Masquerade (56 page)

At each other. At themselves.

At the pair of them.

“It's eerie,” Sarah said. “We're eerie.”

“Almost as if I'm two people,” Liz decided.

They returned to the oolong tea on the coffee table. Sarah poured. “When your father thought I was you, he put in milk and sugar. Is that right?”

Liz nodded and sat back, relaxed in gray wool trousers and a pale blue turtleneck sweater. Her thick auburn hair cascaded to her shoulders, catching the lamplight in rich golds and reds. Sarah's own hair was that color again and growing out into a glossy mass that fell in ringlets around her high-planed face.

“Do you miss your original face?” Liz wondered.

“Sometimes. But I must've been ready for a change, or I never would've agreed to cosmetic surgery.” Sarah handed Liz her cup. “I've been thinking about getting some adjustments so I'd look less like you. But truthfully . . . the ensemble seems to suit me. I haven't figured out quite how or why.”

Liz smiled. “I thought you'd be sick of looking like me,
especially after all the trouble it's caused you.” She sipped tea, studied Sarah. “Do you miss your fling in the business?”

Sarah shook her head. She was relaxed, wearing sweats and slippers. A fragrant oak fire burned in her fireplace. There was still a part of her that was dissatisfied, that felt somehow the whole thing still wasn't over, but she'd gone on and rebuilt her life anyway. “I'm doing investigative pieces now. My most recent is a big environmental article about the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant north of here. It was built on an earthquake fault, can you believe that?” She sipped her tea. “What about you?”

“The desk boys have finished debriefing me, and I'm back on the payroll. I'm considered a risk because of my parents, so Langley will give me only contract work. I think that'll satisfy me. For a while I considered dropping out. Climb a couple of mountains. Take up deep-sea diving. Hang gliding. Maybe go back for a graduate degree in something.” She shrugged.

As a fresh blast of rain thrummed the windows, Sarah watched the conflict in her cousin's face. Liz no longer wanted to be who and what she was.

Sarah said, “I can understand why you'd miss it. It's addictive somehow. But you figure out really fast that if you want to exit intact, you have to compromise. I'll never feel easy about the people I killed, because I'll never know for sure whether I could've found a better way. But I think I was right, and I've had to learn to live with that.”

“That's because you're marching in the parade. Mother says, ‘Some people march in the parade of life, some people stand on the curb and watch, and others don't even know the damn thing's going on.' ” Liz looked down at her teacup. Her voice was low, sad, as she confessed, “Papa let himself be killed, Sarah.” She raised her dark-brown gaze. “He knew better than to stop outside that garage long enough to take out the couple that was firing on you. He should've driven the hell out of there. He seldom made mistakes, and never anything as basic or stupid as that. I'm sure it was because he never really wanted to come in at all. For him, death was better than retirement.”

Sarah nodded. She'd never thought about why he'd stopped,
and Liz was right. It had been a mistake. But there was something else that had happened right afterward. . . . And then it came to her. She recalled seeing a clown—Or had that been an illusion? The adrenaline of the violent action and the photos she'd noticed on Quill's fireplace mantel?

Liz gave a small smile and continued, “Mother, however, is in her element. Now that the President's relented, they'll be debriefing her for at least another year. She feels as if she's making amends, making a contribution, and that's what convinced the President. I wish you could see her and Arlene Debo.” She gave a dry chuckle. “They dislike each other, but they understand each other, too. Makes for some interesting fireworks.”

Sarah and Liz discussed the secret hearings the House and Senate intelligence committees had conducted into M
ASQUERADE
, MK-U
LTRA
, Sterling-O'Keefe, and G
RANDEUR
. They'd testified at both.

“I'd like to write a book about the Carnivore,” Sarah said, “maybe with Leslee Pousho. We talked about it when I visited her in the hospital. Her face was almost repaired. Talk about courage—” She paused, recalled Leslee's suffering. “The problem is the government won't declassify the files for twenty years. I'd need information from other sources.”

“I'd like to help, but I know only what was in the messages I was ferrying into the Languedoc. Papa told me nothing. Neither did Mother, and now she won't talk because her deal with the U.S. government is that they get it all.”

Sarah poured more tea. “It was a shock to realize I was the Carnivore's niece.” She handed Liz her cup and looked into her dark eyes. Not Sarah's eyes, but somehow connected. “How was it being their daughter?”

Liz held the cup as steadily as her father had held his back in the dingy safe house in Paris. “When I was growing up, Papa was away on business a lot. That's all I knew. After a while Mother traveled with him, and eventually on her own. Later I learned he'd been training her then. My grandparents took care of me.”

Liz shrugged. “It all seemed normal. They were good parents,
and we had great times together. But I knew only part of who they were. I'd always sensed there was some huge secret, but I couldn't figure it out. Maybe it was because of that I started having nightmares when I was little. I used to scream myself awake. I had those nightmares until three years ago when I saw Papa on that job in Lisbon. Suddenly everything made sense. The big secret was my parents were assassins. I was stunned. Horrified.”

“You talked them into quitting?”

“Into taking time out. And then we fought a lot. Fighting is one hell of a lot better than silence. From the beginning, Mother made it clear she'd never loved or needed the work. In fact, Papa had tricked her into it by telling her it was for England. Since she was raised in a military family, she knew her duty. By the time she figured out he wasn't on staff with MI5 or MI6, she was in too deeply to quit.” Liz looked down at the floor. “I think she almost got to enjoy the work, too. The danger, the matching of wits, the thrill.”

“I'll bet she was protecting you, too, Liz.”

“Yes. Neither one of them wanted me to know. But when I joined them, she realized what it was doing to all of us, and then she desperately wanted to quit. Papa wanted to keep working. He was damaged, Sarah. Something was broken inside. In the end I think the only reason he agreed to come in was he was afraid of losing us. He always said I was his weakness. I loved him, too, until I saw his eyes that night in Lisbon when he killed the courier. His eyes were so deadly, so sick. The courier was just a boy—” She bowed her head. “I hated Papa after that.”

They continued to talk until nearly midnight, when Liz announced she had to leave. She was driving south to Los Angeles International to catch the red-eye back to Washington. She crossed the room with the elegance of a cheetah, all athletic rhythm and body-joy.

She put on a trench coat, tied the belt, and went to the door, fidgety. They kissed cheeks.

“When will I see you again?”

“Who knows?” Liz cocked her head, pursed her lips. “You
know, there's talk at Langley about hiring you. Interested?”

Sarah felt a flash of panic, then curiosity. What would it mean? She shook her head, certain. “My mother has a saying, too: ‘Never fight with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig loves it.' ” She smiled. “Now I'm fighting for causes I choose. I don't mind the dirt nearly as much. Keep your eye out for more investigative pieces from me.”

“I will. Oh, and one more thing. When you see Asher, remind him to forget he knows me.” She gave a cheery wave, ran lightly through the rain, and disappeared into her car.

They had lived together, Sarah and Asher, in the bungalow on the beach since their releases from the Languedoc's infirmary. While he was away on assignments she met with editors, researched, interviewed, and wrote. Her probing articles appeared in major magazines across the nation.

Each day that winter she walked on the beach beneath the gray, heavy sky. The ocean crashed and pounded the sand. Seagulls gathered in large flocks, beaks pointed into the wind, taught by nature to prepare in this way for a storm.

One day she returned from her beach walk to find the light on in the bedroom. Asher was home! She ran up the steps, flung open the door, and rushed into his arms.

“You're so cold.” He kissed her cheeks, her throat, her mouth. “God, it's so good to see you—”

“Did you get an address for Jack O'Keefe?”

“Of course. But I don't know why you want it.”

“Tell you later.” She smiled mysteriously, kissed him deeply. “How long will you be able to stay?”

“A month. And this time you'll damn well marry me.”

She thought about Liz, about how much distance there could be between two identical women joined by blood and fate.

“I might want to have children,” she warned.

“That's good, because I might want to, too.”

They tore off each other's clothes, panting, smiling, whispering secret love words. She couldn't get enough of his wild black hair, his snow-white teeth, his feral eyes. When they
were both naked, he spun her around, her back to his front, and they fit together tightly. It made her ache, the old need renewed each time. He buried his mouth in her hair, his breath warm and spicy against her throat. She inhaled and arched back into him, her spirit soaring, healing, with love.

She wrote the letter in late January and began her wait.

It went first to a post office drop in London, then was forwarded to Amsterdam, and finally found Red Jack O'Keefe on Majorca. From there, he sent it on to Madrid, where it was forwarded to Algiers, and then mailed one last time, to Palermo, Sicily. All in all, it took six weeks.

Don Alessandro Firenze received the letter at his villa outside the beautiful resort of Cefalù, halfway between Palermo and Messina. A small town of some 12,000, Cefalù had been his occasional home for some forty years. It was the family seat of the Firenzes and the Bosas. No longer the young firebrand who'd rejoined his heritage as a teenager, then whored all night and drunk all day, Don Alessandro now sought the education he'd passed over as a youth. He was systematically reading through the eclectic library he'd collected. He still took a job periodically, just often enough to quench the fire that otherwise would blaze out of control and make him destructively restless.

Besides his books, the don enjoyed Cefalù's white-sand beaches, the rocky coves, and the dramatic backdrop of sheer rock that towered above the old fishing village. He liked the fresh grapes and olives, and the unsophisticated life-style; Sicilians were mostly a primitive farming people. Over the last two thousand years in this difficult arid climate, they'd learned to mind their own business. Thus, Cefalù—and Sicily—were congenial to him in all ways.

The don looked first at the signature on the letter. A lump formed in his throat. It was her handwriting: “Liz.” He glanced around. Nothing but the winter wind moved amid the olive trees that dotted his vast mountainside estate.

Lo leggo subito
. He would read it immediately. He took the
letter to his chair beneath a cork tree in his large garden and began—

Dear Papa,

I thought you'd like to know Langley is giving me some contract work. I suspect I'll be bored, and I'll have to look for something else to do with my life. I'm telling you this because you probably haven't heard from Mother, and you won't for at least another year. That's how much longer Langley will keep her on a short leash, in safe houses, debriefing her. . . .

He waved for the maid.
“Signorina, vorrei tè subito per favore.”
The winter day was chill, and he wanted his hot tea with milk. Also he asked for his radio. He moved his simple wood chair and little side table out into the Mediterranean sun, and he held up the envelope to gaze at it in the light. He next held up the letter, scrutinizing it closely, too.

Off in the distance, three vultures caught his eye. They were circling lower and lower. Some carrion must be waiting beneath. This was another thing he liked about Sicily: Few wild animals were native here, except several varieties of vulture. The vulture was an elegant bird, great, patient, and it performed a useful service, ridding the scrub of rotting flesh and maggots.

His tea and radio arrived on a tray. He told the maid she and the other staff could have the rest of the day off. She bowed herself back to the villa, and he added milk and sugar to the tea, then a little packet of something else. He touched several buttons on the “radio.” He resumed reading.

You must be wondering how I know you're alive, Papa. I saw Sarah recently. She told me when you and she were in the MG leaving your safe house, she saw Mother on the corner in her clown disguise. I now know Mother was there because she and I were coming in that night, and she was going to help you fake your death again. Later Jack O'Keefe told Sarah you had to
be playing one of your tricks, pretending to have died. I imagine he's regretted his slip. . . .

The don took a long drink of the hot tea—assam, his favorite. He looked off down the slope toward the turquoise Tyrrhenian Sea. He stood, beat his arms against his chest, warming himself. They'd be here soon.

Even as the words entered his mind, he saw shadows dart among the trees, swift and elusive, but still he saw them. He could smell them, too, as a vulture smelled prey. As a dog smelled a bone he'd buried a lifetime ago. The sea breeze and the experience of years carried their scent. He felt his heart squeeze, and then the sudden rush of adrenaline that made life worth continuing.