guessing, and his people were watching and would let him know if anything unusual happened. He already knew Felice had met with Al again very early that morning, and he also knew that, after Lizzy’s confrontation with her surveillance, whoever Felice had hired to do the job had been pulled off.
That would be the smart thing to do, not push Lizzy, let her settle back into her routine. The biggest question was, did Felice know how not to push? She had too much confidence in her own cleverness, which meant she was constantly underestimating what other people could and would do to fuck up her plans and schemes. In her world, all she had to do was give orders, and she expected them to be followed. In the real world, people disobeyed orders all the time. If it wasn’t in their own best interests, people could be amazingly uncooperative.
So she would be shitting bricks that Lizzy had blown the surveillance put on her. Al would be … God only knew. Predicting what Al would do at any given time wasn’t easy, which was why he was so good at what he did.
Felice was completely predictable. Al was the opposite. So why did he trust Al the most?
Because Al had been through a lot of the same experiences that he himself had dealt with, that was why. Al knew what it was to take live fire, and to return it. Al knew what it was like to kill someone. What they did was real to him, not an abstraction. Five years ago, they had all become involved in a bad situation; four years ago, the bad situation had devolved into a nightmare. How they’d handled it was something that kept them all tied in an uneasy alliance.
They all had to live with what they’d done. All except Lizzy. She’d been the outsider, the one deemed untrustworthy. Considering she’d been at ground zero of the plan Xavier didn’t see how she could be untrustworthy, but he had to admit she’d had a hard time dealing with it afterward, and that was what had tipped the scale against her. She’d been a mess, withdrawn, crying a lot. The solution had been a bullet in the head or undergoing the process. Lizzy had chosen the process. Yeah, some choice. Lose her life, or lose herself.
He himself hadn’t had a choice, not at the time. Either way, he lost Lizzy, and he’d been damn pissed about it.
But he was nothing if not tactically aware, so even though he hadn’t been able to stop that snowball from rolling downhill, from the beginning he’d been working on his trip wires. By the time Felice noticed he wasn’t falling in line like a good little soldier and was ready to turn on him too, she’d found out that if he went down, so did she, along with everyone else who’d been in the group.
Originally there had been eight of them. Two of them were now dead. One had died a natural death; the second one had been helped along. Xavier knew, because he was the one who’d done the helping.
Himself. Lizzy. Al. Felice. Charlie Dankins. Adam Heyes. They were the perpetrators, and the survivors. Charlie and Adam had both retired, gotten on with their lives, secure in the knowledge that they’d done the right thing and content to let Felice and Al handle any situations that might crop up in the future.
Xavier could have done the same thing … except for Lizzy. He had kept watch over her since she’d been installed in her new life, all her fire and spontaneity destroyed—or so they’d thought. Thank God the others had been so convinced of the success of the process, and thank God they’d been so wrong.
He’d given up hope, accepted that the chemical brainwash had been permanent, that his Lizzy was gone forever and only that dull shadow of her remained. Al and Felice would have been equally as confident that nothing would change. Then she’d gotten sick, and the Winchell woman had dropped that verbal clue that things in the world weren’t as the incurious, routine-bound Lizette thought they were.
No—wait. Damn, he should have seen it before. The vomiting. The severe headache. That hadn’t been a virus; that had been her brain beginning its recovery, fighting through and around the memory-wipe process. That was why she hadn’t reacted at all to Winchell’s comment: she’d already been aware something was going on. And at the first feasible opportunity,