overhead. He was coming up just behind her, the fingers of his left hand flexing in anticipation of the grab, his right thumb poised over the hair-trigger catch on the knife.
Suddenly, there was a bustle at the main entrance fifty yards away. He held back, crouching deeper into the shadows as the front door opened and three people came out—an elderly woman and two men who might have been her sons. The men huddled around her, supporting her by the elbows, murmuring as she cried softly.
Cursing under his breath, Burton pocketed the knife as his target walked from the parking lot along a short walkway to the entrance. She stepped out of the path of the family coming down the staircase, watched them for a moment, then ran up the front steps of the nursing home. Burton turned and headed back to his car, regretful but philosophical. No matter—he might still have a chance to get her on the way out. Besides, if this was too easy, he might feel he hadn’t earned his fee. That’d be a shame, he thought, snorting lightly. Guilt had never been his strong suit.
2
As she passed through the front doors, Mariah noticed that she was holding her breath. Sooner or later, though, you have to breathe. She made it past the receptionist and almost as far as the east-wing nursing station before drawing her first breath, hoping the delay would help—but it was futile, of course. Little sensors in her nose had been at work even as she nodded to the woman at the front desk, an early warning system for the incoming olfactory assault. And when she finally inhaled, her stomach plunged as always at the smell of medicine and antiseptic, starched linen and slowly dying flesh.
The young nurse at the station smiled brightly as she saw Mariah approach. “Hi, Mrs. Tardiff,” she said.
The nurses knew her well by now—knew she normally used Bolt, her own surname, not David’s, but she had told them she had no objection to being called Mrs. Tardiff, if they preferred. Most, especially the older nurses, seemed more comfortable with that, likely suspicious of her disregard for the proper order of things. David would have been more insistent than Mariah herself on her right to use her own name, but he was in no position to argue with anyone—on points of principle or anything else.
“He’s been looking forward to seeing you,” the nurse said. “The orderly rolled him into the hallway an hour ago.”
Mariah nodded and forced a smile. This nurse had a sweet disposition and meant no reproach, she knew, but she gave herself a mental lashing anyway. “Traffic,” she said. “It’s awful tonight.” The nurse smiled sympathetically.
Mariah turned the corner and headed down the hall. David’s was the last room on the right and she could see his wheelchair outside the door, past all the other lonely souls—ancients, most of them, waiting and watching with futile hope in their eyes each time a visitor entered the corridor. Mariah smiled at some of the old-timers as she walked by, pausing briefly to squeeze the hand of the old lady who always called her Thelma and asked about the boys.
“They’re fine, Mrs. Lake, just fine,” she answered, as she always did, now that she had given up trying to explain that she wasn’t Thelma—wondering, as she always did, who the real Thelma was and whether the boys were really fine
She turned once more toward David. She could see him clearly now, watching her every step—those deep brown eyes with irises so dark that the pupils were invisible. Large, innocent eyes that looked right into your soul. Who could resist them? Certainly she had never been able to.
She had met him in the mid-seventies, the year before the Central Intelligence Agency had recruited her. She was a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, a political science major specializing in the Soviet-American arms race. When her liberal arts background left her bogged down in the complexities of nuclear weapons, her thesis adviser sent her to the head of the physics department. He, in turn, introduced her to David Tardiff, one of the department’s youngest and brightest doctoral candidates.
But if physics brought Mariah and David together in the first place, biology took over pretty quickly thereafter. Mariah was taken by surprise. Her mother’s life had been ruined by Mariah’s father, a poet and novelist still lionized in literary circles, long after his death. He was no hero to Mariah. How could he be, after abandoning his young child and pregnant wife to pursue his own self-absorbed whims?
Buffeted by a cascade of losses that began with her father’s betrayal, Mariah had grown up determined to chart an independent course for her life—one that certainly didn’t include falling under the sway of some boy wonder from New Hampshire. David Tardiff was on the short side, barely five-eight. Compared to the strapping, blond, too-cool-for-words beach boys she had grown up with in southern California, Mariah found him a bit on the homely side, his nose a little too large, his mop of black curls a little too unruly. And he was cocky, she told herself—funny and bright, but awfully sure of himself.
Still, as she had listened to him wax enthusiastic about physics and hockey—his other driving passion—her longstanding defenses against emotional involvement crumbled. Within three months, they were living together in a tiny Berkeley apartment, making plans for the future. But then things changed—that was the first time she lost David.
The University of California ran a top-secret nuclear weapons research facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, on behalf of the federal government, and Berkeley’s physics department supplied many of the lab’s research staff. It came as no real surprise, then, when six months after they moved in together, David was offered a job at the Los Alamos weapons lab.
Mariah followed him into the desert to work in earnest on her graduate thesis. But if New Mexico provided a good working environment for the thesis, it was no place to nurture their relationship. The split finally came the day Mariah watched a military truck towing a canvas-draped missile through the center of town. She confronted David late that night when he came in from the lab.
“David, this isn’t the place for us.”
He was nuzzling her neck and missed the point. “How about the dining-room table?” he asked, wrapping his arms around her more tightly. “Don’t you just love all this space? So many options!”
Mariah poked him in the ribs with her elbow, laughing in spite of herself. “That’s not what I’m talking about! ” Her smile faded. “I mean Los Alamos.”
He held her at arm’s length, his twinkling dark eyes betraying the clever comeback he was formulating—but her own expression must have squelched the urge. “What’s wrong with it? You’ve got teaching prospects here. And it’s a clean, safe place to make babies and raise a family,” he added, pulling her close again.
“Safe? It’s a nuclear bomb factory! Don’t you ever think about what it is you do over at that lab?”
“We do science—good science, with equipment that any university researcher would kill to get his hands on.”
“Yeah, well, kill is definitely the operative word here. You guys design nuclear weapons.”
“We unlock the secrets of the atom. Come on, Mariah, lighten up. The lab does nonmilitary work, too, you know that. And this work is exciting. The atom holds the key to unlimited energy—not to mention incredible biomedical and industrial advances. Weapons are the least interesting part of it.”
“That’s just a cop-out. If there’s one thing this lab stands for, it’s the creation of the bomb.”
“You can’t blame scientists if the government perverts our work,” he said, a stubborn
