Shadow Woman: A Novel (3 page)

She needed to call in sick, the first time she’d done so since she began working at Becker Investments. Her department head, Maryjo Winchell, had a company-issued cell phone for this type of thing, and, being the careful type she was, Lizette had programmed Maryjo’s number into her own cell phone.

They would know
.

The eerie words echoed through her brain again and Lizette tensed, but this time they weren’t followed by debilitating pain and nausea. Why hadn’t it happened now?

Because she’d had that thought before.

Yes
. The answer felt right. She didn’t know why, because on the surface it was both stupid and paranoid, but—yes.

Okay. The best thing to do, then, was to not let people know she’d flipped out, and just act normal—sick, but normal.

She got her cell phone from the table where she’d left it, and turned it on. She always turned it off at night, because … She didn’t know why. No answer came to mind; she just did.

When the phone had booted up, she scrolled through her contacts until she found “Maryjo,” selected the number, and hit the green call icon. She heard ringing almost right away, but she’d read that the first couple of rings were placebo rings, put in place so the caller would think something was happening, when in reality the connection took a few seconds longer to happen. She tried to think where she’d read that, and when, but came up blank. Maybe it no longer held true; cell phone technology changed so fast—

A click, and “This is Maryjo” sounded in her ear. Lizette was so caught up in thinking about cell-phone technology that for a second she was blank, trying to remember why she’d called.
Sick. Right
.

“Maryjo, this is Lizette.” Until she spoke, she hadn’t realized how ragged she sounded, her voice thick from throwing up, her breath still too fast. “I’m sorry, I won’t be able to make it to work today. I think I have a bug. Trust me, you don’t want me spreading it around.”

“Throwing up?” Maryjo asked sympathetically.

“Yes. And a splitting headache.”

“A stomach virus is going around. My kids had it last week. It lasts about twenty-four hours, so you should feel better tomorrow.”

“I hate that it’s such short notice.” Though how she could have anticipated getting sick, she didn’t know.

“Not your fault. This is the first sick day you’ve had in three years, so don’t sweat it.”

“Thanks,” Lizette managed to say. Something rang an alarm bell deep in her mind, something that felt as if there was something else—Her stomach lurched. “I’m sorry, I have to run—” And she did, stumbling, gagging. She hung over the toilet and awful choking noises tore out of her throat, but there was nothing else to come up.

By the time she could catch her breath, every muscle was trembling. Straightening, she held on to the vanity for a moment, then turned on the cold water in the sink. Bending over, she splashed water over her hot face, over and over again until she felt calmer and could breathe without a hard ragged edge tearing at her throat.

Better. This was better. But she didn’t let herself look at the stranger in the mirror; instead she closed her eyes and just stood there for a moment. Finally she grabbed the towel and blotted the water from her eyes, swiped it across her face and neck.

Her heart was still pounding. What on earth had set off this last bout? Was it something Maryjo had said? Nothing jumped out at her, yet she distinctly remembered that sense of alarm, as if Maryjo had ventured into dangerous territory. She mentally replayed the conversation, trying to find anything out of whack, even something trivial. Maryjo’s kids had had a stomach virus, it had lasted about twenty-four hours, blah blah blah. There literally was nothing else, except for the comment about how long it had been since she’d taken a sick day.

Pain streaked through her head like a warning shot. She gripped the edge of the sink and waited it out, trying to keep her mind clear of thoughts, and the pain faded.

Okay
.

Something nagged at her, something she felt she should remember but that stayed maddeningly at the edge of—

No. There it was. And so trivial. Exactly when
had
she last taken a sick day?

She hadn’t, not that she could remember. Not in the entire five years she’d worked at Becker Investments. So why had Maryjo said she hadn’t taken a sick day in
three
years? When had she been sick? Surely she’d remember, because she was almost never sick. The few times she had been really stuck in her memory, such as when she was twelve and picked up a gross, nasty bug at summer camp that totally knocked her on her keister. She didn’t even catch the normal assortment of head colds that circulated around the office every winter.

So when, other than now, had she ever been absent from work?

She thought back to when she started work at Becker.

This time the pain simply exploded in her head and nausea twisted her stomach. She hung over the toilet, heaving and gasping—and while she did so, she dropped her cell phone on the floor and stomped on it, breaking it apart.

That was insane
. And yet—the impulse to destroy her cell phone was so strong that she’d simply acted on it, without hesitation, without question.

When she got control again, she first blew her nose, then splashed more cold water on her face, as she fought for a logical explanation.

There was none. She couldn’t remember ever being sick enough to be out of work, but that wasn’t what had made her insides curdle with fear. She felt as if a stranger were fighting her for control of her body, and sometimes the stranger won.

Whatever was going on, whether she was having a complete
mental breakdown or there really was something colossally
off
, she’d find out, and she’d deal with it.

Until then, she could only go with her instincts, such as stomping the cell phone to smithereens. She felt almost painfully foolish, but—

Maybe not.

She looked down at the cell phone. Just in case it was still working, she said, “Oh, crap,” in her ragged voice, and picked up the little plastic carcass. “Now I have to buy a new phone.” Then she popped out the battery to be certain it was dead, and dropped both the phone and the battery in the trash. After a second she fished the pieces out, put them in the sink, and ran water over them before once again dumping everything.

She was so scared she didn’t know what to do next, but what frightened her most of all was the realization that
she didn’t remember starting work at Becker Investments
.

Xavier got up before dawn and ran his usual five miles. He liked running in the relative cool of darkness; not only was it more comfortable, occasionally it offered some chance entertainment: once some shit-head had made the serious mistake of trying to mug him, and had finally managed to crawl away with nothing more serious than a few cracked ribs, some crushed fingers, and Xavier’s size eleven-and-a-half track shoe planted halfway up his ass. He’d considered breaking the shit-head’s neck, just to make the citizens of D.C. a little safer, but bodies could lead to complications so he’d refrained. There had been a few other interesting moments, but in general, once the shit-heads got a good look at him, the smart ones would back away and let him run in peace.

He was a big man, pushing six-four, and muscled in a way that had little to do with a gym and a lot to do with staying alive in all sorts of going-to-shit situations. He could swim ten, fifteen miles, and run twice that many, while carrying up to a hundred pounds of equipment. He could fly a helicopter, pilot a boat,
and he’d had so many hours of weapons training that almost any weapon fit his hand as naturally as his own skin. It wasn’t his size, though, that made would-be muggers think twice; it was the way he moved, the hyper-alert vigilance of a predator—not that any muggers would ever think in those terms. Their survival instincts would more than likely whisper, “bad dude,” and they’d decide to wait for a more likely victim. Xavier was a lot of things; victim wasn’t one of them.

He was back home by five thirty, and twenty minutes later he was already showered and dressed, which today meant jeans and boots, and a black tee shirt. The color of the tee shirt changed from day to day, but the rest of it was pretty much standard. “Dressed” meant he’d also checked his weapon, then situated his holster so it rode his right kidney. The big Glock wasn’t the only weapon he carried, but it was the only one that was readily visible. Even in his own home—perhaps most particularly there—he was always armed with two or more weapons, and never more than a step away from others in his private arsenal.

He didn’t feel paranoid; most of the other black ops people he knew did the same. Home was a point of vulnerability, for him and for everyone in the business, because it was a fixed point. People who stayed on the move were much harder to target. The good news was that, as far as he knew, no one was gunning for him … yet. The “yet” was always there, acknowledged but unspoken.

Because of that, he’d taken the precaution of buying two condo units, side by side. One was in his name; the other was in the name of J. P. Halston. If anyone checked deeper, they’d find that the “J. P.” stood for Joan Paulette. A lot of single women went by their initials. Joan had a social security number and a bank account, paid her maintenance and utility bills on time, and had no love life at all. He knew because he was Joan and she didn’t really exist, except on paper. Currently, his and
Joan’s love lives had a lot in common, which was a real pisser, but that was reality and he could deal.

He slept in one condo and kept the other as a safety valve; he’d installed a hidden door, which could be opened only with the fingerprint of his left little finger, in the back-to-back closets linking the two. He’d put other safety measures in place as well, because someone in his line of work couldn’t be too careful. He hoped to God most of them were a waste of time, because if he ever really needed them, then it meant he was chin-deep in a world of shit. His particular skill set was valuable because he was both bold and careful, an attitude he applied to his private life as well as his work.

The powers that be were stupid as hell if they didn’t expect that, so he operated under the premise that they
did
. He felt more comfortable when everyone—within a limited circle—knew what everyone else was doing. Probably that was why he was still alive; they figured he’d set a trigger to expose them if they ever made a move against him. In that case, they were one hundred percent correct. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t someday try to find a way around, over, or under the situation; when that happened the political shit-bomb would be about to explode and everyone would be scrambling to survive, which was the exact situation he watched for. He’d known the price going in and had judged the end result worth the cost. Unfortunately, the cost had turned out to be higher than he’d expected.

Like he did every morning, he sat in the small, shielded room in the safety-valve condo, which served as the nerve center for all of his various alerts, electronic trip wires, and information-gathering programs, drinking coffee while he listened and read, and monitored the monitorers. He’d piggybacked onto their systems, so when her house was swept they picked up only their own bugs, but, again, he figured they knew anyway. If they hadn’t been smart, he wouldn’t have been working
with them in the first place. Not that he didn’t trust his own people; he did, up to a point. Beyond that point, he trusted only himself. He was surprised they’d kept him in the loop this long, but then, he was intimately involved, and he wasn’t someone they wanted to piss off. He had friends with power, and even more dangerous friends with skills; he didn’t know which one of the two had more influenced the decision to keep him informed, but as long as it worked, he didn’t give a fuck why.

Still. They watched her; he watched them, and made certain what they reported was what he already knew. And because he already knew, they were careful to keep the status quo going. They couldn’t withhold information, or give him the wrong intel. What he couldn’t control was if they initiated an action without there being a trigger, if someday someone in power simply decided the risk was too great to let the situation continue.

That was where he trusted his gut instinct, honed to a lethal edge by all the action he’d seen. The day that instinct whispered to him was the day he acted.
Mutual assured destruction
, a fancy way of saying “Mexican standoff,” was a fine concept when it came to keeping the peace.

At the moment, he was reading about the state of the euro—not that he was any kind of financial guru, but then, he wasn’t reading for investment information. Money drove everything in politics, in national security—hell, it drove everything, period. Desperate nations did desperate things, and a ripple in the monetary market could have him on a jet within the hour, traveling to God only knew where, to do whatever had to be done. Because he wasn’t available to oversee her all the time, he had a backup in place, to act if necessary. He tried to anticipate those times, predict when his services might be needed. While he was reading, he was also listening for anything the least out of the ordinary. So far, her routine had seemed to go as usual. Anything
un
usual would trigger a tidal wave of reaction.

“Ten, twelve, one, forty-two, eighteen.”

The whispered numbers grabbed his attention as abruptly and completely as if a shot had been fired. He set down his cup and swiveled his chair around, his head cocked, his entire body alert. Automatically he reached for a pen, jotted down the numbers.
What the hell—?

Seconds later, she repeated the sequence of numbers, though this time in a slightly stronger voice.

There was a pause. Then came sounds of movement, at first normal, then hurrying, followed by the unmistakable noises of prolonged and violent vomiting.

Fuck!
He wished he had eyes on her, but the surveillance network had allowed her that privacy. Nothing she said, either on her house phone or cell phone or even her work phone, not to mention what she watched on TV or did on her computer, was private. Her car was constantly tracked by a GPS device. But video had been nixed; not out of any concern for her constitutional rights, which had pretty much been shredded and trampled in the mud, but because it had been deemed unnecessary. They didn’t need to see her go to the toilet, or take a shower, so long as they knew that was what she was doing.