by Linda Howard
“So send him out on a job.”
She really hadn’t dealt with Xavier enough to know he wasn’t “sent” anywhere. He was offered jobs. He took them if he wanted to. Al had worked with him, trained him, and he trusted him in the field more than he’d ever trusted another human being. The one thing he’d never do was underestimate the man.
“He won’t go. Not now. He has his own ears on Subject C; he knew about the breach at the same time we did.”
“What? What?” She almost shouted the last word, which for Felice meant she was about to explode with fury. “You knew that, and you didn’t prevent it?”
“He isn’t going to trust us if we don’t trust him. He knows we know.” To ease the tension from the atmosphere, Al went to the coffeemaker and selected a pod, popped it into the machine, and slid a polystyrene cup into place. The machine hissed and popped, and a few seconds later began dribbling hot coffee into the cup. “What’s more, he knows where our operational base is, who our analysts are, what shifts they work, and where they live. He knows your routine, he knows your house, he knows your daughter’s house. If you don’t believe anything else I’ve said, Felice, believe that. Of all the operators in the world, he’s the one I wouldn’t want to piss off.”
She was silent for a moment, her nostrils flaring as she processed that she was as much of a target as any of them. He’d learned a long time ago that people who felt safe were a lot more willing to risk the lives of others than were people who were in the trenches themselves. It was a completely different viewpoint.
Still, this reaction was because she wanted to contain the threat to herself. He imagined she’d have him knocked off without losing a minute’s sleep if she thought he would ever be a security risk, but he was part of her team, and she trusted him. He trusted her too, as far as that went, not to turn on him. But Subject C was a different matter, and now she was seeing Xavier, too, as not being part of her team. That was her mindset, and one of Felice’s strongest points—and also one of her weak points—was that she didn’t doubt her own decisions. She considered options, and she made the call.
He sipped on his coffee, and she mentally poked and prodded at the situation. Finally she straightened from the table. “You’ll have to handle Xavier,” she said, her eyes cold. “I want reassurance that everything with Subject C is status quo, so the active surveillance will be in place asap. I’ll handle it. You may alert him if you think he absolutely has to know, but I advise against it. Be very careful what you do.”
Annoyed, Al registered that by handling it herself, Felice meant she didn’t want him using his people; she wanted to use people he didn’t know. Fine. Reducing his measure of control was a slap at him, but it was also something that could backfire, and with that last comment she had put the responsibility on him no matter what happened. If he told Xavier and things still went south, it was on him—but not telling Xavier was a risk no sane person would take.
“Oh, I’ll tell him,” he said mildly, reining in his temper. “After all, you wouldn’t want your men to get their throats sliced while they were sitting in their cars.”
Her lips pressed together. “If that happens, then all bets are off, and I’ll move on him. I’ll think of a way to handle the fallout. Just make sure he understands that.”
She left the tank, her heels clicking smartly against the tile floor. Al took another fortifying gulp of coffee. No way was he telling Xavier what she’d just said, because that would guarantee she didn’t wake up tomorrow. How could she not realize that?
Because she felt safe.
But she wasn’t. None of them were.
Chapter Eleven
Lizette’s Sunday was completely uneventful, mainly because she didn’t leave the house. Instead she cleaned, and in cleaning looked as intensely as she dared for hidden microphones and cameras. She rolled back rugs, dusted lamps, even rearranged the furniture a bit. All the wiring that hooked up her TV to boxes and recorders and such had seemed like prime possibilities, but her TV was wall mounted, which meant she couldn’t unhook everything under the guise of moving it to another location. Besides, as far as she could tell, everything had looked normal.
On TV, bugs were always planted in the phones, or the lamps; cameras were mounted behind stacks of books, peeping through tiny openings, though of course they were always spotted because of blinking red lights. What kind of idiot would use a covert surveillance camera that had a blinking red light, for crap’s sake?
With that thought she braced for a headache, but—nope, not even a twinge. Hallelujah! Not that she had any clue why her thoughts would cause such savage headaches, but she was all for anything that stopped them. She couldn’t say definitely, but it seemed as if the first time she had these weird thoughts was when the headaches were most hellish. By now, she’d thought about bugs and cameras so often that the subject felt commonplace.
Finally she concluded that if the house was bugged, it was in the wiring, which she couldn’t check. She slid the battery cover off her cordless phone and examined the compartment, but couldn’t see anything suspicious.
There were three conclusions she could draw from her findings. One, the bugging was a professional job. Two, she didn’t know enough about the subject to do a thorough search. Or, three, she was completely nuts. She threw that last one in just to allow for the possibility, but everything in her rejected it. She knew she was missing two years of memories. She knew she’d had surgery on her face, which she also didn’t remember. Every time she started to doubt herself, those two irrefutable items pulled her back into full doubt-everything, trust-nothing mode.
Not being able to figure out what was going on was the most frustrating situation she’d ever dealt with in her life. It wasn’t just that there was no obvious reason for the no-memory, altered-face deal, but she couldn’t think of any off-the-wall, subtle reasons, either. No medical condition that she knew of fit the parameters. Nothing in her life as she knew it fit the parameters.
As she knew it. Those were the key words.
All that was left to her was some sort of conspiracy theory, which, as far-fetched as it seemed when compared to her very ordinary and unexciting life, did fit the details better than anything else she could imagine. How else could she explain the suspicion about her cell phone being bugged—something that had never before occurred to her—or her car having a tracker on it, or suddenly discovered driving skills that were completely out of place with her normal driving habits? And what did she know about burner phones?
It was as if a different person was inside her, fighting to the surface. No—that sounded kind of split-personality, and that wasn’t how she felt at all. She felt as if she, the real person, was trying to escape the drab prison They had put her in. The life she lived now, the withdrawn, no-fun, dull and completely predictable day-in-and-day-out, didn’t jibe with the person she’d been before. She’d always been up for an adventure, for pushing herself. At her job in Chicago, she’d—
Damn, damn, damn! She dropped to the floor, clutching her head and trying to stifle her moans as she curled into a tight ball and fought to focus on something, anything, that would break the grip this unbearable pain had on her. If anyone was listening, she didn’t want them to know anything was wrong, because suddenly this seemed like a weakness that they might be able to exploit. She was helpless enough if one of these attacks caught her, without someone figuring out how they were triggered. What if they could just ask her a question about her past, and trying to think of the answer would do this to her?
Working out that possibility shifted her focus enough to let the pain ebb to a bearable level. Evidently anything that she could concentrate on would do the job, which gave her a strategy for handling the headaches. They weren’t coming as often, and most of the time now she could catch herself before the pain really got her. It was only when an entirely different subject would pop into her head that she’d get ambushed now.
But these thoughts were clues to her past.
If the headaches were the price she had to pay to find out exactly what had happened to her, she’d deal. Instead of trying to avoid the triggers, maybe she should be exploring them. She knew she’d lived in Chicago; she remembered that. So the problem was with the job she’d done; that part of her life was vague and misty, shrouded in mental fog. For now, it was enough to identify the problem. Trying to clear away the fog would be like probing a sore tooth. Maybe the fog would gradually clear away on its own, maybe not. She didn’t know if she had the luxury of waiting to find out, so she had to assume that she didn’t. Now that she knew the area to check, she could revisit the subject occasionally, see if things became any clearer.
Chicago had to be the key. That was when she’d lost touch, because she didn’t remember getting from Chicago to D.C. Something had happened in Chicago. At least now she had a starting point.
By bedtime, she was tired from all the cleaning and frustrated because she hadn’t found anything, but definitely ready for bed. She showered because she was dirty from cleaning—wasn’t that just wrong on some level?—and crawled into bed ten minutes earlier than her usual time.
Maybe she’d dream about the hot guy in the pharmacy again. Every time she thought about Friday night’s dream her heartbeat would speed up a little. It had been so great, the dream so intense and realistic that she’d actually felt him enter her; if she closed her eyes, she could still clearly recall the heat and sensation, and, wow, her climax had been explosive. Yeah, waking up that way in the middle of the night was well worth the lost sleep.
But Mr. X didn’t visit her dreams, and she woke Monday morning feeling a little disgruntled about it. She went through her normal routine, not because she found comfort in the familiar but because for now she sensed being normal was critical to her well-being.
She left on schedule and took her normal route to work. Every so often she’d check her rearview mirror, but the rush-hour traffic was so chaotic, with vehicles dodging back and forth in the lanes, jockeying for position, that she could barely keep track of who was directly behind her at any given time. There were a lot of similar cars and SUVs, too; a vehicle would seem familiar and she’d try to watch it, only to notice a moment or two later that, wait, there was another one that was identical in color, but the headlights were a little different. And she couldn’t constantly watch the mirror and drive at the same time, unless she wanted to rear-end someone. In the end, she gave up and simply concentrated on getting to work.
At the office, she felt a little more secure. She smiled at the guard as she paused to sign in. Her ID card was clipped to a lanyard that she wore around her neck; the guard knew her, of course, but the procedure was strictly enforced. Entry into the building was controlled, and everyone had to check in at the security desk.
She got into the elevator with several other people and punched in the code that would make the elevator stop on the floor where Becker Investments was housed. The car began rising, the motor and cables whining. The elevator-code thing was more for impressing clients than anything else. After all, the stairwells were still free access, and had to be because of fire codes. Still, she had walls and people around her, and whatever was going on didn’t seem to warrant an entire assault team roping down from the top of the building.
Headache.
Willing herself not to make a sound, not to collapse on the floor, she stared hard at the abstract patterned blouse the woman in front of her was wearing. The pattern was wild but the colors were kind of muted, in grays and creams and blues, which made a nice mix.
Okay, good. Concentrating on the pattern worked as well as anything else, and she hadn’t had to resort to humming.
She got off on her floor. The receptionist was just arriving too, emerging from another elevator car, and together they walked down the carpeted hallway. “Good morning, how are you?” the receptionist said. Her name was Rae; she was pretty and maybe twenty-three, twenty-four. Lizette got a glimpse of the book she was carrying: a textbook on marketing. Evidently, Rae was going to school at night, with an eye on a different field of work. Lizette had done her share of receptionist work when she’d been straight out of college, as well as waitressing. Strange, but she’d take waitressing over being a receptionist any day. It was much harder work, but at least she’d been moving, and every day had been different even though most of the customers had been regulars.
If she’d still been in school, it might have been a different story; she might have needed a quieter job, so she could get in some studying.
Then she thought back to the energetic kid she’d been. No, she would still have picked waitressing. She’d even liked the challenge of keeping certain customers under control.
Those memories, she noticed, didn’t trigger any kind of reaction. They were normal memories. But now she knew she could add assault teams, and roping down the outside of buildings, to her list of avenues to explore, along with Chicago. Evidently she’d really been into some derring-do kind of stuff.
Deep down, she felt a sense of rightness. Whatever she’d done, wherever she’d been, she hadn’t been content to sit in an office building every day.
Almost as soon as she stored her purse in the bottom drawer of her desk, Diana stuck her head around the cubicle wall. “Hi! Still feeling okay? I meant to call you this weekend, but things went nuts with the kids. I’d think about calling you, then Armageddon would break out and it would slip my mind, and I’d remember again after we’d already gone to bed.”
Diana’s kids were four and five years of age, a boy and a girl, and both of them seemingly hell-bent on breaking their necks before first grade. Having been around them before, Lizette completely understood.
“I’m still getting headaches, but it’s more off than on.” She said that to give herself some cover in case she had one of the attacks. “No more nausea. That was over with by Friday afternoon.”
“Good. You sounded awful when I talked to you. Feel well enough to grab some lunch today?”
“Sure. See you then.”
Diana waved and headed for her own cubicle. They had lunch together at least a couple of days a week, whenever Diana didn’t have errands to run. Her kids seemed to generate a lot of errands, everything from doctor’s visits to picking up stuff for birthday parties for their day-care buddies and replacing broken items. Diana’s life was a study in damage control—real, physical damage, not the bad-news kind.
Then it hit her. Diana’s kids were four and five, which meant that if Lizette had truly worked at Becker Investments for five years, she’d at least remember one of her friend’s pregnancies … but she didn’t. She couldn’t remember when Diana didn’t have the two kids.
She’d hardly needed more proof that something was very wrong, but somehow the personal nature of this was way more convincing than her car registration, driver’s license, and tax returns. She remembered Diana’s birthday, the kids’ birthdays, things like that, so if she’d been here she definitely would have remembered them being born.
Ergo, she hadn’t been here. She’d worked here, and lived in her house, for roughly three years. The couple of years before that—anyone’s guess.
She’d been a different person, and she needed to find out who that person was, and what she’d done. Everything hinged on that.
Chapter Twelve
She thought about it all day, knowing inside that she was living a life that wasn’t hers, that the person she’d been had somehow been stolen. She had been concentrating on appearing as if nothing had changed, but maybe the key to unlocking her past was in breaking free of routine, in acting more as she imagined she’d have acted in that forgotten life.
She didn’t have to do the same thing day after day after mind-numbing day. If she was being surveilled—and where in hell had that word come from?—as long as she didn’t do anything really out of character, such as suddenly signing up for martial arts classes, she shouldn’t set off any alarms. Not that she wouldn’t like to get in some martial arts training,
but she wanted to take this gradually.
With that in mind, when she left work that afternoon, Lizette took a different route away from the office building, heading away from home, losing herself in new twists and turns, losing herself in ordinary, maddening rush-hour traffic. She wasn’t going anywhere in particular, so she wasn’t in a hurry.
The workday had been uneventful—normal—and should have lulled the sense of urgency that kept her internally on edge, but it hadn’t. Normal didn’t feel normal, it felt fake, as if she should be more on guard now than she had been before. Every so often during the day she’d felt as if the hairs on the nape of her neck were standing up, warning her, indicating a high level of alarm. The fact that she couldn’t detect anything in her immediate surroundings that could possibly be alarming wasn’t reassuring. Was her office bugged? Was someone in the office keeping an eye on her? Was every keystroke on her computer being logged?
She needed a long, leisurely drive to settle her down. If anyone followed her, that would give her a chance to spot them. If no one followed her, then she’d have scouted out the territory past her usual boundaries, and she’d feel more settled when she did go home. There was nothing like a good, long drive to clear the mind; she could remember taking drives in the past when something was bothering her, not going anywhere in particular, and how her subconscious would take over and the solution to her problem would surface.
She drove a little faster than normal, too, whenever she’d catch a break in the traffic and could. Zipping in and out, moving smoothly and quickly among and around the other cars, gave her a mild shot of adrenaline that almost felt like relief, as if she’d loosened a too-tight belt. She usually stuck to the speed limit and the right lane, puttering along like an old lady. Not today, though.
She’d headed west, into Virginia. The miles unspooled beneath her wheels. For a moment, just a moment, she felt as if she could truly breathe. No one would be looking for her here; no one would care. If she’d been followed, she hadn’t spotted the tail.
