Mirror Image

She screamed.
    Nelson’s face registered surprise, then anger, then outrage. That was his death mask. He was dead before he hit the floor.
    Eddy leaped from the dais into the crowd of hysterical spectators. The Lone Star flag fluttered. A man stepped from behind it and fired his previously concealed weapon. Eddy Paschal’s head exploded upon impact.
    It was Zee’s voice that Avery heard from afar.
    “Bryan! My God.
Bryan!
”

Fifty
    “I thought it would be best if we all met together like this, so I could clarify everything to everyone at once.”
    FBI Special Agent Bryan Tate addressed the somber group assembled in Avery Daniels’s hospital room. Her bed had been elevated so that she was partially sitting up. Her eyes were red and puffy from crying. A bandage covered her left shoulder; her arm was in a sling.
    The others—Jack and his family, Zee and Tate—were sitting in the available chairs or leaning against the walls and windowsills. All kept a wary distance from Avery’s bed. Since Tate had disclosed her true identity to them, she had become an object of curiosity. After the tragic events of the night before, Mandy had been taken to the ranch and left in Mona’s care.
    “All of you experienced what happened,” Bryan Tate said, “but you don’t know the reasons for it. They’re not easy to talk about.”
    “Tell them everything, Bryan,” Zee said softly. “Don’t leave out anything on my account. I want them,
need
them, to understand.”
    Tall and distinguished, he was standing beside her chair, a hand on her shoulder. “Zee and I fell in love years ago,” he stated bluntly. “It was something neither of us predicted or wanted, particularly. We didn’t set out to make it happen. It was wrong, but it was powerful. We eventually surrendered to it.” His fingers flexed on her shoulder. “The consequences were far-reaching. They culminated in tragedy last night.”
    He told them how he had returned home from Korea a few months ahead of his buddy Nelson. “At his request, I checked on Zee periodically,” he said. “By the time Nelson got home, the relationship between Zee and me had grown way beyond friendship or simple mutual attraction. We knew we loved each other and would have to hurt Nelson.”
    “I also knew I was pregnant,” Zee said, reaching up to cover Bryan’s hand with her own. “Pregnant with you, Tate. I told Nelson the unvarnished truth. He remained calm, but laid down an ultimatum. If I went with my lover and his bastard child, I would never see Jack again.”
    Tears welled in her eyes as she smiled at her older son. “Jack, you were still a toddler. I loved you, something Nelson knew very well and used to his advantage. When I vowed never to see Bryan again, he said he forgave me and promised to rear Tate as his son.”
    “Which he did,” Tate said.
    His eyes locked with Bryan’s. The man was his father, though he’d never met him before last night. And the man he had known and loved as his father had been gunned down right before his eyes.
    “I didn’t know about Nelson’s ultimatum,” Bryan said, continuing the story. “I just got a note from Zee saying that our affair—and I couldn’t believe she’d given it such a shoddy name—was over and that she wished it had never happened.”
    Despair had prompted him to volunteer for a dangerous overseas mission. When his plane malfunctioned and began spiraling down toward the ocean, he actually welcomed death, since he’d just as soon die as have to live without Zee. Fate intervened, however, and he was rescued.
    While recovering from the injuries he had sustained, the FBI approached him. He had already been trained in intelligence work. They proposed that Bryan Tate remain “dead” and start working for them undercover. That’s what he’d been doing for the last thirty years.
    “When I could, I came to see you, Tate,” he said to his son. “From a careful distance, never getting close enough to risk running into Nelson or Zee, I watched you play football a few times. I even tracked you around the base in Nam for a week. I was at your graduation from UT and law school. I never stopped loving you or your mother.”
    “And Nelson never forgot or forgave me,” Zee said, bowing her head and sniffing into a Kleenex.
    Bryan touched her hair consolingly, then picked up the story again. His latest assignment had been to infiltrate a white supremacist group operating out of the northwestern states. At the