Taylor Smith - The Innocents Club

“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.

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 its way along the beltway, the convoy had turned off at the road leading through the Langley Wood, entering the CIA complex through a subterranean passage.

There, Tucker had carted the box to his sub-basement office. Prying it open with a crowbar, he’d flipped quickly though the moldering files inside before depositing the whole bunch in his heavy steel safe. After a quick call upstairs to confirm his return, he’d slammed the safe door and spun the dial, heading home to catch up on some of the sleep that had eluded him for the two days he’d been gone.

Now, with a warm summer rain splashing on the windowsill and the damp, earthy scent around him of a world washed clean, he was back in his own wide, empty bed in suburban Alexandria, fully dressed, only his shoes kicked off before he’d crashed on top of the covers.

How long ago?

The heavy curtains were drawn tight to shut out the light of day. Tucker glanced at the digital clock next to the bed: 11:33 a.m. He’d slept less than two hours before snapping awake to the sound of his own mournful cry.

The mattress dipped as he rolled onto his side, feet dropping with a thud to the carpeted floor. He exhaled a long, shuddering sigh, and the blade of his big hands scraped the tears from his cheeks—denying even this familiar room the pathetic sight of a middle-aged man reduced to tears. He had no recollection of the dream that had moved him to this state. All he knew was that it had left him with a profound sense of loss and longing.

He knew, too, that he was ludicrous—a brooding, barrel-chested hulk whose ferocious, black-eyed scowl had once struck terror in the hearts of fools and his more timid underlings. Now, here he was, reduced to whimpering in his bed like some self-pitying boy with a complaint about the unfairness of life.

He got to his feet and walked to the window, throwing back the drapes. The cloud-shrouded day cast a gentle light across the back lawn rolling down to the creek at the bottom of his property. The grass, dry and yellowing when he’d left forty-eight hours earlier, had already been transformed to lush green. On the borders of his lot, red hibiscus, white daylilies and blue hydrangeas were all in bloom—a patriotic display in time for the Fourth of July. The long fronds of the big willow by the creek swayed in the summer rainstorm, a slow, easy dance.

No automobile horns, no loud voices, no pounding jack-hammers. After the noise and bustle of Moscow, the quiet was deafening.

Tucker passed a hand over his head, feeling stubble on a dome normally shaved bowling-ball smooth. He debated his next move. He was bone-tired, but even if jet lag was insisting it was evening, sleep wasn’t an option. His dreams, obviously, weren’t to be trusted. Anyway, he’d only meant to grab forty winks. If he went back to bed now, he’d be left to struggle with his bleak thoughts through the long, dark night to come.