Masquerade (3 page)

In the silent room she tried to recognize the solemn youth with the earnest eyes, but she couldn't. She'd loved him. She must have been devastated to lose him. But what was love? She loved Gordon, still . . . she had no remembered experience of romantic love, and the concept, the hugeness and newness of it, was more than she wanted to deal with.

Her parents had died, too, while she was at Cambridge. Killed by a mugger in New York City during one of her
father's annual sales meetings. She felt a jolt of pain for this unremembered couple. Her parents.

What would it take to retrieve her memory, to again feel their passing as the personal loss she knew it must have been?

For a few moments she sat and thought of those two unknown people who had been her parents. With a long sigh she returned to her reading and received another emotional jolt.

The year after her parents died she'd married a blond young man with freckles, muscles, and a look of easy confidence. Garrick Richmond, an American on a Fulbright scholarship at Cambridge. There were even more photos of her and the blond American. He was always smiling, radiating happy-go-lucky charm. Twenty-one that year, she had also chosen U.S. citizenship. Later she and Garrick had moved to Virginia, where he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. It was dangerous work, and Garrick Richmond had been killed while on assignment in Lebanon.

She closed the album and the file folder. A dark, suffocating cloak fell over her. Another death of someone she'd loved. Had everyone she'd loved died? Was there something about her, some curse she couldn't remember? Without her memory she could only speculate and be afraid. Without her memory it seemed as if they'd never lived. Without her memory
she'd
never lived.

She walked to the bed. When the memory is blank, you can't be yourself because you don't know who you are. You have no identity. No past that shaped you. No experiences to make judgments from. No old emotions to test new ones against.

You're simply a face in the mirror. The taste of toothpaste. The square of sunlight that warms you. The feel of cotton soft against your skin.

You grieve and rage and speculate endlessly, fruitlessly.

Her name was Liz Sansborough. She was thirty-two years old. Widowed. Except for Gordon, everyone she had loved was dead. She lay on the bed in the strange room and cried for all those thirty-two years, for all those she had lost and didn't remember.

She had worked for the CIA. She was a spy.

Her complete CIA dossier was in the next file folder. She'd joined after Garrick Richmond was killed. She'd trained at Camp Peary, Virginia, “the Farm.” The dossier listed the instruments and machines she'd checked out on. Her cipher and judo skills. Marksmen tests. She was a good shot . . . or had been. No wonder Gordon had insisted she take the automatic.

She put a cassette into the VCR. According to the label, it showed her London flat, filmed by a friend five years ago. The flat was small, with the same Danish-modern furniture that now decorated her Santa Barbara condo. A close-up showed her holding a book, the little finger on her left hand crooked.

She remembered none of it.

The second cassette had been made by the Company. It showed her on surveillance in Potsdam . . . picking up a drop in Salzburg . . . trailing someone through a murky alley in Vienna. At the end of the film, she looked up from the Vienna darkness, and yellow lamplight illuminated her in a haloed glow. That face was hers, right down to the dramatic beauty mark above her mouth.

According to her dossier, she'd been stationed in London because she knew it so well, and she'd worked throughout western Europe. Then, three years ago, she'd been sent to meet a courier in Lisbon. When she got there, the courier was dead. An assassin who called himself the Carnivore had just shot him. The Carnivore then shot her. Shot her and left her for dead.

It had been a long haul, but CIA medical people had pulled her through. Then they'd retired her and set her up in Santa Barbara as a journalist with the cover name Sarah Walker.

Sarah Walker!

So the desk in the condo was hers after all. She contemplated being someone named Sarah Walker. A magazine journalist. There was something familiar about the name, but it was more an emotion than a memory.

Then she thought about being shot and left for dead. In a way, she had died. Only the dead remembered as little as she.

Was all this really her?

The last item in the file folder was a photograph of her and Gordon, arms wrapped around each other, standing on the beach. They were wearing swimsuits, and behind them white surf pounded the golden sand. She studied the photo, turned it over. The inscription said the picture had been taken the year before at Hendry's beach.

They looked happy.

As she stared at the photo, she heard the door open. She turned. Gordon stood there, his face pale, his shoulder heavily bandaged, his arm in a sling.

She ran to hold him.

They were sitting side by side on the bed in the small room. She said, “I worked for the CIA. You knew that?”

“Yes, Liz.”

“Then you must be with the CIA, too.”

“That's how we met, you and I. We call it the Company, or the Agency, or simply Langley.”

“And the men who rescued us, this house?”

Gordon smiled. “They're CIA, too. This is one of our safe houses.”

“But how could you and I have been living together in Santa Barbara? What about your work? Your assignments?”

“Even agents have private lives, darling. I was in and out, but Santa Barbara became ‘home.'
You
were home. See this?” He held up his left hand. On the ring finger was a wide gold band.

She remembered seeing it, but hadn't really thought about it. “We're married?”

“Not officially. Not our style.”

He took a smaller band from his shirt pocket, studied it solemnly, then smiled into her eyes. “This one is yours.”

“You gave it to me . . . before?” She glanced at her left hand, the ring finger, so smooth and empty.

“Yes. We gave the rings to each other when I moved in. But the nurse took yours off in the hospital. They worry about theft, especially when the patient is unconscious. Then, when
we found out you had amnesia, I figured I didn't have the right to put it back on. Take it, darling.”

The gold band was heavy on her palm.

“When you fell and got the concussion,” he told her softly, “I couldn't leave you. You became my assignment. Making you well.”

She sensed he wanted her to put on the ring, but she couldn't. It was too full of meaning she didn't yet understand.

She slipped it into her pocket and changed the subject. “ ‘The Carnivore' is an ugly name, vicious sounding. Who is he, Gordon?”

He acknowledged her decision with a disappointed flicker of his eyes. “An international assassin, with a code name to match his reputation. No one knows who he really is, and there are no photos of him. He supposedly kills anyone who sees him. That's what happened to you in Lisbon. He believed you had seen him, so he had to kill you.”

She looked into his ashen face and said, “Tell me everything about him. The Carnivore.”

Gordon stood, paced across the room to the barred windows. He gazed out at the night as if he could see not only the past, but the future.

“For thirty years, give or take, Langley's tried everything to neutralize him.” He turned, his face grim: “And we're not the only ones. Every other intelligence agency on both sides of the old Iron Curtain would like to take him out, now more than ever. He's a loose cannon in an increasingly volatile world. Ruthless. Efficient. Totally independent. His only allegiance is to money. We've heard his real name is Alex Bosa, but we haven't been able to confirm it. When and where he was born, his parents' nationalities, his schooling, if he even had any, his age, are also big unknowns. We don't know what he looks like, because, as I explained, he kills anyone who spots him.”

“If I saw him, why didn't I give you a description?”

“Apparently, all you saw was a silhouette, but he thought you saw a lot more. He fired. His bullet knocked you unconscious and left one hell of a lot of fatal-looking blood.”

Fear clenched her heart. “I was lucky.”

“Very. If a police patrol hadn't turned in to the alley just as he was heading toward you—his back was to them—probably to make sure he'd finished you off, he'd have realized you were alive. Fortunately he ran. We figured right away it was him, and the next day we got confirmation from covert ops.”

Liz shivered. Then she realized Gordon was staring at her. He was intense, gloomy. She studied his pallid face, his bandaged shoulder, his arm in the sling. She thought about the sudden, violent attack on her condo and the CIA's swift rescue.

The pieces began to fit together with chilling logic. “Obviously the CIA's been watching me,” she said. “Those men who attacked us! Who were they?”

“We're not sure. The one we caught hasn't talked and probably won't. But we know what they wanted.”

She waited, her heart pounding.

He said, “We've had a leak. The Carnivore's heard you survived, Liz, and he says your claim that you didn't see his face is too convenient to be believable. He's spread the word he'll pay top dollar to your killer. He's taking no chances, so he's personally looking for you, too. One way or another, he's going to make sure . . . this time . . . you die.”

Chapter 3

In a working-class area of Paris, a man wearing soiled jeans and a tight T-shirt fought his way through a pack of striking bus drivers and entered a tough bar. He needed the maintenance van that had been parked outside. He intended to steal the van and its driver.

The man had a light gait and an uncanny ability to blend into his surroundings. He was about sixty years old, but he looked at least a decade younger. In Zurich, cosmetic surgery had erased his wrinkles, flattened his nose, and decreased his chin. In Rome, a doctor had capped his teeth and destroyed the records, making the new teeth impossible to trace. In Berlin, a special acid had burned off his fingerprints. Now he was taking steroids again and working out daily. His mind was clear, and his heart was as cool and ruthless as it had ever been. He was a businessman. He had returned to Paris yesterday.

He kept his gray hair in a crew cut, and for that reason in some French circles he was called Plume. In English, he was Quill.

Quill moved straight to the bar, caught the bartender's eye, and jerked his head. As the bartender approached, scowling and wiping a glass, Quill scanned the patrons lined up as if at a trough. Better here than outside in the noise and chaos.

The bartender stood before him.
“Qu'est-ce que?”

“Bock
. Miller.” Quill laid a few coins on the bar.

As the bartender scooped them into his white apron and
headed for the tap, Quill spotted the man he needed. The driver. On the back of his tan jumpsuit was the name of the maintenance company, which was also stenciled on the van outside.

Quill picked up his beer and headed toward him. The man was drinking beer, too. It was early afternoon, and a hard-working Frenchman grew dry.

Far south of Paris, on the green banks of the Rhone, the
citoyens
of the ancient city of Avignon stepped from shops, offices, and homes into the sparkling summer sunshine. Gay calliope music was ringing in the distance, calling forth the city's excited children, who knew from colorful posters pasted to twelfth-century walls and twentieth-century lampposts that a circus would parade through that day. As the country spiraled deeper into yet another recession, people hungered for any respite from their troubles.

In the back of a petrol stop, a young woman in bicycling clothes locked herself into a primitive stall. There was no toilet, only a hole in the ground and two worn spots in the stone where she was to place her feet.

But she wasn't there to use the facilities.

With smooth, practiced skill she stripped off her cap, sunglasses, backpack, and biking clothes. From the backpack she took out a cheap, formless dress, put it on, and stuffed the bicycling outfit into the backpack.

She did not rush. Nor did she waste motion. Consequently she was very fast.

From a side pocket she removed a compact mirror and makeup. She rubbed on makeup base until her natural rosiness turned to leather. She drew furrow lines around her mouth and across her forehead. She smoothed the lines. With a scarf, thick-lensed eyeglasses, and a sun-dried face, she would turn no heads in bustling Avignon.

She felt a welcome rush of adrenaline. For three years she hadn't worked. She'd missed it, although she'd be glad—no, “euphoric” was more accurate—when this operation was finished.

Satisfied with her new appearance, she went outside. The calliope music was coming closer, which meant she had little time. She bicycled to an
épicerie
, where she filled the wicker basket on her handlebars with fresh carrots, strings of garlic, onions, and radishes. She paid with francs.