by Taylor Smith
His expression was angry and the color had risen in his face. But what’s wrong with this picture? Mariah asked herself. She knew exactly what was wrong with it. If David was approached to do something illegal, then Mariah knew who had done it. But she couldn’t tell Chaney that without tipping him off to the fact that she had read the CIA file on Katarina Müller—also known as Elsa von Schleimann. And who brought Elsa and David together, Chaney? You did, you bastard!
“So you think he refused and someone tried to kill him, is that it?”
Chaney shrugged. “Something like that.”
“Well, you’re wrong, and I’ll tell you why,” Mariah said, leaning back in her chair. “If that truck was waiting to plow into our car, then it could only have been waiting for me—or Lindsay, if your conspiracy theory also extends to her. But it wasn’t waiting for David because he wasn’t supposed to be there that morning. He drove Lindsay only because there was a last-minute switch in plans.”
“It might have been you, I suppose,” Chaney said. “Maybe it was a way to coerce his cooperation.”
“Come on, Paul—think! That doesn’t make sense. Why would David cooperate if they murdered his wife and child?”
“You’re right. Then it had to be David they were after. I don’t know how they knew he’d be there—maybe your apartment was bugged and they switched their plans when he switched his. But it was no accident,” he insisted, meeting her skeptical look.
“Give me some facts, Paul, or take a hike, because I have no patience for this vague garbage.”
He glanced away momentarily and then sighed. “I did some checking. Apparently, the driver of the truck that hit your car was a Turk who was in Austria on a guest worker’s visa, a guy named Mohammed Kamal.”
“So?”
“Well, there’s one problem—the real Mohammed Kamal was back home in Ankara dying of AIDS when the accident happened. I visited him a couple of months ago, just two days before he died. He told me that he had sold his Austrian working papers to some Libyan three months before the accident in order to get enough money to go home to Turkey to die.”
Mariah’s eyes were locked onto Chaney’s face, but her mind was reeling. “What about the driver arrested by the Austrian police?” she asked, her voice flat.
“He was charged with reckless driving and auto theft. Unfortunately, he had a heart attack in jail a few days later and died. Whoever he was,” Chaney added, “he couldn’t have been much over twenty years old.” The implication was obvious. “The guy never intended to be caught, I’m sure. He jumped out just before the impact and tried to take off on foot, but he was tackled and held for the police by some burly Viennese citizen.”
“The truck was stolen?”
“It belonged to a courier outfit named Intertransport. Except that they had reported it stolen from their dispatch depot in Salzburg three days earlier.”
Mariah stood and walked over to a wall unit holding the television, as well as books and baubles and pewter-framed photographs. She fingered a photo of David and Lindsay that they had given her for her birthday the year before. David was seated and Lindsay was standing behind him, her arms draped around his shoulders. She was leaning down, her cheek next to his, her red curls contrasting beautifully with his black ones. He was holding the hands she held clasped across his chest, and they were both beaming at the camera with the same expression of conspiratorial delight that Mariah had seen on their faces a thousand times. No father and daughter had ever been better buddies than these two.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then turned to confront Chaney. “Look, you said yourself that there are hundreds of blue-sky guys floating around at loose ends these days.”
“Hundreds of what?”
“Blue-sky guys. That’s what the technicians at Los Alamos used to call the physicists. You know—head in the clouds? Always thinking about their latest arcane theorems, hopeless on the practical matters that we lesser mortals worry about. Blue-sky guys.”
The corners of Chaney’s mouth turned up.
“So why David?” Mariah asked. “Why would anyone approach David for a clandestine nuclear weapons operation? He hadn’t done hands-on weapons work since he left Los Alamos fourteen years ago. Why would they imagine that he would cooperate with them?”
“That’s what I was hoping you could tell me.”
But Mariah just sat down and shook her head. “This doesn’t make any sense, Paul. David was an excellent theoretician, but he was also a physicist with a conscience. Besides which, no one recruits an out-of-date weapons designer for an operation like this. If you were planning to buy yourself some ready-made nuclear weapons, you’d hire people with current skills to handle them—mostly engineers and technicians, in fact, not physicists.”
Chaney leaned back on the sofa, frowning as he examined his sprawling legs. Then he nodded slowly. “Watchdog.”
“What?”
He looked up. “Watchdog—David’s role with the IAEA. That’s the other possibility. He wasn’t being recruited for the operation—he found out about it. And he was going to blow the whistle, so they silenced him.”
Mariah felt a chill and shivered, reaching up to fluff her still-damp hair. Then she rested her palm against her forehead, where a dull ache was rising. “This is pure speculation on your part, and I’m tired. What do you want from me?”
“Was David working for the CIA in Vienna, Mariah?” She stared at him, feeling the blood drain from her face. “He was, wasn’t he? He had to be, to have found out about an operation like that. It couldn’t have been through the IAEA. They couldn’t get near the Russian nuclear establishment. Even in countries where they are allowed to inspect, their efforts are pretty pathetic—you know that. They haven’t got the budget or the personnel to do the job right. They have to ask permission to go anywhere, give advance warning—by which time, anything that they aren’t supposed to see is well hidden. If the Russians are smuggling out nukes for cash, then the CIA would be the one to catch them at it.”
Mariah rose from her chair. “I think you should go, Paul. This conversation is getting to be ridiculous.” She started to gather up the coffee cups.
“Aren’t you going to answer my question?”
“All right, here’s your answer—no. David was not working for the CIA—not in Vienna, not ever.”
“Would you have known if he was?”
“Yes, I would have known. Even if he had tried to keep something like that from me, he couldn’t have. I met him at Berkeley when he was twenty-five years old, and there was nothing about David Tardiff I didn’t know. He was warm and funny and brilliant and he didn’t have a devious bone in his body. He’d have made a lousy spook.”
She went to the kitchen, dumped the cups on the counter, then got Chaney’s jacket from the hall closet. He was behind her when she turned around.
“Mariah, you must have felt it—something was very wrong in Vienna. You know I’m not making this up.” She handed him the jacket. He took it but stood there, not moving to put it on. “You know it, don’t you?” he insisted.
“Yes! I know—all right?” Her eyes, when she looked up at him, were burning. “I know he was nervous about something, not acting like himself. After the accident, I put it out of my mind. I had too many other things to worry about. But I know something else, too, Paul—you were there, right in the middle of whatever was going on. So don’t come in here like the Lone Ranger, trying to ease your conscience! David lost everything and my little girl was damaged for life. Where were you when things started to go wrong? Playing stupid, dangerous games!”
“Mariah, please—”
She was already holding the front door open. “You and I have nothing more to say to each other. Leave me alone, Chaney.”
Rollie Burton, in his battered green Toyota, was fighting fatigue and the cold and the urge to doze. He reached under the seat for the thermos of coffee he had stashed there. He was unscrewing the lid when a man stepped out the
front door of the woman’s house. When he finally noticed him coming down the steps, Burton barely had time to sink into his seat, pulling his baseball cap lower over his eyes.
He had seen the man’s shadow at the kitchen window after the Bolt woman had escaped his knife a couple of hours earlier. She had taken off like a shot, and Burton just hadn’t been able to catch up after dumping the old man’s body. Damn that old geezer, he thought, I would have had her and been long gone by now.
This job and that woman were beginning to get on his nerves. Women always got on his nerves. You start out thinking they’re okay, but they always mess you up in the end. He was going to have to show her what happens when you cross Rollie Burton—show her like he showed the others.
Burton squinted at the tall figure heading toward the road. It looked like the same guy she’d met at the nursing home—the reporter. As Chaney climbed into his car, Burton recognized the white Ford and had his suspicions confirmed. He should have set a higher price, he decided, watching the car pull into the road. If the voice called again for a progress report, he might just try to renegotiate the deal. Nobody should have to work with reporters standing by to stir up trouble.
The downstairs lights in the town house snapped off, one after the other. She’s packing it in early, he thought, glancing at his watch—barely ten o’clock. A few minutes later, a light came on in an upstairs window and she appeared, portable phone in hand. He saw her punch in a number, then stand with the phone to her ear, absently running her free hand through her hair as she looked out over the street. Rollie slipped down a little farther in his seat, but he was parked in shadow and there was no reason to think she could see him from that distance.
Her body shifted suddenly and her lips began to move. The call was a short one. She lowered the antenna when it was done and then stood for a moment, tapping the phone against her chin.
Burton’s eyes were blazing as he watched her draw the curtains. You should have let me take you today, lady, he thought angrily. It would have been quick and painless. You think you outsmarted ol’ Rollie, but you’ll pay in the end.
With a vicious twist, he put the lid back on the thermos bottle and started the car’s engine.
8
Mariah watched Stephen Tucker’s finger on the Formica table as he widened the circle of condensation that had collected under his plastic cup of Coke. The nail, she noted, was bitten to the quick, as always. Poor Stephen—twenty-eight years old now and still the same intense bundle of nerves she had first met when he was twelve.
Time to get over it, Stevie, she thought. Growing up under Frank’s stern gaze couldn’t have been easy, but you should have learned to see through it by now. Why did so many people—Frank’s son included—find it so difficult to recognize the basically gentle man that lay under that gruff, intimidating exterior?
Following Chaney’s departure the previous evening, she had left a message on Stephen’s answering machine, asking him to meet her for breakfast in a fast-food place not far from Langley. He had been waiting for her when she pulled into the parking lot at eight-thirty. He seemed both mystified by this unexpected invitation and awkward in her presence—but then, there weren’t many people with whom Stephen Tucker had ever felt really comfortable. David, in fact, was one of the few who came to mind.
She had made one or two preliminary attempts at conversation, but Stephen had covered his shyness by turning his attention to the menu over the head of the gum-cracking cashier. Mariah had no difficulty limiting herself to coffee. Spoiled by the cafés of Vienna, she found she could no longer handle the greasy fare that people downed in places like this. Stephen was a case in point. The tray on the table between them was heaped with the wrappings from his order of eggs, sausages, hash browns and biscuit. Hard to believe that his father was a gourmet cook—but then, Stephen’s eating habits, like so much else in his life, had always been more about rebellion against Frank than anything else.
Watching him tracing circles in the water ring, Mariah was astonished by how much Stephen had grown to resemble Frank. He had the same coarse hair along the back of his hands, the same bushy dark eyebrows and almost-black eyes. Stephen had also inherited his father’s premature baldness, although he was still raking the last few wisps of hair across his head in a vain attempt to hide his pate. And he had the same large frame. But where Frank’s bulk came from a powerfully strong body gone a little rotund with the years and his own fine cooking, Stephen was just a fat young boy who had become a very large, fat man. All the planes of his body were curved, pushing against the constraints of buttons and belt, no muscle definition to be seen anywhere.
But despite a physical resemblance to Frank, Stephen was painfully shy and withdrawn, possessing none of his father’s blustering strength. In many ways, Mariah thought, he still looked like the lonely, confused boy who had spent most of his childhood watching his mother slip away from him until, at the age of fifteen, he had lost her forever.
In the first couple of years after Joanne Tucker’s death, when Frank and Stephen’s stormy relationship had degenerated to its lowest point, Mariah and David had often taken Stevie in to give him and his father a break from each other. He would stay with them for a few days, playing with Lindsay, who was just a toddler at the time, and devouring David’s extensive science-fiction library. Mariah did it to take the pressure off Frank, knowing how rough things had been for her old friend when Joanne was dying. David, coming from a big, warm family—he had five brothers and sisters of his own—always had time for one more youngster, and he and Stevie had become fast friends. Mariah secretly doubted that Stephen would have pulled out of the tailspin into which he had fallen after his mother’s death if it hadn’t been for David’s stabilizing influence.
She laid her hand now over Stephen’s bitten fingers. He withdrew them quickly, then blushed and shrugged.
“We haven’t talked in so long,” she said apologetically. “It’s pretty stupid, really, working in the same building. But you guys are so buried down there among the mainframes.”
“We’ve got weird shifts, handling stuff coming in from different time zones,” Stephen said. “Most of the computer ops people never meet anyone from DDI or DDO.”
“When we left for Vienna, you had just joined up. I’ve been meaning to get together with you ever since we got back—see how you’re getting on—but I’ve been so preoccupied with David and Lindsay.” He nodded again. “So how are things going, kiddo?”
“Okay. Fine.”
“How do you like the Company now that you’re seeing it from the inside?”
“It’s all right. Just a job, really, when you do the kind of work I do, except the equipment’s better than most places.”
“Frank tells me you’ve designed and sold some computer games on the side.”
Stephen grimaced. “I’m surprised he’d mention it. He thinks writing games is a pretty stupid way for a grown man to spend his time.”
“Well, you know your father—he’s not into high technology. It’s all Patty can do to get him to turn on his terminal in the morning.”
“My father,” Stephen said, “is a computer Neanderthal. My sister and I bought him a PC for Christmas a couple of years ago—figured he could index his recipes, if nothing else. I also thought he might understand what I’m doing if he tried a few games I’ve written, but the machine just sits in his den and collects dust.”
Mariah shifted in her seat. It probably wasn’t a good time to tell him that Frank had given her his copies of Stephen’s games for Lindsay to use. “I know,” she said. “But in his own way, Frank is proud of you. He said you’ve done really well with your games. I think he takes perverse pride in the fact that you make more money than he does.”
“A lot more.” There was wicked delight in Stephen’s sudden smile. It was kind of nice to see.
“I’ll bet. Not bad for a hobby. Your father showed me an OMNI article on computer games that rated Wizard’s Wand as one of the best on t
he market.”
Stephen looked up in surprise. “He saw that?”
It was Mariah’s turn to look surprised. “Didn’t you know?” When Stephen shook his head, she rolled her eyes. “You two! Someone should bang your pointy little heads together.”
“Bald little heads, don’t you mean?” He ran his hand over his pate.
“Whatever. Anyway, for my part, I hate your guts, Stephen Tucker,” she said, smiling. “Lindsay has Wizard’s Wand and it’s addictive. When she gets into it, a bomb could go off beside her and she’d never notice. I’m not surprised it’s done well.”
He began poking holes in his disposable cup with a plastic fork. “How’s she doing?” he asked quietly, his eyes riveted on the cup rapidly disintegrating in his hand.
“All right, I guess. It’s been rough, of course, and I worry about her. But she seems to be pulling through.”
Stephen finally stopped fidgeting and looked up at her, with those dark eyes so like Frank’s. “But not David,” he said.
Mariah shook her head sadly. One day, a couple of months after they returned to the States, she had run into Stephen just as she was arriving at the nursing home. She’d had no idea he would be there. He had already been up to David’s room and when he saw her, Stevie had been able to muster only a few choked words. But then, seeing David for the first time had that effect on most of their friends.
He lowered his head now and Mariah noticed, when he spoke, that his voice was hoarse. “It shouldn’t have happened to him. He didn’t deserve this.”
Mariah pressed her lips together tightly, fighting tears as she squeezed his hand, breathing deeply to maintain control. “Stevie,” she whispered, “I need your help.”
“Help?” His eyes were bright when they leaped to her face.
