Chapter 14

CHAPTER 14

P RU JACKSON SLOWLY MADE THE sign of the cross, just in case anyone was watching. She was actually surprised her hand had so instinctively followed the correct motions, because Jackson and God had not been on speaking or praying terms for a long time now. She picked up the dying woman’s hand and looked down into a face that used to resemble her own.

Children visited their dying mothers in hospice all the time, she told herself. However, it didn’t make it any easier to navigate, knowing that she had plenty of company in her personal sorrow.

There had been a definite risk in Jackson’s coming here to say goodbye, but this woman was worth the risk. She had also come prepared, just in case they might still be looking for her, though they had no reason to believe she was still alive. Yet they were the sort who never stopped looking.

But I’ll never stop looking for them, either.

Jackson was dressed as a woman around her mother’s age. Every line, every wrinkle, every eye pouch was exquisitely done. Jackson’s feigned slow-motion manner and wobbly gait were also spot-on for an unhealthy older woman.

The name she’d written down in the visitor’s log was Karen Crawford, who had been a neighbor of her mother’s from long ago, until Crawford had retired to Florida to live in a modest Caribbean blue-painted cottage a half-mile walk from the beach. Crawford had no idea that Molly Jackson’s spitfire of a daughter had assumed her identity to visit her dying mother.

Jackson had reinvented herself in a form that was not so different than the role she had occupied on behalf of the United States government—the shining beacon on the hill until it came time to kill, destroy, disrupt, displace, and generally screw over others who stood in the way of the Stars and Stripes. She had been very good at organizing and then executing such operations, and had been awarded plaques and promotions for her Herculean efforts on behalf of a grateful country. And then her world had come tumbling down, and years of her life had been spent in a hellish nightmare that not even Orwell could have come within five hundred miles of in his deepest, darkest ruminations.

Her father, now dead, had always been a nonentity in her life, fleeing the responsibility of parenting when Jackson was only six months old, after impregnating her fortyish mother against her wishes. But her mother had loved her only child and raised her to be a strong, independent, resilient, and tenacious person. And an adult Jackson had realized that her skill set and other personal qualities could help her become a once-in-a-generation superstar in the field of espionage.

And when she had risen to the zenith of her profession, at a relatively young age, she was sacrificed for another prize that was deemed more vital to the national interest. And at that point, when the decision had been made, nothing, not her past work, or skills, or connections, could save her. Basic human decency might have carried the day in her favor, but apparently no one she worked with had any.

Once that symbolic door closed behind her, she had survived in brutal captivity for two long years that felt like fifty, where the resolute, painful sameness of every day was eclipsed only by moments of terror and agony that she never managed to see coming. Jackson had endured things she had never meted out on those whom she had targeted, because Jackson possessed hard moral stops.

Her captors had no such issues.

It had taken another two years after her escape simply to rebuild her body. She had still not yet fully recalibrated her mind past the ordeal, but she no longer had any hard moral stops.

Her full given name was Prudence, a term with a definite understanding. She considered herself that. But also so much more.

She bent down and kissed her mother goodbye.

Using a walker, she slowly made her way down the hall with clumsy motions of her seemingly diminished arms and legs.

There was a man in a suit hovering near the front desk when she came into the lobby. Jackson looked at him without seeming to. He stood out so much, he might as well have been flashing his government badge to everyone passing by.

So they know or more likely suspect I’m still alive?

She worked her way up to the front desk, adjusted her glasses, and smiled at the suit. She purposefully fumbled with the pen, which government man politely picked up and handed to her. She wrote her name in an old lady scrawl of cursive.

“Thank you, young man,” she said in an elderly person’s croak and then she headed out after surreptitiously palming the pen. Her prints were on a restricted database.

She had had the cab wait for her, and the driver loaded her walker into the trunk after helping her into the rear seat.

The cab drove off as she glanced in the side mirror. The watcher in the government suit had not even bothered to come to the doorway to see her off. Standards had surely fallen since her time there.

But there was another explanation.

They suspect it’s me and are playing dumb. And they have a tail on me right now.

Well, game on.

Hours later, she had gone through several different disguises and “disruption funnels” as she termed them, which were designed to throw off any pursuers no matter how skilled.

Now safe, the old woman was gone and Pru Jackson was returned to herself, whatever that actually meant these days.

Baggy clothes hid her athletically crafted and leanly muscled body. Her captors had broken bones and they had been left to reset on their own, and had done so badly. After her liberation they had had to be rebroken with grafts and rods used to repair the damage and bring her back from painful immobility. She often rose from sleep stiff and heavy-limbed.

Passing through airport security required a doctor’s note since the bells went off in the face of all the metal she now carried inside her person. That was one reason she liked to fly private, and now had the financial means with which to do so.

She took an Uber to the airport and boarded a set of wings for a ride across the country.

Seattle, Washington, was her destination. She had someone she fervently wanted to meet there.

His name was Travis Devine, formerly of the United States Army, but now just another go-along operative for the very same government that had betrayed her.

She feared and respected Travis Devine, for he had also shown himself to be a survivor.

We’re perhaps more alike than not, former Captain Devine.

So it was up to her now to end the man’s life, because she was done relying on anyone else to do it.

Devine could have easily killed her on that train between Geneva and Milan.

And I could have killed him at Dulles Airport, when I slipped the note in his pocket.

So they were even on that score. Now, one of them was going to die.

We just have to see which one.