still never moved from her spot.
Now Geoffrey might never come home.
Sarah was left alone in a bed that was too large, in an apartment that was too quiet. She shuddered as a silent wave of pain rose and caught in her throat. She wanted desperately to cry, but the tears refused to fall.
She collapsed onto the bed with her face against the pillows. They smelled of Geoffrey. They smelled of his skin and his hair and his laughter. She clutched one of the pillows in her arms and curled up in the very center of the bed, in the spot where Geoffrey always lay. The sheets were ice-cold.
Geoffrey might never come home. They had been married only two months.
* * *
NICK O’HARA DRAINED his third cup of coffee and jerked his tie loose. After a two-week vacation wearing nothing but bathing trunks, his tie felt like a hangman’s noose. He’d been back in Washington only three days, and already he was edgy. Vacations were supposed to recharge the old batteries. That’s why he’d gone to the Bahamas. He’d spent two glorious weeks doing absolutely nothing except lie around half-naked in the sun. He’d needed the time to be alone, to ask himself some hard questions and come to some conclusions.
But the only conclusion he’d reached was that he was unhappy.
After eight years with the State Department, Nick O’Hara was fed up with his job. He was headed in circles, a ship without a rudder. His career was at a standstill, but the fault was not entirely his. Bit by bit he’d lost his patience for political games of state—he wasn’t in the mood to play. He’d hung in there, though, because he’d believed in his job, in its intrinsic worth. From peace marches in his youth to peace tables in his prime.
But ideals, he had discovered, got people nowhere. Hell, diplomacy didn’t run on ideals. It ran, like everything else, on protocol and party-line politics. While he’d perfected his protocol, he hadn’t gotten the politics quite right. It wasn’t that he couldn’t. He wouldn’t.
In that regard Nick knew he was a lousy diplomat. Unfortunately those in authority apparently agreed with him. So he had been banished to this bottom-of-the-barrel consular post in D.C., calling bad news to new widows. It was a not-so-subtle slap in the face. Sure, he could have refused the assignment. He could’ve gone back to teaching, to his comfortable old niche at American University. He had needed to think about it. Yes, he’d needed those two weeks alone in the Bahamas.
What he didn’t need was to come home to this.
With a sigh, he flipped open the file labeled Fontaine, Geoffrey H. One small item had bothered him all morning. Since 1:00 a.m. he’d been staring at a computer terminal, digging out everything he could get from the vast government files. He’d also spent half an hour on the phone with his buddy Wes Corrigan in the Berlin consulate. In frustration he’d finally turned to a few unusual sources. What had started off as a routine call to the widow to give her his regrets was turning into something a bit more complicated, a puzzle for which Nick didn’t have all the pieces.
In fact, except for the well-established details of Geoffrey Fontaine’s death, there were hardly any pieces at all to play with. Nick didn’t like incomplete puzzles. They drove him crazy. When it came to poking around for more information, more facts, he could be insatiable. But now, as he lifted the thin Fontaine file, he felt as if he were holding a bagful of air: nothing of substance but a name.
And a death.
Nick’s eyes were burning; he leaned back in his chair and yawned. When he was twenty and in college, staying up half the night used to give him a high. Now that he was thirty-eight, it only made him crotchety. And hungry. At 6:00 a.m. he’d wolfed down three doughnuts. The surge of sugar into his system, plus the coffee, had been enough to keep him going. And now he was too curious to stop. Puzzles always did that to him. He wasn’t sure he liked it.
He looked up as the door opened. His pal Tim Greenstein strode in.
“Bingo! I found it!” said Tim. He dropped a file on the desk and gave Nick one of those big, dumb grins he was so famous for. Most of the time, that grin was directed at a computer screen. Tim was a troubleshooter, the man everyone called when the data weren’t where they should be. Heavy glasses distorted his eyes, the consequence of infantile cataracts. A bushy black beard obscured much of the rest of his face, except for a pale forehead and nose.
“Told you I’d get it,” said Tim, plopping into the leather chair across from Nick. “I had my buddy at the FBI do a little fishing. He came up with zilch, so I did a little poking around on my own. Not easy, I’ll tell ya, getting this out of classified. They’ve got some new idiot up there who insists on doing his job.”
Nick frowned. “You had to get this through security?”
“Yep. There’s more, but I couldn’t access it. Found out central intelligence has a file on your man.”
Nick flipped the folder open and stared in amazement. What he saw raised more questions than ever, questions for which there seemed to be no answers. “What the hell does this mean?” he muttered.
“That’s why you couldn’t find anything about Geoffrey H. Fontaine,” said Tim. “Until a year ago, the guy didn’t exist.”
Nick’s jaw snapped up. “Can you get me more?”
“Hey, Nick, I think we’re trespassing on someone else’s turf. Those Company boys might get hot under the collar.”
“So let ’em sue me.” Nick wasn’t in the least intimidated by the CIA. Not after all the incompetent Company men he’d met. “Anyway,” he said with a shrug, “I’m just doing my job. I’ve got a grieving widow, remember?”
“But this Fontaine stuff goes pretty deep.”
“So do you, Tim.”
Tim grinned. “What is it, Nick? Turning detective?”
“No. Just curious.” He scowled at the day’s pile of work on his desk. It was all bureaucratic crap—the bane of his existence—but it had to be done. This Fontaine case was distracting him. He should just give the grieving widow a pat on the shoulder, murmur a kind word and send her out the door. Then he should forget the whole thing. Geoffrey Fontaine, whatever his real name, was dead.
But Tim had set Nick’s curiosity on fire. He glanced at his friend. “Say, how about hunting up a few things about the guy’s wife? Sarah Fontaine. That might get us somewhere.”
“Why don’t you get it yourself?”
“You’re the one with all that hot computer access.”
“Yeah, but you’ve got the woman herself.” Tim nodded toward the door. “I heard the secretary take down her name. Sarah Fontaine’s sitting in your waiting room right now.”
* * *
THE SECRETARY WAS a graying, middle-aged woman with china-blue eyes and a mouth that seemed permanently etched in two straight lines. She glanced up from her typewriter just long enough to take Sarah’s name and direct her toward a nearby couch.
Stacked neatly on a coffee table by the couch were the usual waiting room magazines, as well as a few issues of Foreign Affairs and World Press Review, to which the address labels were still attached: Dr. Nicholas
