by Jenna Black
Nadia had known a disguise was part of the plan—it wasn’t like she or Nate could just walk into the Fortress without anyone noticing—but she’d been envisioning wigs and makeup. Not having some stranger hacking at her hair with a pair of scissors.
“What’s wrong with a wig?” Nadia asked, grabbing the end of her long braid protectively.
The woman crossed her arms and gave Nadia a stern look. “Wigs can come off, no matter how firmly you anchor them in place. And you’ll be wearing this disguise for many hours. It’s going to be uncomfortable enough without adding a wig into the mix. Your hair will grow back.”
After everything she’d gone through, it seemed ridiculous for Nadia to be upset over getting her hair cut, but to her utter humiliation, there were tears gathering in her eyes.
The look on the woman’s face softened with sympathy. “I’m sorry, Miss Lake. I’m being completely insensitive. My name is Andrea, and this is my partner, Roger.” She indicated the man, who was still taking things out of his case. “I’m going to cut and color your hair, and Roger is going to do your face. When we’re finished with you, you won’t even be able to recognize yourself in the mirror.”
Nadia swallowed hard and dabbed at her eyes. “I’m sorry for making such a big deal over my hair. It’s so stupid, I know.”
“I don’t think it’s your hair you’re crying about,” Andrea said gently, and Nadia practically lost it.
Of course, Andrea was right. Nadia still had a lot of crying left to do, but somehow she was going to have to shove it all down and put off her grief for later, after everything was over. She took a deep breath, then another. After the third, the grief receded to the back of her mind—still hovering, but not as overwhelming.
Nadia had had long hair all her life, but Andrea cut most of it off and dyed the remainder a deep chestnut brown, leaving her with a short, punky hairdo that required copious amounts of mousse and hair spray to hold in place. Already, she barely recognized herself, but then she sat in Roger’s chair and the true transformation began.
Nadia had imagined Roger would disguise her by putting makeup on her with a trowel, but this disguise was more thorough than that. He wouldn’t let her look in the mirror while he was working, but the stuff he was putting on her face looked more like putty than makeup, and she could feel it building up in places, especially around her nose and chin. Whatever the stuff was, it would be hell on her pores.
“Hold still,” Roger snapped at her when she almost laughed at the absurdity of her thoughts.
After he’d finished with the putty, Roger went to work with a series of paintbrushes and mysterious metallic instruments that Nadia thought would fit in perfectly in a dentist’s office. She was especially careful to hold still when he wielded those.
Eventually, he finished. Nadia’s face felt strange and tight. Roger finally let her look in the mirror, and she couldn’t suppress a gasp.
She looked nothing like Nadia Lake. Her nose was thicker and more sharply flared, her chin was pointier, her cheekbones were higher, her eyebrows had less of an arch, and somehow—Nadia had no clue how he’d done it—Roger had made her look older. With her new face, she could easily pass for twenty-five.
“Avoid touching it as much as you can for the next thirty minutes,” Roger advised. “It’s not entirely dry yet, but when it is, the adhesive will be strong enough to keep it in place even if you do, and nothing but the external makeup can get wiped off. I’ll give you some towelettes with solvent on them. When you’re ready to take the mask off, moisten the edge of it with the towelette, and then pull the rest off. It’ll feel like peeling off a bandage, but I’m afraid that can’t be helped.”
Nadia blinked at herself in the mirror, hardly able to believe that it was her under that face. “Who are you?” she asked Roger, shaking her head in disbelief. “Do you work in the movies or something?”
He met her eyes in the mirror and smiled. “I do real life, not movies. Draw your own conclusions from that.”
The fact that Synchrony had a safe house here within Paxco suggested that they had a pretty healthy and active spy network. Nadia supposed it wasn’t surprising that someone in that network was good at creating disguises. She was anxious to see what Nate would look like when they were through with him.
“Thank you,” she said to both Roger and Andrea. “You did amazing work.”
“Good luck today,” Roger said as Nadia slipped out of the chair and headed for the door.
Her disguise got its first test when she reached the stairs to the second floor. Nate was just coming down for his own transformation, and he passed her on the stairs, nodding an impersonal greeting. Nadia couldn’t help laughing, and Nate paused on the stairs below her, looking at her with a puzzled frown. Which made her laugh harder. She hoped her watering eyes weren’t damaging the mask.
“Nadia?” Nate asked wonderingly. “Is that you?”
“Took you long enough to recognize me,” she teased, fighting off more laughter.
He shook his head. “I still don’t recognize you. I would never have guessed if I hadn’t recognized your laugh.”
She nodded in satisfaction. “Then I very much doubt Dorothy or any of the board members will recognize us. At least not until we want them to.”
“As long as we keep our mouths shut.”
That, Nadia believed, they could do. It was everything else she had doubts about.
* * *
Belinski’s team had turned Nate into a freckled redhead with pudgy cheeks and broad shoulders. There was no way anyone at the Fortress could recognize him or Nadia, but that didn’t stop his heart from beating double time or his palms from sweating. Too many awful things had happened at the Fortress, too many images of the place haunted his nightmares.
He didn’t want to set foot inside the building ever again. And though he mined his rage for strength, he had to admit that the thought of facing Dorothy again made his stomach curdle with fear. By walking into the lion’s den, he and Nadia were putting a whole lot of faith into the small electronic device one of Belinski’s bodyguards carried in the pocket of his suit jacket. It seemed only logical that Thea was using radio waves to communicate with Dorothy and that disrupting those frequencies would cut off the communication. But they couldn’t be sure that was how Thea was controlling her puppet. Thea’s was a nonhuman intelligence. She had invented the Replica technology, and no human scientist had come close to figuring out how she’d done it. Who was to say she hadn’t invented some new way to communicate without wires?
If that was the case, if Belinski’s device couldn’t cut the connection, then Nate and Nadia’s story was going to sound like the ravings of a couple of lunatics. And, thanks to the fabricated video of Nate shooting his father, they would be dangerous lunatics. Belinski might still believe them if the plan failed, but Nate had no illusions about what would happen. With no proof that Thea existed and that Dorothy was her puppet, he would cut his losses and declare that he’d been duped. When Thea demanded he hand Nate and Nadia over to “face justice,” he would likely do it.
Belinski’s motorcade pulled up to the gates of the Fortress and was quickly motioned through. Nate sat in the rearmost car of the motorcade, while Nadia was in the car with Belinski. She was playing the part of a personal aide, and Nate was camouflaged as part of the security detail that accompanied the Chairman wherever he went.
Some of the security detail stayed with the cars when they arrived at the entrance, but Nate joined a group of four others and Marco, Belinski’s chief bodyguard, all wearing bland dark suits and on obvious alert. He tried to mimic their posture and behavior, turning his head this way and that, scanning for danger as they approached the Chairman’s car and opened the door for him.
The Chairman exited, accompanied by his entourage—including Nadia—and they all proceeded into the building and were guided to a large conference room on the fourth floor. The room wasn’t large enough to host a board meeting, especially not wit
h a visiting dignitary and his entourage attending. It was clear that extra chairs had been wedged in around the conference table, with only the chair at the very head—Dorothy’s, no doubt—having any elbow room whatsoever.
About two thirds of the board members had already arrived, most of them with a couple of aides who were forced to stand with their backs against the wall—there wouldn’t have been room to have chairs for all of them.
Getting Chairman Belinski to his seat at the foot of the table reminded Nate of trying to navigate a shopping mall during the Christmas season. A lot of squeezing and sidestepping, with the occasional inadvertent bump. It was similarly difficult for the Chairman’s security detail and aides to make room for themselves against the back wall. Nate wondered again why Dorothy insisted on having board meetings here. The boardroom in the Paxco Headquarters Building was specifically designed for a gathering of this size, with ample seating at the table and a second row of seating behind for the aides and secretaries.
The rest of the board members trickled in one by one, and though Nate could hear the air conditioner going full blast, it wasn’t powerful enough to cool a room this crowded. He longed to loosen his tie and take off his jacket, but of course such a thing was Not Done, at least not by members of a security detail. The board members were shedding their jackets as soon as they sat down, and Nate noticed more than one had brought fans with them, either the cheap paper kind or the tiny little battery-operated ones that could sit on the table. He’d have expected them to do more grumbling about the conditions, but perhaps they had gotten that out of their systems during the first couple of meetings here.
Nate’s pulse soared when, fifteen minutes later, the door behind the head of the table opened and Dorothy’s security detail filed in. Chairs rolled back cautiously—if they rolled back too far, they’d roll over toes—and everyone stood up. Nate’s entire body went rigid, and he became vividly aware of the gun he wore in a shoulder holster. It was meant to be part of his disguise, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t work.
Not that shooting Dorothy would accomplish anything, but it was a tempting fantasy. So tempting he clenched his hands into fists to remind himself not to do anything stupid. There was a breathless pause—for dramatic effect, no doubt—and then Dorothy entered the room.
The body she had created for herself was beautiful and bore just enough similarities to Nate and his father to make everyone believe she was a close relative. She wore a formfitting shell pink skirt suit that managed to be business-appropriate and sexy at the same time, and she carried herself with all the pride and confidence of a woman used to being in charge.
Nate took a deep breath and forced himself not to stare at Dorothy and not to look at Nadia to see how she was handling seeing their nemesis in the flesh. His attention was supposed to be focused entirely on the task of guarding Belinski, though it wasn’t like there was a whole lot to protect him from in this conference room.
Dorothy smiled brightly, her eyes sweeping over the assembly, passing over both Nate and Nadia with nary a flicker of recognition. She waited for one of her bodyguards to pull her chair back for her, forcing everyone else in the room to remain standing in the pettiest of power plays.
Finally, she sat, and everyone else did as well.
Like Nate’s father, Dorothy seemed to take a special pleasure in asserting her authority with a multitude of small reminders. Discussing her business with a visiting head of state should have been the first item on her agenda if she were following any standards of courtesy. Then again, if she were following standards of courtesy, she and Belinski would have met before the meeting and entered the boardroom together. Instead, she had made him wait—and put him in the awkward position of having to stand when she entered or be the only person in the room who remained seated.
Nate was sure Dorothy had done it that way on purpose, and he wished Belinski had been a little less polite and stayed in his seat. Letting Dorothy win in even such a trivial matter felt like a mistake. Then again, Nate was incapable of thinking rationally while his mind kept replaying Dorothy’s murder of his father.
Dorothy compounded the insult of her grand entrance by not immediately ceding Belinski the floor for his address. Instead, she spent a good ten minutes giving a speech about how well her campaign against the Basement was going and about how she predicted in the next two to three days, the “wannabe revolution” would be thoroughly crushed and order restored.
There was a round of applause when she’d finished, though Nate noticed some board members were more enthusiastic than others. A few of them seemed almost manic with glee, and Nate had to force himself to look away. He had always hated sycophants.
Although Chairman Belinski had stood when Dorothy entered the room, his excess of courtesy did not extend to applauding her litany of lies, and he crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair while the board members cheered, a couple of them even pounding on the table in their enthusiasm.
Dorothy noticed that Belinski did not join in the applause, her eyes and lips both narrowing in displeasure.
“I have just delivered excellent news,” Dorothy said to him from across the length of the table when the noise level in the room lowered. “And yet you don’t seem to share our spirit of celebration, Mr. Chairman. Are you not pleased that peace will soon return to Paxco? Surely you don’t wish continued armed conflict within the borders of your closest ally.”
Nate couldn’t help staring at her, though since her attention was entirely focused on Chairman Belinski, she didn’t notice.
What was the bitch up to? It was one thing to show the kinds of subtle disrespect she’d already shown, but challenging him on his lack of applause was a far bigger breach of etiquette. Some of the board members were made visibly uncomfortable by her words, but some of them clearly didn’t care or were even pleased by the insult.
The hair on the back of Nate’s neck rose. In his days as Chairman Heir, he had sat in on many a board meeting. He’d never made much of a show of paying attention, and he had always found them excruciatingly boring. Even so, he knew every one of the board members personally, and there was something decidedly off about the tone of this meeting. He was used to most of them being sycophants to some extent, but he was not used to the vocal minority keeping their mouths shut.
He looked closely at Directors Bull, Nielsen, and Riley, all three of whom had balls of steel—though Shana Nielsen might object to the description—and all three of whom were quietly nodding in agreement. Tom Bull was almost eighty years old and had the biggest stick up his ass of anyone Nate had ever known. The man could parse an insult out of even the most innocuous of statements and use it as an excuse to get up on his soapbox and pontificate. He’d even had the nerve to rebuke Nate’s father a few times, using his advanced age to excuse his seeming disrespect. He should have been appalled at Dorothy’s blatant lack of manners, not nodding in agreement.
Chairman Belinski stood up, his gaze traveling around the table, making eye contact with every member of the board of directors—at least those who weren’t so embarrassed by Dorothy’s rudeness that they were staring at the table or at their hands.
“Some very disturbing information has come my way,” Belinski said. “Information that suggests you have not been entirely truthful about what has been happening in the Basement.”
The board members looked variously intrigued, shocked, and outraged. Nate himself was surprised at Belinski’s bluntness, but then considering the tone Dorothy had already set, perhaps it was only fitting.
Dorothy rose slowly to her feet, her eyes fixed on Belinski’s, her face giving away nothing.
“I must say I resent your implications, Mr. Chairman,” Dorothy said. “Perhaps we should continue this conversation in a more private setting rather than airing dirty laundry in public.”
Belinski didn’t budge. “I have nothing to hide, Madam Chairman. Can you say the same?”
“Are you calling me a liar? Right here in my ow
n boardroom?”
There was an angry murmur among the board members, and several of them were glaring at Belinski so fiercely it looked like they were about to leap across the table and tackle him.
“According to my sources,” Belinski said, his voice rising to be heard over the murmur, “you cut off phone service, then power, then food and medical supplies to the Basement—which caused them to riot, not surprisingly.”
Dorothy snorted. “Your sources have it backward. Assuming these so-called sources even exist. Or are you trying to pick a fight in hopes of breaking our trade agreements without violating the letter of said agreements?”
Belinski’s lips twitched in a small smile. “Believe me, Miss Hayes, if I wanted to get out of our trade agreements, I’d find a more subtle and tactful way than this to do it.”
Dorothy’s face flushed red, and several of the board members pushed back their chairs and stood up with shouts of outrage.
“You will address me as Chairman Hayes,” Dorothy said, “or you can go back home to your pathetic little state and Paxco will have nothing more to do with you.”
The board members who had stood up—there were eight of them, Nate noticed—all voiced their agreement. Nate could hardly believe that Directors Bull, Nielsen, and Riley were all standing, all glaring at Belinski with almost identical looks of fury, as if he had personally insulted them. They should have been demanding answers from Dorothy, not blindly taking her side. Even if Dorothy had secured their loyalty through bribes or threats, they should have at least shown some interest in Belinski’s claim.
“You are not the real Chairman Hayes,” Belinski said, and Nate realized with a start that that was his cue.
Nate opened the moistened towelette the makeup artists had given him, using it to loosen the edges of his makeup/mask. Pulling the damned thing off was an exercise in torture—he wondered if he had any eyebrows when he was finished—but he managed it. Nadia, too, was removing her mask, pulling the false face off to reveal the familiar features beneath. It was a relief to be able to recognize her once again, and from the look they shared, he guessed she felt the same way.
