A Fare To Remember_ Just Whistle_Driven - Vicki Lewis Thompson [57]
Well, with what she wanted him to think was a childlike grin. So far as he knew, Domino Black had never been a child.
The second time she brandished the key, he took it quickly into his possession. “I’ve had enough games today.”
He opened the door and let them inside. The room in the boardinghouse was sparse, but relatively clean. The furniture, consisting of a couch, a twin bed, a coffee table, a small refrigerator and safe, would provide all he’d need for the next hour or so until he made contact with the Agency again. First, he’d need some time to gather his thoughts.
Roman locked the door securely behind him and pressed a button on the wall, activating a mechanism that rendered all listening devises useless. Anyone trying to eavesdrop on their conversation electronically would hear nothing but a buzz.
“Isn’t pulling contact duty a step down for you?” he asked.
She sneered. “I was in the city. They called me in. We caught the shooters. They’re in custody. Well, one of them is in the morgue.”
He caught the sly grin on her face. She had returned fire that morning. That the driver hadn’t been taken out, too, remained a miracle of sorts.
“How did you catch the driver so fast?”
Domino removed her gloves but was careful to touch nothing. “The cabbie provided a dead-on description of the car to his dispatcher before he rescued that girlfriend of yours. We intercepted the car just four blocks away.”
“You had agents in the area?”
“We had credible information that the sleeper cell had identified you as the one trying to stop them from intercepting the final message, which was probably why the Agency sent me since I knew you on sight. You may not be any closer to figuring out who the cell members are, but you’re clearly pissing them off.”
“So I suppose I have a price on my head now?”
Domino clucked her tongue. “Wouldn’t be the first time. Oh, and I’m supposed to give you this,” she said, handing him a small silver disk. “These are communication intercepts from the cell in Madrid. We think you’ll see a similarity in the rhetoric.”
“We have a solid connection to the larger network?”
“Looks like. If you can stay alive long enough, we might be able to save the world.”
Roman smirked, running his hand through his hair as Domino chuckled at her dark joke. The situation couldn’t get any worse. Not that he gave two shits about a death warrant from a bunch of terrorists—the Agency would ensure his safety. But during the ride over, he’d assured Mario that Rachel wouldn’t be in any danger. Now he wasn’t so sure.
“Did the shooters make Rachel?”
Domino waved her hand dismissively. “Can’t be sure.”
“I want agents watching her.”
“Already done. The Agency wants to avoid any messy civilian interference.”
Roman couldn’t believe how a mission that had started out so relatively simple could have spun so wildly out of control. The technical side had been rather complex, but he’d never dreamed Rachel’s life would be endangered.
Intercepted cell phone conversations between a Middle Eastern terrorist organization and a sleeper cell in New York tipped off the U.S. government that the opening credits of various documentaries were being used to deliver messages between terrorists in Europe and their American counterparts. The Agency, an off-shoot organization comprised of operatives from the CIA, the FBI and a task force from Homeland Security, had identified two such messages—and one had been designed by Rachel.
Naturally, she’d been the first focus of the investigation. She’d traveled around the world extensively and could have easily had contact with terrorists outside of the United States. Roman had been brought in because of his ability to make everyone believe he was a television consultant, when in truth, he knew very little about the industry before he’d been briefed. But he had a natural, chameleon-like quality and a photographic memory. His mission had been to find out if Rachel had terrorist sympathies or if she might have been coerced into planting