Riptide

had worried and worried, tried to
    figure out the odds, determine the best thing to do, but Adam had
    simply stepped in and begun protecting his daughter from a stalker
    who could be, truth be told, Krimakov, although to Adam the odds
    were that Krimakov was long gone. But it was a lead. It was something,
    the only thing they had.
    Thomas should have known that he didn't have to even ask.
    Adam also imagined that Thomas Matlock felt a goodly amount of
    relief.
    As he spoke quietly on the phone, he saw the jolt of pain cross

Thomas Matlock's face, and he knew it was because Thomas would
    never again see Allison. And more than that. Thomas Matlock
    hadn't been with his wife when she died. He'd wanted to be, but
    Becca was there, always there, and he couldn't take the chance. The
    pain and guilt of that had to be tearing him up inside.
    Oh yeah, he'd try to save Thomas's daughter.
    Only one mistake in the seventies, and Thomas Matlock had lost
    any chance at the promising life he'd begun. He'd had to hold himself
    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