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“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?”
