Sight Unseen

by Gayle Wilson

  Ellington sidestepped to avoid going down, but the effort had been enough to disrupt his aim. The bullet from the revolver splintered wood in the doorframe over Ethan’s head.

  The echo of that shot was lost in the roar of the shotgun. Ellington staggered backward. His hands, the right one still holding the weapon, attempted to cover the widespread pattern of buckshot that centered his chest.

  He looked down, eyes widening as if surprised to find blood staining the pristine whiteness of his shirt and the open seersucker jacket. Then he lifted his head, mouth open, to meet Ethan’s gaze. The look of surprise on his face hadn’t faded.

  The old woman was screaming again, a sound that echoed as loudly as the gunshot in the confines of the small room. Ellington spoke to her, the words gasped in the language she had used to her niece. Then he fell back against the fireplace, his free hand clutching the mantel.

  Sabina reached him in time to help him slide bonelessly down the bricks until he was sitting on the hearth, legs stretched straight out before him. At first she tried to stanch the flow of blood using the white handkerchief from his breast pocket. Finally realizing it was hopeless, she began a high-pitched keening, obviously the sound of grief.

  Ellington’s hand reached out and blindly found the back of her head. He patted it as one might comfort a child before he pulled her against his shoulder, finally—mercifully—cutting off the noise. Ethan watched them, his finger on the trigger of the other barrel, until the hand that rested against that snow-white braid finally relaxed and then fell.

  With the tableau the two of them presented, Ethan discovered the last piece of the puzzle. Raine had been right. Marguery had been in the room all along, only he’d been disguised as Charles Ellington.

  There was no doubt in Ethan’s mind that the man he’d just killed was the same one who had talked to them in Griff’s office this morning, the respected British scientist who had supposedly worked on the CIA’s parapsychology projects. Who had even written the definitive book on those. And if that were Marguery, then when and how had he taken on the persona of Ellington?

  “Ethan?” Raine’s voice.

  “I’m here,” he said. “Everything’s okay. It’s over.”

  He pulled his eyes away from the couple by the fireplace and closed the distance to Raine. He bent and pulled the blindfold over her head without bothering to untie the strings. She blinked against the sudden light, ducking until her eyes adjusted.

  He took that opportunity to scan the room again, still wary of the unexpected. When his eyes returned to her face, she was looking up at him,

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  It was the question he should have asked her. Unwilling to answer it, he broke the connection between them, looking again at the old woman, still sobbing against her husband’s body.

  “No wonder I didn’t recognize him.”

  Raine sounded controlled. A little too controlled, considering what had just happened.

  “Was there ever a Charles Ellington?”

  “I didn’t remember him this morning, but that isn’t saying much. I didn’t remember Sabina, either. Or my uncle. Not until tonight.”

  She had told him that Gardner had taken her away from her uncle. Now she seemed to be saying—

  “Marguery was your uncle?”

  “By marriage. Sabina was my aunt. My mother’s sister. My flesh and blood,” she added bitterly.

  “Then…”

  “No, Mr. Gardner isn’t my father. I only wanted him to be. You can’t imagine how much.”

  He wasn’t sure what to say in the face of that admission, not given the pain her claim had caused Gardner’s family. That was something that would eventually have to resolved, but not tonight.

  “Come on,” he said, putting his left hand, the one that seemed to be functioning almost normally, under her elbow to help her up. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “He murdered him.” Raine was still looking up at him, but she had made no attempt to rise. “That’s what I saw that night at the pond. My uncle slashed his wrists while he begged for his life, and then, when he was dead, together they dragged his body into the edge of the water and rolled it in.”

  Despite all he’d seen in his years with Cabot’s team, a coldness settled in his stomach at the description of that brutality. And he wasn’t a five-year-old girl.

  “Ellington? You’re saying your uncle killed Ellington.”

  She nodded. “I didn’t know why they were doing it, but I understood enough…” The words trailed.

  She had been a child, and she had witnessed the kind of unspeakable violence she had chosen to step away from as an adult. The fact that it had touched her so personally and at such a vulnerable age made her decision far more understandable.

  “I’d forgotten all of it until today,” she said.

  “The pond brought it back?”

  “Sabina, first, I think. I knew I’d heard the phrasing she used before. The language you couldn’t identify. The smell of her cigarettes, the same as my mother smoked. It was all tantalizingly familiar, but I couldn’t remember. For so long I hadn’t wanted to remember, and then when I did…”

  “Come on,” he said when she ran down.

  This time she let him help her up. When she was standing beside him, he laid down the shotgun in preparation of removing her bonds. Before he did, he had to physically restrain himself from taking her into his arms. Later. After this is finished. There’ll be plenty of time….

  It was the same argument he’d made last night, he realized. And then today, time had almost run out. For both of them.

  He gathered her to him with his good arm, hugging her tightly despite the fact that her hands were still tied. After a moment he held her away from him, looking down into her face to make sure she really was all right. What he saw reassured him enough to turn her so that her back was to him.

  “And I know why Mr. Gardner destroyed Cassandra,” she said as he began to unfasten her bonds.

  “You’re saying that Monty closed down the project?”

  She nodded, rubbing her newly freed wrists to restore the circulation. “He discovered that Cassandra wasn’t designed to spy on the Russians. My uncle was spying on Americans. On anyone he suspected of having allegiances to other ideologies.”

  Ethan wondered why Gardner hadn’t mentioned any of this when he’d sent them to Raine. Maybe because he, like everyone else, had really believed Marguery was dead. And because he had never seen any link between Cassandra and The Covenant.

  As soon as Marguery found out they’d visited the former DCI, however, he believed the Phoenix had made that crucial connection. He’d tried and failed to get rid of the old man.

  When Ethan had taken Raine back to Washington, it had thrown them into panic mode. First the attack at the hospital, with the unknown member of The Covenant posing as an agent. Then the attempt on the night of the fund-raiser. There was no doubt that if Raine hadn’t fled onto that ledge that night, Marguery would have killed her. She knew far too much. Or so he thought.

  “And he was using you to do the spying?”

  “I can’t imagine that the method could be very efficient—”

  “What is it?” Ethan asked when she stopped.

  Slowly she raised her eyes to his. They were wide and dark in the shadowed room.

  “Or maybe it was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think Ellington was the first.”

  Not the first person Marguery had killed? If her uncle were involved in The Convenant, with their plots to fund domestic terror, then it shouldn’t surprise him that he was guilty of multiple murders. Raine, however, was clearly devastated by the memories tonight’s events had unlocked. As she’d said, these people were her flesh and blood.

  “Let it go,” he said, putting his hand under her elbow.

  “What if when I gave him the information—”

  “Stop it.” His voice harsh. “You were a
kid. You had no idea what he was doing. You couldn’t have. Besides, you aren’t sure…” He hesitated, unwilling to complete that thought.

  “Sometimes I overheard them. They thought I was too young to understand what they were saying, but I understood the words. I didn’t always understand what they meant, but now…”

  “You have to let it go, Raine. If you don’t—”

  “It will drive me insane?” she asked with a small, bitter laugh. “It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”

  “You’re the sanest person I know.”

  “Given your background, that isn’t saying much.”

  Despite her taunt, he pulled her to him again, wrapping his good arm around her. She leaned against him willingly, as if she knew this was where she belonged. Next to his heart.

  “It’s over. Marguery’s dead. He can’t hurt anyone anymore. Especially not you. Not if you refuse to let him.”

  She nodded, her head moving against his chest. Her fingers had tightened around the material of his shirt, holding on to him. It was an emotion he certainly understood. When he had walked past that cruiser…

  “What do we do now?”

  Good question. He again considered Sabina Marguery, who was still stroking her dead husband’s head. No longer a threat, but someone who would have to be dealt with. And he wasn’t going to call the locals to do it.

  “We call Cabot,” he said. “Tying up the loose ends, especially if they’re politically sensitive—as I suspect a lot of this will be—is Griff’s specialty. We’re going to hand this one over to him.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “You were a child,” Monty Gardner said. “How could any of it have been your fault?”

  During the seemingly endless week since James Marguery’s death, Raine had spent most of her time talking to representatives of one national security agency or another. The news that, on the same day she and Ethan had driven to Mrytlewood, Mr. Gardner had regained consciousness and seemed to have no damage was almost all that had kept her going.

  This afternoon was the first time the old man had been allowed visitors other than family. Although Griff had offered to arrange for her to see him, Raine had insisted on following the rules. She’d done enough damage with her fantasy.

  “I could have told you what I saw that night.” Raine was sitting on the edge of his bed, holding both Gardner’s hands in hers.

  “You probably couldn’t have,” Cabot said. “Not him. Not anyone.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What you saw, combined with what you’d suffered at the hands of your uncle, would almost certainly have kept you quiet. And as soon as Monty removed you from his influence, your mind set about creating an alternate reality to the one you had been living.”

  An alternate reality. Almost her entire life could be reduced to that phrase.

  So much of what she had believed were things she had fabricated to replace the events her mind couldn’t deal with, until ultimately the reality had been wiped from her memory. And that made her feel more like a freak than her gift ever had.

  “Forgetting was exactly what I had hoped you’d do,” Gardner said. “At the time I had no idea how much you needed to forget.”

  “And you never had any inkling that Marguery had faked his own death?” Cabot asked.

  “You’re thinking I should have,” the former DCI accused, “but I had no reason to doubt his suicide. I fired Marguery as soon as I found out what he was doing with Project Cassandra. No one was sorry to see him go. He was already persona non grata with most of the agency because of his arrogance. And his wife, of course.”

  “Because they thought she was Russian?” Raine asked.

  “Because she wasn’t as adept at hiding her prejudices as Jimmy was.”

  “What kind of prejudices?” Ethan asked.

  Raine was physically aware of him, of course, every time they were in the same room, which hadn’t been very often since those events at Myrtlewood.

  They had both been busy dealing with the fallout, part of which had been that a female FBI agent had replaced Ethan as her bodyguard. Raine had tried to convince herself that the reason for that was nothing more than a medical issue. Ethan was still wearing his right arm in a sling, and she knew from the careful way he moved that his ribs were still painful.

  “Sabina was an equal-opportunity hater,” Gardner said in answer to Ethan’s question. “The Russians. Jews. Muslims. And she made no bones about any of it. Although we hadn’t reached the heights of political correctness Washington has since attained, her rabidity didn’t go over particularly well in the rather select community her husband belonged to.”

  “Since her country had fallen under Soviet dominance,” Ethan said, “I can understand her hatred of the Russians, but the others…?”

  “Anti-Semitism has always had deep roots in Eastern Europe. The hatred of the Muslims went back to their conquest of her country centuries ago. That was especially true within her culture.”

  “Her culture?” Raine asked.

  “You didn’t know? No, how could you?” the old man said. “Sabina was Romany.”

  Romany. Rom. Gypsies. The outcasts of Europe. It took only a second for Raine to make that progression in her mind. And less than that to make the next.

  “Did she have the gift?”

  “If she had, she wouldn’t have needed you.”

  “Sabina?” Cabot questioned the old man’s wording. “Why did Sabina need Raine?”

  “To get the one thing she wanted more than anything else in the world.”

  “Marguery,” Raine said softly.

  “The difference in their ages was obvious. She must have been fifteen years older. What wasn’t obvious was why someone as brilliant as Jimmy Marguery would tie himself to a woman who was despised by everyone he knew.”

  “She had brought him Raine?” Griff suggested.

  “When the agency tapped Jimmy to head up our answer to the Russian’s experiments in parapsychology, he began to discreetly put out feelers for psychics. Some of those feelers were undoubtedly made to the Romany population in the States, who quickly passed them on to the European communities.

  “I don’t remember the details,” Gardner went on, “but eventually someone set up a meeting with Sabina. I do remember that he was reluctant to make the trip behind the Iron Curtain. Ironically, he didn’t like operating undercover. When he met you with your aunt and found out how talented you were, he was willing to do anything to bring you back here.”

  “Including marrying Sabina,” Ethan guessed.

  The old man nodded. “I don’t know how she made him stick to his bargain for so long, but she did. At least his ‘suicide’ freed him from her constant company.”

  Despite her feelings about her aunt, the image of the old woman’s grief was still fresh. Whatever her aunt’s faults, she had loved James Marguery. Judging by his final action, he may even have grown to appreciate her devotion.

  “From what I’ve heard about him,” Cabot said, “suicide would seem out of character.”

  “I’d destroyed his life’s work as well as his reputation, at least within the agency. At the time of his death, he hadn’t worked in several years. I don’t think anyone at the CIA thought to question that he had taken his own life. We certainly had no reason to suspect he’d taken someone else’s instead. And remember, we weren’t as sophisticated in those days. There was no DNA testing.”

  “He probably chose Ellington because physically they were the same type,” Griff said. “And perhaps because the man was a British national. There was no family here to report him missing.”

  “As I recall, it took a while before they discovered the body. Being in the water all that time…” Gardner shrugged. “Identification would probably have been made by Marguery’s wife.”

  “And the local sheriff was in Marguery’s pocket.” Ethan’s injuries were a constant reminder of exactly how deep in his pocket that department had be
en.

  “The agency might have checked dental records,” Gardner said, “but for someone with as much experience in intel as Jimmy had, it would have been easy enough arrange an exchange of his and Ellington’s.”

  “So Ellington did work for the CIA?”

  “Not on those projects. Not that I remember. As a psychologist, I suppose he could have done some contract work, but…” The old man shook his head.

  “Ellington’s book was based on Marguery’s work,” Cabot said. “Who better to write it than the man himself?”

  “That was the kind of arrogance at which Jimmy excelled. He obviously believed he was far too clever to be caught. Certainly not after twenty-five years.”

  “That arrogance might also explain why he kept the records of The Covenant in a safe at Myrtlewood,” Cabot said. “The FBI is having a field day with those.”

  “Then he was involved,” Gardner said.

  “He fancied himself as carrying on his family’s noble tradition of protecting this country. Much of the material is couched in those terms.”

  “There are references in what the Bureau found to the Illuminati, an organization many of the founding fathers were rumored to belong to,” Ethan added.

  “Crazy bastard,” the old man said. And then, glancing back at Raine, “Forgive me, my dear, but it’s such a tragedy to see a good mind so twisted.”

  “Judging by Cassandra, it always was,” she said.

  Acting on the information she’d provided them, the FBI had drained the pond at Myrtlewood and were in the process of identifying the bones that had been found in its deepest part. Even though Marguery had been working for the agency at that time, she didn’t see any reason to tell Mr. Gardner about those murders. Not yet. He would learn that particular detail about Cassandra soon enough.

  “I think that’s enough talk for one day,” Griff said, seeming to realize, as she had, that they were treading dangerously near information Gardner didn’t need to hear. Not at this fragile stage of his recovery. “Later on I’m sure the Bureau will want to hear what you know about Marguery.”