Her gaze bore into him like twin icepicks; she clutched her hand into a fist, so tightly it seemed as if she would break a fingernail.
“What’s in the memos, Mrs. Unteling?” he asked. He tried a long shot. “What’s going to happen when your husband finds out about you and Michaelson?”
As Craig stared back, a crack appeared in her glacial features, until slowly her hardened expression melted, and her face grew slack.
She looked around the room. Pictures, snapshots and open photo albums were scattered on the bed, parts of the “classified documents.” But he could see that most of the photos showed her and Michaelson — standing in front of a dacha, toasting each other while dressed in elegant dinner clothes, dressed in parkas with a world of white around them. Cute pictures, love letters, all incorporated into red-bordered documents. Classified information. What sort of game had they been playing?
Unteling plopped down on the big bed with her eyes closed. She slowly shook her head. “Another week or so and we could have taken care of all this. But Hal wouldn’t return my calls. The bastard! Now look at the mess he got me into.”
Goldfarb stepped into the room and looked around, his dark eyes wide at the sight of the classified documents. Craig holstered his weapon and motioned with his head for Goldfarb to call for Jackson. As Goldfarb quietly spoke into his flip phone, Craig talked to Unteling.
“Looks to me like you did a pretty good job of getting yourself into a mess.” She said nothing, and neither did he, prompting her with his continued silence.
“I loved him,” she said dully, finally. “I really loved him.” She shook her head. “Most people hated the son of a bitch, let his Neanderthal ego to grate on their nerves. But no one could go up against him one on one. He was just too damn smart. And that’s what drew me to him.”
“Then why did you kill him?” said Craig.
She laughed, a short high giggle. “Kill him? Sometimes I wish I had. It would have made life a lot easier back then, back when I was his executive assistant at Livermore, and my husband’s Coalition was taking off. Some of Hal’s outrageous demands didn’t endear anyone to him.
“But you know what? He got things accomplished that way. He made things happen, when other people failed. Hal Michaelson didn’t care who you were or what position you had, if you got in his way, he would bull right through you. When he left Livermore for Russia, I jumped at the chance to go along, to be at the center of history in the making.
“Besides, I had to get away from my husband for a while. Fred wanted me to give up my whole career so I could help him with his Work. Capital W. Everybody loved Fred, but he was just so… so vanilla. Calm and comfortable, without a spark of passion in his whole body. He didn’t have a clue.”
Craig picked up a stack of photos showing Hal Michaelson and Diana Unteling. The photos were not those of friends; there was something much deeper present, a longing of unspoken intimacy. “That’s when you started your affair.”
“If you thought Hal was relentless during a Congressional testimony, it was nothing compared to his stamina in bed. The guy didn’t know how to do anything slow. It wasn’t his nature.”
Craig tossed the photos on the nightstand and picked up two of the classified documents Unteling had found. Each message had a cover sheet — but the inside document was a personal letter, one from Michaelson to Unteling; another from Unteling to Michaelson.
Goldfarb waited at the back of the room, listening to the testimony. Diana Unteling watched Craig flip through the classified memos and laughed; but it was a tired laugh, worn out, defeated.
“That was our game, the only absolutely certain way that we could communicate with no one else catching on. We were each Classifiers. We could stamp whatever we wanted on the documents.”
“Pretty elaborate precautions just to hide an affair,” said Craig.
“Just an affair?” Unteling looked at him bitterly. “Mr. Kreident, I am the wife of the nation’s number one protector of morality. My husband’s Coalition for Family Values went national, and he decided to move the whole organization to Washington D.C. Can you imagine what a field day the press would have if they found out I was cuckolding my dear husband? That would have done far more harm to his Coalition than any assault by a hate organization.
“Fred worked on this for years, and my entire family life was wrapped up in promoting it. My son went into a seminary, even after I encouraged him to study engineering, his first love. Millions of people’s lives have been turned around because of Fred’s outreach program. Just think what could have happened if word had gotten out — that the Coalition director’s wife was fucking Hal Michaelson.”
She paused. “I was offered a job back at DOE headquarters after the on-site inspection work, and exchanging classified memos with Hal seemed to be the only way to keep the affair quiet.”
Diana Unteling looked up sharply when Craig didn’t say anything. “I don’t expect you to condone what I’ve done, Mr. Kreident, but the very least you can do is to keep it out of the papers.”
“I’m not a press agent, Mrs. Unteling,” Craig said. “I don’t write news releases. Maybe if you tell me why you were present in Dr. Michaelson’s lab the night after his body was found. We have the CAIN booth records — that and the threatening message you left on his answering machine.”
She looked defeated. “I was looking for these memos! I thought I could destroy them before they were discovered. I didn’t think at first that he might have kept classified material at home. When I found them missing from his repository, I thought you had already confiscated them.
“But when you came to talk to me, I knew you were lying. You didn’t have them. You didn’t have any idea what the memos contained, or your attitude would have been entirely different. Then I thought I knew where Hal might have kept them, and it would be only a matter of time before you did go through his house with a fine-toothed comb.” She shrugged. “I needed to find them first.”
She stood, ignoring the documents now and brushing aside any pretense of innocence. “But no, the killer wasn’t me, Mr. Kreident. I wanted Hal to live… even if only so I could cut off his balls.”
Craig told Goldfarb to start gathering the classified documents and photos together. “I’ll need to get a statement from you, Mrs. Unteling. And fingerprints as well.”
Unteling set her mouth, but her shoulders sagged. “My fingerprints are already on file with my security clearance, Mr. Kreident. But I suppose this statement will affect my confirmation hearing.”
“We’ll have to give the Senate committee everything in your records. Now if you’ll come with me, I need to take you to our Oakland office.”
As they left the old farmhouse, Jackson stepped from the blue Ford Taurus, having driven up after Goldfarb’s call. They held the back door open for her. As she ducked to get in the car, she stared at Craig, then disappeared inside. Jackson slammed the door.
CHAPTER 38
Late in the evening, as the doctors and nurses and orderlies rushed around him, Duane Hopkins felt small and invisible. He wasn’t part of their concern, but he didn’t need to be.
Stevie was the one they should be paying attention to.
He had not seen his son since they had whisked him back into the examination rooms. Duane sat quietly in the blue plastic chair of the emergency room waiting area, looking at his knees. Empty sounds buzzed in his head. He wished one of the doctors would tell him something about his boy, but he didn’t want to be a bother.