just left Riptide yesterday, sent the FBI all the fingerprints we got in
Linda Cartwright’s house, all the fibers we bagged. No word yet.
The woman he killed in Ithaca, and stole her car–they’ve combed
the hills for witnesses but came up empty. All that boils down to
nada, nothing, zippo.” And then he cursed in some language Becca
didn’t recognize. She lifted her eyebrow at him. Hatch said, flushing
a bit,”That was just a bit of Latvian. A nice set of words, full-bodied
and pungent, covers a lot of the hind end of a horse and what one
could do with it.”
There was laughter, lots of it, and it felt so good that Becca just
looked around at all the people she hadn’t even known existed until
very recently. People who were friends now. People who would
probably remain friends for the rest of her life. She looked over at the
baby lying in his carryall, sound asleep, a light-blue blanket tucked
over him. He was the image of his father except for his mother’s
blue, blue eyes.
She looked at Thomas Matlock, who was also looking at the
baby and smiling. Her father, who hadn’t eaten much pizza because,
she knew, he was so worried. About her.
My father.
It still felt so very strange. He was real, he was her father, and her
brain recognized and accepted it, but it was still too new to accept
all the way to the deepest part of her that had no memories, no
knowledge of him, nothing tangible, just a couple of photos taken
when he and her mother were young, some when they were even
younger than she was now, and stories her mother had told her,
many, many stories. The stories were secondhand memories, she
realized now. Her mother had given them to her, again and again,
hoping that she would remember them and, through them, love
the father she’d believed was dead.
Her father, alive, always alive, and her mother hadn’t told her.
Just stories, stupid stories. Her mother had memories, scores of
them, and she had stories. But she kept quiet to protect me, Becca
thought, but the sense of betrayal, the fury of it, roiled deep inside
her. They could have told her when she was eighteen or when she
was twenty-one. How about when she was twenty-five? Wasn’t
that adult enough for them? She was an adult, a real live independent
adult, for God’s sake, and yet they’d never said a thing, and now
it was too late. Her mother was dead. Her mother had died without
telling her a thing. She could have told her before she fell into
that coma. She would never see them together now. She wanted to
kill both of them.
She remembered many of those times when her mother had left
her for maybe three, four days at a time. Three or four times a year
she’d stayed with one of her mother’s very good friends and her
three children. She’d enjoyed those visits so much she’d never really
ever wondered where her mother went, just accepting that it was
some sort of business trip or an obligation to a friend, or whatever.
She sighed. She still wanted to kill both of them. She wished
they were both here so she could hug them and never let them go.
Savich said, “I’ve got the latest on Krimakov. A CIA operative
told me about this computer system in Athens that’s pretty top-secret
and that maybe MAX could get into. Well, MAX did invite
himself to visit the computer system in Athens that keeps data on
the whereabouts and business pursuits of all non citizens residing in
Greece. It is top-secret because it also has lists of all Greek agents
who are acting clandestinely throughout the world.
“Now, as you can imagine, this includes a lot of rather shady characters
that they try to keep tabs on. Remember, there was nothing
left in Moscow because the KGB purged everything on Krimakov.
But they didn’t have anything to do with the Greek records. This is
what they had on Krimakov. Now, recognize that we’ve already
learned most of this, that it was pretty common knowledge. However,