grimaced and nodded.
“Had he been in touch since you got back to the States?”
Mariah shook her head. “He came to the hospital in Vienna a couple of times, but I hadn’t seen him in months before he showed up yesterday.”
“Does Chaney know you’re CIA?”
“No, I’m sure he doesn’t. David wouldn’t have told him—he was absolutely discreet. During the entire three years we were in Vienna, there was never the slightest hint that my cover was blown, with Chaney or anyone else. As far as anyone knew, I was simply an embassy administrator. Chaney always seemed more interested in David’s work at the IAEA. He often turned to David to demystify some of the complexities of nuclear issues, and he knew that David was working to beef up the agency’s policing role.”
“So what do you think Chaney’s on to now?”
Mariah glanced at him sharply. “That’s what I was hoping you’d tell me,” she said. She came forward and stood in front of his desk, leaning closer, hands planted in the middle of his papers. “Frank, you told me—you swore—that the truck hit our car by accident. You knew I wasn’t in any position, between David’s and Lindsay’s injuries, to pay close attention to the investigation. But you promised me that every angle would be looked into.”
“And it was.” Frank brought his hammy fists together and stared at them intently for a moment before looking back up at her, his voice low. “Dammit, Mariah—don’t you think I was blown away by what happened? I felt responsible. I recruited you, helped you get that assignment in Vienna. I felt bloody awful when things ended up the way they did.”
Mariah’s shoulders slumped as she watched his gruff old face transformed by guilt. She reached out and squeezed his hand. “It wasn’t your fault, no matter what. But now, with Chaney, I’m wondering again….” She sank down onto a chair and stared at the floor. “It was just a fluke that I wasn’t in the car. David should never have been there. He normally jogged to work, but at the last minute that morning we changed plans. Lindsay had a science project that she needed help carrying in and I had an early meeting with an asset, so David drove her to school. If they hadn’t dropped me off first, neither of them would have been there when the brakes failed on that truck.”
Frank nodded. Mariah knew she had told him this before, but the awful irony of it never left her. David’s life had been destroyed in her place because she’d been too busy that morning to drive their daughter to school. Now, what if it wasn’t an accident, after all?
“I’ve been thinking—was I the target?” she asked quietly, her eyes fixed on his. “Was it the CHAUCER operation? Was someone trying to kill me and made a mistake?”
Tucker’s eyes held hers for a second and then his glance shifted away. Mariah flinched. They had known each other too well and for too long.
“Frank!” she said, alarmed. “Tell me, for God’s sake!”
“I’m not sure.”
Her focus moved from Tucker’s face to an invisible point somewhere between them, but she saw nothing. Beyond the office door, the clatter of voices, the tramp of feet and the hum of office machinery faded, replaced by a cottony stillness. Then a wave came out of nowhere, washing over her, and she felt herself drowning. She fumbled for the arms of the chair and gripped them tightly.
She never saw Frank jump up out of his chair and move around the desk, nor did she feel his hand on her shoulder. It was only when he planted himself squarely in front of her and bent down to peer into her eyes that she began to rise again to the surface. Her gaze flitted from side to side, coming finally to rest on Frank’s face when he had called her name for the third time, his voice urgent.
“Mariah! Are you all right?”
“All right?”
She was breathing, she knew—her shoulders rose and fell heavily with the effort of her lungs to grasp oxygen. But all right? No, she definitely was not all right.
“Who was it?” she asked, her voice husky. She clenched her fists, pulling in hard on the reins of self-control. Tucker’s face came into focus and she held his eyes, her voice firm now. “Who did this to my family, Frank?”
He sat back on the desk and studied her for a long time. Then he walked around behind it. He stood, banging his knuckles on the green baize desk pad. “Leave it alone. You can’t change what happened, and you need to concentrate your energies on Lindsay and David. Let somebody else worry about the other stuff.”
Mariah leaped from her chair and leaned across the desk between them. “Don’t patronize me!”
His head snapped up. “I’m not patronizing, goddammit!”
“Then what kind of answer is that?”
“It’s the only answer I can give you.”
“It’s not good enough!”
“It’s the only answer you’re gonna get. This is a closely held file and you have no ‘need to know.”’
He might just as well have slapped her face. She recoiled and stared at him, dumbfounded. His sharp frown held her momentarily, then his eyes shifted away and skimmed across the ceiling before coming to rest on her face again. “Look, I honestly don’t know for certain whether what happened in Vienna was an accident or not. I thought it was at first, but now I’m not sure. If it wasn’t, then your family got caught in the middle of some bloody dangerous business and you don’t want to know about it, believe me.”
“Oh, yes, I do,” Mariah said firmly. “If someone did this deliberately, I definitely do want to know about it.” His expression remained glumly resistant. “Frank! Dammit! Let me in! If I can do something—anything—to make sense of what happened and help bring down whoever did this, at least I won’t feel so helpless. Give me a break, please?”
Tucker shook his head. “I can’t. Even if I wanted to—which I don’t—it’s not my decision. Operations is handling the file and access is severely limited. Besides which—I’m dead serious here—you’ve got Lindsay to think about. You put yourself in the line of fire and she could end up an orphan. Is that what you want?”
“As opposed to what? As opposed to the life of a fatherless cripple that I’ve already managed to give her?”
“Don’t do this. Don’t punish yourself for something you weren’t responsible for.”
“If not me, who? Tell me who—I’d love to punish someone else. I’d like to rip them limb from limb. I’d like to blow their goddamn heads off!”
Tucker dropped into his chair. “And that’s exactly why you’re no good for this case. You’re personally involved. You’ve got no distance or objectivity, and that’s a recipe for getting yourself killed. Now, I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Go do your job and let me do mine.”
Mariah watched him as he opened a file in front of him and pointedly ignored her. She stood still, glaring at him, fists clenched. Then she wheeled around and headed for the door, throwing it open with such energy that it bounced back against the wall with a bang.
Pat Bonelli had finally arrived for work and was sitting at her desk when Mariah stormed out of Frank’s office. She jumped as the door crashed. “Mariah! You scared the shit out of me!” She stopped cold as she caught sight of Mariah’s face. “Are you all right?”
It was the second time she’d been asked that question, Mariah thought. What did people think? Of course she wasn’t all right!
Pat arched her neck to look in on Frank, almost as if she expected to see blood on the walls. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” Mariah muttered as she stormed into her own office next door.
5