Masquerade (8 page)

She reread the material about the Walker family.

Father, Hamilton Walker.

Mother, Jane Sansborough Walker.

Brother, Michael Walker.

She switched off the computer and sat back in the dark. The names and relationships swirled in her mind, and neither memory nor logic could make sense of them. Frustrated, baffled, she left. At the outside door, she tapped in her code, reactivating the alarm. She turned the knob and opened the door a few inches.

And stopped. There was someone outside.

Heart pounding, she swiftly deactivated the alarm. It was a man, shorter and thinner than Gordon, and he strolled in a lazy slouch, hands stuffed into jacket pockets as he gazed up at the night sky. He was just taking a stroll, she decided with relief. But at this hour? She felt a flash of kinship with him, two strangers alone in the night, where neither was supposed to be.

Abruptly he stopped.

He turned to stare in her direction. The clouds parted and moonlight illuminated his face. It was angular, with bushy black brows and wide lips. He was the new personnel director.
He'd arrived a few days after she and Gordon. He was younger than she, in his late twenties, a hotshot with a swagger. He was known around camp for his increasingly strange behavior.

The charcoal clouds floated together, cutting off her view of his features. He seemed to stare longer at the door of the personnel hut. At last he moved toward it.

Fear knotted her chest. She reactivated the alarm, closed the cracked door, ran softly behind the rail that defined the reception area, and then to the farthest corner.

But she'd forgotten to lock the door.

Stupid, stupid!

Too late, the doorknob turned!

She had no choice. She dropped under a desk, touching her lock picker and infrared flashlight to make sure she'd left neither behind. Her goggles hung from her neck. She silently pulled the desk chair in behind her. Thank God its wheels were well oiled.

She sweated.

When the door opened, he swore.

She held her breath, making no sound, encouraged: The quality of his swearing told her he thought he'd been the one who'd left the door unlocked, a breach of security.

Grumbling, he punched in his code, stepped inside, and closed the door. He turned on a small desk lamp.

His feet moved from desk to desk. He stopped directly in front of where she was crouched. She held her breath. The waiting seemed endless. His feet made a circle as he surveyed the room. Probably looking for something left out of place.

Sweat dripped from her forehead. Again she touched her lock picker, and then the infrared flashlight. But in her nervousness she bumped the flashlight. She could feel it topple.

Her hand lunged, caught it, and froze.

At last he headed toward the other room—the computer room. He stopped in the doorway to turn on the overhead light. He was going to check in there, too. Probably to make certain the computers were undisturbed.

As he stalked inside, she carefully rolled back the chair. She
crawled out and raised her eyes above the desk. He started to turn. She dropped back down.

She strained, listening.

He was moving again, away from her. She had to take the risk, so she looked out again. He was walking toward the first computer in the distant room, and his back was solidly toward her.

Relieved, she crouched, moved lightly, swiftly, around the rail to the outside door. Low to the floor, she glanced back. He was nowhere in sight, probably sitting at a computer.

Out in the crisp mountain air, she silently closed the door and forced herself to calm down, furious about her two errors: Leaving the door unlocked and knocking over her flashlight.

Praying for luck to cover your mistakes was for suckers and losers. She'd have to do a hell of a lot better if she planned to succeed—and survive—whatever lay ahead with the Carnivore.

As she retraced her circuitous path to her cabin, a name reverberated in her mind. Hamilton Walker.

Now she was sure: She'd had a memory, but with a confusing twist. She'd remembered the name of someone who didn't exist. How could that be? How could a nonexistent person be important enough to make her recall him, when she had no memories of anyone or anything else?

Unless, of course, Hamilton Walker was real.

Chapter 8

Just a few miles from Washington's beltway, Lucas Maynard wandered through the underground boutiques at the Crystal City Metro stop in Arlington. He was practicing routine antisurveillance maneuvers. He'd also begun to carry a pistol—a Walther TPH, Taschen Pistole Mit Hahn. Easy to handle and conceal, the pistol was a lightweight, scaled-down version of the famed Walther PP/PPK series.

He crossed and recrossed streets, used plate-glass store fronts as mirrors, and paused to admire window displays.

In these ways he was able to check whether anyone followed.

After an hour, when at last he was sure he was clean, he reemerged onto the street. He took off his suit jacket and strode briskly through the August heat.

He turned down a side street and walked another three blocks to a red-brick apartment building. He was sweating, which annoyed him. He didn't like to arrive sweaty. He used his key to enter, climbed the stairs, and on the second floor unlocked the door to the front apartment.

“What smells so good?” he asked.

Hot meat-and-gravy odors filled the modest, air-conditioned apartment with a welcoming aroma. Suddenly he was a boy again, back in Terre Haute, Indiana. But then, Leslee always made him feel like a boy of seventeen with his future still ahead. This for a long-divorced man in his sixties with diabetes, a weight problem, and three alienated, adult kids.

As he locked the door behind him, Leslee Pousho emerged from the kitchen, flushed beneath her pale-blond hair, small and compact, and so happy to see him her blue eyes danced.

“Darling, you're early!”

He held her and his heart pounded against her small, hard body. He kissed her oven-warm cheeks and thanked God again for this second chance.

She gripped his face and kissed him on the lips, hungry, teasing. He started to pick her up, carry her to the bedroom, but she pushed him away.

“Look what I have for you.”

She stepped back and pulled her halter dress up over her head. She stood there in a black-and-pink lace teddy. Shiny satin insets covered her nipples and pubic hair for modesty. But it wasn't modest, it was teasing. She knew it and spun on her heels, her short legs long in black net stockings, her small feet arched daintily in teetering heels.

She laughed because this was so unlike her.

“Christ, Les.” His voice was husky as if they were in some trashy movie. He didn't give a damn. He grabbed for her. She ran into the bedroom. He followed, a boy eager and in love.

Afterward, Lucas and Leslee lay naked on the bed, the air conditioner bathing them in a cool stream. He was in awe of her body, so taut and smooth, her small breasts tight against her rib cage. She was thirty-two, he was sixty-two, covered with sags, bulges, and wrinkles, especially now that he was losing weight. But Leslee seemed to think he was beautiful.

“Have I made you burn dinner?” he asked.

“Nope. It's beef burgundy, slow-cooking on the stove. Too hot for this weather, but I was in the mood. Do you care?”

He smiled. “I'm always in the mood for whatever you're in the mood for.”

She was a writer and editor at the
Washington Independent
, an alternative newspaper that had survived twenty-five years of shoestring budgets, conservative attacks, police inquiries, and an underpaid revolving-door staff.

And she'd changed his life.

“I wish I'd known you were this easy.” She laughed.

She'd changed his life by changing his focus from past mistakes to future possibilities. He had made careful plans. To be with Leslee, he intended to get out from under his past.

Yes, what he and his colleagues had done was wrong. In fact, Iran-contra and Bill Casey, head of Central Intelligence during the go-go '80s, had been wrong. Reagan and Bush had been double wrong. It shamed Maynard that he himself had falsified records, stolen money, and aided killers.

Tiredly he closed his eyes and saw Leslee plainly in his mind. If he listened carefully, he could hear her voice in the silence of the room, even though she was drifting off to sleep in his arms. His new understanding came from Leslee Pousho with her little, compact body and her biting intelligence. He longed to tell her everything, but not until he had a deal for immunity.

Then he'd tell Leslee and marry her, if she'd have him.

“My God,” she murmured. “The food.”

“Let me. You're tired.” He stood, held onto the bedpost, dizzy. Damn his diabetes. Why in hell hadn't he met her before he was old, sick, and in trouble?

“Are you all right?” She sat up, her breasts so small and perfect they hardly jiggled.

The teddy and black net hose were in a tangle with his clothes on the floor. He had no idea where her pumps were. In the hall, maybe.

“I'm fine.” He put on his robe. “What do I do about dinner? Do you think it's burning?”

She chuckled. “No. It's just ready. Are you hungry?”

They ate as usual at her kitchen table on a red-checked oilcloth. Again, like Terre Haute. And she a career woman from Manhattan.

“I'm working on a story about your industry,” she said between mouthfuls. “Want to comment?”

“Probably not. But go ahead and try me.”

At first they'd fought about the responsibilities of government intelligence, its place in a democracy, whether its very
existence was antidemocratic. Then they'd fought about the excesses of the Reagan and Bush years, and finally about the Company's role in today's post–cold war world.

She said, “The junior senator from Utah has submitted another bill to allow the CIA to engage officially in economic espionage.”

“You act surprised.”

“This time it may pass.”

“That's what I hear.” He chewed and watched her heart-shaped face.

She was getting angry, because he wasn't responding.

He said, “Look, I understand it. We Americans are afraid. We're sliding down a slick hill of our own greedy shit. We're the biggest financial power in the world, and now we want guarantees we'll stay there. But everything seems to work against us. Foreign intelligence agencies plant moles in our companies. They photograph and steal the papers and high-tech samples of our businessmen when they travel abroad. French espionage even bugs Air France's business class. Look at all the American consultants here in Washington on the Japanese, British, Russian, German, and Chinese payrolls. No wonder our businesses want us to recruit agents in the finance ministries of foreign countries. If we're in danger of falling behind, why not?”

“But when we steal a foreign business secret, how do we choose whom to give it to—IBM or Apple? Delco or G.E.?”

“Maybe we just publish it in the
Wall Street Journal
and give everyone a shot.”

“If the bill goes through, we'll end up spying on our allies. And you know our corporations will try to bribe our agents every chance they get. Each one wants information first, so they'll have a competitive edge not only over other nations' corporations, but their U.S. competitors as well. Then there's the problem of the world's multinationals. How do we figure out which are even U.S. corporations?”

“Trade talks are more important these days to national security than arms talks, Les.”

“We're a democracy, goddammit.” She shook her blond head angrily. “Democracy mandates separation of private corporations from government, just as it does church from government. We'd need basic changes in our culture and laws to hand over CIA-acquired economic intelligence to businesses. Actually, if you take the idea of the feds mucking around in private industry to its logical conclusion, we could end up where the government and industry were one, a totalitarian, Communist state. Now that'd be a severe shock for knee-jerk right-wingers.”

Maynard chewed thoughtfully. “Americans have always had a hard time resolving the conflict between an open democracy and the secrecy that gathering intelligence requires. I go along with George Washington. He thought intelligence was vital, but only to stop violence against our nation and our people. No matter how you slice it, making money isn't violent. It
causes
violence when one greedy son of a bitch goes after another greedy son of a bitch, or the bastard tries to take food from starving people. But in itself, financial competition isn't violent. So I figure Langley's got no business doing industrial spying.”

Leslee put down her fork. “You're serious? I've made a dent in that stubborn skull of yours?”

“A near-fatal dent that's caused a rebirth of sorts. You're right. Our political system—democracy—has been polluted by our economic system—capitalism. In fact, we run the United States as if capitalism
were
our political system. Profit is everything. The only real measure of success is money.”

She nodded. “When people ask what you do, they're really asking how much you make.”

“Langley wasn't intended for that,” he said. “Its mission is simply to give useful intelligence in a timely manner to government policy makers so they can make decisions. That's all, and that's critical. That's what our new DCI wants, and she's been working to put in reforms that'll stop other activities. But it's hard. Langley's gone off half-cocked for fifty years. Now if we bow to pressure and start spying on foreign companies, we'll be turning our backs on what democracy stands for again, and that
means we weaken our nation's ethical base even more.”

Her smile was radiant. “May I quote you?”

“You can quote me as an unidentified government source.” He frowned. “But soon, Les, very soon, I'll go public.”