Masquerade Read Free Page B

married a blond young man with freckles, muscles, and a look of easy confidence. Garrick Richmond, an American on a Fulbright scholarship at Cambridge. There were even more photos of her and the blond American. He was always smiling, radiating happy-go-lucky charm. Twenty-one that year, she had also chosen U.S. citizenship. Later she and Garrick had moved to Virginia, where he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. It was dangerous work, and Garrick Richmond had been killed while on assignment in Lebanon.
    She closed the album and the file folder. A dark, suffocating cloak fell over her. Another death of someone she’d loved. Had everyone she’d loved died? Was there something about her, some curse she couldn’t remember? Without her memory she could only speculate and be afraid. Without her memory it seemed as if they’d never lived. Without her memory
she’d
never lived.
    She walked to the bed. When the memory is blank, you can’t be yourself because you don’t know who you are. You have no identity. No past that shaped you. No experiences to make judgments from. No old emotions to test new ones against.
    You’re simply a face in the mirror. The taste of toothpaste. The square of sunlight that warms you. The feel of cotton soft against your skin.
    You grieve and rage and speculate endlessly, fruitlessly.
    Her name was Liz Sansborough. She was thirty-two years old. Widowed. Except for Gordon, everyone she had loved was dead. She lay on the bed in the strange room and cried for all those thirty-two years, for all those she had lost and didn’t remember.

    She had worked for the CIA. She was a spy.
    Her complete CIA dossier was in the next file folder. She’d joined after Garrick Richmond was killed. She’d trained at Camp Peary, Virginia, “the Farm.” The dossier listed the instruments and machines she’d checked out on. Her cipher and judo skills. Marksmen tests. She was a good shot . . . or had been. No wonder Gordon had insisted she take the automatic.
    She put a cassette into the VCR. According to the label, it showed her London flat, filmed by a friend five years ago. The flat was small, with the same Danish-modern furniture that now decorated her Santa Barbara condo. A close-up showed her holding a book, the little finger on her left hand crooked.
    She remembered none of it.
    The second cassette had been made by the Company. It showed her on surveillance in Potsdam . . . picking up a drop in Salzburg . . . trailing someone through a murky alley in Vienna. At the end of the film, she looked up from the Vienna darkness, and yellow lamplight illuminated her in a haloed glow. That face was hers, right down to the dramatic beauty mark above her mouth.
    According to her dossier, she’d been stationed in London because she knew it so well, and she’d worked throughout western Europe. Then, three years ago, she’d been sent to meet a courier in Lisbon. When she got there, the courier was dead. An assassin who called himself the Carnivore had just shot him. The Carnivore then shot her. Shot her and left her for dead.
    It had been a long haul, but CIA medical people had pulled her through. Then they’d retired her and set her up in Santa Barbara as a journalist with the cover name Sarah Walker.
    Sarah Walker!
    So the desk in the condo was hers after all. She contemplated being someone named Sarah Walker. A magazine journalist. There was something familiar about the name, but it was more an emotion than a memory.
    Then she thought about being shot and left for dead. In a way, she had died. Only the dead remembered as little as she.
    Was all this really her?
    The last item in the file folder was a photograph of her and Gordon, arms wrapped around each other, standing on the beach. They were wearing swimsuits, and behind them white surf pounded the golden sand. She studied the photo, turned it over. The inscription said the picture had been taken the year