Guilt By Silence

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 school 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.”

Mariah leaped from her chair and leaned across the desk between them. “Don’t patronize me!”

His head snapped up. “I’m not patronizing, goddammit!”

“Then what kind of answer is that?”

“It’s the only answer I can give you.”

“It’s not good enough!”

“It’s the only answer you’re gonna get. This is a closely held file and you have no ‘need to know.”’

He might just as well have slapped her face. She recoiled and stared at him, dumbfounded. His sharp frown held her momentarily, then his eyes shifted away and skimmed across the ceiling before coming to rest on her face again. “Look, I honestly don’t know for certain whether what happened in Vienna was an accident or not. I thought it was at first, but now I’m not sure. If it wasn’t, then your family got caught in the middle of some bloody dangerous business and you don’t want to know about it, believe me.”

“Oh, yes, I do,” Mariah said firmly. “If someone did this deliberately, I definitely do want to know about it.” His expression remained glumly resistant. “Frank! Dammit! Let me in! If I can do something—anything—to make sense of what happened and help bring down whoever did this, at least I won’t feel so helpless. Give me a break, please?”

Tucker shook his head. “I can’t. Even if I wanted to—which I don’t—it’s not my decision. Operations is handling the file and access is severely limited. Besides which—I’m dead serious here—you’ve got Lindsay to think about. You put yourself in the line of fire and she could end up an orphan. Is that what you want?”

“As opposed to what? As opposed to the life of a fatherless cripple that I’ve already managed to give her?”

“Don’t do this. Don’t punish yourself for something you weren’t responsible for.”

“If not me, who? Tell me who—I’d love to punish someone else. I’d like to rip them limb from limb. I’d like to blow their goddamn heads off!”

Tucker dropped into his chair. “And that’s exactly why you’re no good for this case. You’re personally involved. You’ve got no distance or objectivity, and that’s a recipe for getting yourself killed. Now, I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Go do your job and let me do mine.”

Mariah watched him as he opened a file in front of him and pointedly ignored her. She stood still, glaring at him, fists clenched. Then she wheeled around and headed for the door, throwing it open with such energy that it bounced back against the wall with a bang.

Pat Bonelli had finally arrived for work and was sitting at her desk when Mariah stormed out of Frank’s office. She jumped as the door crashed. “Mariah! You scared the shit out of me!” She stopped cold as she caught sight of Mariah’s face. “Are you all right?”

It was the second time she’d been asked that question, Mariah thought. What did people think? Of course she wasn’t all right!

Pat arched her neck to look in on Frank, almost as if she expected to see blood on the walls. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” Mariah muttered as she stormed into her own office next door.

5

Even Dieter Pflanz had to smile when he thought back on it later.

There was Angus McCord, billionaire industrialist—one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful—wearing a green surgical gown over his suit and a gauze mask over his face. A cotton cap rested heavily on his not-insignificant ears, forcing them to flap even more than usual. He looked like a diminutive cross between Marcus Welby, M.D., and Dumbo the elephant. Only the tiny, wizened baby girl whose hand McCord held through the porthole of an isolette, and the simultaneously proud and anxious expression on the faces of her similarly gowned parents, revealed the serious nature of the business at hand.

The Newborn Intensive Care Unit was a large room, full of high-tech equipment and bustling staff. It had been functioning for several weeks now, even though the neonatal clinic of McCord General Hospital was not yet officially open.

The isolette stood near the unit’s big plate-glass window. To Pflanz, standing with dignitaries in the hall outside, the preemie looked like a baby bird, lying on her back, arms and legs splayed. Her skin hung loose and wrinkled, and her spindly rib cage was protruding—she had been born too soon to have built up any healthy baby fat. Repeated sticking for blood samples had left bruises all over the little body. When McCord arrived at the NICU, the baby was wearing patches over her eyes to protect her retinas from the bili lights set up over the isolette to treat her jaundice. The lights were turned off for now and the patches removed for the benefit of the visitors, but a tangled network of plastic tubes extruded from her minute nose and arms, and several wires were taped to her chest.

Cameras outside the glass enclosure whirred and snapped as McCord gently stroked the frail baby, listening as the neonatal specialist beside him described the prognosis for the three-pound, eight-ounce preemie—iffy, but looking better with each passing day that she managed to cling to life. McCord looked up at the baby’s parents, his eyes smiling over the mask, and then back down at the tiny fighter in the isolette.

“You show ’em, little one,” he whispered.

A few minutes later, he emerged from the NICU, soberly stripping off the hospital garb as he made his way toward the lounge that marked the entry to the McCord Neonatal Unit. His entourage fell in step behind, photographers and television camera retreating before his advance. When he reached the red ribbon strung across the lounge, McCord stopped and the hospital’s chief of staff, Dr. Emory, pulled up alongside him. A hush fell over the assembled group of doctors, nurses, local politicians, community activists and media representatives.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Emory began, “this day has been a long time coming. It was almost seven years ago that the city of Fargo first expressed a desire to build an advanced neonatal care unit to serve this region. For the people of this community, it wasn’t enough to say that this is a small city—that we couldn’t afford the ‘luxuries’ of big cities like Boston and San Francisco. Our children deserve nothing less than the best. And so, the people of Fargo set out to acquire the finest neonatal facility that love and dedication—and yes, money—could build. And they did it with the generous support of North Dakota’s most famous offspring—Mr. Angus Ramsay McCord. This fine hospital already stands as a testament to this native son’s boundless commitment to our community.”

A murmur went through the crowd in the lobby and heads nodded.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, it is my very great pleasure to extend a warm welcome and our deepest appreciation to Mr. and Mrs. Angus McCord, and to call upon them to open this fine new addition to McCord General Hospital.”

A round of applause accompanied Gus McCord to the front of the room. His face became flushed as he looked around and waited for the clapping to die down, but it went on and on. He grinned sheepishly and rubbed the bump on his nose, then looked over at his wife and shrugged. Turning back, he raised his hands and made a dampening wave.

“Thank you. Thank you all,” he called above the noise. But the group showed no sign of letting up. Gus passed his hand over his brush cut as the applause rolled on. Then he seemed to have an inspirational flash.

“Shh!” he whispered loudly, his finger to his lips. “You’ll wake the babies!”

The audience laughed, but the noise finally died down. There was a long silence as they waited expectantly for him to say something, but he seemed to be lost in thought, examining his shoes and shuffling awkwardly. One or two nervous throat-clearing sounds rose up from the room. His voice, when he spoke at last, was soft.

“I have a confession to make,” he said, eyes still on his toes. “It’s not an easy thing to say, for an old coot like me. But I’m here to tell you that I’ve fallen in love again.”

A few chuckles sprinkled the room.

“The lady in question,” McCord went on, stronger now, looking up at the crowd, “has the face of an angel and a form so exquisite it takes your breath away. Of course, there are those who will say she’s too young for me, that these May-December romances never work out. But I don’t care. Because when I look in her eyes, I know that she is the culmination of everything that is good and beautiful in this world. Her name is Jessica Boehm, ladies and gentlemen. She is five days old and she weighs just three and a half pounds. But she’s a spunky little lady, and I am the luckiest man in the world for having met her.”

McCord reached out a hand to the mother of the baby he had been caressing in the isolette. “And this is Mary Boehm, the mother of that wonderful young lady down the hall.” Mrs. Boehm, tears streaming down her smiling cheeks, held on tightly to Gus’s hand as the audience applauded warmly.

McCord’s other arm reached out to embrace his wife, who had been standing off to his left. “And this beautiful lady, for those of you who don’t already know her, is my wife, Nancy. We have been married for forty years. She is my courage, my inspiration and my best friend. She is also the mother of our four sons and the grandmother of five beautiful grandchildren. We have a good life. But like the parents of little Jessica, we have known the fear and pain of a baby’s illness.”

He and Nancy exchanged glances and squeezed hands.

“I believe,” McCord went on, “that the sheer force of Nancy’s mother-love saw our sick children through their darkest hours. But sometimes, when a baby is born too soon, or with special problems, even a mother’s love needs a little help. This clinic is dedicated in ensuring that even the littlest ones like Jessica will survive and grow and thrive.”