Internal Affairs (13 page)

That had been true for most of the cases Romo had investigated throughout his career, too. He and Alicia had worked at the local level, albeit on the high-dollar scale intrinsic to Vegas. Even the corruption they’d stumbled on had been very personal—a handful of dirty cops and two very powerful moneymen. After her death,
he’d run from his grief—he was willing to admit now that he’d run rather than dealing, rather than healing. He’d wound up in Bear Claw working internal affairs, which had suited his need for justice while staying on the small, familiar scale. Then al-Jihad had escaped from the ARX Supermax, and that small, familiar scale had widened abruptly.

At the time he’d thought he’d been doing everything right, bearing down on the hints of local-level corruption and conspiracy because that was what he knew how to do, and because it freed the federal agents to do the bigger-picture stuff. But over time he’d realized this wasn’t the sort of case that could be deconstructed to the smaller scale, not really. In leading a witch hunt in his own PD, he’d taken attention away from where it needed to be—higher up the food chain.

Which, he realized as he came up against a dead end in his decryption, backed up and tried a different route, wasn’t unlike what he’d done with Sara. He’d accused her of being intransigent, and dared her to give him another chance. As with making love to her under only partial honesty, the challenge had seemed like a good idea at the time, but as he worked on the encrypted transmissions, he started to wonder whether that hadn’t been another misstep on his part. He had, whether he’d intended to or not, asked her to give him a pure pass on one of her most fundamental beliefs—that of fidelity.

Yes, he’d apologized for what he’d done, and he’d explained the situation, at least partly. But he’d never really admitted he’d been wrong to do it. And he’d never
promised not to do it again. Without those assurances, how was it fair to put the fault back on her?

“Damn,” he muttered under his breath. “I
am
an idiot.” However, on the plus side, it’d only taken him a few hours to realize it this time, rather than the weeks or months he’d gone previously. Surely that was evidence against her belief that people couldn’t change?

He should call the safe house and—

His fingers paused as his eyes locked on a piece of code. One part of him had been hard at work while his heart thought of Sara, and damned if he didn’t think he’d found what the other analysts had missed. Maybe he’d seen it because he’d looked at so many other of the terrorists’ files, maybe because he hadn’t been trained in the FBI program, who knew? What mattered was that he was pretty sure he could break the damn thing.

Focusing, setting aside his other thoughts and worries, he got down to the serious business of decrypting. When O’Reilly checked on him fifteen minutes later, he was halfway there. The senior agent left the door unlocked when he ducked back out, and coffee appeared at Romo’s elbow a few minutes later.

Something unknotted inside him—a tightness he’d been carrying for so long now, he hadn’t really been aware of it until it was gone, banished by the feeling of finally having come in from the cold, finally being a part of something larger than his small, angry world.

Just under an hour from when he’d entered O’Reilly’s office, Romo pushed away from the computer with a sound of satisfaction. “Gotcha, you bastards.” His satisfaction, though, was badly tainted with dismay, be
cause the information he’d uncovered meant that they didn’t have much time to counter al-Jihad’s nefarious plan.

O’Reilly appeared in the doorway, though Romo hadn’t been aware of the senior agent hovering. More than likely, he’d tasked an underling to keep an eye on Romo’s progress and signal him when it looked as though things were getting ready to break free. “Tell me something good,” O’Reilly demanded.

“I can tell you something, all right.”

“But not good.”

“Not so much.” Romo waved the senior agent forward, so they were both looking at the screen. After a quick rundown of the methods he’d used to crack the encryption, he summarized, “It’s a set of instructions to Weberly.”

“Damn it.” A muscle pulsed alongside O’Reilly’s square jaw at the news. Weberly was the new head warden of the ARX Supermax, having been promoted into the position following his predecessor’s death during the prison riot. “The riot wasn’t just designed to cover your death,” O’Reilly growled.

Romo shook his head. “I think that was a side benefit. The main goal was clearing the way for Weberly. Hell, for all we know, that was why al-Jihad, Feyd and Mawadi orchestrated their arrest and incarceration, as a means to develop the most useful contacts inside the prison.” He grimaced. “It houses the worst of the worst, which is why the terrorists targeted it. Al-Jihad and the others wanted to do some internal recon.”

“But why al-Jihad himself?” O’Reilly wondered
aloud, then shook his head. “Never mind. What else did you find?”

“A timetable of sorts.” Romo brought up the message on-screen. “Even decrypted, it’s couched in doublespeak. You’ll probably want to have the pros go over it, see if they’re seeing what I am.” He pointed out a couple of key phrases he thought referred to the planned jailbreak, along with what he thought was a schedule. “Which means that if I’m right,” he continued, “and if they’re still on this same schedule, we’re less than a day away from the jailbreak.”

O’Reilly cursed under his breath. “You got any idea how it’s going to go down?”

“No details,” Romo said with ill-concealed regret. “There are a couple of references I can’t place. Maybe your agents will be able to provide some insight.”

“I’ll get it right over to them.” O’Reilly stuck his head out into the hallway and barked some orders. Moments later, the laptop was whisked away by two heavily armed, grim-faced men. O’Reilly himself, though, stayed behind in the office. “We’re getting somewhere, at least.”

The senior agent’s body thrummed with barely restrained eagerness, and some of the lines in his face had eased. That, more than anything, proved to Romo that O’Reilly was the right man for the job at hand. Although a few years older than the average field operative, the senior agent was clearly chafing at the Cell’s recent lack of action, and the knowledge gaps that had rendered the task force unable to respond to the growing terror threat. That was why Romo had agreed to fake
his own death and go undercover, he remembered now. Not just because it had been the right thing to do, but because he’d believed in his backup.

Hoping he wouldn’t find out that his belief had been misplaced, Romo said, “Al-Jihad gave me forty-eight hours to return the flash drive to him. I don’t know why he wants the thing back, or why he gave me so long to retrieve it, but if—and that’s a big assumption, granted—he truly wants the thing back, we might be able to use it as bait.”

O’Reilly regarded him steadily. “What did you have in mind?”

Romo lifted a shoulder. “We’re running out of time to figure out what else is on the drive that he’s so anxious to recover—frankly I don’t see it, period, which makes me think the countdown was intended to get me focused on the wrong things.”

“Misdirection.” O’Reilly nodded. “It’s consistent with al-Jihad’s overall actions over the past eighteen months. Hell, the FBI didn’t catch the significance of the hidden flash drive until it was almost too late. They were so busy trying to protect Mawadi’s ex-wife, they let him get away with the drive.”

Romo remembered that part of the investigation, and knew there had also been some infighting within the federal arm of the task force, and an affair between Mariah and her FBI protector, Grayson, which had further complicated things. But again, that had been the nature of al-Jihad’s plans all along: sleight of hand and, as O’Reilly had said, misdirection.

“So what if we do some misdirection of our own?” Romo suggested.

O’Reilly’s eyes narrowed with interest. “What do you have in mind?”

“I’m not sure yet.” Romo thought for a moment, frowning. “Al-Jihad’s men tried to kill me, to keep me from escaping from them in the woods. I get that. What I don’t get is why they didn’t move in on me while I was at Sara’s, but instead went after Fax and McDermott before I could make contact in person. Then, instead of chasing me down, they herded me to the old apartment, where they’d planted a message that gave me enough clues to break the amnesia.” He glossed over Sara’s involvement in that aspect, hoping to keep her out of trouble. “Which suggests they knew about the amnesia somehow and wanted me to get my memory back. But why? The first thing I did was bring you guys the flash drive.” He stalled, sucking in a breath. “Which might mean…”

“He wanted us to learn about the tunnels, but feel clever about it,” O’Reilly said, then cursed viciously under his breath. “So we have to go on the assumption that either it’s another misdirection, or it’s a hell of an ambush.”

“Or both,” Romo muttered.

Before O’Reilly could say anything else, the office door swung open to reveal one of the heavily armed men, looking even grimmer than before. His eyes flicked to Romo and away.

“What’s wrong?” Romo asked, surging up from the desk chair as every warning bell he possessed started clamoring all at once. “What happened?”

The agent looked at O’Reilly, who said, “I’ll be right
there.” The younger agent nodded and hurried from the room without looking at Romo, making him wonder whether the emergency had something to do with him, or whether he simply wasn’t in the circle of trust.

“Come on,” O’Reilly ordered, gesturing for Romo to join him and the other agent as they headed for what proved to be a conference room with a podium at one end and a long table. There were already a number of other Cell members seated at the table, a disparate half-dozen men who were very different in their outward appearances, ranging from a slick business type to a big guy who borderlined on thug territory. Romo was surprised to see Fairfax at the far end, looking paler than his usual tough-guy routine, and sporting a line of stitches along his scalp, but seeming otherwise okay. Romo sketched a small wave, got an even smaller, cool-eyed nod in return and figured he’d have to be satisfied with that.

If Sara’s friends had been inclined to be angry with him for dumping her, he could only imagine how they felt about him now. But at the same time, he wasn’t planning on letting that stop him from going after what he wanted. Not this time. He wanted all this to be over so he could go to her, sit her down and clear the air. Yes, he needed her to be flexible, but he needed to give her a better reason to take that chance. Simply demanding it wasn’t enough, he’d realized.

He only hoped he hadn’t realized it too late.

After O’Reilly closed and locked the door, and turned on some sort of scrambler apparatus that sat in the center of the long table, the meeting began. There were no introductions made, no real explanations before
the slick-looking guy got up at the front of the room, pushed a couple of buttons and brought up a schematic that made Romo freeze in place. He was admittedly no expert, but the picture looked an awful lot like a large air-to-ground missile.

Slick said, “Based on our heuristic analysis of the transmissions Detective Sampson was able to decrypt, we believe the terrorists have acquired an incendiary bomb, and have placed it in the tunnel system very near the prison.”

O’Reilly cursed bitterly. “Why are we just now hearing about this?” Then he shook his head. “Never mind. The how and why isn’t important right now, not on this tight a timeline. Tell me what we know, and what we’re going to do about it.”

Over the next fifteen minutes, Slick—who Romo learned was actually named Wilson—went over the sparse details the Cell had managed to amass, which summed up to a very grim picture. The device, if it was what they thought it was, would crater the hell out of the tunnel system and the prison, killing everyone within either location. Al-Jihad had apparently named his successor within his terror organization, and a transmission intercepted only minutes earlier suggested that, in the event that the jailbreak failed, al-Jihad intended to martyr himself while making the explosion look as if it had been part of an FBI attack on the tunnel system and the prison itself, thereby inflaming the passions of terror leaders worldwide, and achieving his desired end of uniting America’s enemies against her.

The concept was all the more chilling because none of the gathered agents was willing to say it wouldn’t work.

Soon, the meeting moved into a response planning phase, and it became clear why O’Reilly had wanted Romo sitting in. He asked about numbers and thought processes, and about the men Romo had met personally during his months stuck in the crummy little apartment. If the senior agent had asked him going in whether he’d be able to help or not, Romo would’ve said no. But it turned out that he knew more than he thought, and the small details the Cell agents managed to pull from him helped shape the beginnings of a planned attack on the tunnel system. Other groups—including the FBI and BCCPD—would be brought in when the time came, of course, but for the moment, O’Reilly made it very clear that the plans stayed within that one room, period.

At the hour mark, once things had gone well beyond his areas of expertise, Romo held up a hand. When O’Reilly acknowledged him, he said, “No offense, but I don’t think you guys need me here for this. I’d like to take another crack at the files on the flash drive, see if I couldn’t find something we’re all missing, some reason why al-Jihad would want to ensure that he got the copies back before launching the attack.”

“Of course. The laptop is back in my office.” O’Reilly tossed the key card to his office and waved him from the room, calling an absent thanks as the Cell members returned to their strategizing.

Romo found his way back to O’Reilly’s office, used the key card to let himself in and sat back down at the
computer. But he’d be damned if he could see what he was missing. There had to be some reason al-Jihad let him live as long as he had.

Staring intently at the files he’d pulled from the terrorist leader’s computer, he muttered, “What if—”