Читать книгу Guilt By Silence - Taylor Smith - Страница 11

Mariah spotted her daughter as soon as she pulled up in front of the school. Lindsay was sitting at the top of the wide staircase at the main entrance, her mass of hair a burning bush under the overhead lights. She was deep in conversation with another young girl, and the two of them were feigning indifference to the group of boys nearby. The boys, falling over themselves in their rush to impress the girls, were performing death-defying skateboard tricks up and down the staircase. Their only reward was, alas, two pairs of pretty thirteen-year-old eyes rolled heavenward each time one of them tripped over his own gangly legs. In spite of the dread that clung to her like soot, Mariah grinned. Some things never change.

When Lindsay spotted the Volvo, she stood and waved goodbye to her friend, then started carefully down the stairs. Her arms were laden with books, and her pace stopped and started as the damaged left leg followed the stronger right, one step at a time. Mariah gripped the wheel, suppressing the urge to jump out of the car and run to take the books and offer a supporting arm. But Lindsay had thrown away her crutches a few weeks earlier and reacted angrily on those rare occasions when Mariah forgot her determination not to hover and fret. The ache in her mothering heart was less easily suppressed, however.

She leaned over and opened the passenger door. Lindsay dropped heavily into the seat, weighted down by her books. Mariah took them from her and placed them on the back seat while the girl lifted her left leg with her hands and settled it into a comfortable position before pulling in the right and shutting the door. Mariah watched her buckle up, then passed her fingers gently over Lindsay’s damp red curls, pushing the perpetually unruly mass back over her shoulders. The color was a throwback to ancient Bolt and Tardiff ancestors, it seemed, but the curls were pure David.

“Hi, kiddo. Sorry I’m late. I got held up at the home.”

Lindsay’s head snapped toward her mother, her expression shifting instantly from adolescent lightheartedness to all-too-adult anxiety. “Is Daddy all right?”

Mariah was putting the car in gear, but she paused and patted her daughter’s arm. “He’s fine, Lins. He loved your cookies.” Lindsay settled back into her seat, a smile replacing the fear in her eyes. “I was running late, that’s all.”

Lindsay shrugged. “It’s okay. Our practice went a little over. I just got out.” Mariah pulled the Volvo into the road, turning right. “Mom? Where are we going?”

“Home, of course.”

“Why are we going this way?”

Mariah glanced around, noticing where she was and realizing with a start that she had made a wrong turn. “Oh, for—”

“Hello-o! Earth to Mom—come in, Mom. Are you with us?”

“All right, all right. Sorry. I’ll pull a U-turn at the next light.”

Lindsay shook her head and then promptly launched into a long and detailed report on recent developments in the ongoing drama of thirteen-year-old social politics. Today, it seemed, two girls had decided to ostracize a third for some perceived infraction of teenage standards of decorum.

Like anyone who read all the parenting books, Mariah knew that teenagers lived in a parallel universe of strange customs and even stranger preoccupations. Still, she hadn’t quite been prepared when Lindsay suddenly turned into one of those hormone-tossed creatures.

After observing her daughter’s friends, though, Mariah had concluded that Lindsay was different, old beyond her years, more given to sober reflection. Mariah put it down to the accident and its awful consequences. Most youngsters were certain that they were invulnerable. Lindsay had learned early—too early—what a fragile illusion that was. Under the circumstances, it was probably a good sign that Lindsay could get caught up in the same trivial issues as her friends.

“Isn’t that mean, Mom?”

Mariah had only been half listening, waiting for a break in the on-coming traffic so she could turn around, thrown off by meeting Chaney again.

“What? Oh—for sure,” Mariah said, snapping back into focus. “So what did you do about it?”

“I told Megan I thought she wasn’t being fair and that I didn’t care what she said, Jenna was still my friend. Boy! It makes me so mad!” Lindsay folded her arms across her chest, eyes flashing.

Mariah smiled. “Good for you, kiddo. You’re a loyal friend. Don’t let the mob mentality rule.”

“Yeah,” Lindsay said, her lower lip jutting out as she nodded. “Some people think they know it all—like the rest of us should just sit back and let them rule the world!”

Dieter Pflanz knew something about what it took to rule the world—or at least, manage good chunks of it. And he knew how easily that control could be lost if you didn’t pay attention to details.

He glanced at his watch, calculating the time back East. Ignoring the sleek designer telephone on his desk, Pflanz reached into a cabinet behind him and pulled out a sliding shelf on which sat a bulkier unit. He turned a key next to the number pad and punched in a series of digits. Spinning his chair to face a big plate-glass window, he leaned back and propped his feet on the sill. A digital click in his ear traced the signal of the long-distance call. Crooking the telephone receiver against his shoulder, Pflanz picked up an India rubber ball from his desk, powerful fingers compressing the dense sphere as he watched the scene below him.

The California sun was still well above the western horizon. From his eighteenth-story aerie in McCord Tower, at the heart of Newport Center, Pflanz could see the late-afternoon surfers heading toward the beach, the diehards braving the cold December surf in wet suits. He shook his head as he watched all the cars with surfboard-laden roof racks wending their way along the Coast Highway. Despite the fact that he’d been based here for a decade now, he had never gotten used to the southern California life-style. “Laid-back” was not in Dieter Pflanz’s vocabulary. The daily sight of beaches packed with strapping young surfers and volleyball players only filled him with contempt. It was symptomatic of a society gone soft.

The telephone at the other end of the line began to ring as the connection was completed. Halfway through the third ring, it was picked up. “Hello?”

“It’s me. Going to scramble.”

“Roger.”

Pflanz punched a button under the telephone keypad. After a brief delay, a light began to flash on the unit. At the other end of the line, he knew, a similar light would be flashing. A long beep following a series of short ones confirmed that the scrambler was operational. From here on in, anyone trying to monitor the call would hear nothing but a piercing whine. Only the synchronized software of the two machines was capable of decoding the electronic gobbledygook passing across the connection.

“Okay,” Pflanz said. “We’re set.”

“I’ve been expecting your call. How’s it going?”

“We’re coming in tomorrow. There’s one stop en route—a charity thing. We arrive in D.C. in the evening. McCord sees the President on Friday.”

“I heard. He’s up to speed.”

“Good.”

“What about New Mexico?”

“It’s on for tonight.”

“Tonight? Jesus, Dieter! So soon?”

“We have no choice. Everything’s in place. Either we do it tonight or we miss the window of opportunity.”

“Are you sure about this? If anything goes wrong, this could blow up in our faces.”

Pflanz squeezed the rubber ball tighter. “Nothing’s going to go wrong, George. Not,” he added pointedly, “like that mess in Vienna.”

There was a long sigh on the other end of the line. “Hell, don’t talk to me about that. We’re still cleaning up.”

“What about the woman? She’s back in operation now?”

“She’s nothing to worry about.”

“She hasn’t made the connection?”

“No. She’s off the file and preoccupied with her family. Trust me—Mariah Bolt poses no threat to us.”

“She’d better not,” Pflanz growled. “All right, look—I’ll call you when I get in tomorrow.”

“No. Call me tonight, when you hear from New Mexico.”

“It’ll be late.”

“You’ve got my home number. Call. I’ll be up till I hear.”

“Roger.”

Pflanz cradled the receiver and closed the cabinet housing the secure phone. Then he leaned back and watched the sun sinking lower toward the Pacific.

A big man, with a hawk’s beak for a nose and hands like bulldozer shovels, Pflanz still looked at forty-nine as if he belonged in jungle fatigues instead of the corporate uniform that he mostly wore these days. Despite the suit, though, no one would mistake him for anything but a security man—the ever-watchful, hooded eyes missed nothing. His massive shoulders hunched forward, giving him the appearance of a bird of prey poised for takeoff.

He had spent a quarter of a century mounting complex security operations, first as a CIA covert operative, then as chief of security for McCord Industries. McCord’s head office was in Newport Beach, California, with subsidiaries in eleven American cities and fourteen other branches worldwide. It was a multifaceted business with diverse interests ranging from electronics to construction engineering, with dozens of difficult foreign projects that sometimes demanded special arrangements to ensure the safety of the employees. And the extracurricular activities of the company’s president and CEO, Angus McCord, added yet another dimension to Pflanz’s security duties.

You have to pay attention to detail, he told himself again—even the tiniest. That’s the key to success. You can’t leave anything to chance because it’s the little things, the loose ends, that are sure to foul you up. Despite the assurances on the other end of the line a moment earlier, he’d been convinced all along that the Vienna episode had left too many loose ends—loose ends that he himself had already begun to tidy up.

Rollie Burton’s battered green Toyota was parked across the road and down the street a little way from Mariah’s condo in McLean, but the town house was still dark. He had lost her in heavy rush-hour traffic outside the nursing home, but from the look of things, he had beaten her here. When he finally spotted the Volvo coming up the street, the sight of two figures in the front seat gave him a jolt. He peered closely as the car passed under a streetlight. Oh, shit, he thought—she’s got a kid. The voice had conveniently neglected to mention that.

The garage door began to rise as the Volvo approached the driveway. Burton slumped in his seat, tugging a baseball cap low over his eyes, watching the car pull into the garage. The brake lights flashed and then went dark as she killed the engine. Inside the lit garage he could see an interior door leading into the town house. When the automatic door began to drop, Burton glanced at the sweep hand on his watch: It took about five seconds to close.

The garage was on the side of the house facing the street, he noted, taking careful stock of the landscape. There was a cedar hedge running along one side of the driveway, with open lawn extending down to a cross street on the other. No prying neighbors. He nodded in satisfaction—good cover and a quick escape route.

The front door was around the corner of the town house, facing a footpath. It was part of a network of well-treed walkways and ravines that ran throughout the parklike condominium complex, radiating like a spiderweb from a recreation center at the hub. The trees were mostly evergreens, pine and spruce, casting deep shadows. Good possibilities there, too, he thought. Maybe she was a jogger. Burton loved joggers.

Then he pursed his lips, weighing the problem of her daughter. Nobody was paying him for the kid, and he had no intention of getting caught. But if he ever was—God forbid—he knew what happened to prison inmates who offed kids. On the other hand, he could wait forever to catch her alone at home.

First the reporter, now this—I don’t need this kind of grief, he thought, exasperated. Why can’t things ever be as simple as they seem?

Gathering up her briefcase, Mariah again resisted the temptation to carry in Lindsay’s books, walking ahead into the house as her daughter reached into the back of the car for her things. By the time Lindsay came into the kitchen, Mariah had already opened the freezer and was examining the neat piles of plastic storage containers, their contents labeled and dated, part of the determined effort she had been making in recent months to try to get the chaos of her life under control. She withdrew a chicken cacciatore left over from one of the double-size recipes she prepared on weekends, put it into the microwave and shrugged out of her coat. She fixed Lindsay with a frown as the girl stood poised to drape her own jacket over a kitchen chair. Lindsay sighed deeply, rolling her eyes. Mariah pursed her lips, then held out her hand for the jacket that Lindsay handed over with a winning smile.

The rewinding hum of the answering machine greeted Mariah when she returned from the hall closet. Lindsay was hunched over the kitchen counter, pen poised as the machine began to play back messages. Typically, they all seemed to be for her. It was a mystery how, after a full day spent together, so much urgent business could accumulate among a bunch of thirteen-year-olds in the two short hours since junior high had been dismissed. Mariah set a pot of water to boil for the pasta as a string of disembodied adolescent voices crackled across the kitchen. Just as she began chopping vegetables for the salad, the machine beeped again and Mariah froze at the sound of a deep, professionally modulated voice.

“Mariah? It’s Paul Chaney. I’m staying at the Dupont Plaza. I’m only in town for a few days, but we really do need to talk. Call me, please.” He gave a room and phone number before ringing off.

Lindsay was madly writing down the numbers as the message ended and the machine rewound itself. “Mom! That’s the TV guy who used to play hockey with Daddy in Vienna, isn’t it?”

Mariah nodded, then turned back to chopping vegetables. It was the last message on the machine—he must have headed straight for a phone as soon as she left him at the nursing home. The knife came down hard as she slashed at a piece of celery. “Time to wash up for dinner,” she said.

“Are you going to call him, Mom?”

“I doubt it. Can you set the table, please?”

“Why not?”

“The table, Lindsay.”

“Okay, okay. I’m setting.”

Lindsay limped over to the cupboard and began taking out dishes. Mariah watched her daughter’s slim shoulders as she reached for plates. Coppery curls tumbled down the back of the girl’s gray sweatshirt. During the ten months Lindsay had been recuperating—first in a wheelchair, then, until recently, in a leg brace and hunched over crutches—she had grown phenomenally. Now that she was upright again, it came as a shock to Mariah that this child—her baby—had already surpassed her own five foot two and might even overshoot David’s five-eight.

She’s no baby anymore, Mariah thought—not after everything she’s been through—and she doesn’t deserve this dismissive exercise of parental authority. She closed her eyes briefly and took a deep breath. “I’ve got a ton of work at the office, honey. I just don’t think I’ve got time for Mr. Chaney this week, that’s all.”

“It sounds kind of important,” Lindsay said, setting out plates and cutlery. “I mean, he seemed really anxious for you to call.”

“I hardly know the guy. And to be perfectly honest, I never thought much of him when we were in Vienna, even if he was your dad’s buddy. Anyhow, he’s probably just calling to be polite. Reporters,” she added scornfully, “they make everything sound like a national crisis. I’ll call if I get a minute, maybe.”

Lindsay shrugged and Mariah changed the subject as they moved to the table.

The evening, as always, passed in a weary blur of homework and piano practice, housework and laundry. It was nine-thirty when Mariah went into Lindsay’s room to encourage her to pack it in for the night. The lights were on but Lindsay was in bed under the covers, her eyes closed. In one hand she held David’s old harmonica. Mariah stood for a moment watching her, swallowing the lump she felt rising in her throat.

The radio was vibrating with an insistent beat, the bass turned up to the max. Mariah reached over to lower the volume and then moved around the room, picking up discarded clothes with a sigh and depositing them in the laundry hamper before turning back to the bed. Posters of rock stars and TV idols stared down at her, strangely juxtaposed with others of puppies and kittens. Old stuffed toys took up so much of the bed that Mariah always wondered how Lindsay managed to turn over at night. Despite regular urging that she cull the herd, however, Lindsay insisted that every one of the fuzzy creatures was indispensable.

Bending over the bed, Mariah tried to remove the harmonica without disturbing her, but Lindsay’s eyes opened, glistening, as soon as Mariah touched her hand. She sat down on the edge of the bed, reaching out to stroke her daughter’s cheek. “Is your leg bothering you?” Lindsay nodded miserably. “I’ll get you some Tylenol and the heating pad,” Mariah said, rising.

“Mom?”

Mariah had been moving toward the bathroom, but she stopped and looked at the girl.

“I miss Daddy so much,” Lindsay whispered, tears washing over her dark eyes.

Mariah sat back down and wrapped her daughter in her arms, rocking her gently and stroking her hair. As the child sobbed, her own chest and throat ached with the effort of holding back tears. “I know, Lins,” she whispered. “So do I.”

Lindsay buried her face in her mother’s shoulder. As her crying subsided, she caught her breath in great, shuddering sighs. Her voice, when it came, was muffled against Mariah’s body. “I have such awful thoughts sometimes. I know I should be thankful we weren’t killed. But when I think about Daddy—how he is now, in that place,” she said, pulling back and looking down guiltily, “I feel so angry. Sometimes I even hate him—and then I hate myself for feeling like that.”

Mariah stroked her hair. “It’s normal to feel angry, honey. What happened in Vienna isn’t fair. It’s horrible and not fair—to you, to me and especially to Daddy. Can you imagine how much he wants to be here with us?” Lindsay nodded. “But sometimes life isn’t fair—you just found that out sooner than most kids. It won’t always feel this bad, I promise. Just give it some time. And you know what?” she added, lifting her daughter’s chin. “I couldn’t have handled what happened to you and Daddy if you hadn’t been such a terrific kid. I’m proud of you, Lins—and I’m so glad you’re my daughter.”

Lindsay’s lip quivered even as she smiled, and she threw her arms around her mother’s shoulders. They held on to each other for a little while. Then Mariah tucked her securely under the covers. “You’d better get some sleep if you’re going to go back tomorrow to battle Megan the tyrant. Let me get your tablets and heating pad.”

When Mariah turned out the lights a few minutes later, her daughter was snuggled under the blankets, hugging a bald teddy bear and looking calmer. Mariah kissed her, then stepped out of the room and closed the door behind her.

Moving into the living room, she settled wearily onto the sofa and opened her briefcase, pulling out a stack of magazines and press clippings. The best part of highly classified work was that it wasn’t supposed to be brought home, however hectic things might be at the office. While Mariah could use her evenings to catch up on press speculations on her most recent area of study—the interwoven networks of international terrorism—the top-secret reports to which she had access at the Central Intelligence Agency weren’t something to be left lying around on coffee tables. Spot checks of briefcases at the agency’s exits ensured that overzealous employees didn’t attempt to carry out the crown jewels.

She started to read a few press clippings, but found it impossible to focus on the printed words. The feeling was rising in her again—the gut-wrenching anxiety that she tried to block out by concentrating on Lindsay and the daily effort to rebuild some normalcy in their lives. Why did Paul Chaney have to show up today, after all this time? What kind of game was he playing now? Why would he say it wasn’t an accident when she knew for a fact that it was?

She had told Chaney only part of the truth, of course. He had no idea of her CIA connections nor that the Company, and not just the embassy, had gone over David and Lindsay’s accident with a fine-tooth comb to rule out any possibility of foul play. And although Mariah had been too busy running between hospital rooms to take part herself, someone she trusted absolutely had seen to it that no stone was left unturned in the Company’s investigation of the disaster. No, Mariah thought, the bottom line is that Chaney doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

She leaned back and massaged her temples, then glanced at her watch. Propping her feet on the coffee table, she grabbed the television remote and flicked on the ten o’clock news. As the screen began to glow, two figures came into view—the “CBN Nightly News” anchors. They fit the standard TV-news format. The man, Bob Michaels, was in his mid-forties, telegenic, conservatively dressed, sober. Beverly Chin, by comparison, was younger, more brightly dressed and seated on the right side of the screen, where the eye is naturally drawn. She smiled a great deal, although her face became serious when she read from the TelePrompTer. Her Chinese features and the good looks of the African-American weatherman brought a politically correct racial balance to the news team.

The newscast opened with the latest on the aftermath of a terrorist triple-header that had occurred three days earlier. Forty-seven deaths and scores of injuries had resulted when bombs had exploded simultaneously in London’s Trafalgar Square, Paris’s Eiffel Tower and at the Statue of Liberty in New York. The horrifying brilliance of the attacks—their stunning coordination and the pointed symbolism of the three targets, all objects of intense national pride—was such that dozens of groups had jumped in to claim responsibility and threaten further action if their demands were not met. A coordinated intelligence effort had narrowed the field of probable attackers to one fundamentalist religious group and two “liberation fronts.”

Mariah watched the item closely. Now that the Soviet Union was defunct, she had been assigned a new focus of analysis. She was in the middle of drafting a paper on the arms market for interconnected terrorist groups and she thought she might have uncovered a new supplier with possible links to Libya. There was no evidence of a connection to this ghastly terrorist triple play—not yet, anyway—but she was determined to keep at it, knowing that a coordinated assault like this had to have had strong and experienced backing.

The news report, however, told her nothing she didn’t already know. When it ended, the screen shifted back to the grave features of anchorman Bob Michaels.

“The Cold War may be over, but there seems no end to troubles in the former Soviet Union. There was rioting again today in the streets of Moscow, as another cold Russian winter sets in and food shortages loom large. Correspondent Paul Chaney reports that some cash-strapped Russians may become desperate enough to try to sell the country’s nuclear arsenal.”

Mariah’s heart began to pound. She leaned forward in her seat as the tall, lean figure of Paul Chaney appeared on the screen, standing in front of the State Department building. He was wearing a sport coat and tie instead of the habitual bomber jacket—his concession to the camera. It looked as if the report had been videotaped earlier in the day.

“Since the end of the Cold War, the Russian and American governments have agreed to drastic cuts in nuclear arsenals. Thousands of weapons researchers have seen their funding disappear as the former superpowers cut weapons programs to cash in the promised ‘Peace Dividend,’ freeing up military funds for domestic purposes.

“But there are those who would be willing to pay a high price for these cast-off weapons—and for the experts to operate them. In Vienna, the International Atomic Energy Agency—the IAEA—has been fighting for more power to inspect nuclear weapons sites to ensure that these arsenals are destroyed as promised. The IAEA has also proposed a registry of nuclear scientists to make certain that these specialists don’t auction off their skills to the highest bidder.

“I asked an official here at the State Department why our government has not been more supportive of the IAEA’s efforts.”

The scene shifted to an office, where a white-haired man in a pin-striped suit sat, hands folded, behind a desk. A line on the screen identified him as William Hoskmeyer of the State Department’s Nuclear Affairs Division. Mariah knew him well—he was a pompous idiot.

Hoskmeyer: “I think you have to see it as a question of equity. If we insist that the Russians allow snap inspections by outsiders of their nuclear facilities, then they have every right to insist that we do the same. Frankly, we’re not prepared to do that—to give foreigners unrestricted access to American security installations.”

Chaney: “So how do we know that Russian weapons and expertise won’t end up in the pockets of madmen and terrorists in exchange for much-needed dollars?”

Hoskmeyer: “Because Moscow is as committed as we are to nuclear nonproliferation. We’re confident that the agreements on force reduction that we’ve struck with the Russians will be fully respected—both the letter and the spirit. And we’re monitoring closely, of course.”

The scene shifted back to Chaney in front of the State Department building. “Despite Washington’s apparent lack of concern, there is evidence that unstable governments and terrorist groups are scrambling to acquire nuclear weapons—and that whistle-blowers in the IAEA are being silenced. Some of these potential customers can pay top dollar for smuggled nuclear weapons and the specialists to handle them. If they succeed, we may find ourselves looking back fondly on the Cold War—when only Moscow and Washington appeared likely to blow up the planet.

“Paul Chaney—CBN—Washington.”

The news continued, but Mariah wasn’t listening to the television anymore. She snapped off the set, staring numbly at the disappearing glow.

David had been working in Vienna for the International Atomic Energy Agency and had been in the forefront of IAEA officials seeking greater powers to stop the spread of nuclear weapons—and Paul knew it.

But what Chaney couldn’t know was that it was Mariah herself—not David—who had blown the whistle on a suspected nuclear weapons ring. And that if David and Lindsay’s accident in Vienna had been an attempt to silence a whistle-blower, it should have been Mariah—not David—who was the target.

“But it wasn’t,” Mariah whispered. “Dammit, Chaney. I would have been the first to know.”

No one could have guessed that the five men at the corner table were doomed.

They were sitting in the Trinity Bar (“Live Country Music Every Nite!”) just on the outskirts of Taos, New Mexico. Around them, the usual Wednesday-night crowd of ranch hands and laborers, most in jeans and Stetsons, moved through the smoky haze to the rhythm of a steel guitar. At the front of the bar, a singer in a fringed shirt stood under a spotlight, his throaty twang straining to be heard as he begged Ruby not to take her love to town.

Admittedly, the three Russians were a little conspicuous. In the crowd of sweat-soaked Stetsons and dust-lined faces, their crisp Levi’s marked them as dudes. And the new white cowboy hats looked incongruous above round Slavic faces. The two Americans with them seemed drab by comparison: rumpled corduroy pants, casual shirts and down ski jackets. The younger one—thirtyish maybe—wore wire-rimmed glasses patched at the nosepiece with adhesive tape. The other man was in his fifties, white-haired, with a weary countenance.

Five matching black leather briefcases on the floor under the table provided the clue to the brotherhood that united the men. Each case bore a gold-lettered inscription stenciled in the corner: Los Alamos National Laboratory. Their obituaries would note how the five former enemies perished together just at the moment they had joined forces to put their scientific genius to work for the benefit of mankind.

A tired-looking waitress, eyes ringed with black mascara, bleached hair teased and sprayed to defy the law of gravity, balanced a tray on her hip as she deposited another round of drinks on the table and cleared the remains of the last round. Five pairs of eyes were fixed on the low neckline of her ruffled white blouse each time she bent over to put down or pick up a glass or bottle. “That’s five Coors and four vodkas straight up, right, boys?” she said, straining to be heard over the music.

“But Russian vodka, yes?” Blue almond eyes sparkled in a flushed round face, watching the topside of her breasts roll with her up-and-down movements.

The waitress raised her eyes heavenward and nodded without breaking the rhythm of her work. “Yeah, yeah—Smirnoff—good Russian vodka.” The two Americans at the table exchanged amused glances. “That’s twenty-four-fifty, fellas.”

Larry Kingman dropped a twenty and a ten on her tray. Once again, as he had on the last two rounds, he waved away the change she had begun to count out.

“Well, thanks! Thanks a lot,” the waitress said, taking a real good look at him now and smiling warmly. “You just holler if you need anything else, okay?”

Kingman smiled and nodded. The woman lingered a moment, then wandered reluctantly over to a table where some good ol’ boys were calling loudly for refills. Kingman raised one of the shot glasses of vodka and held it out over the center of the table, looking at each of the other four faces in turn. “To the future, gentlemen. To science.”

The Russians lifted the three remaining shot glasses. “Na zhdoroviye,” they said in unison, tossing back the clear liquor, then slapping the glasses down on the stained wooden tabletop and reaching for the beer chasers.

Kingman directed an inquiring eyebrow at the younger American seated next to him. Scott Bowker was frowning, but he grasped one of the beer glasses, touching it briefly to his lips. Kingman shook his white head as he watched the younger man. “What’s up?”

Bowker glanced at the Russians, then around the room. “We shouldn’t be drinking like this.”

Kingman leaned back in his chair and smiled indulgently. “Relax, Scotty. We’ll let you be designated driver, okay?” Bowker’s frown deepened even further. “Re-lax,” Kingman repeated. “Everything is under control. Now, enjoy.”

One of the Russians, at Bowker’s left, grinned and put an arm around his shoulders, squeezing good-naturedly. “Larry is right. Enjoy! We are allies now—comrades in a common struggle. The Cold War is finished and we, my serious friend, have all won. Now,” he added, “we work on the same side.” The Russian raised his glass and nodded above the brim before taking another swallow of beer. The others echoed his nod. Scott Bowker looked pointedly at his watch, then at Kingman.

“Yup,” Kingman acknowledged. “It’s getting late. We should be going, boys. Tomorrow’s a big day.”

The five men drained their glasses, then stood and gathered up their briefcases. Kingman shifted uncomfortably, stretching out knees that were stiff and swollen after three days of playing guide for the Russian visitors. He trailed the others to the door, offering a nod and a warm smile as he limped past the blond waitress.

“’Bye now,” she said, giving him a wistful wave. “You come again, okay?”

They walked out of the beer-and-smoke fog of the tavern and into the cold night air of the New Mexico desert. The parking lot was full: pickups and old beaters, a few motorcycles, gaudy yellow license plates proclaiming New Mexico—Land of Enchantment. Kingman tossed a set of keys to Bowker as the men approached a minivan. Bowker unlocked the doors and the Russians slipped into the back seats. Kingman shut the sliding rear door and climbed into the front passenger seat.

They pulled out of the parking lot and turned south on NM 68, the main highway linking Taos and Los Alamos. The men fell silent, contemplating the landscape eerily lit by a cloud-draped moon over the Sangre de Cristo—the Blood of Christ—Mountains. A powdery snow had been falling while they were inside and it muffled the sound of the tires on the road. The Pueblo Indians believe that the spirits of the dead linger on the mesas of New Mexico, guarding the land. In this spectral glow and eerie silence, it was easy enough to believe that ghosts were hovering nearby. Watching and waiting.

The highway curved along the banks of the Rio Grande, hugging the line of the rushing river. It was past midnight and the road was virtually deserted. As the van sped along toward Española and the Los Alamos turnoff, a single pair of lights could be seen approaching from far off, flashing between the hills.

Kingman rolled down his window, the wispy white strings of his breath escaping into the night. He inhaled deeply, drinking in the cold, fresh air—infinitely preferable to the hops-and nicotine-soaked atmosphere of the Trinity Bar. Then he rolled the window up again and glanced back at the men in the rear of the van. The two Russians on the rear-most bench were heavy-eyed, their heads lolling with the motion of the vehicle, on the edge of dropping off to sleep. But Yuri Sokolov, sitting on the center bank of seats, had his gaze fixed on the road ahead, his thoughts impenetrable but obviously stone-cold sober, despite his consumption at the Trinity Bar.

At fifty-two, Sokolov was acknowledged in the arcane world of nuclear physics as the most brilliant mind in the field. Until recently, of course, his reputation in the West had been based entirely on the discoveries of meticulous spycraft, since he had never before stepped outside the Soviet weapons community, nor knowingly circulated a paper in the West.

Sokolov glanced briefly at Kingman, then focused again on the road ahead, watching the snow spinning through the van’s headlights—remembering Moscow nights, perhaps. They were intellectual brothers, Kingman reflected, forced to live their lives as enemies until suddenly, one day, someone had decided to change the rules. Now they had a common purpose—always had, maybe. The vagaries of politics irritated him. There was neither method nor reason to human behavior, and politicians were more irrational than most. Only science was constant, sane.

The single set of headlights rolling north on NM 68 toward the van belonged to a tanker truck making a night run to Taos. Diamond-shaped plaques on the tanker noted the contents as gasoline—hazardous material, highly flammable. The rig was hauling over eight thousand gallons of unleaded fuel and doing sixty on the open road.

When the two vehicles collided, the explosion could be heard all the way to Taos. The fireball rose eighty feet into the air, lighting up the night sky, although the only immediate witnesses to the event were jackrabbits and owls. The heat generated by the fire was enough to twist steel into Silly Putty and incinerate anything else unfortunate enough to be caught in the vicinity. Within a matter of seconds, even the asphalt road was ablaze.

Another car traveling south on NM 68 came upon the accident six minutes after the collision. After realizing that nothing could have survived the inferno, the driver turned back toward Taos to telephone for help from the Trinity Bar. When the emergency vehicles arrived, there was nothing they could do but try to keep the blaze from spreading to the surrounding juniper and piñon trees. It took three hours for the fire to burn itself out. Fire fighters doused the site with foam to guard against another flare-up, but this only served to seal the tomb.

The next day, curiosity seekers from both sides of the closed highway swarmed over the hills for a look, but nothing was left at the scene except a surreal metal sculpture, smoldering ash and the stench of burnt rubber.

A piece of evidence that had miraculously survived the impact of the crash and resulting blaze—the van’s rear license plate—allowed state police to trace the ownership and determine that it had been signed out to Dr. Lawrence Kingman, deputy director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who had been squiring around some scientists visiting New Mexico under the Russia/U.S. Nuclear Cooperation Pact. Someone at Los Alamos remembered that Kingman and a few others attending a dinner at the Hilltop House Hotel earlier that evening had headed down the mesa for drinks afterward.

The police spoke to a waitress at the Trinity Bar who clearly remembered the group and was able to confirm that there had been three Russians and two Americans. The Russkies had been obvious, she’d said, rolling her eyes at the memory of the new cowboy getups they had worn. The table had ordered several drinks over a couple of hours, although they hadn’t been staggering or anything when they left. She was really sad to hear about the accident—the older American had seemed like a good guy.

The federal government took a close interest in the follow-up investigation and insisted that the van and the remains of its occupants be returned. The coroner explained that anything they scraped off the melted highway would consist primarily of American automotive technology and very little by way of identifiable human remains. Investigators were sifting through the rubble, but the blaze appeared to have made as effective a funeral pyre as any crematorium could boast, if a little less tidy.

All the same, the federal men were insistent, and around northern New Mexico everyone knew that you didn’t argue with the feds. They had played a mysterious role in the area ever since World War II, when Manhattan Project scientists working at Los Alamos had conducted a top-secret test—code-named Trinity—of the world’s first atomic bomb. The Trinity test had led directly to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of the war with Japan.

If the feds wanted a bulldozed pile of ashes and twisted steel, the coroner decided, they were welcome to it.