by Taylor Smith
“I know that.”
“You do?”
She nodded. “I do now.”
He took her hand in his. “Then know this, Mariah—I still love you. No, listen to me,” he said as she glanced down uncomfortably. “I want you, but I’ll never try to force myself on you again. I’ll be there, whenever and however you want me—or not, as you wish. You only have to tell me.”
Mariah studied his sober face in the half light. She knew what she wanted to tell him. She wanted to tell him how grateful she was that he was there. She wanted to tell him she was sorry for every nasty thought she’d ever entertained about him—and there had been plenty. She wanted to ask him to put his arms around her and hold her for a while. She wanted very much to kiss him, and maybe more. But she couldn’t. Not now. Maybe not ever.
“I don’t know what to say, Paul.”
“You don’t have to say anything, except maybe, ‘Good night, Paul.”’
She gave him an attempt at a smile. “Good night, Paul.”
“Good night, Mariah.” He squeezed her hand one last time, then returned to his bed, light-years away, as promised.
Mariah lay back on her side, pulling the blankets tight. Closing her eyes, she focused once more on listening to his breathing and wrestling with the demons, pretending to sleep until finally, at long last, she did.
George Neville and Dieter Pflanz were less than a mile away, on the top floor of a low-rise office building in downtown Los Alamos. The sign on the front door of the suite indicated that it was leased to McCord Industries, a defense contractor well known locally. Most of the offices in the suite were occupied during working hours by marketing and engineering staff, but none of these employees was present when Neville and Pflanz arrived late Sunday night. Nor, when the employees returned the next morning, would they be aware that the two men had ever been there.
The two covert operators were in a securely locked set of rooms at the end of a long hallway, one with its own separate entrance near the building’s stairwell. The rooms housed an elaborate communications complex linked by satellite to the company’s headquarters in California and, from there, to McCord operations worldwide.
It was nearly ten o’clock when they arrived at the ComCenter and settled in for the night. The listening device in Paul Chaney’s hotel room had been functioning for about an hour, the receiving end set up at the McCord office. So far, it had been transmitting only silence, the technician monitoring the bug said. At Neville’s order, the technician had amplified the sound until they finally were able to hear breathing sounds and concluded that Chaney was asleep.
“Apparently, the switchboard logged one outgoing call earlier this evening, local,” the man said.
“To?”
The technician shook his head. “It was before we got the tap activated.”
“We can track it through the phone company records first thing in the morning,” Neville said.
“Why don’t we just move in now?” Pflanz asked, turning to the deputy. “He hasn’t had a chance to do any damage. We should take him before he does.”
“Take him where, Dieter? We don’t know whether Chaney really knows anything or whether he’s just fishing.”
“He suspects! Why else would he be here?”
“Suspecting is one thing. Proving is another. You can’t just go snatching citizens off the street.”
“What do you think he’s doing in Los Alamos if not looking for proof? And suppose he finds something?”
“There’s nothing to find.”
“You hope. But suppose he does? And suppose he tells the woman, wherever the hell she is. What are you going to do, appeal to their patriotism? Chaney’s a muckraker, George. He’d like nothing better than to blow this all over the six o’clock news.” Pflanz rolled his massive fists into wrecking balls. “There are bigger things at stake here than this guy. We should take him now.”
Neville’s voice was low and dangerous. “We watch. We listen. And we do nothing—do you get that?—until I say we do.” They stood eye to eye, neither blinking nor moving, fixing each other with the hard stare of those accustomed to having their orders followed, warriors whose long alliance was showing dangerous signs of fraying.
“This is a tactical mistake and you’re going to regret it, Neville,” Pflanz told him finally. “We’re all going to regret it.”
“Maybe,” Neville said, “but it’s my call. We keep him under surveillance for a little longer, see if he meets up with Mariah Bolt, and find out what she’s been up to. With luck, they’ll both come up empty and back off.”
“And if not?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Meantime,” Neville said, “let’s get some shut-eye.” He turned to the technician monitoring the bug in Chaney’s room. “You shout if you hear anything.” The man nodded as Pflanz and Neville moved to an office next to the Com-Center and stretched out on a couple of couches.
It was around midnight when the technician called them to report that there was a conversation going on in the hotel room. As they grabbed up headsets to listen, Neville recognized the second voice. “She’s there with him!” he said, punching the air with his fist. “We’ve got them both!”
They listened to the conversation between the reporter and the analyst, and then replayed it again on tape after the targets went back to sleep—in separate beds, it seemed.
“Okay,” Neville said. “This is good.”
“Good? How do you figure?”
“Because they’re both where we can see them. They won’t find out anything poking around Los Alamos. No one at the lab knows anything, and even if they did, they sure as hell wouldn’t talk to any hotshot television reporter.” Pflanz did not look reassured. “Interesting,” Neville mused aloud. “If he’s not lying to her about his involvement with the Müller woman, then I guess it confirms what you learned, Dieter. That Chaney was just the vehicle she used to get to David Tardiff.”
Pflanz nodded. He had never had any doubt that Katarina Müller told him the truth before she died. He had long since learned what death-row priests have always known—that the confessions of the condemned are nearly always truthful.
“Rachel, this is Paul Chaney,” Mariah said, stepping back from a hug. She and Chaney had risen early that morning and ordered a room-service breakfast before driving down the road to arrive at the medical building at precisely seven-thirty.
Dr. Rachel Kingman closed the door of her office and turned to face them. She was wearing a white lab coat over a navy sweater and slacks, sensible oxfords on her feet. Her steel gray hair was arranged in a no-nonsense helmet, and she wore not a speck of makeup. Only the sparkling green eyes gave away the humor and warmth that Mariah knew lay under that efficient exterior.
In this small community, where the men worked and most of their wives stayed home with children, it had been difficult for a young graduate student to find friends with similar interests. During her brief stay in Los Alamos, Mariah had felt socially as well as physically isolated, her only kindred spirit being the wife of David’s boss at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Rachel Kingman had been on the lab’s medical staff at the time, although she had confided to Mariah even then that she was considering switching to private practice.
The Kingmans were childless—whether by choice or circumstance Mariah never knew. All she knew was that Rachel Kingman had wide interests that extended to history, politics and philosophy, and that the older woman had been good company over many evenings when Larry Kingman and David had disappeared into the intellectual thickets of high energy physics. Seeing her again after all these years, Mariah regretted that she hadn’t made an effort to keep in touch. She had left Los Alamos and David under unhappy circumstances, and social niceties had been the last thing on her mind at the time.
Mariah watched Rachel’s warm features now as shook hands with Paul. “Mr. Chaney, how do you do?”
“It’s good to meet you, Dr. Kingman. And call me Paul, p
lease.”
“Paul. And I’m Rachel. Only my patients call me Dr. Kingman. I presume you’re not here for a checkup.” Chaney smiled. The doctor glanced at Mariah and then studied Chaney. “You’re a reporter, aren’t you?”
“That’s right. But I’m off duty at the moment—unemployed, as a matter of fact.”
“Unemployed?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Paul’s a good friend, Rachel,” Mariah said. “David’s and mine. He was with us in Vienna.”
“Well, then, you’re welcome here.” She turned away from Chaney and her expression became sober as she took Mariah’s hand. “How have you been? I was so sorry to hear about David.”
Mariah pressed her lips together and nodded. “I’m trying to deal with multiple shocks. First the accident, then finding out that he had cancer when he died. And there have been some other things, too. It’s been a horrible year, to tell you the truth, Rachel.”
“What a tragedy. He was a fine young man. I wasn’t surprised, of course, to hear about the cancer, but how awful that his last months should have been wasted because of a senseless traffic accident.”
“What do you mean,” Chaney asked, puzzled, “‘not surprised about the cancer’?”
Rachel Kingman had been patting Mariah’s hand but she glanced up when Chaney spoke, then waved them to some chairs. She herself took up a perch on the edge of her desk. “A professional hazard, I’m sorry to say. I’m seeing all too much of it here.”
“Because of the lab?”
She shrugged. “The jury’s still out. The few epidemiological studies done so far have been inconclusive, and officials, of course, deny any link. But the fact is, here in Los Alamos, we seem to have very elevated rates for certain cancers—brain tumors, leukemia, thyroid cancer.”
“Like David’s,” Mariah said.
“Exactly. They’re better equipped now to handle radioactive materials at the lab, but you just have to look at the photos in the historical museum to see how naı¨ve they were about the dangers back in the early years of this place. You may not have heard about this, Mariah, but there’s been radioactive waste found in one of the canyons around here. People go horseback riding and kids have been playing there all their lives. We’re talking about waste that will be deadly for thousands of years to come.”
“This sounds just like what’s happened in the former Soviet weapons sites,” Mariah said, astonished.
“On a lesser scale, perhaps, but no less worrisome.”
Chaney shook his head. “Fifty years of tinkering with radioactivity and we still haven’t worked out a satisfactory way to handle the deadly garbage that’s left over. And even if we figure out how to store it permanently, how are we going to warn future generations away from dump sites? There won’t even be any common language in a thousand years, but this stuff will still be lethal.”
“Our gift to the future,” the doctor agreed grimly. “Of course, David didn’t have to go horseback riding in the canyon to develop his cancer.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was the accident in his lab, I would think.”
“The accident?” Mariah asked. “The fire, you mean, where the technician died?”
“David told you about how that poor boy suffered?” Mariah nodded. Rachel shook her head sadly. “It was terrible—terrible. No one should ever have to die in that kind of agony.”
“Awful,” Mariah agreed. “David had nightmares about it for years. But what’s that got to do with his cancer, Rachel?”
“Well, unlike the technician, David took a sublethal dose of radiation that night, but we knew that he was at an extremely elevated level of risk for cancer as a result.” Dr. Kingman stopped short as she glanced up and caught sight of Mariah’s face. “I suppose the two of you never enjoyed talking about this, did you?”
“Talking about what, Rachel? He told me about the fire and about how the tech died a lingering death from radiation sickness. What else was there to tell?”
Rachel sat back on the desk, frowning. “David didn’t tell you that he was the one to find the technician that night and get him out of the building?”
“What!”
“Oh, dear,” the doctor said quietly. She massaged her temples wearily for a moment. “I suppose he might have feared your reaction, Mariah. We had some long conversations during his recuperation. He told me you’d lost all of your family. He missed you terribly after you left Los Alamos, and perhaps he feared you wouldn’t take him back if you knew the prognosis.”
Mariah was too stunned to speak.
“Exactly what happened that night?” Chaney asked.
Rachel shifted her gaze to him. “David’s lab was in one of the old buildings left over from the war. Those buildings have pretty much all been torn down now. They were never meant to be more than temporary but, typically, some had remained in use long past their normal lifespan. They were rickety wooden things and the wiring was inadequate for all the new equipment they had put in there. My ex-husband was always ranting about lost time when the fuses blew and experiments were ruined.”
“Faulty wiring—is that what caused the fire?”
She nodded. “That’s what I heard, although the investigation was never made public. David and the technician were working late that night, running some sort of experiment on a cesium source. I don’t know the details—that’s all classified, of course. Anyway, David had run out to pick up some dinner. When he returned, he found the building in flames. He ran inside and found the technician, who was unconscious by then. Apparently, the fellow had grabbed the radioactive source with a pair of tongs and was trying to get it out of the building, but he was overcome by smoke. He dropped the source and collapsed right on top of it.”
“Giving himself a lethal dose of radiation.”
Dr. Kingman nodded again. “I was working in the laboratory’s health complex at the time, and I was on duty when the two of them were brought in. We treated them both immediately for smoke inhalation, but we knew from the technician’s dosimeter badge that he had taken a supralethal dose of gamma radiation. David had taken off his badge when he went out to get dinner, so there was no way of knowing how severe the damage might be in his case. All we could do was monitor. As it turned out, he developed a milder case of radiation sickness. He recovered, but—”
“But there were long-term ramifications,” Mariah said. “Damn him! How typical!”
“Typical?”
“That he never told me this.” She looked up at Dr. Kingman. “You might be partly right about why he didn’t, but it was more than that. He never wanted to be the bearer of bad tidings. We were a great team. I always anticipate the worst, David refused to ponder it—the eternal optimist. He seemed to think that if you shut your eyes to the ugliness in this world, it wouldn’t touch you. He just sailed through life, ignoring the bad things.”
“Maybe that’s not such a bad way to live.”
“Que sera, sera?” Mariah said bitterly.
“Sort of. Live today to the maximum and let tomorrow take care of itself.”
Just then, there was a knock at the door. When Rachel walked over and opened it, Mariah saw a young woman in a nurse’s uniform standing on the other side. “’Morning, Dr. Kingman,” she said cheerily. She glanced at Mariah and Paul, then at her boss. “Sorry to disturb you—just wanted you to know I’m here. I didn’t realize you had patients already.”
“Not patients—visitors. An old friend. We won’t be too long. The Marshall twins are still due to come in for their allergy shots at eight?”
The young woman in the doorway nodded. “On their way to school, and then you’re giving flu shots at the seniors’ center this morning, remember?”
“I remember. Buzz me when the twins arrive, okay, Beth?”
“Okeydokey,” the young woman said, bowing out.
When the door was closed again, the doctor turned back to see Chaney studying Mariah. Then he leaned forward in his chair
, turning his attention to the older woman. “Rachel, we shouldn’t hold you up, but we wanted to ask you some questions about the accident involving the other Dr. Kingman, your ex-husband.”
“What about it?”
“Mariah and I have been looking into David’s car accident in Vienna and we’ve uncovered strong evidence that it might have been a deliberate attack. When we heard about the accident here involving your ex-husband, we became curious about possible links between the two. Among other things,” Chaney continued, “David had recently been in contact with one of the Russians who was with Larry that night. And this Russian—a Dr. Sokolov—apparently went to some extraordinary lengths to ensure that the other two Russians killed that night were included in the delegation that was visiting the lab.”
Mariah jumped in. “And now we think we’ve uncovered some anomalies that suggest that the tanker accident wasn’t what it appears to be.”
“What kind of anomalies?”
“For one thing, the fact that Larry and the others drove all the way to Taos for a drink that night,” Mariah said. “We went to the bar. Frankly, Rachel, it’s kind of a dive. Not Larry’s sort of place, from what I recall of him. And then there was the way the investigation was handled.”
“What do you mean?”
“Federal officials claimed jurisdiction,” Chaney said. “Pushed the local police and fire authorities off the case.”
“That’s not surprising, is it? Given Larry’s work? And the death of the Russians?”
“But there was no investigation, Rachel,” Mariah explained. “The locals said the feds just bulldozed the evidence. You know how meticulous the security people are here. Does that sound like something they’d allow?”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Had you spoken to Larry recently—before the accident?”
“Yes, of course.” She caught their exchange of glances. “We split up about five years ago. It was just one of those things. Other people were involved, but that really wasn’t the reason. We just seemed to have drifted into a state where we couldn’t live together anymore. But once we had established a little distance, we found we could enjoy each other’s company again. In fact, I had dinner with Larry only two days before the accident.”
