Page 143 of Enemy of My Enemy

“Who is your husband?”

“Jack. Jack Spiers.”

God, he didn’t want to watch this. He didn’t want to watch Jack’s wife be tortured onscreen. No matter how he felt about her reappearance, he didn’t want to see this. Moving quickly, he headed for the laptop balanced near the monitors, trying to end the video. He’d take the laptop with him, bring it back to Irwin. They could analyze the footage, figure out what had happened. He didn’t need to see this.

More video files were queued up. Dozens of them. He held his breath, and despite himself, clicked on the next link.

She was fighting back in the next video, shrieking and twisting in the chair, thrashing against the restraints. What came out of her mouth wasn’t human, howls that scraped down his bones. Men rushed through the frame, stabbing her with needles as she wailed. Eventually, she slumped in the chair, breathing hard, and the same man walked into the frame.

“State your name.”

She stared back at him, a thin line of drool falling from her bottom lip.

“She needs more cognitive structuring. Set up the implantation protocols again. We’ll start with—”

He clicked another file, further down the line.

Something older popped up, an interview with Jack from years and years ago, back when he was a new Senator from Texas.Honoring Fallen Heroesblazed across the screen, and then there was Jack, painfully younger, sitting on a couch in his office on Capitol Hill, smiling for the camera.

“Tell us more about your wife, Senator. What was she like?”

Jack smiled on screen. “She had the biggest heart, especially for her goofball husband. Let me tell you this story. We’d been married maybe a year. She was gone for over a week on field training, and I, wanting to welcome her home the right way, tried to cook her a great chicken dinner.” Jack laughed, shaking his head. “I burned it all. I mean, charcoal for chicken breasts. I forgot about the sides entirely, I was panicking so much. She came in, the apartment was full of smoke, and I had this black hunk of chicken on the table.”

Jack and the interviewer laughed together. “So what did she do?”

“She ate it. Bless her heart, that woman ate my horrible attempt at cooking. I microwaved a can of beans and slapped some store-bought potato salad on the table, and she just laughed and ate it all.” His smile turned wistful onscreen, and then his lips pressed together, and he looked off to the side, away from the camera.

Ethan paused the video.

A chill tap-danced down his spine, frigid fear that coiled around his guts. He scrolled down, through the files.

There were hundreds of files. Videos, photos, saved posts from social media. Clicking furiously, he opened file after file, the videos starting automatically, playing on top of each other on different screens. Photos of Leslie in training, at her wedding, candid shots of her and Jack flashing across the hold. Social media posts captured from the Internet came next, paragraph after paragraph, tweet after post after picture after video, each a moment of her life.

A part of her story.

A part of her identity.

He scrolled back to the top, to the first video, and pulled it up again.

Playback resumed where he’d left off.

“Who is your husband?”

“Jack. Jack Spiers.”

“Who is your target?”

Leslie’s voice turned cold, hard as steel. “President Jack Spiers. First Gentleman Ethan Reichenbach. General Bradford. Lawrence Irwin. Director Rees. Vice President Elizabeth Wall.” The names continued, a list of Jack’s key staff, the national security strength of the nation.

“State your attack plan.”

She spoke with no inflection. No emotion. A hardened operative, reciting her battle plan. “I will ingratiate myself into the White House as Jack’s wife. Return to President Spiers’s side. Remind him of our history together. Reconnect through shared experiences and recitation of deep emotional memories. I will build trust through emotional bonding and gain access to key staff and personnel. When a critical mass of personnel has been reached, I will execute on American soil in a location selected for mass terror infliction.”

“Excellent,” the man purred. His back stayed to the camera, his voice just a dark, low purr. “You’ve come so far.”

What the hell was this? Had Leslie been brainwashed? She seemed like a robot, like an automaton, and nothing at all like the emotional, heart-wrenching woman they’d carted off the streets of Sochi and treated on Air Force One. Was it all an act? But which one? The killer, trying to navigate out of her torture? Or the loving, devoted wife, living in the White House at Jack’s side?

Sweat beaded on his forehead. His breath came fast, his heartbeat even faster. Shaking fingers scrolled through the files, all the way to the beginning. There had to be something in there, something that would show what she had been put through. “Cognitive structuring,” the man had said. “Implantation protocols.”