Shadow Woman

  Like he did every morning, he sat in the small, shielded room in the safety-valve condo, which served as the nerve center for all of his various alerts, electronic trip wires, and information-gathering programs, drinking coffee while he listened and read, and monitored the monitorers. He’d piggybacked onto their systems, so when her house was swept they picked up only their own bugs, but, again, he figured they knew anyway. If they hadn’t been smart, he wouldn’t have been working with them in the first place. Not that he didn’t trust his own people; he did, up to a point. Beyond that point, he trusted only himself. He was surprised they’d kept him in the loop this long, but then, he was intimately involved, and he wasn’t someone they wanted to piss off. He had friends with power, and even more dangerous friends with skills; he didn’t know which one of the two had more influenced the decision to keep him informed, but as long as it worked, he didn’t give a fuck why.

  Still. They watched her; he watched them, and made certain what they reported was what he already knew. And because he already knew, they were careful to keep the status quo going. They couldn’t withhold information, or give him the wrong intel. What he couldn’t control was if they initiated an action without there being a trigger, if someday someone in power simply decided the risk was too great to let the situation continue.

  That was where he trusted his gut instinct, honed to a lethal edge by all the action he’d seen. The day that instinct whispered to him was the day he acted. Mutual assured destruction, a fancy way of saying “Mexican standoff,” was a fine concept when it came to keeping the peace.

  At the moment, he was reading about the state of the euro—not that he was any kind of financial guru, but then, he wasn’t reading for investment information. Money drove everything in politics, in national security—hell, it drove everything, period. Desperate nations did desperate things, and a ripple in the monetary market could have him on a jet within the hour, traveling to God only knew where, to do whatever had to be done. Because he wasn’t available to oversee her all the time, he had a backup in place, to act if necessary. He tried to anticipate those times, predict when his services might be needed. While he was reading, he was also listening for anything the least out of the ordinary. So far, her routine had seemed to go as usual. Anything unusual would trigger a tidal wave of reaction.

  “Ten, twelve, one, forty-two, eighteen.”

  The whispered numbers grabbed his attention as abruptly and completely as if a shot had been fired. He set down his cup and swiveled his chair around, his head cocked, his entire body alert. Automatically he reached for a pen, jotted down the numbers. What the hell—?

  Seconds later, she repeated the sequence of numbers, though this time in a slightly stronger voice.

  There was a pause. Then came sounds of movement, at first normal, then hurrying, followed by the unmistakable noises of prolonged and violent vomiting.

  Fuck! He wished he had eyes on her, but the surveillance network had allowed her that privacy. Nothing she said, either on her house phone or cell phone or even her work phone, not to mention what she watched on TV or did on her computer, was private. Her car was constantly tracked by a GPS device. But video had been nixed; not out of any concern for her constitutional rights, which had pretty much been shredded and trampled in the mud, but because it had been deemed unnecessary. They didn’t need to see her go to the toilet, or take a shower, so long as they knew that was what she was doing.

  Surveilling her had been easy. She never deviated from her routine. She was calm, predictable—and now, it seemed, sick. But what the fuck were those numbers?

  He listened to a couple more episodes of vomiting. Definitely sick. Then came the signal that she’d turned on her cell phone. The name of her department supervisor at work, Maryjo Winchell, popped up on his screen.

  He’d cloned her cell, so he listened in real time to the call. What he heard reassured him. She thought she had a bug, she was throwing up—he already knew that—and had a splitting headache. Maryjo confirmed there was a stomach virus making the rounds, her kids had had it, blah blah blah.

  His tension had just begun to fade when Maryjo threw a grenade in his face. “This is the first sick day you’ve had in three years, so don’t sweat it.”

  Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck! He’d long ago learned to control his temper—most of the time—but now he really wanted to throw his coffee cup through the computer screen. Why the hell would Maryjo Winchell keep up with how long someone had gone without taking a sick day?

  Thank God, Lizette didn’t seem to notice. Maybe she was too sick. She mumbled a thanks, then said, “I’m sorry, I have to run.” He listened to her do just that, listened to a bout of vomiting, running water, a long pause, another bout—then there was a clatter, and the cell phone connection went dead.

  Simultaneously, from the other bugs, he heard a clatter and heavy thud. After a few minutes, she blew her nose. There was the sound of heavy breathing, more running water. Then, in the thick voice of someone who had been vomiting and whose nose was stopped up, she muttered, “Oh, crap, now I have to buy a new phone.”

  More noises, as if she was fiddling with the phone. Water running again. Then came the sound of the hair dryer. That made sense; she washed her hair in the shower every morning. Even though she was sick, she was drying her hair. That was her routine, one she hadn’t deviated from in the three years he’d been surveilling her. Not going in to work, even though she was sick, was the equivalent of an earthquake in her well-ordered life.

  After she turned off the hair dryer, he followed the sounds as she went back into her bedroom; from what he could tell, she was going back to bed.

  Everything should be all right. The other listeners would have noticed Maryjo’s verbal bomb, but the important thing was whether or not Lizette had noticed, and she hadn’t seemed to. She was sick, she’d been on the verge of heaving again, so she might not have been listening all that closely.

  Could they take that chance?

  He knew her. Her biggest talent had been her ability to think on her feet, to take a fluid situation and flow with it, letting her instinct lead her. She was undoubtedly puking her guts up, but given the Winchell woman’s slip, it was too much of a coincidence, at least to him, for Lizette to “accidentally” drop and destroy her cell phone almost immediately on the heels of that revelation.

  On the one hand, something like this was never supposed to happen. She was shut down, and the process was permanent.

  Maybe. It had never before been tried to the extent that they’d used it on Lizette. She was supposed to have been forever altered, the way an amputee is altered; she would function, she would have a life, but would never again be the way she had been before. But because the process hadn’t been pushed to that extreme, how could anyone know for certain exactly how she’d respond?

  That was where his own gut instinct kicked in. He had to factor in the fluidity of her thinking, which maybe made her more resilient. Add that to the damaged cell phone, and his gut said, “She’s back.”

  So the question wasn’t whether or not they could take the chance of ignoring the alarm sounded by Winchell’s slip, but could he?

  Chapter Three

  Information was everything. The gathering of it went on ceaselessly, every second of every day. Eyes and ears were everywhere, in one form or another. There were cameras, wiretaps—some warranted and some not—and keystroke loggers; cell phones were cloned or their calls simply captured; there was thermal imaging; there were GPS units that logged the position of both vehicles and cell phones, and even the old-fashioned method of human surveillance. Sifting through that monumental collection of information, separating the meaningful from the mundane, was a chore that never ended. With the completion of the NSA’s data center in Utah, there would be even more details about every call, every text, every e-mail for the computers to sort through, based on certain keywords that would trigger a closer look.

  But even with all the high-tech stuff, there we
re still realtime, human eyes and ears that watched and listened, especially to sensitive cases that couldn’t be trusted to any computer program, no matter how advanced and top secret. If it was never in the data banks, then it couldn’t be mined, couldn’t be hacked.

  Dereon Ashe had one of those sensitive-case jobs. He didn’t know everything about it, but what he did know was enough to make him wish he didn’t know anything, because he was damn certain this was the kind of shit that got people killed. Nevertheless, he and at least five other people endlessly monitored the woman known as Subject C—which always made him wonder exactly what had happened to subjects A and B—and examined every move she made, every call she placed or received, every detail of her life. It didn’t matter that her life was, as far as he could tell, pretty damn boring; it was minutely examined.

  Damn boring, that is, until now.

  First there were those weird numbers, which made him tense and quickly scribble them down, in case they meant something, then—“Oh, shit!” It was definitely an “oh shit” moment. Dereon rubbed his eyes, not because he was tired, but to give himself time to think. He was incredulous that something so simple—calling in sick—could blow up in their faces like this.

  Quickly he punched the numbers to connect him with the agent in charge of this operation.

  “Forge.”

  The brusque identification by Al Forge made Dereon grimace with a combination of worry and alarm; he didn’t want this decision to be on him so he had to notify Forge, but at the same time, he didn’t like being in the crosshairs of Al’s attention. It gave him a goosey feeling, like ice cubes dripping down his back.

  Swiftly and without any embroidering, he related what had just happened with Subject C. Though of course they knew her name, in conversation she was never identified. Subject C existed only to a very select group of people, of which he was one—damn his luck. He didn’t know what had happened with Subject C, and he never wanted to know. He watched her, he reported his findings, and he kept his nose out of business that wasn’t his. It seemed safer that way, because whatever had gone down had to have been seriously big shit.

  “I’ll be right there,” said Forge, and dead air filled Dereon’s headset as the call was terminated.

  He keyed back in to the surveillance audio and continued listening to Subject C, picking up where he’d left off. By the time Al Forge arrived, Dereon was able to bring him up to date on what had happened in that short interval.

  Al scratched his jaw, his sharp gaze turned inward as he weighed events against possibilities. He was pushing sixty, his short hair gone mostly gray, his pale eyes a little less icy as age began to cloud them, but he was still as lean and hard as he had been when he was in the field. His face was lined by the weight of decisions he’d made, actions he’d taken. Dereon didn’t ever want to be in Al Forge’s position; nevertheless, he’d be hard put to think of anyone he respected more.

  The silence wore on as Al stood there in thought, the seconds ticking past.

  “C might not have noticed.” Dereon finally felt compelled to point out the obvious, just to break the silence.

  The flicker of Al’s gaze sliced at him for the waste of time. Abruptly he said, “Put me through to Xavier.”

  That was one of the most puzzling aspects about this job. Everything that happened with Subject C was reported to this Xavier, who, as far as Dereon could find out, was nothing more than someone who worked black ops; he wasn’t a supervisor, wasn’t in any position of power. There were, in fact, very few details readily available about the man, which in its way signaled that there was more to him than those few details revealed. Al was always the one who talked to him; even more remarkably, none of those conversations were ever recorded. But then, nothing about this situation was on the record. After every shift, all of the data on Subject C was erased.

  A few strokes of the computer keys accomplished that. Al slipped on a headset. After a moment Xavier answered, his deep voice familiar and remote, as if he had never been touched by any emotion. “Yeah.” There was something in that remoteness that made Dereon glad he’d never have to meet Xavier in person, that Xavier didn’t know he even existed. His world and that of the black ops people were eons apart, and carefully kept that way.

  Al said, “Subject C has possibly been alerted to a discrepancy in the timeline.” He paused. “Given that you’ve piggybacked your own surveillance system to ours, you already know this. I trust you haven’t done anything precipitous.”

  Dereon swiveled around in his chair and stared at his superior in open astonishment. Of course they’d known that Xavier was in their system, but they never gave away information. Never. The smallest detail could give them an invaluable advantage—or, conversely, give one to the enemy. Exactly who the enemy was in this situation wasn’t clear, but he did know strategy, and knowledge was power. Al had just given away some power by letting Xavier know that they were aware of his activities. Now he knew that they knew that he knew—God, this sounded like some old vaudeville routine.

  “You’d have been an amateur if you thought for a second that I wouldn’t.” The cool, disembodied voice registered a faint amusement.

  Okay, that was another wrinkle, Dereon thought. Xavier had already known that they knew about his surveillance. Vaudeville? No, this was a chess game, played by two masters who evidently knew each other well. Dereon hated chess. It made his head hurt. For someone who was in his line of work, he really preferred that things be straightforward, uncomplicated, and exactly what they seemed.

  He should have gone into accounting.

  Al made an impatient gesture, then swiftly brought himself back to stillness, as if impatience was a luxury he couldn’t allow himself. “The point is, I’m not going to pretend to give you update reports that I know you already have. You want to know if I’ve been straight with you. I have, all the way. You also need to know that I’m not working with a hair trigger here. There’s no indication that the situation with Subject C has changed, and every reason to think it won’t.”

  “So you called me because, what, you want reassurance that I won’t make a preemptive move? You know better than that. If I said so I’d be lying, and you wouldn’t believe me anyway because if you were in my position you’d be lying your ass off.”

  That went without saying, so Al didn’t bother trying to deny it. In his job, in their jobs, they did whatever was necessary. Sometimes the necessary was ugly; that didn’t make it any less necessary.

  “I don’t want to do anything that will cause harm to Subject C,” Al said, choosing his words carefully. “The situation is balanced.”

  Xavier gave a short, humorless bark of laughter. “I’ve known from day one—hell, before that—that the situation is only as balanced as I make it. Your dilemma is that you don’t know what safeguards I put in place, or how many trip wires. Otherwise I’d have been dead years ago. You know it and I know it.”

  “My job isn’t to kill patriots,” Al said, a quiet note entering his voice. He was a man who’d fought for his country on multiple levels for most of his adult life, and his creed was the same as Truman’s: the buck stopped with him. He wouldn’t throw any of the black ops people under the bus; if it became necessary, he’d sacrifice his own career and freedom first. The people who worked under him knew it; Dereon knew it. That inspired a very deep level of loyalty—except, it seemed, in Xavier.

  “No, your job is to protect the country, whatever that means on any given day.” Cynicism laced Xavier’s words. “And I’m with you on that, normally.”

  “Except in this situation.”

  “Let’s just say I trust you as much as you trust me.”

  “If I didn’t trust you, you wouldn’t still be on the job.”

  “Unless your motive was to keep me busy and maybe out of the country.”

  “I’d assume your trip wires would cover that contingency.”

  “You’d assume right.”

  “So we’re at a stalemate.?
??

  “Remember the Cold War term? Mutual assured destruction? That works for me.”

  “You’re making enemies,” Al said. “Powerful enemies, people who wonder why they should trust you when you obviously don’t trust them. You’re forcing them to see you as a threat.”

  “I am a threat, unless they behave themselves. Yeah, I know, we can all hang together or we can hang separately, but I know these people. At some point, some son of a bitch is going to figure he can outsmart me and put this thing away forever. He’ll be wrong, but the shit will have hit the fan before he figures that out. So, yeah, regardless of what reassurances you give me, I’ll make my own decisions.”

  Al was silent for a moment, deep in his stillness mode. Then he said, “Don’t assume that I’m the enemy. Just remember that. If I can help you, I will.”

  Dereon worked that over in his head. With Al Forge, you never knew; he could either be on the level or he could be playing Xavier. Only time would tell.

  That same curt laugh sounded in their headsets. “There’s another Cold War saying: Trust, but verify. Talk to you later, Forge.” There was a brief pause. “You too, Ashe. It is Dereon’s shift today, isn’t it? Or have I lost track?” The connection ended.

  Dereon’s blood ran cold. He jerked his headset off and stared at Al, his expression frozen with horror. “H-how did he know that?” he stammered. “How the fuck did he know my name?” Or what shift he worked, or anything at all about him? This was like attracting the attention of a velociraptor: nothing good could come of it.

  Al closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Because he’s Xavier, that’s how. Shit. This means he has a mole in here, or somehow he’s got eyes and ears on us that our sweepers didn’t pick up, or he got this location and followed us all to our homes. He’s a patient bastard; he’d spend weeks figuring everything out.”