Shadow Woman: A Novel

by Linda Howard

  His lips set in a grim line, he got back into bed and stuffed the pillows behind his back. “You let your emotions get the best of you. The decision was that you couldn’t be trusted, so the options were the memory wipe, or a bullet.”

  “Wow, some choice.” She didn’t like what she was hearing. She didn’t like that she’d evidently been weak. She’d handled some tough situations in her job, made some hard calls, and she’d lived with the results. What could have so upset her that she’d been judged unstable enough to be a threat to … whoever they were? “So when I started getting my memory back …”

  “You were a threat to everyone.”

  “Including you?”

  “Including me.”

  She was horrified that anything she’d ever done had been a danger to him. She had never thought of herself as a weak person, not even these past three years when she’d been such a dulled-down version of herself. What had been so bad that she’d broken under the strain?

  “Tell me,” she said brusquely.

  “All right.” He made the decision as incisively as a surgeon would wield a scalpel, though the scowl on his face made it obvious he didn’t like it. “You do need to know. But if you freak out on me, I’ll drug you and keep you locked up somewhere. Got it?”

  He would, too. She didn’t doubt him for a second. “Got it.”

  He picked up his phone from the bedside table, slapped the battery in, and turned it on. He began tapping the screen; from where she sat on the bed she could see a web page loading. “Remember what I said,” he warned, and turned the phone toward her so she could see the screen.

  Lizzy frowned, startled, as she instantly recognized the image. It was a picture of herself, the way she used to be before she’d been given this new face. “That’s me. Why are you showing me a picture of myself?”

  “Because that isn’t you. That was First Lady Natalie Thorndike.”

  “Get out,” she said, disbelieving. She took the phone and stared at the image, trying to make the connection. Something tickled in her brain, a sense of repulsion, as if she wasn’t supposed to go there. Pain stabbed at her temples and she caught her breath, laid the phone down.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked sharply, picking up the phone again.

  “Headache,” she managed, trying to breathe deeply and focus on something else. She thought about him, about the years he’d spent protecting her, and before that when he’d trained her for—

  Well, that didn’t work. She put both hands to her head and squeezed her eyes shut. “Sorry. It happens every time a new memory tries to come through. It isn’t as bad as it was the first few times.” Forget the Oscar Mayer wiener song; she had something much better to think about now, which was Xavier naked. Different kind of wiener. She almost laughed at the thought, and the pain ebbed. Opening her eyes, she smiled at him. He was watching her closely, not trying to help, gauging how well she handled the situation.

  Deliberately she held out her hand for the phone, and was gratified when he gave it to her. She made herself look again—and felt another one of those clicks of memory. She examined the photo, and now she could see that this was an older version of her former self. The First Lady had looked extremely good for her age, whether from very good facial work or from genetics. Regardless, except for the hint of age on the First Lady, and the hairstyle, she and Lizzy had been identical.

  Had been.

  Was the First Lady dead? Lizzy didn’t remember anything about her dying, but when she thought about Mrs. Thorndike, it was in the past tense.

  “Is she dead?” she asked uneasily.

  “Yes.”

  “When did she die?”

  “Four years ago.”

  Four years, which put her death in the middle of Lizzy’s two missing years.

  Don’t go there don’t go there don’t go there.

  Despite the warning echoing through her brain, she swallowed and said, “What happened to her?”

  “I shot her.”

  Lizzy went numb with shock. She stared at him, unable to say a word. He took the phone from her nerveless fingers, turned it off, and removed the battery. She focused on that because it was easier than thinking about what he’d just said. Even though she thought his phone was probably as secure as any phone that could be devised, he still took the precaution of removing the battery. His expression was as remote and cold as the Arctic landscape, and that scared her.

  “Does the name Tyrone Ebert mean anything to you?” he asked, breaking the thick silence.

  After a minute’s thought, she slowly shook her head.

  He reached out and tugged her close to him, settled her with her head once more on his shoulder. “That was the name I went by when I was transferred to the Secret Service.”

  This was too huge for her to comprehend, yet she sensed this was just the tip of the iceberg. Because it was so big, she seized on a detail, frowning up at him.

  “Your name isn’t Xavier?”

  “It is. Tyrone Ebert was a carefully built alias. It stood up to a deep background check.”

  An alias like that wasn’t easy to build, and only an agency like the CIA, FBI, or NSA could pull it off, build a background so solid that they couldn’t detect their own work. There were compartments within compartments in any intelligence agency, some unknown to even the people who worked there.

  “You were in the Secret Service,” she said, feeling her way through the maze.

  “For a while. I was assigned to Mrs. Thorndike’s detail.”

  “But … why?” Why was he given an alias? Why was he inserted into the Secret Service? She didn’t have to detail all the “whys,” because he knew each and every one of them.

  “We called it a code-black situation.”

  “Which is …?”

  “When the President is committing treason.”

  The President … President Thorndike. Try as she might, Lizzy couldn’t put a face to the name. She tried to think who had succeeded him. After him had come … President Berry, who had fulfilled the remainder of President Thorndike’s term when—

  She breathed deeply through the pain in her head, forced it away. She could get through this.

  “Treason.”

  “We were investigating him.”

  “Who is ‘we’?”

  “I’ll tell you who we aren’t. We aren’t the FBI. This was too deep, and the FBI is hampered by all kinds of laws and shit.”

  She started to protest that it was the FBI’s job to investigate domestic threats to the country’s security, but then bit it back. He was right; the FBI was hampered by laws and shit. That was why there were people like him, who would do the dirty work and then, when it was all tied up beyond doubt, “arrange” for the FBI and others to get the evidence practically dumped in their laps, so their hands were clean and they broke no laws in getting said evidence, which would have made it inadmissible in court. Some things were too important to let someone skate on a technicality.

  “But where did I come in? The last I remember, I was working for a security firm in Chicago. I do remember some of the training with you, and … other stuff … but not any investigation or even how I met you.”

  “Other stuff, such as the fact that we were all over each other almost from the day we met?”

  “We were? That fast?”

  “Damn close.”

  Well, hadn’t she known it, deep down? She’d even had the thought that she’d always been easy for him. She didn’t even mind, because the attraction hadn’t been one-sided; they got to each other then, and they got to each other now. She could push him further than anyone else would dare—and have fun doing it.

  She cleared her throat. “Back to the story.”

  “The story is, when we started investigating Thorndike, we contacted someone who worked at the same place you did, for some technical assistance. He brought you to our attention. Except for your hair, you were a dead ringer for the First Lady. Do you remember anyone ever mentioning
it to you?”

  Lizzy shook her head. “No. But until Thorndike was elected, no one knew anything about her. If anyone said anything about it afterward … I just don’t remember.”

  “We brought you in on the investigation, trained you. The idea was that, with the help of a couple of senior Secret Service agents, we’d be able to get you in and out of the President’s private quarters without anyone thinking about it.”

  “Surely to God he wasn’t stupid enough to keep incriminating stuff lying around the White House! Think of the staff, the aides—there’s no privacy.”

  “Lying around, no. But everything leaves a trail, if you know how to look. And we weren’t actually thinking about inserting you into the White House; it was on campaign stops, holidays, things like that, where the First Lady would act as a go-between for her husband and the Chinese.”

  The Chinese … something teased at her memory, but it was so vague, so deeply buried, that nothing solidified.

  “Long story short, we were in San Francisco, and we slipped you into their hotel suite to search for intel on the payoffs. Thorndike made himself a huge fortune, selling the country out to the Chinese. Money has to be kept somewhere, and we were almost certain the First Lady was handling the transactions. With her family background, she knew almost all there was to know about the ins and outs of international banking.”

  “And she had this information with her?”

  “During the meet and greets, a go-between would slip her a thumb drive during a handshake. On the thumb drive would be information about the latest deposit. They spread it around, to make a pattern harder to spot. She’d download the information to an off-site location, delete the information from her laptop, and destroy the thumb drive.”

  “So I had to get the thumb drive she’d been given in San Francisco, copy the info, and get out.”

  “And if anyone saw you, including the President, no one would think anything about it. You were dressed exactly as she was that day; your hair had been lightened and cut and done just like hers.”

  Lizzy took a deep breath, closing her eyes and taking comfort from the closeness of his big body, the heat of his skin under her hand. “But something went wrong.”

  “Fuckups always happen. Even when you plan for them, you’re hit by a different fuckup than the one you’d planned for.”

  She swallowed. “Was I the fuckup?”

  “No. We’d arranged for the First Lady to leave the suite—took some doing—so the other agents didn’t see her, but the heads of both details were working with us and we got it done. Then we slipped you in. The President was in his bedroom; he wasn’t even aware the First Lady had left. You went into her bedroom, started running the water in the bathroom as if you were in there, located the thumb drive in the purse she’d carried that day, and began copying it.”

  She turned in his arms enough that she could look up at him. “So what happened?”

  “We were sold out by another agent on her detail. He was working with us—we thought. Instead he was on the take with the Chinese, too. He panicked, told the First Lady what you were doing, and she went back up to the suite before you could get finished. He also gave her his weapon.”

  Lizzy fell silent, desperately searching her brain for the pieces of the puzzle, but all she could find was blankness. She had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, a dawning horror that made her want to stick her fingers in her ears so she wouldn’t hear any more, yet what he was telling her was why all of this was happening now, why she was missing two years from her life. Even if she never truly remembered, she needed to know why.

  “The President and First Lady together confronted you in her quarters,” he said. His tone went calm and remote. “She had the pistol, but she didn’t know who she was dealing with. From what you told us later, you jumped her, fought for the pistol, pulled the trigger, and Thorndike was hit.”

  She knew there was a lot he wasn’t telling her; there were gaps and simplifications, details glossed over, yet there was no glossing over the biggest detail of all: she’d killed the President of the United States.

  She didn’t move, stayed locked in his arms. She felt numb and sick at the same time. Later she’d analyze everything he’d told her, poke and prod at the details, but for now all she could do was try to handle the essential fact that she’d not only killed someone—even if it might have been self-defense—but that someone had been the most important person in the world. It went against everything she felt as an American, that no matter what, agree or disagree, the life of the President should be protected. The possibility that she might have been defending herself was cold and scant comfort, because she couldn’t remember, so she couldn’t say for certain what had happened. She might have panicked. She might have lied about tussling with the First Lady for possession of the pistol. She didn’t know and Xavier didn’t know; he was recounting what she’d told him—them—after the President was dead.

  “What did I do? How did you get me out?”

  “You banged the First Lady’s head against the wall, dazed her, put the gun in her hand, and hid in the closet. Both the details broke into the suite. The First Lady saw us, probably figured they were caught—guessing, here, because no one knows for sure—and she started shooting. She shot two Secret Service agents, killed one, a good agent named Laurel Rose. I shot the First Lady.”

  “How did you get me out of the closet, out of the suite?”

  “For twelve minutes, we controlled everything: access to the suite, the weapons, the scene, everything. The senior agent of the First Lady’s detail was down. I took over. We’d planned on you being in disguise when you left the hotel, so thank God we had that ready. Change of clothes, a wig, glasses. We got you changed, and out of there through a connecting room, and set everything up to make it look as though the First Lady shot the President because she had proof he was sleeping with her sister—which he was, by the way.”

  They’d gotten her changed, got her out. She didn’t miss the way he’d phrased that. She sounded as if she’d been more of a liability than a thinking, functioning part of the team.

  “You hadn’t finished copying the thumb drive. You brought the original out with you, too. The evidence nailed him. He was selling not just technology details, but military secrets as well. After we had the situation handled, we talked it over and agreed to leave things as they were. A cheating husband was better than a traitor.”

  Oh, God, this hurt so much. She ached inside, as if she were being torn apart. Not only had she done something awful, but she’d dragged him and everyone else on their team into this with her. “You took an oath—”

  “I took an oath to uphold the Constitution, to protect the country from its enemies, both domestic and foreign. In this case, the enemy was domestic.”

  Their own President.

  “I was a loose end.” She understood now why her memory had been wiped, why her face had been changed. Not only was it best that she no longer resembled the deceased First Lady, but changing her appearance would keep people from commenting on it, perhaps triggering a memory.

  “We’re all loose ends. All of us. But you kind of unraveled afterward, had a hard time dealing with it—”

  “Ya think?” she shot at him, then shook her head at the anger in her tone. “Sorry. I made things impossible for the rest of you, didn’t I?”

  “I knew you’d come through it. You’d had a shock, we all had, but you’re tough, and I knew you’d deal with the facts when you’d had enough time. But the others thought you were a liability, one that would get us all lined up in front of a firing squad.”

  “So … the brain wipe.”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the agent who was working for the Chinese, the one who gave Mrs. Thorndike his weapon? That’s a huge loose end.”

  “He’s the other one whose brain was wiped.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  Xavier got that cold, remote expression on his face again. �
��What do you think?”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Felice wandered restlessly through her house, staying away from the windows even though all the curtains were drawn. She could feel the darkness pressing against the glass, hiding the living ghosts who slipped unseen through the shadows. She didn’t want to make a target of herself by letting her silhouette show, however briefly, against the curtains.

  According to her contact, the specialist he’d called in was out there somewhere, watching, but no matter how good he was he was still just one man, and he couldn’t watch all four sides of the house at once. Her contact had given her a name—Evan Clark—by which the specialist would identify himself if necessary, but she couldn’t think of any reason why she should ever meet him face-to-face. That wasn’t his real name, of course, but under no circumstances did she want that information.

  What had been set in motion five years ago was rolling downhill to its inevitable conclusion, as unstoppable as an avalanche. She didn’t feel good about it; this was the one contingency that they hadn’t prepared for, hadn’t anticipated—that the team members would, by necessity, have to eliminate each other in order to hold the secret safe. It was too big, otherwise. In the end, only one person could know.

  Xavier and Lizzy had to die. Dankins, Heyes, Al Forge—they all had to die. If there was to be only one survivor, she intended to be that one. She had Ashley to think about. Dankins and Heyes had families, too, but she wasn’t worried about their families, she was worried about her own. Wasn’t that the way the human race was wired?

  Once they’d all been so close, linked by the importance of the mission; she’d never respected a group of people more. Not one of them had taken the job lightly, but even so, going in, none of them had realized how steep the price they’d paid would be. How had it come to this?