Shadow Woman Read online

  That would be the smart thing to do, not push Lizzy, let her settle back into her routine. The biggest question was, did Felice know how not to push? She had too much confidence in her own cleverness, which meant she was constantly underestimating what other people could and would do to fuck up her plans and schemes. In her world, all she had to do was give orders, and she expected them to be followed. In the real world, people disobeyed orders all the time. If it wasn’t in their own best interests, people could be amazingly uncooperative.

  So she would be shitting bricks that Lizzy had blown the surveillance put on her. Al would be … God only knew. Predicting what Al would do at any given time wasn’t easy, which was why he was so good at what he did.

  Felice was completely predictable. Al was the opposite. So why did he trust Al the most?

  Because Al had been through a lot of the same experiences that he himself had dealt with, that was why. Al knew what it was to take live fire, and to return it. Al knew what it was like to kill someone. What they did was real to him, not an abstraction. Five years ago, they had all become involved in a bad situation; four years ago, the bad situation had devolved into a nightmare. How they’d handled it was something that kept them all tied in an uneasy alliance.

  They all had to live with what they’d done. All except Lizzy. She’d been the outsider, the one deemed untrustworthy. Considering she’d been at ground zero of the plan Xavier didn’t see how she could be untrustworthy, but he had to admit she’d had a hard time dealing with it afterward, and that was what had tipped the scale against her. She’d been a mess, withdrawn, crying a lot. The solution had been a bullet in the head or undergoing the process. Lizzy had chosen the process. Yeah, some choice. Lose her life, or lose herself.

  He himself hadn’t had a choice, not at the time. Either way, he lost Lizzy, and he’d been damn pissed about it.

  But he was nothing if not tactically aware, so even though he hadn’t been able to stop that snowball from rolling downhill, from the beginning he’d been working on his trip wires. By the time Felice noticed he wasn’t falling in line like a good little soldier and was ready to turn on him too, she’d found out that if he went down, so did she, along with everyone else who’d been in the group.

  Originally there had been eight of them. Two of them were now dead. One had died a natural death; the second one had been helped along. Xavier knew, because he was the one who’d done the helping.

  Himself. Lizzy. Al. Felice. Charlie Dankins. Adam Heyes. They were the perpetrators, and the survivors. Charlie and Adam had both retired, gotten on with their lives, secure in the knowledge that they’d done the right thing and content to let Felice and Al handle any situations that might crop up in the future.

  Xavier could have done the same thing … except for Lizzy. He had kept watch over her since she’d been installed in her new life, all her fire and spontaneity destroyed—or so they’d thought. Thank God the others had been so convinced of the success of the process, and thank God they’d been so wrong.

  He’d given up hope, accepted that the chemical brainwash had been permanent, that his Lizzy was gone forever and only that dull shadow of her remained. Al and Felice would have been equally as confident that nothing would change. Then she’d gotten sick, and the Winchell woman had dropped that verbal clue that things in the world weren’t as the incurious, routine-bound Lizette thought they were.

  No—wait. Damn, he should have seen it before. The vomiting. The severe headache. That hadn’t been a virus; that had been her brain beginning its recovery, fighting through and around the memory-wipe process. That was why she hadn’t reacted at all to Winchell’s comment: she’d already been aware something was going on. And at the first feasible opportunity, she’d destroyed her cell phone.

  She probably didn’t remember everything; she might never get all of it back. But her basic personality was reasserting itself, which meant the process was breaking down. That was a good thing to know, concerning the future applications of the process—because it would be used again, maybe already had been.

  Al would need to know that, at some future date, but definitely not now. If they knew the process was breaking down, Lizzy wouldn’t live out the morning.

  But for now, everything had settled down. Lizzy was at work, none of his network of watchers was reporting anything alarming, and he was able to get some sleep.

  He was awakened at noon by an alert. He swung his feet down from the desk, sat up in his chair, and studied the computer screen. Lizzy was in her car, and moving. It was lunchtime, so that wasn’t unusual. Everything else was normal, too. There was some old coffee left, so he zapped it in the microwave, threw a sandwich together, and downed both as he monitored her.

  The trackers showed her stopping, and the screen gave him the address. Another screen gave him the physical picture of her location. Shit, she was at the bank again. A big alarm sounded in his head. She’d stopped at the ATM yesterday on the way home from the sporting goods store. Why was she going back to the bank less than twenty-four hours later?

  Cash. She was getting more cash. She knew better than to use a credit card, would know it was instantly traceable. Not by regular cops, no, but Felice’s people, Al’s people, his own … hell, yeah.

  Was she planning on running?

  He sent out an alert code, eyeing the movement of Lizzy’s car on the map. Now she was heading back in the direction of the office. She stopped again; he pulled up the address of a barbecue restaurant. She was picking up lunch. Okay, everything still mostly normal, except for the bank. Al’s analysts might or might not catch that, because a different analyst was on duty now and he wouldn’t necessarily know that she’d stopped at the ATM the evening before. The surveillance records were destroyed daily. Al got updates, and he’d sure as hell catch that anomaly if—big if—the analyst now on duty reported that she’d gone to the bank.

  He’d just swallowed the last of the bitter coffee when all hell broke loose.

  His computer screen blew up with a red-flagged message, and simultaneously his secure land line began ringing.

  “Fuck!” He snarled the word as he surged out of the chair. He knew exactly what was happening: that fucking Felice had bypassed Al and was acting on her own. If she succeeded, if anything happened to Lizzy, he’d blow that bitch’s world apart.

  He answered the blaring phone as he read the message: Attempted hit going down.

  “Are you on site?”

  “Almost there. Just got the message.”

  Another IM came through: Owner outside with shotgun, returning fire.

  “Did you get that?” Xavier asked. He had his Glock out and was checking the clip, slapping it back in. He couldn’t sit there reading IMs when Lizzy was under fire. The coldness he always felt was settling in his veins, his stomach. If they killed her, within the hour the world would know what they’d done, but Felice’s ass was his. No matter what precautions she put in place, no matter where she went, he’d get her—and he’d make her pay.

  “Yeah, I’m almost there. Shooters are peeling out.”

  “Do you see her?” That was the most important detail, the one on which his life, and the lives of several others, hinged.

  “Not yet. I’m just pulling in. Shit! There she is! She’s coming straight toward me!”

  She was alive. The fist squeezing his heart eased its iron grip.

  The world hadn’t ended.

  “I’m on the way,” Xavier said tersely. “Keep me updated on the secure cell.” He broke the connection and went out the door.

  Felice wouldn’t hit only Lizzy. She was far from stupid. The big question was, would her people try to take him here at the condo, or aim for a more secluded area, such as the stretch of road a couple of miles down, which was the fastest route to where Lizzy was?

  They couldn’t have known where Lizzy would stop to get lunch, but the restaurant was on the way back to her office, so they might have originally planned to hit her there, but then th