Lethal Affairs (12 page)

Her fear of winding up in jail overcame her sense of dread over recent events, at least for the time being. Her mind raced. She had to get the note out of there and erase the message. And she didn’t have any time to waste
.
Manny had introduced her to the landlady as his niece, so she could use that. Talk her way into the apartment, get in and out fast while it was still daylight. It was a crowded building, so she should be safe enough. She told her boss she had a personal emergency and had to leave right away. Ten minutes later, she was speeding up the highway to Brooklyn.

The Atlas Gym was old-school, designed for those serious about self-improvement. It had machines and weights and a locker room, plus a clientele who didn’t give a damn about choosing the right exercise ensemble to make the opposite sex notice them.

“Easy, champ, we’re not going for gold,” Domino’s sparring partner said, his voice a ragged whisper.
She released the pressure and removed her knee from his throat, then got to her feet and extended her hand to help him up.
“Fanatic much today?” he said playfully, punching her on the shoulder.
Domino smiled apologetically. “Sorry, didn’t realize, I guess.” It was out of character for her to get carried away like this. She was always very aware of the gym’s rules and how far she should and could go.
She removed her headgear and started toward the press bench, pausing only to sip from her water bottle and swipe at her face with a hand towel. Her black sweatpants and tank top were already damp with sweat, but she planned to do another hour at least. Workouts were necessary in her life, and she enjoyed them, but today wasn’t about enjoyment. Today was about trying to redirect her frustration. This assignment was getting to her, and she couldn’t figure out why.
Twenty minutes pressing weights failed to diminish her rising turmoil. She needed some air. So she hit the showers, stashed her bag in one of the lockers, and changed into shorts and a T-shirt for a five-mile run. It was supposed to get well into the eighties again in the nation’s capital, but at eight thirty a.m. under cloudy skies it was still comfortable, not that she wasn’t used to workouts in every type of extreme weather.
The gym was in an office complex north of East Potomac Park, so her preferred course took her over the Fourteenth Street Bridge into Virginia and a paved jogging/bike trail along the river.
She heard a loud male voice coming from her right. A man was seated at the bow of a rowing scull, urging the women on board to row faster. It seemed as though they were keeping pace with her, while the man continued to count and urge, or was she keeping to their pace? She wasn’t sure, but the loud, steady voice put her in a trance.
She closed her eyes for a few seconds, and when she opened them again she had been transported to a very different landscape.

She was fifteen, and this time the voice to her right was that of David Arthur, driving his jeep alongside herself and two classmates—a young man and her one and only friend, Mishael, also fifteen. They were in the Rio Grande National Forest. Her lungs hurt from running nonstop for more than two hours. The sandbags strapped around her ankles and the heavy rucksack, both wet after she’d swum across the river, made her feel as though she was dragging a lifeless body.

The male op to her far left fell, cursing. And again, the voice of Arthur. “Move on. Get up and move on.”
She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt more tired or more determined. Mishael was next to her and looked like she was about to lose her breakfast. She mumbled something about how easy it would be to kill Arthur with just one thumb.
Arthur drove the jeep in closer until he was at arm’s length. “Do you feel the pain?” he shouted over the roaring engine.
“Yes, sir,” Domino shouted back, never taking her eyes off the path.
“Do you want it to stop?”
“Yes, sir,” she shouted again, knowing her agony was evident on her face.
“Then keep running,” he yelled. “Keep going until you can’t feel the pain. Until you can’t feel anything. Until you don’t want the pain to stop.”
“Yes, sir, until I can’t feel anything. No pain.”

For most of the run, she went mindless, her feet pounding faster and faster, a steady pace on the asphalt. “Until I can’t feel anything,” she said out loud. She was halfway over the bridge when she suddenly slowed, then stopped. “Damn it,” she spat to herself and kicked the cola can at her feet.

Running was all she had known—from others, from herself— until she couldn’t feel anything. Why wasn’t it working now, why was Hayley making her feel as though she didn’t have to, and why did it hurt to lie to her? She didn’t have the answers to all these whys, but she did decide to walk the rest of the way to the gym.

Her cell phone rang as she neared the entrance. It was Pierce, relaying information provided by the operative monitoring the listening devices in Hayley’s apartment.

“Strike just called her new friend in Brooklyn,” he said. “She left a message on his answering machine.”
“I’m listening.”
“She apparently gave him something, and he told her he’d give her something in return tonight…something that ‘sounded promising.’ She’s heading up to meet him at six. Get up there now, pick up Reno en route. Send him into the guy’s apartment, and see if you can recover what he got from her and whatever she was going to get from him.”
“On my way.” She retrieved another change of clothes from the trunk of her car before she returned to the locker room.
An hour out of Brooklyn, Reno began to complain he felt ill. Probably, he said, from the seafood buffet he’d overindulged in the night before. By the time they reached their turnoff, he was heaving violently into a plastic bag in the back of the van. So weak he could barely sit up, he couldn’t possibly go into Vasquez’s apartment.
Domino waited for an elderly woman who was putting out trash to get around the corner of the building before she exited the van and went inside. No one else was around, and no one saw her. The evening before, she’d scoped out the complex and had seen the bars on the two back windows in Vasquez’s place. Going in through his front door was her only option.
She grimaced when she saw all the locks, though they really didn’t surprise her. She’d been briefed the guy was the paranoid type. But it would likely take a minute or two to get in, and several other apartments led off his hallway. She could be discovered at any minute. First she knocked, loud enough so he would hear, but not enough to alert any of his neighbors. When there was no response, she set to work on the locks and was inside three minutes later.
Though she’d been in all kinds of unsanitary places during her career, she’d never experienced anything this bad in a first-world country. Aside from the filth and mess, the stench was so bad she had to breathe through her mouth. She searched the place and quickly found Hayley’s note, stuffed inside a manila folder lying on Vasquez’s couch. Though she spent several minutes scanning the contents of a couple dozen more manila file folders crammed into the desk drawers, she didn’t discover anything else of interest in his living room.
Voices at the door made her duck into the bedroom as the deadbolt—the one lock on the door she’d bothered to set—sprang open. It was the only one on the inside that didn’t require a key.
Her curiosity turned to alarm when she recognized one of the voices as Hayley’s. “Thanks, Edna. I really appreciate this.”
She heard Hayley enter the apartment, then the door close again. Domino squeezed behind the bedroom door, where she was well hidden but able to glimpse some of the living room through the crack at the hinge. Hayley passed by her narrow field of vision, then she shuffled some papers and cursed. Domino knew if Hayley had entered the apartment without Manny being there, she was apt to continue looking for the note until she found it. Silently, she slipped off her small backpack, reached inside for her ski mask, and put it on. She
had
to prevent Hayley from seeing her.
She heard Hayley play back the message she’d left on Manny’s answering machine, then delete it with a beep
.
Shortly after, she opened the squeaky drawers of Vasquez’s desk and shuffled more papers. After a couple of minutes, Domino sensed Hayley’s approach and saw her cross her thin field of vision, headed toward the bedroom.
Pressing tighter against the wall, her backpack now at her feet, she braced for a confrontation. When Hayley entered the bedroom, Domino smelled the familiar jasmine of her perfume as she passed. Then she held her breath, every nerve ending alert, her heart racing. She was more anxious, more tense than usual in such situations, and she wondered briefly whether her growing attraction to Hayley made the difference.
More drawers opened and closed, presumably in the dresser near the bed and the two nightstands she’d glimpsed earlier.
Hayley mumbled to herself, “No shit,” and shuffled more papers. Domino risked a quick glance. Hayley was only a few feet from her, facing away and bent over the bed, reading papers spread across the mattress. “Jesus. Oh, Manny.” Her voice was enthusiastic, and as Domino watched, Hayley picked up a large envelope and tore it open.
She crept from her hiding place, but Hayley seemed to sense her and began to turn in her direction just as she reached her. To keep her facing forward, she embraced her in a half nelson to control her arms. Under ordinary circumstances, she would have immediately knocked her victim out, but something prevented her. Instead, she pushed Hayley’s head forward, which threw her off balance, and put her facedown on the bed.
She started to struggle, but Domino pinned her with her weight, pulled her gun, and pressed it hard against Hayley’s back, near the middle, next to her spine. She didn’t cock it. Then she spoke, one word only, in a tone lower than her own voice, hoping Hayley wouldn’t recognize it. “No.”
Hayley froze, face buried in the mattress.
Her labored breathing sounded loud to Domino, and she could smell her fear. She hated having to do this, but she didn’t have a choice. Keeping the gun against Hayley with one hand, she used the other to scoop up the envelope Hayley had just opened and the other papers scattered on the bed. Then she backed away, slowly, praying Hayley would be smart enough to remain where she was. She had to risk speaking again. Low. Gruff. Threatening. “Don’t move.”
Backing away, she retrieved the backpack on her way to the living room, then paused beside Vasquez’s couch to search Hayley’s purse for the assassination tape. What she found instead was a DVD marked
Madonna HBO Special 2003
. The smart move almost made her smile. No wonder they hadn’t found it in the toss of her apartment. She stuck it in her backpack and glanced once more at the bedroom door, relieved Hayley didn’t attempt to look at her, or follow.
As she opened the door to the hallway, she stripped off her mask, grateful that none of Vasquez’s windows overlooked the parking lot so Hayley couldn’t see her leave. Her heart boomed in her chest. No one was about. No one saw her leave
.
Her relief quickly turned to anger when she realized what had almost happened. The possibility of having to hurt Hayley if she’d tried to run made her stomach turn. She walked back to the parked van, curious to find out what the hell Reno had been up to and why he hadn’t warned her. He was laid out flat on his back, cold sweat pouring off him.
She called Pierce with an update and asked whether they should stick around to follow Hayley or return to Washington. He told her to stay put and see where Strike went next, so she donned a red wig and sunglasses and moved the van farther from Hayley’s Mustang. While she waited for Hayley to emerge from the apartment, she put the DVD into the laptop and watched the surveillance tape without emotion, studying it for signs it could be used to identify her.
Had she gotten it all, everything Manny had and everything Hayley had left? Pierce wasn’t pleased by the day’s events, but she hadn’t been willing to hurt Hayley. The objectivity that normally characterized her assignments was simply impossible with Operation Eclipse.

ayley didn’t move for at least five minutes, her face buried in a noxious, stained tangle of sheets Manny had probably never changed. It took that long for her heart to stop thumping, and she was too afraid the intruder who’d subdued her would return. She knew, from the bare glimpse she’d had of the figure in black, from the voice, and most especially, from the feeling of the breasts against her back as she was thrown onto the bed, the intruder was female. And very strong. From the EOO?

The possibility this was the same woman from the tape, here to erase her tracks, almost made her lose her breakfast. That could be why she hadn’t found her note in Manny’s file. The intruder must have it. Hayley ran to her purse. The DVD copy of the tape was also missing, so they now knew she had the original. Her fear turned into panic and for an instant she couldn’t breathe.

The intruder had also taken all the papers she’d been looking at— copies of the case files of the Dennis Linden assassination. Included in the file were Manny’s handwritten notes and a business card for a Timmy Koster, Video Specialist. She prayed he was listed in the phone book. It was all she had to go on, now.

Manny’s death most probably wasn’t an accident. And this secret organization did exist, determined and able to cover up its lethal missions.

Maybe the intruder didn’t have time to search all of Manny’s belongings, if that was what she was here to do. His short list, the Frankie the Fox tape, and whatever else he’d planned to show her could still be here somewhere. But it was unlikely. The masked woman would have knocked her out, or worse, if she had reasons to look further. Miraculously she was still alive, but she wondered why they’d let her live. A cold shudder of fear skittered up her back. It was time to get the hell out of here
.

The first day of July had dawned overcast, but by late afternoon the skies were blue and cloudless, and a steady breeze made the summer heat comfortable, so it seemed everyone was outdoors. But at Monty Pierce’s Arlington home, every window was closed and every curtain drawn.