LITMIR.BIZ

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Just loud enough to be heard.

      “What?” Lindsay snapped from the other side.

      Mariah opened her mouth to ask if she could come in, but what if the answer came back no? Better to take acknowledgment as invitation. When she walked in, Lindsay was stretched on her stomach across the unmade bed, arms hanging down as she flipped through a pile of plastic CD cases on the floor beside her.

      “We need to turn the music down,” Mariah said. “The windows are open, and it’s getting late.”

      “Fine,” Lindsay said, but didn’t move.

      Mariah walked over to the desk and lowered the volume on the stereo. The chair, typically, was covered with clothes from the try-and-toss ritual Lindsay went through as she debated her image each day. Mariah made a move to start hanging them up, but if she did, she knew it would be interpreted as criticism—not that the mess didn’t warrant it, but there was a time and a place, and this wasn’t it. On the other hand, she wanted to sit down, and she couldn’t bring herself to sit on top of all those clean clothes. She compromised and draped the whole pile over the back of the desk chair, then settled and looked around.

      The decor was in a constant process of transformation. Nothing was ever removed, but layer upon layer was added as Lindsay’s interests evolved. Between posters of rock bands and animals, new ones had been hung—book jackets and astronomical phenomena, two of the many passions of this difficult but incredibly bright daughter she was trying to raise. Images of the Milky Way and the Horsehead Nebula hung interspersed with others of writers as diverse as Jane Austen, George Orwell and Ken Kesey—and, Mariah noted, one whole wall of Ben Bolt, the grandfather Lindsay had never known.

      Maybe it was just coincidence that she’d discovered her grandfather not long after losing her dad. Ben’s novel Cool Thunder had been on her freshman English curriculum, after all. But Lindsay had taken her Ben Bolt study well beyond school requirements, reading everything by and about him that she could get her hands on.

      Not surprising, Mariah supposed. At a certain point, everyone wants to know who they are and where they came from, and she herself hadn’t provided much information over the years. Where Ben was concerned, she’d operated on the theory that if you can’t say something good about someone…

      “Why couldn’t I stay at Chap’s while you’re working?” Lindsay asked sullenly.

      Chap Korman was the literary agent who’d handled Ben’s work from the start of his career. His house in Newport Beach, California, was only a couple of blocks from the cottage where Lindsay and Mariah were spending their three-week vacation. Since her own mother’s death twenty years earlier, Mariah had become sole guardian of Ben’s estate, and it was a credit to Korman that she felt as close to him as she felt estranged from the memory of his former client.

      “There really wasn’t time to arrange it with Chap and change your ticket—although, to be perfectly honest, Lins, I didn’t even think of it. Carol was the first person I thought of.” Carol Odell was the married daughter of Mariah’s old CIA mentor and boss, Frank Tucker. The families had always been close. “She and Michael are really looking forward to having you there for a couple of days. So is Alex. Apparently, he’s having sibling anxiety over the new baby. That little guy’s crazy about you, and you haven’t seen much of him lately.”

      “It’s not my fault. I had exams and everything.”

      “I know. But when this assignment got thrown at me and I tried to think how to work it, Carol’s just seemed like the best idea. I did try to call you,” Mariah added, “but the phone here was tied up all afternoon.”

      “I was talking to Br—to my friends about the party at Stephanie’s tomorrow. It’s not fair I can’t go.”

      “There’ll be other parties. This couldn’t be helped.”

      “It won’t be the same! People won’t be around later.”

      “People? Are we talking people like Brent?”

      She nodded miserably. “He’s going to Connecticut to see his dad. I won’t see him again till school starts.”

      Mariah said a quiet prayer of thanks for that. She didn’t think she was being overprotective. At eighteen, Brent was just too old and altogether too smooth. But she adopted what she hoped was an appropriately sympathetic expression and reminded herself not to let any dismissive platitudes pass her lips. The only safe recourse was to agree that this development was, indeed, as earth-shattering as it seemed from a fifteen-year-old perspective. “I know it’s the pits,” she said. September was a long way off, thank God.

      Lindsay sighed, a real heartbreaker of a sigh. Mariah moved next to her on the bed and stroked that beautiful copper hair.

      “Carol says Charlotte’s just started smiling,” she ventured. Lindsay smiled a little at that. Mariah put an arm around her daughter’s slim shoulders, bending to kiss her head. “I know how frustrated you are, Lins. Me, too. I’m so fed up with work these days, I could put a chair though the window. We really need this vacation.”

      It seemed they’d been planning it forever. A beach holiday, they’d decided, in a rare instance of total accord—three weeks of relaxing, swimming, tanning, shopping. Long walks on the sand. Maybe a few sailing lessons. California wouldn’t have been Mariah’s first choice. She’d have opted for the Hamptons or the Carolinas, but there had been advantages to going west, not the least of which was the chance to spend some time with Chap Korman, who wasn’t getting any younger. That was certainly where Lindsay’s vote had gone, in any case, so California-bound they were—with this one small wrinkle.

      “Just be patient? I’ll go do this job, and then we’ll have three whole weeks to veg in the sun.”

      “Yeah, I suppose.”

      Mariah hugged her again, too grateful for the diverted crisis to listen to the doubts gnawing in the back of her mind. Doubts that should have told her there was something altogether too coincidental, too pat about this sudden call to duty on an old enemy’s turf.

      If she’d been less distracted, less weary, less defeated, she might have pulled her wits about her faster and found a way to turn Geist down flat. But she hadn’t. And sure enough, it wasn’t long before she felt an unseen hand clawing at the frayed threads of her life.

Tuesday, July 2

      Chapter Two

      Frank Tucker awoke in gloom and found himself crying. He froze, catching himself in mid-sob, and held his breath, ears straining. But the only sound he heard was a lonely summer rain pelting the roof like a sympathetic echo to his grief.

      Though disoriented, his instincts were sufficiently honed to render him both wary and appalled at his lapse. He racked his brain to think where he was. His first thought was Moscow. Room 714, Intourist Hotel. Surveillance devices embedded in every wall.

      Horrified to think the listeners might have heard him crying, he wondered if he’d been drugged to induce this sense of utter desolation. A dead weight of despair seemed to be bearing down on him, crushing his chest. He inhaled deeply, trying to cast it off, and as he did, the piney scent of wet juniper tickled his nostrils. This wasn’t the typical Russian urban perfume of diesel, must and cooked cabbage, he realized. It was the smell of his own yard, drifting in through the open window.

      Then he remembered flying back that morning. The unmarked aircraft had taken off from Moscow before dawn, Tucker the sole passenger. The only cargo had been one wooden crate. Picking up eight hours on the westbound journey, overtaking the rising sun, the plane had landed at Andrews Air Force Base just in time for the morning capital commute.

      The driver who met the plane on the tarmac had taken Tucker’s suit bag and put it in the trunk of a dark sedan, watching while Tucker himself loaded the wooden crate. They exchanged hardly a word on the drive from suburban Maryland to McLean, Virginia, a chase car trailing close behind. Wending

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