But there wasn’t any place to go. Nowhere to which he could escape. Not really.
He sank back into his chair. “Her memory is all I have left. Why the hell do you want to rip that away from me?”
Seagrave’s shoulders sagged. “I’m sorry. The fact is that I need you on this. And I thought—well, I thought you’d rather curse the truth than curl up with a lie.”
For the first time in over a decade, Winston wished he hadn’t given up smoking. “Yeah, well, I guess you thought wrong.”
“I suppose I did.” Seagrave rolled toward the door. Pressing a button on the remote so that it began to swing open. “Take as long as you need. You know the way out.”
Winston kept his eyes on the floor, not looking up until he heard the door click shut behind his friend. Only then did he let the tears that had been clogging his throat flow free. It couldn’t be true. How the hell could it possibly be true?
Even now, he could remember the way she felt in his arms. Their long, intimate conversations. The trust they shared. The love that had filled them.
If all that was a lie, then he didn’t know himself, much less his wife. He wouldn’t believe that. Couldn’t believe it. Because if it were true, then the best years of his life had been nothing but a charade. A mockery of his former happiness.
“It’s not real,” he told himself. “It can’t be.”
But of course it could. He might be trapped beneath a pain so intense he would just as soon die than work through it, but that didn’t mean he was blind. Of course it could be true. He’d seen stranger things during his tenure at the SOC. And God knows he’d seen crueler women.
But his Linda? Even if it was her, how could she have walked away from him like that? She’d loved him with the same intensity that he’d loved her.
Hadn’t she?
He’d never once doubted that reality, and he didn’t want to now. It was as if he’d suddenly learned that gravity wasn’t real, and he’d been stuck to the earth with glue all these years. It didn’t feel right contemplating the possibility that she’d been playing a role. Acting a part. And yet there she was. It was her on that video—there was no doubt in his mind. And while it might be nice to think she had an identical twin or been cloned in some evil genius’s laboratory, this was reality, not a Netflix series.
His wife—Linda Marie North Starr—had just killed a man in cold blood. He’d seen it, and as much as he wished he could punch Seagrave in the face and erase the whole bloody evening, he couldn’t deny that basic reality. It wasn’t in his nature to hide from pain or bad news, no matter how much he might want to. He had to face the truth head-on. He knew three things for certain—Linda’s DNA had been recovered from the car, the body had been unrecognizable, and she’d worked for the city government of a town that was fraught with corruption.
“Damn you,” he whispered as the dark threads of a twisted reality twined around him. “Don’t you know I loved you?”
He took a moment to simply breathe. To calm the rage that was threatening to explode out of his fingertips. Then he stood and went to the door, planning to go find Seagrave in his office. He didn’t have to. His friend was waiting in the antechamber.
“She faked her own death,” Winston said.
“It certainly appears that way. I’m sorry, Winston,” he added, his expression and his voice underscoring the sincerity of the words.
“I know you are,” Winston said, his shoulders sagging under the weight of emotion. “So am I.”
There was a battered couch against the far wall, and Winston took a seat on it. “Who was he?”
“One of ours,” Seagrave said. “Deep cover with a law firm that does a significant amount of legal maneuvering for an arms dealer based in South Africa.”
“She assassinated him.” He had to say the words. Had to feel the weight of them on his mouth and tongue before he could believe them. “My Linda. Who once told me she didn’t like me bringing my gun into the house, but that she’d get over it because of my job.”
“Yes.”
“Why? Who’s she working for? The Consortium’s gone. We ended them. Or was that fake, too?”
“As far as we know, the Consortium exists no more. We interrogated the Serpent again. He confirmed as much. As for her employer, we’re still trying to ascertain who that is.”
“Ascertain?” Winston scoffed. “Going easy on her, then?” His gut clenched at the thought of the interrogation techniques he imagined they were using on her. He tried to tell himself she deserved every one of them. And yet just thinking about it made him feel nauseous.
“She’s not in custody,” Seagrave said.
Winston stared at him, not comprehending. “You tailed her. You watched her. How the hell didn’t you—?”
“That isn’t our footage.”
Winston leaned back in his chair, his head starting to throb. “Listen, Anderson. I get that you think I’m fragile where Linda is concerned, and maybe you’re right. But spit it the fuck out, okay? Quit dancing around whatever you know and whatever you want me to do. Tell me now, or I’m walking.”
Seagrave moved closer. “Here it is, then. That wasn’t her first kill. Not by a long shot. And we have intel that she has a new assignment. I need you, Winston. You’re the best man for this job.”
“Am I?” His voice was rough. His body numb.
“You know her better than anyone. We need to stop the coming assassination. And we want to bring her in alive.”
He studied Seagrave’s face. “You’re saying she’s a professional, but you think she’ll falter if it’s me she’s up against. That I can bring her in alive where nobody else can.”
Seagrave lifted a shoulder.
“I have a job.”
“And I’ve spoken with both Ryan and Damien. I told them I wanted to borrow you for a special assignment.”
“They don’t know I used to work for you.”
“They still don’t,” Seagrave assured him. “But they do believe that you’ve had joint operations with the SOC before. I told them I need you on special assignment. And I told them why.”
“You told them about Linda. About that video.”
“No. But I told them you’d want to be involved.”
“I don’t want to be involved.”
“No?”
Winston pushed up off the couch and paced to the window. He looked down at Los Angeles a dozen floors beneath them. “Don’t play mind games with me, Colonel. You’ll only piss me off.”
Behind him, Seagrave sighed. “That isn’t my intent. If you truly want to walk away, I won’t pressure you. But I don’t think that you do.”
Winston closed his eyes, working to keep his whole body from sagging with the truth of that statement. He told himself he wanted nothing more than to go home and forget he heard any of this. To let some other agent go in and learn why Linda had killed that man. Why she’d killed others, too, assuming what Seagrave said was true. He should use this meeting as a fulcrum. A lever to send his past life with Linda tumbling down into a pile of so much rubble, and a springboard to move on with his life.