Shadow Woman: A Novel Read online

  “No. Absolutely not. He’ll think it’s just a means of getting to her before he can react.”

  That was entirely possible, knowing how Xavier thought, how he allowed for every contingency. On the other hand—“Do you think he won’t know you’ve put a team on her? Not alerting him is the riskiest thing you can do.”

  “So send him out on a job.”

  She really hadn’t dealt with Xavier enough to know he wasn’t “sent” anywhere. He was offered jobs. He took them if he wanted to. Al had worked with him, trained him, and he trusted him in the field more than he’d ever trusted another human being. The one thing he’d never do was underestimate the man.

  “He won’t go. Not now. He has his own ears on Subject C; he knew about the breach at the same time we did.”

  “What? What?” She almost shouted the last word, which for Felice meant she was about to explode with fury. “You knew that, and you didn’t prevent it?”

  “He isn’t going to trust us if we don’t trust him. He knows we know.” To ease the tension from the atmosphere, Al went to the coffeemaker and selected a pod, popped it into the machine, and slid a polystyrene cup into place. The machine hissed and popped, and a few seconds later began dribbling hot coffee into the cup. “What’s more, he knows where our operational base is, who our analysts are, what shifts they work, and where they live. He knows your routine, he knows your house, he knows your daughter’s house. If you don’t believe anything else I’ve said, Felice, believe that. Of all the operators in the world, he’s the one I wouldn’t want to piss off.”

  She was silent for a moment, her nostrils flaring as she processed that she was as much of a target as any of them. He’d learned a long time ago that people who felt safe were a lot more willing to risk the lives of others than were people who were in the trenches themselves. It was a completely different viewpoint.

  Still, this reaction was because she wanted to contain the threat to herself. He imagined she’d have him knocked off without losing a minute’s sleep if she thought he would ever be a security risk, but he was part of her team, and she trusted him. He trusted her too, as far as that went, not to turn on him. But Subject C was a different matter, and now she was seeing Xavier, too, as not being part of her team. That was her mindset, and one of Felice’s strongest points—and also one of her weak points—was that she didn’t doubt her own decisions. She considered options, and she made the call.

  He sipped on his coffee, and she mentally poked and prodded at the situation. Finally she straightened from the table. “You’ll have to handle Xavier,” she said, her eyes cold. “I want reassurance that everything with Subject C is status quo, so the active surveillance will be in place asap. I’ll handle it. You may alert him if you think he absolutely has to know, but I advise against it. Be very careful what you do.”

  Annoyed, Al registered that by handling it herself, Felice meant she didn’t want him using his people; she wanted to use people he didn’t know. Fine. Reducing his measure of control was a slap at him, but it was also something that could backfire, and with that last comment she had put the responsibility on him no matter what happened. If he told Xavier and things still went south, it was on him—but not telling Xavier was a risk no sane person would take.

  “Oh, I’ll tell him,” he said mildly, reining in his temper. “After all, you wouldn’t want your men to get their throats sliced while they were sitting in their cars.”

  Her lips pressed together. “If that happens, then all bets are off, and I’ll move on him. I’ll think of a way to handle the fallout. Just make sure he understands that.”

  She left the tank, her heels clicking smartly against the tile floor. Al took another fortifying gulp of coffee. No way was he telling Xavier what she’d just said, because that would guarantee she didn’t wake up tomorrow. How could she not realize that?

  Because she felt safe.

  But she wasn’t. None of them were.

  Chapter Eleven

  Lizette’s Sunday was completely uneventful, mainly because she didn’t leave the house. Instead she cleaned, and in cleaning looked as intensely as she dared for hidden microphones and cameras. She rolled back rugs, dusted lamps, even rearranged the furniture a bit. All the wiring that hooked up her TV to boxes and recorders and such had seemed like prime possibilities, but her TV was wall mounted, which meant she couldn’t unhook everything under the guise of moving it to another location. Besides, as far as she could tell, everything had looked normal.

  On TV, bugs were always planted in the phones, or the lamps; cameras were mounted behind stacks of books, peeping through tiny openings, though of course they were always spotted because of blinking red lights. What kind of idiot would use a covert surveillance camera that had a blinking red light, for crap’s sake?

  With that thought she braced for a headache, but—nope, not even a twinge. Hallelujah! Not that she had any clue why her thoughts would cause such savage headaches, but she was all for anything that stopped them. She couldn’t say definitely, but it seemed as if the first time she had these weird thoughts was when the headaches were most hellish. By now, she’d thought about bugs and cameras so often that the subject felt commonplace.

  Finally she concluded that if the house was bugged, it was in the wiring, which she couldn’t check. She slid the battery cover off her cordless phone and examined the compartment, but couldn’t see anything suspicious.

  There were three conclusions she could draw from her findings. One, the bugging was a professional job. Two, she didn’t know enough about the subject to do a thorough search. Or, three, she was completely nuts. She threw that last one in just to allow for the possibility, but everything in her rejected it. She knew she was missing two years of memories. She knew she’d had surgery on her face, which she also didn’t remember. Every time she started to doubt herself, those two irrefutable items pulled her back into full doubt-everything, trust-nothing mode.

  Not being able to figure out what was going on was the most frustrating situation she’d ever dealt with in her life. It wasn’t just that there was no obvious reason for the no-memory, altered-face deal, but she couldn’t think of any off-the-wall, subtle reasons, either. No medical condition that she knew of fit the parameters. Nothing in her life as she knew it fit the parameters.

  As she knew it. Those were the key words.

  All that was left to her was some sort of conspiracy theory, which, as far-fetched as it seemed when compared to her very ordinary and unexciting life, did fit the details better than anything else she could imagine. How else could she explain the suspicion about her cell phone being bugged—something that had never before occurred to her—or her car having a tracker on it, or suddenly discovered driving skills that were completely out of place with her normal driving habits? And what did she know about burner phones?

  It was as if a different person was inside her, fighting to the surface. No—that sounded kind of split-personality, and that wasn’t how she felt at all. She felt as if she, the real person, was trying to escape the drab prison They had put her in. The life she lived now, the withdrawn, no-fun, dull and completely predictable day-in-and-day-out, didn’t jibe with the person she’d been before. She’d always been up for an adventure, for pushing herself. At her job in Chicago, she’d—

  Damn, damn, damn! She dropped to the floor, clutching her head and trying to stifle her moans as she curled into a tight ball and fought to focus on something, anything, that would break the grip this unbearable pain had on her. If anyone was listening, she didn’t want them to know anything was wrong, because suddenly this seemed like a weakness that they might be able to exploit. She was helpless enough if one of these attacks caught her, without someone figuring out how they were triggered. What if they could just ask her a question about her past, and trying to think of the answer would do this to her?

  Working out that possibility shifted her focus enough to let the pain ebb to a bearable level. Evidently anything that she could