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The smile stayed on his lips, but those lips stayed sealed. Benson didn’t want to push his luck with Kaiser. Martin hated Benson’s obsession with names, couldn’t stop rolling his eyes at Benson’s insistence that names were magical, that a rose by any other name would absolutelynotsmell as sweet, that names carry power, decide their own destinies, seek out their own fates.
Sometimes even their own mates.
Now Benson’s attention snapped back to Ice and Indy, and immediately the smile was gone from his face and the clock began to tick in his mind. Paige had activated Scarlet hours ago. Ice’s phone went offline shortly after that. For all Benson knew, Ice and Indy were already dead.
Let it play out, he told himself as that uncharacteristic anxiety gnawed at his insides. Either way, there was no pulling the plug on Scarlet now. As Benson’s tech-guy had explained, Paige’s NOC-hack would probably have broken the connection between Scarlet and her handler.
Which meant Scarlet was a weapon that had already been fired.
So Benson had to trust Ice and Indy to take care of themselves for now. His job was to set the game-board up in the United States, position the remaining players so that if Indy and Ice did make it through whatever challenge their fate had tossed at them, they’d have a shot at ending this game the right way, the only way itcouldend.
With Rhett Rodgers dead.
There was no other option. Benson knew it and he hoped Kaiser knew it too. There would be no snitching to the FBI, no tale-telling to Senator Robinson. This would be handled the CIA way.
Old-school and underground.
In the shadows where it belonged.
Paige’s lighthearted question about the names still hung heavy in the air, but Benson ignored it, feeling an urgency to get to the end, deliver the punchline—and hope to hell it landed right.
“Like I said, I was distracted chasing other recruits,” Benson continued. “When I checked in months later I was surprised to see that not only had Scarlet decided to keep the baby, but she’d gone public with the pregnancy. Rhett had just been fired, but Scarlet had been ruined too. I found emails from her family back in New Delhi. She’d told them everything and they’d cut her off, disowned her like she’d been tainted. Her father called her a whore for getting knocked up by a white man out of wedlock, for showing her sinfully swollen belly like it was a point of pride.”
“Wait, Scarlet told her parents everything even though she must have known they’d disown her?” Paige tilted her head and frowned. “So maybe she’d decided she wanted the baby more than anything else, that everyone else could go to hell and she was going to be a kickass single mom and superstar lawyer.”
Benson smiled at Paige’s earnest optimism. “That did occur to me, yes. But no such luck.” The smile faded as the memory resurfaced. “You did get the second part right, though. She wanted to be a superstar lawyer, but her shadow was running the show now, and it wanted vengeance along the way. Killing Rhett’s career wasn’t enough. She wanted to killhim. His rejection awakened a dragon in her, a dense dark shadow that carried all the emotional repression of her upbringing, tripping all the wires that lit up the grid of her psychosis, her natural drive to destroy instead of create—exactly what the CIA looks for.” Benson took a breath, hissed it out through gritted teeth. “Except I didn’t see it until the very end. Didn’t see that keeping the baby wasn’t Scarlet’s heart softening. The baby was just a means to an end. Just a prop on the stage of her madness.” He sighed, shook his head. “I recovered a deleted document on her computer outlining her legal defense. Scarlet was planning a temporary insanity plea. She’d worked out the story. Naïve young girl in a foreign land gets played by an older man in a position of authority. She gets pregnant, is dumped by the man she thinks loves her. Then her conservative parents back home disown her, cut her off from her past. Suddenly she’s alone in the world, betrayed and humiliated, shell-shocked and stunned, teetering on the edge of a breakdown. Then comes the final psychotic break. She gives birth.” Benson exhaled. “And the child is stillborn. It’s too much to handle. She snaps, kills the man who put this all into motion. Doesn’t try to hide or destroy evidence. Instead turns herself in, rolls the dice that her story is tragic enough that she can get a jury to acquit her on grounds of a temporary psychotic break, post-partum taken to the extreme, manifesting in homicide instead of suicide. Scarlet had found relevant caselaw. She’d cited psychological studies.” Benson smiled thinly, a hint of dark admiration in his voice. “It might have worked in court. Might have even made her famous as a cult figure of sorts—especially if people privately supported what she’d done, if people felt the secret thrill of their own shadows taking dark delight in what she’d had the audacity to pull off, dispensing justice in a way most people would never dare.”
Kaiser flinched and rubbed his eyes. “That’s one hell of a gamble.”
Paige gasped and covered her mouth. “Wait, what do you mean bystillborn? Oh, God, she . . . she was planning to . . .”
Benson nodded. “She’d been telling her classmates about how she wanted to have the child at home, the natural way. Setting up every detail in her story. She planned it perfectly. Set the stage with breathtaking brilliance. A superb example of what you’re capable of when your shadow takes control. Rhett’s betrayal triggered the darkest elements of the shadow—sex and violence. That’s what society, religion, and tradition want to repress most of all, and it’s why there’s so much darkness associated with those deeply rooted drives.” He shrugged, shook his head. “Scarlet channeled all that energy, focused it to a sharp point, bet on herself to force it through. She was counting on the power of her emotions to turn fate in her direction, twist destiny into submission. She might not haveknownshe was doing that—hell, back then even I didn’t fully understand the power of human emotions. But I did have a sense that she might have gotten away with it, was good enough to pull it off.”
Benson blinked rapidly now, his mind spinning back to that crackling clear moment when he’d seen the last part of her plan, the pivotal moment which would make the whole story work for her.
“Scarlet knew the plan wouldn’t work if she had an abortion and then later killed Rhett,” Benson said quietly. “She knew abortion was a divisive thing in America, that it would split the jury—especially the women in the jury. But a stillborn child was a universally understood tragedy. Add in the rejections by her lover and her family and the story is powerful, alluring, hard to resist. Scarlet knew she would just need one person in the jury to hold firm to a Not-Guilty verdict.”
“Hung jury,” Kaiser muttered, a hint of angry admiration in his tone. “Judge is forced to dismiss. State could bring it to trial again, but no prosecutor would want to risk losing twice. If Scarlet was sympathetic enough in the press and the courtroom the first time around, the hung-jury decision might be the end of it. District Attorney might just take the hit and let it go.”
Paige let go of another gasp, like she was still picturing what Benson had left unsaid, was feeling it in a way perhaps the two men in the room couldn’t.
“Oh, my God, she was going to give birth at home alone, then kill her own child and pretend it was stillborn?” Paige was on her feet now, hugging herself as she approached Benson. “But you stopped it, right? You got there in time.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “But you didn't have cameras in her place. So how . . .”
“I don’t know how,” said Benson softly. “And I don’t know what. All I know is that I’d come back to town just past the eight-month mark, well before the baby was due. Didn’t want to take any chances that Scarlet might hurt the child. Figured I’d try a straight-up recruitment pitch, with the deleted document as a backup in case Scarlet needed a nudge.” He rubbed the back of his head, exhaled heavily as his mind went back to that day, to those events that had taught Benson a thing or two about circumstance and coincidence, biology and belief, how time and space colluded to drag people to their fates. “I was in my hotel room, had just ordered room service, was unpacking my suitcase. Along with my CIA-issued gadgets was a radio-frequency scanner—the kind that picks up police and paramedic emergency channels.” Benson shrugged. “I always carried it, just in case, but rarely used it. But that night for some reason I turned it on, maybe just for entertainment, I don’t know, it was an absentminded decision, almost unconscious.” He glanced at Kaiser, then gazed into Paige’s eyes, finally blinked off towards the floor and shook his head. “Room service had just arrived when I picked up a 911 call on the scanner. Woman’s voice, hysterical and sobbing, saying her baby wasn’t moving, that she’d given birth prematurely at home and the child wasn’t breathing. It was Scarlet.”
“Premature? Wait, so maybe shedidn’tdo anything to the baby!” Paige cried hopefully. “It came early, so maybe—”
“Let him finish.” Kaiser stared at Benson. “What didyoudo, John?”
Benson blinked twice. “Hotel was just a few blocks from Scarlet’s place. I got there before the paramedics, busted in through the door.” He swallowed hard. “Scarlet was on the floor, naked on a plastic sheet, blood all around her, caul and placenta and cord between her spread-out legs. The child was at her breast, like it had been suckling. Scarlet was staring at the ceiling, her eyes glazed over, her face expressionless, like she was in a trance. She snapped out of it when I burst through the door. I took the child off her, placed it on the table, tried to give CPR. But the little girl was still as a stone, silent as death. She was gone. I knew it the moment I held its lifeless little body. And then I knew Scarlet hadn’t called 911 immediately after suffocating her. It was murder.”
Kaiser exhaled hard. “She waited before calling it in so there’d be no chance of reviving the child.”
Benson nodded, rubbed the back of his neck. “This next part is still a blur, but I remember thinking that it was taking too fucking long for the ambulance to get there.” He shrugged. “So I just snatched that tiny little girl from the table, wrapped her in my jacket, raced down to my car without giving a damn about Scarlet. Sped to the ER even though I knew it was too late, that the child was too far gone, well past the threshold, nothing but an empty shell devoid of its life-force.” Benson blinked twice, huffed out a breath. “But just as I screeched into the hospital lot the child made a sound beside me. The strangest sound. It wasn’t a gasp or sputter or a cry. It was like a sigh, but in . . .reverse. There was a gravity to it, a weight, a heaviness that I still remember clearly. The strangest thing, like something had suddenly entered the child.”
“It was taking a breath,” said Kaiser evenly. “That’s all it was.”
Benson shook his head. “That first sound wasn’t air entering her lungs. I mean, the childdidstart breathing after that strange sound. But that sound was of something entering the body. Something that had maybe left when the child died, but chose to come back.”
