THAT WAS EXACTLY what Maddy did for the next five hours as she and Tom made and executed plans to get her off the island and up to Washington. Hogan volunteered to go along, too, but Maddy vetoed his generous gesture. Considering the threats regarding his pension, going to D.C. to investigate a closed case would probably get him kicked off the force, and Maddy didn’t want that on her conscience. Ultimately she convinced him that Ed and Bobby were sufficient muscle to keep her safe.
She packed her overnight bag with her toiletries and one change of clothes—the same drab brown outfit she’d arrived in Charleston with—and left quietly on the afternoon ferry. She caught a regularly scheduled shuttle to Washington, rented a car and let Bobby DiVesta do the driving to the Georgetown address while she sat in the back seat with Ed Raphaelson watching over her.
It was early evening and Saturday-night traffic was light. It didn’t take long for them to reach Georgetown, and Maddy’s heart began to race as they turned the final corner, inching forward to stop in front of 469 Beech.
Sitting very still, almost afraid to breathe, she studied the building with mounting anxiety and disappointment. This wasn’t a residential neighborhood. The building was a stately old brownstone that looked like all the others on the quiet street. The building on its right, according to a hanging placard, was a law firm. The building to the left housed an accountant and an architect. This was undoubtedly some sort of office, as well. How likely was it that someone would be working this late on a Saturday?
She wouldn’t know, though, until she walked up to the house and rang the bell.
She was utterly terrified.
“I don’t suppose you gentlemen would consider lending me one of the guns that you took such pains to check through airport security. Would you?”
“Sorry, ma’am,” Ed replied with genuine regret.
“I’m quite a good shot,” she reminded him.
“I know, but I can’t, ma’am.”
Maddy took a deep breath. “If I do nothing else before I die, I’m going to break you of calling me ma’am.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Maddy felt hysterical laughter bubble up in her throat. She tamped it down quickly and climbed out of the car.
Her bodyguards stayed right with her as she marched up the short flight of stairs. She rang the bell and waited. She rang the bell again, and this time she heard a distinct click. She almost jumped out of her skin when the door popped open automatically, and she wasn’t the only one. Both her guards reached for their weapons and sprang into action. Bobby grabbed Maddy and pushed her behind him, and Ed seized the initiative, slamming his shoulder against the door to open it wide.
What they found inside wasn’t the least bit threatening. A very pleasant-faced woman in her mid-fifties was sitting behind a reception desk in what looked to be a perfectly normal office reception room.
The only thing wrong with the entire scene was the fact that the woman didn’t seem the slightest bit alarmed by the sight of two armed men.
Her smile encompassed all three of them. “You don’t need the guns, gentlemen. We’ve been expecting you.”
It took some doing, but Maddy navigated around her bodyguards. “Expecting us?”
“Yes.” The receptionist rose and gestured for Maddy to accompany her. With Ed and Bobby following, they went across the cozy lobby, past an elegant polished wooden staircase, down a corridor past a half-dozen doors until they reached one marked Jacob A. Carmichael, Deputy Director of Internal Investigations.
Maddy’s heart was hammering so hard she couldn’t hear herself think—not that she had any thoughts worth listening to. All she had were questions and the knowledge that two possibilities lay behind that door: one was a man who might be able to answer all her questions; the other was a bullet meant for her.
Maddy reached for the handle, heard it squeak as it turned and pushed the door open to find herself facing a man sitting behind a desk. A little rectangular placard bore the name Jacob A. Carmichael.
But Maddy knew the tall, handsome, dark-eyed man behind the desk as Adam Hopewell.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ODDLY ENOUGH, Maddy wasn’t at all afraid. Her anger and confusion were too strong to leave room for something as mundane as fear. She wanted answers now. She wanted to know why this man had lied to her and betrayed her.
Her rage had boiled over into hatred. She used the force of that emotion to keep the tremor in her limbs under control as she stepped into the room.
Ed and Bobby came with her, but the man behind the desk rose and told them, “It’s all right, guys. You can wait outside. She’s safe here.”
Neither man had let his guard down for a moment. “If you don’t mind, we’ll stay with the lady,” Bobby replied tersely.
Adam seemed exasperated by their obvious suspicion. “If I’d wanted her dead, boys, I could’ve killed her while she was still in the hospital and been long gone before anyone realized she wasn’t just sleeping.”
“He’s right,” Maddy said without looking at them. “Leave us alone.”
She could feel their hesitation, but she didn’t take her eyes off the man behind the desk. A moment later she realized Ed was holding his hand out to her. She glanced down and saw the butt end of a Colt .38 Special.
“You might need this.”
Maddy accepted the gun. “Thanks.”
The man behind the desk raised one eyebrow, as though questioning what she was going to do with the gun, and Maddy very deliberately reached behind her and shoved it into the waistband of her slacks.
She met his gaze evenly, controlling her voice, but making no effort to keep her hatred from showing. “If I used it to kill you, would I get out of here alive?”
“Probably not.”
“Will I get out of here alive even if I don’t kill you?”
“Absolutely.” He looked at the woman just outside the door. “Marta, will you take Mr. Raphaelson and Mr. DiVesta down the hall and get them something to drink?”
“Yes, sir. This way, gentlemen.”
Maddy’s bodyguards backed out of the room and she heard the door close behind her.
“I know you have a million and one questions,” he told her, resuming his seat. “Where do you want to start?”
Maddy moved slowly but purposefully toward his desk, picked up the rectangular name plaque that read Jacob A. Carmichael and turned it to face him. “Is this you?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Does the A stand for Adam?” she asked sarcastically.
“Yes. It does.”
“Well, good. At least we know there was one thing you haven’t lied to me about.”
“Believe it or not, there are actually quite a number of things I didn’t lie about,” he replied.
“Are we married?” she asked skeptically, knowing what the answer would be.
“No. We’re not.”
“Is my name Madeline Hopewell?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t lie to me about anything important!” Her rage finally erupted, and she slammed her hands onto his desk. “Who the hell are you, and what kind of sick game have you been playing with me?”
“A dangerous one. With very high stakes,” he said as he leaned back in his chair. “Now, do you want to scream at me some more, or do you want to know what’s going on?”
He was looking at her with a kind of resigned stoicism, and Maddy realized there was emotion in his eyes again. If she’d had to put a name to it, she might have called it sadness. She might even have decided it was laced with some pain and a lot of guilt. But she was beyond caring about his emotions. If he was feeling guilt it was richly deserved.
“Tell me,” she said, straightening. “And make it good. What’s my real name?”
“Jennifer Lambert. Most of your friends call you Jenn.”
She stiffened when she recognized the name. “Lambert? Does that make me any kin to Paul and Irene?”
“They wer
e your real parents, and as I told you in the hospital that first day, they were killed in a plane crash while you were a teenager in boarding school. In fact, everything I’ve told you about them has been the truth.”
She frowned. “If you could tell me the truth about that, why did you have to lie about everything else? Why didn’t you tell me my real name?”
“Because we didn’t know where or why you’d picked up your Madeline Hopewell alias. We were trying to buy time until we could figure out what kind of game you were playing with us.”
“We?”
“My superiors and myself.”
“Who just so happen to be…?”
He hesitated for a moment. “Affiliated with a major U.S. intelligence-gathering organization.”
Maddy didn’t pause to let that information digest. “Why was my alias any concern of yours to begin with?”
“Because you’re one of us.”
Maddy’s breath hitched in her throat and it was a moment before she could ask, “I’m a spy?”
“Yes.”
Her mind flashed back to their first evening in the resort’s dining room. He had told her the truth then, too, only he’d wrapped it in a package so playfully comical that considering the possibility seriously had been out of the question.
“Why? Why the elaborate charade?” she asked. “If I’m one of you, why did you trick me? Why did you lie to me?”
Jacob Adam Carmichael stood and walked around the desk. Maddy moved quickly away from him, but he clearly hadn’t been headed for her in the first place. There was a credenza on the back wall, and he moved to it as he told her, “When a woman bearing your fingerprints and the identity of a dead girl from Utah appeared unexpectedly at a Charleston hospital claiming to have amnesia, it created a lot of confusion around here. Madeline Hopewell was not an Agency-sanctioned cover identity, and using an unsanctioned cover is against Agency policy. Given the prevailing circumstances, we had to be cautious.”
“What circumstances?”
He poured a clear liquid from a carafe into a glass and held it out to her. “Here, drink this. It’s only water,” he said. When she just glared at him he took a sip himself. “See? No poison.”
“Go to hell,” she muttered. “What circum-stances?”
He moved back to the desk, set the glass on the side closest to Maddy, then returned to his chair. “I’ll have to go back a ways to explain. You might as well take a seat.”
“I’ll stand, thank you. Now talk, damn it! Make some sense out of this!”
Adam sighed deeply. “All right. For the past nine years, you’ve been an intelligence operative working back and forth between the European sector and the Middle East. Your specialty is collecting information on terrorists, and for a large part of the past eighteen months your work focused almost exclusively on an independent contractor—a hit man known only as the Raven.”
Maddy sank onto the leather chair opposite his desk. “My nightmare,” she murmured. “The black wings.”
Adam nodded. “That was my interpretation, but try as I might, I never could get you to make the connection between the Raven and the dream.”
“But it did happen to me, didn’t it?” she asked, feeling a flutter of excitement because finally she was about to learn the truth about herself. And unlike the moment Dr. Manion had told her she was married, she didn’t feel disconnected from the information. She knew this was the truth.
Jenn Lambert was her name. It felt like her name. She had spent most of her adult life trusting no one but herself and pretending to be someone she wasn’t. She didn’t actually remember living the solitary, schizophrenic existence of Jenn Lambert, but she knew she had. It was an exhilarating, liberating sensation.
Adam was nodding in answer to her question. “It seems very likely that your dream is about something that really happened. It fits the facts as we know them, anyway.”
“What facts? Who was the man in my dream?”
“Majhid Al’Enaza, a shopkeeper in Al’Khatar, Turuq. He was one of a network of informants you cultivated a few years ago when you were working the Mediterranean sector of the Middle East.”
The face of the man in her nightmare flashed in front of her, and with it came the memory of the crowded streets of the port city of Al’Khatar, in the tiny principality of Turuq. The images were so vivid that she could even see the exterior of Majhid’s shop in the bazaar. She tried to carry the vision to the inside of the tiny store, but her mind rebelled because she knew that’s where the blood would be.
The memory fragment left as quickly as it had come. “Is Majhid really dead?”
“Yes.”
Jenn felt her stomach clench. “Did I kill him?”
Adam hesitated. “The Turuq military police think so, as do your station chief in Paris and my boss at the Pentagon.”
“Do you think I killed him?” Despite her hatred for this man, she needed to know that he didn’t believe she was responsible for the murder.
“No. I’ve never believed that you killed Majhid. Frankly, that’s why I volunteered for this job,” he told her. “I know you don’t remember this, but I’ve been out of undercover work for quite some time. When you disa—”
“Wait a minute. You mean we actually do know each other? I wasn’t a total stranger to you when you told Dr. Manion we were married?” she asked, a little glimmer of hope stirring in her at the possibility that Adam’s betrayal hadn’t been as total as she’d believed.
But as quickly as the hope rose, Jenn pushed it away. It didn’t matter whether he’d betrayed her a little or a lot. What he’d done to her was unforgivable, no matter what his reasons. All she wanted from Jacob Adam Carmichael were explanations. Rationalizations didn’t matter.
“Yes, Jenn, we did—”
She came to her feet abruptly. “I don’t care. Forget I asked,” she snapped. “Just tell me about Majhid Al’Enaza. Why does everyone think I killed him?”
Adam looked disappointed that she hadn’t let him explain how he’d come to know her, but he controlled it quickly. “Because two women came into the shop while you were kneeling beside the body. Your veil had come undone, and they swore you’d killed him and were robbing the dead.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“Of course it is, but when they started shrieking— probably that cawing of crows sound you hear in your nightmare—you ran past them into the street. You disappeared into the crowd and vanished off the face of the earth. No one saw or heard from you again until your fingerprints turned up three days later in the FBI computer under the name Madeline Hopewell.”
“That doesn’t make me a murderer.”
“No, but it is suspicious. You see, you’d gone to Turuq because Majhid had gotten word to you in Paris that he had information about the Raven’s next strike. You weren’t working the Middle East anymore, and you’d been taken off the task force that was tracking the Raven, but—”
“Why?” she asked. “Why was I pulled off the assignment?”
Adam looked very uncomfortable. “Because you’d let the Raven slip through your fingers twice—once when he killed an industrialist in Germany, and again when he hit an American businessman who was traveling in Italy. The task force had solid leads on both those hits, but the Raven got away clean. The second time he had to move right past you at a train station in Rome, but you claimed you never saw him.”
“What does the Raven look like?”
“No one knows for sure. He’s a genius at disguises.”
Jenn frowned. “How could I be blamed for not spotting him if I didn’t know what he looked like?”
“Apparently you had a good description of the disguise he was using.”
“He could have ditched it,” she said irritably.
“That was the assumption at the time,” Adam replied. “No one suspected that you had deliberately let the Raven escape, but you don’t get many second chances in this business, Jenn. When you struck out in Rome, you were taken off
the Raven task force and reassigned.”
“To what?”
But Adam just shook his head. “Sorry. I can’t give you any information on your caseload until you regain your memory or are cleared of the charges against you.”
“You mean the murder of Majhid Al’Enaza?”
Adam hesitated a moment. “And treason.”
“What?”
“Jenn, there’s been a rumor flying for the past few months that someone has hired the Raven to kill the President of the United States. No one could get any hint of where or when the assassination was supposed to take place, but you were thrust right back into the middle of the task-force action when Majhid contacted you with the message that he had information about the Raven’s next hit. He would only talk to you, so you were back on the case.”
“Which began to seem a little too convenient when Majhid was murdered and I disappeared. You couldn’t help wondering whether I had reinserted myself into the case so that I could feed information to the Raven.”
“That was what everyone feared,” Adam confirmed. “You’d let him get past you twice. It was possible he was paying you for inside information. And that seemed even more likely after we searched your Paris apartment and found a number for a Swiss bank account.”
She felt no outrage at the invasion of privacy. “How much was in the account?”
“Nearly a million dollars.”
She sprang to her feet and began pacing. “Where did I get that kind of money?”
“No one knows. Your parents left you modestly wealthy, but the Agency is supposed to have a record of all your assets. That kind of hidden wealth makes the Agency very nervous.”
“All right, I understand why everyone was suspicious. Majhid was dead. I had taken whatever information he’d given me and disappeared with it. You found hidden assets, and when I finally surfaced, I was using an unauthorized alias that probably made it seem as though I was trying to evade detection.”
“Exactly.”
Jenn turned on him, unable to keep the venom out of her voice. “But that still doesn’t explain why you pretended to be my husband or concocted the elaborate Bride’s Bay honeymoon charade. Why the hell didn’t you just pull me in and tell me the truth?”
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