. “Some people think they know it all—like the rest of us should just sit back and let them rule the world!”

Dieter Pflanz knew something about what it took to rule the world—or at least, manage good chunks of it. And he knew how easily that control could be lost if you didn’t pay attention to details.

He glanced at his watch, calculating the time back East. Ignoring the sleek designer telephone on his desk, Pflanz reached into a cabinet behind him and pulled out a sliding shelf on which sat a bulkier unit. He turned a key next to the number pad and punched in a series of digits. Spinning his chair to face a big plate-glass window, he leaned back and propped his feet on the sill. A digital click in his ear traced the signal of the long-distance call. Crooking the telephone receiver against his shoulder, Pflanz picked up an India rubber ball from his desk, powerful fingers compressing the dense sphere as he watched the scene below him.

The California sun was still well above the western horizon. From his eighteenth-story aerie in McCord Tower, at the heart of Newport Center, Pflanz could see the late-afternoon surfers heading toward the beach, the diehards braving the cold December surf in wet suits. He shook his head as he watched all the cars with surfboard-laden roof racks wending their way along the Coast Highway. Despite the fact that he’d been based here for a decade now, he had never gotten used to the southern California life-style. “Laid-back” was not in Dieter Pflanz’s vocabulary. The daily sight of beaches packed with strapping young surfers and volleyball players only filled him with contempt. It was symptomatic of a society gone soft.

The telephone at the other end of the line began to ring as the connection was completed. Halfway through the third ring, it was picked up. “Hello?”

“It’s me. Going to scramble.”

“Roger.”

Pflanz punched a button under the telephone keypad. After a brief delay, a light began to flash on the unit. At the other end of the line, he knew, a similar light would be flashing. A long beep following a series of short ones confirmed that the scrambler was operational. From here on in, anyone trying to monitor the call would hear nothing but a piercing whine. Only the synchronized software of the two machines was capable of decoding the electronic gobbledygook passing across the connection.

“Okay,” Pflanz said. “We’re set.”

“I’ve been expecting your call. How’s it going?”

“We’re coming in tomorrow. There’s one stop en route—a charity thing. We arrive in D.C. in the evening. McCord sees the President on Friday.”

“I heard. He’s up to speed.”

“Good.”

“What about New Mexico?”

“It’s on for tonight.”

“Tonight? Jesus, Dieter! So soon?”

“We have no choice. Everything’s in place. Either we do it tonight or we miss the window of opportunity.”

“Are you sure about this? If anything goes wrong, this could blow up in our faces.”

Pflanz squeezed the rubber ball tighter. “Nothing’s going to go wrong, George. Not,” he added pointedly, “like that mess in Vienna.”

There was a long sigh on the other end of the line. “Hell, don’t talk to me about that. We’re still cleaning up.”

“What about the woman? She’s back in operation now?”

“She’s nothing to worry about.”

“She hasn’t made the connection?”

“No. She’s off the file and preoccupied with her family. Trust me—Mariah Bolt poses no threat to us.”

“She’d better not,” Pflanz growled. “All right, look—I’ll call you when I get in tomorrow.”

“No. Call me tonight, when you hear from New Mexico.”

“It’ll be late.”

“You’ve got my home number. Call. I’ll be up till I hear.”

“Roger.”

Pflanz cradled the receiver and closed the cabinet housing the secure phone. Then he leaned back and watched the sun sinking lower toward the Pacific.

A big man, with a hawk’s beak for a nose and hands like bulldozer shovels, Pflanz still looked at forty-nine as if he belonged in jungle fatigues instead of the corporate uniform that he mostly wore these days. Despite the suit, though, no one would mistake him for anything but a security man—the ever-watchful, hooded eyes missed nothing. His massive shoulders hunched forward, giving him the appearance of a bird of prey poised for takeoff.

He had spent a quarter of a century mounting complex security operations, first as a CIA covert operative, then as chief of security for McCord Industries. McCord’s head office was in Newport Beach, California, with subsidiaries in eleven American cities and fourteen other branches worldwide. It was a multifaceted business with diverse interests ranging from electronics to construction engineering, with dozens of difficult foreign projects that sometimes demanded special arrangements to ensure the safety of the employees. And the extracurricular activities of the company’s president and CEO, Angus McCord, added yet another dimension to Pflanz’s security duties.

You have to pay attention to detail, he told himself again—even the tiniest. That’s the key to success. You can’t leave anything to chance because it’s the little things, the loose ends, that are sure to foul you up. Despite the assurances on the other end of the line a moment earlier, he’d been convinced all along that the Vienna episode had left too many loose ends—loose ends that he himself had already begun to tidy up.

Rollie Burton’s battered green Toyota was parked across the road and down the street a little way from Mariah’s condo in McLean, but the town house was still dark. He had lost her in heavy rush-hour traffic outside the nursing home, but from the look of things, he had beaten her here. When he finally spotted the Volvo coming up the street, the sight of two figures in the front seat gave him a jolt. He peered closely as the car passed under a streetlight. Oh, shit, he thought—she’s got a kid. The voice had conveniently neglected to mention that.

The garage door began to rise as the Volvo approached the driveway. Burton slumped in his seat, tugging a baseball cap low over his eyes, watching the car pull into the garage. The brake lights flashed and then went dark as she killed the engine. Inside the lit garage he could see an interior door leading into the town house. When the automatic door began to drop, Burton glanced at the sweep hand on his watch: It took about five seconds to close.

The garage was on the side of the house facing the street, he noted, taking careful stock of the landscape. There was a cedar hedge running along one side of the driveway, with open lawn extending down to a cross street on the other. No prying neighbors. He nodded in satisfaction—good cover and a quick escape route.

The front door was around the corner of the town house, facing a footpath. It was part of a network of well-treed walkways and ravines that ran throughout the parklike condominium complex, radiating like a spiderweb from a recreation center at the hub. The trees were mostly evergreens, pine and spruce, casting deep shadows. Good possibilities there, too, he thought. Maybe she was a jogger. Burton loved joggers.

Then he pursed his lips, weighing the problem of her daughter. Nobody was paying him for the kid, and he had no intention of getting caught. But if he ever was—God forbid—he knew what happened to prison inmates who offed kids. On the other hand, he could wait forever to catch her alone at home.

First the reporter, now this—I don’t need this kind of grief, he thought, exasperated. Why can’t things ever be as simple as they seem?

Gathering up her briefcase, Mariah again resisted the temptation to carry in Lindsay’s books, walking ahead into the house as her daughter reached into the back of the car for her things. By the time Lindsay came into the kitchen, Mariah had already opened the freezer and was examining the neat piles of plastic storage containers, their contents labeled and dated, part of the determined effort she had been making in recent months to try to get the chaos of her life under control. She withdrew a chicken cacciatore left over from one of the double-size recipes she prepared on weekends, put it into the microwave and shrugged out of her coat. She fixed Lindsay with a frown as the girl stood poised to drape her own jacket over a kitchen chair. Lindsay sighed deeply, rolling her eyes. Mariah pursed her lips, then held out her hand for the jacket that Lindsay handed over with a winning smile.

The rewinding hum of the answering machine greeted Mariah when she returned from the hall closet. Lindsay was hunched over the kitchen counter, pen poised as the machine began to play back messages. Typically, they all seemed to be for her. It was a mystery how, after a full day spent together, so much urgent business could accumulate among a bunch of thirteen-year-olds in the two short hours since junior high had been dismissed. Mariah set a pot of water to boil for the pasta as a string of disembodied adolescent voices crackled across the kitchen. Just as she began chopping vegetables for the salad, the machine beeped again and Mariah froze at the sound of a deep, professionally modulated voice.

“Mariah? It’s Paul Chaney. I’m staying at the Dupont Plaza. I’m only in town for a few days, but we really do need to talk. Call me, please.” He gave a room and phone number before ringing off.

Lindsay was madly writing down the numbers as the message ended and the machine rewound itself. “Mom! That’s the TV guy who used to play hockey with Daddy in Vienna, isn’t it?”

Mariah nodded, then turned back to chopping vegetables. It was the last message on the machine—he must have headed straight for a phone as soon as she left him at the nursing home. The knife came down hard as she slashed at a piece of celery. “Time to wash up for dinner,” she said.

“Are you going to call him, Mom?”

“I doubt it. Can you set the table, please?”

“Why not?”

“The table, Lindsay.”

“Okay, okay. I’m setting.”

Lindsay limped over to the cupboard and began taking out dishes. Mariah watched her daughter’s slim shoulders as she reached for plates. Coppery curls tumbled down the back of the girl’s gray sweatshirt. During the ten months Lindsay had been recuperating—first in a wheelchair, then, until recently, in a leg brace and hunched over crutches—she had grown phenomenally. Now that she was upright again, it came as a shock to Mariah that this child—her baby—had already surpassed her own five foot two and might even overshoot David’s five-eight.

She’s no baby anymore, Mariah thought—not after everything she’s been through—and she doesn’t deserve this dismissive exercise of parental authority. She closed her eyes briefly and took a deep breath. “I’ve got a ton of work at the office, honey. I just don’t think I’ve got time for Mr. Chaney this week, that’s all.”

“It sounds kind of important,” Lindsay said, setting out plates and cutlery. “I mean, he seemed really anxious for you to call.”

“I hardly know the guy. And to be perfectly honest, I never thought much of him when we were in Vienna, even if he was your dad’s buddy. Anyhow, he’s probably just calling to be polite. Reporters,” she added scornfully, “they make everything sound like a national crisis. I’ll call if I get a minute, maybe.”

Lindsay shrugged and Mariah changed the subject as they moved to the table.

The evening, as always, passed in a weary blur of homework and piano practice, housework and laundry. It was nine-thirty when Mariah went into Lindsay’s room to encourage her to pack it in for the night. The lights were on but Lindsay was in bed under the covers, her eyes closed. In one hand she held David’s old harmonica. Mariah stood for a moment watching her, swallowing the lump she felt rising in her throat.

The radio was vibrating with an insistent beat, the bass turned up to the max. Mariah reached over to lower the volume and then moved around the room, picking up discarded clothes with a sigh and depositing them in the laundry hamper before turning back to the bed. Posters of rock stars and TV idols stared down at her, strangely juxtaposed with others of puppies and kittens. Old stuffed toys took up so much of the bed that Mariah always wondered how Lindsay managed to turn over at night. Despite regular urging that she cull the herd, however, Lindsay insisted that every one of the fuzzy creatures was indispensable.

Bending over the bed, Mariah tried to remove the harmonica without disturbing her, but Lindsay’s eyes opened, glistening, as soon as Mariah touched her hand. She sat down on the edge of the bed, reaching out to stroke her daughter’s cheek. “Is your leg bothering you?” Lindsay nodded miserably. “I’ll get you some Tylenol and the heating pad,” Mariah said, rising.

“Mom?”

Mariah had been moving toward the bathroom, but she stopped and looked at the girl.

“I miss Daddy so much,” Lindsay whispered, tears washing over her dark eyes.

Mariah sat back down and wrapped her daughter in her arms, rocking her gently and stroking her hair. As the child sobbed, her own chest and throat ached with the effort of holding back tears. “I know, Lins,” she whispered. “So do I.”

Lindsay buried her face in her mother’s shoulder. As her crying subsided, she caught her breath in great, shuddering sighs. Her voice, when it came, was muffled against Mariah’s body. “I have such awful thoughts sometimes. I know I should be thankful we weren’t killed. But when I think about Daddy—how he is now, in that place,” she said, pulling back and looking down guiltily, “I feel so angry. Sometimes I even hate him—and then I hate myself for feeling like that.”

Mariah stroked her hair. “It’s normal to feel angry, honey. What happened in Vienna isn’t fair. It’s horrible and not fair—to you, to me and especially to Daddy. Can you imagine how much he wants to be here with us?” Lindsay nodded. “But sometimes life isn’t fair—you just found that out sooner than most kids. It won’t always feel this bad, I promise. Just give it some time. And you know what?” she added, lifting her daughter’s chin. “I couldn’t have handled what happened to you and Daddy if you hadn’t been such a terrific kid. I’m proud of you, Lins—and I’m so glad you’re my daughter.”

Lindsay’s lip quivered even as she smiled, and she threw her arms around her mother’s shoulders. They held on to each other for a little while. Then Mariah tucked her securely under the covers. “You’d better get some sleep if you’re going to go back tomorrow to battle Megan the tyrant. Let me get your tablets and heating pad.”

When Mariah turned out the lights a few minutes later, her daughter was snuggled under the blankets, hugging a bald teddy bear and looking calmer. Mariah kissed her, then stepped out of the room and closed the door behind her.

Moving into the living room, she settled wearily onto the sofa and opened her briefcase, pulling out a stack of magazines and press clippings. The best part of highly classified work was that it wasn’t supposed to be brought home, however hectic things might be at the office. While Mariah could use her evenings to catch up on press speculations on her most recent area of study—the interwoven networks of international terrorism—the top-secret reports to which she had access at the Central Intelligence Agency weren’t something to be left lying around on coffee tables. Spot checks of briefcases at the agency’s exits ensured that overzealous employees didn’t attempt to carry out the crown jewels.

She started to read a few press clippings, but found it impossible to focus on the printed words. The feeling was rising in her again—the gut-wrenching anxiety that she tried to block out by concentrating on Lindsay and the daily effort to rebuild some normalcy in their lives. Why did Paul Chaney have to show up today, after all this time? What kind of game was he playing now? Why would he say it wasn’t an accident when she knew for a fact that it was?

She had told Chaney only part of the truth, of course. He had no idea of her CIA connections nor that the Company, and not just the embassy, had gone over David and Lindsay’s accident with a fine-tooth comb to rule out any possibility of foul play. And although Mariah had been too busy running between hospital rooms to take part herself, someone she trusted absolutely had seen to it that no stone was left unturned in the Company’s investigation of the disaster. No, Mariah thought, the bottom line is that Chaney doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

She leaned back and massaged her temples, then glanced at her watch. Propping her feet on the coffee table, she grabbed the television remote and flicked on the ten o’clock news. As the screen began to glow, two figures came into view—the “CBN Nightly News” anchors. They fit the standard TV-news format. The man, Bob Michaels, was in his mid-forties, telegenic, conservatively dressed, sober. Beverly Chin, by comparison, was younger, more brightly dressed and seated on the right side of the screen, where the eye is naturally drawn. She smiled a great deal, although her face became serious when she read from the TelePrompTer. Her Chinese features and the good looks of the African-American weatherman brought a politically correct racial balance to the news team.

The newscast opened with the latest on the aftermath of a terrorist triple-header that had occurred three days earlier. Forty-seven deaths and scores of injuries had resulted when bombs had exploded simultaneously in London’s Trafalgar Square, Paris’s Eiffel Tower and at the Statue of Liberty in New York. The horrifying brilliance of the attacks—their stunning coordination and the pointed symbolism of the three targets, all objects of intense national pride—was such that dozens of groups had jumped in to claim responsibility and threaten further action if their demands were not met. A coordinated intelligence effort had narrowed the field of probable attackers to one fundamentalist religious group and two “liberation fronts.”

Mariah watched the item closely. Now that the Soviet Union was defunct, she had been assigned a new focus of analysis. She was in the middle of drafting a paper on the arms market for interconnected terrorist groups and she thought she might have uncovered a new supplier with possible links to Libya. There was no evidence of a connection to this ghastly terrorist triple play—not yet, anyway—but she was determined to keep at it, knowing that a coordinated assault like this had to have had strong and experienced backing.

The news report, however, told her nothing she didn’t already know. When it ended, the screen shifted back to the grave features of anchorman Bob Michaels.

“The Cold War may be over, but there seems no end to troubles in the former Soviet Union. There was rioting again today in the streets of Moscow, as another cold Russian winter sets in and food shortages loom large. Correspondent Paul Chaney reports that some cash-strapped Russians may become desperate enough to try to sell the country’s nuclear arsenal.”

Mariah’s heart began to pound. She leaned forward in her seat as the tall, lean figure of Paul Chaney appeared on the screen, standing in front of the State Department building. He was wearing a sport coat and tie instead of the habitual bomber jacket—his concession to the camera. It looked as if the report had been videotaped earlier in the day.

“Since the end of the Cold War, the Russian and American governments have agreed to drastic cuts in nuclear arsenals. Thousands of weapons researchers have seen their funding disappear as the former superpowers cut weapons programs to cash in the promised ‘Peace Dividend,’ freeing up military funds for domestic purposes.

“But there are those who would be willing to pay a high price for these cast-off weapons—and for the experts to operate them. In Vienna, the International Atomic Energy Agency—the IAEA—has been fighting for more power to inspect nuclear weapons sites to ensure that these arsenals are destroyed as promised. The IAEA has also proposed a registry of nuclear scientists to make certain that these specialists don’t auction off their skills to the highest bidder.

“I asked an official here at the State Department why our government has not been more supportive of the IAEA’s efforts.”

The scene shifted to an office, where a white-haired man in a pin-striped suit sat, hands folded, behind a desk. A line on the screen identified him as William Hoskmeyer of the State Department’s Nuclear Affairs Division. Mariah knew him well—he was a pompous idiot.

Hoskmeyer: “I think you have to see it as a question of equity. If we insist that the Russians allow snap inspections by outsiders of their nuclear facilities, then they have every right to insist that we do the same. Frankly, we’re not prepared to do that—to give foreigners unrestricted access to American security installations.”

Chaney: “So how do we know that Russian weapons and expertise won’t end up in the pockets of madmen and terrorists in exchange for much-needed dollars?”

Hoskmeyer: “Because Moscow is as committed as we are to nuclear nonproliferation. We’re confident that the agreements on force reduction that we’ve struck with the Russians will be fully respected—both the letter and the spirit. And we’re monitoring closely, of course.”

The scene shifted back to Chaney in front of the State Department building. “Despite Washington’s apparent lack of concern, there is evidence that unstable governments and terrorist groups are scrambling to acquire nuclear weapons—and that whistle-blowers in the IAEA are being silenced. Some of these potential customers can pay top dollar for smuggled nuclear weapons and the specialists to handle them. If they succeed, we may find ourselves looking back fondly on the Cold War—when only Moscow and Washington appeared likely to blow up the planet.

“Paul Chaney—CBN—Washington.”

The news continued, but Mariah wasn’t listening to the television anymore. She snapped off the set, staring numbly at the disappearing glow.

David had been working in Vienna for the International Atomic Energy Agency and had been in the forefront of IAEA officials seeking greater powers to stop the spread of nuclear weapons—and Paul knew it.

But what Chaney couldn’t know was that it was Mariah herself—not David—who had blown the whistle on a suspected nuclear weapons ring. And that if David and Lindsay’s accident in Vienna had been an attempt to silence a whistle-blower, it should have been Mariah—not David—who was the target.

“But it wasn’t,” Mariah whispered. “Dammit, Chaney. I would have been the first to know.”

No one could have guessed that the five men at the corner table were doomed.

They were sitting in the Trinity Bar (“Live Country Music Every Nite!”) just on the outskirts of Taos, New Mexico. Around them, the usual Wednesday-night crowd of ranch hands and laborers, most in jeans and Stetsons, moved through the smoky haze to the rhythm of a steel guitar. At the front of the bar, a singer in a fringed shirt stood under a spotlight, his throaty twang straining to be heard as he begged Ruby not to take her love to town.

Admittedly, the three Russians were a little conspicuous. In the crowd of sweat-soaked Stetsons and dust-lined faces, their crisp Levi’s marked them as dudes. And the new white cowboy hats looked incongruous above round Slavic faces. The two Americans with them seemed drab by comparison: rumpled corduroy pants, casual shirts and down ski jackets. The younger one—thirtyish maybe—wore wire-rimmed glasses patched at the nosepiece with adhesive tape. The other man was in his fifties, white-haired, with a weary countenance.

Five matching black leather briefcases on the floor under the table provided the clue to the brotherhood that united the men. Each case bore a gold-lettered inscription stenciled in the corner: Los Alamos National Laboratory. Their obituaries would note how the five former enemies perished together just at the moment they had joined forces to put their scientific genius to work for the benefit of mankind.

A tired-looking waitress, eyes ringed with black mascara, bleached hair teased and sprayed to defy the law of gravity, balanced a tray on her hip as she deposited another round of drinks on the table and cleared the remains of the last round. Five pairs of eyes were fixed on the low neckline of her ruffled white blouse each time she bent over to put down or pick up a glass or bottle. “That’s five Coors and four vodkas straight up, right, boys?” she said, straining to be heard over the music.

“But Russian vodka, yes?” Blue almond eyes sparkled in a flushed round face, watching the topside of her breasts roll with her up-and-down movements.

The waitress raised her eyes heavenward and nodded without breaking the rhythm of her work. “Yeah, yeah—Smirnoff—good Russian vodka.” The two Americans at the table exchanged amused glances. “That’s twenty-four-fifty, fellas.”

Larry Kingman dropped a twenty and a ten on her tray. Once again, as he had on the last two rounds, he waved away the change she had begun to count out.

“Well, thanks! Thanks a lot,” the waitress said, taking a real good look at him now and smiling warmly. “You just holler if you need anything else, okay?”

Kingman smiled and nodded. The woman lingered a moment, then wandered reluctantly over to a table where some good ol’ boys were calling loudly for refills. Kingman raised one of the shot glasses of vodka and held it out over the center of the table, looking at each of the other four faces in turn. “To the future, gentlemen. To science.”

The Russians lifted the three remaining shot glasses. “Na zhdoroviye,” they said in unison, tossing back the clear liquor, then slapping the glasses down on the stained wooden tabletop and reaching for the beer chasers.

Kingman directed an inquiring eyebrow at the younger American seated next to him. Scott Bowker was frowning, but he grasped one of the beer glasses, touching it briefly to his lips. Kingman shook his white head as he watched the younger man. “What’s up?”

Bowker glanced at the Russians, then around the room. “We shouldn’t be drinking like this.”

Kingman leaned back in his chair and smiled indulgently. “Relax, Scotty. We’ll let you be designated driver, okay?” Bowker’s frown deepened even further. “Re-lax,” Kingman repeated. “Everything is under control. Now, enjoy.”

One of the Russians, at Bowker’s left, grinned and put an arm around his shoulders, squeezing good-naturedly. “Larry is right. Enjoy! We are allies now—comrades in a common struggle. The Cold War is finished and we, my serious friend, have all won. Now,” he added, “we work on the same side.” The Russian raised his glass and nodded above the brim before taking another swallow of beer. The others echoed his nod. Scott Bowker looked pointedly at his watch, then at Kingman.

“Yup,” Kingman acknowledged. “It’s getting late. We should be going, boys. Tomorrow’s a big day.”

The five men drained their glasses, then stood and gathered up their briefcases. Kingman shifted uncomfortably, stretching out knees that were stiff and swollen after three days of playing guide for the Russian visitors. He trailed the others to the door, offering a nod and a warm smile as he limped past the blond waitress.

“’Bye now,” she said, giving him a wistful wave. “You come again, okay?”

They walked out of the beer-and-smoke fog of the tavern and into the cold night air of the New Mexico desert. The parking lot was full: pickups and old beaters, a few motorcycles, gaudy yellow license plates proclaiming New Mexico—Land of Enchantment. Kingman tossed a set of keys to Bowker as the men approached a minivan. Bowker unlocked the doors and the Russians slipped into the back seats. Kingman shut the sliding rear door and climbed into the front passenger seat.

They pulled out of the parking lot and turned south on NM 68, the main highway linking Taos and Los Alamos. The men fell silent, contemplating the landscape eerily lit by a cloud-draped moon over the Sangre de Cristo—the Blood of Christ—Mountains. A powdery snow had been falling while they were inside and it muffled the sound of the tires on the road. The Pueblo Indians believe that the spirits of the dead linger on the mesas of New Mexico, guarding the land. In this spectral glow and eerie silence, it was easy enough to believe that ghosts were hovering nearby. Watching and waiting.

The highway curved along the banks of the Rio Grande, hugging the line of the rushing river. It was past midnight and the road was virtually deserted. As the van sped along toward Española and the Los Alamos turnoff, a single pair of lights could be seen approaching from far off, flashing between the hills.

Kingman rolled down his window, the wispy white strings of his breath escaping into the night. He inhaled deeply, drinking in the cold, fresh air—infinitely preferable to the hops-and nicotine-soaked atmosphere of the Trinity Bar. Then he rolled the window up again and glanced back at the men in the rear of the van. The two Russians on the rear-most bench were heavy-eyed, their heads lolling with the motion of the vehicle, on the edge of dropping off to sleep. But Yuri Sokolov, sitting on the center bank of seats, had his gaze fixed on the road ahead, his thoughts impenetrable but obviously stone-cold sober, despite his consumption at the Trinity Bar.

At fifty-two, Sokolov was acknowledged in the arcane world of nuclear physics as the most brilliant mind in the field. Until recently, of course, his reputation in the West had been based entirely on the discoveries of meticulous spycraft, since he had never before stepped outside the Soviet weapons community, nor knowingly circulated a paper in the West.

Sokolov glanced briefly at Kingman, then focused again on the road ahead, watching the snow spinning through the van’s headlights—remembering Moscow nights, perhaps. They were intellectual brothers, Kingman reflected, forced to live their lives as enemies until suddenly, one day, someone had decided to change the rules. Now they had a common purpose—always had, maybe. The vagaries of politics irritated him. There was neither method nor reason to human behavior, and politicians were more irrational than most. Only science was constant, sane.

The single set of headlights rolling north on NM 68 toward the van belonged to a tanker truck making a night run to Taos. Diamond-shaped plaques on the tanker noted the contents as gasoline—hazardous material, highly flammable. The rig was hauling over eight thousand gallons of unleaded fuel and doing sixty on the open road.

When the two vehicles collided, the explosion could be heard all the way to Taos. The fireball rose eighty feet into the air, lighting up the night sky, although the only immediate witnesses to the event were jackrabbits and owls. The heat generated by the fire was enough to twist steel into Silly Putty and incinerate anything else unfortunate enough to be caught in the vicinity. Within a matter of seconds, even the asphalt road was ablaze.

Another car traveling south on NM 68 came upon the accident six minutes after the collision. After realizing that nothing could have survived the inferno, the driver turned back toward Taos to telephone for help from the Trinity Bar. When the emergency vehicles arrived, there was nothing they could do but try to keep the blaze from spreading to the surrounding juniper and piñon trees. It took three hours for the fire to burn itself out. Fire fighters doused the site with foam to guard against another flare-up, but this only served to seal the tomb.

The next day, curiosity seekers from both sides of the closed highway swarmed over the hills for a look, but nothing was left at the scene except a surreal metal sculpture, smoldering ash and the stench of burnt rubber.

A piece of evidence that had miraculously survived the impact of the crash and resulting blaze—the van’s rear license plate—allowed state police to trace the ownership and determine that it had been signed out to Dr. Lawrence Kingman, deputy director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who had been squiring around some scientists visiting New Mexico under the Russia/U.S. Nuclear Cooperation Pact. Someone at Los Alamos remembered that Kingman and a few others attending a dinner at the Hilltop House Hotel earlier that evening had headed down the mesa for drinks afterward.

The police spoke to a waitress at the Trinity Bar who clearly remembered the group and was able to confirm that there had been three Russians and two Americans. The Russkies had been obvious, she’d said, rolling her eyes at the memory of the new cowboy getups they had worn. The table had ordered several drinks over a couple of hours, although they hadn’t been staggering or anything when they left. She was really sad to hear about the accident—the older American had seemed like a good guy.

The federal government took a close interest in the follow-up investigation and insisted that the van and the remains of its occupants be returned. The coroner explained that anything they scraped off the melted highway would consist primarily of American automotive technology and very little by way of identifiable human remains. Investigators were sifting through the rubble, but the blaze appeared to have made as effective a funeral pyre as any crematorium could boast, if a little less tidy.

All the same, the federal men were insistent, and around northern New Mexico everyone knew that you didn’t argue with the feds. They had played a mysterious role in the area ever since World War II, when Manhattan Project scientists working at Los Alamos had conducted a top-secret test—code-named Trinity—of the world’s first atomic bomb. The Trinity test had led directly to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of the war with Japan.

If the feds wanted a bulldozed pile of ashes and twisted steel, the coroner decided, they were welcome to it.

4

His secretary hadn’t arrived yet when Mariah entered her chief’s office the next morning to go over the report on the terrorist arms connection. Frank Tucker was there, though, standing at the window and talking on the phone. She hesitated in the doorway, but he spotted her and waved her in, raising a finger to indicate he would be done in a minute.

Perching herself on the edge of his desk, Mariah examined the dusty framed photos of his kids and grandson while she waited. She picked up the picture of Carol, Frank’s daughter, standing in a wedding dress beside her husband, Michael. They had been married four years earlier, just a few weeks before Mariah and David had left for Vienna. Examining the picture, Mariah smiled as she remembered Frank’s uncharacteristic beam when he had walked his daughter down the aisle. His only regret, he’d said, was that his wife hadn’t been there to see their daughter happily married.

Next to the wedding picture was a shot of baby Alex, Carol’s son— “the ankle biter,” Frank called him, his pride obvious behind his good-natured grumbling. He had been born eight months earlier, but the only photo Frank seemed to have was the infant’s hospital picture, little Alex’s face red and squashed like that of every newborn babe since the beginning of time—Lindsay included, Mariah thought, touching the photo with a soft smile. She returned the baby’s picture to its place on Frank’s desk and picked up the remaining frame.

And then there was Stephen, Carol’s twin. The high school graduation photo was at least ten years old. Joanne Tucker’s leukemia had been diagnosed when the twins were two, and they were fifteen when Frank’s wife finally lost her battle with the disease. Carol had become the family’s mother substitute during the long crisis, but Stephen had reacted with anger and defiance, most of it directed against Frank. It hadn’t been an easy time for either of them. Maybe it would have happened, anyway, Mariah thought, a normal conflict between a strong-willed father and an equally stubborn son. In the end, after a period of sullen rebellion and minor scrapes with school authorities, Stephen had finally managed to pull his act together. Now, at twenty-eight, he was a computer specialist deep in the bowels of the CIA. But despite the fact that he had followed his father into the Company, the two were still as different—and incompatible—as night and day.

Frank hung up the phone and turned to Mariah. “Okay, what have you got for me?”

“The latest take on that new arms link,” she said, slipping off the edge of the desk and into a chair across from him. “You know, I still don’t know why we’re doing this, Frank.”

“Doing what?”

“Chasing crazy Irishmen and Libyans and Iranians and God knows who else. How did we get into the terrorist game? You and I are supposed to be Soviet experts.”

“Times have changed. The Soviet Union is kaput.”

“Yes, but their nukes aren’t. Why didn’t they make you head of the new nonproliferation unit? You were the logical choice—and that’s where I wanted to be, too.”

“Call it career development. Guess they decided we should widen our focus a bit. Anyway,” he said, more briskly, “let’s get on with this report. That was the seventh floor on the phone just now. The director wants to read it over the weekend, so we’re going to have to hustle and get this baby delivered.”

“It’s under control.”

Frank nodded. He was the one who had recruited her into the Agency and had been something of a mentor for much of the past sixteen years. Mariah knew he had total confidence in her.

Tucker had approached her on the recommendation of one of her professors when she was doing her graduate degree at Berkeley. She had met with him one afternoon in an off-campus office—a huge man, completely bald except for bushy black eyebrows that seemed to be compensating for the deficit of hair on the rest of his head. Years later—over a late-night glass of Frank’s secret stock of Glenlivet that they had broken out to celebrate the closing of a difficult file—Mariah had given in and asked him whether he shaved his head for the pristine bowling-ball effect. He did.

She could have a bright future with the CIA, Frank had said. They were looking for people like her with a strong understanding of the Soviet Union and its military capabilities. She had been astonished, then a little appalled, when she realized that this intimidating man from CIA headquarters at Langley was serious about offering her a job. It was the mid-seventies. The Vietnam War had just ended and “peace, love and good vibes” was still the operative theme on American campuses. The CIA, to put it mildly, was not in good odor—especially at Berkeley.

All the same, Mariah had spent several years studying the Soviet threat and she had no illusions about Moscow’s ambitions, either. It was just naïve, she was convinced, to think you could face down that kind of threat without decent intelligence work. She had never seen herself in the spook business, but Tucker’s offer had been intriguing, his arguments persuasive as he talked about the importance of solid intelligence analysis to avoid the snake pits out there.

But Mariah and David had become seriously involved by then and he had already been offered the job at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, so she turned Tucker down and followed David to New Mexico. But then, six months later, she left New Mexico and said yes to a career as a CIA analyst, after all—even if it also meant the end of her relationship with David. That didn’t seem to be going anywhere, anyway.

Mariah had gone through the basic Company training program and had then been sent to work as an analyst in the Soviet section headed by Frank Tucker, undaunted by his reputation as a chief who ate analysts for breakfast. To be sure, working with Tucker was challenging. The fierce glare of the beetle dark eyes under those black eyebrows had terrified a legion of analysts.

And no secretary had stayed with Tucker for more than a few weeks until Personnel had finally had the wit to park Patricia Bonelli outside his door, a New Jersey native with a truck driver’s vocabulary who could give as good as she got when Frank Tucker got too far out of line. Someone had once told Mariah that Patty and Frank had a legendary, rip-roaring battle the first day she came on stream. But when Frank realized that Personnel had sent him the female equivalent of Genghis Khan as a secretary, he broke down and roared with laughter—much to the amazement of the trembling staff in the section, who had expected a bloodbath.

His secretary had been with him for almost twenty years now. When Mariah had appeared on the scene, Patty had recognized a kindred spirit and had explained the fundamentals of dealing with Frank Tucker. They boiled down to this, she said: never cringe, never apologize, and never—but never—screw up. Easier said than done, maybe, but it suited Mariah to a T. She had worked with Tucker, off and on, for most of her career since.

“Are you okay, Mariah? You look dead on your feet.”

She glanced up sharply. Frank Tucker could never be accused of being the most sensitive man in the world. If he thought she was looking tired, she must look god-awful.

“I’m fine. I didn’t sleep very well last night.” She hesitated, debating whether or not to raise the subject of Chaney. But they had been over this ground many times during the investigation of the accident. Mariah knew what Frank’s reaction to Chaney’s claims would be and she knew who she trusted. It wasn’t Paul Chaney. Leave it, she decided—don’t keep picking at this scab. Let it heal. “Where were we?”

“You were telling me about the Libyan connection.”

“Right. Tripoli station has an asset who says Libya may be shipping arms through the island of Madeira.”

“Have the birds picked up anything?”

Mariah nodded. “I was down with the satellite recon boys yesterday. There was a shipment out of Tripoli three weeks ago on a state-owned Libyan vessel. The birds picked up markings on the crates that said they contained tomatoes, but the Libyans don’t usually export vegetables to Madeira. And there was an awful lot of security watching over those so-called tomatoes.”

“What happened to the crates in Madeira?”

“The photo resolution isn’t quite as clear as on the pictures from Tripoli, but the Libyan ship off-loaded some crates onto a smaller ship. They look to be the same ones. That ship subsequently set sail for Le Havre, France.”

“That’s a long, roundabout trip for tomatoes,” Tucker said, tapping a pen against his big knee. “From Le Havre, of course, it’s just a short hop to Paris or across the channel to the U.K. These guys could conceivably have supplied both the Trafalgar and the Eiffel bombers.”

“Yup,” Mariah agreed. “Except the crates weren’t on board when the ship docked at Le Havre. French Customs inspected the hold after a quiet suggestion from our station in Paris, but they found no tomatoes—nor anything else resembling the crates loaded in Madeira.”

“Were there other ports of call before Le Havre?”

“We don’t think so, but there are several thousand miles of open sea between the two points and the ship wasn’t under constant satellite surveillance. NSA was monitoring the boat’s communications, but they didn’t hear anything unusual.”

“They could have had a prearranged silent rendezvous with yet another vessel and done a quick transfer on the high seas,” Frank’s pen took up a staccato beat on his knee. “So who owns the ship out of Madeira?”

“It’s a Liberian-registered vessel belonging to Niarchos Transport.”

“The Greek outfit?”

“Ah, well—here’s where it gets interesting,” Mariah said. “Niarchos was bought out last year by a company called Triton Transport, which is in turn owned by another company called Ramsay Investments.”

“Bloody big business! Such a spiderweb of interlocking connections. Who can figure these people out?”

“I think the idea is that we’re not supposed to figure it out too easily,” Mariah said dryly. “But you know of course that Ramsay Investments is Angus Ramsay McCord of McCord Industries.”

Tucker leaned back in his chair and whistled softly. “Great! They’re going to love this upstairs—the President’s buddy, a terrorist gunrunner.” He rolled his eyes and then fixed Mariah soberly. “Not likely, kid. Give me something I can sell.”

“Are you saying you want me to suppress the evidence?”

“No, but neither do I want us leaping to conclusions on the basis of a possible shipment of so-called tomatoes on a vessel with a tenuous link to the richest man in America—a guy with a philanthropic reputation just this side of God’s.” Mariah rolled her eyes. “I know, I know,” Tucker said. “I don’t buy that crap, either. But unless you want to spend the rest of your career counting goatherders in Ulan Bator, you’ll be very careful about linking McCord to terrorists—unless, that is, we come up with a hell of a lot more evidence than this. If it’s out there,” he added, “I personally will be more than happy to act on it. But in the meantime, tread carefully, Mariah.”

The McCord Industries Learjet taxied to a halt in front of the Fargo, North Dakota, terminal and the pilot cut the engines. Dieter Pflanz checked out the terrain, scowling at the sight of the waiting crowd. He turned to his boss, sitting across from him in one of the deep upholstered armchairs that were arranged in clublike groupings throughout the cabin.

Gus McCord’s face fell as he glanced out the window and spotted the long black limousine at the head of a caravan of vehicles lined up on the tarmac. “Aw, for crying out loud,” he moaned, turning back to the four other passengers on the private aircraft. “Jerry, I told you to tell them to keep it simple. This is embarrassing.”

A young man sitting across the cabin unbuckled his seat belt and then stood and looked over McCord’s shoulder at the retinue waiting on the runway. “I know, Gus.” Jerry Siddon grimaced apologetically as he ran a hand back though his hair. “I tried.”

“Yeah, well, try a little harder next time,” McCord grumbled. “People are gonna think I’m putting on airs.”

“Come on, dear,” Nancy McCord said, patting his arm with a smile as she rose from her seat. “They all know you wouldn’t do that. People here are proud of you, that’s all, and grateful for everything you’ve done for your hometown. Let them spoil you a little.”

Her husband seemed unconvinced as he stood up, brushed his pants and buttoned his navy blue suit jacket—bought off the rack, despite the fact that Angus Ramsay McCord was a billionaire several times over. The shirt he was wearing, like every shirt he owned, was white. The tie was typical, too—conservatively striped in muted colors. At sixty-one, he was still wiry, the suit jacket covering only the tiniest paunch. He weighed one hundred thirty-eight pounds, wringing wet, and stood only five foot six (five-eight in his elevator shoes), although the aggressively erect cut of his steel gray hair added almost another inch to his height. Under lashless lids, he had small, light brown eyes that never seemed to blink. In conversation, these eyes, like tiny copper nails, could fix people with an intensity that left them feeling impaled.

The uniformed young man who served as steward on McCord’s personal aircraft came forward from the closet in the aft section carrying a black, Russian sable coat. Nancy McCord glanced at the soft, rich fur and then out the window, where sleety gusts of snow were swirling across the black asphalt, whipsawing the legs of the people in the welcoming party. She shook her head regretfully. “No, Miguel, the blue woolen one, please.”

Miguel exchanged coats and Gus McCord took the cloth coat from him, holding it up for his wife. “That’s my girl,” he said, hiking it over her shoulders while her arms slipped down the sleeves. She turned to smile at him, her clear blue eyes enveloping him in the love that had been his anchor for the past forty years.

She’d been just nineteen years old, and Gus only twenty-one, when they had married. Cynics said Angus McCord had courted Nancy Patterson to win the favor of her father, a California businessman who had made a fortune during World War II selling equipment and spare parts to the Long Beach naval shipyard. McCord had just completed his military service as midshipman on a navy destroyer when his captain had introduced him to the industrialist. There was no doubt that having Robert Patterson as a father-in-law had helped launch McCord on the way to his first million, but Gus and Nancy had been a love match from the start. Four kids and five grandchildren later, they still were.

The steward brought out the coats of the four men on the aircraft and then hurried to open the door. An icy blast of air rushed in as Gus McCord shrugged into the tan, three-quarter-length down parka that his wife held up for him.

Pflanz pulled on his own parka, suppressing a grin at the obvious discomfort of McCord’s executive assistant. Jerry Siddon shuddered as he turned up the collar of his overcoat. A Los Angeles native, Siddon was less than ecstatic, Pflanz knew, when he had to accompany the boss on these hometown swings in wintertime. But the new neonatal unit of McCord General Hospital was opening today in Fargo. It had been planned as the most advanced facility for the care of premature babies in the northern United States and had been financed almost entirely by the McCord family. The neonatal unit, in addition to the cancer wing and the heart institute, would help cement the reputation of McCord General as one of the country’s preeminent health-care facilities, putting Gus McCord’s hometown firmly on the medical map.

Dieter Pflanz headed for the open door of the aircraft. At Pflanz’s insistence, and after a foiled kidnap attempt several years back, McCord almost always traveled with two bodyguards now. But the one place Gus refused to have the burly guards present was in his hometown, and so the bodyguards had flown ahead to McCord’s next stop in Washington, D.C. Pflanz was not in the habit of doing guard duty, but he often came along for the ride to discuss business with McCord, and the imposing presence of the former covert operative would give pause to even the most determined adversary. He patted his chest, feeling the comfortable bulge of the Smith and Wesson semiautomatic holstered under his suit jacket. He expected no trouble, but it always paid to be prepared.

Jerry Siddon nodded to the other passenger in the aircraft, and McCord Industries’ private photographer followed close behind the security chief. The photographer, Pflanz was certain, would get plenty of shots of McCord’s arrival and the opening ceremonies at the hospital. Gus McCord was being actively courted by both major parties as a possible presidential contender when the current administration’s mandate ran out. While he professed impatience with Washington, both bureaucrats and the squabblers in Congress, McCord had never firmly shut the door on a political career, dangling teasing hints from time to time that would send the parties’ politicos into a mad frenzy of courtship. It had been Jerry Siddon’s idea to keep a personal photographic record of McCord’s civic contributions.

The security chief and the photographer were the first to step out the door of the plane. Pflanz slipped on dark glasses, despite the gray overcast, while the photographer took readings on his light meter, adjusted the aperture setting on his camera and snapped a few quick shots of the waiting dignitaries.

As Pflanz descended the steps, his eyes swept over the scene, taking in the roof of a gray terminal building nearly invisible against the big, prairie winter sky. His gaze dropped to the faces pressed against the glass of the terminal’s observation lounge. Satisfied that there was no obvious danger lurking in those quarters, he took up a position near the bottom of the aircraft steps and turned his attention to the crowd on the tarmac—a dozen or so people, those in front smiling bravely while the lesser lights in the rear ranks stamped their feet against the bitter cold and blew on their hands.

The knot of dignitaries near the limo included a man Pflanz recognized as Fred Hansen, the mayor of Fargo, his wife and two hospital administrators who had visited the McCord head office in California several times. The other men and women in business dress appeared to be local bigwigs. A couple of more casually dressed men detached themselves from the crowd—press, Pflanz decided, watching them warily nevertheless. The one carrying a canvas sack focused his camera on the door of the Lear. A cameraman from the city TV station also stood peering through the lens of a video camera perched on his shoulder.

McCord’s own photographer had taken up position next to the local press when Gus and Nancy emerged from the aircraft. They waved from the top step and then descended, hand in hand, like the President and First Lady that Pflanz suspected they might someday be. Jerry Siddon followed a discreet few steps behind.

The mayor and his wife moved forward to meet the McCords, the rest of the ground party streaming after. Gus McCord dropped his wife’s hand and took the mayor’s outstretched one, slapping the politician’s shoulder with his other hand.

“There you are, Fred, you old son of a gun,” McCord said heartily. He cocked his thumb toward the limo. “You expecting the queen of England?”

The mayor chuckled. “No, Gus, we laid it on special for you. It’s a loaner from Vigan-Carlson.”

McCord threw back his head and roared. Vigan-Carlson was a local funeral parlor. “I’m not dead yet—no thanks to you,” he said, rubbing a prominent bump on the bridge of his nose.

The break had happened forty-five years earlier during a high school baseball game. It was the bottom of the ninth. Fred Hansen had flung the bat after a base hit and it had caught McCord, playing catcher, square in the face. Masks and other protective equipment were unheard of in the poor farm community just outside Fargo where the two men had grown up. They’d been lucky to have a ball and bat.

“Yeah, you always were a hardheaded old cuss,” Hansen said, grinning. He nodded in the direction of Dieter Pflanz. “You bring that guy along to make sure I don’t take another crack at it?”

“Nah! He carries Nance’s suitcases. She always was a lousy packer!” McCord grinned affectionately at his wife, who slapped his arm and then stepped forward to greet the mayor and his wife.

“Isn’t he awful? How are you, Fred?” She kissed his cheek before turning to embrace his wife. “And Stella. How good to see you. What a beautiful coat!”

Stella Hansen’s lined face, heavily caked with makeup, lit up as she stepped back from Nancy’s hug and stroked the dun-colored fox fur she was wearing. “Gorgeous, isn’t it? It’s an early Christmas present from Fred. He wanted me to have it for the opening.”

“You look lovely, and so cozy.”

“But Gus has given you a fur coat, surely,” Stella said, checking out Nancy’s cloth number.

“Nothing like yours,” Nancy said truthfully.

Stella Hansen smiled triumphantly at her husband, then turned to McCord. “Well, Gus, now you know what Nancy wants for Christmas. Aren’t you just awful not to have thought of it before?”

“You got me there, Stel,” McCord said, shrugging sheepishly. “But what do you want—I’m just a farm boy. This fancy stuff is beyond me, I swear.”

Stella’s eyes danced over him and her face folded into the layers of her most winning smile. A flake of black mascara separated from her lashes, settling on the soft pink down of her cheek. Gus McCord had been friends with Stella’s older brother when they were kids. Gus had asked her out to a school dance once but, to her everlasting regret, she had turned down the scrawny little guy in favor of the captain of the football team. Then John Lindquist—he of the boozy breath and groping hands—had gone off and gotten himself killed in Korea after his senior year, leaving Stella obliged to spend six months discreetly visiting an aunt in Minneapolis.

Watching Gus McCord now as he moved down the line of the welcoming committee, shaking hands and slapping backs, Stella marveled again at her inability back then to recognize his potential. But who could have known the hyper little guy had had it in him, for crying out loud? Of course, Gus had been smart, marrying a rich girl. Stella watched Nancy McCord as she followed close to Gus, smiling warmly at the people he introduced. It was a good thing her old man had had money, Stella thought, because Nancy had always been kind of a plain thing—always wore her hair simple, just a blunt cut curled behind her ears. She’d gone gray real early on, too, and then white, although it looked kind of nice now, Stella had to admit, kind of striking, especially with those bright blue eyes. And she was still trim—she must go to one of those fat farms that the magazines said rich people like Liz Taylor hid out in when they’d blimped out.

Stella smoothed her fox fur, grateful for the way it camouflaged her own ample body. Still, when she was younger, she’d had a body to kill for—that’s what John Lindquist had always said, and Fred had thought so, as well. He’d panted after her all through high school and had just about choked when she’d returned from Minneapolis and said she’d think about marrying him, after all. And now Fred was mayor and Stella got to ride in the back of an open convertible in the Fourth of July parade, and she got to meet some big shots, and she had a fur coat that even Nancy McCord envied. So things had turned out all right, really, even if she and Fred didn’t fly all over the world in their own private plane.

They climbed into the limousine, Gus wedged between Stella and Nancy, while Fred took up one of the jump seats facing them. Jerry Siddon slipped into the other jump seat after arranging for the photographer to ride with the TV camera crew, which was racing ahead to set up at the hospital before McCord arrived. The limo dipped when Dieter Pflanz climbed into the front passenger seat. The driver gave him a nervous smile, to which Pflanz replied with a curt nod.

During the ten-minute ride to the hospital, Fred Hansen went over the schedule one more time. “You’ll have about thirty minutes to tour the new unit before the official opening,” he told McCord. “Then we’ll have some speechifying and ribbon-cutting and such. Then it’s off to the hotel for lunch. Should be all done by around two, then we’ll get you back to the airport. Jerry here tells me you’re flying out today to Washington?”

Stella Hansen’s eyes grew wide. “Are you going to be seeing the President? What’s he really like?”

McCord shrugged. “Pretty much like most folks, Stel. Puts his pants on one leg at a time.”

She shook her head, obviously skeptical. “I can’t imagine what you must think of poor little Fargo, Gus, after all the places you’ve been and people you’ve met.”

“There’s nothing poor about a place with air as clean and people as fine as this city’s,” McCord said soberly. “Don’t ever think different, Stel.”

Glancing back, Pflanz saw Stella Hansen looking as if she would melt. He and Jerry Siddon exchanged fleeting looks of amusement as they listened to McCord charming the mayor and his wife. Siddon, Pflanz reckoned, would be calculating once again the number of months to the presidential primaries. He had listened to the eager young aide explain ad nauseam why Gus had to run. McCord had everything going for him, Siddon said—money, charisma (despite less-than-classic looks), a charming wife, nice kids and photogenic grandchildren, a Horatio Alger personal history and an outstanding record of community service. He couldn’t possibly lose.

And if Gus McCord went to the White House, Pflanz knew, Jerry Siddon intended to be there as his right hand. Siddon was thirty years old, and had been working for McCord Industries for five years after graduating from Stanford near the top of his business class. But it was his extracurricular activities on behalf of American Families of Missing Vietnam Veterans that had brought a teenage Jerry Siddon to Gus McCord’s attention. Siddon’s father had disappeared in a bombing raid over Hanoi in 1970. Jerry had been the youngest member of a delegation from the AFMVV that had approached McCord in the early eighties to help finance and organize a search for men rumored to be still alive in Vietnam. With the tacit support of the CIA, a mission had gone ahead under the direction of Dieter Pflanz and a team of quietly hired mercenaries. But the evidence the contingent obtained had been inconclusive.

As a result of that first meeting, however, Siddon had caught McCord’s eye and his sympathy. The billionaire had subsequently underwritten Siddon’s college studies and guaranteed him a job upon graduation. Siddon repaid the debt with hard work and unstinting devotion to the interests of Gus McCord. Today, those interests included reaping good PR value from the opening of the latest in a string of McCord charitable facilities.

To Pflanz, however, these hometown good deeds were just so much chaff, incidental to the real mission.

“What’s bugging you, Mariah?” Frank Tucker asked, studying her closely.

She had risen from her chair to leave his office, but when she got to the door, she hesitated, her hand resting on the knob, a frown creasing her forehead. Then she turned back to face him. “Did you see the news last night? CBN?”

Frank exhaled a long sigh and he shook his head regretfully. “Damn. I was hoping you had missed it.”

“Oh, I saw it—and Paul Chaney. And not just on the tube.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was waiting for me when I left David last night,” Mariah said. She moved away from the door and ran her hand along the line of books on Frank’s credenza, straightening the edges—an instinctive reaction against chaos. “And he left a message on my answering machine.” She stopped cold and looked toward the ceiling, her jaw clenched. “Oh, dammit, Frank! Lindsay took the message off the machine. If she ever—”

“Whoa! Slow down. You’re not making any sense. Sit down and tell me what happened.”

She drummed her fingers on the edge of the credenza, then turned and leaned against it, crossing her arms tightly across her chest, looking down at the toes of her shoes. “Paul Chaney showed up at the nursing home yesterday. He had seen David earlier and was waiting for me. Said he needed to talk about what really happened in Vienna—something about the people who did this to David and Lindsay. He called my house, too. And then I saw that thing on the news.”

“You knew him in Vienna, didn’t you?”

Mariah nodded. “David knew him better than I did. They played hockey together, but we all used to get together after the games. And he hung out on the cocktail circuit, of course, trolling for news leads—and women,” Mariah added wryly. “He and David got to be good friends and Paul used to drop by our place a lot, but I never felt very comfortable with him. He’s one of those guys who figures he’s God’s gift to womankind.”

Tucker watched her closely, and then a grin formed at the edge of his lips. “Make a pass at you, did he?”

Mariah grimaced and nodded.

“Had he been in touch since you got back to the States?”

Mariah shook her head. “He came to the hospital in Vienna a couple of times, but I hadn’t seen him in months before he showed up yesterday.”

“Does Chaney know you’re CIA?”

“No, I’m sure he doesn’t. David wouldn’t have told him—he was absolutely discreet. During the entire three years we were in Vienna, there was never the slightest hint that my cover was blown, with Chaney or anyone else. As far as anyone knew, I was simply an embassy administrator. Chaney always seemed more interested in David’s work at the IAEA. He often turned to David to demystify some of the complexities of nuclear issues, and he knew that David was working to beef up the agency’s policing role.”

“So what do you think Chaney’s on to now?”

Mariah glanced at him sharply. “That’s what I was hoping you’d tell me,” she said. She came forward and stood in front of his desk, leaning closer, hands planted in the middle of his papers. “Frank, you told me—you swore—that the truck hit our car by accident. You knew I wasn’t in any position, between David’s and Lindsay’s injuries, to pay close attention to the investigation. But you promised me that every angle would be looked into.”

“And it was.” Frank brought his hammy fists together and stared at them intently for a moment before looking back up at her, his voice low. “Dammit, Mariah—don’t you think I was blown away by what happened? I felt responsible. I recruited you, helped you get that assignment in Vienna. I felt bloody awful when things ended up the way they did.”

Mariah’s shoulders slumped as she watched his gruff old face transformed by guilt. She reached out and squeezed his hand. “It wasn’t your fault, no matter what. But now, with Chaney, I’m wondering again….” She sank down onto a chair and stared at the floor. “It was just a fluke that I wasn’t in the car. David should never have been there. He normally jogged to work, but at the last minute that morning we changed plans. Lindsay had a science project that she needed help carrying in and I had an early meeting with an asset, so David drove her to school. If they hadn’t dropped me off first, neither of them would have been there when the brakes failed on that truck.”

Frank nodded. Mariah knew she had told him this before, but the awful irony of it never left her. David’s life had been destroyed in her place because she’d been too busy that morning to drive their daughter to school. Now, what if it wasn’t an accident, after all?

“I’ve been thinking—was I the target?” she asked quietly, her eyes fixed on his. “Was it the CHAUCER operation? Was someone trying to kill me and made a mistake?”

Tucker’s eyes held hers for a second and then his glance shifted away. Mariah flinched. They had known each other too well and for too long.

“Frank!” she said, alarmed. “Tell me, for God’s sake!”

“I’m not sure.”

Her focus moved from Tucker’s face to an invisible point somewhere between them, but she saw nothing. Beyond the office door, the clatter of voices, the tramp of feet and the hum of office machinery faded, replaced by a cottony stillness. Then a wave came out of nowhere, washing over her, and she felt herself drowning. She fumbled for the arms of the chair and gripped them tightly.

She never saw Frank jump up out of his chair and move around the desk, nor did she feel his hand on her shoulder. It was only when he planted himself squarely in front of her and bent down to peer into her eyes that she began to rise again to the surface. Her gaze flitted from side to side, coming finally to rest on Frank’s face when he had called her name for the third time, his voice urgent.

“Mariah! Are you all right?”

“All right?”

She was breathing, she knew—her shoulders rose and fell heavily with the effort of her lungs to grasp oxygen. But all right? No, she definitely was not all right.

“Who was it?” she asked, her voice husky. She clenched her fists, pulling in hard on the reins of self-control. Tucker’s face came into focus and she held his eyes, her voice firm now. “Who did this to my family, Frank?”

He sat back on the desk and studied her for a long time. Then he walked around behind it. He stood, banging his knuckles on the green baize desk pad. “Leave it alone. You can’t change what happened, and you need to concentrate your energies on Lindsay and David. Let somebody else worry about the other stuff.”

Mariah leaped from her chair and leaned across the desk between them. “Don’t patronize me!”

His head snapped up. “I’m not patronizing, goddammit!”

“Then what kind of answer is that?”

“It’s the only answer I can give you.”

“It’s not good enough!”

“It’s the only answer you’re gonna get. This is a closely held file and you have no ‘need to know.”’

He might just as well have slapped her face. She recoiled and stared at him, dumbfounded. His sharp frown held her momentarily, then his eyes shifted away and skimmed across the ceiling before coming to rest on her face again. “Look, I honestly don’t know for certain whether what happened in Vienna was an accident or not. I thought it was at first, but now I’m not sure. If it wasn’t, then your family got caught in the middle of some bloody dangerous business and you don’t want to know about it, believe me.”

“Oh, yes, I do,” Mariah said firmly. “If someone did this deliberately, I definitely do want to know about it.” His expression remained glumly resistant. “Frank! Dammit! Let me in! If I can do something—anything—to make sense of what happened and help bring down whoever did this, at least I won’t feel so helpless. Give me a break, please?”

Tucker shook his head. “I can’t. Even if I wanted to—which I don’t—it’s not my decision. Operations is handling the file and access is severely limited. Besides which—I’m dead serious here—you’ve got Lindsay to think about. You put yourself in the line of fire and she could end up an orphan. Is that what you want?”

“As opposed to what? As opposed to the life of a fatherless cripple that I’ve already managed to give her?”

“Don’t do this. Don’t punish yourself for something you weren’t responsible for.”

“If not me, who? Tell me who—I’d love to punish someone else. I’d like to rip them limb from limb. I’d like to blow their goddamn heads off!”

Tucker dropped into his chair. “And that’s exactly why you’re no good for this case. You’re personally involved. You’ve got no distance or objectivity, and that’s a recipe for getting yourself killed. Now, I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Go do your job and let me do mine.”

Mariah watched him as he opened a file in front of him and pointedly ignored her. She stood still, glaring at him, fists clenched. Then she wheeled around and headed for the door, throwing it open with such energy that it bounced back against the wall with a bang.

Pat Bonelli had finally arrived for work and was sitting at her desk when Mariah stormed out of Frank’s office. She jumped as the door crashed. “Mariah! You scared the shit out of me!” She stopped cold as she caught sight of Mariah’s face. “Are you all right?”

It was the second time she’d been asked that question, Mariah thought. What did people think? Of course she wasn’t all right!

Pat arched her neck to look in on Frank, almost as if she expected to see blood on the walls. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” Mariah muttered as she stormed into her own office next door.

5

Even Dieter Pflanz had to smile when he thought back on it later.

There was Angus McCord, billionaire industrialist—one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful—wearing a green surgical gown over his suit and a gauze mask over his face. A cotton cap rested heavily on his not-insignificant ears, forcing them to flap even more than usual. He looked like a diminutive cross between Marcus Welby, M.D., and Dumbo the elephant. Only the tiny, wizened baby girl whose hand McCord held through the porthole of an isolette, and the simultaneously proud and anxious expression on the faces of her similarly gowned parents, revealed the serious nature of the business at hand.

The Newborn Intensive Care Unit was a large room, full of high-tech equipment and bustling staff. It had been functioning for several weeks now, even though the neonatal clinic of McCord General Hospital was not yet officially open.

The isolette stood near the unit’s big plate-glass window. To Pflanz, standing with dignitaries in the hall outside, the preemie looked like a baby bird, lying on her back, arms and legs splayed. Her skin hung loose and wrinkled, and her spindly rib cage was protruding—she had been born too soon to have built up any healthy baby fat. Repeated sticking for blood samples had left bruises all over the little body. When McCord arrived at the NICU, the baby was wearing patches over her eyes to protect her retinas from the bili lights set up over the isolette to treat her jaundice. The lights were turned off for now and the patches removed for the benefit of the visitors, but a tangled network of plastic tubes extruded from her minute nose and arms, and several wires were taped to her chest.

Cameras outside the glass enclosure whirred and snapped as McCord gently stroked the frail baby, listening as the neonatal specialist beside him described the prognosis for the three-pound, eight-ounce preemie—iffy, but looking better with each passing day that she managed to cling to life. McCord looked up at the baby’s parents, his eyes smiling over the mask, and then back down at the tiny fighter in the isolette.

“You show ’em, little one,” he whispered.

A few minutes later, he emerged from the NICU, soberly stripping off the hospital garb as he made his way toward the lounge that marked the entry to the McCord Neonatal Unit. His entourage fell in step behind, photographers and television camera retreating before his advance. When he reached the red ribbon strung across the lounge, McCord stopped and the hospital’s chief of staff, Dr. Emory, pulled up alongside him. A hush fell over the assembled group of doctors, nurses, local politicians, community activists and media representatives.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Emory began, “this day has been a long time coming. It was almost seven years ago that the city of Fargo first expressed a desire to build an advanced neonatal care unit to serve this region. For the people of this community, it wasn’t enough to say that this is a small city—that we couldn’t afford the ‘luxuries’ of big cities like Boston and San Francisco. Our children deserve nothing less than the best. And so, the people of Fargo set out to acquire the finest neonatal facility that love and dedication—and yes, money—could build. And they did it with the generous support of North Dakota’s most famous offspring—Mr. Angus Ramsay McCord. This fine hospital already stands as a testament to this native son’s boundless commitment to our community.”

A murmur went through the crowd in the lobby and heads nodded.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, it is my very great pleasure to extend a warm welcome and our deepest appreciation to Mr. and Mrs. Angus McCord, and to call upon them to open this fine new addition to McCord General Hospital.”

A round of applause accompanied Gus McCord to the front of the room. His face became flushed as he looked around and waited for the clapping to die down, but it went on and on. He grinned sheepishly and rubbed the bump on his nose, then looked over at his wife and shrugged. Turning back, he raised his hands and made a dampening wave.

“Thank you. Thank you all,” he called above the noise. But the group showed no sign of letting up. Gus passed his hand over his brush cut as the applause rolled on. Then he seemed to have an inspirational flash.

“Shh!” he whispered loudly, his finger to his lips. “You’ll wake the babies!”

The audience laughed, but the noise finally died down. There was a long silence as they waited expectantly for him to say something, but he seemed to be lost in thought, examining his shoes and shuffling awkwardly. One or two nervous throat-clearing sounds rose up from the room. His voice, when he spoke at last, was soft.

“I have a confession to make,” he said, eyes still on his toes. “It’s not an easy thing to say, for an old coot like me. But I’m here to tell you that I’ve fallen in love again.”

A few chuckles sprinkled the room.

“The lady in question,” McCord went on, stronger now, looking up at the crowd, “has the face of an angel and a form so exquisite it takes your breath away. Of course, there are those who will say she’s too young for me, that these May-December romances never work out. But I don’t care. Because when I look in her eyes, I know that she is the culmination of everything that is good and beautiful in this world. Her name is Jessica Boehm, ladies and gentlemen. She is five days old and she weighs just three and a half pounds. But she’s a spunky little lady, and I am the luckiest man in the world for having met her.”

McCord reached out a hand to the mother of the baby he had been caressing in the isolette. “And this is Mary Boehm, the mother of that wonderful young lady down the hall.” Mrs. Boehm, tears streaming down her smiling cheeks, held on tightly to Gus’s hand as the audience applauded warmly.

McCord’s other arm reached out to embrace his wife, who had been standing off to his left. “And this beautiful lady, for those of you who don’t already know her, is my wife, Nancy. We have been married for forty years. She is my courage, my inspiration and my best friend. She is also the mother of our four sons and the grandmother of five beautiful grandchildren. We have a good life. But like the parents of little Jessica, we have known the fear and pain of a baby’s illness.”

He and Nancy exchanged glances and squeezed hands.

“I believe,” McCord went on, “that the sheer force of Nancy’s mother-love saw our sick children through their darkest hours. But sometimes, when a baby is born too soon, or with special problems, even a mother’s love needs a little help. This clinic is dedicated in ensuring that even the littlest ones like Jessica will survive and grow and thrive.”

There was a round of applause.

“I would ask my wife, Nancy, and Mary Boehm—two of the finest and most determined mothers I know,” McCord said, “to jointly do the honors of cutting the ribbon to open the McCord Neonatal Clinic.”

Mary Boehm’s surprise showed through her tears, but she quickly wiped them away as Gus stepped back. Nancy McCord moved beside her, offering a smile and a hug, and then handed Mrs. Boehm a pair of large surgical shears and held up the ribbon. Mary Boehm’s hand was trembling as she reached out and snipped the wide red sash. It fell to a cheer and a hearty round of applause.

Dieter Pflanz looked around the room and noted that several full-grown men were conspicuously swallowing lumps in their throats. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place. For a fleeting second, he felt the instinctive bristle rise up his spine as the crowd rushed forward to surround McCord, but then he relaxed again. It was obvious that there was nothing but goodwill toward Gus McCord in that room.

Watching the milling crowd, scanning those who were approaching McCord from all sides, Pflanz paid little attention to Jerry Siddon, who had moved next to him.

“That was a neat trick, wasn’t it?” Siddon said.

Pflanz glanced down at him. “A neat trick?”

Siddon waved his hand toward McCord. “That performance,” he said, grinning. “And turning the ceremony over to the baby’s mother. Focusing the attention on himself by seeming to turn it on someone else. Very neatly done.”

Pflanz arched one eyebrow. “You’re very cynical today, young Siddon.”

“Not cynical, just overawed at the man’s skill.” He glanced up at Pflanz, who was watching him closely. “You know what I mean. This guy’s tough as nails. You know it, and so do I. That’s how he made his fortune and his name. But look at him now.”

They both turned back to McCord, who was guffawing with a group of old cronies, his hands buried deep in his pants pockets.

“He looks like he just drove in from the farm in the family pickup,” Siddon continued. “Yet this is the same man who, in a few hours, will be standing toe-to-toe with the sharks and vultures in Washington. The man who may have done more than any other American to throw the Reds out of the Kremlin. I tell you, Dieter, this is the one. This is the guy we’ve got to put in the White House. He’s the one who can make things happen.”

The corners of Pflanz’s mouth angled up ever so slightly. He doesn’t need to be elected, Jerry boy, he thought. Things are happening already.

When Frank’s secretary tapped on her door a few minutes after she had stormed out of his office, Mariah was standing at the window, staring down on Langley Woods situated beyond the high fence surrounding the Agency’s headquarters.

“Mariah?” Pat hesitated, her hand on the door. Finally, she stepped in and shut it behind her. “What happened? Frank’s in there bellowing on the phone and you look like you’ve seen a ghost. What’s going on around here?”

Mariah glanced at Pat and then stared back across the trees, denuded now of their leaves. It was a bleak landscape this time of year.

Tucker’s secretary was one of her closest friends, as was Frank himself. But Patty Bonelli and Frank were also an item—undeclared, discreet. It was a relationship that only Mariah and a few others in the office knew about. Mariah wasn’t altogether certain when Pat and Frank’s relationship outside the office had begun—for the first few years after his wife died, Frank had been too preoccupied with finishing the job of raising his kids to have time for anything else—but it had been going on for some time now. They seemed to be comfortable with it just as it was, neither one showing any sign of needing or wanting a more public commitment.

There was no way of knowing whether Pat was aware of the covert operation Frank had alluded to. As a senior secretary, she was privy to many of the compartmented cases that Frank and Mariah had worked on in the past, providing clerical support. But Frank had said that Operations was leading on this, and they always kept knowledge of their files to a minimum. If they had allowed Tucker in, it could only be because they had required his expertise. It was doubtful Pat knew anything, even if she were prepared to defy Frank and tell Mariah. On the other hand, Mariah thought, if Chaney had stumbled onto something, then it wasn’t as closely held a secret as Frank thought.

“Do you know if Frank has been working on any major cases with the Ops people over the past ten months?”

“He and George Neville have been working on a file,” Pat said. Neville was the CIA deputy director for operations—DDO. “I’m not cleared for it, though. I thought you were.”

“Why did you think that?”

“Because Neville was in Frank’s office the other day. Frank asked me to bring them coffee and when I opened the door, I heard Neville mention your name.”

“What was he saying?”

Pat shook her head. “He clammed up when I walked in. What’s this about, Mariah?”

“That’s what I’d like to know. I think it’s got something to do with the accident in Vienna.”

“What do you mean?”

“Apparently, it was no accident.”

“What?”

Mariah sighed and settled down on the edge of her desk. “Look, Patty, I don’t know what’s going on, but I shouldn’t be saying anything. You know Frank—he’d throw a fit if he knew I’d told you this much, so do me a favor and don’t mention it, okay?”

“I won’t say anything. But what do you plan to do?”

Mariah turned back to the window. “I don’t know. But I have to find out what really happened.”

With Frank or without him, she thought.

When Pat left her office, Mariah stood at the window a few minutes longer, struggling against the pain and black fury that were threatening to short-circuit her brain. Forcing herself to turn away from the window, she caught sight of the computer terminal next to her desk. She sat down and flicked it on, her mind racing as the monitor raised its greenish glow.

After a short delay, the screen prompted her to enter her password, the first line of defense against unauthorized access to the Agency’s data banks. All employees had a personal access code, known only to themselves and the computer. Security procedures required that the password be changed every month.

Mariah punched in her current personal code— “SIGMUND,” the name of her neighbor’s cat. After the mess she had found in her tiny garden, the feline had been on her mind the last time she had changed her password. The cursor moved across the screen as she entered the cat’s name, but only Xs appeared—another security measure.

After a brief delay, the monitor flashed a message: “PASSWORD VALID. FILE SEARCH MODE. ENTER FILE NAME.”

She returned her gaze to the keyboard and punched in “CHAUCER.”

There was another short delay. Her stomach flipped when she saw the reply: “RESTRICTED FILE. ACCESS DENIED. ENTER NEW FILE NAME.”

“Access denied, my foot!” she muttered. “That’s my file.”

She punched in her password again: “CHAUCER.”

“RESTRICTED FILE. ACCESS DENIED. ENTER NEW FILE NAME.”

Her heart was pounding as she leaned back in her chair and stared at the stubborn message. Then she hunched forward again. “All right,” she said under her breath, “let’s try another approach.”

She punched in a new file request: “MARIAH BOLT. PERSONAL LOG. VIENNA STATION.”

The cursor flashed for a moment as the Cray computer down in the Agency’s basement searched its data banks. Then a long list of document titles began scrolling down the screen—three years’ worth of contact reports and intelligence assessments that she had filed while she was posted to the CIA station in Vienna. As her eye scanned the rolling list, Mariah’s mind wandered back.

It was never a given that she would get an overseas assignment.

Despite its monolithic appearance, the CIA is a bureaucracy like any other, with internal divisions and rivalries. The most pronounced is between its operations (DDO) and analysis (DDI) directorates. Operations officers do the overseas clandestine work, while back at Langley, analysts sift through masses of intelligence garnered from various sources like tea-leaf readers, trying to predict the future. These two sides of the house view each other with mutual suspicion bordering on contempt. The trained covert operators regard the analysts as ineffectual pencil pushers, shuffling papers and conducting endless intellectual debates while the world burns around them. To the analysts, the clandestine ops people are cowboys, too often launching risky and ill-conceived operations that end up backfiring and smearing the Agency’s reputation. Limited interplay between these two directorates only feeds the skepticism and distrust between them.

Mariah had made her career among the analysts. Frank had recruited her because of her specialized knowledge of the Soviet arsenal, and for ten years she had helped track political and military developments in the Soviet Union. She had worked on various desks, sifting through intercepted communications for hints of what the Soviets were planning next, poring over the satellite photographs of secret installations, interpreting whatever gossip could be gleaned on who was up and who was out in the Moscow hierarchy. On a couple of occasions, under State Department cover, she had attended Soviet-American conferences posing as an administrative aide, meeting the faces behind the names in the intelligence reports and trying to figure out if there were moderates on the other side who would work for an end to the craziness.

During this time, David had been building a name for himself as a brilliant theoretician as well as a thoughtful writer on the need to contain the atomic beast that the scientists at Los Alamos had unleashed in 1945. When the Soviet Union had first begun to show signs of disintegration, he and Mariah had both worried about the danger of its nuclear arsenal slipping away in the confusion. David had developed a friendship with Hans Blix, the Swedish director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog. When Blix asked David to come to Vienna to help with the job of beefing up the IAEA, he was eager to accept.

Mariah had talked it over with Frank and he, in turn, had gone to DDO, George Neville. In the end, they had agreed to transfer Mariah to the operations side of the Agency and post her to the Vienna station under cover of the embassy’s administrative section. For the period of the Vienna assignment, Mariah—somewhat to her chagrin—had joined the cowboys.

The list of titles on the screen ended with a reference to the last contact report she had filed in Vienna. It was a brief account of her secret meeting with the Hungarian diplomat she had raced off to see instead of driving Lindsay to school that terrible morning.

She fumed at the sight of his code name on the screen— “RELIANCE”—someone’s idea of a joke, it seemed. The man was an alcoholic and a completely unreliable asset. He had been run by the Company for years, far beyond his capacity to provide anything useful by way of information on the crumbling Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. For this bum, I sent my family into a trap, Mariah thought bitterly.

But what she was looking for as she scanned the names of reports was “CHAUCER”—the code name of the Russian physicist who had confided her suspicion that Soviet nuclear weapons were being traded for hard currency. Mariah had met her through David’s office, had recruited her, had been her handler right up to the day the woman disappeared.

Tatyana Baranova was serving in the multinational IAEA when Mariah first encountered her at an agency farewell party for a departing British inspector. Lindsay was there, too, Mariah suddenly remembered with a smile. In fact, truth be told, it was Lindsay who had opened the door to the CHAUCER operation.

She had picked Lindsay up from the American School, and the two of them had run up to David’s IAEA office in the Vienna International Centre on the Wagramerstrasse. There they had found an office party in full swing.

Someone had placed a glass of wine in Mariah’s hand and a soft drink in Lindsay’s, and the two of them were sitting perched on a desk in a corner, laughing at David playing his harmonica and the impromptu chorus serenading the retiring British inspector with an off-key and tragicomic rendition of the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” When the song ended, half of the chorus was on bended knee, arms wrapped around the legs of the laughing Brit, imploring him to stay. Lindsay giggled at the silliness as the inspector turned several shades of red, struggling in vain to detach himself from the grip of the clowns at his feet.

“What a beautiful child!”

Mariah turned away from the antics across the room and found herself facing a woman who was watching Lindsay, bewitched, it seemed, by the copper curls and laughing dark eyes. She had apparently sidled up next to them at some point during the song. She looked to be in her early thirties, a few years younger than Mariah herself, short and on the pudgy side—the typical result of a starchy East European diet. She had a round, pleasant face and wide-set, pale blue eyes under overpermed blond hair. Her smile, as she glanced over Lindsay’s head at Mariah, was the hesitant gesture of the shy and lonely. The eyes dropped quickly, back to the child.

Lindsay looked up, a flicker of self-consciousness crossing her features before the giggles overtook her again. “That’s my dad,” she said, pointing at the group across the room. “He’s so crazy!”

The woman smiled once more, her eyebrows rising as she followed Lindsay’s finger. “Which one? Mr. Hewlett, who is leaving us?”

“No, the one with the harmonica. He’s a really good player. He taught himself. He can play anything, but he likes the blues best,” she confided.

“Oh, I see. So you are Dr. Tardiff’s little girl. What is your name, sweetheart?”

“Lindsay Bolt-Tardiff,” Lindsay said, holding out her hand, very grown-up. “And I’m eleven—well, almost.” They shook hands.

“Please excuse me,” the woman said, her expression appropriately serious. “I meant to say ‘Dr. Tardiff’s fine young lady.’ I am very pleased to meet you, Lindsay Bolt-Tardiff. I am Tatyana Baranova—you must call me Tanya.”

“Hi.” Lindsay glanced back at Mariah. “This is my mom.”

“Mrs. Tardiff. How do you do? You have a beautiful daughter.”

“Thank you,” Mariah said, smiling as she took the woman’s hand. “Call me Mariah. Do you work with the IAEA, Tanya?”

“Yes, but I have only been here a few weeks. I do not know many of my colleagues yet.”

“How are you finding Vienna?”

“It is very beautiful. Very expensive,” she added, rolling her eyes. “There are so many things in the shops—my goodness, I can hardly believe it—but not many bargains.”

“That’s for sure.”

“In Moscow, the shops have nothing. Here, it is the opposite, but expensive! How simple people live, I cannot imagine.”

“There’s a lot to see and do that doesn’t cost a fortune, once you find your way around.”

“I’ve seen the Lippizaner stallions three times!” Lindsay proclaimed proudly. “They dance!”

Tanya smiled warmly at her. “Just like your eyes, lovely one. Tell me, where did you get your beautiful hair? Your papa’s is black and your mama is fair, but you—so beautiful, this hair!” She ran her fingers lightly across Lindsay’s curls.

“I don’t know. Daddy says I’m a throwaway.”

“Throwback, Lins,” Mariah said, laughing. She looked up at Tanya. “My grandfather had red hair. I’ve never met a redhead in David’s family, but he says there were a few somewhere on the family tree, so I guess he must be carrying the gene, too.”

“Why would Daddy carry his jeans? And what’s that got to do with hair, silly?”

“Not jeans—genes. G-E-N-E-S,” Mariah explained, spelling out the word. “The kind you inherit from your mother and father that determine if you’ll be big or small—have brown eyes or blue. Red hair is uncommon because the gene is recessive. It hides, unless both parents pass it on.”

“I knew that,” Lindsay said, sniffing. “I was just testing to see whether or not you did.” She turned to Tanya. “I have hockey genes, too.”

“Hockey genes?”

Lindsay nodded. “From my dad and not my mom ’cause she comes from California and she hasn’t got any winter-sport genes in her at all. My dad’s teaching me to play hockey.”

“You don’t say. Well then, Lindsay Bolt-Tardiff, we have something in common, because when I was a little girl, believe it or not, I used to play on a girls’ hockey team at my school in Russia. We had a small league, but we were very good—at least, we thought so. I played goalie.”

“My dad plays center. I don’t play any position here because they don’t let girls on the teams. It’s not fair! I have to just skate around with my dad and we pass the puck. But I’ve got a killer slap shot,” she added. “I bet I could get it past you!”

“I am certain you could,” Tanya said, laughing. “I have not played in many years. Now, I just like to watch.”

“You could come and watch Daddy’s team play on Saturday. Mom? Couldn’t Tanya come with us?”

“Yes, of course. We’d love to have you join us. David’s team is just a bunch of guys from some of the foreign missions. Your embassy has a house team, too—David and his friends often play against them. But they’re playing a team from a local factory on Saturday morning. It’s not professional caliber or anything, but it’s fun. Why don’t you come and watch with us?”

“Oh, you are very kind, but I don’t think—”

“We could pick you up,” Lindsay offered helpfully, checking with her mother. Mariah nodded.

As she watched Tanya searching for a response, Mariah saw in her eyes that sudden fear—the fear born of dire warnings from KGB officers about what lies in wait for those who consort with capitalist enemies. And as Tanya’s eyes fell, Mariah saw regret, and then a flash of something else. Anger? Defiance?

“I would love to, really. But I do not think I can make it on Saturday. Thank you for asking.” Tanya looked at Mariah, hesitating, and then she turned and smiled at Lindsay. “I should be going now. I very much enjoyed meeting you, Lindsay,” she said, giving her a kiss on the cheek. “And you, Mrs. Tardiff.”

Mariah had unobtrusively scribbled something on a piece of paper. When Baranova held out her hand, Mariah pressed the slip in and left it there when she withdrew her own. “I wrote down the name of the arena,” she said quietly. “It’s near the Alte Donau U-Bahn station, in case you find yourself free on Saturday, after all. The game starts at nine. It was good to meet you, Tanya.”

The Russian woman held her gaze for a moment, and then turned and walked away.

In the end, Mariah recalled, Tanya had shown up that Saturday, somehow managing to shake the KGB watchers that kept tabs on all Soviet diplomats. And that was the beginning of it.

The hockey game was the only time, apart from the IAEA office party, that Mariah and Tatyana Baranova had ever met on open ground. But as the list of references on the computer indicated, they had met eight times again over the next fourteen months.

Then Tanya had disappeared and CHAUCER appeared to be wound up. Not long after that, David and Lindsay’s car was wiped out in front of the American School.

Mariah highlighted the first reference to CHAUCER on the screen, hoping against hope to find a back door into the file through her personal log. But when she hit the Enter key, the same stern message appeared: “RESTRICTED FILE. ACCESS DENIED.”

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