Chapter Twenty-Two Edges

She stepped closer and studied Lizzy through her goggles, her head tilting, quizzical. "Killer camouflage, Agent Bennet."

Lizzy zipped up Wickham's coat. "Indoor maneuvers."

Karen grinned below the goggles, the effect macabre and humorous at the same time. "Do tell."

Lizzy had finally recovered enough to remember the first team from the cabin and the last member of the other team that Karen had ambushed. Ignoring the pain in her side and her feet, she grabbed Karen's hand. "C'mon, hurry! Two men"— Wickham?— "maybe three coming from behind me.”

"Oh, I didn't know…" Karen confessed quietly as she turned. Then she tugged on Lizzy's hand. "Let me lead." She pointed to her face. "Goggles."

"Right," Lizzy said as she sidestepped to let her rescuer slip past her. Much as she wanted to know how Karen had ended up there, now was not the time for conversation. She stopped by the body of the man who'd been nearest to her, rolling him over and frisking him. She found what she wanted, a walkie-talkie, and turned it off.

"Good thinking," Karen said. They moved on.

Karen led her downhill more quickly than she expected, moving quickly and silently even in the boots and on the rocky, bushy ground. They loped along, Lizzy attending to Karen’s steps and mimicking them.

After ten or fifteen minutes, Karen stopped them behind a small, tight clump of pines. They stood still, listening, and she scanned behind them uphill. Shaking her head, she faced Lizzy. "Can't see anyone. We can rest here for a minute. It's still a distance to my car, and it was a long climb up here. Want to turn on the walkie-talkie, see if we hear any chatter?"

Lizzy fished the walkie-talkie out of her coat pocket and, careful to make sure the volume was all the way down, turned it on. Then she turned the volume up slightly. A faint popping and crackling was audible. For a moment, she thought that was all there would be, the electronic Rice-Crispy sound.

But then a voice. Wickham. "I'm coming, Fanny…Charlie…whatever your name is. I will find you. I will fuck you. And I will strangle you as I come inside you."

Her mask was gone, and so was his. The true Wickham.

She felt close to the edge of the world. Close to the edge.

Turning off the walkie-talkie, she looked at Karen, whose alarmed expression had immediately softened into sympathy. Her sympathy disclosed to Lizzy how fraught and haunted her own expression must be.

"The…indoor maneuvers?" Karen asked carefully.

"Yes."

"I hated those classes at the Farm."

Lizzy nodded, acknowledging her confession but not lingering on it. "That man―Wickham―and another man were behind me." Lizzy didn't go into the whole story, the details; she didn't know exactly what Fitzwilliam had told Karen in their briefing. "But the two of them must have reached the bodies and realized a walkie-talkie was missing. We have no way to know if the three of them are now together—or whether the man who ran has joined them, a fourth. I have information, details on a terrorist attack planned for tomorrow in Rapid City, but it's on my phone and there's no signal. At least there wasn't." She located her phone and looked at it. Still no bars.

Karen nodded, her lips hardening into a plump line. "We should go. There's no signal until we're in the car and still farther down the mountain, farther than we can manage on foot." Her voice sank, and her face showed embarrassment around the goggles.

"What is it?"

Karen frowned as she lifted her head and spoke hurriedly. "I was supposed to have a satphone and give you a second one in the airport bathroom—but I left them at the office. I got so focused on the guns, I didn't remember about the satphones until you and your mark left the airport. I couldn't break the tail to go all the way back to the office…Agent Darcy stressed it…"

Lizzy started. She pocketed her own phone and got Wickham's out. She hadn't looked closely at his phone in the cabin― too rushed ―or when he had been using it on the trip to Casper or in the airport― too suspicious . But he’d gotten a call in the cabin.

She examined the phone as closely as she could in the faint moonlight. Karen looked at it, too, and then faced Lizzy. "That's one of those new phones, satphone and cellphone combined. Not as bulky as the ones I have in the office and no visible antenna."

Lizzy had recognized it. She nodded. "It's Wickham's. But I can't open it."

"And you won't without guessing the password. Even the computer nerds at Langley would have no luck without it."

"No time for that now, anyway. Let's go." Lizzy shoved the phone back into her pocket. They started again, once more in a line of two, Karen in the front.

Lizzy looked back. She could see nothing, but she felt Wickham's malevolence bearing down on her like an avalanche. She could not safely move faster than Karen, who was moving faster than Lizzy could travel in the dark unaided.

I will find you. I will fuck you. I will strangle you as…

She made herself stop replaying Wickham's words. The thought of facing him again filled her with a glacial cold, vast and unstoppable. Before, as difficult or awful as each encounter with him had been, they had all been mediated by her cover and his determination to restrain himself until she yielded to him, to temptation. The next time, they would be face to face. He would do whatever he did to her , Lizzy, even if he did not know her name.

She wondered how much of his mask Wickham had let slip with Georgiana, especially at the end. If he had ever spoken to her as he had spoken on the walkie-talkie, if he had ever touched her in that tone of voice, with such acid cruelty, it was no wonder Fitzwilliam’s half-sister had crumbled, retreated from the world, and stayed in retreat. Lizzy shuddered.

They hurried forward, a phalanx of two in the dark, one who could see in the dark followed by one who now wanted only to escape the dark. Down, down, down, Lizzy chanted to herself, done, done, done. I can't do this anymore. I need to talk to Fitzwilliam and then to Kellynch.

And then I need a new life.

Standing in the little red cabin in that little red nightie, naked beneath, holding drinks, Fanny posed, was as far as Lizzy would willingly go in her old life. Close to the edge of the world.

She was cold to the bone and bone-tired, her exhaustion, the exhaustion that had been chasing her far longer than the Wicker Man's teams, that had been chasing her as she arrived at Langley for the meeting with Kellynch and Darcy—her exhaustion had caught her. She wanted to sleep, sleep for a week, and wake to another week of sleep.

Lizzy stumbled, and Karen turned around. "Are you okay?"

"Yes, I fell before you found me. Rock to the ribs—and the exertion and the cold…"

"I've got a medkit in the car with painkillers. It won't be long now. We'll turn toward the road soon. We've been descending roughly in parallel with it but stayed away from it because it's too exposed. The people I followed knew you wouldn't go up or go deeper into the wilds of the mountain, that you'd stay close to the road but avoid it."

"To tell the truth, I hadn't really thought it out, planned. I was just running. Reacting. The path of least resistance. Down."

Karen scanned behind them and then turned back around and started walking, this time a bit more slowly for her companion’s benefit. After another five minutes, she turned toward the road. Instead of walking downhill, they were now walking across the slope.

"How much farther?" Lizzy asked. She glanced uphill anxiously without the benefit of Karen's night vision goggles. Her tone as well as her question underscored her exhaustion.

"A little farther. Keep moving. My car's down on the far side of the road, but you won't need to go all the way to it. You can hide on this side and get in the car when I bring it up to the road. Just jump in, and we'll get to a phone signal. Maybe we'll find Agent Darcy. According to his timetable, he ought to be on the mountain by now. He said you were carrying a tracker."

"It's in my bag." Lizzy patted the Patagonia bag hanging securely at her side.

"Thank God! Maybe he won't report me to Director Kellynch about the satphones."

"I'll defend you, Agent McDougal. Are you sure you didn't just lose the phones in your bag?"

She chuckled softly. "Maybe. Not a standard issue, that bag. But with a rugrat and no husband, I have to carry everything all by myself. We can check it when we're safely in the car. It's in the trunk, with my other shoes."

"Who's watching your child?" Lizzy found talking better than thinking, and she was curious. They both were whispering.

"My ex-sister-in-law. Despite the divorce, she's still my friend."

Lizzy imagined that being friends with Karen would be easy. She'd never thought that about any other agents, particularly female agents. Maybe that was because her father had trained her to look for other peoples' faults and follies and foibles—and because the CIA had trained her to look for other peoples' darkness. Seeing their darkness caused Lizzy to see her own and to fear its increase in the future.

Lately, however, she'd been seeing more—light. Karen, Fitzwilliam.

"Ricky. That’s my little boy. Blonde and chunky, although a mom shouldn't say that. He's just past two years old, recently drafted into the terrible twos, but not yet too terrible." Karen stopped walking, laughing softly to herself—presumably as she thought about Ricky.

The ground in front of them rose steeply. "We're almost to the edge of the road," she said. "I'll leave you behind those bushes there"―she pointed up to the ones she meant at the top of the rise―"and I'll cross the road, go down the other side. My car's hidden there, as best I could hide it. The three I followed parked a little farther down the mountain." She moved her arm to indicate the location. "I went past them and found a spot above them, waited. They never expected you to get out of the cabin. I heard them talking."

She turned and looked back uphill, behind them, and seemed satisfied with what she saw—or didn't see. "These goggles gave us a real advantage. We've stayed well ahead of them. Nowhere to be seen."

They climbed the severely pitched rise laboriously. Karen was obviously tired, her movements even slower now. Meanwhile, Lizzy felt like each step was a fresh miracle since she was convinced each prior step was her last. The end. Karen kept looking back at her, concerned.

Lizzy spotted the road as they reached the bushes, the asphalt ribbon a darker dark than the surrounding dark landscape. No headlights or taillights were visible. No artificial lights at all beneath the dim slip of the moon.

They stopped by the bushes, and Karen checked behind them again. "Okay, Agent Bennet. Rest here in the bushes. I'll go up to the car. It's an old Toyota 4Runner—but I guess you didn't need to know that. It'll take me a few minutes to reach it and come back."

She looked behind them one last time and crossed the street. As she reached the asphalt, Lizzy heard the rubber boots squeaking for the first time…and then Karen vanished down the hill on the far side.

Lizzy squeezed herself deeper into the bushes, sinking down between two. She was relieved to be off her feet, only then aware of the blisters forming or that had already formed on both feet. She pulled her revolver from her pocket and put it on the ground in front of her in easy reach. After another cautious look around and seeing no movement or lights, she retrieved Wickham's phone.

The notification was still showing. Holding it close to herself to minimize the glow of the screen, she swiped up. A number pad appeared. The phone was unlike Lizzy's personal iPhone or her CIA phone. It was unclear how many numbers or letters it would take to unlock it. There was no way to know if there was a limit on the number of unsuccessful tries, but she worried there would be. She stared at it for a moment, too tired even to speculate on the password.

She put it back in her pocket and glanced across the road. There was no sign of Karen's car, no lights.

And then Lizzy jumped at the sound of a gunshot, unsilenced.

And another.

Then an answer, one Lizzy had heard earlier. Spit.

Spit.

Spit. Spit.

She grabbed the revolver from the ground, jumped up, and leaped out of the bush and onto the road, ignoring the pain of her side and her feet, her utter exhaustion. She ran, gun up and extended ahead of her, every nerve screaming with life. Her boots pounded the asphalt. When she reached the far side of the road, she slowed and crouched, scanning ahead of her, trying to use her ears as well as her eyes.

More gunshots.

Spit. Spit.

Lizzy could see no one, no movement, no muzzle flash.

But the sound came from down, from below the road. She stood and ran down the steep pitch toward the trees. As she stumbled down, she could see a break between the trees, one large enough for a car to fit through. She angled for it as she caught her balance. Her ribs hurt as if she'd been stabbed. The blisters, open, raw, scorched her feet.

In the distance, she heard a scream, agonized, high-pitched, and feral. It was impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman.

She reached flatter ground, moving the same way she and Karen had moved earlier across the mountain, neither uphill nor downhill. The break between the trees was black, abysmal, and repellent to vision, but Lizzy ran toward it, into it. She would save Karen if it was possible.

Suddenly, her head exploded. The black around her erupted into a multi-colored fireworks display―all light and pain but without noise.

She tumbled forward, her revolver lost from her grip…tumbled toward the ground. She was unconscious before she struck it.

***

When Lizzy came to, she was on her back, although she had fallen forward. The coat she wore was unzipped but bunched beneath her. Her chest and torso and legs were cold, exposed. Her back burned.

It took her a moment to realize that the nightie was bunched around her neck too, above her breasts. Her skin was damp with cold sweat, a sheen of mountain night. She blinked, trying to clear her vision, somehow watery and dark all at once. It was as if she could see the pain in her head, massive and overpowering, radiating forward from the back.

And then she realized her panties were gone.

"Hello, Fanny, " Wickham said. The edge of the world. That tone of voice.

She heard him but could not see him. He was close, near her feet but standing. She blinked back the pain, trying again to clear her vision, and she thought she could see him, a silhouette looming above her, the darkest thing in the dark.

He had dragged her from beneath the trees into the faint moonlight. My burning back. He wanted to see her as much as he could. Lizzy heard nothing but Wickham's voice, his heavy breathing. The firefight she had been running to had ended.

Karen!

The thin remainder of the waning moon above her seemed a portent. She could see him now a bit better, the gun in his hand, heavy and long-barreled. She tried to move, but her body seemed distant from her will, unresponsive. She could feel, sense, experience—but not act. He bent and put the gun on the ground by his feet. When he stood back up, he unzipped his pants.

"I wanted you to do this willingly and then to regret it and have to live with that regret—but you were never her, were you, Fanny?” He reached into his pants and produced his erection, which took the place of the gun he had been holding on her. He stroked himself a couple of times as he spoke. "I told you what was coming, whoever you are." His voice was supersaturated with cruel desire, desire for cruelty.

A second later, he was on top of her. She could not move before, but now it was impossible. His full weight bore down on her, pressing her against the rocky ground beneath her. She felt his hand slip between her legs.

He's touching me in that tone of voice.

The final act in the theater of the real.

Final curtain.

"It's a shame," he whispered regretfully in her ear, his breath hot, infernal. "I'd have so enjoyed you wet ."

Tears ran from Lizzy's eyes. Wickham's hand moved from between her legs to her throat and joined his other there. He began to squeeze as she felt him move his body, positioning himself to violate her. She shut her eyes and held Fitzwilliam in her mind, trying not to acknowledge what was about to happen, trying to imagine that she had yielded to Fitzwilliam when he visited her in her bedroom, that she had abandoned this mission when she had the chance.

"Look at me, you little bitch," Wickham said, squeezing her throat tighter.

She opened her eyes. She could see the leer on his face, the pride of possession, revenge. He moved his hips again, trying to align himself with her but finding it hard to do with both hands occupied. It was horrifying and ludicrous.

"Never easy, are you, Fanny?" He moved again, using his death grip on her throat to lift his upper body, and she felt him touch her there, down there, not with his hands, ready but not yet inside her. More tears. Her vision blurred again.

And then she heard sounds, loud sounds.

It took her a moment to recognize them. Gunshots . Wickham's head snapped up as if he heard them, too. But when he faced her again, his forehead was different—black. For a moment, his hands were still tight around her throat, and then they relaxed and he slumped forward on top of her.

Dead weight . She felt his hot blood wet on her face, in her hair.

His forehead wasn't black, it was red ...

"Lizzy…!" She heard Fitzwilliam’s voice from the other edge of the world, or she thought she did…

It might have been a dream, infinite but infinitesimal, a hazy prelude to another forfeit of consciousness…