The Innocents Club

by Taylor Smith

  This woman was my father’s lover. For her, he left us.

  As the museum director stepped up to the microphone and began introducing the guests of honor, Mariah felt detached, floating. She was vaguely aware of the secretary of state and Foreign Minister Zakharov taking their turns at delivering platitudes, but their voices seemed a long way off, part of a scene viewed through the wrong end of a telescope.

  Eventually, someone extended a pair of gleaming silver shears, and Renata stepped up to the ribbon and opened them around the crimson velvet, then she paused, turning toward a bank of photographers standing at Mariah’s left, waiting while they took their formal opening shots.

  It was at that moment the two women made eye contact.

  Renata’s pupils dilated almost imperceptibly, and a tiny crease appeared at the corner of her mouth. The whole reaction lasted a split second, at most—so brief that Mariah doubted anyone else on the terrace had registered it. Then, the moment passed, and the older woman’s self-confident gaze traveled over the crowd once more.

  Mariah was taken aback. Somehow, against all odds, Renata had recognized her. She was certain of it. Given that Mariah been seven years old the last time their paths had crossed, and then, only briefly, the woman’s memory seemed extraordinary.

  Or maybe, she thought grimly, it was simply the power of a guilty conscience.

  Chapter Eight

  Twenty-four hours. One day, Tucker calculated. Maybe two, if he was lucky.

  Geist would be too distracted by Turks, Kurds and presidential briefing opportunities to notice immediately that the report on the Navigator’s files hadn’t shown up on his desk as promised. But the man was a micromanager, a human vacuum for information that he monopolized and doled out as his own agenda dictated—a tried-and-true route to personal advancement. Sooner or later, the DDO’s thoughts would turn again to the files in the basement. At that moment, Tucker knew, people would start looking for him.

  He stood awkwardly outside a Dutch door on the third floor of the agency’s main building, waiting for the lone occupant of the large, open room on the other side to notice him, still wrestling with the morality of what he was about to do.

  The door was divided horizontally, the top and bottom halves operating independently of one another. It was an architectural throwback to old farmhouses and barns, allowing air and conversation to circulate over the top while holding back unwanted intruders like chickens and dogs—or old bosses seeking special favors.

  Wanetta Walker was working alone in the document processing unit, reams of paper piled high on her corner desk. All those requests for bulk printing, copying, collating, labeling, uploading and downloading onto computer disks would no doubt require urgent attention from her staff tomorrow, but Tucker was relieved to see that everyone else had left for the day. Just what he’d been hoping to find.

  When Wanetta finally did glance up, she started, then her wide face erupted in a broad smile. Her half glasses dropped to her not-insubstantial bosom where they dangled by a beaded chain slung around her neck.

  “Well, well, well! If it isn’t the long lost Mr. Frank Tucker!”

  “Hey there, Wanetta. What are you doing hanging around at this late hour?”

  She got to her feet and ambled to the door. “Tryin’ to get a little ahead of the game here. I wouldn’t mind taking a long Fourth of July holiday weekend, but it’s not looking real promising at the moment.”

  “Management not all it’s cracked up to be?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” she said, leaning amiably on the half door. “I like givin’ orders a whole lot better than I liked gettin’ ‘em.”

  She was a big woman, standing nearly eye-to-eye with him. Probably close to his own age, Tucker estimated, though he’d always been too much of a gentleman to ask. She kept herself more up to date than he did, though. Row on row of tiny braids divided her peppered hair today, each braid ending in black and amber beads that tinkled gently when she moved. Her deep mahogany skin gleamed against the brilliant orange African-inspired print of the flowing, knee-length robe she wore over black slacks.

  “Where you been hiding, anyway?” she asked.

  “Oh, they gave me a little corner ‘bout two miles underground and left at West Virginia.”

  “You don’t belong down there,” she said indignantly. “When you gonna get back in the swing of things, stop whippin’ yourself like some mad monk?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not so bad, you know. No committee meetings. No deadlines. No stupid requests from seventh-floor executive assistants who graduated from kindergarten day before yesterday.”

  “Yeah, sure. And where’d you be if you couldn’t chew up at least one snot-nosed E.A. a day?”

  “Right where I am, I guess. Listen, Wanetta,” he said, lifting the folder of carefully selected documents he’d brought up from his office, “I was wondering if you could put these on a disk for me.”

  She slipped her glasses back on her nose and looked askance at the thick pile. “All of it?”

  “You can do that, right?”

  “While you wait, no doubt.” One of Wanetta’s eyebrows arched high as skeptical brown eyes peered at him over the top of her glasses, letting the absurdity of that proposition sink in for a moment.

  “If you wouldn’t mind. I’m kind of in a rush.”

  “You’n everybody else.” Her head gave a rueful shake, the beads on her braids clacking softly.

  “I like the hairdo, Wanetta. Looks real nice.”

  “You just get along with your flattery, now, Frank Tucker,” she scolded in her deep, melodious lilt. She held out the flat of her hand. “Give me that. What is it, anyway?”

  Tucker gave her the file. When she opened it, her nose wrinkled at the mildewy smell of the loose, yellowed papers. She frowned at the Cyrillic lettering.

  “How old is this stuff? Isn’t even in English.”

  “They’re part of an old Russian archive,” he said. “Thing is, I’m supposed to be putting together an itemized proposal for the resources I need to analyze the whole bunch. It’s basically a stalling tactic from the front office. A bureaucratic way of telling me to get stuffed.”

  She glanced up sharply. “Frank Tucker! You want to jump to the front of the queue here, and you haven’t even got a budget authorization number for me, do you?”

  “No, ma’am, I don’t.”

  “Do you know how much I get hammered by the comptroller if I don’t account for every minute of time we spend and every last piece of paper that moves in and outta here?”

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea.”

  “Well, then,” she said, using the elaborately patient tone normally reserved for the intellectually challenged and seventh-floor executive assistants, “why don’t you just go on over to whoever it is ordered this project and ask him to assign an interim authorization number to get you started?”

  “Because it’s Jack Geist.”

  He might as well have said it was Jack the Ripper, the way Wanetta’s playful expression vanished. She gripped the door latch and stepped back as it swung open. “Come on in and set a spell, honey,” she said grimly. Her flowing robe billowed as she swung around, file clutched in her hand, and headed to a bank of machines against the far wall.

  Tucker trudged behind her, feeling guilty. What he had in mind could get Wanetta fired if her assistance was discovered, not to mention the probability of five-to-ten in the Allenwood federal pen that he was pulling down on his own head. He didn’t care much about the risk to himself, but she was an old friend.

  But, he reasoned, her minor role need never come to light. He could plausibly argue that he’d copied the documents to disk himself. Only Patty, who knew the level of his computer skills, would see through the patent lie, but she wasn’t around. Even if she were, she’d never betray Wanetta. If Wanetta could do the job now, with no staff around to see her doing it, they’d be home free.

  At the thought of her staff, Tucker could
n’t suppress a small grin.

  He’d spent more than a quarter of a century in the CIA, and in that time, he’d seen a revolutionary change in the way the agency’s day-to-day business was conducted. These days, every officer worked with a desktop computer terminal linked to all sections of Langley and to CIA stations around the world. Those with the proper security and operational clearances had instant access to a vast archive of intelligence assessments and operations, past and present. The systems software also contained idiot-proof document formats that even a technological Neanderthal like himself could learn to work. Nowadays, a basic knowledge of that software was about all it took, mechanically speaking, to create the intelligence assessments that were the Company’s bread and butter—the product that kept the administration and Congress informed on threats to American security and justified the billions of dollars allocated annually to keep the intelligence program and the nation in a state of watchful readiness.

  But in the old, pre-desktop era, the only computers at Langley had been clunky, room-size Univacs dedicated almost exclusively to the arcane work of cryptology, the code breakers’ tool for deciphering messages intercepted from the opposition. As for the agency’s massive paper product, the essential cog in that wheel had been an army of security-cleared typists drawn from the old central steno pool.

  Wanetta Walker had had the bad luck to join the steno pool about fifteen years earlier, as the wheel of technology was beginning to turn, creating new opportunities in some areas but rendering other skills obsolete, just as weavers of old had been replaced by mechanical looms and auto welders by computerized robots. Many women in the steno pool had been selected for computer retraining, but when the budget crunch of buying new systems hit, many others were scheduled for layoff, since officers themselves would henceforth do their own drafting and revising online.

  At the time, Jack Geist had been doing a brief tour of duty in administration, a strategic career move designed to bolster his trajectory into management’s upper echelons. Downsizing the steno pool had fallen under his jurisdiction. His approach was a rigid last hired–first fired arrangement—though it didn’t take long before people began to notice that exceptions were being made for a few perky young things, for whom “admin trainee” positions suddenly seemed to materialize.

  Wanetta Walker had been a recent hire with only basic typing skills, a widow with two sons to raise. It had counted for nothing in Geist’s scheme that what she lacked in experience, she made up for in hard work, her family situation sufficient motivation that she ran rings around the “perky brigade.”

  Fortunately, when the proverbial hit the fan, Wanetta had already worked a temporary replacement stint in Tucker’s Soviet unit, which kept its own small group of secretaries to handle material too sensitive for the steno pool. When Patty found out Wanetta was scheduled for layoff, Tucker requested an additional position for his unit, then stared down Geist until he agreed to let Wanetta fill it. She’d been inordinately grateful for his intervention, and Tucker had never let on that he knew about the humiliation she’d suffered when the job she so desperately needed was threatened—and that Jack Geist had cornered her alone one evening and propositioned her, telling her “a little brown sugar” would go a long way toward sweetening his disposition. Geist, the ass, had bragged about it himself, figuring a good ol’ boy like Frank Tucker would surely appreciate the humor.

  Wanetta stood at the document scanner now, feeding through the papers Tucker had spent the last hour and a half selecting from among all those in the Navigator’s crate.

  “I had a postcard from Patty,” she said over the hum of the machine. Then she glanced up, wincing. “Oops! Sorry. Am I allowed to mention that?”

  “Sure, it’s okay,” Tucker said. “I talked to her a couple of weeks ago myself. She tell you she got a dog?”

  “No kidding. That’s nice. So you guys—?”

  “It was an amicable parting,” Tucker assured her.

  “That’s good.” She smiled at him and went back to feeding paper. When she was done, she moved to a computer station, inserted a new floppy disk, then linked up to the scanner and started downloading the documents she’d just fed into digital storage.

  Tucker watched her work, impressed as always by her amazing efficiency. She’d only lasted about a year in his section before the personnel wheels had turned again. Jack Geist had moved on to a station chief position abroad, while Wanetta’s obvious competence marked her for one promotion after another.

  Now, here she was, running one of the technological units for which she’d once been considered too unqualified even to apply. She’d remarried a few years back, too, and was a grandparent, just like him.

  “What about Mariah?” she suddenly asked over her shoulder.

  Tucker looked up sharply. Damn! She didn’t miss a thing. “What about her?”

  “She still seeing Mr. Blow-Dry?”

  He stifled a grin. “Not nice, Wanetta.”

  She downloaded the final document, then popped the floppy disk out of the drive, closed the scanner link and swiveled in her chair, handing the disk over to him. “Nice guys finish last,” she said. “Here you go.”

  Tucker studied the computer screen. “This isn’t still in the system, is it?”

  “Nope. I deleted it. You’ve got the only copy. And here,” she said, getting to her feet and gathering the Navigator’s papers back into the file folder, “are your originals. I’m guessing the line is, ‘You were never here,’ right?”

  “No, ma’am, I was not.”

  “Got it. But in future, you don’t be a stranger, hear?”

  “You bet. I owe you.”

  “Been a while since we’ve tasted your Chicken Marbella.”

  Tucker smiled. He had a bit of a reputation, mostly over-blown, as a gourmet cook, although you couldn’t prove it by the way his clothes hung loose on him these days. “You got it. I’ll give you guys a call. And thanks again for this.”

  “No problem at all. You just make sure you do call. And Frank?” she said, walking back to the door and holding it open for him. “Don’t give up on her. She’s a smart lady. Mr. Blow-Dry won’t last, mark my words.”

  Tucker shook a finger at her. “You are a wicked, wicked woman, Wanetta.”

  She grinned. “But in the nicest possible way. Now, git!”

  He returned to his office just long enough to use the shredder. Page by page, the Navigator’s files were transformed into mulched confetti.

  Then he sat down in his chair, placed Wanetta’s disk against the inside of his right calf and secured it with two heavy rubber bands. He winced pulling his sock up to cover them, suddenly acquiring a new appreciation for the female ritual of leg waxing. Grabbing his sport coat and briefcase, he locked his office door and headed back up the elevator.

  At the building’s exit, the security guard gave the inside of his briefcase a bored once-over. Then he waved Tucker out the door.

  Chapter Nine

  The cold flicker of Renata’s bluesteel eyes had stunned Mariah into brief immobility, unleashing a flood of images that ripped through her calm.

  A little girl, seven years old, alone in the dark. Petrified. Something has woken her from a troubled sleep, but the drafty house is silent now. Eerie quiet. Then, she hears it again. A terrible, keening sound. Her mother, in the next room, weeping. The little girl pulls her knees up into her chest, wrapping herself into a tight ball. Wishing she could disappear the way she made him disappear. Rocking. Whispering, “I’m sorry I made him go, Mommy. I’m sorry I made him mad.”

  The museum crowd stirred around her like a living breeze. When Mariah looked up, Renata and the ministers had disappeared into the gallery.

  She sloughed off the guilty memory like a dank old shroud. It wasn’t you who made him leave, the adult in her reminded the child. It was that ogress in pearls. You stumbled across the two of them together, and that was what precipitated Ben’s last temper tantrum before he finally stormed out
for good. But it wasn’t your fault.

  Right. So why had she never been able to believe that? Mariah wondered grimly.

  Inside the windowless galleries, the lighting was subdued, the gray marble decked out for the occasion in royal-blue silk damask draperies, swagged and tied with heavy gold tassels. Plush, mushroom-colored carpeting muffled the sound of footsteps, but in her chest, Mariah felt the deep, tympanic reverberations of Rimsky-Korsakov flowing from concealed speakers, the majestic symphony reducing voices to a reverent hush.

  It was like being in church, except the object of worship here was material excess—glass-enclosed treasures illuminated by the heavenly touch of strategically aimed ceiling spots. Bejeweled Fabergé Easter eggs. Gilt icons and priceless religious relics. The czar’s coronation uniform, adorned with gold braid and gleaming military medals. Gemencrusted tiaras, necklaces and gowns that had been worn by the czarina and her four pretty daughters.

  And then there were the personal items—the elaborate wicker and filigreed wrought-iron carriage in which the tragically hemophiliac young son had been wheeled about. The little boy’s toy soldiers. His sisters’ careful embroidery samplers. And hundreds of photographs, letters and wistful pages from the journals of the obliviously doomed Nicholas and Alexandra.

  Mariah watched two hyper-thin beauties sigh over the royal love letters, written in English to deflect prying palace eyes. An older woman shed an obligatory tear over photos of the murdered children.

  It was voyeurism at its Hollywood best, offering equal measures of glamour and pathos. Those old Bolsheviks were no dummies, she reflected. They’d had no use for their monarchs in the flesh, but they must have sensed a surefire commercial gimmick when they’d squirreled away this treasure trove of regal memorabilia rather than condemn it to the same ash pit where they’d dumped its owners.

  She’d already taken a quick look at the artifacts that afternoon after the Secret Service and FBI contingents had done their security sweep for bombs and booby traps. Now she was on the lookout for Yuri Belenko, determined to make contact sooner rather than later, try to gauge where his interests lay, and if it seemed worthwhile, arrange a meeting on quieter turf. Then she could in good conscience blow this pop stand.