Liar's Market

by Taylor Smith

  She’d had to give up gardening completely, except in the early spring when it was still cool enough in the morning to putter around a little, tugging up a weed here and there and potting a few marigolds for the back patio. This year, even that had been more than she could handle. When the children had arrived back home, the patio pots had held nothing but dried-out weeds.

  Althea had planned to have the fellow who took care of the lawns replant the pots, but then Carrie had volunteered to do them herself. Her intentions had been good, Althea supposed, but really, the colors she chose to put together! It wasn’t the way Althea would have done it—all those pink asters and blue salvia mixed together like that, the effect so gaudy and unstructured. Althea’s idea of gardening was neat, straight rows of red begonias and that silver-gray dusty miller in front of the clipped boxwood hedges lining the drive. That was the way she’d always done it, and it had looked very orderly.

  But Carrie—well, this wasn’t the first time Althea had had to suffer through the girl’s gardening efforts. Drummond had first brought her home from his posting in Africa the summer Althea had had her gall bladder removed. While she was laid up, Carrie had started redoing the flower beds with all sorts of new varieties of daylilies and climbing roses and impatiens and heaven only knew what else—a riot of colors.

  “A get-well surprise,” she’d called it, obviously delighted with the effect.

  It certainly was. It had taken Althea three bottles of Roundup, secretly applied, before the blessed things had all finally died off. She’d thought she had her new daughter-in-law convinced her choices weren’t suitable here, however they might have fared back in California where she’d been raised. But then the next thing she knew, Carrie was back and those gaudy pots had started sprouting all over the patio again.

  Was there any of that plant-killing spray left in the garden shed? Althea wondered.

  She heard voices murmuring down in the kitchen and suddenly realized one of them was Drummond’s. She glanced at the clock, frowning. This was awfully late for him to be at home.

  Something was going on. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but both her son and his young wife had been acting strangely of late. Nothing overt, mind you. No loud arguments or angry whispering behind closed doors. Just a dangerous politeness that to Althea’s ears didn’t ring true.

  Of course, she’d thought from the start that the marriage was a poor idea—not that Drummond or his sister had ever been interested in any advice their mother had to offer. Althea had long since learned to keep her opinions to herself. But when she’d first received the news of Drummond’s second marriage, along with that photograph of him and the girl in the Serengeti—her in a gauzy top and African print skirt, that wild red hair tumbling everywhere, and Drum with his arm around her, grinning like an old fool—all she could think was that his father would have been appalled.

  What had he been thinking, a forty-two-year-old man taking up with a girl barely out of her teens? Well, there was the obvious explanation, of course—men did go for a pretty face and a firm, young body—but just because he wanted to have his fun didn’t mean the fool should marry her.

  Was it grief that had driven him into her clutches? His first wife, Theresa, had died two years earlier, and Althea suspected that Drum felt guilty about not having been home the night she’d taken it into her head to go out on the river by herself, but the girl had always been a little clueless, and if it hadn’t been that night she did some damn foolish thing, it would have been another.

  But why rush into another marriage? Althea had done the math. Carrie hadn’t gotten pregnant until a couple of months later, so it wasn’t as if Drum had had to get himself tied down to someone so unsuitable. Really, she had no idea what he’d been thinking. Still, she’d set her own feelings aside and tried to be as welcoming as she could when they came home.

  But then yesterday, there’d been that odd telephone message left on the machine. Althea had gone to the phone book to look up the name of the office calling to confirm an appointment Carrie had apparently made for this morning. Childers and Overturf was a legal firm, according to the listing. A small ad in the Yellow Pages said the practice, based in Alexandria, specialized in family law—wills and estates, adoptions, divorce and child custody cases.

  So which of these services was her daughter-in-law after? Althea wondered. Adoption? She had it easy with only one child to care for and Jonah off at camp or sports or some other activity more often than not. It was a mystery to Althea how the girl planned to fill her day once Jonah started school, especially with Rose handling the household chores. It was often when their children entered first grade, though, that young mothers started to think about a second baby.

  Neither Carrie nor Drummond had ever mentioned giving Jonah a little brother or sister before now. Althea had begun to suspect there was some physical problem. Carrie had delivered Jonah in a hospital in Nairobi, despite Althea’s warning to Drum about getting her back to the States well before her due date. Were there complications at the birth they hadn’t chosen to tell her about? Well, Althea wouldn’t be surprised. Who knew how a woman’s inside might get butchered in a god-forsaken backwater like that?

  But at the thought of an adoption, Althea felt a dread chill. Oh, please, let them not bring a strange child into the house. A real grandchild was one thing. Jonah could be rambunctious, of course, but when it was your own flesh and blood, you made allowances. But a stranger’s child? A drug addict’s, perhaps, or some trailer trash floozy’s? Really, it wasn’t to be borne.

  Then, she had another indignant thought. Childers and Overturf also handled divorce. Surely Carrie wasn’t thinking about that? On what grounds? Because Drummond worked long hours and wasn’t there to entertain her? Althea had no sympathy for that kind of nonsense—not when she herself had been married for thirty-six years to a soldier who was often gone for months at a time. Of course, Carrie was young, and young girls these days didn’t seem equipped to handle the kind of sacrifices generations before them had. Still, there was no excuse for irresponsibility. What could she be thinking, when there was a child to consider? When it came to the needs of children…

  The toilet flushed in the upstairs bathroom. Althea hadn’t heard her grandson go back up. He must have been told to tiptoe, unlike his noisy descent earlier.

  She sighed. His mother would be driving him to camp shortly. They would go out and the house would be hers again for a little while—at least for as long as it took Carrie to attend to that appointment. But an appointment to do what? That was the question.

  Well, if the marriage was falling apart, Althea couldn’t say she was surprised. It was what she’d secretly predicted all along. That seemed to be the way things went these days, wasn’t it? She was only surprised it had lasted as long as it had.

  Still, there was the child. If it came to divorce, Drum would get custody, of course. It only made sense that his son would grow up in the house that had sent so many generations of MacNeils out into the world. Which meant, Althea thought wearily, that she would be called upon to assist in caring for the boy.

  Well, it couldn’t be helped. She would have to put her own interests and needs aside, just as she’d always done. That was the kind of person she was.

  CHAPTER NINE

  TOP SECRET

  CODE WORD ACCESS ONLY

  NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION

  FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

  INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTION

  (continued…)

  Why not a marriage counselor instead of a divorce lawyer, Carrie?

  I tried to suggest counseling to Drum. Several times, in fact.

  And?

  He didn’t see that we had a problem.

  But it sounds like you were fighting most of the time. How could he not see a problem?

  I never said we were fighting. That wouldn’t be true. We never fought.

  Never? Come on, Carrie, all married people fight sometimes.

  No
t us. Not really. I wish we had.

  Why is that?

  Because it might have shown there was some emotion other than indifference at work there. Oh, we had arguments, of course, but when we did, it was Drum who usually made the deciding call.

  You just went along with whatever he said?

  Pretty much, especially in the beginning. After that, I guess it became our default mode—my fault as much as his.

  Look, I married a man twenty years older than me who was smart, sophisticated and articulate. And me, I had zero self-confidence. Most of the time, especially in the early years, I just assumed he knew better. Even on those occasions where I had doubts, I couldn’t out-argue him, so I didn’t often try.

  But you’d attended Georgetown University, Carrie. You’d gone on to graduate school. You were working again on your master’s thesis. You also had enough guts to see a lawyer to safeguard your rights in case you and he split. That doesn’t sound like someone with zero self-confidence.

  Maybe I finally grew up. God knows, it took me long enough to do it. But even so, it wouldn’t be accurate to say he and I fought. Maybe I couldn’t be bothered. I was on my own so much that for the most part, I just waited until he was gone, then went ahead and did what I wanted to do, anyway.

  So, when did you decide that wasn’t enough?

  It was something I’d been thinking about for a while—even before we went to London, in fact. Things hadn’t been going well for a long time. We were happy in Dar es Salaam, I think, when we first met and got married. I got pregnant pretty quickly. We were both thrilled about it—Drum, too. But then, everything started to change.

  Change how?

  I guess we started to grow apart after Jonah was born. He was colicky for the first six or seven months, so I had to be up with him most nights. Even when he slept, I was exhausted so I didn’t really have any time or energy left over for Drum.

  Jonah eventually outgrew the colic and things started to settle down, right about the time we were scheduled to leave Dar. But then the embassy was bombed and after that, the situation at home took another nosedive.

  We wanted to talk about that. We’ve noted that you were there the day the embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were bombed.

  What a horrible day that was. We were…Wait a minute…what? What’s that expression supposed to mean?

  What expression?

  The smug, “gee, why am I not surprised?” expression on your face. So now what? You think Drum had something to do with the bombing of the embassies in Africa?

  We don’t know when his extracurricular business dealings began. It could go back that far.

  Get real. Eleven people died in the Tanzania embassy bombing that morning. Several dozen in Nairobi, if I recall correctly. Drum and I were both in the building when the truck bomb drove into the yard and detonated. You think he would have set himself up to be killed?

  Call it unintended consequences. You play with fire, there’s always a chance you get burned.

  That’s crazy. If he was supplying information to—who? I still haven’t figured out who exactly he’s supposed to have been dealing with in these supposed treasonous activities of his. You said he blew that Chinese double agent. I gather we know that it was Middle Eastern terrorists who bombed the embassies in Africa. And the shooting in London—well, I’m still not sure who that was. If you guys have figured that one out, I never heard about it.

  That investigation is still ongoing.

  So what’s the link between all these far-flung fiascoes you’re trying to dump at Drum’s door? Who exactly is he supposed to have been dealing with? The Chinese? Al Qaeda? Al Capone? Good Lord, why not pin the Kennedy assassination on him, too, as long as you’re blaming him for everything else? This makes no sense to me at all.

  Well, let me put it this way, Carrie. You know that countries spy on other countries, collecting intelligence for their own military and other purposes. But these days, obviously, there are a lot of non-state actors out there, too. Terrorist groups, anti-government rebels of one sort and another, that sort of thing. That being the case, there’s an active market for certain kinds of inside information. And whenever you get a market for anything developing, you’re going to have not only sellers and buyers, but eventually you’re going to see middlemen popping up, people who deal in the bulk acquisition of a product—in this case political and military intelligence—that they then re-package and re-sell to interested buyers. These middlemen have operations that function sort of like an espionage vacuum cleaner. They suck up every bit of secret information they can get hold of, shake it all out on the floor, figure out which bit of information is worth how much to who, then turn those bits around and re-sell them, piecemeal, to interested parties.

  Terrorist middlemen?

  Let’s call them information brokers. They maintain the connections with interested buyers, so they set the market in terms of demand. And recently, we got wind of one broker who was rumored to have had a high-level source inside the American intelligence community.

  And you’re thinking that source was my husband? Tell me, Agent Andrews, did this brilliant theory occur to you guys before or after this past Monday, when Drum went missing?

  You asked who we thought he was dealing with, Carrie. Without getting into specifics, I’m just trying to put this all in context for you. Let’s just get back to what we were talking about.

  You were asking some very personal questions about the state of my marriage, for reasons I’ve yet to fathom, unless you’re planning a mid-career switch to marriage counseling, Agent Andrews.

  I’m interested in any changes you noted in your husband’s behavior, Carrie, because the timing could provide a clue as to when he started dealing with this broker I mentioned. So, let’s go back to the morning the embassies were bombed. Where were you and he when the bomb went off in Dar es Salaam, for example?

  I told you, in the embassy. Drum was in a meeting on the third floor. I was on the main floor with the admin officer, handing in our shipping inventory. As I said, we were getting ready to leave the country. Fortunately, I’d left the baby at home with the ayah.

  That’s when the bomb went off. It was horrible. Eleven people died, and dozens of others were injured by flying glass and falling walls and furniture—myself included. I’ve still got scars here, on my arms and neck, from windows shattering in the office I was in.

  And what about your husband?

  He wasn’t really hurt. Not physically, anyway. It was after that, though, that he started having headaches.

  You mentioned his headaches. He had one on Monday, just before he disappeared, you said. So, were they migraines?

  No, tension headaches, I think. He seemed to get them whenever he was stressed. I kept trying to get him to see a doctor about them.

  So he must have been stressed on Monday morning—which would suggest he had something more on his agenda than a routine meeting of bureaucrats.

  Not necessarily. I told you, he hated all that committee work he’d been saddled with.

  Right. And they started after the embassy was bombed? How did he react that day?

  How do you think? It shook him up. Badly.

  Because he felt responsible?

  My God, you really are accusing him of being somehow involved in that. I can’t believe it.

  Not necessarily. But the bomber breached the security perimeter. That was a failure of the post’s physical security precautions, for sure, but it was also a major intelligence failure, wasn’t it? Nobody saw it coming, after all, and your husband was in charge of intelligence operations there.

  Well, maybe that had something to do with it. He seemed—it was as if—oh, I’m not sure. It was a horrible day all around. And now, after everything else that’s happened—September 11 and attack on the USS Kohl and all—it seems pretty clear that it was the beginning of a trend that nobody really saw coming. But maybe Drum did feel partly responsible. Whatever the case, it does seem to be wh
en the headaches started.

  What happened right after the bombing? What exactly did he do that morning? How did he respond in the first few minutes?

  How do you think? It was terrifying. The whole building shook, and not just once. It went on and on—wave after wave of noise and pressure. Glass and debris flying everywhere. People screaming. Smoke. Lights gone. Even after the main blast finally stopped reverberating, there were still smaller explosions outside—tires and gas tanks blowing on the cars in the parking lot. Everyone was traumatized. Who wouldn’t be?

  And Drum? Was he traumatized, too? Carrie? What?

  I told you, we were in different parts of the embassy when it happened.

  But you do know something, Carrie. What? What did he do?

  (unintelligible)

  Come on, Carrie—speak up, dammit! What did Drum do after the truck bomb went off?

  Oh, God…he panicked. There. Are you happy? When the admin officer and I finally made our way to the emergency exit, I stumbled away from the smoke, and that was when I spotted him. Near the edge of the parking lot. He must have been one of the first people out of the building. I don’t think anyone else noticed him.

  What was he doing?

  He was in his car.

  In his car? Doing what? Carrie? Louder, please.

  I only realized it when I got up close to the car. He was freaking out. Desperate to get away. It didn’t mean anything, though. He was disoriented. He didn’t even seem to realize that the tires on the car had blown out. He was screaming that he couldn’t find his keys, although frankly, I doubt the car would have started, anyway, and even if it turned over, it wasn’t going anywhere on four blown tires. I couldn’t convince him, though. It was all I could do to keep him from taking off on foot.