Shadow Woman: A Novel Read online

  His lips set in a grim line, he got back into bed and stuffed the pillows behind his back. “You let your emotions get the best of you. The decision was that you couldn’t be trusted, so the options were the memory wipe, or a bullet.”

  “Wow, some choice.” She didn’t like what she was hearing. She didn’t like that she’d evidently been weak. She’d handled some tough situations in her job, made some hard calls, and she’d lived with the results. What could have so upset her that she’d been judged unstable enough to be a threat to … whoever they were? “So when I started getting my memory back …”

  “You were a threat to everyone.”

  “Including you?”

  “Including me.”

  She was horrified that anything she’d ever done had been a danger to him. She had never thought of herself as a weak person, not even these past three years when she’d been such a dulled-down version of herself. What had been so bad that she’d broken under the strain?

  “Tell me,” she said brusquely.

  “All right.” He made the decision as incisively as a surgeon would wield a scalpel, though the scowl on his face made it obvious he didn’t like it. “You do need to know. But if you freak out on me, I’ll drug you and keep you locked up somewhere. Got it?”

  He would, too. She didn’t doubt him for a second. “Got it.”

  He picked up his phone from the bedside table, slapped the battery in, and turned it on. He began tapping the screen; from where she sat on the bed she could see a web page loading. “Remember what I said,” he warned, and turned the phone toward her so she could see the screen.

  Lizzy frowned, startled, as she instantly recognized the image. It was a picture of herself, the way she used to be before she’d been given this new face. “That’s me. Why are you showing me a picture of myself?”

  “Because that isn’t you. That was First Lady Natalie Thorndike.”

  “Get out,” she said, disbelieving. She took the phone and stared at the image, trying to make the connection. Something tickled in her brain, a sense of repulsion, as if she wasn’t supposed to go there. Pain stabbed at her temples and she caught her breath, laid the phone down.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked sharply, picking up the phone again.

  “Headache,” she managed, trying to breathe deeply and focus on something else. She thought about him, about the years he’d spent protecting her, and before that when he’d trained her for—

  Well, that didn’t work. She put both hands to her head and squeezed her eyes shut. “Sorry. It happens every time a new memory tries to come through. It isn’t as bad as it was the first few times.” Forget the Oscar Mayer wiener song; she had something much better to think about now, which was Xavier naked. Different kind of wiener. She almost laughed at the thought, and the pain ebbed. Opening her eyes, she smiled at him. He was watching her closely, not trying to help, gauging how well she handled the situation.

  Deliberately she held out her hand for the phone, and was gratified when he gave it to her. She made herself look again—and felt another one of those clicks of memory. She examined the photo, and now she could see that this was an older version of her former self. The First Lady had looked extremely good for her age, whether from very good facial work or from genetics. Regardless, except for the hint of age on the First Lady, and the hairstyle, she and Lizzy had been identical.

  Had been.

  Was the First Lady dead? Lizzy didn’t remember anything about her dying, but when she thought about Mrs. Thorndike, it was in the past tense.

  “Is she dead?” she asked uneasily.

  “Yes.”

  “When did she die?”

  “Four years ago.”

  Four years, which put her death in the middle of Lizzy’s two missing years.

  Don’t go there don’t go there don’t go there.

  Despite the warning echoing through her brain, she swallowed and said, “What happened to her?”

  “I shot her.”

  Lizzy went numb with shock. She stared at him, unable to say a word. He took the phone from her nerveless fingers, turned it off, and removed the battery. She focused on that because it was easier than thinking about what he’d just said. Even though she thought his phone was probably as secure as any phone that could be devised, he still took the precaution of removing the battery. His expression was as remote and cold as the Arctic landscape, and that scared her.

  “Does the name Tyrone Ebert mean anything to you?” he asked, breaking the thick silence.

  After a minute’s thought, she slowly shook her head.

  He reached out and tugged her close to him, settled her with her head once more on his shoulder. “That was the name I went by when I was transferred to the Secret Service.”

  This was too huge for her to comprehend, yet she sensed this was just the tip of the iceberg. Because it was so big, she seized on a detail, frowning up at him.

  “Your name isn’t Xavier?”

  “It is. Tyrone Ebert was a carefully built alias. It stood up to a deep background check.”

  An alias like that wasn’t easy to build, and only an agency like the CIA, FBI, or NSA could pull it off, build a background so solid that they couldn’t detect their own work. There were compartments within compartments in any intelligence agency, some unknown to even the people who worked there.

  “You were in the Secret Service,” she said, feeling her way through the maze.

  “For a while. I was assigned to Mrs. Thorndike’s detail.”

  “But … why?” Why was he given an alias? Why was he inserted into the Secret Service? She didn’t have to detail all the “whys,” because he knew each and every one of them.

  “We called it a code-black situation.”

  “Which is …?”

  “When the President is committing treason.”

  The President … President Thorndike. Try as she might, Lizzy couldn’t put a face to the name. She tried to think who had succeeded him. After him had come … President Berry, who had fulfilled the remainder of President Thorndike’s term when—

  She breathed deeply through the pain in her head, forced it away. She could get through this.

  “Treason.”

  “We were investigating him.”

  “Who is ‘we’?”

  “I’ll tell you who we aren’t. We aren’t the FBI. This was too deep, and the FBI is hampered by all kinds of laws and shit.”

  She started to protest that it was the FBI’s job to investigate domestic threats to the country’s security, but then bit it back. He was right; the FBI was hampered by laws and shit. That was why there were people like him, who would do the dirty work and then, when it was all tied up beyond doubt, “arrange” for the FBI and others to get the evidence practically dumped in their laps, so their hands were clean and they broke no laws in getting said evidence, which would have made it inadmissible in court. Some things were too important to let someone skate on a technicality.

  “But where did I come in? The last I remember, I was working for a security firm in Chicago. I do remember some of the training with you, and … other stuff … but not any investigation or even how I met you.”

  “Other stuff, such as the fact that we were all over each other almost from the day we met?”

  “We were? That fast?”

  “Damn close.”

  Well, hadn’t she known it, deep down? She’d even had the thought that she’d always been easy for him. She didn’t even mind, because the attraction hadn’t been one-sided; they got to each other then, and they got to each other now. She could push him further than anyone else would dare—and have fun doing it.

  She cleared her throat. “Back to the story.”

  “The story is, when we started investigating Thorndike, we contacted someone who worked at the same place you did, for some technical assistance. He brought you to our attention. Except for your hair, you were a dead ringer for the First Lady. Do you remember anyone ever mentioning