Guilt by Silence

by Taylor Smith

  “There are things I need to know. About some stuff that was going down in Vienna when David and I were there.”

  “Stuff?”

  Mariah sighed. “An operation I was involved in.”

  “So why do you need me?” He wasn’t stupid—he knew exactly where she was heading. And she was appalled at herself for even suggesting that he break into compartmented files on her behalf, but she was desperate.

  “Because I’ve been shut out. I can’t get access to the files. And I need to see what’s in there—what happened when I wasn’t looking.”

  He leaned back in his chair. “What’s this all about?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe nothing. I won’t know until I get a look at those files. But I promise you, Stevie, I’m not planning anything illegal. I’m not selling out to the enemy or anything.”

  “Just stealing classified files.”

  “Picky, picky!” She waved her hand, the effort at levity failing miserably. Watching Stephen watching her from under his lowered lashes, she knew he was weighing the risks and the debts, and she hated herself for calling in markers that she had no right asking him to pay. “It’s for David,” she said quietly. “That’s all I can tell you, Stevie, but I need this badly. You can do it, can’t you?”

  Stephen’s chair creaked as he twisted it on its base. “Yeah—maybe,” he said at last. “It depends. Some files are easier to get to than others. What do you need?”

  “It’s a compartmented file code-named CHAUCER. It started out with some traffic between me and Frank and DDO that I generated when I was in Vienna, and Frank was back in the Soviet section. There may be some subcompartments since then—I’m not sure.”

  He glanced at her sharply. “Does my father know about this?”

  “Get serious! You know him better than I do. Do you really think he’d go along with this? He’d have my butt in a sling.” She exhaled heavily. “I can’t even believe it myself that I’m asking you to do this. But I need some information and I need it fast. I don’t know if this file will be any help, but I don’t know where else to start—or who else to turn to. Will you help me?”

  He began chewing on a hangnail and his gaze shifted around the room. Then he nodded slowly. “I’ll try. It may take a day or so. I’ll need to work on it late, after everyone’s gone home.”

  “No one will wonder why you’re staying late?”

  Stephen shook his head. “I usually work till one or two in the morning. In fact, I’m going back home now. My shift doesn’t start till four.”

  “So late?”

  “I always do the late shifts, and they’re always glad to have people volunteer. Nobody likes graveyard duty, but I do. It’s real quiet—just a handful of people monitoring the computers and doing the daily backups. Nobody to bother you. I get a lot more done then.”

  Nobody to bother you, Mariah thought. Nobody to talk to, either. “Doesn’t give you much time for a social life.”

  He returned to the job of demolishing his paper cup. “I’m too busy for that stuff right now. There’s a distributor waiting for a new game I’m working on and it takes up all my spare time. Anyway,” he added, “it’s not like I’ve ever been a party animal.”

  Watching him, Mariah thought back to her own youth. There’s a sadness that runs through some homes like an invisible current. It had run through Stephen’s childhood home, just as it had run through her own. David and Lindsay had brought her out of that sad, dark place and into the light, but Stephen was still struggling with it. She could easily understand his love affair with the computer. Machines behave predictably; they don’t criticize, and they don’t up and disappear from your life when you need them most.

  “Are you coming to your dad’s annual Christmas bash tomorrow night?” she asked.

  He sighed. “Yeah, I guess. I wasn’t going to, but then my sister gave me a hard time about it.”

  She studied him closely. “How is it that you and your father are still on the warpath after all these years, Stevie?”

  “We’re not really—it’s not like it used to be. We’re just not close. Mostly we avoid each other, except when Carol gets us together. It’s easier that way.”

  “So how come you went to work for the Company? You can’t tell me Frank had nothing to do with that.”

  He nodded reluctantly. “He got me these summer intern jobs when I was in college, trying to get me to focus on what he called a ‘serious career’—as opposed to my games, is what he meant. After I graduated, I just kind of drifted into full-time. I didn’t feel like going through a bunch of job interviews, and I already had the security clearances and they knew me at Langley. But I never run into my dad there, except in the cafeteria occasionally. Works out just fine.”

  Mariah shook her head sadly. “Oh Stevie—don’t you get it yet? Whatever happens between people—the many things we’ve done and can’t undo—it isn’t worth staying mad about. Because one day it’s over, and all we have left are memories and regrets. And it would be the pits if the regrets outweighed the good memories.”

  Stephen’s jaw was clenched and he was silent for a long time. “Maybe,” he said finally. “But I think it’s too late now for my dad and me.”

  “It’s never too late, Stevie.”

  He glanced up at her and then away, his expression dubious.

  The lunchtime rush at Adam’s Rib was in full swing when Gus McCord’s entourage swept through the front door. Dieter Pflanz glanced at the statue of the biblical first man situated near the entrance. Original sin, he thought, your doing, pal. Thanks a lot. Look at the messes we’ve been trying to clean up ever since.

  He’d spent the morning at the Smithsonian trailing Gus and Nancy before they dropped Mrs. McCord back at the suite at the Madison Hotel. The President was scheduled to meet with McCord at two.

  The restaurant was just off Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks from the White House, but the reason Gus habitually went there when he was in D.C. was that it featured the kind of meat-and-potatoes fare that he preferred. There were no unpronounceable words on the menu like that pretentious French place that he’d let Siddon talk him into once. Jerry had said that was where all the big Washington movers and shakers hung out, but in Pflanz’s experience, it was always best to meet people on your own turf, not theirs. In the meantime, he was happy Gus liked to eat where they served American food for real Americans.

  Charlie Briggs, head waiter of the restaurant, came rushing out as soon as the hostess had seated McCord and his party. McCord, Siddon and Pflanz were at one table. The bodyguards sat at another nearby, their backs to the stone-tile sculpture of the Garden of Eden adorning the wall, their eyes scanning the crowd, the entrance and Gus McCord.

  “Mr. McCord! It’s good to see you again,” Briggs said.

  McCord reached out to shake his hand. “You, too, Charlie. How’s business?”

  “Can’t complain. Is your table all right? I had the usual ones held when Mr. Siddon here called to say you were coming today.”

  “It’s fine. How’s your son?”

  Three years earlier, Briggs’s son, then thirteen, had been playing with acetone and matches—one of those stupid pranks that kids pull, never thinking of the consequences. He had coated the inside of the kitchen sink with the chemical when no one was home, planning to videotape the resulting fire for a horror movie he was putting together as an English term project. He had counted on the sink containing the fire, taking special care to remove all flammable materials from the vicinity—except his own clothing. When he struck the match and the acetone blew up in his face, he had received third-degree burns to thirty percent of his body. McCord had heard about the accident and had personally sent in top burn specialists and plastic surgeons to treat the boy, and had paid for every aspect of the long treatment.

  Briggs shook his head. “My gosh, Mr. McCord, we were so lucky. It’s a miracle Kevin wasn’t killed or blinded.” His voice dropped. “I don’t know how we would have managed if you
hadn’t—”

  But McCord just patted the waiter on the back. “You just concentrate on that boy of yours,” he said. “That’s all that matters. Tickles me pink to hear that he’s on the mend.”

  “Yes, sir. What can I get for you and your friends? We’ve got some terrific filet mignon today—melt in your mouth.”

  McCord looked up, his expression wistful, almost pained, then back at the menu. “No, I guess not,” he said, sighing deeply. “Cholesterol, you know—my wife’ll want to know what I had. Better bring me the trout, Charlie.”

  “You bet, Mr. McCord. Wine? A nice Moselle, maybe?”

  “No, thanks, Charlie. Need to keep a clear head—busy afternoon scheduled. Just soda water for me.”

  Briggs went around the table, taking orders from Pflanz and Siddon, then snapped his fingers and directed another waiter to take the bodyguards’ order on the double.

  When the waiter had gone, Jerry Siddon reached into his briefcase and pulled out the latest issue of Newsweek. On the cover was a photo of Gus McCord sitting behind the big antique oak desk in his wood-lined Newport Beach head office. He was leaning back in the oxblood leather chair—arms extended, palms flat on the desk, staring directly at the camera, his copper eyes piercing, challenging, a hint of a smile playing across his mouth. On a credenza behind him, a bronze Remington cowboy dug his spurs savagely into a wildly rearing horse.

  The headline read: Angus McCord—The Cowboy and the Kremlin. And then, in smaller type: How the American Billionaire Helped Harness the Communist Behemoth—and Why Business Has Been Good Since.

  “This just hit the newsstands, Gus,” Siddon said.

  McCord took the magazine and examined the cover, breaking into a grin. “A little melodramatic, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Maybe,” Siddon said. “But it’s a pretty positive piece. You get full marks for being the first American businessman to get close to Gorbachev and tip him toward perestroika, and then moving in fast to make sure American business was first to profit when the trade barriers came down.”

  McCord rolled his eyes. “This is getting to be a little ridiculous. All I did was show him around some farms and stockyards in North Dakota that time he visited in ’82, and we just happened to hit it off. Like Maggie Thatcher said, this was a man you could do business with.”

  “Yeah, but when Gorby decided he could do business with you, too, it may just have changed the course of history.”

  “Unbelievable, isn’t it?” McCord said, flipping through the Newsweek article. “After that, it was just a matter of time. The old Kremlin guard finally kicked the bucket, Gorby took up the leadership, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

  He returned the magazine to Siddon as the waiters arrived with their food. The three men launched into their meals, then sat back over coffee to go over the issues McCord was planning to raise with the President in his meeting at the White House that afternoon.

  A limousine was waiting when they stepped out of the restaurant a short time later. McCord squinted—it was an uncharacteristically sunny day for December in Washington, but the air was bracingly cold, the kind of brilliant cold that McCord had known during his prairie youth.

  “Think I’ll walk, guys,” he said.

  Dieter Pflanz was taken by surprise. “Walk? I don’t think so, Gus. Not a good idea. Better take the car.”

  “No. I need a walk. I’ve got plenty of time and it’s only a few blocks. Can’t remember the last time I took a stroll through Foggy Bottom. Vary the routine—isn’t that what you always tell me I should do, Dieter?”

  “This isn’t what I had in mind.”

  “Dieter’s right, Gus,” Siddon said. “You should go in the car. Aside from the security issue, it doesn’t look good, arriving on foot at the White House.”

  Gus looked up, fixing his copper eyes in turn on Siddon and Pflanz, nailing them. “I’m walking, boys. And I don’t want that damn car trailing beside me, Dieter. Send it on ahead. The driver can tell the guards at the White House gate that I’m on my way.”

  Behind his dark glasses, Pflanz scowled, then waved the driver on with an exasperated fling of his hand, snapping his fingers for the bodyguards to follow McCord, who had already headed down Pennsylvania Avenue.

  “I wish the hell,” Pflanz muttered to Siddon as they took off after him, “that he’d make up his mind whether he wants to be General Patton or Jimmy bloody Carter.”

  “It’s not gonna fly, Mariah.” Frank Tucker leaned back in his chair and its springs protested creakily. Mariah’s paper on the Libyan arms operation lay on the desk in front of him.

  “I downplayed the McCord shipping angle,” Mariah argued. “But I don’t think we should leave it out altogether. This morning there was a cable from Tripoli reporting a rumor of a recent transfer of guns and rocket launchers—a figure of twelve million dollars was cited. I’ve got a gut feeling there’s a link.”

  “And I trust your instincts. But George Neville hit the ceiling when he saw the draft and insisted that the reference to McCord be taken out.”

  “Why should DDO have the final say on what goes into our report?”

  “He shouldn’t, and normally I’d fight it, but in this case, I happen to think he’s right. The evidence is still too flimsy.” Mariah began to disagree but he held up his hand. “Gut feelings don’t belong in a report to the President, Mariah. If there’s proof, we’ll nail the bastard. Keep digging. But take it out of this paper.”

  Mariah frowned, and then she had a thought. Since Chaney’s departure the previous evening, she had been debating whether—and how—to broach again the subject of Vienna. Now she saw an opening.

  “All right then, I’m going to look into possible links to CHAUCER.” If she thought she could slip it by him, she was wrong. Tucker saw immediately where she was headed.

  “No way. There’s no connection and I don’t want you wasting your time.”

  “How can you be sure? We know terrorist groups have tried to get their hands on a warhead before and we know the Libyans are tied into all the major arms supply lines. There could be a link.”

  “Goddammit, Mariah!” Tucker tossed his pencil down on the desk. “How dumb do you think I am? I told you yesterday that I want you to leave this alone—and that means CHAUCER, too!”

  She set her jaw stubbornly. “CHAUCER’s my file, Frank. I started that particular ball rolling.”

  “It’s not your file. It’s an operations file and you—in case you’ve forgotten—are an analyst, not some fancy secret agent. You’re back home now and those glory days are over.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  His bushy eyebrows knit together. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

  Mariah’s fingers snapped the plastic-coated ID card hanging by a chain around her neck. Telling Frank Tucker something he didn’t want to hear had never been high on her list of fun things to do. She could, she supposed, not tell him that Chaney had shown up again and firmed her resolve to look into the accident. For sure she wasn’t going to tell Frank that she and his son were planning to break into a restricted file.

  “Paul Chaney came to my place last night,” she said at last.

  “And?”

  “He said the driver who rammed David’s car had stolen the truck and was using a false identity—that he might have been a Libyan. He thinks the driver was murdered after he was arrested.” Mariah took a deep breath. “Chaney thinks David might have gotten mixed up with arms dealers looking to acquire Soviet nuclear weapons.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “About David? No, of course not. Anyone who looked into his background would realize he didn’t fit the profile. He had no ideological axes to grind—never did, even back at Berkeley, when revolution was all the rage. He couldn’t be bought because he didn’t care about money. Although,” Mariah added wryly, “if someone had a formula to turn him into a Wayne Gretzky clone, he might have sold a secret or two.” Her expression became sober ag
ain. “And he couldn’t be blackmailed because his entire life consisted of Lindsay and me and his work, with a little hockey thrown in for good measure. He was basically a simple guy, Frank—brilliant, but uncomplicated. Not the kind of guy who becomes a double agent. And—bottom line—he was committed to nuclear disarmament. He’d never help anyone looking to spread weapons like those around.”

  “So why are you wasting your time with Chaney?”

  “Is what he told me about the driver true?” Tucker’s gaze wavered momentarily and his silence spoke loudly. “Then it was me,” Mariah said. “I knew something and they decided to shut me up. It could only be CHAUCER. First Tatyana Baranova disappeared, then the attack in front of Lindsay’s school. They have to be linked.”

  “Did you tell Chaney this?”

  “I told him David couldn’t have been targeted because he wasn’t supposed to be in the car that morning. I don’t think I convinced him, though. He doesn’t suspect that I could be involved in anything to put me in the line of fire. Chaney’s other theory is that David was working under-cover for the Company and was attacked when he discovered a smuggling operation.”

  Tucker rocked in his chair for a moment or two, then abruptly leaned forward on his desk. “Okay, look,” he said, “here’s the story—as much as I can tell you, anyway—and you’ll forget it immediately if you know what’s good for you.” He paused, clasping his thick fingers together, his reluctance obvious. “Your friend Tanya opened a real can of worms. Turns out she was right about the Soviets having developed a mini-nuke a few years back. We think they produced a couple hundred of them. Weighs about fifty pounds—small enough to be carried in a backpack. Limited range, but effective, and highly radioactive. One could completely depopulate a small city. Obviously, this thing would make a very effective terrorist threat. And the problem is, they’re so small we can’t locate them using overhead surveillance—not like the big intercontinental missiles.”

  “What happened to Tanya, Frank?”

  “The KGB spirited her back to Russia. She might be in Siberia or in a psychiatric institute. Maybe she’s dead—we don’t know. The players at the Kremlin may have changed, but for sure they don’t want news of this to get out. Especially if selling these weapons is a secret government operation to raise cash. Anyway,” he continued, “there’s a very tight little team working on this case.”