Spitting Image (15 page)

“And you got access to all that?” I was impressed. I’d been in recon and counter intelligence and knew how hard some records were to get at. How tough it could be to separate real intel from phony stuff.

“I may not be a soldier, or a spy, but I’ve spent my life in academia,” she said. “Research is what I do. Studying ancient languages, you look for patterns. In spelling, usage, phonetics, even themes to see what developed from what. This is the same concept.”

“Makes sense,” I said. I’d learned enough languages in my misspent past to know that patterns help. There are a lot of words that share roots or sounds, so that if you speak, say, French, you can probably fumble through Spanish or Italian. Or at least read it. After years of doing research, it did make sense that she was a good investigator.

“I owe you another one,” I said.

“You came for me when I needed you,” she replied. “I couldn’t let anything happen to you if I could help.”

She stared into space for a long moment. Then shook her head. “God dammit, why do these things have to happen to us?”

There wasn’t anything to say to that. I understood that kidnapping and death threats could be a deal breaker for a relationship, but the truly frustrating thing was that it was out of my control. I couldn’t just give up assassination attempts. There wasn’t a twelve step program for ancient vendettas. Baby, I can change. All that being targeted for my supernatural abilities is behind me.

But you know how it is, one day at a time, one knife fight is one too many. I swear I’m gonna kick this thing. Tomorrow.

The gallows humor helped. Well, maybe it didn’t but it’s what I had.

“It’ll work out,” I said. “We’ll get through this.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “Why do I believe that when you say it?”

“I’ve gotten through a lot. I was at Culloden and Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and the Alamo. I’m still standing.”

“You have made some lousy career choices, though.”

Well there was no arguing that.

I took a look at the list of names Sarah had tracked down. A number of the names were grouped, the ones she believed were aliases. Caruthers may have also gone by the name William Butler, John Malcolm and Joseph Chalmers. Very WASP-y.

That made me wonder about the family’s origins. Doors’ clan had seemed very Eastern European, but I got a very Anglo Saxon feeling from this group. Which brought up more questions. Like did all these “gifted” clans originate in the same place and spread out, or did they crop up separately? And if they–we, I guess–all started in the same place, then why? Something in the water?

It would really be nice if I could remember any of that.

I stared at the list, willing patterns to form. Sarah had already drawn lines to indicate possible or likely alliances, and they did seem to be pretty clearly broken into two groups.

Except...

One name. Or rather, one number with a few names, that appeared on both lists.

Something nagged at my brain. Could that be it? Could I actually have caught a break? Small details that showed up in multiple places, scraps of information, or phrases that seemed familiar, crossing the lines of a family feud.

“Before I get excited,” I said to Sarah, “take a look at this name. Does anything seem special about that one?”

She looked at the list for a while. “This person is the only one who seems to connect with members of both camps,” she agreed. “Peacemaker?”

“Or double agent,” I said. I quickly copied the number. “Can I borrow your phone?”

“You may.”

I felt a smile coming on. You can take the girl out of the classroom...

I put the phone in my pocket, grabbed a sandwich and walked into the interrogation room.

Brad was still tied to the chair. He looked up when I entered and there was flicker of ... well maybe not fear, but at least some mild anxiety. I had good reason to dislike him, and he might expect me to be looking for payback.

In a way I was.

I put the sandwich on the table. “I’m going to cut your left hand free so you can eat. Don’t be stupid.”

He nodded and after I cut the tie off his hand he picked up the sandwich and took a bite.

“So I was doing some investigation,” I began. “It’s not as easy as when you can just change your face to look like the guy who’s supposed to work at the bank or the IRS or whatever, but it can be done by the rest of us.”

He kept staring at me.

“While I was looking into your little family, I noticed that you guys really don’t get along all that well. Thanksgiving dinner must be murder.”

“In my experience, the murder usually starts a few years after Thanksgiving,” said John.

Walked into that one, I guess.

“But you know what I did see?” I went on. “There is one person, one phone number that anybody can call and pour their heart out for hours. Now, that could mean that it belongs to the one easygoing guy who likes everybody, who hosts Christmas dinner, sends out the family newsletter. That’s a possibility.

“But it also occurred to me that that guy could be playing both sides of a family dispute. Taking information gained in confidence from one side and feeding it to the other.”

He did a pretty good job of keeping his expression neutral, I’ll give him that.

“And then I wondered, how would this family, a family who are happy to kidnap and impersonate and waterboard people, how exactly would they feel if they found out that somebody was telling tales out of school. How do you think they’d react?”

I turned to Bob. “You find a phone on this guy?”

“Yeah but it’s locked. Oddly enough, he wouldn’t give us the code. It’s on the table.”

“I’m gonna go out on a limb and say I think I know the number.” I pulled out Sarah’s phone and dialed. When the phone rang I let my face break into a slow, predatory grin. Brad kept his face pretty controlled, but I saw hope die in his eyes.

It was even better than if I had shot him in the knees like I’d dreamed while he was torturing me.

“I think it’s going to voice mail,” I said. “Yeah. Hi, Brad. This is the guy you tortured. Yeah, so I just realized I have you by the balls and I’m deciding how hard I want to squeeze. Have a nice day.” I ended the call.

I sat in the unoccupied chair, threw a foot up on the desk and leaned back. “So, you’re going to tell me all about the little family feud, the plans for me, and who’s who in your little clan of Mystique wannabes, and I’ll see how that squares with what I already know. Then I’ll decide who I’m going to hand you over to. Oh, sorry. To whom I plan to hand you.”

He took a deep breath. I could see him thinking, weighing the consequences of speaking versus those of remaining silent.

I SWAGGERED OUT of the office with my notebook.

“He talked?” Sarah asked.

“He’s still wrestling with himself, but he’ll sing like a bird.”

“How do you know?”

“I know these guys are bastards. I know that very well. And I know they’re more scared of the rest of the family than they are of me. We saw that at the house in Rowley. This guy was the one who supervised my interrogation. He’s a prick, and he expects everybody else is as big a prick as he is. And the biggest prick move I could make is to turn him over to his own side with a pile of evidence that he’s been double crossing them.”

“I’ll hand it to you,” said John. “That was worthy of your perfidious ancestors.”

“If the enemy is awful, use that against them. If they try to enforce the wall of silence by making informing scary, you just use that fear to strong-arm informers.”

“What do you mean?” asked Sarah.

“Say you think a guy is spying for the enemy. Say a shopkeeper or a bartender, since those are great jobs to pick up gossip. Well, you just show up at his place in broad daylight, thank him for his service and hand him some payment. It can be money or cigarettes, chocolate, c-rations, whatever people would sell their buddies out for at a given time a place. Try to look like you’re being discreet, but do a bad job. He’ll worry that people will see him taking your bribes, and they’ll assume he’s working for you. Then he has to decide to really start working for you and hope you’ll protect him, or he has to explain to the Black and Tans or the KGB or the Viet Cong or Taliban or whoever that it was just an evil trick of the enemy, and he’s loyal, honest. Nobody trusts anything a spy says, so it’s easy to turn their own friends against them, and they know it.”

“Sneaky,” she said. “And a little cruel.”

“If he was on the side of the angels, he wouldn’t be afraid of them,” I said. “And it’s better than they treated me. If I didn’t co-operate, they were going to use impostors to get you and Pete and Nique fired or arrested of blacklisted for various high crimes and misdemeanors. Not sure how bad that would have to be for a tenured professor at a Jesuit school. I mean, genocide and pedophelia get swept under the rug by the Vatican, so–”

“What?”

“Yep,” I said. “That was their plan to assure my compliance. It might still be. Which is why we need to finish these bastards. If it was just a threat to me, I could disappear. I’ve probably lost my job, lost you, I may as well do a hitch in the Corps or the Legion and start over someplace new. But I didn’t want to see the ways they could screw with everybody I cared about.”

She shook her head slowly, her eyes wide. “I didn’t realize just how evil they were.”

“They’re that willing to get what they want, regardless of who gets hurt.” I suppose that’s a good enough definition of evil.”

“So you’re just staying and fighting for me? You said if it was just you, you’d vanish.”

I squirmed a bit as I thought about it. To an extent I was doing it for her. For Nique and Pete as well. But in a way, it was for me. Because the cost of letting them suffer for my safety was worse than the danger of staying.

It’s not a lack of fear that keeps you from bugging out and leaving your buddy to the enemy. It’s that the guilt and shame of abandoning them are even more frightening than a bayonet.

I blew out a big breath. “If I left,” I said, “if I went someplace new and started over with a new identity, they’d start messing with you to try to bring me back. If I let that happen, let them destroy your life to keep mine a secret, I’d have to live with the fact that I was a bigger prick than even they were. I’d rather get shot than face that kind of coward in the mirror every morning.”

“That helps,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to think it was just for me. To win the damsel in distress. If you want to help get rid of a threat to me, that’s great, but I’m not a prize to be won.”

“You’re not a prize,” I said. “You’re a partner. You’re smart and good at seeing angles I don’t. Help me figure out how to set these guys up. Then we’ll both be safe”

“OK,” she said. “Let’s start with what they want.”

“My DNA.”

“One of the factions wants that,” she said. “The other wants them to fail to get it. Why? Because they want it themselves? Because they don’t like the idea of the one side of the family having it? Do they have a different idea for it? Or just for leverage?”

“That’s the kind of thing Brad might be able to tell us,” said Bob.

“OK,” I said, pulling out a notebook and a pen. “Let’s see what we know or guess before we question our friendly neighborhood Skin-Walker.”

“So if Caruthers is probably these aliases, what name do we think belongs to the woman you met at the house in Rowley?”

“She’s probably Amelia Bennett. That was the name connected to her phone number and on the registration for the Walther. She’s probably got more aliases, but let’s go with that.”

I drew a line beneath each name. “So what do we know that each one wants? And what do we know they’ve done?”   

“We know Amelia wants your swimmers,” said Bob.

I nodded. “She pretty much admitted that. Admitted stalking me at work, posing as an EMT, kidnapping and impersonating Sarah, all that.” I wrote each item beneath her name. “But she denied the real strong-arm stuff. I think she wanted to get the goods and move on, leave us none the wiser.”

I looked at Sarah. “Just so we know what lines they’re happy to cross, what did they do to you? Or threaten to do to you?”

She looked over my shoulder, into a distance from which the memory was bearable, let out a long breath and spoke. “They never hurt me, never actually laid a hand on me. They tricked me. Somebody posed as you took me for a drive, then when they got me to the cabin and I asked about plans...whoever was playing you...got evasive. Colder and harder than you are. Like you were trying to be funny, but coming off as just mean. I said if you were going to be an asshole, you could just take me back home, and then you–he–whoever– told me I wasn’t going anywhere, so get used to the cabin. They kept me in the cabin, fed me, never said much. I couldn’t figure out what was going on.” She turned to look at me again. “Then you and Bob turned up and rescued me, like I’m fucking Rapunzel, which yes, I know you had to, and thanks, but I don’t like it.” She shrugged. “I don’t like feeling helpless.”

I nodded. I understood, sort of, how it would bother her to need to be rescued. I have no baggage about the cavalry riding in to save me, but I don’t have a thousand years of cultural cliche weighing on my shoulders.

“You saved me right back tonight,” I said. “Even a charming and resourceful man of action like myself needs rescuing sometimes.”

“I get how they hoped to keep you isolated if you bought into the romantic weekend thing,” said John, “but once you’d seen the true face of the enemy, what were they keeping you safe for? Not that I want to see you hurt, but these people couldn’t afford to let you go to the police.”

“They seem to put a lot of faith in blackmail.” I said. I thought back. “No. Wait. Back in Rowley, when we questioned Amelia. She mentioned something about letting Sarah go ‘unharmed and with her memory wiped,’ or something like that.”

“Can they do that?”

“I don’t think they can, but they probably know who could,” I said. “Supposedly that’s a power of one of the families. It would save them having to dispose of a lot of bodies.”

“So what does Caruthers want?”

“It seems mostly to keep Amelia from getting what she wants. He’s the one who tipped me off about the original plan, and probably set up the scene at the college so I’d think you were cheating and do something stupid, probably in the direction of Amelia’s group, who were the only ones I know were messing with me. And this latest attack, when they kidnapped and tortured me, I don’t think that was Amelia.”

“How can you be sure?” asked Bob.

“It’s tough to be sure of anything, but the woman I fought was probably a man shifted to look like a woman, just based on body mass and muscles. When John tossed Amelia around in Rowley, she weighed what it looked like she weighed, and she tried to get my DNA the old fashioned way, which only a woman could do.”

“So why would a man try to look like her if he couldn’t...get your sperm?” asked Sarah.

“That bothered me all along. Hadn’t put it together until now. Now I’m thinking Sarah is right. It’s a family feud. The kidnapper looking like Amelia was misdirection. Make it look like the whole thing was Amelia’s group, not Caruthers’. They wanted me to think it was the same woman, but I’m convinced it wasn’t.”

“But why torture you and question you if they wanted you to escape and go after Amelia?” asked Sarah. “Isn’t that going a long way to piss you off?”

I shrugged. “They seemed to want to know how much I knew. Maybe wanted to know if I’d roll over on Caruthers as my informant. That would tell him if his secret was safe from the other faction. Damn, this is tangled.”

“So, let’s make it simple,” said Sarah. “Have we established that Amelia’s group wants your DNA, with as little attention as possible, and Caruthers’ wants to stop them?”

“Well, Without Caruthers, they’d probably have gotten away with it, right?” I asked. “Why would I ever assume fake Sarah was a replacement? It makes no sense. More likely to figure you were upset and acting different. And Sarah wouldn’t have figured they were impostors either, probably. I mean, would you have believed that wasn’t me who’d kidnapped you before I walked in with my Doppelganger at gunpoint?”

Sarah shook her head. “No. If they’d dropped me back home and then you called the next day, I’d never believe it hadn’t been you. I’d have been pissed, but I’d figure it was you.”

“So they blur your memories, or have some guy do that, you go home without any knowledge, I figure you were acting strange, and we work it out. Or we don’t. But we break up and blame each other, never figuring on shapeshifting impostors.”

“That probably would have worked,” said Bob.

“Right. So why did Caruthers stick his oar in? If he’d just wanted to help, he could have done a lot more to put me on the trail. As it was, he just kind of pulled the pin and rolled me into the room and let the damage happen.”

“So was he just trying to stop Amelia from getting your powers for her side of the family, or was he trying to destroy her side using you, keeping his own hands clean?” asked Bob.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But we do know this is an ugly family feud, we know our buddy Brad has been playing both sides, and he’s probably not thrilled about them finding that out, so we see how much he’s willing to tell us to avoid that.”

“Once you know what they want, what are you going to do about it?” asked Sarah.

“That depends,” I said. “All I really want is to be left alone. I don’t feel any need to destroy these people if I can get a hold over them. It worked with Doors last year. I’ve kept out of his way, and he hasn’t come after me or anyone close to me. I don’t know what would scare these guys enough to make them stand down, and they’re hard to guard against. I’d have to suspect everyone I met. Passwords would get real old real fast. So the question is how do I ensure they’ll back off and stay backed off?”

“Any chance you’d pick one side? Help them take out the other one in return for a truce?” asked Bob.

“I guess,” I said. I didn’t like the idea. “It would depend on exactly what they wanted. What the dispute was about.”

“Well, I guess we see how much dirt our friend is willing to dish about the family.”

“Bring him a beer and turn on the ball game,” suggested Sarah. “That always worked at our house.”