Shadow Woman: A Novel (20 page)

Then what?

She was running for her life; one wrong turn, one miscalculation, and she was dead. At this speed she’d probably take someone with her, maybe several someones. She didn’t want that, didn’t want to hurt anyone, but she had to escape.

There it was, the black car, weaving in and out of traffic the same way she was, though more recklessly. One car they met ran off the road, dust flying.

This wasn’t going to last. By now the cops had a description of the car she was driving, and they could call ahead. They had resources: spikes, a roadblock, helicopters. She hadn’t just carjacked the guy, she was involved in a shooting, and they’d be looking hard for her as well as for the guys in the black car. Once they had overhead eyes on her she was sunk.

Traffic began to clear, making way for her and for the black car.

“So much for making it look random,” she muttered. “Chase me through the outskirts of the city and run me off the road or shoot me after this … no way everyone won’t know you executed me. No way.” Execution? Yes, that’s what this was meant to be. She didn’t know who she was talking to, but whoever it was, she was definitely pissed at them.

She took the next ramp that would dump her on the interstate, two wheels all but leaving the pavement as she made the sharp turn. She was heading into Virginia again. Only a few minutes had passed since she’d peeled out of the parking lot in a stolen car, and she didn’t have much time.
No helicopters, please, not yet
.

The black car followed her onto the interstate. Their engine was more powerful than hers—which was definitely a V-6, damn its puny little cylinders—and they had no trouble gaining on her. Her foot was pressed to the floor, and they were still gaining. She watched the rearview, gripping the wheel, judging the moment.
Closer, closer
. The car was coming up beside her, on her left. They were flying down the interstate at over a hundred miles an hour, side by side, the V-6 steady but not giving her a lot of extra power. The man in the passenger seat, hood pushed back down, aimed a black handgun out the open window at her.

She slammed on the brakes, yanked the steering wheel sharply to the side, and spun so she was facing the wrong way on four lanes of interstate. Oh, shit! Nice move. Where the hell had she learned to do that? The black car was stopping, too, but now flashing lights in the distance signaled that cops were on the way.

“Fuck!” she said violently, her vision blurring at all the traffic coming toward her, and she hit the gas. A hundred miles an hour on the interstate was scary.
Any
speed going the wrong way on the interstate was enough to give even the most hardcore adrenaline junkie a high.

She left the roadway much faster than she wanted to be going, but she had to get off the road or have a head-on with a semi. She sailed off the shoulder, the car taking to the air for a moment before landing on the gently sloping grassy hill and heading for a stand of trees. Shit! Tree, car—the tree always won. She’d really hate to get away from the bad guys and basically kill herself by driving into a fucking tree.

She’d said “fuck.”

For one little frozen-in-time moment, that struck her as the most unlikely thing she’d done in the past terror-filled fifteen minutes.

She spun the steering wheel, eased off the gas, and slid the car to a hard, jarring stop that rattled her teeth. The passenger side crumpled against a tree.

Then she bailed. She grabbed her purse and ran, sprinting away from the interstate. The sirens were still at a distance, but it wasn’t as if she could hide the car. Her tracks were plain in the grass, not to mention the traffic was horribly snarled directly behind her, and, oh yeah, here was a wrecked car.

Would they have a good description of her, what she looked like, what she was wearing? Most eyewitnesses gave god-awful accounts, completely missing hair color, miscalculating how tall someone was, how old, but the guy with the shotgun had struck her as a man with a good head on his shoulders and sharp eyes in that head. There was no way to know, and no time to worry about it. She needed to put distance between her and this whole situation.

As she raced across the ankle-high grass, she remembered that she hadn’t taken the time to wipe her prints from the car. But—what difference did that make? Whoever was trying to kill her knew damn well who she was, and if her prints were on file somewhere … well, who was she kidding? Of course her prints were on file somewhere. The big question was whether or not they were in the AFIS files that cops accessed, or some other kind of file.

Given the locale and general topography, she couldn’t expect to remain undetected for very long. The trees thinned, giving way to asphalt and a playground that had seen better days and a street lined with apartment buildings. There were a number of people out and about, in the park and nearby. They probably saw joggers all the time, but how often did they see a jogger wearing office attire and carrying a purse? In the distance, even over her own heavy breathing, she could hear the whap-whap of a helicopter, probably a news crew but possibly a police helicopter. Other people heard the same thing, shading their eyes against the hot sun as they looked up. A plane could drone overhead without anyone so much as glancing up, but helicopters always got people’s attention.

Whoever was in the helicopter, reporter or cops, would be looking for someone who was running, so that someone couldn’t be her. She stopped, clutched her purse tight, and looked up, shading her eyes with one hand as she mirrored what other people were doing. There were several women in the park, many of them with children. If she just didn’t run, she’d look like everyone else.

Hide in plain sight.

Lizzy stood in place and looked up. She wondered if anyone on the street would mark her as a stranger, if they would notice she’d been running when she arrived, that she was breathing hard and that her cheeks were red. But there were a lot of apartments on this street, and there was no way anyone would notice someone who didn’t belong, the way Madison—the much-too-savvy child who’d helped Lizzy deface her own car—had noticed in that little complex. God, that seemed so long ago, and it had just been … three days?

The helicopter was flying low, banking over the interstate where, Lizzy knew, the traffic was a snarled nightmare. From here, though, no one could see the highway or how backed up the traffic was.

One man asked, his question directed to no one in particular, “What’s going on?”

No one seemed to know. The helicopter turned, heading back the way it had come. Lizette looked at the woman next to her, shrugged, and walked away as if she knew exactly where she was going.

Hah. The truth was, she had no idea beyond her next step.

Xavier grabbed some much-needed sleep in the safe room in “J. P. Halston’s” condo, tilted back in his chair, his booted feet propped on the desk. He could have slept in his own bed, but being where people could find him—and by that he meant not his own people—struck him as a little risky right now.

An instant message had alerted him about the confrontation Lizzy had had with the surveillance dumb shit. God, that was such typical Lizzy, slick and ballsy.

But none of the others knew Lizzy the way he did. The way she was playing it, there were still reasonable explanations for everything. She was keeping them guessing, and his people were watching and would let him know if anything unusual happened. He already knew Felice had met with Al again very early that morning, and he also knew that, after Lizzy’s confrontation with her surveillance, whoever Felice had hired to do the job had been pulled off.

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.