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Bastien
My head swims,but I force myself to focus on him. Those cheekbones, the arch of his black eyebrows, the refined European nose, the shape of his jaw… it’s like someone made a mask of my face before the accident, and he is wearing it.
“Is this some kind of fucking joke?” I snap at the man as I sit up.
“Keep your voice down,” he says mildly. His accent is American. Southern. He’s from a wealthy family. I can see it in the way he carries himself and the way he dresses. He’s wearing a gun-metal gray chambray suit, white oxford shirt, and suede double monk-strapped shoes, and he has an ostrich-skin briefcase. A Patek Phillipe watch glitters on his wrist.
He glances at the door, then his ice-blue gaze drifts back to me. His eyes are the same color as mine. It’s uncanny. “No, it’s not a joke. I’m your cousin Robert. Well, distant cousin, like twice removed or something like that.”
My cousin. I have family that my parents never told me about. Why?
“We’re like twins.” I stare at him in amazement.
He returns the stare, examining my new features with a critical squint. “Not anymore, thanks to the surgery. But last month, you were. A friend of ours spotted you on the news at the security expo in London and told us about you. As soon as we saw that news clip, we knew you had to be family.”
I remember that. My mother was very upset about it. Another one of my family’s paranoias. Because we’re rich, they insist on keeping an extremely low profile. We’re not supposed to be photographed in public, ever. My mother is petrified of kidnappers.
My company, Cyber-X Solutions, had a booth at a security expo in London, and I made a public presentation. This was the first time my picture had ever been made public. My mother was hysterical when she found out, and my father was grimly angry, telling me I’d put our entire family at risk. I thought it was a bizarre over-reaction, but I was also used to their strange behavior when it came to me.
Or maybe not so strange, since apparently, they’ve been keeping some pretty big secrets.
“Who’s we?” I have a million questions for him.
“Our family. The men in our line are very distinctive looking. We knew right away that you were related to us. We’ve been… researching you, ever since.”
I frown at that. I’m not crazy about strangers digging into my private business. Why didn’t they just call me and introduce themselves?
That’s a subject that needs to be explored more, but first, I need to know why I’m in the hospital. “You said there was no car accident,” I prod.
“Your father paid someone to drug you and had you brought here to be operated on. He paid a fortune to the doctors not to ask any questions. There was also some blackmail involved.”
A shock wave rolls over me. My God. My mother would have to have been in on it too.
But all along, I’ve sensed on some level they were lying to me about the accident.
The only surgery was on my face. There wasn’t a single mark on my body. How could I have had a car accident and only injured my face? And the way both of my parents were acting when they came to visit me, jumpy and guilty. No wonder my father ordered me a new car. He was the one who trashed my car to lend credence to the story of the accident.
“Why?” I say faintly.
“So you wouldn’t look like yourself anymore. Too great a risk of exposure. You bear a strong resemblance to your father or, rather, to the way he used to look.” He leans in, eyes darting around the room before he continues just above a whisper. “Your mother and father are fugitives.” That soft, lilting voice of his is tearing my world apart. “They fled the United States almost thirty years ago and have been hiding in France under false identities ever since. If anyone in law enforcement spotted you and traced you back to your father, it would end their lives as they know it. They’d have to go into hiding, and they’d lose everything.”
“But that can’t… it doesn’t…” For the first time in my life, I’m at a loss for words. My mother’s irrational terror of the United States and the way my parents fiercely guarded our privacy and refused to even have our pictures in the school newspaper or yearbook suddenly seem to make sense. Red flags wave in my mind, telling me it’s all true.
“I might look like him, but I’m not him,” I snap. “So what if they come to me. I’m fine to play dumb and cut my parents off for good. They can live their fucked-up lie.”
He shakes his head. “They’ll never stop hunting them. Your father was a very famous man back in the day. His disappearance was a big deal. The risk was significant.”
Robert pulls a tablet from his briefcase and clicks a button. When he holds it out for me to look at, my stomach clenches.
It’s an article from a New York newspaper, twenty-eight years ago. There’s a picture of a man named Joshua Smith, who looks exactly the way I used to and exactly like Robert. Joshua Smith was a billionaire corporate raider. The article says that the police are investigating him for the disappearance of a woman named Tamara Bennett.
“Tamara is your mother’s real name. Joshua is your father. That wasn’t his real name, actually, but that’s another long, very complicated story.”
In the picture, Joshua Smith has wavy black hair, and he’s clean-shaven. That’s why all the men in our family had to keep their hair cut so ridiculously short, and why they all wear beards. To disguise our appearance.
He shows me more newspaper articles, including one about my mother. They’re mind-boggling. She was kidnapped by my father’s twin brother and tortured for a week before a rogue police officer rescued her.
Apparently, she suffered a mental breakdown from her ordeal. She shot and killed a pedophile on a busy downtown street at lunchtime, and then, months later, escaped from a psychiatric institute, five months pregnant.
