the milling crowd, scanning those who were approaching McCord from all sides, Pflanz paid little attention to Jerry Siddon, who had moved next to him.
“That was a neat trick, wasn’t it?” Siddon said.
Pflanz glanced down at him. “A neat trick?”
Siddon waved his hand toward McCord. “That performance,” he said, grinning. “And turning the ceremony over to the baby’s mother. Focusing the attention on himself by seeming to turn it on someone else. Very neatly done.”
Pflanz arched one eyebrow. “You’re very cynical today, young Siddon.”
“Not cynical, just overawed at the man’s skill.” He glanced up at Pflanz, who was watching him closely. “You know what I mean. This guy’s tough as nails. You know it, and so do I. That’s how he made his fortune and his name. But look at him now.”
They both turned back to McCord, who was guffawing with a group of old cronies, his hands buried deep in his pants pockets.
“He looks like he just drove in from the farm in the family pickup,” Siddon continued. “Yet this is the same man who, in a few hours, will be standing toe-to-toe with the sharks and vultures in Washington. The man who may have done more than any other American to throw the Reds out of the Kremlin. I tell you, Dieter, this is the one. This is the guy we’ve got to put in the White House. He’s the one who can make things happen.”
The corners of Pflanz’s mouth angled up ever so slightly. He doesn’t need to be elected, Jerry boy, he thought. Things are happening already.
When Frank’s secretary tapped on her door a few minutes after she had stormed out of his office, Mariah was standing at the window, staring down on Langley Woods situated beyond the high fence surrounding the Agency’s headquarters.
“Mariah?” Pat hesitated, her hand on the door. Finally, she stepped in and shut it behind her. “What happened? Frank’s in there bellowing on the phone and you look like you’ve seen a ghost. What’s going on around here?”
Mariah glanced at Pat and then stared back across the trees, denuded now of their leaves. It was a bleak landscape this time of year.
Tucker’s secretary was one of her closest friends, as was Frank himself. But Patty Bonelli and Frank were also an item—undeclared, discreet. It was a relationship that only Mariah and a few others in the office knew about. Mariah wasn’t altogether certain when Pat and Frank’s relationship outside the office had begun—for the first few years after his wife died, Frank had been too preoccupied with finishing the job of raising his kids to have time for anything else—but it had been going on for some time now. They seemed to be comfortable with it just as it was, neither one showing any sign of needing or wanting a more public commitment.
There was no way of knowing whether Pat was aware of the covert operation Frank had alluded to. As a senior secretary, she was privy to many of the compartmented cases that Frank and Mariah had worked on in the past, providing clerical support. But Frank had said that Operations was leading on this, and they always kept knowledge of their files to a minimum. If they had allowed Tucker in, it could only be because they had required his expertise. It was doubtful Pat knew anything, even if she were prepared to defy Frank and tell Mariah. On the other hand, Mariah thought, if Chaney had stumbled onto something, then it wasn’t as closely held a secret as Frank thought.
“Do you know if Frank has been working on any major cases with the Ops people over the past ten months?”
“He and George Neville have been working on a file,” Pat said. Neville was the CIA deputy director for operations—DDO. “I’m not cleared for it, though. I thought you were.”
“Why did you think that?”
“Because Neville was in Frank’s office the other day. Frank asked me to bring them coffee and when I opened the door, I heard Neville mention your name.”
“What was he saying?”
Pat shook her head. “He clammed up when I walked in. What’s this about, Mariah?”
“That’s what I’d like to know. I think it’s got something to do with the accident in Vienna.”
“What do you mean?”
“Apparently, it was no accident.”
“What?”
Mariah sighed and settled down on the edge of her desk. “Look, Patty, I don’t know what’s going on, but I shouldn’t be saying anything. You know Frank—he’d throw a fit if he knew I’d told you this much, so do me a favor and don’t mention it, okay?”
“I won’t say anything. But what do you plan to do?”
Mariah turned back to the window. “I don’t know. But I have to find out what really happened.”
With Frank or without him, she thought.
When Pat left her office, Mariah stood at the window a few minutes longer, struggling against the pain and black fury that were threatening to short-circuit her brain. Forcing herself to turn away from the window, she caught sight of the computer terminal next to her desk. She sat down and flicked it on, her mind racing as the monitor raised its greenish glow.
After a short delay, the screen prompted her to enter her password, the first line of defense against unauthorized access to the Agency’s data banks. All employees had a personal access code, known only to themselves and the computer. Security procedures required that the password be changed every month.
Mariah punched in her current personal code— “SIGMUND,” the name of her neighbor’s cat. After the mess she had found in her tiny garden, the feline had been on her mind the last time she had changed her password. The cursor moved across the screen as she entered the cat’s name, but only Xs appeared—another security measure.
After a brief delay, the monitor flashed a message: “PASSWORD VALID. FILE SEARCH MODE. ENTER FILE NAME.”
She returned her gaze to the keyboard and punched in “CHAUCER.”
There was another short delay. Her stomach flipped when she saw the reply: “RESTRICTED FILE. ACCESS DENIED. ENTER NEW FILE NAME.”
“Access denied, my foot!” she muttered. “That’s my file.”
She punched in her password again: “CHAUCER.”
“RESTRICTED FILE. ACCESS DENIED. ENTER NEW FILE NAME.”
Her heart was pounding as she leaned back in her chair and stared at the stubborn message. Then she hunched forward again. “All right,” she said under her breath, “let’s try another approach.”
She punched in a new file request: “MARIAH BOLT. PERSONAL LOG. VIENNA STATION.”
The cursor flashed for a moment as the Cray computer down in the Agency’s basement searched its data banks. Then a long list of document titles began scrolling down the screen—three years’ worth of contact reports and intelligence assessments that she had filed while she was posted to the CIA station in Vienna. As her eye scanned the rolling list, Mariah’s mind wandered back.
It was never
