Running Blind

by Linda Howard

  Oh my God. The shots had come from inside the suite.

  The doors and locks were sturdy; it took Charlie several attempts, and by that time Laurel and Tyrone and a swarm of other agents had reached them. Tyrone positioned himself beside Charlie and said, “Now,” and they kicked together, the combined force finally crashing the doors inward. The agents went in high and low, weapons ready, rapidly sweeping the parlor for the threat.

  The room was empty. She couldn’t hear anything, which was even more horrifying, but her heartbeat was thundering in her ears so maybe it was drowning out any sounds. To the right, the door to the first lady’s bedroom stood open, but Laurel controlled her instinct to rush toward it. Right now, their priority was the president, which meant Charlie was in charge.

  The door to the president’s bedroom, on the left, was closed. Charlie rapidly assessed the situation; until they knew where the president was, they could assume nothing. He pointed at Laurel and Tyrone and the rest of the first lady’s detail, indicating they should check her half of the suite, while he and the others swept the president’s quarters.

  His tactics were sound. The detail moved toward the first lady’s bedroom in an endlessly rehearsed procedure.

  The lamps had been turned off in the bedroom, but light from the open bathroom door streamed across the polished marble floor and plush oriental rug. They rushed the room in precision, halting when they spotted Natalie Thorndike standing motionless on the other side of the sofa, her left side turned toward them.

  Laurel had taken the left-hand position as they moved into the room, with Adam Heyes, the detail leader, to her right, and Tyrone to Adam’s right. Adam said sharply, “Ma’am, are you—”

  Then they saw that someone was lying on the floor in front of the first lady, someone with thick dark hair that had gone mostly gray: the president.

  The next couple of seconds came in lightning-fast slices, as if time had become a strobe light.

  Flash.

  Mrs. Thorndike swung around, and that’s when they saw the weapon in her hand.

  Flash.

  Laurel had a split-second, a frozen instant, to register the horrible blankness of the first lady’s expression, then light flashed from the muzzle of the weapon and what had been only a “pop” from a distance was an endless blast of noise in the confines of the hotel room as the first lady fired and kept firing, her finger jerking on the trigger.

  Flash.

  A huge force slammed into Laurel, knocking her backward to the floor. On some distant level she knew she’d been shot, even recognized that she was dying.

  Flash.

  She had another of those split seconds of sharp awareness: Adam was down, too, sprawled beside her. Her dimming vision caught Tyrone’s expression, set and grim, as he fired his own weapon.

  Doing what he had to do.

  Dear God, Laurel thought.

  Maybe it was a prayer, maybe an expression of the horror she couldn’t fully realize. There were no more flashes. She gave a small exhalation and quietly died.

  THE ASSASSINATION OF the president by his own wife, and her subsequent death at the hands of the Secret Service when she opened fire on them, killing one of the agents in her own protective detail and wounding another, was almost too massive a blow for the national psyche to take in. The country as a whole was in shock, but the mechanism of government automatically kept moving. On the other side of the country, the vice-president, William Berry, was sworn into office almost before the news of the president’s death hit the wire services. The military went on high alert, in case this was the beginning of a bigger attack, but gradually the pieces were put together to form a sordid picture.

  The picture was literally a photograph, found in the first lady’s luggage, of the president engaged in intimate relations with her own sister. Whitney Porter Leighton, four years younger than the first lady and a power in Washington in her own right, immediately went into seclusion. Her husband, Senator David Leighton, had no comment other than, “The president’s death is a tragedy for the nation.” He didn’t file for divorce, but then no one in the know in the capital expected him to; regardless of the situation, his wife was still a member of the powerful Porter family, and he wasn’t about to cut his political throat because the president had been banging his wife.

  A few people wondered what had made the first lady snap, because the liaison wasn’t exactly a secret and she had to have known about it for some time, but in the end it was decided that no one would ever know for certain.

  Secret Service agent Laurel Rose was buried with honor, and her name immortalized among those others who had given their lives in the performance of their duties. Adam Heyes was severely wounded, his recovery taking months, and had to retire from the Service. After several months, the agent who had shot and killed the first lady, Tyrone Ebert, quietly resigned from the Service.

  And the government ticked on, the wheels turning, the papers being shuffled, the computers humming.

  Chapter One

  IT WAS A normal morning. Lizette Henry—Liz to her coworkers, Liz or Lizzie to her friends, and once upon a time Zette-the-Jet to her family and childhood friends—rolled out of bed at her usual time of 5:59 A.M., one minute before her alarm was set to go off. In the kitchen, the automatic timer on the coffeemaker would have just started the brewing process. Yawning, Lizette went into her bathroom, turned on the water in the shower, then while the water was heating she took a desperately needed pee. By the time she was finished, the water in the shower was just right.

  She liked starting her mornings off with a nice relaxing shower. She didn’t sing, she didn’t plan her day, she didn’t worry about politics or the economy or anything else. While she was in the shower, she simply chilled—or more aptly, warmed.

  On this particular June morning, her routine so honed and finely tuned she didn’t need to look at a clock to know what time it was at any point during that routine, she showered for almost precisely how long it would take the coffeemaker to finish its brewing process, then wrapped a towel around her wet hair and dried herself with a second towel.

  Though the open door of the bathroom, the wonderful aroma of the coffee called to her. The bathroom mirror was fogged over with steam, but it would be clear by the time she fetched her first cup of the morning. Wrapping herself in her knee-length terry-cloth robe, she went barefoot into the kitchen and grabbed one of the mugs from the cabinet. She liked her coffee sweet and light, so she added sugar and milk first, then poured the hot coffee into the mixture. It was like having a dessert first thing in the morning, which in her book was a nice way to start off any day.

  She took the coffee with her into the bathroom, to sip while she blow-dried her hair and put on the small amount of makeup she wore to work.

  Setting the cup on the vanity, she unwound the towel from her head and bent over from the waist, vigorously rubbing her shoulder-length dark brown hair. Then she straightened, tossing her hair back, and turned to the mirror—

  —and stared into the face of a stranger.

  The damp towel slid from her suddenly nerveless fingers, puddling on the floor at her feet.

  Who was that woman?

  It wasn’t her. Lizette knew what she looked like, and this wasn’t her reflection. She whirled wildly around, looking for the woman reflected in the mirror, ready to duck, ready to run, ready to fight for her life, but no one was there. She was alone in the bathroom, alone in the house, alone—

  Alone.

  The word whispered through her mind, a ghost of a sound, barely registering. Turning back to the mirror, she fought through confusion and terror, studying this new person as though she were an adversary rather than … rather than what? Or, who?

  This didn’t make sense. Her breathing came in swift, shallow gulps, the sound distant and panicked. What the hell was going on? She didn’t have amnesia. She knew who she was, where she was, remembered her childhood, her friends, what clothes were in her closet, and what she’
d planned to wear today. She remembered what she’d had for dinner the night before. She remembered everything, it seemed—except that face.

  It wasn’t hers.

  Her own features, what she saw in her mind, were softer, rounder, maybe even prettier, though the face she was looking at was attractive, if more angular. The eyes were the same: blue, the same distance apart, maybe a little more deeper set. How was that possible? How could her eyes have gotten more deep set?

  What else was the same? She leaned closer to the mirror, looking for the faint freckle on the left side of her chin. Yes, there it was, where it had always been; darker when she’d been younger, almost invisible now, but still there.

  Everything else was … wrong. This nose was thinner and more aquiline; her cheekbones more prominent, higher than they should have been; her jawline was more square, her chin more defined.

  She was so completely befuddled and frightened that she stood there, paralyzed, incapable of any action even if one had occurred to her. She kept staring into the mirror, her thoughts darting around in search of any reasonable explanation.

  There wasn’t one. What could account for this? If she’d been in an accident and required massive facial restructuring, while she might not remember the accident itself, surely she’d remember afterward, know if she’d been in a hospital and undergone multiple surgeries, remembered the rehab; someone would have told her about everything, even if she’d been in a coma during her recovery. But she hadn’t been in a coma. Ever.

  She remembered her life. There hadn’t been any accident, except for the one when she was eighteen that had killed her parents and turned her world completely upside down, but she hadn’t been in the car; she’d dealt with the aftermath, with the crushing grief, the sense of floating untethered in the black space of her life with all of her former security gone in the space of a heartbeat.

  She had that same feeling now, of such unfathomable wrongness that she didn’t know what to do, couldn’t take in all the meanings at once, couldn’t grasp how fully this affected everything she knew.

  Maybe she was crazy. Maybe she’d had a stroke during the night. Yes. A stroke; that would make sense, because it could screw with her memory. To test herself, she smiled, and in the mirror watched both sides of her mouth turn up evenly. In turn, she winked each eye. Then she held both arms up. They both worked, though after showering and washing her hair she thought she’d have already noticed if one of them hadn’t.

  “Ten, twelve, one, forty-two, eighteen,” she whispered. Then she waited thirty seconds and said them again. “Ten, twelve, one, forty-two, eighteen.” She was certain she’d said the same numbers, in the same sequence, though if she’d had a stroke would she be in any shape to judge?

  Brain and body both appeared to be in working order, so that likely ruled out a stroke.

  Now what?

  Call someone. Who?

  Diana. Of course. Her best friend would know, though Lizette wasn’t certain how she could possibly phrase the question. Hey, Di; when I get to work this morning, look at me and let me know if I have the same face today that I had yesterday, okay?

  The idea was ludicrous, but the need was compelling.

  Lizette was already on her way to the phone when sudden panic froze her in midstep.

  No.

  She couldn’t call anyone.

  If she did, they would know.

  They? Who was “they?”