Taylor Smith - The Innocents Club

Tucker’s blood froze. Mariah. He forced his gaze to remain steady on the old man. “Can’t think which one you mean. Got a few good-looking ones kicking around the place,” he added wryly, tilting his glass.

The Navigator’s jaundiced eyes narrowed. Then he tipped back his own glass. Tucker watched it drain. How a man with a diseased liver could consume that much vodka defied all logic.

The tumbler dropped back to the table. “It only proves my point,” Deriabin rasped. “You get more beautiful women than you can even remember, while my people never send me one who doesn’t look like she was suckled on lemons instead of mother’s milk.”

Nothing more was said on the subject as they worked their way through what remained of the bottle and the night. At 2:00 a.m. the driver knocked on the door to let them know it was time to leave for the uncharted airstrip on the outskirts of Moscow where the Company plane had been cleared to land and wait for Tucker’s predawn departure.

Deriabin went along for the ride. As soon as they pulled onto the tarmac, the driver jumped out, but the Navigator remained in place behind the car’s opaque tinted windows. Tucker felt the rear of the car dip and rise as the driver opened the trunk and removed something. His guard went up, but when the lid of the trunk slammed, he saw through the rear window that the driver had only unloaded a wooden crate.

“I am giving you some files for safekeeping,” the Navigator said.

The driver opened the back door of the car on Tucker’s side and lifted the lid of the box for inspection.

“What’s in them?” Tucker asked.

“Not a bomb, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Wasn’t worried about that,” he replied truthfully. The aircraft crew would pass the crate through metal and chemical scanners before they would agree to load it. He could see them through Deriabin’s window, watching the car. Wondering what the hell was going on, obviously.

“At least, not a bomb of the traditional variety,” Deriabin added, striking a match and cupping his hands to light another cigarette. He straightened creakily, inhaling the smoke deeply, as if the predawn breeze coming in through Tucker’s open door was too rich a mixture for his compromised system to handle. “You will find they make interesting reading.” He nodded to the driver, who closed the crate and walked over to the plane, handing it off to one of the American crewmen.

“Why are you turning these papers over to us?” Tucker asked.

“Not ‘us,’ Mr. Tucker. I am turning them over to you.”

“Fine. Me. Why?”

“Because you have time to give them the attention they deserve. You are underused these days, I’m told.”

“If you know that, then you know they could easily be taken off my hands the minute I get back.”

“That would be a great pity and a great mistake. Take my word on this, my friend, even if you are disinclined to believe most of what I say. No one else will have as much interest in these files as you. No one else will ensure that what they contain is properly handled.”

Deriabin extended his emaciated hand. Again, Tucker worried about crushing the brittle bones under that transparent skin, but the old man’s grip was firm.

“This will be goodbye for me,” Deriabin said. “Only remember this, my friend—no man on earth desires as passionately as a Russian. Beware the one who desires too much.”

On the flight back, Tucker had been too exhausted and too drunk to give that or anything else much thought. It was only the next day, picking through the files, that he recalled the Navigator’s words. Who was “the one who desires too much”? he wondered.

Foreign Minister Zakharov, he presumed now. It seemed clear from the content of the files that Deriabin was determined for some reason to derail the man’s ambition by any means necessary—even treason. Zakharov’s rise to power had been nearly as ruthless as Deriabin’s own, but Tucker was aware of no evidence the two men had ever been rivals before now. So what had changed?

Then there was the old man’s apparently drunken commentary on women. His pointed reference to Mariah had been anything but haphazard, Tucker knew. It was to demonstrate the man knew where Tucker was most vulnerable. That, however debilitated the Navigator might seem, he had no compunction about manipulating that vulnerability for his own purposes. And that he was confident Tucker would act on the information in the files.

Well, maybe, Tucker thought grimly. But not necessarily in the way Deriabin expected. Because the linchpin in the Navigator’s scheming, he now knew, was the death in Paris nearly thirty years earlier of an impoverished American author. And if it were up to Tucker, that episode could bloody well remain shrouded in lies.

But it wasn’t up to him.

After Mariah’s call from Los Angeles, he realized the decision might already be out of his hands. Although fame had eluded Ben Bolt in life, it had grown exponentially in the years since his death, pretty much guaranteeing that someone, sooner or later, would stumble on the truth. If not this Urquhart character, then someone else.

Now it was time for damage control.

Still shaken by the eerie timeliness of Mariah’s call, and by hearing her voice for the first time in weeks, Tucker gathered the musty folders abruptly and got to his feet. If they hadn’t called him upstairs by now, to hell with them. He’d go and collect her letter.

Or not.

A rap sounded on his door and the Operations deputy strode in without waiting for a response. “Hey there, Frank,” Jack Geist said breezily.

Tucker nodded. “Jack.”

“Don’t get up on my account.” Geist dropped his lanky frame into a chair on the other side of the desk, giving the cramped office a smug once-over as his legs sprawled out in front of him. “See you got back safe and sound from your trip. Would’ve called you up first thing, but things have been a little wild today.”

“I figured.”

“You heard about this Kurdish business?”

Tucker nodded and sat down again. He was out of the loop, but he wasn’t brain-dead. He’d been in the game long enough to know that any situation making headlines would have the front office running to stay ahead of the breaking-news wave. The morning papers said the Turkish crisis had heated up overnight, with rebel Kurds massing for imminent confrontation with government forces.

“I gather the Russians have sent forces southward through Armenia,” he said.

The deputy grimaced. “Bastards just can’t resist mixing into it, can they?”

“They’ll say they’re looking to protect the country’s soft underbelly in case the situation spills across borders.”

“That’s what they’re saying, all right. Situation’s turning into a bloody circus. The Russians, Iran, Iraq, Greece, Cyprus—all getting their knickers in a twist. And, of course, the usual charges that we’re behind everything, orchestrating the situation for our own nefarious ends.”

Tucker nodded. The truth was less tidy than anybody’s simplistic explanations would have it, but it didn’t change the fact that once again, policy wonks like Geist here had gotten themselves caught on the horns of their own short-sightedness. It had probably seemed like a good idea after the Gulf War to enforce a no-fly zone to protect Saddam Hussein’s Kurdish opponents in northern Iraq. Except now that they no longer had Baghdad to worry about, the Iraqi Kurds were free to come to the aid of their unhappy brethren living across the border in Turkey, launching a full-scale assault on the weakest link in the NATO chain.

“Kind of makes you long for the good old black hat– white hat days of the cold war, doesn’t it, Jack?”