Obsession

by ROBARDS, KAREN

  “It’s probably lost under the seat,” Nick said, having observed her fruitless hunt. “This is a 1972 Ford Fair-lane. Seat belts weren’t that popular back then. Hot-wiring cars only works on really old ones.”

  “Good to know.” She was already looking at so many possible ways to die that driving around without a seat belt was the least of her worries. They were on the street now, heading west. A tall chain-link fence and a shadowy basketball court and another long row of apartments flashed past her window. They came to a cross street, and as he stopped at the stop sign, another car drove through the intersection in front of them. She gave it an anxious glance.

  “We’re safe now, right?” she asked, as he accelerated through the intersection in turn.

  “Reasonably, I think. Whoever that was back there is searching for us big time, I guarantee it, but since they’ve got my car, they probably think we’re still on foot. That buys us some time.”

  “What do you mean, ‘whoever that was back there’? Weren’t those Ed’s men?”

  “Probably. I just can’t figure out how they found us.” He turned down another street, a little better lit, and Jenna realized they were headed for the expressway.

  “They’re CIA. They can find anything,” Jenna said. The thought made her shiver, and she cast another worried look around. They were nearing the on-ramp for the Beltway, and the overhead lights illuminated the inside of the car. As a result, she felt hideously exposed. There was more traffic, lots of vehicles, in fact, as they merged onto the expressway, but none of them seemed particularly threatening. Still, when an eighteen-wheeler zoomed past, rattling the old car right down to the frame, she jumped a little.

  Face it, girlfriend, your nerves are fried.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, hoping he had a plan. It had occurred to her that maybe they were running out of options.

  “Someplace safe.”

  She looked at him for a moment. When no more was forthcoming, she said, “You going to tell me where?”

  The quick grin that transformed his face was almost reassuring.

  “I’d say something like, ‘Don’t you trust me?’ but I think I already know the answer.”

  “You’re right, you do.”

  “The thing is, though, just in case we don’t make it to where we’re going, it’s better if you don’t know where that is. Barnes isn’t too particular about how he gets his information, as you undoubtedly remember.”

  “You think he’d try to torture it out of me?” Horror sharpened her voice. For just a moment, she had a flashback to those terrible moments when Hendricks burned her, and felt sick. Glancing out at the vehicles speeding around them again, she was conscious of cold chills racing over her skin.

  Nick didn’t answer, which she knew was an answer in and of itself.

  Ten minutes later, they exited the Beltway way out past Bethesda, and he drove down a series of country roads that got narrower and narrower and darker and darker until Jenna was ready to bite off her manicured fingernails and actually jumped at the hoot of an owl.

  Then he pulled off the road into some woods, bumping over what was scarcely more than a footpath. It was barely wide enough for the car, and several times Jenna thought they might not get through.

  Finally, he slowed even more as a small, Cape Cod-style house came into view. There was a light on downstairs, and another upstairs in a dormer window. Just about the time Jenna saw that, registered that this must be their destination, and started to relax a little, a man stepped out of the night onto the path right in front of the car.

  He was dressed in camouflage and carrying an enormous rifle, which he aimed straight through the windshield at Nick.

  27

  Nick cranked down his window. He had to do it by hand. Then he stuck his head out to speak to the guy.

  “Yo, Baker, it’s me.”

  The rifle—no, wait, Baker—moved a little closer, giving Nick a suspicious look. He then lowered the rifle, but only slightly. Jenna kept a wary eye on it.

  “That’s not your car. And you’re not on the schedule. ”

  “Yeah, well, I got a new one, and next time I’ll be sure to make a reservation.”

  Baker seemed to hesitate, but then he stepped aside, waving the Ford through. Nick drove through more dense trees, following the track in a semicircle that led around to the back of the house. Except for the lights shining through several of the house’s windows, the night was dark and shadowy.

  “Who lives here?” Jenna asked, looking at the house with curiosity.

  “Nobody, really.” He pulled alongside a two-car garage—both doors were closed—and stopped the car. “It’s owned by the Bureau, and we use it as a safe house. People come and go as needed.” Turning off the ignition and lights, he scooted across the cracked vinyl seat toward her. “I love these old cars,” he added in an appreciative aside, draping an arm around her shoulders. As she looked up at him with widening eyes, he slid his other hand along her cheek, stroking his thumb over her smooth skin.

  “Nick . . .” she began.

  He shook his head at her to silence her. “I’ve got something to say, and I want to get it out there while I’ve got the chance.” His eyes swept her face. There was the slightest hint of a twinkle in them, but there was heat and tenderness there for her, too. “Just for the record, I love you, too, Jenna.”

  Even as she recognized the echo of the words she had said to him not very long before, he bent his head and kissed her. His body was firm and warm against hers. His lips were fierce and hot. Her stomach clenched and her heart pounded and she surged up against him, wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him back.

  Nick Nick Nick . . . I love you, Nick.

  When he lifted his head she told him so, and so of course he kissed her again, quick and hard but amazingly thoroughly for all that. She was still reeling from it when he pulled his mouth from hers.

  “Hold that thought,” he murmured, nuzzling her ear, then reached around her and opened the door. “Right now we’ve got to go.”

  Yes, right. Bad guys trying to kill them. The stars falling like confetti through her mind cleared enough for her to remember. She looked up at him . . . Nick . . . and then she unwound her arms from around his neck and slid out of the car, once again back with the program.

  With one vital difference: She was wrapped in a warm cocoon of happiness that had her smiling, even at Baker, who was watching them suspiciously from the thick line of oaks just beyond the garage.

  Okay, get a grip.

  Taking a deep breath, drawing in a lungful of the earthy scent of the surrounding woods and a slightly burning smell that, she thought, had to be the car, she waited as Nick got out, thrust his gun into the back waistband of his pants, and fished Muffy out of the backseat. She smiled at Nick—which was much more reasonable than smiling at Baker, after all—who smiled back at her, which made her heart beat faster and her stomach go all fluttery. Then she smiled at Muffy, who lashed her tail and looked grumpy. As they walked across the grass and climbed the steps to a small concrete porch that led to the back door of the house, the night seemed extra-beautiful. The moon was a softly glowing white globe in a midnight velvet sky. The stars were glittering diamonds adorning the velvet. The light spilling from the back windows of the house was a lovely golden yellow. Even the deep shadows ringing the trees seemed to dance with joy.

  Then Nick punched a code into the keypad beside the back door, and they walked inside the house.

  Into an exact replica of her kitchen in the town house.

  Holy crap.

  Jenna’s jaw hit the floor. Her gaze swept the room—center island, bar stools, brick wall, microwave, everything seemed the same—before fastening on Nick, who was looking after Muffy, who had just jumped from his arms and was stalking away. Toward a doorway that opened into a replica of the town-house dining room.

  “Nick,” she said, in a completely different tone than she had used the last time she had utt
ered his name. An awful tone, in fact.

  His gaze swung around to her.

  “Jesus,” he said, taking one look at her face. “I forgot. I should have warned you. We redid the inside of this house to match the town house. Don’t you remember? So you’d be familiar with it. You lived here for almost a month.”

  Jenna’s mind reeled. She was absolutely speechless. Then her eyes dropped to the floor. The terra-cotta floor with its twelve-inch tiles.

  “My God.” Crouching, she touched the tiles to make sure. Yes. There was no mistake. They were solid and real and indubitably the dirty tiles she had been nose to floor with on the night Lisa had been murdered.

  Then the horrible truth broke over her like a tsunami.

  “It was a fake. That night. That night Lisa was killed.” Her voice was little more than a croak. Nick was standing over her now, looking worried—good call—and she slowly came back up to her full height to glare at him eyeball to eyeball. Well, except for the whole difference in height thing.

  “Not a fake.” His tone was placating. He reached for her, but she shrugged him off and took a couple of steps back, which ended when she came up against the counter. She stopped, folding her arms over her chest and scowling at him. The counter felt less than solid, she discovered as she leaned back against it, and with another sweeping glance around she realized that the entire kitchen, while visually virtually identical to the one in the town house, was actually a cheaply thrown-together replica. It might look the same, but the quality was vastly different. And whoever had done it had made a mistake on the size of the floor tiles.

  “It was a re-creation,” Nick continued. “Katharine and her friend really were attacked in her town house earlier on that same night. The friend—Lisa—was killed, but Katharine managed to escape just exactly the way you did. That’s why the decision was made to put you in then, which was about a month earlier than we intended to do it. Everything had to be rushed at the last minute, because the attack threw our timetable off. If she’d been killed that night, our whole investigation would have gone down the tubes. We couldn’t risk it.”

  “You terrorized me.”

  “I actually wasn’t here for that. I was with Katharine, the real Katharine, who really was rushed to Washington Hospital after the attack. We substituted you for her later that night at the hospital. If I had been here when they were doing the re-creation, some things would have been done differently. You wouldn’t have been hurt, for one thing.”

  “Well, I was hurt,” Katharine said, glaring at him. “I suppose those were fake bullets they were shooting at me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Somebody smashed my face into the floor.” Indignation lent a shrill edge to her voice.

  “That was Rimaldi. He was in charge here that night.” Nick looked apologetic. “See, the one real difference that still remained between you and Katharine was your noses. Yours has that cute little bump on the bridge and hers doesn’t. You nixed the whole idea of a nose job, and we were still brainstorming how to handle the difference when the people here had to make an immediate decision. The decision Rimaldi made was to smash your nose into the floor. That didn’t actually happen to her.”

  “Lucky her,” she said sardonically. Her head was hurting again, and she pressed her fingers to her temples. It was, as she had learned all too well, the sign of a repressed memory resurfacing.

  I hate it when that happens.

  The pain got worse, but she ignored it, concentrating. At first the memory was as amorphous as a cloud, but then, slowly, it took on shape and weight and color. She had been here in this house on that night, lying sleepless in the bedroom she’d been using, already heartily sick of learning to be Katharine but determined to see the thing through, both for her father’s sake and to a lesser degree because—yes, be honest here—because Nick stopped by to check on her progress every day, and she was secretly pretty wild about Nick.

  Not that, at the time, she had ever meant to tell him so.

  Then there had been all kinds of commotion downstairs, and she had just been getting up to see what was going on when her bedroom door opened and about half a dozen people trooped into her room. Something had come up, they told her, and it was now showtime. Then the paunchy little doctor—Dr. Freah, that was his name—had cleared everybody else out and injected her with something, and then—her memory started going fuzzy again as she tried to recall, but she could remember how hard her heart had been beating and the panic that had welled up in her throat and how her hands had curled into fists in silent, futile protest—and then nothing at all except a warm, pleasant, floating sensation. A sense of safety and well-being.

  From which she’d awakened as Katharine, with a man sneaking toward her through her darkened bedroom.

  The feel of Nick’s hands on her arms brought her back to the present. Blinking, taking a deep, shaking breath, she looked up at him. He was frowning down at her, his eyes narrow with worry.

  “You okay?”

  “No.” She flashed him a dark look. “I am definitely not okay.” Then she had a thought. “What about the second attack? The one right after I left the hospital? Was that staged, too?”

  Nick shook his head. “That one was real. And whoever did it really thought you were Katharine Lawrence.”

  Jenna had another thought. “The jewelry they were supposedly after, the inheritance I supposedly used to buy this ring”—she glared down at it—“none of that was real, either, was it? That weasly little doctor planted those thoughts in my mind.”

  Nick made a rueful face at her. “See, we didn’t know what the first attack was about, but we were pretty sure it had something to do with the fact that Barnes was blackmailing just about everybody under the sun. At the time, I figured that he’d probably stashed some of the stuff he had on people in the town house’s safe, which Katharine had no idea was there, and somebody had come for it. But now . . .” His voice trailed off, but then he seemed to give himself a mental shake and went on. “Anyway, since you were going to be playing the role of innocent Katharine, who wasn’t an FBI informant, and since we couldn’t simply cover up the break-in and murder at the town house because the local police were already on the scene, we had to program you with an explanation for the attack that didn’t involve Barnes’s blackmail gig but that would still be believable enough to you so that you could report it to Barnes, the police, whoever, with a straight face. We’d seen that Post photo of you—I mean Katharine—wearing all that jewelry, so we decided to use that. As for the supposed ‘inheritance, ’ that was the money we paid Katharine to act as an informant. Just in case Barnes started checking her bank accounts, we gave you an explanation you could use.”

  “Oh my God,” Jenna said. Before she could expand on that, she was interrupted by a woman’s voice saying cheerily, “I knew I heard voices. Nick, is that you? What are you doing here so late?”

  Nick looked over his shoulder and Jenna did, too. A woman walked into the kitchen. About an inch taller than Jenna and athletically built, she was wearing a navy skirt and a short-sleeved white shirt that buttoned up the front, with a shoulder holster complete with gun bisecting the shirt. But that wasn’t what made Jenna’s eyes widen. The woman’s hair was short, feathery, and nut-brown. Her eyes were brown, too, a soft chocolate color that looked deeply familiar. And her face—the features—Jenna’s breath caught as she had an epiphany.

  She looked down. A delicate tattoo of a trio of interconnected butterflies adorned the woman’s left ankle.

  “Lisa,” she gasped.

  “Special Agent Mary Slater,” the other woman corrected, meeting her gaze. “Hi, Jenna.” Then, looking at Nick, who had turned to face her, she added in a chiding tone, “She’s not supposed to be here.”

  “She played the part of Lisa when we restaged what happened to Katharine that night,” Nick told her. “Complete with auburn wig, in case you somehow happened to see a picture of the real Lisa, who unfortunately was shot to death by whoe
ver broke into Katharine’s house.” As Jenna was still absorbing this, he switched his attention to Mary Slater. “Until this is over, Jenna goes where I go. Too many people are trying to kill her out there.”

  “Kill me, you mean,” a new voice said.

  Jenna looked at the speaker, a blond woman clad in a pale green silky robe and slippers who had just walked up to stand behind Mary in the doorway, and her heart sped up as she experienced the weird sensation of looking at her own double. This, clearly, was Katharine Lawrence. The resemblance was uncanny—except, and it was almost unnoticeable, for the small difference in their noses. Unable to help herself, Jenna stared. After a quick, patently uninterested glance, Katharine did not stare back. The fact that she had a doppelgänger clearly wasn’t news to her. Of course, she had probably been involved all along. Who else would have been able to provide such intimate, and accurate, information about Katharine Lawrence’s life, down to the location of the front door key under the mat and the picture of the Kappa Delts, which Jenna now remembered seeing?

  “Hello, Katharine,” Nick said, and there was a certain something in his tone that told Jenna that her new twin wasn’t his favorite person in the world. “I’m glad you’re up. There’s something I want to show you.”

  “Of course I’m up. I’m a nervous wreck. Do you think I can sleep? I watch TV instead, because there’s nothing else in this hellhole to do.” She turned on her heel and walked away, throwing back over her shoulder, “I’m watching Letterman. If you have something to show me, you can show me in the living room.”

  “The diva rules,” Mary whispered to Nick with a roll of her eyes, then turned to follow Katharine.

  Nick made a face, but he followed Katharine, too. Jenna followed Nick.

  In the living room, which was a replica of the town-house living room, gray walls, charcoal couch, glass-topped tables and all, Katharine sank down on the couch, ignoring the trio that watched her from the doorway. On TV, Letterman was interviewing Drew Barrymore. Nick gave Katharine a grim look, then walked over to the coffee table, picked the remote right up off the top of Rose Gardens of the South, and turned the TV off.