Twice Dead - Catherine Coulter [43]
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. 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, wondered 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 that either, but maybe it was time to consider anything that put 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, maybe you’re right. Maybe Krimakov is the stalker and the one who shot the governor.
He turned off the laptop 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 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, 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 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 dimly lit study. Thomas Matlock was hunched over his computer, aware of the soft sounds of the rain but not really hearing it. He had just gotten an e-mail from a former double agent, now living in Istanbul, telling him he’d picked it up from a Greek smuggler that Vasili Krimakov had died in an auto accident near Agios Nikolaos, a small fishing village on the northeast coast of Crete.
Krimakov had lived all this time in Crete? Since Thomas had found out about his daughter