Masquerade (12 page)

“Sorry.”

He grinned. “Dodgers ahead three to two.”

He wore a Walkman on his belt and headphones on his ears. Dressed in T-shirt, shorts, and jogging shoes, he was listening to baseball in the middle of the workday. He
was
crazy. And she had no time to waste. She mumbled an apology and ran on, straight for her locker.

If she were right, the public phone she'd used early this morning had been bugged. There were no phones in billeting. Private phones were located only in offices and staff huts. The
phone she'd used in front of administration was the single public one at the Ranch.

Since trainees were discouraged from outside contacts, she doubted the only public phone was being monitored just for her. The bug had probably been installed for general, all-purpose fishing. What would be more natural than for a foreign intelligence agency—enemy or friend—to try to infiltrate this top-secret birthplace of U.S. spies?

But no matter its purpose, the bug had recorded her attempts to contact the Walker family in Santa Barbara.

At her locker she grabbed her supplies, already neatly bundled. She ran across the lawn to the personnel hut. It was locked as usual, everyone at lunch or exercising. Which was what she wanted.

She looked carefully around, then used her lock picker and Gordon's code to break in. She locked the door behind her and hurried to the computer room. There she removed the face plate from the light switch and installed a radio-triggered device she'd taken from electronics. The device bypassed the on-off toggle without affecting regular use.

Far back under the top of the first computer desk, she hid a miniature recorder-player. About the size of a matchbook, the recorder-player could be triggered by remote. Its tape contained a half hour of office noises—footsteps on the floor, file drawers opening and closing, a desk chair dragged out, the clicking of someone at work on a keyboard, muted voices. She'd taken the recorder-player from electronics, too, and made the tape while studying in the Ranch's library.

Finished, she checked her watch. She'd been gone just eight minutes. She grabbed her notes and raced back to Gordon.

That night after Gordon was apparently again deep in sleep, Liz silently left their cabin and hid in the shadows beneath a fir tree across from personnel. The air was cool and damp with the scents of pine and earth. Off to the southeast, pinpricks of light reminded her of the village strung out to the southwest.

Time passed slowly.

She reviewed each step of her preparation. She could think of nothing she'd left out. Perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps there was no one reason to set this trap.

Then something moved between the trees.

She stared, all her senses alert. Someone was coming around the corner of the officers' club!

She dropped low beneath the pine branches. The figure unlocked personnel's door. From her control pad she triggered the devices in the computer room that turned on the overhead fluorescent light and started the tape of office sounds.

When the figure slipped indoors, she closed in. At a window she put on her infrared goggles, turned on her infrared flashlight, and shot the green beam into the dark room.

She located him, a man, leaning against the computer room door, beneath which a line of yellow light showed. He was listening to the sounds that indicated someone was inside, working. But still, she couldn't see his face.

Then he turned around, and her suspicions were confirmed.

Gordon!

Furious, disgusted, she watched as he moved to one of the computers in the reception area and flicked it on. She knew what he'd do next: Feed in his override code so he could check what she was doing in the next room. She had to move before he discovered the room was empty.

She ran, scanning the sleeping camp, feeling a deep sense of betrayal. In the beginning the camp had been a source of hope. Now she felt differently. Whoever had been monitoring the public telephone must have told Gordon about her calls to Santa Barbara. The Ranch had deceived her, too.

What didn't he want her to know?

Why couldn't he be straight with her?

She had trusted him, but he hadn't trusted her.

In her heart she still dreamed of innocence and the Gordon she'd grown to trust and admire in Santa Barbara. Now she doubted their love affair had been real. The gold rings had been a beautiful idea—romantic, touching. More important, they'd cemented her faith in him.

Then there was the Carnivore himself—

Because of her training at the Ranch, she now knew how devious Langley could be. Gordon could have staged the attack at her condo back in Santa Barbara and fabricated the dossiers that claimed the Carnivore was searching for her. The bland-faced attacker she'd supposedly killed could have used fake blood. Gordon could have been shot in the arm to confirm the reality . . . because, without the attack and the dossiers, she had no evidence the Carnivore even existed. For all she knew, no assassin had ever tried to kill her!

She was entitled to know who she was. Everyone had that right. It wasn't earned. It wasn't given. All you had to do was be born. And now more than ever she needed to know, because, judging by the way Gordon was acting, her lost memory must contain clues to what he, and perhaps Langley, were really planning.

Inside their dark cabin she moved swiftly. She snapped her survival knife and canteen to her belt, grabbed her day pack, and threw into it her infrared flashlight, compass, wire clippers, 9mm Beretta, and Gordon's billfold with its money and credit cards. Her infrared goggles still hung from her neck.

She checked the window for signs of Gordon. She saw and heard nothing. She cracked open the door.

A fist reached in. She slammed the door against it.

Gordon grunted and blasted open the door. “Get back in! You're not going anywhere!” He shoved her, and she stumbled. Rage swelled his face. His words snapped like a steel trap. She'd broken the rules again, and—worse—she'd fooled him.

She'd fooled God.

Loathing rose in her throat, but she had no time for it. She headed around him to the door. If memory was the foundation of knowing, then she was definitely having memories. She
knew
she had to leave the Ranch.

“I'm going, Gordon.”

“Like hell you are!” He grabbed her arm and turned her. “You'll do as you're told!”

“You've blown it. I don't believe you anymore.” She tried to
pull free. “I want no part of whatever you're doing here!”

“You bitch. You stupid, arrogant bitch!” He grabbed her day pack's shoulder straps, shoved, started to yank them down.

She responded instantly, seized the upper sleeves of his shirt, clipped the inside of his right foot with her right foot, and using his momentum, threw him off-balance. He crashed down onto his back in a
ko-uchi gari
.

“Liz!”

“Fuck off, Gordon.”

Before he could get to his feet, she slammed through the door and tore away.

“Liz, darling!” he called behind her, his voice once more kind, concerned. “Come back. You've got to have your medicine!”

“Fuck my medicine.”

She raced away through the night, heading southwest toward the lights of the village, where there would be a road to civilization and to identity.

Chapter 13

The new, temporary director of Ranch personnel, Asher Flores, was asleep in his cabin. He dreamed of choirboy robes flapping at his heels as he escaped Sunday morning mass, baseball games where the Dodgers always won, and the funny stories his uncles told as his mother's family gathered for Rosh Hashanah.

Then something shook his shoulder.

He tried to return to the safety of the dreams, but the shaking got harder. He opened his eyes.

Gordon Taite stood over his bed in the glow of a flashlight.

“Lay off.” Asher rolled away.

“Get up, Flores.” Taite shook him again.

“I've got $2,000 in dental work. You going to pay for new bridges? Get lost.”

“Up! That's an order!”

Asher opened his eyes again. “We're not in the army, Taite. Give me a break.”

But groaning and swearing, he got up anyway. Gordon Taite was one notch higher on Langley's pecking pole. At another time he would have enforced his recommendation Taite get lost, but not now. He was so sick of the Ranch he could puke. It was driving him nuts. It was worse than boring. Hell, even the Dodgers were losing. If Bremner was going to punish him by keeping him in the United States, at least the Dodgers could have a winning season.

Asher tucked in his shirt, zipped his pants, and fastened his belt. He had a strong, wiry body that his camos covered like a rumpled bed. To him, style was zero priority.

“Okay, what's up?” He tried to use his most captivating voice. Then he saw blood in Taite's hair, an ugly wound on his head. “What happened? Wake up a less-obliging person?”

“I'll tell you when we get to security.” Gordon Taite had no sense of humor.

“Which is it—hiking boots or tennis shoes?”

“Hiking boots.”

“Terrific,” Asher grumbled. “Just what I wanted. A midnight stroll.” He put on the boots and did up the laces.

“You could use some action, Flores. People are beginning to talk.”

That made him grin. His black bushy eyebrows beetled. Gordon Taite was referring to his forays with the camp trash truck, his boom box turned up full volume so everyone could hear when the Dodgers were ahead, and his general inattention to his job as interim personnel director. Of course, he'd accomplished other carefully planned misdemeanors, too, but he couldn't immediately recall them. In any case, maybe the word would get back to Hughes Bremner, and Hughes Bremner would start to worry about the damage he'd do to the Ranch.

“So they're talking, eh?” Asher led the way toward security. “What are they saying?”

“That you've lost it.”

Asher grinned wider. He knew Gordon Taite was disgusted with him. But then, Taite was a tight ass. He'd never liked Taite. Taite was the kind who kissed up and shat down. All charm on the outside, zero quality on the inside. You could never trust weasels like Gordon Taite.

“I hope you reported me to Bremner,” Asher said.

“Of course.”

Inside, Asher chuckled. Maybe he had a future again. “Where's your protégée—the beautiful one with the long legs? She ran into me today, in a manner of speaking. If I'm going to be up all night, I'd rather look at her than at you.”

Gordon Taite's voice turned brittle. “Liz has gone over the wall. I need you to get her back.”

Asher Flores had run field ops his own way once too often and, as punishment, Hughes Bremner had reassigned him to this tiresome little training camp in the middle of nowhere. Asher didn't take to discipline easily. In fact, he tolerated it only by maximizing the few pleasures and dodging the drudgery. Eventually some new emergency would erupt, and Asher figured Bremner would have to throw him back into the field.

Maybe this was it. “So tell me about Liz . . . Sansborough, right?” Asher pushed into security, where rows of wall monitors showed various camp locations in infrared.

“See that?” Gordon Taite pointed to a flashing blip on the radar screen. The blip was moving southwest. “That's her. She was once a good operator, then she had some psychiatric problems. We need her for a special operation. Our doctor thought she'd be okay. If not, we'd find out in training. Well, we've found out, dammit. I've called the doctor. He's flying in now.”

“She cracked?”

Gordon Taite nodded. “Tonight for sure. Couldn't take it. It's too bad. Anyway, we've got to get her back so we can get her medicated again.”

Asher studied the blip. “Looks like she's heading for Ten Scalps. That's the little burg southwest of here.”

As Gordon watched, Asher pulled out a chair, sat, and propped his feet up on a desk. He'd keep his eye on the radar screen from here. He ignored Taite's black look, and when Taite opened his mouth, Asher spoke quickly: “No sense stumbling around in the dark. We'll pick her up when she lands. Anybody got some coffee? Tonight's drug of choice is caffeine.”

As Liz ran through the night, she wondered about Gordon. Surely he'd alerted security. But if he had, why was there no alarm? She didn't understand it. Unless Gordon was protecting his pride . . . or had some other way to catch her—

Worried, she slowed to a fast walk, trying to figure it out. She was breathing hard, more from contemplating Gordon's treachery than the run. Still, she had hours of tough hiking ahead, and she needed to conserve energy.

She moved cross country, watching for sensors and cameras, wondering when the alarm would sound. And when it didn't, wondering what that meant. The moon gave good illumination in the open places. She hiked down slopes and across meadows. She jumped narrow summer streams, fed by snow melting high in the Rockies. Occasionally she heard animals scurrying away. Once she saw a herd of deer silhouetted in the moonlight. She drank from her water bottle frequently and stopped only to pee.

She saw one Ranch structure, a parachute tower. She circled widely around it. She spotted no devices that could track or view her. Maybe security was only at the camp's perimeter.

At last she arrived at the towering, concrete-block perimeter wall. It loomed black and enormous in the night. Concertina wire was rolled across its top. She put on her goggles and shone her infrared light along the walls and through the trees, searching for cameras, sensors, sentries.

Then she found a closed-circuit camera, and a second. Both were located high in fir trees where they could observe overlapping segments of the wall but would be impossible to spot in aerial photographs.

She squatted in the pine needles, considering her situation. At last a solution occurred to her. She reached under the needles to the moist dirt beneath. There'd been a rain this week, and here, where the earth was protected by the duff, the dirt was still mud.