Page 113 of Pride, Prejudice, & Pretense

Lizzy looked more closely at the GPS, at all the information on the screen, not just the arrows directing her.Two minutes to the destination.

Two minutes to my destiny.Fitzwilliam.

She had found the man she wanted to spend her life with, and she knew it. How she knew it was less clear, but that lack of clarity did not negate her knowledge. She had known him as Agent Darcy, then as Ned, and then?not until the end of the mission?as Fitzwilliam. Across those changes, she had discovered the man himself and who he was at his core. Insteadof hiding him, each change had been a variation that revealed more of the man himself. She came to know Fitzwilliam by knowing Agent Darcy and Ned, just as she believed he had come to know Elizabeth by knowing Agent Bennet and Fanny. She was not, or was no longer, Agent Bennet and had never been Fanny, but each revealed aspects of Elizabeth.

No one can be all pretense; each pretense is somehow revelatory. Emerson somewhere warned thatcharacter teaches above our wills.

Lizzy shook her head.I don't need Ralph Waldo along for this ride.But then, despite her effort to shake Emerson, the next line of "Self-Reliance" came to mind anyway:Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

Covert actions communicate, too.

Collingwood had seen only the pretense, but he was right about the reality of her strength, her courage, and even her unruliness. Those virtues had emitted a breath every moment. The breath had not made him suspicious of her at first, but it had made him suspicious of her as a candidate for Wickham's ruination.

She was not a candidate for ruination—neither by Wickham nor by Collingwood. She had proven that. But that did not mean she was immune to ruin.Fitzwilliam!

She turned left a final time, and the GPS showed that they were at the destination. It was an abandoned office building—apparentlylong-abandoned. The windows were boarded up, as were the doors except for one side door that she spotted immediately as she turned into the weedy parking lot. It was an open rectangle of inky blackness immune to the headlights that otherwise revealed the dingy, weathered gray of the building.

Lizzy stopped the van and shut off the engine. In the silence of the vehicle, the only sounds she could hear were her mother'sdeep, regular breathing and the harried barking of a distant dog. The cloying, coppery odor of blood was nauseating her, especially coupled with the knowledge that she was responsible for it. She knew there was some was on the soles of her shoes.

She took a deep breath and checked the gun she had used to shoot the priest. It still had four rounds. The second gun sat in the blood puddled around him and Collingwood. Using her thumb and forefinger, she picked up the dripping weapon. Lacking other options, she wiped it on her skirt.

"Mom? Mom?" She put a gun in each pocket and leaned closer to Mrs. Bennet. "Mom?"

No response except for a deepening of the loll of her mother’s head. Lizzy quickly checked her pulse. She seemed fine. As much as Lizzy hated the thought of leaving her mother there, she could not conjure up anyplace to leave her that was any better. She grabbed the van keys and got out, fervently praying her mother would not awaken to blood and corpses. A white Christmas wholly obscured by a Black Friday.

But Lizzy could not wait. Using Collingwood’s phone, she noted the address indicated by its GPS and called 911. She did not wait past the answer. "Shots fired…" She gave the address and stated, "CIA agent on the scene." Despite her retirement, she gave them her CIA activation code and directed the operator to contact Director Kellynch. She supplied his private number, confident it would still be the same. After she hung up, she took out the gun she had used before and began to jog toward the black doorway.

Once she got close to it, she slowed and deliberately gathered herself. Her Company habits were with her again, but now they felt like a costume. Instead of an agent pretending to be someone else, she was someone else pretending to be an agent. As anxious and fearful as she was, she had to go slowly. It wasunlikely that Collingwood would have left Fitzwilliam alone…unless he had left him dead.

She crouched as she entered the doorway, whipping right, then left, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Every nerve was on tiptoe, and her breathing was quick and shallow. Her heart felt like a cold, used dishrag, as if all the warm blood had been wrung out of it long ago.

She was in a foyer. As her eyes recalibrated, she could see enough from the faint, faraway streetlight outside to tell that the foyer had once been dressy. The floor gleamed in some spots where weak light touched it, and there was a chandelier hanging sideways that had been robbed of all bulbs, a crooked smile from a toothless old man.

No one moved. Nothing moved except Lizzy, who slowly rotated again to make sure that the foyer was clear. Looking more closely at the floor, she noticed footprints in the dust. Those spots where the streetlight had gleamed were the footprints, the spots where the dust had been disturbed. So far as she could tell, the prints headed up the wide stairs on the opposite side of the foyer. Biting her bottom lip, she hurried across the floor and, staying pressed to one wall, began to climb the stairs. Midway, she stopped to listen again.

Nothing.

She climbed on, reaching the second floor. It was darker there, but the stairs led to an intersection of two hallways. One continued in the direction of the stairs toward the far side of the building, while the other ran left and right.

Again, she stopped. She heard no sound. Fitzwilliam’s name was in her lungs, burning there, and she wanted to shout it, ached to hear a response, but she knew that would be a tactical blunder. She swallowed his name and went with her instincts, not turning left or right but instead continuing toward the farside of the building. As she did, the dim light gradually revealed a closed door at the end of the hallway.

Surprisingly, the door still had a pane of frosted glass which glowed translucently from some light source beyond the far side of the building. Even though the door’s glass pane was intact, diamond-like glass shards lined the hallway and had collected in drifts against the walls as if they had been kicked or swept there.

Lizzy could read the lettering upon the frosted glass:Smiley Insurance Agency. Beneath the words was a yellow smiley face, and below the face in smaller letters was the slogan:We Take Care of You.

Walking the broken glass-strewn hallway without making noise would be impossible in shoes. So far, she had been careful to be silent. With the van parked on the opposite side of the building, chances were that no one on the other side of the door?if there was anyone?would know she was there. Her instincts, honed by her Company experiences, told her she had guessed right and Fitzwilliam was divided from her by the frosted glass, inside but invisible.

At just that moment, a shadow passed over glass, implying movement inside the room. She listened, but the shadow disappeared without a sound. No sirens were audible yet, which didn’t surprise her. This was not a part of town likely to be frequented by police cars making rounds and probably not immediately served by dispatch even if her authorization code and name-dropping had the desired effect. For the next few minutes, maybe longer, she was on her own.

She could not wait. She had to find Fitzwilliam. Had to.

Using her right foot, she kicked off her left shoe, and then used her left foot to kick off her right. Breathing deeply but silently, she crept down the hallway toward the door, gun ready. Silence meant more than anything—silence for the sake of Fitzwilliam.Please, please be alive!

She tried to tread lightly, to distribute the weight of each step across her entire bare sole. Slivers of glass penetrated the bottom of one foot, then the other. Her concentration intensified, pushing away her awareness of the pain in her cut feet, her still-sore ribs, and her whole buffeted body. The now lurid-looking smiley face sneered from the door’s pane. It gloated at her, defying her, not cheering her. It seemed to smile more widely at each puncture or slice of her feet. The shoes she had kicked off had been bloody, and now her bare feet were bloody, the blood her own this time. Still, she moved in silence, choking back the pain, allowing it no expression.

When she reached the door, she extended her empty hand to the knob and grasped it, the metal cold to the touch. Loosening and then retightening her grip on the gun, she slowly breathed out, then turned the knob, releasing her breath and pushing the door at the same time. Some of the shards of glass had lodged in her feet, but she had no time to consider that.

She still had the gun in her hand. As the door swung out, she stepped to the side and scanned the room over the barrel. The room was full of office supplies, all in the wrong places, most in the middle of the floor. The room was large. On the opposite wall was a large window, beyond it a tree, and beyond the tree another distant streetlight. A gust of wind shook the tree, and Lizzy thought she’d identified the source of the moving shadow.

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