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Hell, not just possible but probable.
Rhett gulped back a sudden sickness. He lurched away from the whiteboard, staggered across the room, stumbled to his chair. He sat down hard, rubbing his throbbing temples as he recalled some of what he’d been hearing about Benson’s Darkwater outfit.
Something about how the Darkwater names were all lined up.
Something about how Benson had some OCD thing about that.
About the names.
Did Rhett and Scarlet fit that pattern?
Wait, no, not just that: Rhett, Scarlet, andIndia.
All from the same damn story.
Coincidence or cunning?
Providence or planning?
Benson or bullshit?
Again that sharp pain stabbed behind his eye like something was trying to poke into his consciousness. Another of those connections he could feel somewhere in that free-associating creative part of his brain, the same hidden part of his subconscious which had given him Diego Vargas’s eyes.
“Eyes,” Rhett muttered, rubbing his own burning eyes as his caffeine-fueled testosterone-jacked pill-pulsing mind whirred like some cosmic washing machine combining images and mixing memories, dredging up the past, offering up the future. “I’ve seen those eyes before.”
Rhett shook his head almost convulsively fast, pulling up that photograph with the eyes that had popped into his mixed-up mind’s-eye just now.
Not the photograph of Diego Vargas’s eyes.
A different photograph.
Another snapshot of another’s eyes.
India O’Donnell’s eyes.
“You can’t change your eyes,” Rhett muttered. “They’re the same eyes you’re born with . . .” His voice trailed off as O’Donnell’s photograph filled the laptop screen, filled Rhett’s mind, almost his entire world as he stared into that woman’s eyes, that girl’s eyes, that . . . that child’s eyes?
He stared frozen into those eyes for a long terrifying moment, then clapped his hands together hard as if to break a spell, to pull himself back from where his frazzled mind was dragging him.
You’re exhausted and wired and it’s been a hell of a day and you’re starting to see things that aren’t there, he told himself with trembling urgency. Benson popped back into your life and you thought of that video and all those memories are bubbling up again.
But hell, you know memories can’t be trusted when they’re thirty years old, he warned himself. And the name Scarlet is making you believe one coincidence too many. Get your head straight and focus on the here and now. The past is dead.
And so is that child.
The moment of madness thankfully passed. Rhett closed O’Donnell’s picture, clicked out of the NOC database, rubbed his eyes again, then stared across the room to his whiteboard squiggles and scribbles. It brought his mind back into cold focus, and he moved on to the next decision that needed to be made:
The meeting with Kaiser and Benson.
After dark at an empty house.
Unusual to the point of absurdity.
Could they be so audacious and obvious as to attempt an old-school hit on Rhett?
Had Kaiser and Benson decided that Paige’s verbal evidence was enough to justify them taking Rhett out the CIA way?
No trial, no jury, no funeral, no fuss.
