Guilt by Silence

by Taylor Smith

  As he rose and turned toward the cockpit, the door opened and Dieter Pflanz emerged holding a gun. He stepped up next to the closest chair—Mariah’s—and spun it around to face the others. The fingers of one hand gripped her shoulders tightly, like talons, and she felt the cold, hard steel of Pflanz’s gun against her temple.

  “What’s going on here, Dieter?” Neville asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “We’re going to shed some cargo, that’s all.”

  20

  “You can’t do this, Dieter,” Neville said slowly.

  “No? Watch me. You!” he said to Chaney. “Get up!”

  Chaney’s eyes were large and blue as robin’s eggs as he unbuckled his seat belt and stood up. “Don’t hurt her, Pflanz. I’ll do what you want, but leave her out of this. I’m the one who dragged her into it.”

  “She should have stayed away from the likes of you. I tried to warn her.”

  “Warn me?” Mariah said. “What are you talking about?”

  “That envelope I gave your daughter at school. I tried to warn you it would be dangerous to reopen this can of worms. But you couldn’t leave it alone. You had to follow this jerk down the garden path.”

  “You bastard! How could you threaten a child and an invalid?”

  “I just wanted you to back off and mind your own business.”

  “You hired Katarina Müller.”

  “No bloody way.”

  “Then how did you get those pictures?”

  “I took them from her—before she died.”

  “You murdered her!”

  Pflanz’s voice was a deep rumble in his chest just behind Mariah’s head, and she felt his fingers digging into her shoulders. “She was blackmailing your husband and she set up the attack in front of your daughter’s school. You should be thanking me for giving her and that mercenary truck driver what they deserved.”

  “What about Burton, the guy who attacked me in my house? Was he another of your warnings?”

  “No, but I took him out, too.”

  “Gee, Pflanz,” Chaney said. “You’re a regular guardian angel.”

  “I don’t believe in diddling around while the system lets the bad guys get away. People like you, you talk so much about democracy and protecting people’s rights. And then you just sit on your hands, afraid to act, while the crazies take over the world.”

  “Dieter, listen to me,” George Neville said. “This is crazy. I know how you feel. But Chaney and Mariah here, they’re law-abiding American citizens. You and I may not agree with their view of things, but we’re on the same side, for God’s sake.”

  “I’m not on his side. Muckrakers like Chaney, they’re the kind that destroyed America’s will to fight during Vietnam. They suck the spirit right out of this country. What we’re doing is right, George, you know that. We can’t let the same mistakes happen again. This time, we finish what we started, and no reporter’s going to stop us until we win this war.”

  “I won’t go along with this,” Neville said emphatically.

  “Then just stay out of my way. I’m not afraid to do what has to be done.”

  “I’m telling you no, Dieter.” Neville’s hand moved to the front of his jacket.

  Mariah gasped as Pflanz’s fingers slipped up into the soft flesh under her jawbone, wrapping around her windpipe. It would take nothing for those fingers to crush it like a paper straw. “Don’t make me do it,” he growled.

  Neville lifted his hands. “Take it easy.”

  “You—Chaney!”

  Chaney tore his anxious eyes from Mariah’s face. “What?”

  “Get Neville’s gun—inside his suit jacket. And mind, lift it out real careful. One false move and you can kiss the woman goodbye.”

  Chaney nodded and reached inside Neville’s jacket, lifting the weapon out of a shoulder holster, holding it up with two fingers where Pflanz could see it.

  “Take out the clip and toss the gun onto the sofa. All right, now take the bullets out of the magazine and drop them on the floor.” The bullets disappeared into the thick carpet in a series of soft thunks. When Chaney had thrown the empty clip aside, Pflanz released his grip on Mariah’s throat and tapped her on the shoulder. “Get up,” he instructed. He kept one hand on her shoulder and the gun at her head while she unbuckled her seat belt and scrambled to her feet. Pflanz guided her backward toward the door of the aircraft. When they reached it, he stopped. “Get over here, Chaney. Open the door.”

  “Dieter, for God’s sake. Don’t do this!” Neville cried.

  “Shut up, George. Chaney, I said unlatch the door!”

  Chaney stared at him for a second, and then came over and reached for the lever in the big door, yanking it up. There was a hiss of escaping air as the seal was broken and the hatch lifted up and away, opening the side of the aircraft to a gust of frigid wind. A few bits of loose paper whipped around the cabin. The floor was tilted toward the open door, the aircraft hovering low over the barren landscape.

  Pflanz shoved Mariah into Chaney’s arms and stood back against the open hatch. “Okay. One by one or together—your choice,” he yelled above the drone of the engines and the rush of the wind. Mariah gripped Chaney’s jacket and stared at Pflanz, unable to believe that he was serious. “Come on!” he hollered. “I haven’t got all day. Step out or I’ll shoot first and push later. Move it!”

  “No!” Mariah shouted. “You go to hell, Pflanz! You can’t get away with this!”

  “Really? Who knows where you are? Nobody. And by the time the vultures and coyotes are finished with your bodies, there’ll be nothing left by spring.”

  Still they stood frozen to the spot. Pflanz waved his gun impatiently.

  “I’ll go first,” Chaney said finally.”

  Paul, no!”

  He regarded the open door grimly. “Let me get this over with—I hate long goodbyes. By the way,” Chaney added, looking down at her and touching her cheek, “I still think you’re the finest woman I’ve ever known.” He pried her fingers from his jacket and moved next to Pflanz in the doorway, turning briefly to give her a halfhearted salute.

  The next move was as sudden as it was unexpected. As he turned again toward the door, Chaney’s hand made a rapid, slicing arc down on Pflanz’s wrist. Pflanz stared in disbelief as the gun fell, bounced once on the floor and disappeared into the void. But he recovered quickly, reacting with instant reflexes, grabbing Chaney’s lapel with his left hand as his right smashed into the reporter’s face. Chaney fell backward against the bulkhead but Pflanz pulled him to his feet again. The two of them stood poised in the open hatch. Chaney was stunned by the blow but managed to grab Pflanz’s shirt, hanging on tenaciously, evidently determined to take the bigger man with him when he went out the door.

  Pflanz brought his arms up hard between Chaney’s, breaking his grip, then grabbed the reporter’s jacket once more and prepared to heave him out the door like a rag doll. But for some reason, he hesitated. At first, she thought that Pflanz had been distracted by her scream, but Mariah realized that there had been another loud noise and she noticed a small red spot beginning to flower on his chest. Pflanz’s wild gaze traveled down to his shirt, then from Chaney to Mariah and beyond. His scowl deepened as he looked back to the reporter, the two of them locked together as Pflanz began to list toward the blue sky.

  Mariah leaped forward, grabbing Paul by his belt and pulling backward with all her might, but Pflanz was too heavy and her feet skidded on the deep pile of the carpet. As the three of them slid together toward their doom, Chaney struggled to pry open Pflanz’s fingers on his jacket. Finally, with the crimson bloom spreading across his shirtfront, Pflanz’s grip went slack. Mariah gave one last yank on Paul’s belt and the two of them collapsed on the cabin floor. Pflanz flailed desperately for a perch of some sort. Finding none, he fell back into the blue, his beaded eyes bright and furious, his arms outstretched like great wings as he sailed off in the bright morning light.

  From their tangled heap o
n the floor, Mariah and Paul tore their eyes away from the open door and looked back at Neville. He was crouched behind one of the club chairs, his forearms propped on the armrest, the left hand supporting the outstretched right in which he held a gun. It was the gun that he had taken from her in the park in Los Alamos and stuffed in his coat pocket, Mariah realized—Frank’s gun. Neville got to his feet and moved to the door, peering out briefly before pulling it shut with a grunt and ramming the locking bar home. Then he turned to face them.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. They nodded dumbly. “Make yourselves comfortable. I need to have a little chat with the pilot and then make a couple of calls. We’re going home.” Neville disappeared into the cockpit. A moment later, the aircraft began to climb, resuming its eastbound trajectory.

  Mariah turned to Chaney and wordlessly threw her arms around him, burying her face in his neck. He held on tightly for a very long time. “Thanks for hauling me back in,” he said at last, his voice husky. “I thought I was a goner for sure.”

  “You can thank a low center of gravity. Being short finally paid off.”

  Chaney tried to smile but it turned to a wince at the angry welt that was rising on his cheekbone. Mariah touched it gingerly, then planted a light kiss, first on his cheek, then, tentatively, on his lips. The next kiss went much deeper, unrestrained by doubt or hesitation.

  When Neville returned to the cabin a while later, they were sitting together on the couch at the rear, hands clasped, heads bent together in quiet conversation. The deputy’s expression was weary as he settled into a chair across from them. “I’ve arranged for a search party to go out and look for his body,” he said.

  “It’s more than he would have done for us,” Mariah said bitterly.

  “I’m sorry for what he tried to do. I don’t excuse it, but I want you to know that Dieter Pflanz wasn’t really an evil man. He never sought money or personal power for himself. His mind wasn’t particularly subtle, but he believed in the rightness of what he was doing. In the end, he got confused by the blurry lines that divide right from wrong—maybe we all did. He couldn’t tell anymore who the real enemy was.”

  “He was a personal friend of yours?” Chaney asked.

  “We’d been through a lot together. He saved my life more than once.”

  “It must have been hard to do what you did,” Mariah said.

  “It was what I had to do. I’m not an evil man, either, Mariah. I know you don’t think much of me or some of the things I do, but in a dangerous world, we don’t always have the luxury of ideal choices. Nobody wants nuclear weapons landing on their doorstep, but nobody wants our troops out there playing policeman all the time, either. Faced with a danger, I had to make the best choice from a poor range of options. That’s my job.”

  “What happens now?”

  “Well, this operation is obviously wound up, if for no other reason than we can’t run it without Pflanz—he was the linchpin. And anyway, if you stumbled across it, Mr. Chaney, it was probably only a matter of time before someone else did, too, and Congress, as you say, will not be amused. My career, I think it’s safe to say, is about to come to an end. I have only one favor to ask,” Neville added.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s not for me, but rather a humanitarian gesture. We have people out there in the field who are negotiating with buyers for those dud Russian nukes. If this story gets out now, they’re dead. Do you think you could delay just a little before going public with this?”

  “Can you assure me that there won’t be any more arms running by McCord?”

  “You have my word,” Neville said. “That side of the operation is shut down as of this moment.”

  “Well, I don’t have a job, as it happens, so I guess I can sit on this.” Chaney glanced at Mariah. “In any event, I didn’t get into this investigation for its news value.”

  “I appreciate your cooperation, Mr. Chaney.”

  “Then appreciate this—I’m going to be watching, Neville. And I won’t hesitate to raise holy hell if I find evidence that your people have stepped over the line again into illegal activities, however noble the cause. That’s my job.”

  “I know. And despite the fact that you in the media also overstep the bounds of morality sometimes, I’ve seen enough closed regimes to know that your job is important. So, we have an understanding?” Chaney nodded. Neville turned to Mariah. “What about you, Mariah?”

  “It’s not over yet. Not for me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who really hired Katarina Müller to blackmail my husband, Mr. Neville?”

  “We’ve always assumed it was the same Russian intelligence faction that kidnapped Tatyana Baranova. I still think so, despite what Müller told Dieter Pflanz before she died.”

  “What did she tell him?”

  “She said she never met the people who hired her for the job. The assignment came by telephone, with the payoff money transferred electronically. She said the person who hired her spoke English with an American accent.”

  “And you don’t find that strange?”

  “The method, no. It’s common enough—funds get transferred electronically through numbered accounts, difficult to trace. As for the accent, many KGB agents were trained to speak English with an American accent. When Müller and the truck driver she hired were murdered, I thought that was Russian handiwork, too, until Pflanz told me that he himself had been mopping up.”

  “What if it wasn’t Russians who hired Müller?”

  “Why would you think it wasn’t?”

  “Do you know how Müller blackmailed my husband? I mean before she dragged him into bed with her?”

  Neville nodded. “When my guys in Vienna found out about it, your husband told them Müller had threatened your daughter. The bedroom pictures, it seems, were simply to add insult to injury—extra ammunition. It was his child he was trying to protect.”

  “Do you know how she threatened our daughter?” Neville hesitated, glancing at Chaney. “Never mind Paul,” Mariah said. “He knows everything.”

  “I gather that David Tardiff wasn’t your child’s true father. Before she died, Müller confessed to Pflanz that she got her hooks into your husband by threatening to tell your daughter she was illegitimate.”

  “And where did the information come from?”

  “From whoever hired her, I guess.”

  “Your people, Mr. Neville.”

  “What!”

  “It had to be. Only one person knew, besides David and his doctor, and that was Frank Tucker. He told you and you used the information. What I can’t figure out is why you wanted to do this to us.”

  Neville sat back in his chair and stared at her, dumbfounded. “This is paranoia, Mariah! I didn’t know about your daughter until Pflanz told me last night. If Frank Tucker knew, he never told me. For that matter,” he added, frowning, “how do I know it wasn’t you yourself who set up your husband? Maybe you and Chaney cooked this up to get David out of the way.”

  Chaney grabbed Mariah and held her back as she leaped out of her seat toward the deputy. “Back off, Neville!” he said angrily. “That’s not true and you know it!”

  “It makes more sense than what she’s suggesting,” Neville snapped. “Dammit, Mariah! You persist in painting me as the villain in this piece. I’m no angel, but I do protect my own people and I count you among them. I swear, I didn’t know anything about this until Dieter told me yesterday.”

  Mariah slumped down in the sofa again. “Neither did I.”

  “Excuse me? You didn’t know?”

  “I never knew David had been injured in Los Alamos and couldn’t have children. When I became pregnant, I knew there was a chance he might not be the father, but I hoped he was. As time went on, the hope became the reality, in my mind.”

  “But Tucker knew? All along?” She nodded. Neville’s eyes narrowed. “Mariah, is Frank Tucker the father of your child?” She looked away and nodded again, reluctantly. “Oh
, shit,” Neville breathed. “I’m going to have to have him investigated, you know. This doesn’t look good.”

  “Let me talk to him first.”

  “That’s not a good idea.”

  “Please. God knows, Frank Tucker owes me some sort of explanation. But in spite of everything, I can’t believe that he’s corrupt, or that he would deliberately put me or my family in harm’s way. Give me a chance to find out what’s going on.”

  Neville drummed his fingers on his knee. “All right, I’ll let you approach him first. But I want you to wear a wire. If Tucker has been turned, he could be dangerous.”

  “Not to me. He wouldn’t hurt me. Whatever else he’s done, I’m certain of that.”

  “You’re not going to him without surveillance, Mariah. That’s my condition. Take it or leave it.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  When they arrived back at CIA headquarters at Langley, it was early evening and the security watch reported that Frank Tucker had already signed out for the day. George Neville took Mariah down to the boys in technical services and had her fitted with a concealed mike and transmitter, then driven home to pick up her car. Chaney waited at the Agency with Neville. It was about seven-thirty when she rang the doorbell of Frank’s home in Alexandria.

  “Mariah! Where have you been?” Tucker pulled her inside and shut the door, then turned to face her. “Patty was trying to call you yesterday but David’s parents said you’d come back here. Then Neville called to say you’d disappeared—wanted to know if I knew where you might have gone. What’s going on?”

  “I took a trip.”

  “A trip? Where, for Pete’s sake?”

  “Los Alamos.” Frank stepped back and Mariah saw the color drain from his face. “We need to talk,” she said.

  Tucker nodded and followed as she headed down the hall and into the living room. The lights were winking on the Christmas tree and the floor was covered with books and toys.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.