Shadow Woman A Novel

Chapter Ten



“Al.”

Al Forge turned as his name was said in a clipped, calm tone that told him the identity of the speaker even before he saw her. It was a f*cking fact of life: everyone had someone to answer to, even if, at the end, it was Death, or God, or whatever they thought they were facing. As high up on the food chain as he was, he still had a superior, and her name was Felice McGowan.

“Yes?” he said, making it a polite query as if she were a visitor who was interrupting him—which technically she was, because this was his territory—mainly because he knew that even though she wouldn’t show a flicker of reaction, it would annoy her. Annoying Felice was a game he enjoyed playing. Some days an interruption was welcome, but today he had a feeling he knew why she was here, and he wasn’t looking forward to the looming conversation.

“Tank,” she said calmly, turning on her heel and striding away. Al didn’t let himself show any outward signs of concern, but he definitely felt them as he followed her to the tank, an interior soundproof room that was as secure from eavesdropping as they could make it, which was pretty damn secure. No cell phones were allowed in the room, no cameras, no recorders, no weapons, and everyone who entered was scanned to make certain they didn’t have any of those devices. What was said in the tank stayed and died in the tank.

On TV he’d seen clear Plexiglas versions of the tank, with all the inhabitants in clear view, but this tank was a regular room that had been shielded and reinforced, with jammers that prevented both reception and transmission. It wasn’t as cutting edge as the TV versions, but it worked.

Before he entered, he removed his cell phone from his belt and placed it in a vault. Then he pushed open the heavy reinforced door and went inside.

The tank was an ordinary room on the inside, with a conference table lined with high-backed office chairs, a coffeemaker and all the accoutrements sitting on a credenza at one end, and harsh fluorescent lighting that they’d recently replaced with pink-tinted bulbs because they’d noticed they all got headaches and wanted to kill each other when they were in here. Their jobs were stressful enough without throwing bad lighting into the mix.

“What’s up?” he asked casually after he’d closed the door behind him, as if he didn’t already know, but this was part of the game.

“Subject C.” She propped one hip on the table, a dominant position that he was positive she took on purpose. Because she was nothing if not thorough, Felice would have studied body language, micro-expressions, and every other area that could possibly give her an edge in a field that was dominated by men.

He took a few seconds to admire the picture. Felice was an attractive, classy woman: forty-eight years old, divorced, mother of one adult daughter. She had clear gray eyes and her streaked blond hair was cut in a short, almost masculine style that was stylishly feminine on her. Her tailored trouser suit was a muted dark gray, but the blouse under the fitted jacket was a rich blue that deepened the color of her eyes. She trod the narrow line of being both professional and feminine without a single misstep.

She was also the one person he’d worried about most in this situation. Not because she was a screwup, but because she wasn’t. She was cold and logical and would take whatever steps she deemed necessary to contain the damage. In this situation, though, logic could actually work against them. Al worked hard to stay on top of things so he could head off any destructive decisions she might make, but he’d always been aware that the status could turn on a dime and he wouldn’t be able to stop her.

Xavier had always known it, too.

“Subject C,” she said again.

“Everything seems unchanged with Subject C.”

“Except for the security breach concerning the time lapse.”

He hadn’t tried to hide the slip by the Winchell woman from Felice, because straight up was the only way to play this. “It wasn’t a security breach. We know about the time lapse, but Subject C doesn’t. She didn’t react in any way. She was sick, and as far as we can tell from her subsequent actions, she didn’t attach any importance to the statement.”

“You can’t know that. Remember that she was very, very good.”

“That was before. Her memory was wiped. Now she’s just an ordinary person who lives in a very small world.”

“The process has never been tried to this extent before. I don’t put as much trust in it as you appear to.”

“I haven’t decided to not trust it on no evidence to the contrary,” he said with some bite to his tone. Felice might outrank him, but Al didn’t operate from a position of fear; it simply wasn’t part of his makeup.

In a world with a population of over seven billion people, there were six people alive who knew what had really happened four years before. Originally there had been eight, but one had died of natural causes and the other Xavier had taken care of—not that Felice knew that particular detail, but Al did. Six was such a small percentage he couldn’t begin to mentally calculate how many decimal points that was. But Felice was one of the six—and so was Subject C. Technically, Subject C didn’t know, but the possibility that she might one day recover her memory was what kept them watching her. She was the weak link, the one who’d been brought in from the outside and wasn’t part of the team. Felice had never really trusted her, but they hadn’t had any other option.

“I’m ordering physical surveillance,” Felice said, not asking his opinion, simply telling him what she’d decided.

Shit! That could be an unmitigated disaster. He gave her an exasperated look. “You’re overreacting, and you may well push Xavier into overreacting, which is the one thing guaranteed to make this blow up in our faces.”

Being Felice, she didn’t respond to his charges, simply made a counter-charge of her own. She was accustomed to dealing with congressmen and -women, with committees and bureaucrats and generals. He doubted she’d have blinked at being charged by an angry rhino, so she certainly wasn’t going to back down from him. “You’ve always been far too cautious concerning Xavier. He’s as mortal as the rest of us.”

Al cocked his head. “I could have had him killed at any time,” he retorted. “Hell, he could have killed us at any time. He knows that, I know that, and you know that. Do you think he hasn’t made preparations? He has the goods on all of us, and he’s set more trip lines than we could ever find.”

“He says. Why would he incriminate himself?”

“Because he figures he’ll be dead, so it won’t matter about him. It’s too big, Felice; you can’t contain the damage if this blows open, and it will if you don’t stay calm.”

That got a flash of ire from her, because Felice was nothing if not calm. If emotion had ever figured into any of her decisions, Al hadn’t seen it. She actually drummed her fingernails on the table, once, before smoothing out her expression. “I’m not sending a wet team out after her. I just want to make certain she isn’t doing anything unusual, something we can’t pick up from audio.”

“Then I should tell Xavier.”

“No. Absolutely not. He’ll think it’s just a means of getting to her before he can react.”

That was entirely possible, knowing how Xavier thought, how he allowed for every contingency. On the other hand—“Do you think he won’t know you’ve put a team on her? Not alerting him is the riskiest thing you can do.”

“So send him out on a job.”

She really hadn’t dealt with Xavier enough to know he wasn’t “sent” anywhere. He was offered jobs. He took them if he wanted to. Al had worked with him, trained him, and he trusted him in the field more than he’d ever trusted another human being. The one thing he’d never do was underestimate the man.

“He won’t go. Not now. He has his own ears on Subject C; he knew about the breach at the same time we did.”

“What? What?” She almost shouted the last word, which for Felice meant she was about to explode with fury. “You knew that, and you didn’t prevent it?”

“He isn’t going to trust us if we don’t trust him. He knows we know.” To ease the tension from the atmosphere, Al went to the coffeemaker and selected a pod, popped it into the machine, and slid a polystyrene cup into place. The machine hissed and popped, and a few seconds later began dribbling hot coffee into the cup. “What’s more, he knows where our operational base is, who our analysts are, what shifts they work, and where they live. He knows your routine, he knows your house, he knows your daughter’s house. If you don’t believe anything else I’ve said, Felice, believe that. Of all the operators in the world, he’s the one I wouldn’t want to piss off.”

She was silent for a moment, her nostrils flaring as she processed that she was as much of a target as any of them. He’d learned a long time ago that people who felt safe were a lot more willing to risk the lives of others than were people who were in the trenches themselves. It was a completely different viewpoint.

Still, this reaction was because she wanted to contain the threat to herself. He imagined she’d have him knocked off without losing a minute’s sleep if she thought he would ever be a security risk, but he was part of her team, and she trusted him. He trusted her too, as far as that went, not to turn on him. But Subject C was a different matter, and now she was seeing Xavier, too, as not being part of her team. That was her mindset, and one of Felice’s strongest points—and also one of her weak points—was that she didn’t doubt her own decisions. She considered options, and she made the call.

He sipped on his coffee, and she mentally poked and prodded at the situation. Finally she straightened from the table. “You’ll have to handle Xavier,” she said, her eyes cold. “I want reassurance that everything with Subject C is status quo, so the active surveillance will be in place asap. I’ll handle it. You may alert him if you think he absolutely has to know, but I advise against it. Be very careful what you do.”

Annoyed, Al registered that by handling it herself, Felice meant she didn’t want him using his people; she wanted to use people he didn’t know. Fine. Reducing his measure of control was a slap at him, but it was also something that could backfire, and with that last comment she had put the responsibility on him no matter what happened. If he told Xavier and things still went south, it was on him—but not telling Xavier was a risk no sane person would take.

“Oh, I’ll tell him,” he said mildly, reining in his temper. “After all, you wouldn’t want your men to get their throats sliced while they were sitting in their cars.”

Her lips pressed together. “If that happens, then all bets are off, and I’ll move on him. I’ll think of a way to handle the fallout. Just make sure he understands that.”

She left the tank, her heels clicking smartly against the tile floor. Al took another fortifying gulp of coffee. No way was he telling Xavier what she’d just said, because that would guarantee she didn’t wake up tomorrow. How could she not realize that?

Because she felt safe.

But she wasn’t. None of them were.