by Taylor Smith
“What?”
He hesitated, then shook his head. “Nothing. Never mind.”
“No. Tell me.”
“I don’t want you to start hating me again.”
She withdrew her hand and sat back on the bed. “I never hated you, Paul.”
“I made you uncomfortable.”
“Yes, you did. But it was more than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“You reminded me of him.”
“Him?”
“My father.”
“I’m not Ben Bolt, Mariah.”
“I know. You’re nothing like him, but I didn’t know you then. I’m sorry.”
Chaney was silent for a moment. “You have to let it go,” he said at last. “One of these days, Mariah, you’re going to have to forgive your father.”
“Forgive him?”
“I’m not excusing what he did, to you or to your mother and sister. It was despicable. But if I recall correctly, Benjamin Bolt was twenty-eight years old when he died in that Parisian flophouse. Most of us make stupid mistakes when we’re young that we spend the rest of our lives regretting. Maybe, if he had lived, he would have realized that he’d blown it, big time. I can’t believe he wouldn’t have regretted losing you.”
Mariah clenched her jaw. “He should regret in hell.”
“He probably is. But you’re suffering, too, Mariah. You have been all your life. And you’ll continue to do so, until you recognize him for the immature jerk that he was and then forgive him and let him go.”
She watched him dubiously, then shook her head slowly. “Even though you might be right, I’m just not sure I can.”
They sat in silence for a moment. “Come on,” Chaney said. “This pizza’s getting cold.”
She took a deep breath and nodded. “I’m starving.” She curled into a chair across from him and took the slice he held out. They ate in silence for some time. “I made a phone call while you were out,” Mariah said finally.
“To?”
“Rachel Kingman. She’s the ex-wife of Larry Kingman, the deputy director of the lab who disappeared in the accident.”
“When did you last see her?”
“About sixteen years ago.”
“She must have been surprised to hear from you.”
“Very. I told her David had died and that I’d heard about Larry—asked if we could talk. She had dinner guests tonight, but she agreed to see us in her office tomorrow morning before her patients start arriving.”
“You said she’s a doctor?”
Mariah nodded. “Paul? You know that buckle I fished out of the river? I think it might have come from a life jacket.”
“So?”
“It got me thinking about rafting.”
“I don’t get it. What’s the point?”
“Why do you think those scientists went all the way to Taos for a drink?”
He frowned. “I think it’s so they would be seen and noticed. Why else would they go to a place where they stood out like five sore thumbs? They even took their briefcases in with them, so there would be no doubt in anyone’s mind where they came from.”
“Right. And then there’s a messy accident in which nothing survives except the license plate of their van. No bodies to ID, but that’s okay, because everyone knows who was in it.”
“What’s this got to do with the buckle?”
“Well, it comes back down to, why Taos? I think it’s because of that spot in the river where I fell in. It’s one of the best places around here for launching a raft, and there’s easy access to the highway. If you had an experienced guide, you could easily float downriver from Pilar to any one of several pickup points farther south. And guess what, Paul? Larry Kingman was an experienced rafter. He took David and me out when we first came to New Mexico.”
Chaney whistled. “You know what this means, don’t you?”
“Yup. It was all a big setup. Those guys aren’t dead, they just went to a lot of trouble to make it look that way.” She watched him closely through narrowed eyes. “But you’ve suspected it all along, haven’t you?”
“I wasn’t sure. I just felt something wasn’t right and the more I looked, the more not right it seemed.”
Mariah nodded. “All the emergency vehicles came from Taos, to the north of the crash site, so no one would have noticed them slipping away below the scene at Pilar. And even if someone had checked down there later, it snowed that night—their tracks would have been covered.”
“They arranged it so it would look like a collision, but the tanker was probably rigged to blow once everyone was clear. Which explains Eddie Ortega’s comment about the truck,” Chaney said.
“Which comment?”
“Just before we left the bar—maybe you were in the rest room at that point. Ortega said he didn’t know which oil company the tanker belonged to. Whatever markings it might have had were erased by the fire, and he didn’t know who in Taos was scheduled to receive a delivery that night. Since the local authorities were pulled off the investigation, nobody pursued it.”
Mariah munched thoughtfully on her pizza. “If those were real federal officials who moved in, then this has got DDO written all over it.”
“And if they weren’t,” Chaney said ominously, “then it could be anyone. Anyone with the desire and the dollars to buy themselves five of the world’s top nuclear weapons experts.”
Dieter Pflanz was waiting when George Neville came through the arrivals gate at Albuquerque airport. The two men strode quickly to the main entrance, where a car was waiting. They climbed in the back seat and the vehicle sped away.
“We’ve located Chaney at the hotel in Los Alamos. He was alone when he checked in,” Pflanz said. “We haven’t spotted the woman yet, but she might be meeting him there.”
“We did a credit-card trace on car rental agencies in Albuquerque but came up blank,” Neville said. “She flew out of Boston under the name Diane Tardiff, but the AmEx card she used was issued to her husband. We couldn’t find anything else under Bolt or Tardiff except the plane tickets. Are you sure she didn’t meet him here in Albuquerque?”
Pflanz shrugged. “We’re watching the hotel. Might be a good idea to set up electronic surveillance.”
Neville nodded, then leaned forward toward the driver. “Pass me the phone, will you?” he said. The driver handed back a cellular phone and Neville punched in a series of digits. “What’s the room number?” he asked Pflanz as he waited for the call to be picked up.
“It’s 303.”
“Code alpha-seven-two-seven,” he said into the mouthpiece. “Site ninety-four, Priority One—full coverage, unit three-zero-three.”
When the order was confirmed from the other end, he passed the phone to the driver. Arrangements were now in place for Chaney’s room and telephone to be bugged. Site ninety-four was Hilltop House, the usual stop-off point for anyone—domestic or foreign—with an interest in the Los Alamos National Laboratory. More than one visitor had been monitored at that location, so surveillance resources were easily activated when the need arose. Some Russian visitors at the hotel were, in fact, under surveillance at that very moment.
In theory, the CIA has only limited authority to undertake domestic surveillance, and then only on foreign targets, with the FBI taking the lead where surveillance is required on American citizens. Neville felt confident that they could be in and out in a matter of hours, before anyone noticed that DDO had authorized domestic surveillance on a room occupied by an American citizen.
“We’ll just watch him for now. With any luck, he’ll come up empty and back off. In the meantime,” Neville added, “it’s time to come clean, Dieter. I want everything you know and I want it now. I mean it—it’s ‘need to know’ time, fella. I’ve given you loose rein so far, but this is it.”
“And if I say I don’t know what you’re talking about?”
“Then we’re all going down in flames together, my friend. You know that, don’t you? Wh
atever went wrong here, you haven’t managed to plug the leak, despite your extracurricular activities. Oh, yes,” Neville said, as Pflanz glanced at him sharply, “I know what you’ve been up to. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist. I’ve looked the other way up to now, but it’s no good anymore. Either we work together or this party’s over.”
Pflanz stared gloomily at the passing headlights. Almost two years of work and it was all coming unhinged on some sideshow, because a nosy reporter couldn’t leave well enough alone. At this point of the operation, Pflanz knew that damage control called for extreme measures, but he didn’t think Neville would go for it. On the other hand, the man had as much to lose as they did if the thing fell apart. The deputy might yet be persuaded.
18
Chaney’s breathing was deep and regular. He had spent the previous night driving from Phoenix to Albuquerque, managing to snatch only a couple hours’ sleep in the car while waiting for her to arrive from Boston. No wonder he was exhausted, Mariah thought. She’d thought she was, too.
They had both been ready to pack it in as soon as they finished the pizza, hardly able to keep their eyes open. Paul had graciously given her first crack at the bathroom, and she had been under the covers in her own bed, half-asleep, by the time he turned out the lights. But almost against her will, Mariah’s eyes had opened and she watched his silhouette against the window as he slipped out of his trousers and into the other bed. The last thing she remembered before falling asleep was the striking contrast between his long, smooth torso and David’s compact, bristly one.
She glanced now at the luminous readout of the digital clock on the table between them—nearly midnight. They had been sleeping for almost four hours.
Chaney turned onto his side and Mariah stared at his sleeping face in the light from the window, remembering its surprising vulnerability when he spoke of the journal he kept for his son. She felt a sudden urge to touch him, to brush aside the cowlick that tumbled across his forehead and feel his skin under her fingertips. Her eyes followed the long curve of his arm on the bedclothes, the fair hair on his forearm glistening in the pale light. He took up an inordinate amount of space, she thought, studying the hills and valleys in the covers that rolled down to the foot of the bed and beyond. Her hand fought against the impulse to run over those planes and come to rest on the plateau of his hip. She shifted onto her back and closed her eyes, working to block out his image and the urges it was arousing in her. Had always aroused in her, she suddenly knew.
It was true what she had told him, how he had reminded her, with his frank good looks and easy charm, of the father who had abandoned her. But that was only part of the reason she had been so uneasy with him in Vienna.
As time went on and Paul’s attentions toward her remained undimmed, what she had subconsciously feared was that she might be capable of giving in to it, that she might have inherited from her father some “infidelity gene” that preordained her fate, despite David and everything he meant to her. It wasn’t supposed to work that way, she told herself. When you chose a mate, you were supposed to be oblivious to all others—like a cable television box, unwanted signals scrambled. That she had never succumbed to the temptation Paul represented was small comfort to her, and in the end, it had been easier to relegate him in her mind to some philanderers’ dustheap rather than to admit to a simple mutual attraction.
And now, she was feeling his pull again, compounded by deprivation, by not having been held or caressed for—how long? Too long. Too long without a warm and trusted person on the other side of the bed who would draw her close and, just for a while, hold the cold world and her cold fears at bay.
But even as she thought about it, darker images came rushing in. The only man who had put his hands on her in all that time was that animal, Burton. She felt again his groping, brutal explorations, the foul lips and the look of hatred and contempt in his strange eyes. How could she ever let another man touch her without remembering the ugliness of that experience?
And how would she ever forget those photographs and David’s eyes pleading with Katarina Müller as she crouched over him? How could she trust anyone if even David could betray her?
The hardest thing she had ever done in her life was learning to trust him. Every instinct had told her not to, not because it was David, but because experience had taught her that this was a recipe for getting hurt. People left or they were ripped away, and so the safest course was to stand aloof. And then David had come along, with his goofy humor and his wild enthusiasms. He had pursued her with the same dedication that he devoted to all of his passions—his work, his hockey, his family—until his persistence had finally broken down the wall of her defenses.
It had taken Mariah a long time to admit to herself that when she left David in Los Alamos, it was due to something much, much deeper than philosophical opposition to his work. She had left in a panic over the realization that she had come to depend on his being there. Terrified by her vulnerability, she had pushed it away by leaving him. But the period they were apart had been—before now—the worst of her life. She had finally understood that living in an emotional bubble was living without meaning. It had taken David to teach her that, and he had felt it, too, she knew. In almost fourteen years of marriage, they had never made love, never touched, never passed a day together, without his regarding her with the same expression of gratitude that she had always felt toward him.
She shivered and moved onto her side, pulling her knees up and the blankets tighter around her shoulders. When she glanced over at Paul again, she realized with a start that his eyes were open and that he was watching her. “Are you all right, Mariah?”
“Yes. Just wrestling with ghosts.”
“The demons of the dark. Who’s winning?”
“They are. Don’t they always?”
“Not necessarily. Sooner or later, the dawn comes around again—if you give it time and if you let it.” She shivered. “Are you cold?”
“Freezing. I think I’m still feeling the effects of the swim in the river.”
Chaney rolled to a standing position and picked up the bedspread from the foot of his bed, throwing it over her. “Better?”
“Thanks.”
He crouched beside her. “I’d offer up my warm body, too, if I didn’t fear grievous injury.”
“Injury?”
“I’ve seen you fight, remember?”
As Mariah returned his smile, Paul’s hand came up and stroked her hair softly, then moved lower, his thumb lightly tracing the line of her cheek and her lips. Mariah’s eyes closed, but snapped open again as she felt a subtle shift in the air current around them. His face was now close above hers. She laid her palm briefly against his chest, then took his hand in hers, easing it away—wanting to leave it where it was, wanting to let him go on, but knowing it would be a mistake. “I can’t,” she said.
He watched her for a moment, then gave a reluctant nod. “I know. It’s all right.” He squeezed her hand and stood up.
“Paul?”
“What?”
“You’re a good man, you know that? How come I never saw it in Vienna?”
“Beats me.”
“Maybe it was that Casanova image.”
He waved his hand dismissively. “Never believe the image of a media person. I’m not suicidal, you know.”
“Yeah, well, somehow I don’t see you as monk material, either.”
“Never claimed I was.”
“Would have been a pretty hollow claim,” she said wryly.
“We all have our defense strategies— ‘once burned’ and all that. It’s hard to do damage to a moving target.”
“It’s one way to keep the demons at bay, I suppose.”
“It’s lost its appeal, frankly. I don’t much like waking up with strangers.”
Mariah lifted herself onto her elbow, suddenly frowning. “Paul? Would you answer an awkward question for me?”
“Awkward?”
“About Katarina Mül
ler.”
“Mariah, don’t—”
“Please, Paul. I want to know what she had that could make him do it.” He shook his head. “You won’t tell me?”
“Not won’t—I can’t, Mariah. I don’t understand it myself. Except—”
“Except what?”
“Once, just once, I confronted her, asked her what she thought she was up to with David.”
“And? What did she say?” He hesitated, his reluctance obvious. “Come on, Paul. Nothing could hurt more than what I already know.”
“I asked her how she could justify trying to destroy such a good marriage. And she said to me, ‘You think you know them so well, their charming little family, but it’s all a sham, a big lie. You don’t know anything about David and Mariah.”’
“What!” Mariah sat straight up in the bed. “How could she say that?” She crumpled the edges of the blankets in her fists. “I can’t believe David ever, ever said anything to her to justify such a lie. We did have a good marriage, dammit!”
“I know that, Mariah. That’s why I didn’t tell you this before. She was a professional liar and cheat. Don’t let it upset you, please.”
She pulled her knees up tight, rocking slowly. “I suppose she was a sexual gymnast?”
Chaney glanced back, frowning, but his eyes softened when he saw her face. He sat down beside her and wiped her wet cheek. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I never slept with her.”
“Come on.”
“I mean it. I didn’t find her attractive. I was curious about her, but not that curious.”
Mariah took a deep breath and reached for a tissue to blow her nose. “Well,” she said grimly after a couple of honks, “David obviously couldn’t say the same. I guess that makes you the better man.”
“No, Mariah, that’s exactly the conclusion you shouldn’t draw. I’ve got no claim to the moral high ground here. I walked away from every woman who ever cared for me, only to fall hopelessly in love with the wife of one of the best friends I’ve ever had. If that doesn’t make me the jerk of the century, I don’t know what does. But I want you to know,” he added, “I never meant to do anything about it. I would never have touched you if it hadn’t been for…what happened.”
