Undeceived

Also by
Karen M. Cox
1932
Find Wonder in All Things
At the Edge of the Sea

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Undeceived

Copyright © 2016 by Karen M. Cox

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any format whatsoever. For information: P.O. Box 34, Oysterville WA 98641

ISBN
: 978-1-936009-70-1

Cover by Zorylee Diaz-Lupitou
Graphic design by Ellen Pickels

Prologue

East Berlin, GDR
October 1982

His vision began to darken. He heard shouts again, a man’s, no…there was a female voice in the mix, but he lacked the brainpower to muster a care for who it was. Was it English he heard? Or was his mind, so inured to translating, automatically interpreting the German? He was tired, so tired, but if he could only rest a while, he could recruit some strength and get…where?
Ah yes, West Berlin.

The voices grew even as his consciousness faded. His mouth tried to form words like “over here” or “help me.” But nothing came out except more blood—from his side, from his shoulder, from his hand. There were pinpricks behind his eyelids again, moving faster like a giant kaleidoscope, and the world continued to melt away. He felt movement when he slumped out of the pantry door and cursed when someone pushed him back up to a sitting position.

“Come on. Wake up, old chap! We’re getting you out of here. Stay with me. My car is right outside.”

“USBER. Hurry.” His speech slurred as if he’d been on a three-day drunk.

“Yes, straight across the border.”

His lips twitched. “Fitz?”

“I’m here. You’re going to be fine. Hang on.”

William Darcy forced his eyes open, but it wasn’t Fitz he saw in front of him.

“You arrogant bastard,”
she
said in a clipped tone. “What don’t you understand about ‘stay put’? We’ve been looking for you for flipping ever! You’re damn lucky Fitz remembered the location of this safe house.”

“Hi, little cutie. What are you doing here?” His head lolled about on his shoulders.

“I’m saving your overconfident, egotistical hide.”

“Aww, honey, don’t nag. Hey, how you gonna get us out of this one? How good is your German?” He grinned, inwardly laughing at the asinine situation in which he’d found himself.

“You know it’s damn good,
danke
. And I’m going to get us out of here ’cause, unlike you, I’ve got my ducks in a row,” she quipped then gasped as she drew back her hand, covered in his blood. “Holy shit!” She stared at her blood-soaked fingers. Apparently, he’d bled through his last attempt at a bandage. She heaved him toward her and ran her hands over his torso, assessing the damage as he groaned again.

“Fitz”—she spoke with a forced calm—“find something to check this. We’ve got to get him out of here. And there had better be a medical team waiting as soon as we get across the border.”

Fitz disappeared and returned with a couple of musty towels, one of which she slipped under Darcy’s armpit and tied firmly.

“Good God, woman!” he said through gritted teeth.

“I have to stop the bleeding.”

“If you put a tourniquet on there, I’m liable to lose my damn arm!”

“Stop being such a baby. It’s not that tight.”

“Is…too.” He was losing the burst of alertness fostered by the hope of rescue and the pain in his shoulder.

She tried to pull his shirt up to see, but it was stuck to the side wound. Looking at it, she sat back, horrified.

“Bad?” he whispered.

“Not so bad.”

“Liar,” he murmured.

Over her shoulder, she spoke in a low voice. “We have to go—now.”

“Chief said they’re sending an ambulance from a hospital near
Zehlendorf
. No sirens. Should be there when we arrive.”

“But first we have to get him into West Berlin.”

Darcy clutched at her arm. “Set up…” He gasped.

“What?”

“Sniper at the drop. Shooter at my flat”—Darcy indicated his side wound—“traitor…they’re gone now. Took them out. Both of ’em. Natalia…she played me. Damn it, she played me!”

“Traitor? Who is Natalia?”

“Wilhelm,” he said, becoming agitated.

“That’s your name, Darcy.”

“No! Said…Wickham…no!…Wilhelm.”

“Okay, okay, shh now. We’re loading you into the car. Try not to draw attention to yourself.”

They hustled him to the curb as if carting him home from a night full of booze and debauchery. He felt weightless—like a baby might, being carried in its mama’s arms.

Once in the car, there was only silence as she worked to stave off disaster. There was the occasional unintelligible mumble from Fitz behind the wheel and a low response from the woman tending Darcy’s wounds with quiet, efficient desperation. He clung to the sounds; hearing was the only sense left to him, the only thing that told him he was still in the land of the living. He no longer felt anything, no longer could see.

“It’s the end,” he whispered, still incredulous that this could happen to him, of all people.

“You’re too full of yourself to die,” she said in his ear, grasping his uninjured hand, now cold and clammy.

The car rumbled quietly through the calm Sunday morning traffic of East Berlin.

She looked away. “Can’t you go any faster?”

“Going as fast as I can.” Fitz met her gaze in the rear view mirror. “They have good medical facilities on the other side, probably better than anyplace he’s been assigned in the last five years. Don’t worry about our friend.”

“I’m not worried,” she snapped. “And he’s my colleague, not my friend.”

Fitz gave her a kind smile. “Of course he is, love.”

Darcy’s last thought before he lost consciousness wasn’t fear but an overwhelming sorrow. His life really was over, a done deal; he was going to punch his ticket at last. He was down for the count, slipping under for the third time. All the euphemisms in the world couldn’t soften the cold, hard fact.

William Darcy, aka Liam Reynolds, aka Darby Kent, aka the London Fog, veteran of the CIA, recipient of the Distinguished Intelligence Cross, was dying.

Part One

Chapter 1

Charleston, West Virginia
October 1980

It is a truth, universally acknowledged that, when a young woman decides to follow her late father’s career path—especially when her father died in pursuit of said career—her mother will be vehemently opposed to that plan of action.

“Lizzy, I don’t understand your thinking. You were at the top of your high school class. You left for college to be a UN interpreter. I thought you’d move to New York City, meet some dashing diplomat with a ton of money. You’d get married, quit your job, and give me a passel of smart, dashing grandchildren. Not be some kind of…
career
girl!”

“Mama.” Elizabeth Bennet rolled her eyes and gritted her teeth with the effort of being patient. “This is 1980. Women aren’t just entering the work force; they’re changing it. There was a Women’s Liberation Movement a few years back. Maybe you read about it. There was a song, ‘I Am Woman.’ It was on the radio, remember?”

“Pfft. That agency is a man’s world.”

“There is nothing mannish about the CIA. Lots of women work there.”

“If you have to be a career woman then, why can’t you work somewhere else? Anywhere else! That agency sent your father away, and I never saw him again. I was left all alone—with a baby girl to raise by myself.”

“Jim helped you a lot with that.”

“Your stepfather isn’t the issue here! The CIA robbed me of my husband. Now they want to take my baby too.”

“They didn’t rob you of him. My father was a hero. He died in the line of duty.”

“And you want to do the same?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course, I don’t want to die in the line of duty. I just…well, I
would
want him to be proud of me, but that isn’t all there is to it. I’ve wanted to join the CIA since I was fourteen and toured the headquarters building—since I saw the stars on the Memorial Wall and knew one of them stood for my father.”

Not for the first time, Elizabeth wished for her father—her real father. As a CIA man, she knew Tom Bennet would have supported her need to pursue this path. At least, she assumed he would have. She was only three years old when he died, and she remembered almost nothing of him. Until her mother married the affable, perpetual newspaper-reading Jim, the word “father” meant a handsome photograph in a frame—one that was put away in a drawer after Jim arrived on the scene.

“Besides,” Elizabeth went on, “I’m not working in clandestine operations. I’m applying for a linguistics position. It’s not the same thing as my father’s job. Not at all.”

“You’ve always idolized him, but he wasn’t that larger than life man you’ve constructed in your imagination. He was a real man with real faults like any other.”

“And real principles and a real need to find the truth. Serving my country by working at the CIA is an honor. It’s a family tradition, Mama. I’m proud to continue it and proud to be my father’s daughter.”

“I brought you back here to Charleston to keep you away from that nonsense. It’s all politics—the crazy assignments, the weird, hushed phone calls in the middle of the night—and not worth the pittance they pay you. I wanted a better life for my daughter, something normal. When you got that scholarship, I let you go to Duke to learn all those languages. I thought you were learning Hungarian to please your great-grandma!”

“Yes, that was a big part of it. Dédi taught me so much, and she was proud when I wanted to learn more of her native tongue.”

“But instead of studying to be a secretary or learning to do hair or something else you could do until it was time to raise a family, you go and do this crazy thing!”

“I don’t want to be a secretary or do hair! There’s nothing wrong with doing those things, but it’s not what I want.”

“But then you could go back to work later if you felt like you had to.”

“The first step to having a family is finding a man to make one with. That’s certainly not happening here in West Virginia. And a family isn’t high on my priority list right now. The decision’s made, Mom. I’ve applied for the job, been accepted into the training program, and I start right after New Year’s.”

Francine Bennet Langdon shook her head. “I will never understand you.”

Truer words were never spoken.

***

The Farm, CIA training facility
January 1982

“Three weeks, three blasted weeks, and I’m finally through with this place.”

“I know exactly what you mean.” Elizabeth’s classmate, Kitty, inspected her fingernails. “The only good parts of these last few weeks are all the yummy veterans doing the lectures.”

Elizabeth shook her head, smiling. “Is that all you think about?”

“Well, duh. That guy who was here last Thursday was totally hot.”

“The inks expert? George?”

“Girl, I’d blot his ink any time.”

Elizabeth laughed. “Yeah, he was cute.”

“Speaking of totally hot. Check out the guy standing in the doorway. If George was a looker, this guy’s off the charts.”

“Mmm.” Elizabeth looked up, and she was compelled to stare as if drawn by a magnet. Kitty’s observation was right on the money.

He was tall and handsome with a noble profile. Dark wavy hair. Broad shoulders. Elizabeth could barely see his hazel eyes from her seat in the front row. Too bad. She had a thing for blue eyes. He was good-looking even without the baby blues. But it wasn’t only the outer trimmings that captured her notice. It was the intensity in the eyes. The intelligence. The hint of ruthless cynicism around his mouth. Yes, he was definitely a damned fine man to look at.

“Hey, wait a minute. I know who that is.” Elizabeth noticed the unsettled titter that swept the classroom as he stood arguing with their instructor in urgent whispers. “It’s Darcy.” The murmur in the crowd confirmed the name.

“Who?”

“William Darcy. He’s a big shot in clandestine operations—a well-known field officer. He has this ridiculous nickname, the London Fog, but he’s supposedly the real deal—received the Distinguished Intelligence Cross and everything. I thought he was overseas somewhere. There’s a rumor he’s after the COS position in Moscow.”

“He’s going to be the chief of station in the USSR?” Kitty breathed out. “Wow.”

“That’s the rumor.”

He glanced her way at that moment and caught the two women gaping at him, but instead of winking at them like George—the inks expert from last Thursday—he narrowed his eyes and motioned for the instructor to join him in the hall.

Intrigued, Elizabeth stepped out of the classroom and over to the water fountain. The two men had their backs to her several feet away, giving her free rein to eavesdrop. Darcy’s voice proceeded to get louder until she could hear him over the splash of water.

“What the hell is this?”

“Guest lecture, Darcy. Interrogation techniques.”

“Like I’ve got nothing better to do than babysit a bunch of snot-nosed trainees.”

“You agreed to do the lecture.”

“I was
told
to do the lecture.”

“It won’t hurt you, and it’s good motivation for the newcomers to have a seasoned officer talk about his experiences.”

Darcy snorted and jerked his thumb toward the classroom door. “Like those two girls in the front row? If they’re the best the CIA can recruit these days, no wonder everything’s going to hell.”

Elizabeth almost choked on her water.

The instructor’s annoyance flared. “Quit bellyaching and do your damned job! And stop standing around like you’ve got a stick rammed up your ass.”

Elizabeth scurried back inside to her seat and told Kitty the whole exchange.

“Forget what I said earlier.” Kitty leaned over and whispered in Elizabeth’s ear. “What an asshole!”

“Too right.” Elizabeth was a pretty good judge of character, even at first glance. She liked to think it was a gift she had inherited from her father.

“Kitty, my friend, I have learned that there are some fatal flaws that even extreme hotness can’t erase.”

“Amen, sister.”

Darcy gave a fifteen-minute lecture on basic interrogation techniques used in Eastern Europe, fundamentals that they’d learned months ago. Obviously, he underestimated either the class’s level of knowledge or their intelligence. He took exactly three questions from the group and gave them terse, supercilious answers. Then he looked at his watch and abruptly stopped the question and answer session. They watched him strut out the door, back ramrod straight, without another word or a single glance behind him.

Elizabeth filed the incident under
Officers to Avoid in the Future
. She already had some idea what type of colleague she preferred, and Mr. Darcy had come down on the “no, thanks” side of that equation.