private. He’d kept his position in the intelligence community
so he would know if Krimakov ever surfaced. But he’d had to remain
alone.
Jacob Marley’s House
Adam slowly opened his eyes. He was in the same room with
Allison and Thomas Matlock’s daughter, and she was looking at
him with an odd combination of helplessness and wariness. Damn,
she looked so very much like her father. He couldn’t tell her yet.
No, not yet. He said on a yawn, “I’m sorry, I guess I just sort of
flashed out for a while.”
“It’s late. You’re probably exhausted what with all your skulking
around spying on me. I’m going to bed. There’s a guest room at the
end of the hall upstairs. The bed might be awful, I don’t know.
Come on and I’ll help you make it up.”
The bed was hard as a rock, which was fine with Adam. His feet
didn’t hang off the end, another nice thing. He watched her trail off
down the hall, pause for just a moment, and look back at him. She
raised her hand. Then he watched her close the door to her bedroom.
He’d wondered about Becca Matlock for a very long time, won
dered what she was like, how much she’d inherited from her father,
wondered if she was happy, maybe even in love with a guy and ready
to get married. He discovered he was still wondering about her as
he lay on his back and stared up at the black ceiling. All he knew for
sure was that someone had put her in the center of his game and
was doing his best to bring her down. Kill her? He didn’t know.
Was it Vasili Krimakov? He didn’t know, but maybe it was time
to consider anything that put even a shadow on the radar.
He woke up at about four A.M. and couldn’t go back to sleep.
Finally, he booted up his laptop and wrote an e-mail: I told her about
McCallum, She really doesn’t know anything. I don’t either, yet. You know,
just maybe you’re right. Just maybe Krimakov is the stalker and the one
who shot the governor.
He turned off the compact and stretched out again, pillowing his
head on his arms. To him, Krimakov was like the bogeyman, a
monster trotted out to scare children. To Adam, the man had never
had any substance, even though he’d seen classified material about
him, been briefed about his kills. But hell, that was over twenty-five
years ago. Nothing, not even a whiff of the man since then.
Twenty-five years since Thomas Matlock had accidentally killed
his wife. So long ago and in a place that was no longer even part of
the Soviet Union–Belarus, the smallest of the Slavic republics independent
since 1991.
He knew the story because once, just once, Thomas Matlock
had gotten drunk–it was his anniversary–and told him about
how he’d been playing cat and mouse back in the seventies with a
Russian agent, Vasili Krimakov, and in the midst of a firefight that
never should have happened, he’d accidentally shot Krimakov’s
wife. They’d been on the top of Dzerzhinskaya Mountain, not
much of a mountain at all, but the highest peak Belarus had to offer.
And she’d died and Krimakov had sworn he would kill him, kill
his wife, kill anyone he loved, and he’d cursed him to hell and beyond.
And Thomas Matlock knew he meant it.
The next morning,Thomas Matlock had simply looked at Adam
and said, “Only two other people in the world know the whole of
it, and one of them is my wife.” If there was more to the tale,
Thomas Matlock hadn’t told him.
Adam had always wondered who the other person was who
knew the whole story, but he hadn’t asked. He wondered now
what Thomas Matlock was doing at this precise moment, if he, like
Adam, was lying awake, wondering what the hell was going on.
Chevy Chase, Maryland
It was raining deep in the night, a slow, warm rain that would
soak into the ground and be good for all the summer flowers. There
was no moon to speak of to shine in through the window of the