Shadow Woman A Novel

Chapter Two



Xavier got up before dawn and ran his usual five miles. He liked running in the relative cool of darkness; not only was it more comfortable, occasionally it offered some chance entertainment: once some shit-head had made the serious mistake of trying to mug him, and had finally managed to crawl away with nothing more serious than a few cracked ribs, some crushed fingers, and Xavier’s size eleven-and-a-half track shoe planted halfway up his ass. He’d considered breaking the shit-head’s neck, just to make the citizens of D.C. a little safer, but bodies could lead to complications so he’d refrained. There had been a few other interesting moments, but in general, once the shit-heads got a good look at him, the smart ones would back away and let him run in peace.

He was a big man, pushing six-four, and muscled in a way that had little to do with a gym and a lot to do with staying alive in all sorts of going-to-shit situations. He could swim ten, fifteen miles, and run twice that many, while carrying up to a hundred pounds of equipment. He could fly a helicopter, pilot a boat, and he’d had so many hours of weapons training that almost any weapon fit his hand as naturally as his own skin. It wasn’t his size, though, that made would-be muggers think twice; it was the way he moved, the hyper-alert vigilance of a predator—not that any muggers would ever think in those terms. Their survival instincts would more than likely whisper, “bad dude,” and they’d decide to wait for a more likely victim. Xavier was a lot of things; victim wasn’t one of them.

He was back home by five thirty, and twenty minutes later he was already showered and dressed, which today meant jeans and boots, and a black tee shirt. The color of the tee shirt changed from day to day, but the rest of it was pretty much standard. “Dressed” meant he’d also checked his weapon, then situated his holster so it rode his right kidney. The big Glock wasn’t the only weapon he carried, but it was the only one that was readily visible. Even in his own home—perhaps most particularly there—he was always armed with two or more weapons, and never more than a step away from others in his private arsenal.

He didn’t feel paranoid; most of the other black ops people he knew did the same. Home was a point of vulnerability, for him and for everyone in the business, because it was a fixed point. People who stayed on the move were much harder to target. The good news was that, as far as he knew, no one was gunning for him … yet. The “yet” was always there, acknowledged but unspoken.

Because of that, he’d taken the precaution of buying two condo units, side by side. One was in his name; the other was in the name of J. P. Halston. If anyone checked deeper, they’d find that the “J. P.” stood for Joan Paulette. A lot of single women went by their initials. Joan had a social security number and a bank account, paid her maintenance and utility bills on time, and had no love life at all. He knew because he was Joan and she didn’t really exist, except on paper. Currently, his and Joan’s love lives had a lot in common, which was a real pisser, but that was reality and he could deal.

He slept in one condo and kept the other as a safety valve; he’d installed a hidden door, which could be opened only with the fingerprint of his left little finger, in the back-to-back closets linking the two. He’d put other safety measures in place as well, because someone in his line of work couldn’t be too careful. He hoped to God most of them were a waste of time, because if he ever really needed them, then it meant he was chin-deep in a world of shit. His particular skill set was valuable because he was both bold and careful, an attitude he applied to his private life as well as his work.

The powers that be were stupid as hell if they didn’t expect that, so he operated under the premise that they did. He felt more comfortable when everyone—within a limited circle—knew what everyone else was doing. Probably that was why he was still alive; they figured he’d set a trigger to expose them if they ever made a move against him. In that case, they were one hundred percent correct. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t someday try to find a way around, over, or under the situation; when that happened the political shit-bomb would be about to explode and everyone would be scrambling to survive, which was the exact situation he watched for. He’d known the price going in and had judged the end result worth the cost. Unfortunately, the cost had turned out to be higher than he’d expected.

Like he did every morning, he sat in the small, shielded room in the safety-valve condo, which served as the nerve center for all of his various alerts, electronic trip wires, and information-gathering programs, drinking coffee while he listened and read, and monitored the monitorers. He’d piggybacked onto their systems, so when her house was swept they picked up only their own bugs, but, again, he figured they knew anyway. If they hadn’t been smart, he wouldn’t have been working with them in the first place. Not that he didn’t trust his own people; he did, up to a point. Beyond that point, he trusted only himself. He was surprised they’d kept him in the loop this long, but then, he was intimately involved, and he wasn’t someone they wanted to piss off. He had friends with power, and even more dangerous friends with skills; he didn’t know which one of the two had more influenced the decision to keep him informed, but as long as it worked, he didn’t give a f*ck why.

Still. They watched her; he watched them, and made certain what they reported was what he already knew. And because he already knew, they were careful to keep the status quo going. They couldn’t withhold information, or give him the wrong intel. What he couldn’t control was if they initiated an action without there being a trigger, if someday someone in power simply decided the risk was too great to let the situation continue.

That was where he trusted his gut instinct, honed to a lethal edge by all the action he’d seen. The day that instinct whispered to him was the day he acted. Mutual assured destruction, a fancy way of saying “Mexican standoff,” was a fine concept when it came to keeping the peace.

At the moment, he was reading about the state of the euro—not that he was any kind of financial guru, but then, he wasn’t reading for investment information. Money drove everything in politics, in national security—hell, it drove everything, period. Desperate nations did desperate things, and a ripple in the monetary market could have him on a jet within the hour, traveling to God only knew where, to do whatever had to be done. Because he wasn’t available to oversee her all the time, he had a backup in place, to act if necessary. He tried to anticipate those times, predict when his services might be needed. While he was reading, he was also listening for anything the least out of the ordinary. So far, her routine had seemed to go as usual. Anything unusual would trigger a tidal wave of reaction.

“Ten, twelve, one, forty-two, eighteen.”

The whispered numbers grabbed his attention as abruptly and completely as if a shot had been fired. He set down his cup and swiveled his chair around, his head cocked, his entire body alert. Automatically he reached for a pen, jotted down the numbers. What the hell—?

Seconds later, she repeated the sequence of numbers, though this time in a slightly stronger voice.

There was a pause. Then came sounds of movement, at first normal, then hurrying, followed by the unmistakable noises of prolonged and violent vomiting.

F*ck! He wished he had eyes on her, but the surveillance network had allowed her that privacy. Nothing she said, either on her house phone or cell phone or even her work phone, not to mention what she watched on TV or did on her computer, was private. Her car was constantly tracked by a GPS device. But video had been nixed; not out of any concern for her constitutional rights, which had pretty much been shredded and trampled in the mud, but because it had been deemed unnecessary. They didn’t need to see her go to the toilet, or take a shower, so long as they knew that was what she was doing.

Surveilling her had been easy. She never deviated from her routine. She was calm, predictable—and now, it seemed, sick. But what the f*ck were those numbers?

He listened to a couple more episodes of vomiting. Definitely sick. Then came the signal that she’d turned on her cell phone. The name of her department supervisor at work, Maryjo Winchell, popped up on his screen.

He’d cloned her cell, so he listened in real time to the call. What he heard reassured him. She thought she had a bug, she was throwing up—he already knew that—and had a splitting headache. Maryjo confirmed there was a stomach virus making the rounds, her kids had had it, blah blah blah.

His tension had just begun to fade when Maryjo threw a grenade in his face. “This is the first sick day you’ve had in three years, so don’t sweat it.”

F*ck! F*ck f*ck f*ck! He’d long ago learned to control his temper—most of the time—but now he really wanted to throw his coffee cup through the computer screen. Why the hell would Maryjo Winchell keep up with how long someone had gone without taking a sick day?

Thank God, Lizette didn’t seem to notice. Maybe she was too sick. She mumbled a thanks, then said, “I’m sorry, I have to run.” He listened to her do just that, listened to a bout of vomiting, running water, a long pause, another bout—then there was a clatter, and the cell phone connection went dead.

Simultaneously, from the other bugs, he heard a clatter and heavy thud. After a few minutes, she blew her nose. There was the sound of heavy breathing, more running water. Then, in the thick voice of someone who had been vomiting and whose nose was stopped up, she muttered, “Oh, crap, now I have to buy a new phone.”

More noises, as if she was fiddling with the phone. Water running again. Then came the sound of the hair dryer. That made sense; she washed her hair in the shower every morning. Even though she was sick, she was drying her hair. That was her routine, one she hadn’t deviated from in the three years he’d been surveilling her. Not going in to work, even though she was sick, was the equivalent of an earthquake in her well-ordered life.

After she turned off the hair dryer, he followed the sounds as she went back into her bedroom; from what he could tell, she was going back to bed.

Everything should be all right. The other listeners would have noticed Maryjo’s verbal bomb, but the important thing was whether or not Lizette had noticed, and she hadn’t seemed to. She was sick, she’d been on the verge of heaving again, so she might not have been listening all that closely.

Could they take that chance?

He knew her. Her biggest talent had been her ability to think on her feet, to take a fluid situation and flow with it, letting her instinct lead her. She was undoubtedly puking her guts up, but given the Winchell woman’s slip, it was too much of a coincidence, at least to him, for Lizette to “accidentally” drop and destroy her cell phone almost immediately on the heels of that revelation.

On the one hand, something like this was never supposed to happen. She was shut down, and the process was permanent.

Maybe. It had never before been tried to the extent that they’d used it on Lizette. She was supposed to have been forever altered, the way an amputee is altered; she would function, she would have a life, but would never again be the way she had been before. But because the process hadn’t been pushed to that extreme, how could anyone know for certain exactly how she’d respond?

That was where his own gut instinct kicked in. He had to factor in the fluidity of her thinking, which maybe made her more resilient. Add that to the damaged cell phone, and his gut said, “She’s back.”

So the question wasn’t whether or not they could take the chance of ignoring the alarm sounded by Winchell’s slip, but could he?