Internal Affairs

by Jessica Andersen

  Sara’s stomach soured on the image of Romo sitting alone in that depressing apartment, working for the terrorists. He would’ve been in fear for his life every moment of every day. Technically he’d already been dead, at least as far as the rest of the world had been concerned. One misstep, one mistake, and the terrorists could have killed him and hidden his body, and only a few people would’ve known anything had gone wrong. From what little she’d learned of Fax’s undercover experiences—and she had to assume Fax was the “mutual friend” Romo had gone to for his undercover contact—the covert agency he’d worked for was quick to cut its losses, and was as compartmentalized as the terrorist networks it targeted, meaning that help and trust were often rare commodities.

  She thought about how he must have lived, and instinctively knew it’d been worse than she could probably imagine. “What happened in the end?” she asked dully.

  “I earned the trust I needed, and got called to meet a couple of guys on one of the state forest access roads. They brought me to a cabin, handed me a laptop and ordered me to break the encryption on a group of files that dated back to when Mawadi hid the flash drive. I cracked the code, waited until they weren’t paying attention and copied the files to my own flash. I erased the hell out of my tracks, but somehow I tripped up and they figured out I was working for the other side.” He grimaced. “Either that, or my work was done and they had decided I was expendable. Regardless, it became clear real quick that they didn’t intend to bring me back to my truck.” He lifted a hand to his healing shoulder. “I fought them off, killed one and went after the other. I’d warned my contact where I was going, so when I got the Mayday out, he had a team after me almost immediately. Unfortunately—and this is where it’s still a little fuzzy—I took the bullet and the blow to the head, and lost track of who I could trust.” The look he sent her said, Except I knew I could trust you.

  She couldn’t let that matter, though. Not anymore. “Where’s the flash drive?”

  “Hidden in my shoe.” His lips twitched. “An oldie but goodie.”

  She glanced at the battered boots he’d retrieved from her gun cabinet that first night, and sighed. “So what now?” She knew she should be relieved to know they weren’t on their own anymore, that he knew who he could call for help, that maybe they would be able to deal with al-Jihad’s threat, after all. But the realization did little to improve the hollow, empty feeling that came from knowing that Romo hadn’t changed at all. He’d lied to her. Again, and for the last time.

  “I called in already.” Romo glanced out the window. “There are cars on the way, one to bring me in, the other carrying a couple of guys who’ll take you someplace safe while we get this taken care of.”

  He might’ve couched it all in very vague terms, but she got the gist that she was to be locked away under protective custody while the covert group, using the information encrypted on Romo’s flash drive, tried to bring down the terrorist mastermind once and for all.

  A week ago, she would’ve jumped at the chance to disappear from the dangerous situation. She was a pathologist, not a cop, an agent or a spy. She had liked her life simple and even-keeled, and had wanted more than anything for al-Jihad to be recaptured and life in Bear Claw to return to normal, including plans for the special election that would—she devoutly hoped—replace Percy Proudfoot with a somewhat more forward-thinking mayor.

  Now, though, she found herself resisting the idea of passivity. She wanted to go with Romo, wanted to understand how he could walk away from his life with no guarantee of safety or success.

  He’d said he’d lusted after her from afar, that he’d gone into counseling, hoping that they could start over. But how did that mesh with his decision to go undercover? How did a man who wanted a future throw his present away and let the woman he supposedly loved think he was dead?

  He’d been watching her process all the new information, and must have seen something of that confusion on her face, because he crossed to her and touched her cheek. “This terrorist thing is bigger than the two of us, Sara. It’s bigger even than Bear Claw. I didn’t have a choice. Al-Jihad doesn’t make many mistakes, but he did with me. I had to take advantage of that. I hope you can understand that, and forgive me.”

  His words and the fleeting caress left sparks behind, making her want to snap at him because of the way he could make her body respond, despite everything that kept happening between them. But because her body’s response was her problem, not his, and because he was right about the terror threat being more important than individual lives at this point, she held in her frustration.

  Just because she understood, though, didn’t mean she had to forget. She lifted her chin and looked him in the eye. “I can forgive you for dying on me. But I can’t see that there’s any excuse for you not telling me all of this until just now. You should’ve told me last night.”

  He looked away. “I wanted to tell you how I felt without the other stuff overshadowing what I needed to say.”

  “Baloney,” she said, sick at heart because she saw the lie for what it was. “You wanted to get laid.”

  His eyes went very hard, and it was entirely the old Romo who said, “That’s ugly.”

  “Truth hurts.”

  “Especially when it’s your version of the truth.” His voice was as cold as his expression, though she thought she saw a layer of hurt beneath.

  “There’s no such thing as different versions of the truth,” she retorted. “It’s either true or it isn’t.”

  He gritted his teeth, looking furious, but his voice was somehow soft and sad when he said, “I was miserable without you, Sara, and crazy with it. I was just starting to get less crazy when this undercover thing came up, but instead of making me more crazy, somehow it simplified things for me. I want to be with you,” he said, while emotion froze her in place and stole the voice from her throat. He continued. “But I’m not perfect. I want you, and when this garbage is over I want to try to make a life with you. But I can’t tiptoe on eggshells, trying not to make mistakes and trigger your no-second-chances button. You’re going to have to learn to accept an apology and move on, or this can’t go anywhere.”

  The sense of hope that had tried to flare died beneath a wash of cool reality. She rose from the bed, moving past him. “I assume your reinforcements are waiting for us downstairs?”

  His eyes blanked. “They should be.”

  “And you’re sure you can trust the men in this group?”

  “Fax does,” he said, as if he instinctively understood that she’d take her friend’s word over his own at this point.

  She nodded. “Let’s go.”

  But he blocked her at the doorway, the chill in his expression losing way to cold fury and hot, spiky frustration. “That’s it? That’s all I get from you?”

  “You want more?” She drilled a finger into his chest, forced herself not to let the touch linger. “Fine, here goes. Fundamentally, people don’t change. I’ve always known that, and I’ve always applied the knowledge to choosing the people I care for. But you know what? It applies the other way around, too. You’re asking me to accept that you are who you are. I can respect that, but I don’t think I can do it, because you’re asking me to change something that’s fundamental to me. You don’t like my take on no second chances? Well then, tell me where it stops.”

  She gestured around the room, encompassing the two of them, and their shared history. “I’m supposed to forgive you for cheating on me, because you were scared, and because you were dealing with some baggage that you’ve gotten some counseling for. Okay, so say I forgive you for that one. But after that you practically stalked me in my office, endangering my job just because you wanted an excuse to be near me.” She ticked off the points on her fingers. “Then you fake your own death and disappear on me for half a year. After that, you come to me, endanger my life, put my friends’ lives at risk, tear me away from my work and my home…and when you finally have an opportunity to come clean, you do
n’t. You tell me just enough to make me want to be with you again, saving the rest for the morning after.” She broke off, breathing hard, as though she’d been running for her life instead of listing off his sins. “So you tell me. Where does the flexibility stop and the truth begin?”

  Romo’s eyes had gone hooded during her recitation, his face set in stone. At her question, he dipped his head so they were eye level when he said, “It begins with faith. And you have none.”

  Without another word he turned and yanked open the door, and all but hauled her downstairs. He handed her off to her new guards—two stone-faced men in gray suits who could’ve been bookends for each other—and slammed into the second car without looking back.

  Sara climbed into the dark SUV her guards had arrived in, and held herself stiff and still as they pulled away from the hotel, headed for a safe house.

  For the first few miles, she saw nothing but Romo’s face, heard nothing but his voice. After a while, though, she put that aside, realizing none of it had an answer. Looking around herself, she saw that she was separated from the driver and his buddy by a layer of dark, tinted glass. There were no lock releases on the doors, no button to buzz down the partition, suggesting she was riding in what might normally serve for prisoner transport. The realization brought a flash of unease, quickly swept away when she remembered what Romo had said about Fax trusting the people she was with. That was good enough for her. It was going to have to be.

  “See? I have faith,” she said to the lingering memory of Romo’s accusations.

  Numbly, she watched the scenery pass her windows, as the suburbs went to forest and the road began to climb. It wasn’t until the vehicle turned onto an access road and stopped beside a low-slung sedan that her nerves started to flare. She reached to fumble for her purse, only then realizing that one of the guards had taken her bag when he’d helped her into the SUV. He must have the purse—and the .22—in the front.

  Panic threatened. However, when a tall, elegant, professionally dressed woman emerged from the sedan, Sara relaxed and blew out a breath, telling herself not to freak out. They were just picking up another agent, this one a woman. Her sex shouldn’t have mattered, but Sara thought she’d rather not be surrounded entirely by men for a while. They were getting on her nerves.

  The woman opened the far door of the SUV and climbed into the compartment where Sara sat. The driver stood behind her, glowering, all but daring Sara to try to make a break for it. But he probably looked at all his protectees that way, she reassured herself as the woman slid in beside her and nodded for the driver to lock them in.

  “Are you another of my guards?” Sara asked as the SUV got under way again, heading deeper into the woods.

  The woman nodded, her lips tipping up slightly. “You could say that.”

  “I’m Sara.”

  The other woman hesitated, then held out a hand. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Dr. Whitney. You can call me Jane Doe.”

  Sara’s relief morphed to panic in an instant as she recognized the name of Fax’s former boss, the one who’d put him undercover in the ARX Supermax Prison and later proved to be working on collusion with al-Jihad himself. Terror spiked adrenaline into Sara’s bloodstream and she reacted instantly, hurling herself at the window beside her. It gave slightly but didn’t crack. She was trapped!

  She didn’t scream because nobody there would care that she was afraid. Instead, gritting her teeth, she lunged up on the seat and kicked at the window, cursing and spitting.

  “Relax,” Jane said, and Sara felt a prick on her right butt cheek. An injection!

  Now she did scream, and she lashed out a kick at the double agent. But the kick didn’t land. Instead, her legs went to water and she slumped down as the drug Jane had injected her with took hold and the world went gray.

  “Help me,” Sara slurred as she collapsed and unconsciousness closed in, leaving her last few words to echo only in her skull. Romo, damn it. Where are you when I need you?

  But the answer was obvious, wasn’t it? He was gone, because she’d told him to go. There were no second chances in her world.

  Chapter Ten

  When the dark SUV pulled up to the curb midcity, Romo recognized the building in the heart of Bear Claw, though he’d only been there once before. The average passerby never would’ve guessed the space had been taken over by a covert ops group so secret it didn’t even really have a name. The building was squat and rectangular, stuck amid several similar buildings, with nothing much to recommend it aside from its relative anonymity.

  But M. K. O’Reilly and the other members of the Cell preferred it that way. Anonymous was effective, in their line of work.

  Flanked on either side by his driver and another agent, both fully armed and silent, Romo headed for the boss’s office, aware that his escorts would shoot him without a qualm if it looked for a second as if he posed a threat. Mission or no mission, nobody trusted an undercover agent fresh in from the field.

  Well, that was fine with him; he didn’t intend to pose a threat to anyone except al-Jihad and his people. He wanted to get this over with, so he could…Hell, he thought, frustration and anger combining inside him, forming a hard knot in his gut, he didn’t know what he was going to do next, but he knew he damn well didn’t want to do it in Bear Claw. He was done with the city, done with trying to make things work for him there.

  He’d left Vegas for Colorado to forget Alicia and the mistakes he’d made with her. He had a feeling he was going to have to go farther than a state or two away before he started to forget Sara.

  Damn it, he wasn’t blameless in their issues, it was true. But he couldn’t do all the work, either. She was going to have to meet him partway. Or rather, she would have to meet him if she had any desire to make it work. She’d said she loved him, back then. But he was starting to think she’d loved him only when it hadn’t been complicated for her, when it hadn’t challenged some of the rules she’d set for herself long ago.

  “In here.” One of Romo’s heretofore silent escorts waved him through an office door, interrupting his inner frustration with Sara’s intransigence, and his own inability to just walk the hell away from her.

  The name on the door was M. K. O’Reilly, with no rank or position listed. But then again, nobody who got this far inside the building needed O’Reilly’s status spelled out. He was, quite simply, the boss. The fixer.

  O’Reilly was a no-nonsense career agent in his mid-fifties with thirty years on the job and an unimpeachable record. He’d taken over the nameless covert ops group formerly headed by Jane Doe, and had immediately set about bringing them partway into the light.

  Where before the group had been off the books, funded through a shell within a shell, out of discretionary funds leeched off several other groups within the CIA and FBI, now it was an official covert ops group called the Cell. The Cell was still organized as it had been under Jane Doe’s leadership, with the main operatives working independently of one another, often tasked with specific projects without knowledge of the larger whole, much as al-Jihad’s dispersed network was arranged. However, under O’Reilly’s leadership, the operatives each interfaced with two senior agents in addition to the boss, so as to avoid—in theory, anyway—the isolation that had led to Fax being put deep undercover, unknowingly working on behalf of the terrorists when Jane Doe had turned traitor.

  The reorganization, however, didn’t mean the Cell was warm and fuzzy, by any means. The building—dubbed the Cell Block, both as a nod to the group’s new name and because of its austere nondécor—was a spartan setup intended more for function than comfort. O’Reilly’s office was a plain room decorated with basic furniture, a high-powered laptop, and drifts of papers, photos and printouts. Much like the office, O’Reilly himself was spare and functional looking, and a little disheveled in a dark suit and striped tie. His salt-and-pepper hair was neatly trimmed, but stood on end as though he’d run his hands through it in frustration one too many times. His c
areworn face was set in dour folds that lightened fractionally when Romo strode through the door.

  “Damn good to see you alive, Detective.”

  “Technically, I’m not,” Romo said dryly, but shook hands with his erstwhile boss. “Sorry I got delayed.” He’d sketched out the situation when he’d phoned in, hitting the high points while glossing over a few details—such as how he’d finally regained his memory, and what he’d done in the aftermath of the pentothal dosing. At the time, making love to Sara had seemed like an excellent idea. Now, fully sober, he had to admit it hadn’t been one of his better moves.

  Undoubtedly taking Romo’s grimace as pertaining to his bout with amnesia, O’Reilly said, “Understood, but you’re here now. Let’s see what you’ve brought us.” He waved Romo to the desk, with its powerful laptop. “Did you get a look at the file’s contents when you were decrypting the flash?”

  “Just a glance,” Romo answered as he snagged O’Reilly’s chair, slipped off one of his battered boots and retrieved the flash from the deceptively simple hiding spot he’d hollowed out, hidden beneath the sweat-stained lining and Odor-Eaters he’d installed to dissuade casual searchers from groping around in the boots. Fitting the flash into the USB port on the side of O’Reilly’s computer, he said, “It looked like a detailed schematic of the ARX Supermax Prison, which stands to reason given that al-Jihad, Mawadi and Feyd all broke out. They would’ve had to explore a bunch of options before deciding on using Jane Doe to put Fax in place with instructions to help them escape. Except for one thing.” Romo flicked a glance at O’Reilly.

  The senior agent muttered a curse, seeing the problem. “Mawadi hid the flash drive before he was arrested for the Santa Bombings.”

  “Which would suggest they expected—or had planned—to be incarcerated in the ARX Supermax,” Romo said as he pulled up the files and started the decryption chain he’d worked out right before al-Jihad’s thugs had attacked him in the forest cabin, trying—and failing—to tie up the loose ends. Well, he thought, if I have anything to say about it, this loose end is going to be the key to unraveling this whole mess. Which was an optimistic thought, granted, but he figured he could use some damned optimism right about then.