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“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?
Survival of the fittest. That was what they’d failed to take into account, the primal instinct to protect oneself and family.
In hindsight, this was something she should have done years ago, immediately after the mission had been completed, when no one was expecting it. The body count would have attracted too much attention, though, and now here they were. She had to eliminate all of them—do it herself, or have it done.
Xavier should have been first. He was by far the most dangerous, had been even before the bungled attempt on his life. Al was almost as bad, but he’d grudgingly agreed that taking out Xavier was the only thing they could do now, so she’d bought some time there. The main thing with Al was to act before he got his guard up.
The specialist would have to handle Xavier. There was nothing she could do herself; she’d have to be insane to even consider the idea of trying to handle Xavier. He would be coming for her, Al was completely right about that, and the best place to get her was her own home. When she was at work, she was untouchable. Xavier would expect her to take evasive actions going to and from work. He might think she would go to ground somewhere, but she couldn’t live her entire life hiding from him and he’d know that. He’d also expect her to think she had everything handled, that her ego would blind her to her vulnerabilities.
She had an ego, but not where work was concerned. When it came to the job, her motto was simple: do it. No matter what, do the job. That was where they all underestimated her, but then she’d deliberately built that image. Winning was easier when the opposition didn’t know what you were capable of doing.
If she knew Xavier, he wouldn’t wait long. He’d hit fast and hard. She’d truly expected him before now; what had delayed him? Was he trying to find Lizzy? When Lizzy had left her car behind in the restaurant parking lot, they’d lost any way of tracking her. That didn’t mean Xavier had lost her, though. The sneaky bastard probably had his own trackers planted on her. She had no way of knowing for certain, but she trusted when her gut told her something, and it was saying she was on the right track.
In that case, Xavier had gone after Lizzy, and was probably making certain she was in a safe place. That would make locating her more difficult, but she’d surface sooner or later. And every hour Xavier delayed was an extra hour in which she layered in another story, another false trail, another document that proved he was unstable and descending into insanity. Let all of his trip wires be sprung; he’d be just another nut-job conspiracy theorist. The evidence in the deaths of President and First Lady Thorndike was ironclad, right down to the DNA. Despite the unexpected circumstances, the plan had held.
This one would, too. The most worrisome factor for her was the time limit. This couldn’t stretch on for too long.
Ashley was furious at being taken from college, of course. She so enjoyed stretching her wings, and now abruptly her feathers had been clipped. She was very much Felice’s daughter, fiercely determined in everything she did. Felice could make the fiction she’d concocted—that the NSA had picked up on chatter that could indicate a domestic terrorist attack on Ashley’s college—hold for a couple of days, but after that Ashley wouldn’t buy it.
