by Taylor Smith
“Good morning,” the agent said. “Can I help you?”
“Yes, I’d like to fly to Albuquerque. I understand you have a connection this morning.”
The agent punched in the information on his keyboard and peered at the screen. “That’s via Dallas-Fort Worth, departing at seven-thirty, arriving in Albuquerque at ten forty-five, local.”
Plenty of time, Mariah calculated, as long as there were no flight delays. Otherwise, she’d miss the rendezvous with Chaney at noon in Albuquerque’s Old Town. “That’s fine. I’d like a ticket, please.”
“One way or return?”
“One way. I’m not sure about my return plans yet.”
“Name?”
“Diane Tardiff.”
“How do you spell that last name?”
Mariah handed him an American Express card that she had been carrying around in her wallet since David was injured in Vienna, having never gotten around to cutting it up. The name on it said “D. J. Tardiff.” David’s signature was a trademark scrawl that she had long ago learned to forge to facilitate household bill-paying. As long as the AmEx bill was paid, she knew, no one would ever examine the charge slip closely.
“Okay, Ms. Tardiff,” the agent said a few minutes later. “That’s flight 292, gate 47, boarding shortly.”
She thanked him and headed back down the concourse to the women’s rest room, cursing under her breath at the sight of a yellow plastic sign propped in the rest-room doorway—Closed for Cleaning. She hesitated, debating her options, then pulled a tissue out of her pocket. Reaching under the collar of her sweater and loosening the bandage covering the cut she had taken from Burton’s knife, she scratched at it until it began to bleed. After dabbing at it with the tissue, she replaced the bandage. She ran into the rest room holding the bloody tissue over her nose. The attendant looked up in surprise.
“Sorry,” Mariah said, her voice muffled. “I’ve got a nosebleed.”
The wizened old woman nodded. “Sure, sure. Dat’s okay, lady.” She watched as Mariah soaked a paper towel in cold water and held it over her nose, tipping her head back, keeping the bloody tissue in view. “You okay?” she asked. Mariah nodded.
The woman returned to cleaning the cubicles, rolling her cleaning cart in front of the one where the gun was stashed. Mariah watched in the mirror as she wiped down the toilet and lifted the flap on the wall receptacle, peering in. She pulled out the half-full plastic bag and dropped it into the trash bag on her cart, then shook out a fresh liner and slipped it in, folding the edges over the sides of the bin. As her hand reached in to push down the bottom of the bag, Mariah dropped her briefcase. The bang of its brass hinges reverberated in the tiled room. The cleaning woman spun around, then bustled over as Mariah slumped against the sink.
“Lady! You okay?”
Mariah straightened and gave her an embarrassed smile. “I’m fine. I just felt a little dizzy, that’s all.”
“Maybe I get a doctor?”
“No, no, that’s not necessary. I just need to sit for a second,” Mariah said, slipping by the woman and perching on the edge of the toilet seat she had just cleaned. She looked up and smiled. “Really, I’m fine. It’s just the sight of blood—always does this to me. But look, the nosebleed’s stopped now. I’ll be okay in just a minute.”
The woman watched her dubiously for a while, then handed her the briefcase.
“Thanks. Don’t let me keep you from your work. I’m sorry to be such a nuisance.”
“No problem.” The woman moved on down the line of cubicles.
Peering around to see her disappear into the next cubicle, Mariah quietly closed the door and took a deep breath. As the cleaning lady began to clatter in the next stall, Mariah pulled the liner out of the waste receptacle. Reaching in, she peeled back the duct tape and lifted out the gun, then replaced the liner bag. She slipped the wadded-up tape into the bin and the gun into her pocket, then walked out of the cubicle, flashing a wave of thanks to the old woman as she headed back out to the concourse.
At the security control area, she hesitated for a moment, then pulled out her ID card again, took a deep breath and headed for the side gate of the security area that her watcher had passed through not long before. Her expression was sober and her step purposeful as she walked through the gate.
“Ma’am?” A guard approached, his hand raised.
She held up the ID. He glanced at it, and then turned at the sound of a sudden, piercing wail coming from one of the electronic gates. An exasperated mother traveling with a small baby and two other children was trying to push a balky toddler through the security gate. He was clinging to her leg, screaming. A long line of passengers fidgeted behind the mother, anxious to get to their flights. The security guard turned back to Mariah and took one last look at her face and the picture on the card, then waved her past, going back to help coax the toddler through the electronic gate. Mariah headed for gate 47, thankful for small mercies and the terrible twos.
“We have a customer,” Dieter Pflanz said.
He and George Neville were standing on the tarmac at Washington’s Dulles Airport, watching as Nancy McCord’s stretcher was transferred from an ambulance to the McCord Industries Learjet under the close supervision of Gus McCord and her cardiologist. The whine of engines along the taxiways provided effective cover for their conversation.
“Who?”
“A new fundamentalist group with a political agenda. Apparently, they’re looking for a spectacular stunt to gain attention for themselves. Ghaddafi’s people are impressed with our Madeira operation and recommended us as a supplier of special orders.”
“Good. Are your people in place?”
“Everything’s ready. There’s a meeting set for tomorrow to negotiate the deal and let the customer examine the goods.”
“My God,” Neville said, shaking his head. “We might actually pull this off.”
“We will if nobody gets cold feet. And if you keep things under control at your end. What’s happened to the Bolt woman and the reporter?”
“She’s on leave in New England until after Christmas. Chaney’s in Phoenix with his parents. We’re keeping tabs on them.” Neville decided not to mention that the watchers had lost them both for a couple of hours a few days earlier. Nothing had happened, and each of them had been under continuous surveillance since, without incident. “You heard what happened to Rollie Burton?”
“I heard. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”
Neville eyed him closely, then turned away. “I suppose,” he said. He waved his hand toward the medical people milling around the Lear. “What about all this? Is it going to affect the operation?”
Pflanz shook his head. “McCord’s following it closely, but I’ve got the day-to-day responsibility. He’s committed to seeing it through.”
“Good. I guess this thing with his wife has been pretty rough on him,” Neville said, watching McCord bark orders at the aircraft crew.
“Yeah, but he’s a tough old guy.”
“Think he’ll still throw his hat in the political ring?”
“Dunno. Up until a few days ago, I figured he would, but I wouldn’t put money on it now. Not if his wife can’t handle it.”
Neville nodded. “God only knows why anyone would want to deal with those idiots on the Hill, anyway. I’d say he’s more effective doing just what he’s doing now.”
“Yup,” Pflanz agreed.
Mariah picked up the peaked cap and turned it around in her hand. It was brown plaid, the sort often worn by old duffers on the golf course, and it had been lying on the front seat of the car when she got in, next to a lemon yellow polyester windbreaker. Neither item of clothing looked like anything Paul Chaney would be caught dead in.
“Did you get a new tailor?” she asked, positioning the hat on his head. “Your fans are going to love this look.”
He glanced at his reflection in the rearview mirror and grimaced before pulling the hat off. As he did, a cloud of
white powder fell from the hat and encircled his head. Chaney ruffled his hair to shake it out. “It’s my father’s. I wore this stuff and a pair of his glasses when I slipped away from Phoenix last night. Put some talc in my hair to whiten it and then drove out of my parents’ garage after dark. Worked like a charm.”
“This is their car?”
Chaney nodded. “They kept my rental. My dad agreed to stay inside until today. I phoned this morning and my mother said the watchers were still in the street outside the house.”
“The phone might have been tapped, you know.”
“We had a code. I disguised my voice and pretended to be a carpet cleaning outfit. She said they’d just had their rugs done. If she’d agreed to a cleaning, I would have known the watchers were on to me.”
Mariah rolled her eyes. “Don’t they find this cloak-and-dagger stuff a little strange?”
“They love it—most fun they’ve had in years,” Chaney said, grinning. “My mother’s always been a community activist and she loves frustrating the authorities. My dad’s an old newspaperman and he knows what it takes to get a story sometimes.”
“Is that what you’re after here, a story?”
“You know it’s not,” Chaney said soberly. Mariah nodded. “So which way?” he asked, pulling out of the Old Town parking lot.
“Right.” Mariah peered at the map he had handed her. “We need to pick up Interstate 25 north to Santa Fe, then Route 68 toward Los Alamos. But before we hit Los Alamos, I’d like to see where the five scientists were killed.”
“The managing editor of the Phoenix Star is an old friend of my dad’s,” Chaney said, heading for the freeway. “I spent yesterday morning in their morgue. They had a little more information on the accident than what appeared in that Washington Post article.”
“And?”
“It happened just south of Taos. Report said they’d been drinking in a bar there beforehand.”
“They went all the way to Taos for a drink?”
“Apparently. There’d been an official dinner of some sort in Los Alamos for the visiting Russian scientists. After the dinner, Kingman and Bowker, the two Americans, took three of the Russians out.”
“It’s over sixty miles from Los Alamos to Taos. Why would they go all that way?”
“Maybe there are no decent bars in Los Alamos?”
“The place isn’t famous for its nightlife,” Mariah agreed. “But they could have gone into Santa Fe if they were looking for something better. It’s half the distance.”
Chaney shrugged. “Does seem a little strange,” he agreed, yawning.
“Why don’t you let me drive? You’ve been on the road all night.”
“I napped in the car for a couple of hours after I got in this morning. I’m okay for a while. We’ll switch in Santa Fe.” He glanced over at her. “Did you read the CHAUCER file?”
“Yes, finally. But there were gaps. There’s reference to some calls on the secure line between DDO and the station chief in Vienna, but no record of what they talked about.”
“DDO—that’s the deputy director for operations, right? George Neville?” Mariah’s head spun around. “I’ve seen him testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee. And I saw him at your boss’s party that night,” he explained, obviously pleased with himself.
“You did? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because you asked me to play dumb, so I did. But guess what, Mariah? That friend of my father’s at the Phoenix Star? He was in Saigon during the early days of Vietnam and he tells me that Neville and McCord’s man, Dieter Pflanz, were stationed there at the same time. My dad’s buddy drank with both of them. That was about the time Burton, your attacker, was thrown out of the place. Just one big happy family, those guys.”
“I knew I didn’t trust that snake Neville,” Mariah fumed. “But this is beginning to make a little sense.”
“How so?”
“Well, first of all, after Baranova, the Russian woman, told me about the secret nuclear weapons research facility, our satellites and local agents were tasked to confirm the existence of the facility. They were able to confirm her story. I knew that in Vienna—that’s why I was assigned to continue her debriefing. What I didn’t know is that DDO called in an outside agent—the file refers to him by the code name PILGRIM—to do some follow-up work. Exactly what isn’t clear. One of the telex messages between Neville and the station chief confirmed the arrival of PILGRIM in Vienna and ordered the chief to render any assistance requested, but otherwise to stay out of his way.”
“I’ll bet Pflanz is PILGRIM. It would explain why I saw him lurking around there.”
“I think that’s a good bet.” Mariah paused, biting her lower lip.
“What?” Chaney asked when he noticed her hesitation.
“They knew about David and Katarina Müller,” she said grimly. “They all knew. The station chief. Neville. PILGRIM. Frank Tucker.” She glanced at him, her expression cold. “I guess that makes it unanimous, doesn’t it? All of you knew, and nobody told me.”
“Mariah—”
“Never mind. It wasn’t your place to tell me. But those bastards should have.” They rode in silence as Mariah raged over the multiple betrayals.
“It seems strange that they didn’t,” Chaney said finally. “And that they let you carry on with your Russian source. I would have thought they’d pull you out as a security risk.”
“That’s what I thought, too. But according to the file, they bugged our apartment and our car—and David’s office. Then they confronted David. Apparently, he told the station chief that Müller had blackmailed him into the affair.”
“Blackmailed? How?”
Mariah shrugged. “That’s one of the gaps in the file. I can only assume that Müller must have threatened Lindsay and me. I can’t see what else she could have had on David to get him to go along.”
“So what happened after they called David on it?”
“They told him to carry on, find out what she was after. And here’s something interesting—David had taken a trip to Moscow on IAEA business a couple of months earlier, and guess who he met there?”
“Who?”
“Yuri Sokolov, the nuclear physicist who was killed here a few weeks ago.”
“Bingo!”
“Yup. David never mentioned this to me because he knew I would have felt honor-bound to report it, but it seems Sokolov expressed regret over his work on the Soviet nuclear weapons program. Thirty years later,” Mariah said, grimacing, “and the guy’s conscience starts to bother him. David did discuss it with some IAEA people, though, and one of them—surprise, surprise—turned out to be an agent that another of our people in the station was running.”
“Aha! So, when Katarina Müller went after David, your people figured she was tasked to find out whether Sokolov’s loyalties were suspect.”
“Exactly.”
“Seems funny that the Russians would have let Sokolov come to the States if he was under suspicion, doesn’t it?” Chaney said.
Mariah nodded. “Not only that, but Borodin and Guskov—the other two Russians who were in the accident with Kingman and Bowker? Handpicked for this conference at Los Alamos by Sokolov himself.”
“Curiouser and curiouser.”
“If you want curious, try this—I don’t think Katarina Müller’s targeting of David had anything to do with Sokolov.”
“Why not?”
“Because apparently she never tried to get a darn thing out of him. There was one telex from the station chief to DDO, really pissed off because David kept insisting that Müller wasn’t pumping him for any information at all.”
“You think she just had the hots for him?”
“Who knows? Dammit, Paul! David wanted out, but they wouldn’t let him break off the contact. They just left him twisting in the wind. And so did I, when he tried to get me to leave Vienna. If he had told me what was going on, we would have been gone like a shot. They couldn’t have forced
us to stay.”
“But how could he tell you, once it started? By then, he was in over his head. And I knew David,” Chaney added quietly. “The last thing in the world he would have wanted was for you to find out. He would have been terrified of losing you and Lindsay if you did.”
“He should have trusted me,” she said glumly. “We could have worked it out. In the end, he lost everything, anyway.”
Dieter Pflanz was back in his Newport Center office when the secure telephone jangled in the cabinet behind his desk.
“They’re missing,” Neville said as soon as Pflanz picked up and the machine went to scramble.
“Who?”
“Mariah Bolt and Paul Chaney.”
“Oh, for chrissake! Where? When?”
“Chaney gave our people the slip in Phoenix—last night, we think. The woman got on a plane from Boston to Washington this morning and never got off.”
“Whaddya mean she never got off? Are you telling me she parachuted out in midflight?”
“No…I don’t know. We’re still trying to track her. We’ve got a credit-card trace on, but the only transaction that shows up so far is the ticket she bought to Washington. If Chaney hadn’t disappeared, too, I might think she’d been kidnapped.”
“What about Chaney?”
“No paper trail there, either. He left his parents’ home by car. On his own—that we know.”
“And your guys didn’t see him go?” Pflanz asked, incredulous. “You got blind watchers these days, George? Equal employment opportunities or something?”
“It was dark and Chaney was disguised as his father,” Neville snapped, obviously just as furious. “The watchers didn’t tumble until the old man himself walked out the door this morning and waved to them.”
“Laughing his head off, no doubt. Dammit, George! What kind of outfit are you guys running these days?”
“I don’t need this from you, Dieter! Those watchers are in deep shit when I get them on the carpet. Meantime, I called to let you know so your people could be on the lookout. We’re searching the Phoenix airport for the old man’s car and checking passenger logs, just in case Chaney paid cash for a ticket and flew out. If he’s driving somewhere—”
