by Taylor Smith
Pflanz pulled on his own parka, suppressing a grin at the obvious discomfort of McCord’s executive assistant. Jerry Siddon shuddered as he turned up the collar of his overcoat. A Los Angeles native, Siddon was less than ecstatic, Pflanz knew, when he had to accompany the boss on these hometown swings in wintertime. But the new neonatal unit of McCord General Hospital was opening today in Fargo. It had been planned as the most advanced facility for the care of premature babies in the northern United States and had been financed almost entirely by the McCord family. The neonatal unit, in addition to the cancer wing and the heart institute, would help cement the reputation of McCord General as one of the country’s preeminent health-care facilities, putting Gus McCord’s hometown firmly on the medical map.
Dieter Pflanz headed for the open door of the aircraft. At Pflanz’s insistence, and after a foiled kidnap attempt several years back, McCord almost always traveled with two bodyguards now. But the one place Gus refused to have the burly guards present was in his hometown, and so the bodyguards had flown ahead to McCord’s next stop in Washington, D.C. Pflanz was not in the habit of doing guard duty, but he often came along for the ride to discuss business with McCord, and the imposing presence of the former covert operative would give pause to even the most determined adversary. He patted his chest, feeling the comfortable bulge of the Smith and Wesson semiautomatic holstered under his suit jacket. He expected no trouble, but it always paid to be prepared.
Jerry Siddon nodded to the other passenger in the aircraft, and McCord Industries’ private photographer followed close behind the security chief. The photographer, Pflanz was certain, would get plenty of shots of McCord’s arrival and the opening ceremonies at the hospital. Gus McCord was being actively courted by both major parties as a possible presidential contender when the current administration’s mandate ran out. While he professed impatience with Washington, both bureaucrats and the squabblers in Congress, McCord had never firmly shut the door on a political career, dangling teasing hints from time to time that would send the parties’ politicos into a mad frenzy of courtship. It had been Jerry Siddon’s idea to keep a personal photographic record of McCord’s civic contributions.
The security chief and the photographer were the first to step out the door of the plane. Pflanz slipped on dark glasses, despite the gray overcast, while the photographer took readings on his light meter, adjusted the aperture setting on his camera and snapped a few quick shots of the waiting dignitaries.
As Pflanz descended the steps, his eyes swept over the scene, taking in the roof of a gray terminal building nearly invisible against the big, prairie winter sky. His gaze dropped to the faces pressed against the glass of the terminal’s observation lounge. Satisfied that there was no obvious danger lurking in those quarters, he took up a position near the bottom of the aircraft steps and turned his attention to the crowd on the tarmac—a dozen or so people, those in front smiling bravely while the lesser lights in the rear ranks stamped their feet against the bitter cold and blew on their hands.
The knot of dignitaries near the limo included a man Pflanz recognized as Fred Hansen, the mayor of Fargo, his wife and two hospital administrators who had visited the McCord head office in California several times. The other men and women in business dress appeared to be local bigwigs. A couple of more casually dressed men detached themselves from the crowd—press, Pflanz decided, watching them warily nevertheless. The one carrying a canvas sack focused his camera on the door of the Lear. A cameraman from the city TV station also stood peering through the lens of a video camera perched on his shoulder.
McCord’s own photographer had taken up position next to the local press when Gus and Nancy emerged from the aircraft. They waved from the top step and then descended, hand in hand, like the President and First Lady that Pflanz suspected they might someday be. Jerry Siddon followed a discreet few steps behind.
The mayor and his wife moved forward to meet the McCords, the rest of the ground party streaming after. Gus McCord dropped his wife’s hand and took the mayor’s outstretched one, slapping the politician’s shoulder with his other hand.
“There you are, Fred, you old son of a gun,” McCord said heartily. He cocked his thumb toward the limo. “You expecting the queen of England?”
The mayor chuckled. “No, Gus, we laid it on special for you. It’s a loaner from Vigan-Carlson.”
McCord threw back his head and roared. Vigan-Carlson was a local funeral parlor. “I’m not dead yet—no thanks to you,” he said, rubbing a prominent bump on the bridge of his nose.
The break had happened forty-five years earlier during a high school baseball game. It was the bottom of the ninth. Fred Hansen had flung the bat after a base hit and it had caught McCord, playing catcher, square in the face. Masks and other protective equipment were unheard of in the poor farm community just outside Fargo where the two men had grown up. They’d been lucky to have a ball and bat.
“Yeah, you always were a hardheaded old cuss,” Hansen said, grinning. He nodded in the direction of Dieter Pflanz. “You bring that guy along to make sure I don’t take another crack at it?”
“Nah! He carries Nance’s suitcases. She always was a lousy packer!” McCord grinned affectionately at his wife, who slapped his arm and then stepped forward to greet the mayor and his wife.
“Isn’t he awful? How are you, Fred?” She kissed his cheek before turning to embrace his wife. “And Stella. How good to see you. What a beautiful coat!”
Stella Hansen’s lined face, heavily caked with makeup, lit up as she stepped back from Nancy’s hug and stroked the dun-colored fox fur she was wearing. “Gorgeous, isn’t it? It’s an early Christmas present from Fred. He wanted me to have it for the opening.”
“You look lovely, and so cozy.”
“But Gus has given you a fur coat, surely,” Stella said, checking out Nancy’s cloth number.
“Nothing like yours,” Nancy said truthfully.
Stella Hansen smiled triumphantly at her husband, then turned to McCord. “Well, Gus, now you know what Nancy wants for Christmas. Aren’t you just awful not to have thought of it before?”
“You got me there, Stel,” McCord said, shrugging sheepishly. “But what do you want—I’m just a farm boy. This fancy stuff is beyond me, I swear.”
Stella’s eyes danced over him and her face folded into the layers of her most winning smile. A flake of black mascara separated from her lashes, settling on the soft pink down of her cheek. Gus McCord had been friends with Stella’s older brother when they were kids. Gus had asked her out to a school dance once but, to her everlasting regret, she had turned down the scrawny little guy in favor of the captain of the football team. Then John Lindquist—he of the boozy breath and groping hands—had gone off and gotten himself killed in Korea after his senior year, leaving Stella obliged to spend six months discreetly visiting an aunt in Minneapolis.
Watching Gus McCord now as he moved down the line of the welcoming committee, shaking hands and slapping backs, Stella marveled again at her inability back then to recognize his potential. But who could have known the hyper little guy had had it in him, for crying out loud? Of course, Gus had been smart, marrying a rich girl. Stella watched Nancy McCord as she followed close to Gus, smiling warmly at the people he introduced. It was a good thing her old man had had money, Stella thought, because Nancy had always been kind of a plain thing—always wore her hair simple, just a blunt cut curled behind her ears. She’d gone gray real early on, too, and then white, although it looked kind of nice now, Stella had to admit, kind of striking, especially with those bright blue eyes. And she was still trim—she must go to one of those fat farms that the magazines said rich people like Liz Taylor hid out in when they’d blimped out.
Stella smoothed her fox fur, grateful for the way it camouflaged her own ample body. Still, when she was younger, she’d had a body to kill for—that’s what John Lindquist had always said, and Fred had thought so, as well. He’d panted after her all through high s
chool and had just about choked when she’d returned from Minneapolis and said she’d think about marrying him, after all. And now Fred was mayor and Stella got to ride in the back of an open convertible in the Fourth of July parade, and she got to meet some big shots, and she had a fur coat that even Nancy McCord envied. So things had turned out all right, really, even if she and Fred didn’t fly all over the world in their own private plane.
They climbed into the limousine, Gus wedged between Stella and Nancy, while Fred took up one of the jump seats facing them. Jerry Siddon slipped into the other jump seat after arranging for the photographer to ride with the TV camera crew, which was racing ahead to set up at the hospital before McCord arrived. The limo dipped when Dieter Pflanz climbed into the front passenger seat. The driver gave him a nervous smile, to which Pflanz replied with a curt nod.
During the ten-minute ride to the hospital, Fred Hansen went over the schedule one more time. “You’ll have about thirty minutes to tour the new unit before the official opening,” he told McCord. “Then we’ll have some speechifying and ribbon-cutting and such. Then it’s off to the hotel for lunch. Should be all done by around two, then we’ll get you back to the airport. Jerry here tells me you’re flying out today to Washington?”
Stella Hansen’s eyes grew wide. “Are you going to be seeing the President? What’s he really like?”
McCord shrugged. “Pretty much like most folks, Stel. Puts his pants on one leg at a time.”
She shook her head, obviously skeptical. “I can’t imagine what you must think of poor little Fargo, Gus, after all the places you’ve been and people you’ve met.”
“There’s nothing poor about a place with air as clean and people as fine as this city’s,” McCord said soberly. “Don’t ever think different, Stel.”
Glancing back, Pflanz saw Stella Hansen looking as if she would melt. He and Jerry Siddon exchanged fleeting looks of amusement as they listened to McCord charming the mayor and his wife. Siddon, Pflanz reckoned, would be calculating once again the number of months to the presidential primaries. He had listened to the eager young aide explain ad nauseam why Gus had to run. McCord had everything going for him, Siddon said—money, charisma (despite less-than-classic looks), a charming wife, nice kids and photogenic grandchildren, a Horatio Alger personal history and an outstanding record of community service. He couldn’t possibly lose.
And if Gus McCord went to the White House, Pflanz knew, Jerry Siddon intended to be there as his right hand. Siddon was thirty years old, and had been working for McCord Industries for five years after graduating from Stanford near the top of his business class. But it was his extracurricular activities on behalf of American Families of Missing Vietnam Veterans that had brought a teenage Jerry Siddon to Gus McCord’s attention. Siddon’s father had disappeared in a bombing raid over Hanoi in 1970. Jerry had been the youngest member of a delegation from the AFMVV that had approached McCord in the early eighties to help finance and organize a search for men rumored to be still alive in Vietnam. With the tacit support of the CIA, a mission had gone ahead under the direction of Dieter Pflanz and a team of quietly hired mercenaries. But the evidence the contingent obtained had been inconclusive.
As a result of that first meeting, however, Siddon had caught McCord’s eye and his sympathy. The billionaire had subsequently underwritten Siddon’s college studies and guaranteed him a job upon graduation. Siddon repaid the debt with hard work and unstinting devotion to the interests of Gus McCord. Today, those interests included reaping good PR value from the opening of the latest in a string of McCord charitable facilities.
To Pflanz, however, these hometown good deeds were just so much chaff, incidental to the real mission.
“What’s bugging you, Mariah?” Frank Tucker asked, studying her closely.
She had risen from her chair to leave his office, but when she got to the door, she hesitated, her hand resting on the knob, a frown creasing her forehead. Then she turned back to face him. “Did you see the news last night? CBN?”
Frank exhaled a long sigh and he shook his head regretfully. “Damn. I was hoping you had missed it.”
“Oh, I saw it—and Paul Chaney. And not just on the tube.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was waiting for me when I left David last night,” Mariah said. She moved away from the door and ran her hand along the line of books on Frank’s credenza, straightening the edges—an instinctive reaction against chaos. “And he left a message on my answering machine.” She stopped cold and looked toward the ceiling, her jaw clenched. “Oh, dammit, Frank! Lindsay took the message off the machine. If she ever—”
“Whoa! Slow down. You’re not making any sense. Sit down and tell me what happened.”
She drummed her fingers on the edge of the credenza, then turned and leaned against it, crossing her arms tightly across her chest, looking down at the toes of her shoes. “Paul Chaney showed up at the nursing home yesterday. He had seen David earlier and was waiting for me. Said he needed to talk about what really happened in Vienna—something about the people who did this to David and Lindsay. He called my house, too. And then I saw that thing on the news.”
“You knew him in Vienna, didn’t you?”
Mariah nodded. “David knew him better than I did. They played hockey together, but we all used to get together after the games. And he hung out on the cocktail circuit, of course, trolling for news leads—and women,” Mariah added wryly. “He and David got to be good friends and Paul used to drop by our place a lot, but I never felt very comfortable with him. He’s one of those guys who figures he’s God’s gift to womankind.”
Tucker watched her closely, and then a grin formed at the edge of his lips. “Make a pass at you, did he?”
Mariah grimaced and nodded.
“Had he been in touch since you got back to the States?”
Mariah shook her head. “He came to the hospital in Vienna a couple of times, but I hadn’t seen him in months before he showed up yesterday.”
“Does Chaney know you’re CIA?”
“No, I’m sure he doesn’t. David wouldn’t have told him—he was absolutely discreet. During the entire three years we were in Vienna, there was never the slightest hint that my cover was blown, with Chaney or anyone else. As far as anyone knew, I was simply an embassy administrator. Chaney always seemed more interested in David’s work at the IAEA. He often turned to David to demystify some of the complexities of nuclear issues, and he knew that David was working to beef up the agency’s policing role.”
“So what do you think Chaney’s on to now?”
Mariah glanced at him sharply. “That’s what I was hoping you’d tell me,” she said. She came forward and stood in front of his desk, leaning closer, hands planted in the middle of his papers. “Frank, you told me—you swore—that the truck hit our car by accident. You knew I wasn’t in any position, between David’s and Lindsay’s injuries, to pay close attention to the investigation. But you promised me that every angle would be looked into.”
“And it was.” Frank brought his hammy fists together and stared at them intently for a moment before looking back up at her, his voice low. “Dammit, Mariah—don’t you think I was blown away by what happened? I felt responsible. I recruited you, helped you get that assignment in Vienna. I felt bloody awful when things ended up the way they did.”
Mariah’s shoulders slumped as she watched his gruff old face transformed by guilt. She reached out and squeezed his hand. “It wasn’t your fault, no matter what. But now, with Chaney, I’m wondering again….” She sank down onto a chair and stared at the floor. “It was just a fluke that I wasn’t in the car. David should never have been there. He normally jogged to work, but at the last minute that morning we changed plans. Lindsay had a science project that she needed help carrying in and I had an early meeting with an asset, so David drove her to school. If they hadn’t dropped me off first, neither of them would have been there when the brakes failed on that truck.”
Frank nodded. Mariah knew she had told him this before, but the awful irony of it never left her. David’s life had been destroyed in her place because she’d been too busy that morning to drive their daughter to school. Now, what if it wasn’t an accident, after all?
“I’ve been thinking—was I the target?” she asked quietly, her eyes fixed on his. “Was it the CHAUCER operation? Was someone trying to kill me and made a mistake?”
Tucker’s eyes held hers for a second and then his glance shifted away. Mariah flinched. They had known each other too well and for too long.
“Frank!” she said, alarmed. “Tell me, for God’s sake!”
“I’m not sure.”
Her focus moved from Tucker’s face to an invisible point somewhere between them, but she saw nothing. Beyond the office door, the clatter of voices, the tramp of feet and the hum of office machinery faded, replaced by a cottony stillness. Then a wave came out of nowhere, washing over her, and she felt herself drowning. She fumbled for the arms of the chair and gripped them tightly.
She never saw Frank jump up out of his chair and move around the desk, nor did she feel his hand on her shoulder. It was only when he planted himself squarely in front of her and bent down to peer into her eyes that she began to rise again to the surface. Her gaze flitted from side to side, coming finally to rest on Frank’s face when he had called her name for the third time, his voice urgent.
“Mariah! Are you all right?”
“All right?”
She was breathing, she knew—her shoulders rose and fell heavily with the effort of her lungs to grasp oxygen. But all right? No, she definitely was not all right.
“Who was it?” she asked, her voice husky. She clenched her fists, pulling in hard on the reins of self-control. Tucker’s face came into focus and she held his eyes, her voice firm now. “Who did this to my family, Frank?”
He sat back on the desk and studied her for a long time. Then he walked around behind it. He stood, banging his knuckles on the green baize desk pad. “Leave it alone. You can’t change what happened, and you need to concentrate your energies on Lindsay and David. Let somebody else worry about the other stuff.”