Читать книгу Guilt By Silence - Taylor Smith - Страница 13

Even Dieter Pflanz had to smile when he thought back on it later.

There was Angus McCord, billionaire industrialist—one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful—wearing a green surgical gown over his suit and a gauze mask over his face. A cotton cap rested heavily on his not-insignificant ears, forcing them to flap even more than usual. He looked like a diminutive cross between Marcus Welby, M.D., and Dumbo the elephant. Only the tiny, wizened baby girl whose hand McCord held through the porthole of an isolette, and the simultaneously proud and anxious expression on the faces of her similarly gowned parents, revealed the serious nature of the business at hand.

The Newborn Intensive Care Unit was a large room, full of high-tech equipment and bustling staff. It had been functioning for several weeks now, even though the neonatal clinic of McCord General Hospital was not yet officially open.

The isolette stood near the unit’s big plate-glass window. To Pflanz, standing with dignitaries in the hall outside, the preemie looked like a baby bird, lying on her back, arms and legs splayed. Her skin hung loose and wrinkled, and her spindly rib cage was protruding—she had been born too soon to have built up any healthy baby fat. Repeated sticking for blood samples had left bruises all over the little body. When McCord arrived at the NICU, the baby was wearing patches over her eyes to protect her retinas from the bili lights set up over the isolette to treat her jaundice. The lights were turned off for now and the patches removed for the benefit of the visitors, but a tangled network of plastic tubes extruded from her minute nose and arms, and several wires were taped to her chest.

Cameras outside the glass enclosure whirred and snapped as McCord gently stroked the frail baby, listening as the neonatal specialist beside him described the prognosis for the three-pound, eight-ounce preemie—iffy, but looking better with each passing day that she managed to cling to life. McCord looked up at the baby’s parents, his eyes smiling over the mask, and then back down at the tiny fighter in the isolette.

“You show ’em, little one,” he whispered.

A few minutes later, he emerged from the NICU, soberly stripping off the hospital garb as he made his way toward the lounge that marked the entry to the McCord Neonatal Unit. His entourage fell in step behind, photographers and television camera retreating before his advance. When he reached the red ribbon strung across the lounge, McCord stopped and the hospital’s chief of staff, Dr. Emory, pulled up alongside him. A hush fell over the assembled group of doctors, nurses, local politicians, community activists and media representatives.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Emory began, “this day has been a long time coming. It was almost seven years ago that the city of Fargo first expressed a desire to build an advanced neonatal care unit to serve this region. For the people of this community, it wasn’t enough to say that this is a small city—that we couldn’t afford the ‘luxuries’ of big cities like Boston and San Francisco. Our children deserve nothing less than the best. And so, the people of Fargo set out to acquire the finest neonatal facility that love and dedication—and yes, money—could build. And they did it with the generous support of North Dakota’s most famous offspring—Mr. Angus Ramsay McCord. This fine hospital already stands as a testament to this native son’s boundless commitment to our community.”

A murmur went through the crowd in the lobby and heads nodded.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, it is my very great pleasure to extend a warm welcome and our deepest appreciation to Mr. and Mrs. Angus McCord, and to call upon them to open this fine new addition to McCord General Hospital.”

A round of applause accompanied Gus McCord to the front of the room. His face became flushed as he looked around and waited for the clapping to die down, but it went on and on. He grinned sheepishly and rubbed the bump on his nose, then looked over at his wife and shrugged. Turning back, he raised his hands and made a dampening wave.

“Thank you. Thank you all,” he called above the noise. But the group showed no sign of letting up. Gus passed his hand over his brush cut as the applause rolled on. Then he seemed to have an inspirational flash.

“Shh!” he whispered loudly, his finger to his lips. “You’ll wake the babies!”

The audience laughed, but the noise finally died down. There was a long silence as they waited expectantly for him to say something, but he seemed to be lost in thought, examining his shoes and shuffling awkwardly. One or two nervous throat-clearing sounds rose up from the room. His voice, when he spoke at last, was soft.

“I have a confession to make,” he said, eyes still on his toes. “It’s not an easy thing to say, for an old coot like me. But I’m here to tell you that I’ve fallen in love again.”

A few chuckles sprinkled the room.

“The lady in question,” McCord went on, stronger now, looking up at the crowd, “has the face of an angel and a form so exquisite it takes your breath away. Of course, there are those who will say she’s too young for me, that these May-December romances never work out. But I don’t care. Because when I look in her eyes, I know that she is the culmination of everything that is good and beautiful in this world. Her name is Jessica Boehm, ladies and gentlemen. She is five days old and she weighs just three and a half pounds. But she’s a spunky little lady, and I am the luckiest man in the world for having met her.”

McCord reached out a hand to the mother of the baby he had been caressing in the isolette. “And this is Mary Boehm, the mother of that wonderful young lady down the hall.” Mrs. Boehm, tears streaming down her smiling cheeks, held on tightly to Gus’s hand as the audience applauded warmly.

McCord’s other arm reached out to embrace his wife, who had been standing off to his left. “And this beautiful lady, for those of you who don’t already know her, is my wife, Nancy. We have been married for forty years. She is my courage, my inspiration and my best friend. She is also the mother of our four sons and the grandmother of five beautiful grandchildren. We have a good life. But like the parents of little Jessica, we have known the fear and pain of a baby’s illness.”

He and Nancy exchanged glances and squeezed hands.

“I believe,” McCord went on, “that the sheer force of Nancy’s mother-love saw our sick children through their darkest hours. But sometimes, when a baby is born too soon, or with special problems, even a mother’s love needs a little help. This clinic is dedicated in ensuring that even the littlest ones like Jessica will survive and grow and thrive.”

There was a round of applause.

“I would ask my wife, Nancy, and Mary Boehm—two of the finest and most determined mothers I know,” McCord said, “to jointly do the honors of cutting the ribbon to open the McCord Neonatal Clinic.”

Mary Boehm’s surprise showed through her tears, but she quickly wiped them away as Gus stepped back. Nancy McCord moved beside her, offering a smile and a hug, and then handed Mrs. Boehm a pair of large surgical shears and held up the ribbon. Mary Boehm’s hand was trembling as she reached out and snipped the wide red sash. It fell to a cheer and a hearty round of applause.

Dieter Pflanz looked around the room and noted that several full-grown men were conspicuously swallowing lumps in their throats. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place. For a fleeting second, he felt the instinctive bristle rise up his spine as the crowd rushed forward to surround McCord, but then he relaxed again. It was obvious that there was nothing but goodwill toward Gus McCord in that room.

Watching the milling crowd, scanning those who were approaching McCord from all sides, Pflanz paid little attention to Jerry Siddon, who had moved next to him.

“That was a neat trick, wasn’t it?” Siddon said.

Pflanz glanced down at him. “A neat trick?”

Siddon waved his hand toward McCord. “That performance,” he said, grinning. “And turning the ceremony over to the baby’s mother. Focusing the attention on himself by seeming to turn it on someone else. Very neatly done.”

Pflanz arched one eyebrow. “You’re very cynical today, young Siddon.”

“Not cynical, just overawed at the man’s skill.” He glanced up at Pflanz, who was watching him closely. “You know what I mean. This guy’s tough as nails. You know it, and so do I. That’s how he made his fortune and his name. But look at him now.”

They both turned back to McCord, who was guffawing with a group of old cronies, his hands buried deep in his pants pockets.

“He looks like he just drove in from the farm in the family pickup,” Siddon continued. “Yet this is the same man who, in a few hours, will be standing toe-to-toe with the sharks and vultures in Washington. The man who may have done more than any other American to throw the Reds out of the Kremlin. I tell you, Dieter, this is the one. This is the guy we’ve got to put in the White House. He’s the one who can make things happen.”

The corners of Pflanz’s mouth angled up ever so slightly. He doesn’t need to be elected, Jerry boy, he thought. Things are happening already.

When Frank’s secretary tapped on her door a few minutes after she had stormed out of his office, Mariah was standing at the window, staring down on Langley Woods situated beyond the high fence surrounding the Agency’s headquarters.

“Mariah?” Pat hesitated, her hand on the door. Finally, she stepped in and shut it behind her. “What happened? Frank’s in there bellowing on the phone and you look like you’ve seen a ghost. What’s going on around here?”

Mariah glanced at Pat and then stared back across the trees, denuded now of their leaves. It was a bleak landscape this time of year.

Tucker’s secretary was one of her closest friends, as was Frank himself. But Patty Bonelli and Frank were also an item—undeclared, discreet. It was a relationship that only Mariah and a few others in the office knew about. Mariah wasn’t altogether certain when Pat and Frank’s relationship outside the office had begun—for the first few years after his wife died, Frank had been too preoccupied with finishing the job of raising his kids to have time for anything else—but it had been going on for some time now. They seemed to be comfortable with it just as it was, neither one showing any sign of needing or wanting a more public commitment.

There was no way of knowing whether Pat was aware of the covert operation Frank had alluded to. As a senior secretary, she was privy to many of the compartmented cases that Frank and Mariah had worked on in the past, providing clerical support. But Frank had said that Operations was leading on this, and they always kept knowledge of their files to a minimum. If they had allowed Tucker in, it could only be because they had required his expertise. It was doubtful Pat knew anything, even if she were prepared to defy Frank and tell Mariah. On the other hand, Mariah thought, if Chaney had stumbled onto something, then it wasn’t as closely held a secret as Frank thought.

“Do you know if Frank has been working on any major cases with the Ops people over the past ten months?”

“He and George Neville have been working on a file,” Pat said. Neville was the CIA deputy director for operations—DDO. “I’m not cleared for it, though. I thought you were.”

“Why did you think that?”

“Because Neville was in Frank’s office the other day. Frank asked me to bring them coffee and when I opened the door, I heard Neville mention your name.”

“What was he saying?”

Pat shook her head. “He clammed up when I walked in. What’s this about, Mariah?”

“That’s what I’d like to know. I think it’s got something to do with the accident in Vienna.”

“What do you mean?”

“Apparently, it was no accident.”

“What?”

Mariah sighed and settled down on the edge of her desk. “Look, Patty, I don’t know what’s going on, but I shouldn’t be saying anything. You know Frank—he’d throw a fit if he knew I’d told you this much, so do me a favor and don’t mention it, okay?”

“I won’t say anything. But what do you plan to do?”

Mariah turned back to the window. “I don’t know. But I have to find out what really happened.”

With Frank or without him, she thought.

When Pat left her office, Mariah stood at the window a few minutes longer, struggling against the pain and black fury that were threatening to short-circuit her brain. Forcing herself to turn away from the window, she caught sight of the computer terminal next to her desk. She sat down and flicked it on, her mind racing as the monitor raised its greenish glow.

After a short delay, the screen prompted her to enter her password, the first line of defense against unauthorized access to the Agency’s data banks. All employees had a personal access code, known only to themselves and the computer. Security procedures required that the password be changed every month.

Mariah punched in her current personal code— “SIGMUND,” the name of her neighbor’s cat. After the mess she had found in her tiny garden, the feline had been on her mind the last time she had changed her password. The cursor moved across the screen as she entered the cat’s name, but only Xs appeared—another security measure.

After a brief delay, the monitor flashed a message: “PASSWORD VALID. FILE SEARCH MODE. ENTER FILE NAME.”

She returned her gaze to the keyboard and punched in “CHAUCER.”

There was another short delay. Her stomach flipped when she saw the reply: “RESTRICTED FILE. ACCESS DENIED. ENTER NEW FILE NAME.”

“Access denied, my foot!” she muttered. “That’s my file.”

She punched in her password again: “CHAUCER.”

“RESTRICTED FILE. ACCESS DENIED. ENTER NEW FILE NAME.”

Her heart was pounding as she leaned back in her chair and stared at the stubborn message. Then she hunched forward again. “All right,” she said under her breath, “let’s try another approach.”

She punched in a new file request: “MARIAH BOLT. PERSONAL LOG. VIENNA STATION.”

The cursor flashed for a moment as the Cray computer down in the Agency’s basement searched its data banks. Then a long list of document titles began scrolling down the screen—three years’ worth of contact reports and intelligence assessments that she had filed while she was posted to the CIA station in Vienna. As her eye scanned the rolling list, Mariah’s mind wandered back.

It was never a given that she would get an overseas assignment.

Despite its monolithic appearance, the CIA is a bureaucracy like any other, with internal divisions and rivalries. The most pronounced is between its operations (DDO) and analysis (DDI) directorates. Operations officers do the overseas clandestine work, while back at Langley, analysts sift through masses of intelligence garnered from various sources like tea-leaf readers, trying to predict the future. These two sides of the house view each other with mutual suspicion bordering on contempt. The trained covert operators regard the analysts as ineffectual pencil pushers, shuffling papers and conducting endless intellectual debates while the world burns around them. To the analysts, the clandestine ops people are cowboys, too often launching risky and ill-conceived operations that end up backfiring and smearing the Agency’s reputation. Limited interplay between these two directorates only feeds the skepticism and distrust between them.

Mariah had made her career among the analysts. Frank had recruited her because of her specialized knowledge of the Soviet arsenal, and for ten years she had helped track political and military developments in the Soviet Union. She had worked on various desks, sifting through intercepted communications for hints of what the Soviets were planning next, poring over the satellite photographs of secret installations, interpreting whatever gossip could be gleaned on who was up and who was out in the Moscow hierarchy. On a couple of occasions, under State Department cover, she had attended Soviet-American conferences posing as an administrative aide, meeting the faces behind the names in the intelligence reports and trying to figure out if there were moderates on the other side who would work for an end to the craziness.

During this time, David had been building a name for himself as a brilliant theoretician as well as a thoughtful writer on the need to contain the atomic beast that the scientists at Los Alamos had unleashed in 1945. When the Soviet Union had first begun to show signs of disintegration, he and Mariah had both worried about the danger of its nuclear arsenal slipping away in the confusion. David had developed a friendship with Hans Blix, the Swedish director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog. When Blix asked David to come to Vienna to help with the job of beefing up the IAEA, he was eager to accept.

Mariah had talked it over with Frank and he, in turn, had gone to DDO, George Neville. In the end, they had agreed to transfer Mariah to the operations side of the Agency and post her to the Vienna station under cover of the embassy’s administrative section. For the period of the Vienna assignment, Mariah—somewhat to her chagrin—had joined the cowboys.

The list of titles on the screen ended with a reference to the last contact report she had filed in Vienna. It was a brief account of her secret meeting with the Hungarian diplomat she had raced off to see instead of driving Lindsay to school that terrible morning.

She fumed at the sight of his code name on the screen— “RELIANCE”—someone’s idea of a joke, it seemed. The man was an alcoholic and a completely unreliable asset. He had been run by the Company for years, far beyond his capacity to provide anything useful by way of information on the crumbling Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. For this bum, I sent my family into a trap, Mariah thought bitterly.

But what she was looking for as she scanned the names of reports was “CHAUCER”—the code name of the Russian physicist who had confided her suspicion that Soviet nuclear weapons were being traded for hard currency. Mariah had met her through David’s office, had recruited her, had been her handler right up to the day the woman disappeared.

Tatyana Baranova was serving in the multinational IAEA when Mariah first encountered her at an agency farewell party for a departing British inspector. Lindsay was there, too, Mariah suddenly remembered with a smile. In fact, truth be told, it was Lindsay who had opened the door to the CHAUCER operation.

She had picked Lindsay up from the American School, and the two of them had run up to David’s IAEA office in the Vienna International Centre on the Wagramerstrasse. There they had found an office party in full swing.

Someone had placed a glass of wine in Mariah’s hand and a soft drink in Lindsay’s, and the two of them were sitting perched on a desk in a corner, laughing at David playing his harmonica and the impromptu chorus serenading the retiring British inspector with an off-key and tragicomic rendition of the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” When the song ended, half of the chorus was on bended knee, arms wrapped around the legs of the laughing Brit, imploring him to stay. Lindsay giggled at the silliness as the inspector turned several shades of red, struggling in vain to detach himself from the grip of the clowns at his feet.

“What a beautiful child!”

Mariah turned away from the antics across the room and found herself facing a woman who was watching Lindsay, bewitched, it seemed, by the copper curls and laughing dark eyes. She had apparently sidled up next to them at some point during the song. She looked to be in her early thirties, a few years younger than Mariah herself, short and on the pudgy side—the typical result of a starchy East European diet. She had a round, pleasant face and wide-set, pale blue eyes under overpermed blond hair. Her smile, as she glanced over Lindsay’s head at Mariah, was the hesitant gesture of the shy and lonely. The eyes dropped quickly, back to the child.

Lindsay looked up, a flicker of self-consciousness crossing her features before the giggles overtook her again. “That’s my dad,” she said, pointing at the group across the room. “He’s so crazy!”

The woman smiled once more, her eyebrows rising as she followed Lindsay’s finger. “Which one? Mr. Hewlett, who is leaving us?”

“No, the one with the harmonica. He’s a really good player. He taught himself. He can play anything, but he likes the blues best,” she confided.

“Oh, I see. So you are Dr. Tardiff’s little girl. What is your name, sweetheart?”

“Lindsay Bolt-Tardiff,” Lindsay said, holding out her hand, very grown-up. “And I’m eleven—well, almost.” They shook hands.

“Please excuse me,” the woman said, her expression appropriately serious. “I meant to say ‘Dr. Tardiff’s fine young lady.’ I am very pleased to meet you, Lindsay Bolt-Tardiff. I am Tatyana Baranova—you must call me Tanya.”

“Hi.” Lindsay glanced back at Mariah. “This is my mom.”

“Mrs. Tardiff. How do you do? You have a beautiful daughter.”

“Thank you,” Mariah said, smiling as she took the woman’s hand. “Call me Mariah. Do you work with the IAEA, Tanya?”

“Yes, but I have only been here a few weeks. I do not know many of my colleagues yet.”

“How are you finding Vienna?”

“It is very beautiful. Very expensive,” she added, rolling her eyes. “There are so many things in the shops—my goodness, I can hardly believe it—but not many bargains.”

“That’s for sure.”

“In Moscow, the shops have nothing. Here, it is the opposite, but expensive! How simple people live, I cannot imagine.”

“There’s a lot to see and do that doesn’t cost a fortune, once you find your way around.”

“I’ve seen the Lippizaner stallions three times!” Lindsay proclaimed proudly. “They dance!”

Tanya smiled warmly at her. “Just like your eyes, lovely one. Tell me, where did you get your beautiful hair? Your papa’s is black and your mama is fair, but you—so beautiful, this hair!” She ran her fingers lightly across Lindsay’s curls.

“I don’t know. Daddy says I’m a throwaway.”

“Throwback, Lins,” Mariah said, laughing. She looked up at Tanya. “My grandfather had red hair. I’ve never met a redhead in David’s family, but he says there were a few somewhere on the family tree, so I guess he must be carrying the gene, too.”

“Why would Daddy carry his jeans? And what’s that got to do with hair, silly?”

“Not jeans—genes. G-E-N-E-S,” Mariah explained, spelling out the word. “The kind you inherit from your mother and father that determine if you’ll be big or small—have brown eyes or blue. Red hair is uncommon because the gene is recessive. It hides, unless both parents pass it on.”

“I knew that,” Lindsay said, sniffing. “I was just testing to see whether or not you did.” She turned to Tanya. “I have hockey genes, too.”

“Hockey genes?”

Lindsay nodded. “From my dad and not my mom ’cause she comes from California and she hasn’t got any winter-sport genes in her at all. My dad’s teaching me to play hockey.”

“You don’t say. Well then, Lindsay Bolt-Tardiff, we have something in common, because when I was a little girl, believe it or not, I used to play on a girls’ hockey team at my school in Russia. We had a small league, but we were very good—at least, we thought so. I played goalie.”

“My dad plays center. I don’t play any position here because they don’t let girls on the teams. It’s not fair! I have to just skate around with my dad and we pass the puck. But I’ve got a killer slap shot,” she added. “I bet I could get it past you!”

“I am certain you could,” Tanya said, laughing. “I have not played in many years. Now, I just like to watch.”

“You could come and watch Daddy’s team play on Saturday. Mom? Couldn’t Tanya come with us?”

“Yes, of course. We’d love to have you join us. David’s team is just a bunch of guys from some of the foreign missions. Your embassy has a house team, too—David and his friends often play against them. But they’re playing a team from a local factory on Saturday morning. It’s not professional caliber or anything, but it’s fun. Why don’t you come and watch with us?”

“Oh, you are very kind, but I don’t think—”

“We could pick you up,” Lindsay offered helpfully, checking with her mother. Mariah nodded.

As she watched Tanya searching for a response, Mariah saw in her eyes that sudden fear—the fear born of dire warnings from KGB officers about what lies in wait for those who consort with capitalist enemies. And as Tanya’s eyes fell, Mariah saw regret, and then a flash of something else. Anger? Defiance?

“I would love to, really. But I do not think I can make it on Saturday. Thank you for asking.” Tanya looked at Mariah, hesitating, and then she turned and smiled at Lindsay. “I should be going now. I very much enjoyed meeting you, Lindsay,” she said, giving her a kiss on the cheek. “And you, Mrs. Tardiff.”

Mariah had unobtrusively scribbled something on a piece of paper. When Baranova held out her hand, Mariah pressed the slip in and left it there when she withdrew her own. “I wrote down the name of the arena,” she said quietly. “It’s near the Alte Donau U-Bahn station, in case you find yourself free on Saturday, after all. The game starts at nine. It was good to meet you, Tanya.”

The Russian woman held her gaze for a moment, and then turned and walked away.

In the end, Mariah recalled, Tanya had shown up that Saturday, somehow managing to shake the KGB watchers that kept tabs on all Soviet diplomats. And that was the beginning of it.

The hockey game was the only time, apart from the IAEA office party, that Mariah and Tatyana Baranova had ever met on open ground. But as the list of references on the computer indicated, they had met eight times again over the next fourteen months.

Then Tanya had disappeared and CHAUCER appeared to be wound up. Not long after that, David and Lindsay’s car was wiped out in front of the American School.

Mariah highlighted the first reference to CHAUCER on the screen, hoping against hope to find a back door into the file through her personal log. But when she hit the Enter key, the same stern message appeared: “RESTRICTED FILE. ACCESS DENIED.”