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The color drained from Paige’s cheeks. Her body stiffened, eyes flicked to the deadbolted soundproof door. Then she cast a terrified glance in Kaiser’s direction. “Should I . . . should I be hearing this?”
“Nobody should be hearing this.” Kaiser’s face was a dark cloud. “John, what the hell are you—”
“Relax, both of you. Paige, you aren’t going to end up in a landfill because you know too much.” Benson smiled tightly at Paige, shot a glance at Kaiser, then looked up at the ceiling and shook his head. “Trust me, once I get through with what I have to say, I’m the one looking at a one-way ticket to the city dump with a black hood over my head.” He sighed out a breath, strolled back to his chair, sat down heavily, then took another breath and finally gazed dreamily in Paige’s direction before uttering a single word: “Scarlet.”
Paige blinked twice, swallowed once, then nodded in surprise. “Yes. That was the NOC operator’s codename. Scarlet. How did you know? The NOC system doesn’t save any records. Besides, I covered my tracks perfectly. How did you . . . oh, God, did you . . . did you recruit her too? The names, they’re both . . .”
An incredulous snort exploded from Kaiser. “Rhett and Scarlet? You have got to be kidding, John. Who is Scarlet?”
Benson cast that dreamy gaze at Kaiser. “You can guess who she is, Martin. You’ve seen how these Darkwater missions unfold. You know damn well who she is.”
Kaiser stood abruptly, sending the swivel chair spinning off behind him. He snapped his fingers in Paige’s direction. “Get out, Ms. Anderson. You’re done here. This doesn’t concern you.”
Paige stood up hurriedly, relief washing over her.
“It very muchdoesconcern you, Paige. Sit back down.” Benson stopped Paige’s brisk walk to the door with a single look that carried the authority of forty years in the Agency. “You too, Martin. Shut the hell up and listen.”
The severity in Benson’s voice stopped Kaiser’s rage in his throat. The Director took a long breath. Then, still red-faced, he nodded at Paige, gesturing with his head for her to sit back down. Kaiser retrieved his still-spinning swivel chair, sank into it, rubbed his eyes, then gestured with his hand for Benson to get on with it.
“She was a brilliant law student,” Benson said quietly. “One of several women Rhett was sleeping with, but with dazzling potential for the NOC program. CIA desperately needed people in the Indian subcontinent—close to China and Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iran. Of course, they all had to be NOC agents because the damn Indians refuse to allow an official CIA station in their country. She was perfect, so I kept an eye on her as I worked Rhett.”
Kaiser raised an eyebrow. “You had cameras on Scarlet too?”
Benson shook his head. “Wasn’t sure enough at first. Wasn’t certain she had the same ruthlessness I saw in Rhett. And she wasn’t a U.S. citizen, so I’d have needed to call in a favor at the State Department.” He cracked a half-grin at Kaiser. “It was still early in my career, didn’t have a lot of favors racked up yet.”
“And you don’t have a whole lot left,” Kaiser muttered before waving him on. “So what convinced you to go after Scarlet?”
“The child.” Benson’s half-grin faded. “She got pregnant with Rhett’s baby. He wanted her to get rid of it, said he wasn’t cut out to be a dad—and that she sure as hell wasn’t cut out to be a mom.”
Paige shifted in her seat, shot another yearning glance towards the door. But Benson wasn’t going to let her go. Yes, she’d been manipulated by a master, but she wasn’t some clueless creature who had absolutely no inkling of the kind of man Rhett was inside.
In fact Paige had very quickly snapped out from Rhett’s spell after she’d seen that video. Sure, the video was authentic, but it was by no means modern High-Definition footage. The light was bad, and Rhett had been a smoker at the time, which made the room hazy with stale cigarette mist. It definitely looked like Rhett, was enough for Paige to see it was him. But the video was grainy enough that it might not hold up in court, might be enough to establish reasonable doubt—a chance that Rhett didn’t want to take back then, not with the child’s body in Benson’s custody—but would certainly take now if it ever went to trial.
Paige would easily have seen all that, could absolutely have stuck to her guns and argued that it wasn’t Rhett in that old video, that it wasn’t any kind of evidence.
But she didn’t, which told Benson that deep inside Paige was perceptive enough to see Rhett’s darkness, had perhaps been attracted to it, awakened by it, the danger luring her shadow out from the hidden parts of her psyche just enough to terrify her into retreat.
But Paige knew the shadow was there now, and once she got past the initial shock, she would understand that it was a part of her, that it could be tamed—so long as it had the right outlet, the right channel.
The right man.
Yes, she was a Darkwater woman, Benson decided when he sensed that although a part of her wanted to flee, another part of her couldn’t be dragged from this room, was drawn like a magnet to the energy she sensed simmering beneath the surface of this game. Fate had pulled her into this story, and Benson got the distinct sense that his own willingness to come clean in front of her was partly driven by an irresistible urge to bring Paige into Darkwater, show her first-hand how fate spun its web, how destiny cast its spell, how the universe’s eternal story kept unfolding anew.
Gotta keep selling the story, Benson thought with an inside smile as his peripheral vision caught Kaiser shifting uncomfortably in his swivel chair.
Because part of Benson’s “confession” right now was to also keep selling Kaiser on the story.
Benson had dragged Kaiser kicking and screaming down the Darkwater rabbithole for eight missions now, but it was always a battle, always a struggle, always a sales-pitch to get Martin to hang on for just one more, to sink just a little deeper, go just a little darker.
And although he was still kicking and screaming, Kaiser was most certainly getting mired deep in Darkwater’s world, Benson reminded himself when he glanced past the Director’s desk towards the bookshelf, which had a new photograph framed front-and-center.
Martin and his wife Alice, each holding one of their cuddly new twins.
Twins brought into their lives at the end of Fox and Fay’s mission.
Twins that brought Alice back into Martin’s life, forced the two of them to confront their own unfinished love story.
Benson could feel his heart open up with that dizzying expansiveness which felt big enough to overwhelm the world. He swallowed thickly as that effervescent sense of connectedness made his head buzz with almost cosmic bliss. He lost himself in the feeling for a long moment, then forced himself back to the real world.