by Taylor Smith
Mariah turned back to the mirror, gritting her teeth. They would not fight tonight.
From outside the flung-wide windows, the sweet, heavy scent of magnolia blossoms in the park-like condominium complex wafted across the warm evening air. But underneath that, the air crackled with the static charge of a storm brewing. July had arrived with all the restless, humid promise to which hormone-wracked youth are susceptible. Other people, too, perhaps, but not her, Mariah thought. That way lay only grief. She looked past her own reflection to her daughter’s. It was going to be a long summer, and not all the storms would be outside.
Pulling her gaze away from Lindsay, she forced herself to concentrate on the task at hand. It was getting late, and she was damned if she’d stay up half the night agonizing over wardrobe choices for an assignment she’d been dragooned into. She should have said no, and not just because of the assignment. There was also the contact site: the Arlen Hunter Museum. Hunter himself had died several years back. Was his family still involved in the museum that bore his name?
The Hunter family. Mariah grimaced. It wasn’t the family she was worried about. It was Renata. Would she be there? Well, what if she was? Why should it matter? Renata couldn’t hurt her anymore. Had no power over her unless Mariah handed it to her, and why would she do that? Simple answer: she wouldn’t.
She studied the dress in her hand once more. It was sleeveless and front-buttoning, with a high, Chinese-mandarin collar. The shimmering cobalt silk made a striking contrast to her softly cropped blond hair and cast her smoky eyes in an unusual light. It seemed suitable enough, but living with a teenager was enough to shake anyone’s confidence in her own judgment.
“What’s wrong with it?” she asked.
Lindsay’s bare shoulder lifted in a dismissive shrug. She was wearing a black halter top over heavily frayed jeans. A full head taller than Mariah’s five-three, with impossibly long legs, she was fair-skinned and fine-boned, with the doe-eyed delicacy of a Walter Scott heroine that belied an increasingly headstrong nature.
“A little fancy, isn’t it?” Lindsay said without looking up. “I thought this was a work thing. Why don’t you wear one of your suits?”
“It is work, but it’s also a gala opening. I don’t want to look like one of the museum guards, do I?”
Again, the shrug. “Wear what you want, then.”
Lindsay tossed the magazine aside and flopped down onto the big four-poster bed, thick curls washing like copper-colored waves down the smooth expanse of her back. As she landed, the corner of Mariah’s eye picked up a tumbling dust bunny, expelled from under the bed by the exasperated whumphing of the mattress. She tried not to think how long it had been since the vacuum had made a house call under there. She wondered, too, how this maddeningly irritating girl could be the cornerstone of her happiness, her reason for living. Some days, motherhood felt like pure masochism.
Giving up all hope of approval, she lay the Chinese-silk dress on the bed, by the garment bag lying next to Lindsay. Her suitcase was on the floor, and it already held most of the things she’d need for their vacation to follow. Lindsay’s own bag was packed, zipped and standing by the door of her bedroom down the hall.
“I still don’t see why I can’t come with you tomorrow,” Lindsay grumbled. “I would have liked to see the Russian royal treasures, too, you know.”
“I’ll take you another time. The tour’s coming through D.C. We’ll see it at the Smithsonian.”
“Yeah, right. Next year. You could have wangled me into the grand opening.”
Mariah shuddered at the thought. It was bad enough she had to go herself. “The invitation list was tightly controlled,” she said. “With the secretary of state and Russian foreign minister coming, the security contingent alone will take up half the hall. Anyway, this is no social occasion for me.”
“I wouldn’t get in the way. I didn’t in Paris.”
“That was different.”
“Yeah, it was. Those were private meetings. This is a public opening. If I got dressed up, I’d blend right into the background. I look old enough. I don’t even get carded at R-rated movies anymore.”
Mariah frowned. “R-rated movies? I don’t remember approving that.”
“Mom,” she said, rolling her eyes, “everything’s R-rated these days except Big Bird. I’ve told you about every movie my friends and I have gone to.”
Her friends included a six-foot, tank-size junior named Brent who’d started hanging around lately. Drive-in theaters and boys with shiny new driver’s licenses were bad enough, Mariah thought. Now, add R-rated movies to the long list of subjects that she and Lindsay could argue about.
Not tonight, though.
“The point is,” Lindsay said, “I can almost pass for twenty-something if I get really done up.”
“That’s all I’d need,” Mariah said, rifling through her bureau, trying to find her travel makeup bag. She and David had bought the oak double dresser at a country estate auction not long after they were married. Now, for the first time in her life, she had more drawer space than she knew what to do with, and she could still never find anything. The bag finally appeared. “I don’t want to be worrying about some guy hitting on my baby girl while I’m supposed to be picking Russian brains.”
Lindsay’s mouth rounded in a mock-pitying pout. “Aw, poor Mom! Double-oh-seven never had to baby-sit while he was spying on Dr. No, did he?”
“Double-oh-seven, my foot. I’m just an old desk jockey who gets unchained from time to time for a closer look at the other side. Those visiting dignitaries, however, have roving eyes and hands. I’m not exactly going to blend into the background if I have to be beating them off you like some crazed fishwife, am I?”
Lindsay blushed, confirming the general wisdom that redheads look adorable in pink. “Get outta here. You’ll be beating them off yourself in that dress.”
Mariah was packing her toiletry kit, but she turned to her daughter with a look of mock astonishment. “Oh, my gosh, is that a vote of confidence I’m hearing? You do think the dress is okay?”
Lindsay flipped over onto her back. “It’s fine. You going without me tomorrow isn’t.”
“You’re coming right behind me! Honestly, Lins, I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss. It’s barely forty-eight hours.”
“Because it’s boring here. All right? And there’s a party tomorrow night, and I’m not going to get to go to that, either! And if I don’t—” She rolled off the bed and headed for the door. “It’s not fair!”
The walls vibrated with the stomping of her feet down the hall and the slamming of her bedroom door, and then, the stereo came on loud. Very loud. Too loud for open windows and even the most well-baffled condominium walls.
Mariah massaged her forehead, trying to loosen the vise that was in the process of clamping down on her skull. When did the age of roller-coaster hormones end? It couldn’t happen too soon.
She took a deep breath, willing herself to be calm. The neighbors were away. The music still had to be turned down, but she would not fight. Not tonight.
She zipped her makeup kit and tossed it on top of the open suitcase. Then, steeling herself, she went down the hall and knocked softly on Lindsay’s door. No answer. The second rap was a little louder. Not aggressive. Just loud enough to be heard.
“What?” Lindsay snapped from the other side.
Mariah opened her mouth to ask if she could come in, but what if the answer came back no? Better to take acknowledgment as invitation. When she walked in, Lindsay was stretched on her stomach across the unmade bed, arms hanging down as she flipped through a pile of plastic CD cases on the floor beside her.
“We need to turn the music down,” Mariah said. “The windows are open, and it’s getting late.”
“Fine,” Lindsay said, but didn’t move.
Mariah walked over to the desk and lowered the volume on the stereo. The chair, typically, was covered with clothes from the try-and-toss ritual Lindsay we
nt through as she debated her image each day. Mariah made a move to start hanging them up, but if she did, she knew it would be interpreted as criticism—not that the mess didn’t warrant it, but there was a time and a place, and this wasn’t it. On the other hand, she wanted to sit down, and she couldn’t bring herself to sit on top of all those clean clothes. She compromised and draped the whole pile over the back of the desk chair, then settled and looked around.
The decor was in a constant process of transformation. Nothing was ever removed, but layer upon layer was added as Lindsay’s interests evolved. Between posters of rock bands and animals, new ones had been hung—book jackets and astronomical phenomena, two of the many passions of this difficult but incredibly bright daughter she was trying to raise. Images of the Milky Way and the Horsehead Nebula hung interspersed with others of writers as diverse as Jane Austen, George Orwell and Ken Kesey—and, Mariah noted, one whole wall of Ben Bolt, the grandfather Lindsay had never known.
Maybe it was just coincidence that she’d discovered her grandfather not long after losing her dad. Ben’s novel Cool Thunder had been on her freshman English curriculum, after all. But Lindsay had taken her Ben Bolt study well beyond school requirements, reading everything by and about him that she could get her hands on.
Not surprising, Mariah supposed. At a certain point, everyone wants to know who they are and where they came from, and she herself hadn’t provided much information over the years. Where Ben was concerned, she’d operated on the theory that if you can’t say something good about someone…
“Why couldn’t I stay at Chap’s while you’re working?” Lindsay asked sullenly.
Chap Korman was the literary agent who’d handled Ben’s work from the start of his career. His house in Newport Beach, California, was only a couple of blocks from the cottage where Lindsay and Mariah were spending their three-week vacation. Since her own mother’s death twenty years earlier, Mariah had become sole guardian of Ben’s estate, and it was a credit to Korman that she felt as close to him as she felt estranged from the memory of his former client.
“There really wasn’t time to arrange it with Chap and change your ticket—although, to be perfectly honest, Lins, I didn’t even think of it. Carol was the first person I thought of.” Carol Odell was the married daughter of Mariah’s old CIA mentor and boss, Frank Tucker. The families had always been close. “She and Michael are really looking forward to having you there for a couple of days. So is Alex. Apparently, he’s having sibling anxiety over the new baby. That little guy’s crazy about you, and you haven’t seen much of him lately.”
“It’s not my fault. I had exams and everything.”
“I know. But when this assignment got thrown at me and I tried to think how to work it, Carol’s just seemed like the best idea. I did try to call you,” Mariah added, “but the phone here was tied up all afternoon.”
“I was talking to Br—to my friends about the party at Stephanie’s tomorrow. It’s not fair I can’t go.”
“There’ll be other parties. This couldn’t be helped.”
“It won’t be the same! People won’t be around later.”
“People? Are we talking people like Brent?”
She nodded miserably. “He’s going to Connecticut to see his dad. I won’t see him again till school starts.”
Mariah said a quiet prayer of thanks for that. She didn’t think she was being overprotective. At eighteen, Brent was just too old and altogether too smooth. But she adopted what she hoped was an appropriately sympathetic expression and reminded herself not to let any dismissive platitudes pass her lips. The only safe recourse was to agree that this development was, indeed, as earth-shattering as it seemed from a fifteen-year-old perspective. “I know it’s the pits,” she said. September was a long way off, thank God.
Lindsay sighed, a real heartbreaker of a sigh. Mariah moved next to her on the bed and stroked that beautiful copper hair.
“Carol says Charlotte’s just started smiling,” she ventured. Lindsay smiled a little at that. Mariah put an arm around her daughter’s slim shoulders, bending to kiss her head. “I know how frustrated you are, Lins. Me, too. I’m so fed up with work these days, I could put a chair though the window. We really need this vacation.”
It seemed they’d been planning it forever. A beach holiday, they’d decided, in a rare instance of total accord—three weeks of relaxing, swimming, tanning, shopping. Long walks on the sand. Maybe a few sailing lessons. California wouldn’t have been Mariah’s first choice. She’d have opted for the Hamptons or the Carolinas, but there had been advantages to going west, not the least of which was the chance to spend some time with Chap Korman, who wasn’t getting any younger. That was certainly where Lindsay’s vote had gone, in any case, so California-bound they were—with this one small wrinkle.
“Just be patient? I’ll go do this job, and then we’ll have three whole weeks to veg in the sun.”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
Mariah hugged her again, too grateful for the diverted crisis to listen to the doubts gnawing in the back of her mind. Doubts that should have told her there was something altogether too coincidental, too pat about this sudden call to duty on an old enemy’s turf.
If she’d been less distracted, less weary, less defeated, she might have pulled her wits about her faster and found a way to turn Geist down flat. But she hadn’t. And sure enough, it wasn’t long before she felt an unseen hand clawing at the frayed threads of her life.
Tuesday, July 2
Chapter Two
Frank Tucker awoke in gloom and found himself crying. He froze, catching himself in mid-sob, and held his breath, ears straining. But the only sound he heard was a lonely summer rain pelting the roof like a sympathetic echo to his grief.
Though disoriented, his instincts were sufficiently honed to render him both wary and appalled at his lapse. He racked his brain to think where he was. His first thought was Moscow. Room 714, Intourist Hotel. Surveillance devices embedded in every wall.
Horrified to think the listeners might have heard him crying, he wondered if he’d been drugged to induce this sense of utter desolation. A dead weight of despair seemed to be bearing down on him, crushing his chest. He inhaled deeply, trying to cast it off, and as he did, the piney scent of wet juniper tickled his nostrils. This wasn’t the typical Russian urban perfume of diesel, must and cooked cabbage, he realized. It was the smell of his own yard, drifting in through the open window.
Then he remembered flying back that morning. The unmarked aircraft had taken off from Moscow before dawn, Tucker the sole passenger. The only cargo had been one wooden crate. Picking up eight hours on the westbound journey, overtaking the rising sun, the plane had landed at Andrews Air Force Base just in time for the morning capital commute.
The driver who met the plane on the tarmac had taken Tucker’s suit bag and put it in the trunk of a dark sedan, watching while Tucker himself loaded the wooden crate. They exchanged hardly a word on the drive from suburban Maryland to McLean, Virginia, a chase car trailing close behind. Wending its way along the beltway, the convoy had turned off at the road leading through the Langley Wood, entering the CIA complex through a subterranean passage.
There, Tucker had carted the box to his sub-basement office. Prying it open with a crowbar, he’d flipped quickly though the moldering files inside before depositing the whole bunch in his heavy steel safe. After a quick call upstairs to confirm his return, he’d slammed the safe door and spun the dial, heading home to catch up on some of the sleep that had eluded him for the two days he’d been gone.
Now, with a warm summer rain splashing on the windowsill and the damp, earthy scent around him of a world washed clean, he was back in his own wide, empty bed in suburban Alexandria, fully dressed, only his shoes kicked off before he’d crashed on top of the covers.
How long ago?
The heavy curtains were drawn tight to shut out the light of day. Tucker glanced at the digital clock next to the bed: 11:3
3 a.m. He’d slept less than two hours before snapping awake to the sound of his own mournful cry.
The mattress dipped as he rolled onto his side, feet dropping with a thud to the carpeted floor. He exhaled a long, shuddering sigh, and the blade of his big hands scraped the tears from his cheeks—denying even this familiar room the pathetic sight of a middle-aged man reduced to tears. He had no recollection of the dream that had moved him to this state. All he knew was that it had left him with a profound sense of loss and longing.
He knew, too, that he was ludicrous—a brooding, barrel-chested hulk whose ferocious, black-eyed scowl had once struck terror in the hearts of fools and his more timid underlings. Now, here he was, reduced to whimpering in his bed like some self-pitying boy with a complaint about the unfairness of life.
He got to his feet and walked to the window, throwing back the drapes. The cloud-shrouded day cast a gentle light across the back lawn rolling down to the creek at the bottom of his property. The grass, dry and yellowing when he’d left forty-eight hours earlier, had already been transformed to lush green. On the borders of his lot, red hibiscus, white daylilies and blue hydrangeas were all in bloom—a patriotic display in time for the Fourth of July. The long fronds of the big willow by the creek swayed in the summer rainstorm, a slow, easy dance.
No automobile horns, no loud voices, no pounding jack-hammers. After the noise and bustle of Moscow, the quiet was deafening.
Tucker passed a hand over his head, feeling stubble on a dome normally shaved bowling-ball smooth. He debated his next move. He was bone-tired, but even if jet lag was insisting it was evening, sleep wasn’t an option. His dreams, obviously, weren’t to be trusted. Anyway, he’d only meant to grab forty winks. If he went back to bed now, he’d be left to struggle with his bleak thoughts through the long, dark night to come.
He could get moving, he supposed. Shower, shave, see if he had any clean clothes. Drive back into work and tackle those old KGB files.
