by Linda Howard
Then the Highlander turned into the middle-class neighborhood, and Lizette breathed a sigh of relief.
The relief didn’t last long. The gray sedan was still a short distance behind her, not riding her bumper but staying fairly close.
Without using her turn indicator, she took the next left, sharply and cleanly. Huh. The Camry, which she didn’t think she’d have chosen for herself, handled pretty well. On the side road, she slowed her speed. She checked the rearview mirror and saw the gray car turn onto the road behind her.
Her pulse rate jumped. She took a deep breath, and something deep inside her seemed to settle down. Coincidence, like the Highlander? Hell, no. One coincidence was more than enough for one day. She wouldn’t take the risk that this was another. She checked for oncoming traffic, then slammed on her brakes and spun the steering wheel, making a one-eighty turn in the middle of the street and heading back toward the main road. As she zipped past the gray car she didn’t look at the driver, not directly. She could see well enough with her peripheral vision to identify him as the man from the grocery store parking lot, though.
He didn’t look directly at her, either.
Stalker, robber, rapist … innocent bystander? She wasn’t going to take a chance, regardless.
She pulled back onto the main drag and hit the gas. Traffic was light, so she didn’t have any problems swerving in and out between cars, changing lanes, putting some asphalt between her and the man in the gray car. She was so intent on the traffic, on the cars she passed with no more than a hair’s breadth between them, that she didn’t dare check her rearview mirror to see if the gray car was behind her.
But when she hit a fairly clear stretch of road, she checked the mirror. Was that him, a quarter of a mile or so back? His car was so ordinary, it was impossible to tell, and she couldn’t make out the details of his grill and headlights.
Several blocks past her office building she took a fast right, slowing just enough that she could maintain control. She took the next right, too, then a left. She passed a slower-moving black pickup, made another turn, then pulled into the parking lot of a small apartment complex, turned a corner, and slid her vehicle into a small space between a white van and a gray pickup, two high-profile vehicles that hid her smaller car from view, if anyone had been able to follow her to this point.
Just in case, she popped her seat belt and slid down low in the seat so that anyone who did drive by wouldn’t see that she was in the car. Automatically she reached for her purse, as if there should be something there she needed, but her fingers stopped well short of the leather strap. What was she reaching for? Her breath mints? Fingernail clippers?
Yeah, she could be flip about it, but in the back of her mind she knew exactly what she’d been reaching for. I need my weapon.
Her heart was beating hard but not terribly fast; her legs trembled in reaction, to either fear or adrenaline. Right now, she couldn’t tell which.
Maybe she should call the police, but what the hell would she say? She hadn’t gotten a license plate number, and even if she had, the man in the gray car hadn’t done anything illegal. Scaring a paranoid woman wasn’t a crime, last she’d heard. No, no police. Besides, putting the battery in her cell phone and turning it on would let whoever was following her triangulate her position.
Oh, shit. The car had a GPS. It might have a separate tracker hidden on it somewhere, for all she knew. If her pursuer was tracking her movements, the gray car would show up any minute now, and there was no way she could evade him for good, at least as long as she stayed with the car. A part of her mind screamed that she should get out of the car now, that sitting here she was in a position of weakness, but out there … out there in an unfamiliar neighborhood with no gun, no backup, no one to call, was she any better off than she was right here?
No gray sedan showed up, and after a while she had to conclude that it wasn’t going to. If the guy had been following her, she’d lost him. Which brought up two possibilities: either her car didn’t have a tracker on it, or he was some random pervert who didn’t belong with Them. He might have seen where she’d turned off the main road, but there were too many possible routes after that, including more than one that would have taken her back to the main road. In her mind she replayed the drive, the twists and turns, the close calls, the speed.
The freakin’ rush.
Where in hell had she learned how to do that?
Well, maybe she was getting a little too proud of herself. She hadn’t exactly driven a Le Mans race. There was also the more-than-fifty-fifty chance that the guy hadn’t been following her at all, and she’d risked life and limb escaping from nothing.
She waited another five minutes, then finally sat up in the seat. Then she waited some more, wanting to see what was going on around her. Her position here was a good one, she decided. No one passing by on the street would see her vehicle. They’d have to be in the parking lot and right up on her to have a clue. And if that happened she was pretty much screwed, unless she put the car into a low gear and rammed them. She’d have to keep that in mind.
But no one drove past. The only activity she saw was apartment residents coming and going from the Dumpster twenty yards away. She made herself sit there a while longer. How long did she need to wait before she could safely leave? She couldn’t stay here, but she didn’t see how she could leave before dark. Hours from now. Finally she grabbed her purse and pulled the strap over her shoulder, then left the car, easing around the van on the driver’s side to sneak a peek toward the road. There was no traffic, nothing but a few kids playing ball. There wasn’t much beyond this complex, so the road didn’t serve as a throughway to anywhere. Anyone who drove back this way was either coming here or lost.
No one would expect her to hide here.
She popped the trunk, shaking off that weird thought, and ruefully lifted the grocery bag with the softening frozen yogurt in it out. No way would it survive much longer; and she wasn’t leaving this parking lot anytime soon. The chicken would have to go, too. The temperature in the trunk was plain damn hot, and she didn’t want the yogurt melting and the chicken spoiling there. She might as well get rid of them both while she could.
She walked toward the Dumpster, purse strap cross body, one bag of groceries—a.k.a. garbage—in hand. What a waste! Now she’d have to wait until next week to find out if she liked blueberry pomegranate frozen yogurt, because she was damned if she was going back to the grocery store until then. She almost laughed; she was losing her mind—or not—and she was worried about the yogurt.
She was aware of the girl’s presence long before the kid opened her mouth.
“If you don’t live here you can’t use our Dumpster, and you don’t live here. I know everybody here, so don’t lie to me.”
Stifling an inner sigh, Lizette turned to face the girl. Twelve years old or so, she guessed. Skinny, stringy blond hair under a faded blue baseball cap, blue eyes, good bones. She’d be very pretty, one day, if no one messed with her face. She kept a cautious distance between them.
“I didn’t know.” She lifted the bag slightly. “Do you like blueberry pomegranate frozen yogurt? Slightly melted, of course.”
The girl narrowed her eyes. She was so young, but her gaze was already suspicious. “I don’t know. Never tried it.”
“Neither have I, but it looked good. Wanna trade? Frozen yogurt and chicken for that hat.”
A hat would hide her hair, disguise her profile when she finally did leave here. Such caution was probably an exercise in uselessness, but she couldn’t stop herself from making the effort.
“I’m not an idiot,” the girl snapped. She scowled. “Is it poisoned? Drugged?”
“Of course not,” Lizette said indignantly. “I’m just not going home as soon as I thought I would, and I’d hate for it to go to waste.”
“You were headed for the Dumpster with it. Why should I give up my hat for your garbage?”
Good point. At least she was no longer b
eing accused of trying to poison random children. “Fine. Twenty bucks for the hat.”
The girl’s eyes widened. “Deal,” she said promptly.
Lizette set the bag down, reached into her purse for a twenty, and approached the girl. “I’m Lizzy. What’s your name?”
“I’m not supposed to tell strangers my name.”
“I’m not a stranger, I’m the woman who’s about to seriously overpay for a used hat.”
That got a smile out of the girl. “I’m Madison.”
“Anyone ever call you Maddy?”
Madison shook her head briefly and scowled, letting Lizette know she didn’t care for the nickname. “No.” Then she removed the cap and they made the exchange.
Picking up the bag, Lizette turned and heaved it into the Dumpster.
“Hey!” Madison said, shocked. “You threw the ice cream away!”
“You didn’t trade for the ice cream. You want it, you’ll have to do something else for me.”
“I’m not Dumpster-diving for ice cream.”
“Fine. You want to earn another twenty?”
“Doing what? You’re not a perv, are you? I ain’t taking off my clothes.”
“Thank God. I just need some help with my car.”
“I don’t know how to fix a car.”
“It doesn’t need to be fixed. It needs to be disguised.”
A couple of hours later, after full dark had fallen, Lizette tucked her hair under the ball cap and got behind her steering wheel. There was no doubt she’d gone way beyond caution and rode hard on the edge of downright nuts, but in a way she’d had fun. Once Madison had gotten into the swing of things, she’d even laughed. The hubcaps had been removed, and a good dose of mud covered not only the license plate but the bumper and tires, as well. Her neat-as-a-pin Camry now looked anything but. Her car now sported a bumper sticker proclaiming her daughter an honor roll student at the local middle school, and an honest-to-goodness hula girl swayed on her dash. Madison had even gotten some duct tape and put a patch of it on the left passenger window, as if covering a hole. If by chance the man who had followed her out of the market parking lot that afternoon, or anyone else who knew her car by sight, was still out there, watching and waiting, he’d never recognize her or her car.
It was kind of sad that no one came to check on Madison in all that time—she said her mom wouldn’t be off work until after nine—and that she could deface a car that might not be her own with no adult coming to inquire about her activities.
“Hey!” Madison called as Lizette started the engine. Lizette rolled down her window, and the girl leaned in. “I know it’s none of my business, and you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but … who are you running from?”
Lizette eyed her from beneath the rim of her ball cap and gave a wry smile. “Honey, I have no idea.”
Chapter Ten
“Al.”
Al Forge turned as his name was said in a clipped, calm tone that told him the identity of the speaker even before he saw her. It was a fucking fact of life: everyone had someone to answer to, even if, at the end, it was Death, or God, or whatever they thought they were facing. As high up on the food chain as he was, he still had a superior, and her name was Felice McGowan.
“Yes?” he said, making it a polite query as if she were a visitor who was interrupting him—which technically she was, because this was his territory—mainly because he knew that even though she wouldn’t show a flicker of reaction, it would annoy her. Annoying Felice was a game he enjoyed playing. Some days an interruption was welcome, but today he had a feeling he knew why she was here, and he wasn’t looking forward to the looming conversation.
“Tank,” she said calmly, turning on her heel and striding away. Al didn’t let himself show any outward signs of concern, but he definitely felt them as he followed her to the tank, an interior soundproof room that was as secure from eavesdropping as they could make it, which was pretty damn secure. No cell phones were allowed in the room, no cameras, no recorders, no weapons, and everyone who entered was scanned to make certain they didn’t have any of those devices. What was said in the tank stayed and died in the tank.
On TV he’d seen clear Plexiglas versions of the tank, with all the inhabitants in clear view, but this tank was a regular room that had been shielded and reinforced, with jammers that prevented both reception and transmission. It wasn’t as cutting edge as the TV versions, but it worked.
Before he entered, he removed his cell phone from his belt and placed it in a vault. Then he pushed open the heavy reinforced door and went inside.
The tank was an ordinary room on the inside, with a conference table lined with high-backed office chairs, a coffeemaker and all the accoutrements sitting on a credenza at one end, and harsh fluorescent lighting that they’d recently replaced with pink-tinted bulbs because they’d noticed they all got headaches and wanted to kill each other when they were in here. Their jobs were stressful enough without throwing bad lighting into the mix.
“What’s up?” he asked casually after he’d closed the door behind him, as if he didn’t already know, but this was part of the game.
“Subject C.” She propped one hip on the table, a dominant position that he was positive she took on purpose. Because she was nothing if not thorough, Felice would have studied body language, micro-expressions, and every other area that could possibly give her an edge in a field that was dominated by men.
He took a few seconds to admire the picture. Felice was an attractive, classy woman: forty-eight years old, divorced, mother of one adult daughter. She had clear gray eyes and her streaked blond hair was cut in a short, almost masculine style that was stylishly feminine on her. Her tailored trouser suit was a muted dark gray, but the blouse under the fitted jacket was a rich blue that deepened the color of her eyes. She trod the narrow line of being both professional and feminine without a single misstep.
She was also the one person he’d worried about most in this situation. Not because she was a screwup, but because she wasn’t. She was cold and logical and would take whatever steps she deemed necessary to contain the damage. In this situation, though, logic could actually work against them. Al worked hard to stay on top of things so he could head off any destructive decisions she might make, but he’d always been aware that the status could turn on a dime and he wouldn’t be able to stop her.
Xavier had always known it, too.
“Subject C,” she said again.
“Everything seems unchanged with Subject C.”
“Except for the security breach concerning the time lapse.”
He hadn’t tried to hide the slip by the Winchell woman from Felice, because straight up was the only way to play this. “It wasn’t a security breach. We know about the time lapse, but Subject C doesn’t. She didn’t react in any way. She was sick, and as far as we can tell from her subsequent actions, she didn’t attach any importance to the statement.”
“You can’t know that. Remember that she was very, very good.”
“That was before. Her memory was wiped. Now she’s just an ordinary person who lives in a very small world.”
“The process has never been tried to this extent before. I don’t put as much trust in it as you appear to.”
“I haven’t decided to not trust it on no evidence to the contrary,” he said with some bite to his tone. Felice might outrank him, but Al didn’t operate from a position of fear; it simply wasn’t part of his makeup.
In a world with a population of over seven billion people, there were six people alive who knew what had really happened four years before. Originally there had been eight, but one had died of natural causes and the other Xavier had taken care of—not that Felice knew that particular detail, but Al did. Six was such a small percentage he couldn’t begin to mentally calculate how many decimal points that was. But Felice was one of the six—and so was Subject C. Technically, Subject C didn’t know, but the possibility that she might one day recover her mem
ory was what kept them watching her. She was the weak link, the one who’d been brought in from the outside and wasn’t part of the team. Felice had never really trusted her, but they hadn’t had any other option.
“I’m ordering physical surveillance,” Felice said, not asking his opinion, simply telling him what she’d decided.
Shit! That could be an unmitigated disaster. He gave her an exasperated look. “You’re overreacting, and you may well push Xavier into overreacting, which is the one thing guaranteed to make this blow up in our faces.”
Being Felice, she didn’t respond to his charges, simply made a counter-charge of her own. She was accustomed to dealing with congressmen and -women, with committees and bureaucrats and generals. He doubted she’d have blinked at being charged by an angry rhino, so she certainly wasn’t going to back down from him. “You’ve always been far too cautious concerning Xavier. He’s as mortal as the rest of us.”
Al cocked his head. “I could have had him killed at any time,” he retorted. “Hell, he could have killed us at any time. He knows that, I know that, and you know that. Do you think he hasn’t made preparations? He has the goods on all of us, and he’s set more trip lines than we could ever find.”
“He says. Why would he incriminate himself?”
“Because he figures he’ll be dead, so it won’t matter about him. It’s too big, Felice; you can’t contain the damage if this blows open, and it will if you don’t stay calm.”
That got a flash of ire from her, because Felice was nothing if not calm. If emotion had ever figured into any of her decisions, Al hadn’t seen it. She actually drummed her fingernails on the table, once, before smoothing out her expression. “I’m not sending a wet team out after her. I just want to make certain she isn’t doing anything unusual, something we can’t pick up from audio.”
“Then I should tell Xavier.”
