The Innocents Club. Taylor Smith

stupid rug. He’d gone on to marry the hometown girl he’d left behind and raise six kids, of whom Frank was the eldest, all on a one-armed printer’s wage—never, to the end of his days, uttering a word of complaint about his fate.

      Tucker turned abruptly and headed for the bathroom, determined to shake off the sluggishness that enveloped him like a thick, syrupy mantle. Clean yourself up, for God’s sake. Give Carol a call, let her know you’re home.

      But when he dialed his daughter’s number a short while later, it was neither Carol nor Michael who picked up. It was Lindsay.

      “Hi, Uncle Frank! You’re home?”

      “Just got in a little while ago.” Taken aback at hearing Lindsay’s voice, he fell into an awkward silence. She was the one who finally broke it. At fifteen, she had more polish than he did, Tucker thought ruefully.

      “Carol’s upstairs feeding the baby. I just read Alex a story and tucked him in for his afternoon nap. Actually, three stories. Four, if you count the one he made me read twice. I’d probably still be up there, except he fell asleep on the second reading.”

      Tucker smiled. His grandson was two, a whirling dervish.

      “How was your trip?” Lindsay asked.

      He hesitated. She had no idea where he’d been, of course. Neither did Carol, nor anyone else for that matter. It had been a tiny group inside the agency that had studied the cryptic message that had prompted his sudden trip to Moscow. Not even the director had been briefed, so that if Tucker got himself arrested over there, or worse, the front office—and the White House, if it came to that—could claim he was a rogue operative who’d slipped the chain of command to settle some personal score. A burnout case, pushed over the edge by family problems that had nothing to do with official American policy toward its new Russian friends. Tucker had simply told Carol he’d be out of town for a while so she wouldn’t worry if she didn’t hear from him.

      “Trip was fine,” he said. “Dull. Is Carol going out? You baby-sitting this afternoon?”

      “No, I’m staying here for a couple of days. Mom left early this morning for Los Angeles.”

      Tucker’s pulse increased a notch. He’d recruited her mother himself. Mariah had worked with him for years in the old Soviet analysis unit, but their office partnership had ended when his career self-destructed. Since then, she’d moved on to bigger and better things, while he puttered on the sidelines, out of the field of action.

      “I thought the two of you were going out there together,” he said to Lindsay.

      “I leave Thursday morning. There’s an exhibit opening in L.A. tonight that she has to cover. The Russian foreign minister’s going to be there.”

      “Oh, right, the Romanov treasures,” Tucker said more casually than he felt. Why would Mariah be assigned to cover Zakharov’s visit? That kind of thing wasn’t in her bailiwick.

      He had another sudden, uneasy thought. How coincidental was it that she’d been pulled into action just after he himself had received a mysterious summons to Moscow?

      Tucker had started out in Operations, but had moved behind the lines when his wife first got sick. All these years, both he and Mariah had labored in the background, cranking out their intelligence assessments. But if there was one thing he’d come to realize on this Moscow trip, it was how much personal information the opposition had on him. And if on him, why not on her, too?

      “Listen,” he said to Lindsay, “tell Carol I called and I’m back, okay? I’ll talk to her later.”

      “Okay. Will we see you soon?”

      “You bet,” Tucker said firmly.

      He hung up the phone and went to find his car keys. Suddenly, it was no longer enough to let someone else examine what he’d thought were just musty records, selectively chosen and leaked to sway American thinking on the current power struggle in Moscow. He’d suspected, given his Russian contact’s cryptic comments, that there was dirt on Foreign Minister Zakharov in there. Now he wondered if there was more to it than that.

      He needed to know before anyone else saw those files.

      Chapter Three

      As her plane touched down at Los Angeles International Airport, Mariah tried to tell herself that her only objective here was to do the job she’d been sent to do, and do it fast. Make contact with Yuri Belenko, see where his interests lay and file her contact report. If he seemed amenable to doing a little freelance work on the side, Ops would assign him a handler. Or not. Their call. As for her, she’d be free to pick up her rental car and the keys to the beach house, meet Lindsay’s plane and get on with a much-needed vacation. End of story.

      That’s what she told herself. The truth was a little more complex, as truth tends to be.

      They say time heals all wounds, but it’s not entirely true. Some never really heal. On the surface, recovery may seem complete, but certain traumas leave a residual weakness that lurks in a troubled soul like a subterranean fault line, prone to unexpected eruption. There was such a susceptibility inside Mariah, unknown even to herself—a deep, dark place where resentment simmered and bubbled like hot, sulfurous magma. Until now, it had never percolated up to that place where liquid rage hardens into cold calculated action. But it’s the nature of such fault lines to give way without warning, and the explosive results are nearly always devastating—even to innocent bystanders.

      She checked into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel around noon, with an hour or so to kill before she had to head over to get the lay of the land at the Arlen Hunter Museum. The Romanov exhibit was set to open at six.

      While she waited, Mariah decided to give Chap Korman a call. She tipped the bellboy who’d delivered her bag to her suite, then settled into a deeply upholstered wing chair, propping her feet on the bed’s quilted floral spread, and dialed Korman’s number from memory. In the twenty years since her mother’s death, when Mariah had become the reluctant guardian of Ben Bolt’s prolific output, she’d gotten to know the literary agent well.

      “Mariah! I wasn’t expecting you for another couple of days.”

      She smiled at the sound of his voice, although it sounded more wavery each time they spoke, Mariah thought sadly, anticipating the day when this last, best link to her past would be gone. Chap was alternately coy and grumpy about his age, but he’d been older than Ben by several years, so she calculated that he had to be at least in his mid-seventies by now. He’d long since left the bustle of New York to nurse his arthritic joints in the warmer climes of southern California, but he continued to represent a roster of long-time clients, even championing the occasional new one when he found a writer he believed in.

      “I just got in. I’m staying at the Beverly Wilshire,” she told him. “I was drafted for a short-term assignment, so I had to come early.”

      “Aha! A secret mission,” he said delightedly. “Can’t tell me what it is, right, or else you’d have to kill me?”

      She rolled her eyes. “You read too many spy novels, Chap.”

      “Hey, this is exciting. You’re the only spook I know.”

      “Big thrill. I could introduce you to twenty thousand other grunts who toil away in the same obscurity I do.”

      “So, is Lindsay with you on this covert job?”

      “No, she’s staying with friends. She flies in Thursday.”

      “Any chance you’ll take me up on my offer? I’m just rattling around this big old place, you know. There’s plenty of room.”

      Chap had retired to a lovely, bougainvillea-covered house in Newport Beach, of all places—an irony that never escaped her, since she tended to think of Newport as “the scene of the crime,” having spent a fairly miserable youth there. Since she hadn’t returned to the place in twenty years, she’d never