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There was work to be done.
He couldn’t lose focus, couldn’t think too far ahead, couldn’t count too far down the alphabet.
Now anxiety ripped through Benson once more, chasing away that ethereal sense of expansiveness, dragging him startlingly close to all-out panic for one desperate moment.
Suddenly he was thinking about Nancy turning her back on Darkwater, turning her back onhim. He thought of Kaiser turning his attention to his family. He thought of Diego Vargas on the loose—a deeply troubling development from the last Darkwater mission, a loose end that could change the direction of American democracy if he assassinated Robinson.
There were too many irons in the fire, too many balls in the air, too many things that could go wrong.
Benson took a breath as the panic passed. He regained his customary calmness, but the episode bothered him. There’d been this gnawing anxiety ever since the end of that Hogan-and-Hannah mission, something Benson hadn’t felt after the first seven Darkwater missions. For the first time in years doubt swirled beneath Benson’s rock-solid foundation of cocky certainty.
And beneath the doubt lurked a deep void, an empty space in his soul.
A space which had once been filled with Sally’s love.
A love that felt so far away now, seven years after Sally had been taken from him on that first Darkwater mission.
“Mister Benson, are you all right?” came Paige’s voice through the deafening void that was sucking Benson down into a place he didn’t want to admit still existed in him.
Shit, heknewhow the universe worked,knewthat time and space were illusions,knewthat there was a secret part of reality where he and Sally were together right that moment.
But hell, sometimes you just lost your grip on the truth, Benson thought, lost your connection to the vastness out there and got pulled down to the dense dark dimension of flesh and fear, blood and violence, heartbreak and horror.
Because sometimes that’s where the real spiritual work was done.
Within the cosmic constraints of three-dimensional reality, the physical limitations of space and time, the savage beauty of flesh and blood.
“Call me John.” Benson found enough of a spark to flash a grin. “Everyone at Darkwater calls me John.”
Paige frowned. “What’s Darkwater?”
“You’ll have the answer when I finish,” Benson said, that coyote-glint flashing again in his eyes as he kept going forward, kept spinning the story, knowing he needed to lock Paige and Martin into his risky endgame, show them how nobody was truly in control, that the only way to play the game was to surrender to it, lose yourself in it, marvel at its majesty, gape at its grandiosity, get sucked into its story.
“So Rhett tells Scarlet to end the pregnancy,” Benson continued, pushing on, pulling them along. “She refuses, tells him the baby was meant to be, thattheywere meant to be.” Benson chuckled dryly. “Rhett laughs at her, mocks her,humiliatesher. It gets him off in a sick way. But it’s a mistake. Because it flips a switch in Scarlet. She suddenly gets it, understands that he was playing her, that he used the wordloveas a weapon, took a sick delight in exercising that kind of power over a woman, enjoyed the psychological manipulation almost as much as he enjoyed the physical sex.”
Paige visibly stiffened. She touched her face, blinked away a flash of her own humiliation, her own anger at being played by that bastard. Sure, some of that anger was self-directed, but Benson would bet his house that if Paige’s thoughts could kill, Rhett Rodgers would be a dead man right now.
Of course, Paige wouldn’t be the first woman to want Rhett dead.
Scarlet had gotten there first.
“At first Scarlet threatened him,” Benson went on. “He was the law school Dean, and so Scarlet said she’d go public with the pregnancy, ruin his career. But Rhett flipped the script on her, swore he’d make damn sure she lost her scholarship, would lose her visa, end up getting shipped back to New Delhi with an out-of-wedlock child in her bloated belly. Sorry—his words, not mine,” Benson hurriedly added when he saw Paige frown. “So Scarlet backed down. It sounded to me like she had admitted defeat, was submitting to his power. They were in his bugged apartment, and I heard her tell him she’d do what he wanted and end the pregnancy.”
“But obviously she didn’t.” Paige leaned forward. She wasn’t casting yearning looks towards the exit anymore. “But how did Scarlet keeping the baby lead to you recruiting her as an NOC operator? And how did the baby end up with Rhett?”
Benson exhaled grimly. This was the dicey part, that nebulous space between right and wrong, between science and magic. “At first it did look like she was going to end the pregnancy. I had my guy hack into her computer through the law school’s network. Back then the Internet was still fairly young, no real encryption. Her search and email history was all there. She’d contacted a few local organizations that assisted with abortions. But she never followed through. I thought maybe she was on the edge, torn between ending the pregnancy or having the baby in the hope that Rhett would come around once he saw his own child. But her focus was clearly Rhett, not the child.” Benson shrugged. “They kept seeing each other for a couple of months, both of them playing each other in their own ways. For a while Rhett got her believing it would go back to normal once she got rid of the child. I think Scarletwantedto believe that. But she couldn’t, not anymore, not after the veil of innocence had been ripped off.” Benson paused a beat. “Not after Rhett had awakened Scarlet’s own shadow, forced enough of it into the light that Scarlet was becoming a new person now, but also more herself in a way. And that’s when I knew she had what it took. Rhett had screwed up when he awakened that part of her, but he was still right about one thing: She wasn’t cut out to be a mother, wasn’t destined to nurture new life. Perhaps it was a combination of her conservative upbringing, where sex out of wedlock was so taboo it cast a dangerously dark shadow. Or maybe there really is something about how people are wired. Either way, I saw it in her.”
Paige took a breath. “But you said there were no cameras in Scarlet's apartment. So what . . . what did you see?”
Benson ran the back of his hand over his cheek, feeling the beginnings of day-old stubble. “My tech-guy set me up with a direct link to monitor what she was doing on her computer. About three months into her pregnancy Scarlet stopped running searches for abortions and instead spent all her time in the WESTLAW databases looking up old court cases.”
Benson glanced at Paige, then Kaiser. They were both rapt. Benson smiled inwardly, then continued. “Which of course is normal for a law student. She’d pull up old cases, make notes in a separate text document. I figured she was doing it for a class, so I didn’t pay much attention for the next few months.” Benson shrugged. “Rhett and Scarlet were just two of many potential recruits. I had a lot of irons in the fire at the time. Was working prospects from all the top universities up and down the eastern seaboard.”
“Did they all get codenames from great American novels?” Paige asked with the hint of a smile, like perhaps she understood the importance of names, would maybe someday understand that her own name marked her for a particular path, a particular story, a particular man. “Did you name them yourself when they got into the NOC system? You did, didn’t you?”
Benson smiled, a hint of color rushing to his cheeks. It had seemed a harmless bit of fun at the time. It had started with Rhett, who’d been the only one who chose his own name. But then Benson followed the theme, seeing that it sort of fit—after all, once they entered the NOC program, all Benson’s recruits were quite literallygone with the wind.
The way the system worked, even Benson wouldn’t be able to stay in touch with them, wouldn’t know their covers, wouldn’t be able to contact them unless he was heading up a covert operation and became a designated handler. He was still far down the totem pole back then, still a few years away from being able to head up his own international operations. So the early recruits like Rhett and Scarlet vanished from Benson’s sight like smoke on a winter’s night.
