Masquerade (13 page)

She grabbed a handful and climbed the first tree. She smeared mud on the camera's lens, making a brown film. Then she did the same on the next two cameras. With luck the film would look like a normal dirt coating, and when someone came to clean them—or to look for her—they'd have more than a hundred yards of wall to investigate.

On the ground again, she leaped up on the part of the wall surveilled by the second camera and, without touching the concertina wire, balanced precariously on the edge.

She trained her infrared beam along the length of the wall.

Then she saw them: Small metal boxes attached to rods from which the concertina wire was strung. Vibration detectors. If someone pulled the wire, an alarm would instantly warn security.

She took a deep breath and snipped through one thick wire. She watched her watch and, at sixty seconds, she snipped the wire two feet to the right. The time interval was long enough that, with the absence of bad luck, security would think the tiny quivers were normal—wind, birds, or some adventurous squirrel.

Her hands steady, she dropped the clippers into her backpack, packed up the section of cut rolled wire, crawled through, and returned the wire to its previous spot.

She dropped down the other side of the wall. Someone would eventually find the wire had been cut, but by then she expected to be far away. She double-timed off across a long ridge and down a valley toward the little town whose lights she'd spotted. As dawn rose pink and marigold on the horizon, she entered its outskirts. She longed to shower and sleep at the only motel, but that would be an invitation for Gordon to find her.

She was sweaty and exhausted, but she breathed deeply, savoring her freedom. Savoring the knowledge that she'd learned the Ranch's—and Gordon's—lessons well. Now she had two goals: Find out not only what her memories meant, but what Gordon had done to her, and—perhaps most important—why.

She wasn't going to let the bastard get away with whatever the hell he was up to, no matter what she had to do.

PART II

Asher Flores

Chapter 14

Liz moved swiftly through the mountain village and followed the narrow, two-lane blacktop out the other side. She slowed again, pacing herself. After a quarter mile she heard the engine of some vehicle approaching from the south. She stepped off the road and into the trees. She crouched, making herself small. Sweat dripped off her forehead. She waited.

Then she saw it—a Jeep, dammit. It could be from the Ranch. She moved swiftly back through the trees, staying low.

The Jeep skidded to a stop.

Her temples throbbing, she dropped, belly on the ground, and slithered into the underbrush. Branches tore her clothes and skin. She could hear male voices behind her and a great clumping and thrashing. They seemed not to care about the noise. That worried her more.

Sweat pasted her shirt and pants to her skin. Her breathing came in painful rasps. Fear had an iron grip on her chest. She'd escaped a hundred feet from the road when she heard someone ahead of her. Then someone to her left, a third on her right.

Swiftly she reversed direction. If she could get back to the road, she could hot-wire the Jeep.

There was abrupt silence. Not even the insects and birds sang. The shadowy forest was eerie, oppressive. Predatory.

She froze, sweated more. A twig snapped ahead of her. She resumed slithering backward. Quickly. Away from the sound.

That's when Gordon lunged from the timber to her right
and landed flat on her back, knocking the wind from her. At the same time, but from the left, a second man—the personnel director—shot from the timber, too.

She struggled, gasping for air.

The men were fast and perfectly coordinated. They rolled her over. The personnel director sat on her legs. Gordon straddled her chest.

“Dammit, Gordon! Let me up!” She tried to break her arms free.

“Just relax, Liz,” Dr. Levine commanded as he emerged from the forest ahead of her.

“What are
you
doing here!”

“You're not yourself, Liz.” The doctor set down his black bag and removed a hypodermic syringe.

“Jesus Christ! What have you been doing to me!” She looked wildly at the syringe and then at the doctor.

“You need some time out, darling, to compose yourself.” It was Gordon's most soothing voice. He smiled gently.

“Let me go!” She kicked and struggled, but Gordon and Flores had her pinned.

“Hold her still! I can't get close enough to inject her!” The doctor circled.

“Take it easy, lady. There's three of us. No way you can get free.” It was Asher Flores with his angular face and black bushy hair and eyebrows. He was the one who'd almost caught her the first time she'd broken into personnel.

“You son of a bitch!” she yelled. “They've got to have been drugging me—”

Gordon clamped a hand over her mouth. “Now, Doctor!”

Doctor Levine injected her hip through her camos.

Within seconds she felt the potent chemicals. She willed her body to reject the poison, but drowsiness swept over her like a warm, liquid bath. She heard the doctor's voice. She turned to look at him, to remember . . . something . . . but her lids refused to lift.

“That's a hell of a crooked finger,” someone said. Asher Flores, the personnel director. “What happened?”

Gordon breathed hard, angry, distracted. “She broke it a
few weeks ago. Is she unconscious yet, Doctor? The sun's up. We've got to get out of here.”

She felt somebody take her pulse.

Through the murky haze of her mind, Doctor Levine sounded pleased. “You can relax, boys. She's in dreamland.”

Asher Flores ate breakfast in the camp cafeteria, contemplating what to do. For him, the big issues—like Life with a capital “L”—were taken care of. That left the little stuff, like what to do with the day.

It was the little stuff that drove him nuts.

Now twenty-nine, he was the son of a Polish-American mother, who was Jewish, and a Mexican-American father, who was Catholic. He grew up eating matzos and tortillas, knishes and burritos. He went to both church and temple until he was eight, when he refused to go to either again. He'd realized he'd be expected to choose between them someday.

That's when his family still lived in volcanic South-Central Los Angeles, where drive-by shootings and hate crimes were the weekend entertainment. In elementary school he'd hung out with a group of tough Vietnamese kids, so his parents had moved to conservative, upwardly mobile Mission Viejo in Orange County. There he'd made friends with three boys from French families who'd flown the French tricolor every day except the Fourth of July, when they'd hoisted the Stars and Stripes in homage to their new land. He'd thought that was wonderful. He'd helped them start a soccer team at school, and they'd awarded him a T-shirt decorated with the Eiffel Tower in glitter.

In high school his new best friend had been a boy from West Germany. And in college, at the University of California at San Diego, he'd studied international studies so he could get to know people from as many nations as possible. That's where the Company had recruited him. He'd liked their pitch: Help us spread democracy around the world.

He'd been stationed in Europe during the scandals of the 1980s, and so he'd missed Iran-contra. It was mostly over by
the time he'd joined anyway. Like everyone, he'd followed the hearings and trials in the newspapers, and he'd picked up some juicy gossip from other agents, but he'd never really understood why anyone in the Company would do anything so criminal, so dumb.

Asher took pride in being one of Hughes Bremner's top field operators. He even liked the idea that the new director of Central Intelligence was female. He figured it was time. He believed in Langley. The purpose of covert ops was to enlighten the uninformed, give people a new way to see things, back up faltering democracies, and make sure evil intentions failed.

What was wrong with that?

Asher kept his goals and his heart simple.

But there was another side to him, too, the side that craved the excitement of South-Central L.A., where a short, half-Jewish/half-Catholic kid had to fight his way to school and fight his way home. Where allies were brothers for life.

Where you never knew when you woke up what the day would bring.

He was a rule breaker. It was not only guaranteed to make life more exciting, it also ensured he had to live by his wits. The best field operators were the ones who used not only brains but “gut.” Asher was blessed with gut. Too much, according to Hughes Bremner. Which was why Asher had ended up pushing a computer keyboard at the godforsaken Ranch.

The KGB wasn't the only one with a Gulag.

Now he ate breakfast with a hundred eager rookies. He'd not had enough sleep because of Gordon Taite's sunrise adventure, but still he toyed with the idea of jogging. After that he could try out the new earth-moving equipment Uncle Sam had delivered yesterday to clear land for a new Ranch gymnasium.

He could also check in at personnel. After all, he
was
acting director.

He left the cafeteria and strolled around the flag circle, trying to decide. It was too early for the Dodgers game, so he couldn't do that. As he passed the small infirmary, he thought about Liz Sansborough.

What a good-looking broad. Too bad she was bonkers.

On his second lap around the flag circle he decided he really,
really
disliked Taite. There was something slimy about him anyway, but the way he hovered over Sansborough all the way to the infirmary was enough to turn even a rag-picker's stomach. He was probably in there right now, drooling, even though the doctor had said she'd be out cold for a couple of hours.

Gordon Taite was probably a necrophiliac.

Yeah, Asher could believe that.

On his third circle around the flagpole, Asher spun off and headed into his office. His intuition had kicked in with a wallop. He had a sudden feeling Gordon Taite was up to something.

As an expert in maverick field ops, Asher had a sixth-sense for such things. Was old Taite dealing a little private business? If true, Asher would enjoy causing the prick some trouble. He sat at his computer and considered. Might as well start at the beginning. It had to be something that involved the woman.

He asked for Elizabeth Sansborough's file. It came up promptly. After all the preliminary stuff, which looked standard, the file did a nice narrative on her childhood. He read it. Very traditional. Then he found a gem: According to a medical affidavit, the little finger on her left hand had been broken and healed crooked during a childhood accident.

Not a few weeks ago, as Taite had told him when they'd captured Sansborough.

Asher grinned. He was on to something. With luck, it would fry the hell out of Gordon Taite.

Chapter 15

The regular three-person staff in personnel worked around Asher Flores. They updated files, figured vacations and sick times, shuffled in marine replacements, and examined applications for a teacher of Farsi. In the time he'd been there, they'd learned to ignore him. At worst he was negligent; at best he at least let them do their jobs. Obviously he had no idea what a director did and had no interest in learning. If this was Langley's idea of a joke, they found nothing amusing in it.

They eagerly awaited a real personnel director.

Still, Asher Flores knew his way around a computer. The only time they grew upset was when he played games on it—Hammurabi, Harpoon, and his favorite, Jet Flight Simulator. He lacked respect. So this morning when one of them slipped behind and saw he was reviewing a personnel file, the staff member spread the word with relief. Maybe there was hope.

Asher was vaguely aware a wave of optimism had swept the usually taciturn personnel office, but his mind was on the file before him. Other than the inconsistency about when the finger had been broken, he'd found nothing unusual. But then, Sansborough was a stranger to him, so finding other inconsistencies would be next to impossible, unless they were within the file itself.

There was one oddity: The entries ended three years ago. Nothing since. Maybe that's when she'd become unstable.

Just to make sure, Asher accessed Langley's multimillion-dollar Connection Machine 5, a massively parallel computer that could out-crunch and out-run most supercomputers. On his last trip to Langley, Asher had visited it—a severe black cube studded with red blinking lights. Now he argued with it over whether it would let him see Sansborough's file. Finally he realized he had to use the new ultra-high, blue-clearance code bestowed on him as Ranch personnel director.

With the blue code, the CM-5 coughed up Sansborough's file. It was identical to the one at the Ranch, except there were two additional paragraphs at the end.

Asher leaned forward as he read the first one. He thought he'd seen it all, but this blew him away: Some three years ago, CIA agent Liz Sansborough had fallen in love with the deadly international assassin known as the Carnivore and crossed over to him.

Asher let the news sink in, then read it twice more. He leaned back in his chair and whistled tunelessly to himself. That beautiful broad was a traitor. She'd fallen for the world's highest-paid killer. And then she'd abandoned everything she'd believed in so she could play house with him.

He rubbed his chin. He hadn't shaved, and his skin was grade-six sandpaper.

So what in hell was Liz Sansborough doing
here
? Gordon Taite had said she had psychiatric problems. With the Carnivore as a lover, that wasn't surprising. She must have crossed back. Apparently she wanted to help Langley. But if she'd cracked, there was no way they'd trust her now.

Then Asher read the last paragraph: Last month Liz Sansborough had sent word she and the Carnivore were applying to four countries for sanctuary: the United States, Germany, France, and Britain. In exchange for new identities and luxurious retirements, the Carnivore would tell all.