An Affair of Deceit (27 page)

T
HEY WALKED BACK
up the hill to his mother’s house, Riley’s heart beating in his temples. When they reached the open lawn, he paused, holding his hand out to keep Abigail behind him. He listened closely.

Nothing but birdsong and cricket chatter.

“There’s no one here, Riley,” she said, and trudged past him.

Probably, but he hated wondering. The wide lawn in front of the house was an advantage to those inside because anyone approaching would be spotted immediately.

That meant he and Abigail would be seen by anyone in the house—or waiting in the forest.

A chill ran up his spine, but he had to trust his senses, which told him that they were alone. He followed her through the grass, his eyes constantly in motion, his muscles clenched like a runner in starting blocks.

But he wasn’t watching
her
, so when she stopped abruptly he collided with her backside, nearly knocking her over.

“What? What do you see?” he whispered, dropping to one knee, his hand going to his hip holster.

“What’s that over there?” She pointed to something off to the right.

An old ache dulled his alertness. “It’s nothing.”

“No. Riley, there’s something over there.” She lifted a hand to shade her eyes from the bright morning sun and started in its direction. “It looks like a headstone.”

He felt his jaw clench. “It is.”

“You have a graveyard on your property?” She continued walking in the direction of the small memorial.

“Kind of. We can look at it some other time. Come on,” he prodded, reaching for her wrist, but she was too fast and too stubborn.

“Just a minute.” She trotted to the spot where a speckled granite stone was wedged deeply into the ground. “This looks fairly new.”

“It isn’t.” It was only clean because his mother kept it that way.

He didn’t move to join her as she knelt beside the small monument. Her shoulders fell as she read it.

“Can we go now?” he asked impatiently.

“This is your father’s grave. He died in 1989?”

“It’s just a memorial. His grave is in Taiwan.”

She turned, her face blank. “I’m sorry.”

“Fine. Now we go.” He grabbed her arm and pulled her to her feet, breaking into a low, cautious sprint to reach the kitchen door. He unlocked it, and they slammed inside the house, coming to rest against the wooden table in the middle of his mother’s kitchen.

“Why were we running?” Abigail asked, her hands on her hips.

“I don’t like that open field. We’re like sitting ducks on it.”

“Riley, everything is fine.”

She walked closer to him. He could smell her skin, sweet like lilacs and moist with the exertion of their run.

“You’re overreacting,” she said.

“Maybe. Maybe not. I’d rather not take the chance.”

She sniffed. “Can we just go back into the city? I need to go into the office. I haven’t worked in days.”

“It’s the weekend, and you never take vacations. People will understand.” Her office was just as much of a target as her home. Quickly, he tried to think of a reason to make her want to stay. “My mother has a bunch of old photo albums from her time in the Peace Corps. Why don’t we poke through them and see what we can find?”

Dust flew into the air when Riley pulled the leather photo album off the shelf. He sneezed as he walked back to the slip-covered sofa where Abigail sat.

“Bless you.”

“Thanks. This one’s from 1975, the year my parents arrived in Taiwan,” he said, and sat next to her, their thighs touching from hip to knee.

Such casual intimacies did not go unnoticed by her. With Riley’s leg pressed against hers and his scent invading her senses, she was shocked at the force of her yearning. Were his mother not in the next room, Abigail would have thrown him to the floor. She imagined that his body would taste salty with sweat in this heat, and his long, lean limbs would be agile and loose. She would lick his neck, from his collarbone up to his ear, and let her hands run down his torso to find the center of his desire.

There, on the faded Persian rug that covered his mother’s living room floor, Abigail would quench her burning need to feel him inside her.

Oblivious to her obscene thoughts, Riley opened the book and spread it across their laps. The pages were packed with photos that someone had carefully placed between the sticky card stock and thin plastic sheets. Abigail suspected that such albums weren’t acid-free, as the images were badly yellowed. Photographs stuck in albums such as these experienced a slow, inevitable deterioration.

“You should put these pictures into new binders. This paper is eating them away.”

“Sure. Scrapbooking sounds like a fine hobby for a CIA agent.”

“Maybe your mother would like to do it.”

“I’m sure she knows she could. She’d do it if she wanted to.”

Abigail flipped a page, marveling at landscapes that were both exotic and familiar. It was Taiwan, and it called to her like a ghost from the past through the faded color photographs.

Riley’s father must have been the photographer because his mother, recognizable by her strong, brown arms as much as her wide smile, was in nearly every picture.

“Oh, that has to be Yangmingshan,” Abigail breathed when she saw snapshots of steam rising up from a gloriously verdant valley. “It’s seismically active and has some of the best hot springs in the world.”

“I remember. Used to have to go into them naked.” Riley turned the page. A man laughed while immersed from the chest down in an opaque blue pond. “That’s my dad.”

“No kidding.” From the unruliness of his sandy brown hair to the sharp line of his jaw, the laughing man was unmistakably Riley’s father.

“He was a handsome guy.”

“That’s self-congratulatory. He looks exactly like you.”

Riley flashed his wicked smile. “Like I said. Handsome guy.”

The next several spreads were still set in Taiwan and included more people, from barefooted children to farmhands, whom his parents must have met during their travels around the island. Then the journey left the forests and hills. Finally, there were photographs of a major city, crowded and colorful. She could almost hear the cacophony rise up through the images—the endless bleating of car horns, murmurs and shouts in Taiwanese Mandarin, and underneath it all, the constant hum of heavy industry that made Taiwan an economic powerhouse despite its small size.

Taipei
. The album took Abigail on a tour through her long-forgotten home. She turned the pages slowly, wary but eager, like a child about to ride a roller coaster for the first time.

About halfway in, they found a picture of two smiling young men, barely more than teenagers, their arms around each other’s shoulders. Her skin tickled with recognition. One was unmistakably her father. The other was Riley’s.

“That’s my dad,” Riley said, pointing to his mirror image quite needlessly.

“The other man is my father.” She stared at the picture, her face growing warm. He smiled fully, without reservation. “I’ve never seen him smile like that.”

“No? My dad was a happy guy. It looks like they really were friends.”

“It does. I know your mother said so, but I didn’t think it’d be quite this…apparent.” The warmth of her face progressed to a tightness in her throat. Her father hadn’t been happy around her, not like he appeared to be in the photograph, at least. Had he been dissatisfied with his family life? Was that achingly common feeling the reason he’d stayed away?

Riley shrugged and ran his fingers through his hair. “Peter Mason isn’t known as a friendly guy. He doesn’t really have friends, at least not that the CIA knows of. But maybe things were different back then. Maybe your dad was different when he was younger. He’d have been in his early twenties at this point.”

She pushed aside her emotional reaction to the image. “When I met with Donald Wheeler a few days ago, he wouldn’t tell me any details about my father’s career with the CIA or why he left my mother. He told me that if I wanted to know what happened, I needed to listen to you.”

“To me?”

“Exactly. At the time, I thought he was telling me to discontinue my own search for the truth and cooperate fully with the CIA.”

“You did the exact opposite of that and ended up in Arles.”

“Strapped to a chair by agents of my own nation; yes, I remember it well, thank you.”

He looked sheepish.

“But what if Wheeler meant something else?” she continued. “What if he meant it more literally? What if he thought you knew the answers to my questions?”

“I don’t know anything I haven’t already told you.”

Her brain refused to let it go. The answers were here; she just had to keep peeling the onion. “Everything happened in 1989. We left Taiwan, never to see my father again. Your father died under mysterious—and unnatural—circumstances, also in Taiwan.”

Riley blinked slowly, but then his eyes sharpened. “And in Prague, the Czechoslovakians began peacefully dismantling the Communist government.”

Abigail didn’t believe in coincidences. “Could your parents have been mixed up in this mess with Kral, too?”

“Abigail, I’ve told you everything I know. You can’t think that I’d hide something from you at this point. Maybe old Wheeler just thought we’d make a good pair.”

She shook her head. “He’s not a matchmaker. Our histories are connected, and this photograph proves it.” She rapped her knuckles on the book.

“All it proves is what my mother already told us. Four expats found friendship in a foreign land and then drifted apart.”

“What did your mother already tell you?” asked a pleasant voice from the hallway.

Riley and Abigail fell silent as his mother walked briskly into the living room and sat down in a leather armchair.

“Well?” she asked cheerfully, and then her eyes drifted to the album sitting open on their laps. “What did I already tell you?”

“That you and Dad were friendly with Abigail’s parents,” he said, watching her face for a reaction.

She smiled easily. “Of course I did, Son. What are you two looking at over there? Is that an old photo album?”

“Yes,” Abigail said swiftly. “How close, exactly, were your husband and my father?”

“As close as any men can be, I’d say. Your father wasn’t one for idle ties.”

“Were they related?” Abigail asked.

His mother frowned. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“Were your husband and my father brothers, or cousins, or in any way related by blood?”

“Abigail, give her a break.” Riley pressed his hand on Abigail’s leg in an effort to calm her. Her muscles were like iron under his palm. “Mom, I’m sorry. We’ve been running around in circles the last few days.”

“What does your work have to do with your daddy being related to Peter Mason?”

Maybe he was seeing ghosts in the shadows, because he didn’t like the way she said that. “Are they?”

His mom chuckled. “No. Don’t be silly. They were just friends, for crying out loud. Let me say without equivocation that this little girl’s father is in no way related to my husband Scott.”

“Are you quite sure?” Abigail asked through gritted teeth.

“Well, aren’t you just the prettiest little pit bull I’ve ever seen?” His mother’s smile brightened. “Remind me to drop a sedative in your tea the next time you stop by.”

“Stop it, both of you,” he said, desperately trying to order his thoughts and keep his women from scrabbling on the floor like a pair of hyenas. “Mom, the thing is, Abigail’s father is missing, and we’re trying to help him.”

“What do you mean, ‘missing’?”

He exchanged a glance with Abigail. She shrugged her acquiescence to reveal more.

“He’s gone off the radar, and we think that the only way to help him now is to understand why he never joined Abigail and her mother after they moved back to the United States.”

“Is he really in trouble?” his mother asked carefully.

“We believe so. He was last seen in the company of a man who is no friend to America, and we don’t know whether Peter went with him willingly or was forced,” he answered.

His mother jumped to her feet. “I need to make a call.”

She began to leave the room.

“No!” Abigail’s shout froze his mother in place.