A Fare To Remember

by Vicki Lewis Thompson

  Mario clucked his tongue. “That’s obvious. But I’ve got to know that what happened this morning isn’t going to come back to haunt her. You haven’t marked her for a hit, have you?”

  Roman opened his mouth to protest, but stopped and thought he’d better think long and hard about his answer first. Clearly, his mission had been compromised, which was probably why the Agency had sent Domino to intercept him this morning. Not to kill him-if that had been her mission, he’d be dead by now. To warn him. He’d yet to be debriefed, but instead he’d spent his day backtracking and thinking about Rachel, ensuring that he could pay her one last visit without endangering her life. But while he had strong suspicions about who the shooters were and that their attack had simply been a way to send the Agency a message, he couldn’t be sure that they wouldn’t try to use Rachel against him if given the chance.

  “Can you stay with her tonight?” he asked.

  Mario nodded. “But I can’t stay every night.”

  For an instant, Roman thought Mario might be implying that he should be the one to make sure Rachel was safe, but both men knew that his hanging around one minute longer wasn’t good for either Rachel or him. He’d screwed up large.

  He never should have dallied with her in the first place, but the attraction had been so powerful, so tempting. Once he’d cleared her of suspicion of providing information through her graphic designs to the terrorist group he’d been tracking, he’d justified their affair by promising himself it would be brief. One night, maybe two. Enough to sate both of them. But the more he tasted, the more he craved. Everything about her entranced him. She was so fresh, so bright-eyed and in love with the city, with her job, with her friends, with the world. Rachel Marlowe was completely and totally unlike the women he dealt with at the Agency, who were all slightly jaded by what they’d been trained to recognize and prevent. Or like Domino, jaded to her core so deeply, she could kill without regret.

  He’d been weak. He knew that now. And his inability to fight his desires had resulted in Rachel getting hurt. Under different circumstances, he might have fallen in love with her. He had to make things right-in the only way he knew how.

  “I’m checking in with my superiors next. They don’t want any collateral damage, so I’m sure they’ll take care of Rachel until the heat is off. I’ll contact you, let you know when Rachel is safe. She’s probably not in any danger, but-”

  “Better safe than sorry.”

  Roman turned to the stairwell, but Mario stopped him with a halting hand. “Hold on, cowboy.”

  The older man ambled back to Rachel’s apartment, knocked on the door, then whispered through the chain to Iris that he’d be back in less than an hour. He gave her strict instructions not to open the door for anyone but him.

  Mario then gestured gallantly toward the exit.

  Roman frowned. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Mario smiled, smug and confident that whatever he had planned, Roman would comply. Which he would, since the man had promised to take care of Rachel-a task Roman should have been able to do for himself, but couldn’t.

  “I’m going to give you a lift.”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  Mario caught him by the elbow. “Sorry, but it is.”

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU LET HIM drive you here.”

  Domino Black, or so she was called by their superiors, emerged from the shadows of the stairwell in the Agency safe house, her keen almond-shaped eyes gleaming with disgust. Fortunately, Roman had seen her eyes gleam with other basic, elemental emotions before-lust, mostly-so the effect, while disconcerting, didn’t penetrate his already guilt-ridden body.

  “We’ll be out of here in an hour,” he said, sliding his hand along the doorjamb to find the hidden-key compartment. “Once we’re gone, there will be no trace of either one of us. What’s he going to do? Call the cops? Clearly, the Agency has them under control.”

  “I don’t buy it,” she snapped, perennially suspicious.

  “The guy just wanted to read me the riot act about hurting Rachel. She’s like a daughter to him. You can’t blame him.”

  “I could kill him.”

  Roman clucked his disbelief. “Even you aren’t that cold.”

  He checked the doorjamb on the opposite side, then cursed. He was just about to ask Domino if she knew where the key was when the metal piece materialized in her black-leather-gloved hands. When he moved to take the key, she snatched it away with a childlike grin.

  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 design
ed 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 the images in the graphics she’d designed.

  She hadn’t. They’d found no proof whatsoever. Neither he nor the Agency suspected her any longer. Intelligence sources suggested that a third party was inserting the images after the designers turned their work over for post-design production. The minute Rachel had been cleared, Roman should have dropped all contact with her. But he hadn’t.

  Sleeping with her, knowing her, caring about her, had simply been too wonderful to stop.

  He’d made mistakes in judgment before. All agents did. But none of his had ever put a civilian in danger. And he had nothing to blame but his own selfishness and insatiable libido.

  If Rachel got hurt now-physically, permanently-because he hadn’t had the strength and self-discipline to stay out of her life, he’d never forgive himself.

  “What are my orders?”

  Domino gestured to the safe.

  Roman crossed the room, knelt down, then keyed in a series of universal Agency codes. Once the door popped open, he extracted a digital recorder and pressed a second series of numbers. Only then did the device play and let him know what the Agency expected him to do next.

  The orders, essentially, came down to one word.

  Disappear.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE disappeared?” Rachel asked, incredulous.

  She hadn’t had a chance to talk to Mario after he’d taken off the night before. By the time he’d come back to her apartment, Iris had forced a second Xanax down her throat and she’d been out for the count. She’d woken up alone but downstairs, had found both Mario and Iris running the coffee stand. Since it was nearly nine-thirty on a Sunday morning, there were few people around.

  Mario pulled a note out of his pocket and handed it to Rachel. There, in black and white, in Roman’s even handwriting, was a message that made her clutch at her throat.

  The shooters have been apprehended. Rachel is safe. Tell her I’m sorry. Roman

  “What about his safety? Are they hunting him?”

  Mario didn’t reply.

  Rachel stormed away from her friends and wondered how the hell she’d gotten to this point in her life. She’d been in New York a few years, but her circle of friends wasn’t very big. Jeannette was still on the West Coast. Her workout friends and poker buddies weren’t the type you trusted with such outlandish tales. She was grateful to both Iris and Mario, but they were older. She couldn’t keep putting them in the middle of a dangerous situation.

  But she needed them. Mario had proved more than capable of holding his own. And Iris was probably the strongest woman Rachel had ever met. They’d want to help her, just as she’d want to help them if they were in trouble.

  She swung back, trusting she could rely on them one more time. They already knew the story. Besides, her needs focused more on Roman the man than Roman the criminal or cop or whatever the hell he was.

  “He can’t just be gone,” she insisted.

  Mario looked at her with eyes that bespoke a lifetime of experience and just as much caring. “You’re better off, Rachel. You said it yourself. You don’t know what the man is mixed up in-and you don’t want to know.”

  “I didn’t yesterday. But I was scared and angry and dizzy as hell from being tossed to the ground while bullets whizzed by. Now I’m thinking more clearly and I want to know. I want to know the truth about Roman. He would have told me the truth yesterday, I think. But I was too angry to listen.”

  Mario and Iris exchanged glances that told her they didn’t want her to pursue this further. Rachel sighed and for the first time since she moved to the city, felt lost and unsure.

  She’d walked down this street a million times. She was home, in the part of New York City she knew best of all-and yet, this afternoon, nothing looked familiar. Not the coffee stand, not the nearby falafel booth, not the facade of her building. In all her travels, Rachel rarely took more than a few hours to acclimate to her surroundings and feel as if she’d lived in Jakarta or Tokyo or Sydney all her life.

  But losing Roman had left her more damaged than she expected. The hurt ran deep-too deep for her to simply let go.

  “I’m going to find him,” Rachel decided.

  “¿Qué?” Iris asked, her eyes wide.

  Mario stepped around to her. “Why do you want to put yourself through that?”

  Rachel shoved her thumbs into the pockets of her jeans. “I want the whole story.”

  Mario’s mouth curved down hard. “He’s mixed up in something bigger than you want to get involved in.”

  “I don’t want to get involved!” she insisted. “I just want to know why he picked me. If he couldn’t be with me, if he couldn’t stay, then why come into my life at all?”

  Iris wiped her hands on her apron. “Why wouldn’t he pick you, mijita? You’re beautiful and smart and everything a man could want.”

  Rachel grinned at Iris’s compliment, and honestly, she couldn’t argue. She was an attractive woman and she was, except for situations that required picking out the spies from the television consultants, pretty darned smart. She was sexy, interesting and kindhearted to boot. All those good qualities may have inspired Roman to stay with her longer than he’d planned, but she doubted they were the reasons he was drawn to her in the first place.

  She’d seen his ex. Rachel couldn’t think of any woman she was less like. Rachel was adventurous and fun, but the woman who’d kissed Roman on the sidewalk exuded a combination of lethal danger and exotic sensuality. Rachel usually didn’t wonder why a man was attracted to her, but she’d had all morning to recap her interactions with Roman, and something about that first meeting suddenly seemed staged. Arranged. Planned.

  She wanted-no, she deserved-all the details.

  “I was part of something, I can feel it. Something dangerous. What if his leaving doesn’t take away the risk?”

  “He said you’d be safe,” Mario said.

  “He also said he was a television consultant. His word hasn’t been entirely reliable. You said he was some sort of agent. Maybe he plans to have me watched for the rest of my life. I can’t live that way.”

  At this, Mario made excuses to Iris and shuttled Rachel up the stoop of her apartment, his gaze darting from side to side to make sure they weren’t overheard. “He wouldn’t verify anything, but yeah, I think maybe he’s FBI or CIA. Something covert. Either way, you’ve got to let this go.”

  Certain Mario knew more than he was letting on, Rachel decided to push. “I can’t, Mario. I won’t. I need answers. I deserve them, especially if my life is in danger.”

  Mario’s lips pressed tightly together, a thin but pronounced line, not too different from the kind kids drew in the sand in the schoolyard.

  “You’ll never find him,” he concluded.

  “I could go back to the network where we first met, start asking questions. A lot of questions.”

  “That’s an invitation to unwanted attention.”

  She bounced excitedly on the balls of her feet. “If someone comes looking who can lead me to Roman, then I win.”

  “What if the people who tried to kill him get to you first?”

  She hadn’t really thought the plan through, but Mario definitely had a point. Still, he didn’t have to know that she shared his concern. Not yet.

  “It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” she claimed.

  Mario cursed, first in good, old Brooklyn English, then threw in a few Italian words for good measure.
“You’re pigheaded.”

  “I like to think of myself as single-minded.”

  “You’re reckless,” he added.

  “That point has already been proved.”

  He grabbed her by the hand and pulled her up to the entrance to her apartment complex. “Then you’ll need someone with a better plan.”

  RACHEL NEVER IMAGINED that tracking down an undercover secret agent on the lam would prove her particular talent. Luckily, Mario was an ex-cop and an excellent partner in crime. He knew how to work the system, and despite his long and decorated devotion to the law, he’d been willing to bend a few New York statutes in order to get her to where she was now-in a dark, dingy apartment where just forty-eight hours ago, Roman had made his last known appearance in the city.

  The process hadn’t been easy. First, Rachel had had to return to the network where she’d first met Roman to do some snooping. She’d kissed up to the top executive’s secretary and, as a result, now had Roman’s pager number in her possession. She wasn’t sure the number was still valid or even if it was the pager that Roman had used to receive the messages that had sent him running out on her every morning after lovemaking, but it was her best shot. She’d dialed the number-with a prophetic 911 at the end-and in the coded message, she’d left the address of the last place Mario had seen Roman.

  Well, Mario had remembered the building. She’d had to guess on the rest. Luckily for her, all the other apartments were occupied and this one, from the looks of it, had government stash house written all over it. She was also quite fortunate that a fifty-dollar bill slipped to the super had gotten her inside. Clearly, if the secret agency that Roman was working for used this place, they weren’t anymore.

  Comfort hadn’t been a consideration in the decor, but Rachel made do on the faded, dusty couch sitting dead center in the room. She waited just over two hours, finally dozing off with her cheek pressed against the arm and her legs folded safely beneath her. She woke to a light knock, but she didn’t rise. She waited. Seconds later, the locks surrendered to keys.