The Innocents Club

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 world 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.”