Masquerade (25 page)

“What happened?”

The editor sounded annoyed. “The writer got sick and couldn't fulfill the assignment. Terribly disappointing.”

“I see. Did Sarah Walker go ahead and have the plastic surgery?”

“Of course.”

“I'd like to get in touch with her.”

“Sorry. She's away on family business. Besides we're not allowed to give out employees' addresses and phone numbers. Company policy.”

She tried Santa Barbara information for a new phone listing for Sarah Walker. There was none. She hung up, her hand resting on the telephone receiver as she allowed herself to absorb the full impact of the news—

Sarah Walker had a new face.

Sarah Walker had dropped out of sight.

Liz Sansborough couldn't be both in France and in Colorado. Could the one acting as the Carnivore's intermediary be real, while the one in Colorado—she—was the fake?

The reluctant truth began to penetrate the opaque walls of disinformation that had imprisoned her. Liz Sansborough wasn't in two places at the same time.

Liz Sansborough was in Paris.

She wasn't Liz Sansborough.

She was Sarah Walker with a new face. The face of Liz Sansborough.

She was Sarah Walker.

She held onto the telephone, drenched in cold sweat. The dam to her past cracked open, and it swept over her in a powerful tide. Trembling, she recalled family trips to the Sierras . . . sunburned Aqua Camp at Santa Barbara beaches . . . sweaty bicycle rides with her brother, Michael . . . the aggravation of her father's help with math. She recalled the delicious aromas of the kitchen—Campbell's tomato soup, coffee brewing in the morning, bacon frying. Her mother's fingers, so gentle, as she stroked her face—

She leaned into the telephone booth where no one could see. She cried as her found heart grieved.

PART III

Sarah Walker

Chapter 27

Relieved, exhilarated, and furious, the tall, slender woman with the movie-star face and the lanky stride hurried through the Denver library to the entrance steps. Asher Flores was waiting in a rental car, a new Toyota Camry. She slid into the front passenger seat.

He said as he pulled into traffic, “Next stop is the forger's house. Don't pine for the old pickup, dearie. Time we changed our
modus operandi automobilius
. You know how it goes—” He glanced at her. His joking stopped. “Jesus. What happened?”

“I'm Sarah Walker.”

“What?”

“You heard right.”

He pulled to the curb, turned, and stared. He nodded once, and pulled back into traffic. “Okay. Let's have it.”

“I'm not Liz Sansborough. She must be in Paris with the Carnivore. I don't know what I'm doing here, or why Gordon and Bremner need me so much. But I do know I'm definitely Sarah Walker, and those bastards have done one hell of a number on me.”

“A journalist? You don't work for Langley?”

“Never. I do mostly celebrity profiles. Jimmy Stewart, Madonna, Jonas Salk, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Magic Johnson—”

Memories flooded her in an exciting bath of identity. She told Flores her first news job had been as a general-assignment
reporter for the iconoclastic
Santa Barbara Independent
. Her big break had come three years later—show-biz pieces for
Los Angeles
and
California
magazines. Then Tina Brown, who'd been editing
Vanity Fair
at the time, had taken her on, a fresh voice from the wild and kooky West. That had led to assignments for
Talk
, one of the nation's two largest personality magazines. She'd become
Talk
's top interviewer, and last year she'd been promoted to senior contributing editor, her fantasy job. At
Talk
her long-itchy fingers had found a home at last.

She'd never married or had children. Through the years she'd had several boyfriends and lived with one. Somehow her relationships seemed never to last. The men had blamed her, and perhaps they'd been right. The first serious one had been kind and simply told her she had a restless soul. In any case, she'd always felt the need to keep a suitcase packed.

She was born Sarah Jane Walker, the second child, the baby, which she'd minded only on occasion. Her older brother, Michael, was so interested in lizards, dinosaurs, Hot Wheels, football, and then girls, he'd given her little trouble.

Her father was Hamilton Walker, one of those warm, loving men all children need. Her mother was Jane Sansborough Walker, who'd grown up wanting to be a wonderful wife and mother—nurturing, encouraging, loving—and that's what she'd done.

There'd been only one problem in the Walker family, and that had been the unspoken history of each parent. It loomed over the children, a dark secret, casting uncertainty and insecurity.

Only when they'd grown did they learn Hamilton Walker had been put into foster care by his mother when he was four, and he'd never seen her again. He was shuttled from home to home, some good, some bad. He was physically abused in two, beaten and left to go hungry. Yet he'd put that rocky start behind him and made his own life. By the time Sarah was born, he was a respected professor of English at Santa Barbara City College, where he stayed until his retirement. Hamilton Walker loved his family, his students, and the life of an educator.

Jane Walker's father—Otto Sansborough—couldn't stand
Hamilton, because he “lacked ambition,” an abomination to Otto, whose entire life had been devoted to success and power. Otto was one of the West Coast's top litigators. A shark, Sarah had heard her grandfather called. A bandit, a thief, a swindler.

They were dead now, Sarah's grandparents. But her parents—Jane and Hamilton Walker—were still alive, and her brother, too.

She had a family. She remembered telling Gordon—

They were in her condo in Santa Barbara. It was June, and Gordon wasn't living with her. In fact, he'd just introduced himself. He'd moved in downstairs the week before.

As she thought back she knew: Everything he'd told her about their relationship had been a lie. They hadn't lived together two years. They'd
never
lived together. But the story of their fictitious coupling had cemented her bond to him.

On that June day she'd offered tea. He'd followed her into the kitchen and insisted on making it himself. As he opened the new Twinings can, she'd opened a letter from her parents. Return address Cielo Tranquilo, Arizona.

As the kitchen air had filled with the tarry odor of the fresh black tea, she'd told him, “They won an amazing retirement prize from OMNI-American. So they cashed in their Santa Barbara real estate, put most in the bank, and spent the rest on one of those lifetime-care deals in a ritzy golf-club park in Arizona. The prize was they got it for about ten percent of the usual price, which meant they could afford it.”

“They like it?”

“Love it. In fact, it's a kick for Mom. Her father was a high-powered Beverly Hills lawyer, so she grew up rich. But then she married Dad. He taught at city college, and her lifestyle plummeted to real-folks level. So here she is, forty years later, making a comeback at a tony retirement complex.”

He laughed. “Ah, sweet revenge.”

“Yes, and it's the only place I know where the average age and the average temperature are the same.” She smiled.

He laughed again, and she skimmed through the rest of her
mail—bills, junk, the usual invitations to “in” parties in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, common for a well-known profiler for a hot magazine, and a postcard from her brother, Michael.

“Michael's an anthropologist. He left last week for a big dig in the Himalayas. He loves it. Everyone on the trip's Italian. He doesn't have to talk English or bathe for months.”

“Ugh. Better him than me. I like my showers, and only high-school Italian teachers understand my Italian.”

She'd noticed Gordon's eyes were brown. They matched his hair, a wavy mop. He'd needed a haircut, which she'd found endearing.

“Who else is in your family?” he asked.

“That's it. Well, I've got a cousin somewhere in England. I don't know much about her, and I've never met her.” That was Liz Sansborough. The
real
Liz Sansborough.

Then the teakettle whistled. Gordon took the pot to the kettle, hotted the pot, added the tea leaves, filled the pot with boiling water, and topped it off with lid and cozy.

“Now,
I'm
impressed.” She smiled. “You really do know how to make tea.” Yes, he'd impressed her right from the beginning. He'd known exactly what to say and what to do. But that was the job of the secret agent. To ingratiate, to worm one's way in, to go covertly where it was impossible to go honestly.

“I don't know what happened after that,” she told Flores as they drove through the Denver sunshine to the forger's studio. “I mean, I remember meeting Gordon, but that's all. He took me out to dinner, I think, and then—” She struggled, tried to recall, and said angrily, “I just don't know.”

“We'll find out,” he said. “What and why and who.” He squeezed her hand. “What about your plastic surgery?”

“That was before Gordon. About six weeks before, I think—”

She had a new face, and it hadn't been what she'd expected. She'd stood before her bedroom mirror, studying herself. She
was a stranger. Beautiful, but a stranger. The swelling had mostly disappeared, and she should resemble the sketches she and the surgeon had agreed upon.

She turned her stranger's face from side to side. The new nose was wrong. Instead of straight and narrow, which it was supposed to be, it sloped and flared. The chin and cheekbone implants were far more dramatic than she'd expected. There was no change in her mouth, of course. It was still too wide. Not a lot could be done about a mouth. Except the surgeon had put a black beauty mark just above the right corner. Very striking.

Dammit, she'd prepared herself for a quietly attractive face, not this flamboyant one. She looked like a goddamn movie star. Not the interview
er
, but the interview
ee
. Being the interviewer was far better; it gave the illusion of control.

Besides, after you've been considered on the plain side for three decades, you got used to it. Becoming attractive was rational. Gorgeous was dangerous. God knew where it might lead.

She turned from the mirror before she found more questions reflected in it. At her desk in the living room, she went to work on the article she was writing for
Talk
about her before-and-after face. What a deal. Free cosmetic surgery, and
Talk
paid her for the article, too. That's what happened when you had a name as a top writer for a top magazine: The famous, the infamous, and those wanting to be famous or infamous suddenly started stuffing unlisted phone numbers into your pocket.

She pushed all questions from her mind. It was time to be philosophical, because she sure as hell wasn't going to go through surgery again. She should consider this new face an opportunity, not a calamity. After all, what could be the harm in being beautiful?

Chapter 28

As he drove east, Asher Flores nodded thoughtfully. “Hughes Bremner's gone to one hell of a lot of trouble to get you ready for whatever he's got in mind. It's got to be critical.”

“That bastard. Could he have made me lose my memory?”

“Maybe you really did lose it. Accidentally, I mean. Maybe all this time you've had legitimate amnesia, and Bremner just took advantage of the situation. Or he somehow had to rewrite his plan to accommodate it.”

“The fall down the cliff—or whatever—was after I met Gordon. Maybe that's why that part of my memory's still blank.” She paused, thinking. “Could Bremner have set it up for me to get the free cosmetic surgery?”

“Sure.”

“Obviously he wanted me because I'm Liz Sansborough's cousin, just as the Langley dossiers say. A few implants here and there, and I was her double. You know, I did a big cover story about survivalists for
Talk
. I spent a month training in one of their camps in Montana. That's why I knew how to fire the gun Gordon pushed at me, and probably why I adapted to the training at the Ranch so well. Plus I'm a workout freak, which means I was in really good physical condition.”

“Bremner would know all that. You can bet you were researched completely.”

“But what does Bremner gain by having me a lookalike for the Carnivore's girl friend?”

“Good question. What do you know about Liz Sansborough? And I don't mean out of some file.”

She considered. “Nothing. I mean, I know my mother had only one brother—Harold, ‘Hal.' And I know he married, lived in London, and had a daughter my age. I never met any of them. And I don't remember letters from him, not even birthday cards. But he and Mom must've corresponded, or I wouldn't know what I do.”

“Go on.”

“Their mother, my grandmother Sansborough, was nice but sort of vacant. She used to bake cookies for Michael and me when Mom drove us down to visit her and Grandfather in Beverly Hills. She was Great-grandma Firenze's daughter. But, you see, Great-grandma Firenze lived in Santa Barbara, and she was the grandparent I saw all the time and really loved.”

“And your Grandfather Sansborough, the Beverly Hills lawyer?”

“He was cruel, vicious. I remember once he took his shotgun and without a word shot the neighbor's Labrador retriever. No one knew the barking had bothered him. Later I got to thinking he must've chosen the shotgun because he'd wanted the dog to suffer a lot before it died. Mind you, he had perfectly fine rifles in his gun case, and he could've used any one of them for a clean kill. The police came, and the neighbors sued, but Grandfather knew where the skeletons were buried. Nothing came of it.”

“Nice guy.”