The Innocents Club Read online

  But what was the point? Nothing and no one depended on him. Now that he’d gotten his hands on them and spirited them out of Moscow, anyone could take over dissecting the files, for whatever they were worth. From here on in, it would be solitary grunt work, the kind meted out to old operatives who’ve lost the ability or the heart to wade through the secret jungles, waging covert war.

  Tucker knew he’d been written off as a casualty of that war—wounded, though not quite slain. He’d toyed with the idea of early retirement, but at the last minute, he’d backed away from the abyss of empty years stretching before him. He was in disgustingly good health. If statistics were to be believed, he had a third of his life yet ahead of him. What he did with that time mattered to no one but himself.

  His wife had been dead sixteen long years, although there were days when he still half imagined Joanne would be there when he walked in the front door. He’d lost his only son, Stephen, a year and a half earlier. What family he had left needed little from him. His daughter Carol, and her husband, Michael, were a loving couple, hardworking, good parents to their two children. Sufficient unto themselves. All they required from him was that he put in an appearance at the occasional Sunday or holiday dinner.

  Until recently, there’d been a woman in his life, helping to fill the empty hours and days, but that relationship had foundered and run aground like everything else. The extra-curricular involvement with his secretary had started one night a few years back, when Patty had marched into his office after the rest of his section had gone home and demanded he take her to dinner after working her like a slave until all hours. Then she had invited him to her apartment. They’d kept on in a low-key way ever after, and when his son had died, she’d pretty much moved in, nursing Tucker through months of guilt and self-loathing.

  Finally, though, understandably, she’d grown tired of the uneven arrangement, knowing there were prior claims on his heart and mind that she’d never dislodge. As the previous winter had settled in, Patty had announced one evening, with resignation but no rancor, that she was quitting the Company and moving to Florida. Tucker hadn’t been invited to go along.

  “It’s not that I don’t care about you,” she’d said, her voice dusky as she busied herself with packing the suitcase on his bed. “Fact is, I love you. Always will, I guess, fool that I am.”

  Tucker was standing in the doorway, arms hanging stupidly at his sides, watching her and trying to get his mind around the prospect of her absence. “Then why are you leaving?”

  She’d been part of his daily existence for nearly twenty years—at first, just sitting outside his office, running interference, holding back fools and whiners, keeping his expense accounts balanced and his files straight. Lately, he’d grown even more dependent on her.

  She folded a sweater in a couple of brusque movements and laid it across the suitcase. Her hairdresser had taken to putting platinum streaks in Patty’s tawny hair to camouflage the increasing gray, and they sparkled as she moved. Straightening slowly, she turned to face him. “I’m not leaving because I’m mad, Frank. Honest. I just can’t live on a one-way street anymore.”

  He nodded. “I haven’t been there for you. You stood by me these last months. You’ve done for me and done for me—”

  “I was glad to.”

  “I don’t know why.”

  She came over to him, smiling sadly, running a hand up his arm. “I do.”

  He cupped her cheek, thumb tracing the deep lines around her smiling mouth and hazel eyes. Her face was well lived in, but in the soft, forgiving glow of lamplight, he saw the pretty girl she must once have been, full of hopes and dreams that wouldn’t have passed her by, if life were in any way fair. Her body, too, had lost the firmness of youth, but had acquired in its place the warmth and uninhibited generosity that comes to the best of women in middle age. “I haven’t taken care of you,” he said.

  “It’s not that. You take care of me just fine. You remember my birthday. You make me chicken soup when I get a cold. You sit beside me when I watch my stupid shows and never make fun when I blubber. You check the oil in my car, keep my brakes tuned and my tires aligned. There’s not much you wouldn’t do for me, Frank, I know that. Except the one thing I really want, and that’s not your fault. You can’t make yourself be in love with me.”

  He started to reply, but she put her fingers on his lips, saving them both the embarrassment of an empty protest.

  “No, it’s okay. That’s just the way it is. I knew going in how things were with you. I guess I hoped it might change. Or, if not, that what we had would be enough.” She shook her head. “But it’s not. Not for either of us.”

  In his heart, Tucker knew she was right. She needed more than he was capable of giving her, and cutting her losses was probably the best thing for her to do. Knowing that didn’t make it any easier, though.

  She kissed him then, and he wrapped her in his arms, holding on just a little longer. The next thing he knew, they were pushing her suitcase off the bed. And it might very well have been the best lovemaking they’d ever had, but it didn’t change the fact that afterward, Patty had finished her packing, loaded her Toyota and driven away.

  Sighing heavily, now, Tucker stared at the big oak bed. His and Joanne’s twins had been conceived there. She’d nursed them in the chintz-covered rocker next to it. Years later, Tucker had sat in that same chair, watching her life slip away. The Moroccan carpet beneath the chair was worn thin from the long hours of rocking.

  His father had picked up the carpet in North Africa during World War II. A Marine gunnery sergeant, he’d somehow managed to cart the thing around for eight months before he was finally shipped home with a uniform full of campaign ribbons, a stump in place of his left arm and his stupid rug. He’d gone on to marry the hometown girl he’d left behind and raise six kids, of whom Frank was the eldest, all on a one-armed printer’s wage—never, to the end of his days, uttering a word of complaint about his fate.

  Tucker turned abruptly and headed for the bathroom, determined to shake off the sluggishness that enveloped him like a thick, syrupy mantle. Clean yourself up, for God’s sake. Give Carol a call, let her know you’re home.

  But when he dialed his daughter’s number a short while later, it was neither Carol nor Michael who picked up. It was Lindsay.

  “Hi, Uncle Frank! You’re home?”

  “Just got in a little while ago.” Taken aback at hearing Lindsay’s voice, he fell into an awkward silence. She was the one who finally broke it. At fifteen, she had more polish than he did, Tucker thought ruefully.

  “Carol’s upstairs feeding the baby. I just read Alex a story and tucked him in for his afternoon nap. Actually, three stories. Four, if you count the one he made me read twice. I’d probably still be up there, except he fell asleep on the second reading.”

  Tucker smiled. His grandson was two, a whirling dervish.

  “How was your trip?” Lindsay asked.

  He hesitated. She had no idea where he’d been, of course. Neither did Carol, nor anyone else for that matter. It had been a tiny group inside the agency that had studied the cryptic message that had prompted his sudden trip to Moscow. Not even the director had been briefed, so that if Tucker got himself arrested over there, or worse, the front office—and the White House, if it came to that—could claim he was a rogue operative who’d slipped the chain of command to settle some personal score. A burnout case, pushed over the edge by family problems that had nothing to do with official American policy toward its new Russian friends. Tucker had simply told Carol he’d be out of town for a while so she wouldn’t worry if she didn’t hear from him.

  “Trip was fine,” he said. “Dull. Is Carol going out? You baby-sitting this afternoon?”

  “No, I’m staying here for a couple of days. Mom left early this morning for Los Angeles.”

  Tucker’s pulse increased a notch. He’d recruited her mother himself. Mariah had worked with him for years in the old Soviet analysis unit, but t
heir office partnership had ended when his career self-destructed. Since then, she’d moved on to bigger and better things, while he puttered on the sidelines, out of the field of action.

  “I thought the two of you were going out there together,” he said to Lindsay.

  “I leave Thursday morning. There’s an exhibit opening in L.A. tonight that she has to cover. The Russian foreign minister’s going to be there.”

  “Oh, right, the Romanov treasures,” Tucker said more casually than he felt. Why would Mariah be assigned to cover Zakharov’s visit? That kind of thing wasn’t in her bailiwick.

  He had another sudden, uneasy thought. How coincidental was it that she’d been pulled into action just after he himself had received a mysterious summons to Moscow?

  Tucker had started out in Operations, but had moved behind the lines when his wife first got sick. All these years, both he and Mariah had labored in the background, cranking out their intelligence assessments. But if there was one thing he’d come to realize on this Moscow trip, it was how much personal information the opposition had on him. And if on him, why not on her, too?

  “Listen,” he said to Lindsay, “tell Carol I called and I’m back, okay? I’ll talk to her later.”

  “Okay. Will we see you soon?”

  “You bet,” Tucker said firmly.

  He hung up the phone and went to find his car keys. Suddenly, it was no longer enough to let someone else examine what he’d thought were just musty records, selectively chosen and leaked to sway American thinking on the current power struggle in Moscow. He’d suspected, given his Russian contact’s cryptic comments, that there was dirt on Foreign Minister Zakharov in there. Now he wondered if there was more to it than that.

  He needed to know before anyone else saw those files.

  Chapter Three

  As her plane touched down at Los Angeles International Airport, Mariah tried to tell herself that her only objective here was to do the job she’d been sent to do, and do it fast. Make contact with Yuri Belenko, see where his interests lay and file her contact report. If he seemed amenable to doing a little freelance work on the side, Ops would assign him a handler. Or not. Their call. As for her, she’d be free to pick up her rental car and the keys to the beach house, meet Lindsay’s plane and get on with a much-needed vacation. End of story.

  That’s what she told herself. The truth was a little more complex, as truth tends to be.

  They say time heals all wounds, but it’s not entirely true. Some never really heal. On the surface, recovery may seem complete, but certain traumas leave a residual weakness that lurks in a troubled soul like a subterranean fault line, prone to unexpected eruption. There was such a susceptibility inside Mariah, unknown even to herself—a deep, dark place where resentment simmered and bubbled like hot, sulfurous magma. Until now, it had never percolated up to that place where liquid rage hardens into cold calculated action. But it’s the nature of such fault lines to give way without warning, and the explosive results are nearly always devastating—even to innocent bystanders.

  She checked into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel around noon, with an hour or so to kill before she had to head over to get the lay of the land at the Arlen Hunter Museum. The Romanov exhibit was set to open at six.

  While she waited, Mariah decided to give Chap Korman a call. She tipped the bellboy who’d delivered her bag to her suite, then settled into a deeply upholstered wing chair, propping her feet on the bed’s quilted floral spread, and dialed Korman’s number from memory. In the twenty years since her mother’s death, when Mariah had become the reluctant guardian of Ben Bolt’s prolific output, she’d gotten to know the literary agent well.

  “Mariah! I wasn’t expecting you for another couple of days.”

  She smiled at the sound of his voice, although it sounded more wavery each time they spoke, Mariah thought sadly, anticipating the day when this last, best link to her past would be gone. Chap was alternately coy and grumpy about his age, but he’d been older than Ben by several years, so she calculated that he had to be at least in his mid-seventies by now. He’d long since left the bustle of New York to nurse his arthritic joints in the warmer climes of southern California, but he continued to represent a roster of long-time clients, even championing the occasional new one when he found a writer he believed in.

  “I just got in. I’m staying at the Beverly Wilshire,” she told him. “I was drafted for a short-term assignment, so I had to come early.”

  “Aha! A secret mission,” he said delightedly. “Can’t tell me what it is, right, or else you’d have to kill me?”

  She rolled her eyes. “You read too many spy novels, Chap.”

  “Hey, this is exciting. You’re the only spook I know.”

  “Big thrill. I could introduce you to twenty thousand other grunts who toil away in the same obscurity I do.”

  “So, is Lindsay with you on this covert job?”

  “No, she’s staying with friends. She flies in Thursday.”

  “Any chance you’ll take me up on my offer? I’m just rattling around this big old place, you know. There’s plenty of room.”

  Chap had retired to a lovely, bougainvillea-covered house in Newport Beach, of all places—an irony that never escaped her, since she tended to think of Newport as “the scene of the crime,” having spent a fairly miserable youth there. Since she hadn’t returned to the place in twenty years, she’d never actually seen Chap’s house, except in photos. But his wife of fifty years had passed away the previous year, and Mariah knew he was lonely. She felt a twinge of guilt for not accepting the invitation.

  “I really appreciate the offer. This cottage we’ve got is right around the corner. We’ll practically be neighbors. That’s the main reason I jumped on the place when the offer came up. I need some one-on-one with Lins, though. You know, kind of a mother-daughter-bonding-healing thing.”

  “I thought as much,” he conceded, “otherwise I’d have gone all cantankerous on you. How’s that little copper-haired honey of mine doing these days?”

  “Oh, Lord! She’s fifteen. Need I say more?”

  “No, I guess not.” Chap had raised sons, not daughters, but he had a good imagination. “What about Mom?”

  “Day by day. Isn’t that the conventional wisdom?” Mariah hesitated before confiding, “You know that assignment I mentioned? It’s at the Arlen Hunter Museum—the opening of the Romanov exhibit. I’m supposed to help baby-sit the Russian delegation.”

  His heavy exhalation whistled down the line. “Oh, boy. I’ve been seeing ads for that show, and I thought of you. So? Is Renata going to be there?”

  “I’m not sure. I imagine it’s a strong possibility, though, don’t you?”

  “Probably. How do you feel about that?”

  Good question. “Hard to say,” she said truthfully. “I was under a lot of pressure to take this thing on. In the back of my mind, it occurred to me there was a good chance I’d run into Renata there, so I thought about digging in my heels and refusing. But you know what? Somehow I couldn’t muster up the will. It’s like morbid fascination with a car wreck or something. Part of me, I admit, is sick at the thought of seeing her after all these years. But another part of me is dying to get a look at the old witch.”

  “Facing your demons, huh?”

  “Maybe. Either that or pure masochism.”

  Chap fell silent for a long moment. “Talk about timing,” he said finally. “Did you get the package I sent you?”

  “Package?”

  “I overnighted it. I wanted you to see it as soon as possible. It should have gotten there today.”

  “I’d probably left by the time it arrived. What was it about?”

  “Your dad’s manuscript. You know,” the old man said thoughtfully, “it’s a shame the press found out about those papers so soon.”

  “I know. I’m really sorry about that. God knows, I didn’t mean for it to get out. I was at a dinner with Paul Chaney. He was the only other person in the wor
ld besides you, me and Lindsay who knew they existed. He let it slip. We were in a roomful of reporters, so needless to say, the word spread like wildfire.”

  “This Chaney—I’ve never met him, but he seems like a pretty savvy guy, at least on TV. And I thought the two of you were pretty close. Seems odd he’d do something so indiscreet, doesn’t it?”

  Mariah’s free hand twisted the phone cord around her fingers until it began to cut off her circulation. “Funny you should say that. In my charitable moments, I try to convince myself it was an inadvertent blunder, but there are times when I think he did it on purpose. He had to know what a feeding frenzy the news would set off, and that I’d be forced to acknowledge the manuscript and journals existed.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Strangely enough, to try to be helpful. He thinks I should be making more effort to come to terms with Ben’s memory. And I have, to some extent, Chap, mostly to satisfy Lindsay’s curiosity. We went to visit Ben’s grave in Paris, after all. I’d never done that before. But Paul thinks it would be therapeutic if I went further—got involved in promoting this new stuff, for example. I’ve tried to explain that there’s a limit to how far I’m prepared to go with this father-daughter reconciliation, but he just doesn’t get it.”

  “I’ve been getting nipped by this media feeding frenzy myself,” Chap said.

  “I noticed you’d been quoted a few places. You seem to be holding them at bay pretty well.”

  “I thought it best not say anything publicly until you and I had a chance to talk. But I got a letter from a prof out here at UCLA not long after the press reports started. His name’s Louis Urquhart. He’s working on a biography of your dad that’s supposed to come out in time for Ben’s sixtieth-birthday celebrations next year. By the way, I told you what the publisher’s planning for the occasion, didn’t I?”

  “Repackaging and reissuing his whole collection?”

  “Exactly. This Urquhart’s not the only one interested in Ben’s work these days. Might as well brace yourself, kiddo, because we’re going to see a spate of books and articles about Ben over the next little while. He seems to be in vogue all over again with a new generation of readers.”