Married To A Stranger

by Connie Bennett

  “And say what?” Adam asked her. “Excuse me, Miss…you don’t remember me, but your name is Jennifer Lambert and you’re a spy under suspicion of murder and treason?” He shook his head. “Our doctors said it was the worst thing we could possibly do if your amnesia was genuine.”

  “You thought I was faking?”

  “We had to consider the possibility. That’s one of the reasons we came up with the Bride’s Bay scenario. After we found the microdot and decoded Majhid’s message—”

  Jenn moved toward the desk. “Wait a minute. What microdot? What message? Where did you find it?”

  “In your purse,” he replied. “When your fingerprints appeared in the FBI computer, we sent two men down to Charleston to find out what was going on.”

  “The DEA agents!”

  “That’s right. We knew that you had specially designed cosmetics containers with hidden compartments and that it was unlikely the police would’ve found them. Since we needed to know if you were transporting any encrypted messages, we invented the story about your description matching that of a drug courier so that our men could search your belongings without arousing too many suspicions. When they checked your compact, they found a microdot encrypted with Majhid’s code.”

  “What was the message?”

  “Just two words—Bride’s Bay,” Adam replied. “Since that’s where the President was vacationing, we knew it couldn’t be a coincidence. We concluded that if the Raven was, indeed, going to attempt a hit, he would do it at the resort.”

  “And you still thought I might be involved in his plan?”

  “Yes.”

  Jenn tried to put all the pieces together. “Did you ever consider the possibility that maybe the Raven discovered that Majhid Al’Enaza had learned of his plan and was going to tell? Maybe the Raven killed Majhid, and I came in right after—possibly in time to see the Raven leave the shop,” she suggested. “In my nightmare, Majhid presses something into my hand and he babbles words I can’t quite hear. Isn’t it possible I used what he told me to put the pieces together and that I set out to find the Raven?”

  “We considered that possibility naturally,” Adam replied. “Some of us even pushed that theory very hard.”

  If he was trying to curry favor with her, it was too little, too late. “Evidently you didn’t push hard enough,” she said coldly. “Do you have any theories on who tried to kill me at the airport?”

  “Theories, but no facts,” he replied. “The most obvious suspect would be the Raven.”

  “Then doesn’t that prove I’m innocent?” Jenn cried, moving quickly toward the desk. “Why would he try to kill me if I was working for him?”

  “If you’d outlived your usefulness, he’d have disposed of you in an instant,” Adam answered. “We have reason to believe that over the years, the Raven has killed more so-called friends than enemies.”

  “That must make him a very lonely man.”

  “The right amount of money will buy just about anything,” Adam replied. “Including new friends.”

  And the Agency believed that she was one of those friends—one who’d become a liability to the Raven for some reason.

  Suddenly it all made sense. Jenn knew exactly why Adam had pretended to be her husband and why he’d taken her to Bride’s Bay. “You son of a bitch,” she murmured as fury mounted in her all over again. “You were using me as bait! You wanted to see if you could get the Raven to go after me and expose himself!”

  “Yes,” Adam admitted, his face an unreadable mask. “My boss wanted to see if leaving you in the real world would flush him out, and since the assassination is scheduled to take place at Bride’s Bay, that was the most logical place to throw out the hook.”

  “You bastard! I didn’t matter, did I?” Jenn said, coming around the desk toward him. “The possibility that I might be innocent never entered into it! You had to keep me occupied, keep me visible. It didn’t matter how many lies you had to tell! It didn’t matter what those lies did to me!”

  He didn’t flinch from her fury. “No. It didn’t.”

  It was everything Jenn could do to keep from slapping him. She was towering over him. His face was turned up toward hers. She wanted to hit him and hit him and hit him until he felt at least a fraction of the pain he’d caused her.

  But she didn’t do it. She stepped away and returned to the front of the desk, trying to master her anger and figure out what to do next. Only one thing seemed clear. She couldn’t bear to stay in the room with Jacob Adam Carmichael a moment longer.

  But leaving wasn’t as simple as walking out the door.

  “I need to think,” she told him when she was in control again. “I want to get away from you. How do I do that?”

  Adam pressed a button. “I’ll have you taken to a safe house. You can rest tonight, and we’ll talk again tomorrow.”

  “Not you,” Jenn said harshly, planting her hands on the desk and leaning forward to bring herself down to his level. “I’ll talk to your boss, or my boss, or any damned boss in the Agency! I’ll even talk to that grayhaired lady out front, but I won’t talk to you,” she swore. “Not ever again.”

  She straightened just as the door to the corridor opened and Marta, the receptionist, appeared. With-out a backward glance at Adam, Jenn swept through the door.

  Adam stood. “Take care of her, Marta. Transport her to location Red Three and see that she gets a copy of her dossier so that she can read about herself to-night.”

  “Yes, sir.” Marta stepped out, closing the door behind her.

  The room was too quiet now. Adam came out from behind his desk, moved to the credenza and began pouring scotch whiskey into the largest glass he could find. Behind him, he heard a distinctive click as the door to the adjoining office opened and closed, but he didn’t stop pouring until the tumbler was full.

  “Why don’t you just drink it from the bottle?”

  Adam took a long swallow of the scotch and relished the fire it created in his belly. “Before the night is over, I’ll probably do just that.” He turned to face his boss, Tony Vernandas, and very deliberately took another drink.

  The tall, lean director of Internal Investigations calmly moved to one of the leather chairs and sat. “If you think getting drunk is going to spite me, think again. I’m not the one who’ll have to cope with the hangover tomorrow.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Haven’t you heard? That’s where all Internal Investigation officials end up.”

  “Good. It’s the very least we deserve.” Adam took another drink—a sip this time—and moved back to the chair behind his desk. He knew that Vernandas had been listening to his conversation with Jenn, and he was keenly aware that his boss was studying him now, trying to assess the damage. Adam didn’t give a damn what he thought. The operation was over. He’d come to D.C. to do battle with Vernandas, trying to convince him that it was time to pull the plug and tell Jenn the truth. Thanks to Hogan and Graves, things hadn’t worked out exactly as Adam had hoped, but essentially he’d gotten what he wanted. He didn’t have to lie to Jenn anymore, and that was all that mattered.

  “Tell me something, Jake.”

  Adam hadn’t become reaccustomed to that other name yet. He’d grown up with his family calling him Adam to avoid confusion with his father, Jake, and these past two weeks it had seemed so natural to have Jenn call him Adam. He’d even begun to think of himself that way again. Now he was going to have to recondition himself to the name everyone at the Agency used. It wouldn’t be easy, because Adam had come to hate Jacob Carmichael, Jacob Carmichael’s job and everything that Jacob Carmichael stood for. Adam Hopewell had been a much simpler man.

  For a time he’d also been a much happier man, too.

  “Jake?”

  Adam pulled himself into the present and forced his attention onto his boss. That wasn’t easy, either, because he was beginning to feel the effects of the scotch. “What is it, Tony?” he asked irritably. “I know you’re still
pissed because I didn’t follow the scenario to the end, but it would have been over today even if I’d agreed to go back to Bride’s Bay. Graves was so suspicious he was ready to go head-to-head with the Secret Service, and Hogan had the Madeline Hopewell customs file. Between the two of them, they had enough information to bury me. I couldn’t have kept Jenn in the dark any longer even if I’d stayed at the resort. It’s better than she knows the truth.”

  “As I recall, that’s what you said from the very beginning.”

  “It’s what I’ve said every day for the past two weeks! If you’d listened to me, instead of the damned doctors—”

  “Well, we didn’t,” Tony said. “We made a judgment call based on what we thought would be best for her.”

  “That’s a load of bull,” Adam said. “You wanted to use her as bait, and you wanted to play with her head.”

  “We thought she was faking,” Tony countered. “Throwing you at her in the guise of her husband was a thoroughly brilliant way to smoke her out. She couldn’t have possibly fooled you in that scenario for more than a few days.”

  “Except she wasn’t faking,” Adam reminded him.

  Vernandas nodded. “Which you contended from the very beginning, as well.”

  Adam took another swig of whiskey. “For all the good it did.” He wasn’t drunk enough yet to dull the pain, but he was getting there.

  Vernandas let the small silence grow into a larger one as he studied his deputy director. “Why didn’t you tell her all of it?” he finally asked.

  Adam leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “All of what? We covered the salient points. She knows I lied to her, manipulated her and set her up to be bait for a terrorist. What more does she need to know?”

  “You could have told her why you did it.”

  “I did it because it was my job,” Adam replied bitterly, not bothering to open his eyes.

  “You did it because somebody had to, and you wanted it to be someone who believed in her—someone whose first priority would be keeping her alive, not advancing his career by capturing the Raven.”

  “So what?”

  “So you should have told her that,” Vernandas answered.

  Adam gave a snort of laughter. “Yeah, right. ‘Yes, I lied to you, Jennifer, darling, but my motives were pure of heart.’ Bullshit.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Vernandas said, coming to his feet in frustration. “Jump off that self-pity bandwagon, why don’t you? In case you’ve forgotten, your protégée, Jennifer Lambert, was using unsanctioned ID and she’s got a Swiss bank account—”

  Adam finally opened his eyes and came upright in his chair. “Which was probably part of her father’s estate, or something she’s accrued from his investments. You’ve forgotten that he left her so well-off she wouldn’t have had any reason to take money from the Raven.”

  “Greed doesn’t-”

  “Jenn Lambert is not greedy! She is not a traitor! And as for that so-called unsanctioned ID, I don’t know an operative in the Agency who doesn’t have a half-dozen of them tucked away for emergencies. I know mine came in handy more than once when I was still working in the field. That doesn’t make her a traitor!”

  “Well, we won’t know that until we capture the Raven, or Jennifer regains her memory and can provide us with some pretty damned good explanation of her behavior.”

  “Now that she knows the truth, maybe that’ll happen soon.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “In the meantime, I’m out of it.” Adam leaned back in his chair again, took another sip of whiskey and closed his eyes.

  “Jake, you’re not out of it until I say so.”

  “Then you’d better get the firing squad ready, because you’ve got a full-scale mutiny on your hands. I’ve done as much damage to that woman as I intend to do.”

  “She’s not damaged, Jake,” Vernandas argued. “She’s just in love.”

  The statement hung in the air for a long time. “I know.”

  “Women in love tend to be very forgiving.”

  “Who’s she gonna forgive, Tony? Adam Hopewell, the man she fell in love with, or Jake Carmichael, the man who betrayed her?”

  “What’s the difference?” Vernandas asked. “They’re both in love with her.”

  “Yeah.” Adam slowly swiveled his chair, turning his back on Tony Vernandas, signaling the end of their discussion.

  The director stood and moved to his door. “Don’t get too drunk, Jake,” he advised. “There’s still an assassin out there who wants to kill the President—and Jennifer Lambert. I need you sharp and sober first thing tomorrow morning.”

  Vernandas glanced at the back of Adam’s chair, but it didn’t move. With a heavy sigh and a shake of his head, he left the office.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  WHAT LITTLE SLEEP Jenn Lambert got that night in a safe house in Arlington, Virginia, was riddled with nightmare images of Majhid Al’Enaza and haunting scenes of the brief but blissful marriage of Madeline and Adam Hopewell. The combination was too disturbing, and she finally gave up trying to sleep altogether. Instead, she alternated between pacing the bedroom floor and rereading the dossier she’d studied before going to bed.

  The information contained in the background file on Jennifer Lambert felt comfortable, like an old pair of shoes. What’s more, it stirred up fragments of memories-—some vivid, some vague. When she read about her parents she could almost call up their faces. She could see the vague outline of a building on a large manicured lawn and knew it was the house where she’d grown up. When she read a brief section about a horse named Toby that her father had given her as a child, she saw a flash of herself jumping a fence.

  When she read that her father had been an upperlevel diplomat in foreign service, she had a flash of the first embassy party she’d ever attended. When she read how her parents had died in a fiery plane crash caused by a terrorist’s bomb, she felt the pain, and understood why, if not how, her life had taken a path into espionage.

  The dossier was like reading an episodic novel that was all narrative and no dialogue. It started with an extensive background on her parents, then her own birth, and then it jumped from one event to another throughout her childhood. All the information Adam had given her in broad strokes was in the dossier in great detail, right up to the time she’d dropped out of college and began playing on the Riviera when she wasn’t working on archaeological digs in Egypt and Turkey.

  The information stopped abruptly just after her twenty-third birthday, which made sense if she’d been an agent for more than nine years. Everything that had happened since then was probably classified, and she wasn’t exactly the best security risk on the block right now.

  Sometime around dawn, Jenn stopped pacing. She found a measure of calm and steeled herself for what she knew would be a grueling day. She showered and dressed. She fixed juice and toast for breakfast. She sat down to wait.

  She didn’t think it would be a long wait, and she was right. It was still very early when a car pulled up in front of the house and a tall man with narrow shoulders and coal black hair climbed out of the back seat.

  Since the arrival didn’t generate any reaction from the unmarked van filled with the agents who’d spent the night guarding her, Jenn figured the man was from the Agency. He wasn’t a particularly attractive man, but the way he carried himself seemed to demand a certain amount of respect.

  Jenn was waiting by the door to admit him when he walked onto the porch, and she gave him credit for not offering her a phony smile as he came into the living room.

  “I’m Anthony Vernandas,” he said without preamble.

  Jenn recognized the name and fought back a swell of anger. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Vernandas. You got Pere Ruben in your pocket?” she asked sarcastically.

  Vernandas put his briefcase on the coffee table and turned to her placidly. “No. Perry Ruben is still in Paris. He’s your station chief.”

  “That’s just dandy. How many more
familiar names did your friend Mr. Carmichael throw at me, instead of coming out and telling me the truth?”

  “Quite a few actually. As soon as we made the decision to take you to Bride’s Bay, we began salting the entire resort with Agency employees—all of whom you’d worked with before, I might add. We wanted our people around you at all times in case the Raven decided to strike, and it was hoped that using familiar faces might stir memories. You played tennis with one of our people yesterday morning.”

  “Loreen McKinley?”

  Vernandas nodded. “About eight years ago she saved your life in Beirut.”

  “And Arthur Rumbaugh!” Jenn said.

  “That’s right. When you worked with him a few years ago he was going by the code name Sandpiper.”

  “Adam knew that?” she asked, incredulous.

  “Yes.”

  Jenn thought back to her encounter with the strange little computer salesman and the way Adam had reacted when she’d remembered him. Adam’s alarm had seemed so genuine, as though he really believed Rumbaugh was a threat, when he knew all along he was a plant.

  Another wave of fury welled up in her and she fought it. Eventually she was going to have to deal with the pain of Adam’s manipulations and betrayals, but this certainly wasn’t the time.

  “If Perry Ruben is my boss, are you Jacob Carmichael’s boss?” she asked him.

  “Yes. I’m the Director of Internal Investigations and Jake’s my deputy.”

  “What does that mean precisely? Your job, that is.”

  “We follow up on allegations of misconduct and criminal activity within the Agency. Working undercover for months, even years, at a time, can take its toll on people. Idealism gets lost, and the dividing line between right and wrong sometimes gets a little blurry.”

  Jenn met his deceptively placid gaze without flinching. “You think I blurred that line by conspiring with the Raven, don’t you?”

  Vernandas gestured toward a chair, silently inviting Jenn to sit. When she didn’t, the director lowered his lanky frame onto the sofa. “It’s a plausible explanation for everything that’s happened, Ms. Lambert, including two botched assignments in Rome and Berlin.”