Page 1 of Pride, Prejudice, & Pretense

Chapter One: New Mission

Early morning, Thursday, October 15

Elizabeth Bennet stalked through the Langley corridors, her spiked heels echoing down the various hallways in their different directions, making it seem that a synchronized squad of women was on the move rather than only one.

It was late at night or very early in the morning, almost one a.m., and she had been summoned to Langley by the CIA director, Walter Kellynch.

Lizzy was unhappy with the summons. She had returned from a deep-cover infiltration assignment only days before, one which had emptied her mentally and physically. Desperate for time off?time to be herself, no cover?Lizzy yearned to wear her own pajamas, eat her own food, and sleep in her own bed.Think my own thoughts and do my own deeds.

She had spent the past three months as someone else, forced to think and act doubly, always shadowing and monitoring herself. The first requirement of a deep-cover spy assignment was spying on yourself. It was necessary to measure and angle your actions to ensure that you projected the person you were supposed to be. It was utterly exhausting.

Worse, it was dehumanizing. You had to think and act in ways that you could not own and do it for so long with so little downtime that it was hard at times to remember who was the pretense and who was the pretender.

Kellynch had been apologetic on the phone but ultimately insistent. Lizzy tried to refuse and suggested other agents, but he had not yielded. He regretted that it was necessary to send her into the field again so soon, but he had already secured the go-ahead from the Company psychologist who had overseen her final debriefing.

Lizzy had no grounds for refusal other than her preference, and she was not going to fight for her preference with her boss. She was headstrong but not obstinate. At his core, Kellynch was not an evil man, but he was?as his position required?hard. The combination of traits made him brittle, glassy. Driven by jealousy for the Company's reputation and by vanity about its success under his leadership, each morning in his office, over coffee, Walter Kellynch combed the internet for positive press, favorable mentions.

Lizzy was his best, he often told her—and he'd repeated that to her on the phone earlier. This mission required his best.

As she crossed the Central Intelligence Agency logo on the marble floor, she took a deep breath. Kellynch’s administrative assistant, Charlotte Lucas, sat at the desk in front of the door to Kellynch's office, on guard, as ever.

Charlotte smiled when she saw Lizzy, the smile warm but serrated with subtext. While the two women were more than acquaintances, perhaps almost even friends, Charlotte envied her. She had been low-key in love with Walter Kellynch for all the years she had been his AA?low-keybecause Charlotte was rarely otherwise about anything. That did not make her love for Kellynch less real, but her love was as low-key as everything else about her. She had always interpreted his favoritism for Lizzy as partly romantic…not wholly professional.

"Morning, Charlotte," Lizzy said quietly as she reached the large desk. "I won't say it's a good one?too damn early, too damn soon."

Charlotte nodded. "I told him that you needed some time off, that it was too soon, but—" She stopped, fighting a frown from her face. “But he had to have you for this." She managed not to stress theyou.

Lizzy heard it with that stress and took Charlotte to intend it that way. She simply sighed. "I know. He said. On the phone. Thanks."

She was certain Charlotte was wrong about Kellynch’s attraction to her. Once, a year ago, Lizzy had tried to disabuse her of the notion, but the conversation had not gone well. Charlotte had gotten angry—angered both by Lizzy’s cluelessness and her involuntary but clear recoil at the thought of Kellynch's interest. "He'sworthhaving, even if you don't want him," she had hissed, blushing slightly. By silent contract, the two of them had awkwardly avoided the topic since.

Before Lizzy could step around the desk to enter Kellynch's office, Charlotte leaned forward, gesturing for her to lean in to hear her whisper. "He's got two men in there. Agent Bingley and another man I don't know. I think he's MI-6."

Strange for whispers to seem out of place in Langley.

Lizzy smoothed her blouse and checked the slim belt of her pants. Charlotte's previously resisted frown now manifested as she watched her. Pretending not to notice, Lizzy continued to stall while she mentally prepared to enter the next room.Someone from MI-6? Who? Why?She'd had little luck with inter-agency missions and had not faced one in years.

Charlie Bingley, CIA, was familiar to Lizzy, one of the few colleagues she liked and respected. Her regard was not for his skills as an agent, which were perfectly adequate but no more than that. Instead, she appreciated his candid good nature, a near-singularity in Langley.

Almost no one could be a spy for long without it tainting them, embittering them. Most actually came to the job tainted, embittered already. Despite the brochures, the CIA did not collect the best and the brightest?not as a rule. Rather, it attracted the botched and the bungled.

But there were isolated exceptions like Charlie. And, Lizzy hoped, like herself.

Not that she wasn't broken…a little. She knew that. But she did not believe she was (yet) tainted or soured.Not beyond salvage,she encouraged herself, bending a Company term to a personal use.Although I worry.A certain brutal cynicism was the ruling dispassion of the agency. While Lizzy occasionally found it tempting, she had exerted herself to resist it. At least, she believed she had.

She stepped through the open door into Director Kellynch's office. It was at the top of Langley and huge. One long side, the side opposite Lizzy as she entered, was covered entirely in windows. At the moment, only distant lights in the darkness of Fairfax County showed through them. Because of the dark outside, she could see herself dully reflected in the glass panes as she entered.

She was wearing green—her blouse a light green, her pants a dark forest green. She knew green made her eyes more intense, rendering their brown earthier, richer. She habitually wore spiked heels to Kellynch's office, a brown pair tonight. The heels were her way of enhancing her height. She was not short, but she was certainly not tall, not physically imposing. She could hold her own and had done so on numerous occasions?with the scars to prove it?but she never liked seeming…diminished…in Kellynch's presence.

His implicit confidence in her, his reliance on her—these were cornerstones of her self-respect, such as it was. Abstractedly, she knew she was a good agent, but she only felt a concrete certainty that she was when Kellynch said so. That concrete certainty had helped to keep her alive and fortified her to endure missions. Had doubt crept in, she might not have lived to return to Langley.

As she walked farther into his office, Kellynch stood. The two men did, too?Charlie and the stranger from MI-6.

The former looked as he always did. Medium height, medium build.Medium. In every way. He had dark blond hair and pale blue eyes, good teeth—he was displaying them now with his pleasant smile—and a perennially eager posture, always seeming vaguely as if he were about to volunteer for something.

The other man wastall.Even in her heels, Lizzy had to tilt her head to look into his face. His build was athletic but square. Broad and powerful—wrestler, not gymnast?although he was not heavy.Powerfulwas the word that came to mind. Large but energetic. He had very dark eyes, so dark that his pupils were all but lost in his irises. Because of that, at first glance, his eyes gave the impression of imponderable depth, bottomlessness. His face was impassive when Lizzy first looked into it. But then he smiled.

The smile was not warm, but it was not false. Wary…or maybe uncomfortable. The smile returned the pupils to his eyes somehow, and he seemed fleshlier and less marmoreal. He nodded to her once, lightly.

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