Guilt By Silence

Dieter Pflanz watched as Gus McCord rose and went to his wife, who was stretched out on the sofa that ran along one side of the back of the cabin. After ensuring that her seat belt was fastened, he pulled the blanket higher over her shoulders. Then his gaze settled on her face. Her eyes were closed and she appeared to be sleeping soundly. McCord had wanted her to stay home, but Nancy was a trouper and was as excited as Gus himself about the opening of the clinic. She had insisted that she wanted to be there with him.

The angina was getting worse, Pflanz knew. She’d suffered from it for about eight years now, but the last six months she’d apparently had pains almost every day. She tried to hide it from Gus but he always seemed to know when an attack was coming on. She’d slip away quietly and he’d follow to make sure she had her nitroglycerin, but she always insisted that she was fine and he shouldn’t worry.

McCord gently lifted a stray lock of hair from her eyes and watched her for a while longer, studying the slow rise and fall of her shoulders as she breathed. Then he returned to the front of the cabin where Pflanz was waiting for him. Jerry Siddon was sitting on the far side, playing backgammon with the photographer.

Pflanz handed Gus a fax that had just rolled from the machine. McCord settled into a chair and buckled his seat belt, then pulled his reading glasses out of the inside breast pocket of his jacket. The bridge piece connecting the half-moon lenses settled above the bump on his nose and his copper eyes scanned the message.

It was from the Albuquerque office of McCord Industries. The company had had offices in New Mexico for years. Millions of dollars’ worth of defense contracts poured into the state annually, and McCord Industries had always received its share, providing electronics and specialized equipment to the military research and production facilities in Albuquerque and Los Alamos. Defense work entailed special security problems, and the Albuquerque office held a strong contingent of Pflanz’s people. One of his handpicked specialists had had a particularly active schedule this week. McCord seemed pleased to see, as he read the brief message, that all had gone according to plan.

“Shipment delivered. Customer fully satisfied,” the fax said.

McCord nodded and looked up over the half moons at Pflanz. “Good work. I’ll tell you now, Dieter, I had doubts about the timing—visions of a slipup. Should have known you’d pull it off, though.”

Pflanz extended his arms, his massive hands gripping the edge of the table. “It’s all a matter of paying attention to detail, Gus. You know that. That, and keeping the loose ends tidied up.”

“What about the local officials in New Mexico? Are you sure they won’t create any difficulties?”

“They won’t. We had federal people move in soon after it happened and remove all the evidence. By now, the locals know better than to mess with the feds.”

“Family?”

“Kingman was divorced years ago—no kids. His ex is still in Los Alamos. She’s an M.D. and she’s got a life of her own now. Bowker, the other American, was single. Parents dead. Had a brother in Idaho, but they weren’t close. Looks like he bought the accidental-death story, no problem. Funeral’s set for Saturday.”

McCord’s eyebrows shot up. “Not much to bury, I wouldn’t think.”

“Not much. They said it was one hell of a fire. They’re shipping an urn of ashes to the brother, I gather.”

“I’m glad his parents weren’t alive. I can’t imagine how I’d handle it if I got word that something like that had happened to one of my kids.” McCord handed over the fax and leaned back in the chair, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes.

The security chief watched him. It never ceased to amaze him that a man could have a taste for this kind of operation—which McCord obviously did—and still be so sentimental. To his credit, though, McCord had never let sentimentality get in the way of the tough decisions. He’d always said you couldn’t fight a war without casualties.

Her arms sliced the water like a propeller through parachute silk as Mariah hurtled down the length of the pool. As she sailed over the black T mark near the end, her body instinctively pulled into a tuck, rolled, and pushed off again, returning along the roped-off lane in the direction from which she’d come. She churned on, counting out the laps, trying unsuccessfully to get ahead of her racing thoughts.

When the computer had refused to yield to her demands for access to the CHAUCER file, she had tried another approach—logging on to the Company’s biographical data files. This tactic had proven to be only marginally more productive, but there was enough there for her to realize that she had seriously misjudged somewhere along the line.

The file on Tatyana Baranova had given her nothing she didn’t already know, since most of the information was intelligence Mariah herself had fed into the system. Baranova had been thirty-one when they first met. Born in Moscow, parents both members of the Soviet elite—her mother an engineer, her father, like Tanya herself, a physicist.

Baranova was married to a medical researcher living in Moscow, although Tanya had confided to Mariah that they were estranged—unbeknownst to the KGB, which would never have agreed to her IAEA assignment had they known. Leaving a spouse behind was supposed to give Moscow leverage over citizens working abroad. When Tanya was first assigned to Vienna, however, the entire Soviet state apparatus was in the early stages of unraveling, and the system, fortunately, had not worked the way it was supposed to. No living children—she had miscarried a couple of times and had lost one infant after birth. Her attraction to Lindsay, Mariah had soon discovered, owed much to Tanya’s quiet mourning for her own dead baby daughter.

But when Mariah had tried to delve further into the files to find out what might have happened to Tanya—she who’d risked so much by approaching an American—she had run into a brick wall. “CROSS-REFERENCE: OPERATION CHAUCER,” the computer had told her. Yeah, right, she’d thought bitterly, and I know exactly what you’ll tell me when I try.

Drumming her fingers on the side of the keyboard, she had debated which way to go next. And then, without really thinking, she had found her fingers entering “CHANEY, PAUL” on the keys. After all, he was the one who had reopened this wound when he had appeared at the nursing home. A short while later, a new file came up on the screen. In the corner was a photo of Chaney—it looked like a publicity still some archivist must have clipped from the media. Underneath, the basic biographic info:

CHANEY, Paul Jackson. DOB: 4/2/49, New York, N.Y. Citizenship: U.S. Current address: Lannerstrasse 28, Vienna, Austria. Occupation: Senior Foreign Correspondent, CBN Television Network, 700 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. Marital Status: Divorced (Phyllis Chaney Fordham, née Martin; New Haven, Connecticut). Children: Jackson John Chaney Fordham (male), born 6/17/83.

Mariah nodded grimly as she read the reference to Chaney’s son—he was just a couple of years younger than Lindsay. David had mentioned once that Paul had a child he rarely saw. It had done little to endear Chaney to her; it reminded her too much of her own father. By his surname, Mariah guessed that the boy had been adopted by his mother’s second husband. Maybe Chaney’s son had been luckier than she’d been, Mariah thought. At least he had some kind of father.

She skimmed through the summary of Chaney’s travels as a foreign correspondent. If she didn’t know better, she’d say he had a death wish. Over the years, he had covered the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Northern Ireland and South Africa, winning several journalism awards along the way, including one for his coverage of the Gulf War. She’d seen his work, of course, and as much as she hated to, Mariah had to admit he was good. She scanned the rest of the file, but there was little there of interest—mostly references to interviews he had conducted with various political leaders.

But suddenly, the name Elsa von Schleimann leaped off the screen. Someone else in the Vienna station—not Mariah, that much was certain—had alerted Langley to Chaney’s links to the self-proclaimed “Princess.” Every other Austrian, it seemed, claimed to be a descendant of the deposed Hapsburgs, but that alone wouldn’t make Elsa worthy of mention in Chaney’s CIA file. Nor were any other of his numerous lady friends mentioned. So why did someone think it important to note his association with her?

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