was eleven. Old enough to remember when things were better. Thank God I loved hitting folks in the mouth.”
She waited, but he didn’t explain.
“How’s that?” she finally said.
“All my talking, never told you I played right guard at Auburn, three years? It all started there.”
Something changed between them then. She could see the dirt-poor teenager he’d been. The vision gave her the empathy she needed to get close to him.
Close enough to destroy him.
* * *
That night, back in Birmingham, she told Brian what had happened. He knew her cover, of course. Officially, agents weren’t supposed to tell their spouses about undercover operations. But the rule was impossible to enforce, and the bureau didn’t try.
Anyway, she needed Brian’s help. She carried a second phone for Sullivan’s calls. The kids couldn’t be around when she answered, so Brian sometimes had to hustle them away.
They were lying in bed. She always found herself hungry for sex after she went to Montgomery. She tried not to think about why. Tonight, the first time ever, Brian had begged off, but she’d insisted. She’d rolled on top of him, grabbed his hands, pinned him down. Taken her pleasure as he lay on his back hardly moving.
Now she repeated what Draymond had told her about his life, how underneath everything they were alike.
“No doubt. You like being Rachel, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sometimes I think you like being her better than being you.” She didn’t know if he was serious. And she was afraid to ask.
“What am I supposed to say to that?”
“You’re supposed to say no.” He laughed. And rolled onto his side.
* * *
Over the next couple of months, she fell into an odd limbo. She was effectively on hiatus at the bureau. She couldn’t risk conducting interviews under her real name as an agent. Alabama was too small for her to be sure she wouldn’t run across someone who knew Sullivan.
So she was reduced mostly to document work when she wasn’t playing Rachel. And both she and Smith felt a little Rachel went a long way. She went to Montgomery twice a month at most.
She couldn’t work out of the main office in Birmingham, either. Its address was publicly available, and Rachel Townsend had no reason to be there. Of course, Rebecca wasn’t the first FBI agent to have this problem. Every field office maintained at least two backup locations close by, rented through shell companies which had no traceable connection with any federal agency. At least one had to be hidden from local law enforcement, too.
So, Rebecca spent most days alone in a three-room office that the bureau officially referred to as TCF–NA, True Compartmentalized Facility–North Alabama. The space was supposedly rented to CorthoSouth, a medical billing company. No one looked twice at the cover. Birmingham was a center of the American medical-industrial complex.
She and Smith met every other week in Atlanta, two hours east, though they had protocols if she needed to talk more urgently. Every so often he let her join the kind of surveillance where the watchers spent shifts in vans and had no contact with the world. Boring jobs, but at least she could hang out with other agents.
Not being allowed to do regular bureau work did have one advantage. Her cover job was nine to five, so she spent more time at home. But though she saw more of her family, she felt disconnected from her own life. Rachel was glamorous, rich, exotic. Rebecca had two kids and a rented ranch house. Rachel had an M3. Rebecca had an Accord.
On top of the lies was the truth, the danger of an undercover operation, even one with white-collar targets. As long as her cover held, she should be fine. Violence wasn’t part of day-to-day life for Sullivan and his friends. But Rebecca couldn’t be sure how they would react if they discovered the FBI was targeting them.
The upshot was that Rebecca spent a lot of time thinking about Rachel. But Rachel never wondered about Rebecca, much less Kira, Tony, or Brian.
* * *
Sullivan introduced her to his buddies. Every new contact meant more targets. But they were potential trip wires too. Just because Sullivan had bought her cover didn’t mean everyone else would. Let him do the work, Smith told her. Anybody seems too suspicious, back off, we’ve got plenty already.
But she didn’t know exactly what that surveillance had found. Smith wouldn’t let her listen, and he briefed her only broadly. He wanted to cut the odds that she