Angel Face (10 page)

“Who are you?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I’ve made a mistake. This is the wrong house.”

“No, you were looking for this house. I saw you check your directions.”

“I had an appointment. It was prearranged. Please, just let me go!”

“Appointment with who?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ve made a—”

He reached over and pulled off her hat. She cried out as if he’d struck her, and ebony hair tumbled all over the place. But still he wasn’t sure.

“You said you wouldn’t touch me,” she whispered.

This was not what he expected. Where was the evil? This was no avenging fury. She was scared silly, and with good cause if she wasn’t who he thought. Every nuance of her body language, from her wary posture to her expressive eyes said,
Let me go, please!
She was imploring him to end his siege on her, an innocent bystander, and he only wished that he could.

If he’d made a mistake, it was a bad one. But this could be a ploy on her part, and he didn’t trust himself to know the difference right now. He didn’t trust his own instincts,
and that was also a Jordan Carpenter he didn’t recognize. He’d made a grievous error in judgment years ago, and he was still living with the consequences. He’d misread that situation, too, completely.

He wasn’t letting her out of his sight until he knew the truth; he was certain of that much. If she was Angel Face, there had to be some way to flush her out, something he could say or do. He searched his memory and realized he knew everything. He had enough information to put her on death row.

She had stopped rubbing her arm, but she didn’t look any less injured by what he’d done. Her eyes had gone dull, shadowed by an emotion he didn’t understand, except that it resembled pain. It was almost as if he’d let her down.

She knew him. This was no mistake. She knew who he was.

He stared at her with physical force. “Let’s stop pretending we don’t know what this is about, all right?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m Dr. Jordan Carpenter, and you came here to kill me.”

“What?”

“I know who you are, Angel Face. I know everything about you, even the things you can’t remember yourself.”

Her expression had turned to one of mute horror. He couldn’t tell if it was confusion or shock, but she had begun to back away from him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I’m doing interviews for a study. I was given this address, but there must be some mistake.”

“There was no mistake.”

She was looking for a way out. He moved nearer the front door in order to block her. One question ran through his mind over and over again. Did he have the wrong woman? He should have checked her ID, but he’d been
thrown off by his own physical reaction to the search, and by hers. He wouldn’t have recognized her real name, anyway. It wasn’t in the dossier.

“Be careful!” he warned. “Behind you!”

She was inching away from him, unaware that she was about to hit the tree branch where the bird perched. She turned and let out a startled cry, which sent Birdy flailing for cover.

The bird tried desperately to fly. Her mutilated wings fanned madly, grasping at thin air. It was painful to watch, but there was nothing anyone could do. By the time Jordan got there, Birdy was on the ground, shaken but apparently unhurt, and the woman had dropped to her knees.

She was checking the bird for damage, for broken limbs or anything else, and he could hear the distress in her voice. Birdy was fine, but the woman was in some kind of agony, and Jordan remembered his reaction of last night when he’d found the cage turned over. He’d been prone on the floor, nearly senseless with grief.

“What’s wrong with this bird?” she asked.

“What’s wrong?”

“Yes. Why can’t it fly?”

“The wings are clipped.”

She looked up, disbeliving. “Why would you ever do that to a bird?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. So it won’t fly away?”

“But birds are supposed to fly. That’s how they survive. It’s how they protect themselves.”

Jordan didn’t have time to explain that he hadn’t done it, and he didn’t like it any better than she did. She wasn’t interested in his excuses. She was still bent over the bird, trying to comfort it, tremors running through her.

“What if a cat got into the house?” she said in an agonized whisper. “This poor thing would be slaughtered—”

When she looked up again, there were tears welling in her eyes. Jordan watched, stunned, as they spilled over and rolled down her face. He’d never seen such luminosity, such compassion.

Except once.

“It’s you,” he whispered. “You are her, Angel Face. You killed your own father. You were an informant—”

She sprang to her feet. Jordan saw her coat whip open and thought he’d missed a weapon. She was armed, but there was no time to react. She ripped something out of the lining, snapped it in two, and tossed it in the air. When he looked up, his field of vision exploded in blue-white fire. He could see nothing but a blinding burst of radiance. The stench that filled his nostrils smelled pungently of eggs, rotten eggs. Sulfur dioxide gas, he realized.

There was no pain and no report. He hadn’t been shot, but long before he could see again, he knew she was gone. He also knew he would find her. When he’d come around the house behind her earlier, he’d made it a point to get her license plate number.

When his vision cleared, he found what she’d used to blind him. There was a burnt magnesium flare on the floor. It was about the size of a firecracker and charred black from the combustion. Firestarter had warned him that she was a quick-change artist. She changed faces, he said. He’d also called her an escape artist. Jordan could now verify that she was both, but she wouldn’t get away from him again.

T
HEY’RE
right behind you. They’re trying to kill you, and this time they won’t fail. They’ll hunt you down wherever you go. They won’t let you escape again. There are no second chances! Look what they’ve done already. They’re everywhere, even in your computer, setting you up, luring you into traps. They give you drugs. They read your mind. They find the things you care about and use them against you. They used
him
against you. But why did you ever think it would be different? That he would be different?

He isn’t. He isn’t. Oh God, he isn’t.

You should never have believed them. Never have come back.

There isn’t time to take anything with you, not even the picture, but you’ve always known it would be like this, that you would have to leave everything behind.

A
NGELA
stood by a wall of windows, watching quicksilver Learjets taxi back and forth against a hazy
blue sky. She’d been waiting in the terminal all afternoon with nothing but a half-empty canvas pack on her back and a heart full of cold certainty. The shaking had finally stopped, replaced by an emptiness that felt like calm in comparison. She had made a critical decision. She was going away, leaving the country.

It was starting to come back to her, the dark corner of her life that she’d walled off. Right now, it was nothing more than hushed noises in her head—the whispering of ghosts—but it was enough to tell her that she was no longer safe here. There was nothing safe here, not the work she had filled her days with or even the people she had thought of as friends.

“Ma’am? Sorry to keep you waiting this long. The flight to Mexico City is ready to board.”

Angela turned to the smiling face of the young woman who’d come to get her. The shiny jumpsuit she wore set her apart from any airline personnel Angela had ever seen. But then, this wasn’t any airline.

“If you’ll just follow me,” she said.

Her graceful turn forced Angela to quickly reconsider the decision she’d made. She drew a breath and felt it sink to the pit of her stomach. This was it, her last chance to change her mind.

“T
HE
number you dialed is no longer in service, and there is no new number. Please hang up and try again. The number you dialed is no long—”

Jordan hit the Talk button on his cordless phone and amputated the singsong voice midword. He was trying to call Firestarter, or Edwin Truitt, or whatever the hell the agent’s name was, but he’d been getting that message repeatedly. The contact number no longer existed.

Why? What had happened?

He’d gone through the operator and even called the
CIA directly. Whoever answered the phone had informed him the number was not an agency listing, and the CIA didn’t use code names for their personnel. When he finally got an agent on the line, all the man would say was that the CIA didn’t comment on ongoing investigations.

He dropped the cordless on the couch and came to a stop in the middle of the living room. One of his mother’s hand-knotted rugs was twisted in his bare feet, as if he’d been dragging it with him. Maybe his thoughts would slow down if he did. Birdy had been tracking his movements, too, and she looked wobbly enough to fall off her perch again.

“The woman shows up at my place with a story about being lost.” Jordan ran through the sequence of events aloud, in search of some coherent thread. “She poses as an innocent victim, then blinds me with a James Bond device and vanishes, possibly taking my CIA connection with her.

“Any brilliant thoughts?” He queried the bird who was mute for once.

The phone jangled on the couch. Jordan picked it up and saw the words “Private Caller” on the digital display. He hit the Talk button.

“Dr. Carpenter, Mitch Ryder here. I think I found your missing person.”

“Mitch! Fast work. If anybody could do it, you could.”

Jordan had put the detective on Angela’s disappearance. He knew Mitch’s skills in that area because he’d consulted with him during the stalker incident and been so impressed with his expertise he’d referred him to the hospital’s legal counsel, as well as to his own patent attorney.

Jordan had one ace up his sleeve in this Angel Face mess, and that was her license plate number. After she disappeared from his house, the first call he’d made had been to Mitch. He’d left a voice mail message, asking him to find out what he could about the owner of the plates.

“Wish I had more for you, Doc,” Mitch was saying. “But this haystack has no needle. Other than what I got through DMV, there’s no history on this woman, financial or otherwise, and when someone goes to that much trouble to conceal information, there’s usually espionage involved. I’m guessing the government, but it could be private industry.”

Jordan knew what government agency was involved, but he didn’t say so. “Did you get anything at all?”

“Yeah, and you might find this interesting. She lives in one of those attached rental units on Balboa Island. She went straight there after leaving your place, probably packed a bag, and that’s when she made her mistake. She took a taxi to John Wayne Airport. There’s a private terminal there called Million Air.”

“What’s Million Air?”

“It’s where the rich guys keep their jets. Very few people know about this, but if you ask nice—and especially if you’re a woman and you look nice—you can score flights to almost anywhere in the world, and there’s no record of it. Some of these pilots are deadheading, and they’re happy to take on a passenger or two and make a little spare cash.”

“That is interesting, Mitch.”
Damn interesting.
“Did she catch one of the flights?”

“I asked that very question and got blank stares, but I think a little cash would loosen some tongues, if you know what I mean.”

“Sure, make a donation to the cause and bill me.” Jordan continued jotting notes as Mitch gave him the details about the Million Air flights, and by the time the detective was done, Jordan had already formulated a plan. There was just one vital detail missing.

“Did you get her name, Mitch?”

“Oh, yeah, didn’t I tell you? It’s Angela Lowe. Her name is Angela Lowe, or at least that’s the one she’s
using. She may work for a biotech company called SmartTech as a research assistant. I got that information from her apartment, although the company doesn’t list her as one of their employees. There are no records on this woman anywhere, other than the driver’s license, and I’m surprised to have found that.”

Jordan wrote the name down without any sense of recognition. It meant nothing to him, but obviously he had not expected it to. Her name had been left out of the CIA case files, and Firestarter had never revealed it. Maybe that’s why he’d thought it would be meaningful.

Angela Lowe. He stared at the name, studied it. What kind of woman was this? he asked himself. She played tricks with dead birds yet was distraught over one with clipped wings. She’d brutally victimized three doctors and was working on her fourth, but he couldn’t stop thinking of her as the victim. She had eyes like Bambi, for God’s sake. They could destroy a man, those eyes. And had. She was as soaringly lovely as sun peeking through clouds . . . with a soul twisted into as many knots as the rugs on his floor. What kind of woman
was
this?

Mitch’s voice broke into his thoughts, and Jordan realized he’d left the other man hanging.

“I don’t know why you’re looking for this Angela Lowe,” Mitch was saying, “but I’d be careful, if I were you. Nothing about this smells good to me, Doc.
Nothing.”

G
OLDEN
dust poured through the windows of the ramshackle bus as it shambled to a halt, springs creaking and groaning. They’d just come down a dirt hill so steep that Angela had grabbed a rusty guardrail to keep from falling out of her seat. She’d punctured her thumb and would probably need a tetanus shot, but that would have to wait until she found what she was looking for.

“¡Darse prisa!”
the bus driver shouted at the passengers, urging them to hurry and disembark.
“San Luis de la Paz. ¡Prisa! ¡Prisa!”

Was that the right village? There’d been so many towns and villages they were all beginning to sound the same to Angela. The
autobus
had just trundled through mile after mile of the lower
Bajio
, Mexico’s heartland, and the lush, fertile valley she remembered from her one other trip here had turned into a chain of valleys, one indistinguishable from the next. If she were wrong, she would be caught in this wild web of nature forever.

All she knew was that
San Luis
, or a village like it, was a strong link to her unrecoverable past, and much about that time was as thick and gauzy as the dust cloud rising around the bus. She didn’t know what had forced her to take refuge in such a primitive place. Those details were lost now, along with the year of her life that she’d erased. She hadn’t been able to point and click with the specificity of a mouse, and she’d lost good data as well as bad. But this was where she’d fled to, and it was where she hoped to disappear again—if she could find the right house, the right person. Silver, that was the name that had come back to her. Just Silver.

“¡Darse prisa!”

Angela pressed a tissue to her thumb and let the other passengers go first, although no one seemed in any particular hurry, despite the driver’s shouting. They were mostly farm workers of Indian descent on their way to the valley’s fields and orchards, and Angela found their stoicism admirable. Nothing flustered them, including a trip down the face of a cliff. According to the shy young woman who shared Angela’s seat, the planting season was over, and harvest hadn’t begun, but the crops needed to be watered and maintained.

Angela wanted to know more about the young woman’s life and whether there was any joy to be eked out of such
obvious hardship, but her Spanish had given out. It surprised her that she knew any, but if she’d ever spoken it well, she’d erased that, too.

As the dust settled outside, she saw an ornate hillside village that she vaguely remembered from her other time here. Its stucco and adobe dwellings were perched along twisting cobblestone streets, all of which ran uphill at a precipitous rake.
San Luis de la Paz
seemed to hover on the banks of an emerald river that overflowed the valley floor, where acres of avocado trees gave way to lavender amaranth bushes and cantaloupe vines looped like fleur-de-lis. She took it all in with a sense of gratefulness and numb relief.

This was the place. Thank God she was here at last.

Now she could get off the bus.

She’d taken the Million Air flight to Mexico City, where she’d caught the express train,
El Constitucionalista,
and taken it to its very last stop. From there she’d boarded this bus and severed her last tie to civilization as she knew it. She’d only been here once, and she couldn’t have said for how long, but it had felt as if she’d escaped the insanity that chased her. Here she could drink in the sparkling clear air and be cleansed of all sins, no matter how unforgivable. Of the little she remembered about this place, what lingered over everything else was a sense of refuge and rebirth. Thank God that hadn’t changed.

P
ETER
Brandt found his partner in the M-1.5 clean room, suited up in shock-white coveralls and a hood. Since Peter was responding to Ron Laird’s urgent summons, he hadn’t bothered with the full regalia, despite the company’s stringent requirements. He’d slipped on a disposable frock and was still pulling on his bouffant hair cover as he hurried out of the air shower into the rigidly controlled environment.

Ron had left a message on Peter’s voice mail, telling him they had to talk as soon as possible—and any summons to a clean room invariably meant problems with some aspect of their work at SmartTech. Ron’s latest passion was robotics that used components so tiny they couldn’t be seen with the naked eye, but Peter had the feeling that company business wasn’t going to be today’s topic of discussion.

Ron was hunched over a microscope and adjusting the magnification when Peter tapped him on the shoulder.

“What’s up?” Peter asked, speaking over the constant whir of overhead ventilation.

Ron peered at him through the hood’s window. “Where is she?” was his muffled question.