Lethal Experiment

I frowned. “We need to talk about this.”

“Fine,” she said. “Talk.”

Body doubles are disposable people we use to cover our tracks or fake our deaths if our covers get blown. By strategically killing a look-alike—as Sal was about to do to cover Callie’s tracks back in Darnell—we can buy time to eliminate paper trails or change our appearance and get back to the business of killing terrorists for the government. Of course, the body doubles have no idea their lives are owned by Sensory Resources. The way it works, one of us notices a civilian who strongly resembles one of our top operatives. If my facilitator, Darwin, accepts that person as a match, he assigns a trainee to monitor and protect the civilian until he or she is needed. When I first left the CIA I protected a body double for almost a year. Callie guarded someone a year and a half before being promoted to my team of assassins.

The civilian Callie guarded was Eva LeSage.

“Who’s guarding Eva now?” I asked.

“Chavez.”

“He moved to Vegas to guard her?”

Callie nodded. “He’s the one gave me the tickets,” she said.

Eva was just twenty-two when someone spotted her at a gymnastics meet and did a double-take. That’s how it happens. We’re out in the world, we see someone who looks like one of our agents. Eva happened to look like Tara Siegel, who works out of Boston.

You don’t have to be a perfect match to be selected as a body double. You do need to be the approximate age, same height, weight, and body style, with the same cheekbones, facial features and skin tone. When we need you, we fix you up well enough to pass for our agent, then we make the switch. Of course, it’s a fatal switch.

When Callie moved up to assassin, Eva was passed off to Antonio Chavez.

“All these years Antonio never got promoted?”

“He’d rather guard,” she said. “Plus, I think he’s too stable to kill people.”

When Eva moved to Vegas to pursue her career, Chavez could have passed her on to someone else, but according to Callie, he hadn’t. He’d chosen to follow her there instead. I wondered if Chavez had an ulterior motive. It’s pretty common to get attached to the people you guard.

“You think he’s fallen for her?”

“Not a chance,” Callie said.

“You seem pretty certain.”

“Chavez is company, all the way.”

“You have any reason to think Eva is about to be pressed into service?”

Callie glared at me. “You don’t have to sugar coat it, Donovan,” she said. “We don’t press people into service. We murder them.”

“The question stands,” I said.

She curled her lip in disgust. “Tara Siegel’s a loose cannon,” she said. “It’s only a matter of time before she fucks the pooch. Eva LeSage is not some every day, run-of-the-mill suburban housewife soccer mom, Donovan. She’s magic. I don’t care how down I am, whenever I see her, I come away happy. A person like that, who inspires so much and entertains so many doesn’t deserve to die.”

“None of them deserve to die, Callie. It’s about the greater good. We sacrifice one to save many. Look, you already know this.”

Now I understood why Callie had said that after seeing the show it would be a matter of her life and death. She didn’t want this body double to die, which put me in a tough spot. If I sided with Darwin, I’d have to kill Callie. And if I sided with Callie, both our lives would be on the line.

“First of all, she looks nothing like Tara. She’s half her size!” Callie said.

“Darwin must’ve seen something in her.”

“He’s a moron. They need to find someone else. I’ll find someone else.”