A Thin Disguise by Catherine Bybee

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Brackett sat across the desk from him, leaning back in his desk chair, a pen twirling in his fingertips.

“Domestic violence.”

“That’s what she said.” Leo wore a suit for the first time in two months. He didn’t know what pinched more, the tie . . . or the shoes. Both reminded him that if he wanted to keep his job, he’d have to deliver this story to his boss and make it believable. “She was trying to get away from him, made it to Vegas. She’d only been there a couple of days. Wore a wig so he wouldn’t recognize her.”

“Did she say he was the one who shot her?” Fitz sat to Leo’s right, her low-heeled shoe tapping on air as she digested Leo’s information.

“No. But she believed he was responsible one way or another.”

“She didn’t tell you her name?”

“No. We told her we could help her, get her someplace safe. I thought she was turning to our way of thinking. I was about to call in, snow dumped, and the power went out. Without the uplink Neil set up, phone calls don’t work.”

“Where were you?” Fitz asked.

“Outside of Durango, Colorado. Mountain cabin. A big cabin. Neil has some seriously deep pockets.” Leo laced a chuckle into his narrative.

Brackett dropped his feet from where they were resting on the edge of his desk and sat forward, tossed his pen aside. “Two months and the shooter wasn’t aiming at you.”

“My access was limited up there to search out anything. No one down here found a link. Neil’s people, they were looking. Is there anything new, something to suggest Janie wasn’t the target?”

“Janie?”

“That’s what we called her. Jane Doe . . . Janie.”

“Ewhh.”

“It worked.” He wasn’t going to mention Olivia. Not that she would be in any of their databases.

“Nothing new. Mykonos was transferred to his new home. His attorneys are trying to get him placed in a Martha Stewart facility, but so far that hasn’t happened. Navi spent some time in New York before returning to Russia,” Fitz reported. “Interviews with the jurors and attorneys didn’t implicate anything.”

Leo already knew that.

“I’m going to assume the victim is starting her new life . . . wherever that is?”

“That’s what has been reported to me,” Brackett told him.

“So where is Janie now?” Fitz asked.

“I have no idea.” Leo pushed the image of Olivia out of his head and put the cardboard cutout image of “Janie” there in her place. He did not need his boss, or partner, clueing in to his feelings. “She took advantage of the power outage, drove the Jeep to Durango, and that’s as far as we tracked her.”

Fitz shook her head. “I suppose if I had a brush with death and two months of not knowing my own name, I’d take my husband’s threats seriously, too.”

“It’s unfortunate. She’s a bright woman, full of life. The second she remembered who she was, everything changed.” Again . . . not a lie.

Brackett pushed out of his chair. “Nothing we’re going to do about it now. Much as I’d love an arrest to attach to two months of my agent being in a safe house, we can’t force people to testify. Not when they’re the victims. Let the local police in Vegas know we’re giving this back to them.”

Leo stopped himself from showing too much excitement. “Will do.”

The story filled all the holes. While slightly fabricated, the bottom-line truth was Olivia had been the one who was shot. The shooter likely was aiming for her in the first place, and she wasn’t going to testify to put that shooter in prison. Until there was evidence to suggest otherwise, that was the story, and Leo was sticking with it.

Not that Leo was sugarcoating reality in his own head. He was crossing a line by not clueing his people in, but how big of a line, he wouldn’t say. Right now, the victim was Olivia. And unless bodies of known assassins that could have been the shooter started piling up . . . Leo shook the thought from his head.

He stood when Brackett got to his feet. “Fitz will catch you up on what you’ve been missing.”

Later that night, when Leo drove to his three-bedroom bungalow home in the hills of Glendale, he pulled into his garage and closed it before he got out of his car.

The second he opened the door into the house, the alarm buzzed. Leo disengaged the security system as he tugged at his tie. He turned on a hall light and moved to the kitchen. He went directly to his refrigerator, opened it, and immediately shut it again. The smell inside was off the charts. His time in Vegas was only supposed to be for the duration of the trial, with weekends at home. Only that wasn’t how it panned out. And all the perishables in the house perished. Instead of a beer, which he knew would be stale, he turned to a bottle of whiskey.

He walked into his dark living room, a big window facing the street outside, and sat in his favorite chair. After toeing his shoes off and unbuttoning the top of his shirt, he sat back and sipped his first drink in over two months.

The fireplace was dark, the room was cold, there wasn’t anything to eat . . . none of that was any different than it had been before Olivia, but all of it screamed at him now.

Where was she?

Was she okay?

Did she know she had ripped a hole in him with her departure?

Leo was a relationship guy.

In all his years . . . from his first high school girlfriend to the two in college and the one beyond . . . he didn’t know how to play.

Then Olivia showed up in his life.

A connection.

He sat up, pulled his jacket off, and removed his phone from it.

He found her picture. She was smiling at him from over her shoulder. Her flirty smile. The one she sent him as she lured him into the snow and attacked him with balls of fluff and ice. He touched the image. He wanted to save her. It’s what he did. All she needed to do was come back and give him a chance.

Leo put the whiskey to his lips, welcomed the burn as it went down.

The image of Olivia disappeared as his phone rang.

He cleared his throat before answering the call on speaker. “Hello, Neil.”

“How are you holding up?”

“Been better.” No reason to say he was fine, everyone in that house knew what Olivia meant to him.

“Yeah.”

“Have you heard—”

“No. She hasn’t contacted us.”

Leo didn’t expect a different answer.

“How did today go?”

“Everything is fine. Back to normal at the office.” He didn’t have to say his boss bought the story, it was implied.

The conversation paused. “I don’t know how to say this without saying it,” Neil started.

It wasn’t like the man to preamble any conversation. “Never stopped you before.”

“True. Your security system sucks.”

Leo looked away from the phone and around the room. “Excuse me.”

“Go to your front door.”

“Have you been in my house?”

Neil was quiet.

Leo grabbed his phone, walked to his front door. On his porch was a large paper bag. “What’s this?”

He grabbed it, took it to his kitchen, and looked inside. The smell of warm roast beef met his senses before he could open the Styrofoam container. Under the container was a six-pack of beer.

“Sasha predicted you’ll get drunk tonight and thought food would make your morning a little better.”

There weren’t many times he was at a loss for words. “That was thoughtful. Thank her . . . thank you.”

“About your shitty security . . . with your permission, I’d like to bring people over tomorrow and correct that.”

“Neil—”

“You don’t have outside cameras, lighting, or alarms. The garage is completely penetrable. And what happens when something goes off, someone calls you to ask if you left a door open? My housekeeper has a better system than you.”

“You probably put her system in.”

“Beside the point.”

Leo smiled, opened the lid on his dinner. Prime rib . . . nice. “I was undercover for months, barely made it back here to make sure a pipe didn’t break and flood the place.”

“If Olivia shows up, it’s not safe enough for her.”

He looked away from the food, considered Neil’s words. “Do you really think she will?”

“Impossible to tell. I like being prepared.”

Leo grabbed a knife and fork from the drawer.

“I leave at eight in the morning. I’ll put a key under the mat.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

It felt good to laugh.

The beautiful thing about hiding in Europe when you spoke a half a dozen languages, and you weren’t too short or too tall and your features were ambiguous, was that you could morph into almost any nationality, and no one questioned a single thing.

Olivia walked into the ING bank in Amsterdam, where she had an account. And she did so as a woman twenty years older and thirty pounds heavier than her.

The teller walked her back to the safety deposit boxes where she was left in complete privacy.

Olivia looked down at the box she hadn’t seen in three years. There were a dozen of them littered around the world. Europe, Asia, South Africa, the Middle East, America . . . They were her social security.

Pohl had bankrolled many of the early boxes. Cash, identification, passports . . . weapons. Unknowingly, she’d used them . . . at first. Then she realized how easily he could keep track of her through the boxes, through their contents. Slowly, she emptied those he’d financed, liquidated the weapons . . . literally smelting them after each . . . well, after each assignment. And even when he didn’t have her squeezing the trigger, if she used an ID he’d procured for her, she burned it. Found her own resource for new ones and perfected a dozen different identities to access them.

And in time she was harder to track until one day, many months after she’d allowed herself to have a friend again, she disappeared completely.

Amelia’s death had devastated her. Somehow Pohl must have found out about their friendship, and he’d killed her as an example.

That’s what Olivia believed until Sasha and Neil’s team came into play.

For a year after learning the truth, that Amelia hadn’t died because the two of them had been friends, but at the hands of the reigning power at Richter . . . Olivia realized that her disappearance, her accepted demise, had taken root. And once Pohl was eliminated, no one was the wiser.

That didn’t stop Olivia from looking over her shoulder. Didn’t stop her from sleeping light and living with the ever-close gun under her pillow as if it were a teddy bear she could curl up with at night.

Twice in the past seven years she’d tried to find legitimate work. Promised herself she’d eventually abandon the boxes altogether, leave the blood money where it was or acquire enough wealth that she could dump the contents in a charity bin for orphans and walk away.

After all, abandoned and orphaned children don’t care where the money that feeds them comes from. God knows Olivia didn’t question anytime good fortune came her way.

She’d been found at the age of five next to a woman who had overdosed in an abandoned building. It was assumed the woman was her mother, but it wasn’t like anyone bothered with a DNA test to make sure. Olivia remembered next to nothing of those years.

She’d been placed in an orphanage in Munich and shuffled around like chattel. Almost how a dog gets moved from one shelter to another to avoid being put down.

After the third orphanage in Germany, she was moved to one in the United Kingdom . . . some kind of exchange . . . or so she was told. Now she realized that it was likely Pohl acting as an early benefactor to see how she would adapt and grow.

And adapt and grow she did. She abandoned her German accent as she learned English and excelled in the education that was offered. So many of the orphans around her were busy following a path that would leave them dead in a warehouse. Instead of joining them, Olivia found a better way.

Someone had whispered in her ear once, “This is the life you were given, not the life you’ll lead. It’s temporary.”

Olivia believed it.

By the time she was ten, she was at Richter. She’d won the lotto.

“Richter will teach you skills so you never end up like your mother. This education is free to you. The award system will help set you up so when you leave Richter you will have money to start your life.” Thousands of pounds were offered for every language she learned. Incentives for marksmanship, hacking computers . . . more money . . .

By the time she was fifteen, she’d learned that even if she found trouble, and there were times she did, Richter wasn’t going to kick her to the street. She was placed in solitary, which was pretty close to what it looked like in the prison system. No outside contact, dark room, food, but nothing more.

A voice through the door always said the same thing. “If you’re going to step out of line, don’t get caught.”

Another lesson.

Little did she know every lesson she’d learned prepared her for the lonely life of an assassin.

After Richter and years of isolation, Olivia found she liked people. And with every opportunity to find friendship or connection . . . she did. Then she witnessed their lives, their loves . . . their families. Their ambitions and desires.

And then her hellish nightmares smothered her in hot lava, laughing at her . . . calling her a hypocrite. How could a woman who’d stopped hearts from beating be anything but a monster? The people around her . . . if they knew, they would turn on her. Or worse, someone would use them to pull her back into a world she wished she could forget forever. So she pulled away . . . didn’t allow any true connection to anyone.

All legitimate employment was pushed aside, and abandoning the money in charity boxes never happened.

She lived simply. No cars, no insurance, no trail. She rented a month at a time, moved around a lot. Her lovers were limited and never held on long enough for any real connection. As Sasha had pointed out, handholding in the moment was the only handholding that took place.

Olivia looked at her palms as the thought passed.

Leo.

She pushed aside memory lane and opened the safety deposit box. She removed three passports, all the cash and credit cards, and a handgun. From her purse, she removed the remainder of the cash Neil had given her, and the identification she’d used to leave the States, and folded them inside before closing the box and returning it to its place in the wall.

After exiting the bank, Olivia pulled up the collar of her jacket as she walked around the city acquiring what she needed. Cell phones, the kind one used as a pay-as-you-go customer. She went from store to store, buying one or two at a time until she had enough. She bought a laptop and an antitheft backpack that would keep electronics, bank cards, or cell phones safe from someone standing beside you and stealing your shit.

Which was what she did at her first opportunity.

A middle-aged couple stood in front of a sex shop display window, fascinated by the Eiffel Tower–shaped condoms. Olivia moved beside them and struck up a conversation.

“I love visiting Amsterdam for this very reason.” She spoke English with her German accent.

“This is our first trip here,” the woman said.

“Americans?”

“Yes,” the man replied.

Olivia stood close to the woman, placed her hand in her pocket, and turned on the device that would detect any electronic strip in the woman’s purse, including credit cards and identification, and recorded it for later.

“I have heard Amsterdam is often referred to as Europe’s answer to Vegas. Is it?” Olivia asked.

The man was quick to respond. “No.”

“Yes, it is,” the woman countered.

“There aren’t coffee shops with a pot menu on every corner in Vegas,” he argued.

“You can buy pot there.” The woman turned to Olivia, her smile big . . . like she’d been sitting in a smoke-hazed Amsterdam coffee shop for hours. “Pot is legal in a lot of places in America. It’s only a matter of time before it looks more like this.”

“She’s right,” the man said. “But the sex business is less in your face. If you want a peep show, you have to find a club and walk in. Nothing can be seen on the street, and prostitution is illegal everywhere.”

“Is that right?” Olivia asked.

The woman giggled. “How would you know where to look at naked boobies?” she asked her man as she snuggled next to him.

“Yours are the only boobies for me.”

“I think we should try that one.” The woman pointed to one of the many condoms hanging in the store window.

The man smiled at Olivia. “If you’ll excuse us. Looks like I’m gonna get some tonight.”

“Have fun,” Olivia called after them as they disappeared inside.

From there she found a crowded bar and ordered a drink. Within an hour she had three random cell phone numbers, two residing in Europe, one from the States, and the ability to move through those phones when making calls and go undetected.

On the walk back to her hotel, she dodged bicyclists that outnumbered the motorists four to one. She took her time along one of the many canals that crisscrossed the city. The streetlights were buzzing on and reflecting on the water.

Amsterdam was nothing like Las Vegas.

Sex was sold here openly from a window. Prostitution was legal and taxed. That didn’t make it better, just . . . open. With competition and free trade, men like Mykonos didn’t have nearly the same hold on the industry. Olivia wasn’t stupid enough to think human trafficking wasn’t walking past her right at that moment, but it wasn’t the norm.

There were plenty of drunk and high tourists in the city, but there was a rich and sober economy there as well. Jobs that didn’t center on gambling, sex, drugs, and retail. They were known for the fashion industry, shipping, tech . . . the city was filled with highly educated finance and business executives and their companies. And she would venture to guess that most of those inhabitants didn’t frequent the red-light district or coffee shops any more often than a New Yorker walked in Times Square for the fun of it.

Olivia had always liked Amsterdam.

She blended there.

Was invisible there.

Back in her hotel room, she stripped her fake identity away, one layer at a time, and stood under the spray of a hot shower. When her thoughts turned to Leo, she purposely turned the water to cold until all she could think about was scrubbing the soap from her hair and getting out.

For hours she sat at the desk in her room, electronics spread out, the computer and uplink in place, and worked. Every moment since her memory returned, she had questioned how it was possible that all this knowledge could vanish. The languages, the legit technology skills, the hacking . . . infiltrating a computer, a cell phone. Disguise. She really was good at changing her appearance. She’d have to be, she realized, if she wanted to stay alive. It was amazing how big the world was and yet how small at the same time.

She had just started to believe that the world did think she was dead.

Her phone call to Neil, and the job he put her on, was a first step to finding some peace. She would take the money he offered and never reach into a covert safety deposit box again. But that blood money was going to keep her alive, and instead of avoiding it, she decided it was time to embrace it. Take the money she’d sold her soul for and put it to use.

Finally, somewhere after two in the morning, when her fingers couldn’t type any longer and her eyes started seeing double on the computer screen, she backed out of the system she was in.

Olivia relocated a few feet to the bed and climbed on top of the covers.

She closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths, tried to still her mind.

Leo . . .

Was he still in hiding? Did he think the shooter was aiming at him?

Did he hate her?

Now that he knew who she really was, did he think of her and cringe?

Not since her high school years had she felt the need to validate someone else’s feelings about her. Because no one ever felt anything for her.

“I want you to know this means something to me.”

He wasn’t talking about the sex. Hell, she would have owned up to that early on had he taken her up on her offer. He was talking about them, together. It was as close to anyone saying they loved her as she had gotten in her entire life.

The “I love you, baby” in the stacks didn’t count.

Amnesiac Olivia had to know if he hated her.

Richter Olivia justified the desire to reach out by saying he needed to know he didn’t have to hide. That the shooter was aiming at her.

And since Amnesiac and Richter were both on the same yard line, Olivia crawled off the bed, retrieved her computer, and pulled it on her lap.

A few keystrokes in and she nudged Leo’s computer.

If he wasn’t online, she wouldn’t see it.

She closed her eyes and pressed Enter.

He was there.

Or at least his computer was on and linked to the internet. She waited, holding her breath for him to do anything to indicate that he was in fact sitting in front of the screen.

The screen shifted to a search engine, and Olivia’s heart jumped in her chest.