Lethal Affairs (4 page)

Domino returned to her condominium after the job to take a long, hot shower and unwind. She had no television, so she didn’t learn of the Miami police chief’s press conference until ten minutes after it occurred, when the EOO called her. The tape of the incident didn’t surprise her, but she wondered what was on it. Whatever it was, they’d have to take care of it. Even though this had been a nightmare of an assignment, she’d done her part.

When she’d chosen her code name, a few of her classmates had kidded her about it, presuming she was paying homage to the Marvel comic-book character of the same name, a lethally trained mercenary with mutant powers that helped her escape dangerous situations.

But even then she had the gaming tiles in mind, though sometimes, like today, she wouldn’t mind having some of the other Domino’s talent to turn luck in her favor.

Her music helped her decompress, but she was too edgy to sleep, so she started a new layout, carefully setting up her dominos on the smooth, polished hardwood floor.

The spacious condo in suburban Washington had been hers for six years, though she spent vast amounts of time away from it for work. But except for her books and CDs, it retained a still-moving-in austerity. No paintings or posters hung on the immaculate, off-white walls, no photographs sat on the coffee table.

She regretted the last part and wished she could steal some of the places she’d visited on film. Her assignments had taken her to locations worldwide, and even though she was there for a mission, whenever possible, she would stop and admire the beauty around her.

She could turn off all emotions during a job, and she could turn off the job for a few moments of peace. Only the feeling of surrender without consequence could provide that type of peace, the same sensation she experienced when she was in churches and cathedrals. But snapping pictures while on assignment wasn’t an option. Never take any proof of where you’ve been with you—that was the cardinal rule.

Her bedroom furniture consisted of a mattress and box springs, end table, and dresser. A couch in the living room, set in front of her massive floor-to-ceiling windows, looked out on the DC skyline. In the kitchen were only a refrigerator and sink, because she never cooked. No mirrors, except the one on her medicine cabinet. Simple track lighting, always turned low.

The bookcases dominated—floor to ceiling, and filled. Hundreds of CDs fed her state-of-the art music system, and thousands of books fed her mind, for she was always learning. Reading was for knowledge, never pleasure, so her library consisted almost exclusively of nonfiction titles and covered such diverse fields as science, sociology, psychology, photography, and other cultures.

Her barren accommodations reflected who she was and provided maximum floor space for her dominos, though she never called them that. They were her
bones
, a player’s term.

Four hundred thirty-seven bones into her new layout, shortly before dawn, she received another call from the Organization, notifying her the only copy of the Guerrero assassination tape was missing from the Miami police department.

Terrence Burrows was napping on the couch in his den when he received his first call back shortly after four a.m., informing him the tape had been successfully retrieved and was in safe hands, awaiting further instructions. It cost him ten thousand dollars. He thanked Jack and made another request, which took an additional forty minutes.

“I found her,” Jack reported. “Want me to fax the info now?” “Yes, that’s fine.” He put Jack on hold while he scanned the document. Under the heading Personal, it read Age: 29. Height: Five feet, four inches. Hair: Auburn. Eyes: Hazel. Single. Lives alone in a two-bedroom apartment. The address followed. Scottish-American. Both parents alive. Mother does charity work. Father is a retired banker. One brother, Ted, thirty-seven, a sergeant in the army, married with two kids. One sister, Claudette, thirty-four, doesn’t work, married, also with two children. The names and addresses of the family members were included.
The next section covered education and employment. The subject had gone to nursing school, then worked in a hospital in Baltimore for two years before she switched careers. She had returned to college to get a degree in journalism, then been employed at a small weekly newspaper for several months before she was hired at the
Baltimore Dispatch
, where she’d been for the last two years.
“Good work, Jack.” Terrence set down the fax and reached for a handwritten note. “Now, arrange to have the tape mailed to her at her home address, along with a message I’ll dictate to you. Get it there as soon as possible, but be sure she can’t trace it back to me.” He didn’t care whether the EOO could track the tape to Hayley; it would only make them more paranoid. But he had to make sure he was well insulated from discovery.
“Of course. Everything done by phone.”
“Excellent. All right, here’s the message.” He would burn the note he read as soon as he hung up. “Got all that?”
“Yes. Anything else?”
“Nothing right now. I’ll let you know.”
It was five a.m. by the time he finished with Jack. He knew Miami authorities would likely discover the tape was missing when the day shift reported for duty, so he called Pierce immediately. He needed to get back to him before the media got wind of it.
“I’m calling about the tape,” he said when Pierce answered.
“Yes?” Pierce sounded groggy.
“Someone beat me to it,” he lied. “I tried right after you called me, but my contact couldn’t get close to it then. The detectives assigned to the case were viewing it constantly. When he tried again a little while ago, it was missing.”
“Damn!” Pierce suddenly sounded much more awake. “Anything else? Any copies?”
“My contact said none were made. That’s all I know.”
“All right. I’ll be in touch if I need you for something more,” Pierce said before signing off.
Terrence set down the phone, then ran a hand along the back of his neck to free a knot of tension there. Pierce certainly never neglected an opportunity to tug on his leash
.
Reminded him every chance he got they would always be nearby, looking over his shoulder, ready to ask for the next favor. Well, hopefully, not for much longer.

ayley Ward threw her keys on her kitchen counter, next to a pile of unopened junk mail and on top of a stack of articles clipped from newspapers and magazines, all of which had prompted ideas for potential off-shoot stories of her own. The clippings were everywhere—on her nightstand, bulletin board, coffee table, refrigerator. Nearly every waking hour, which was twenty or so out of every twentyfour, Hayley searched for page-one material, though so far her stories hadn’t made it above page three.

And you never knew. The right investigative report might send her into the big leagues, net her a job on an influential paper with a wide reach, like the
New York Times
, or at some national publication like
Newsweek
.

For the time being, she had to expend her energy during her workday hours on whatever Greg, her editor, handed her. And as second lowest on the office totem pole, that was often something for the Lifestyles section, which wasn’t even worth saving for her scrapbook. Sometimes he threw her a bone, but she enterprised most of her meatier stories herself, working on them in her off-time.

The red digital readout on her answering machine told her she had three messages waiting. Her mom begged her to come for dinner soon, her sister Claudette wanted to see the latest Susan Sarandon flick, and an old friend from her nursing days offered gossip about mutual acquaintances.

As Hayley played the messages, she ran through her usual afterwork routine.
While her laptop booted up, she turned on the TV to CNN and started a pot of decaf, then changed into comfy clothes. She chose sweatpants and a favorite well-worn T-shirt because she didn’t expect to go out again.
Her apartment was warm, cozy, and colorful, cluttered with mementos. Framed photographs in small groupings—family, friends, pets, vacation snaps—adorned several surfaces. An enormous glass jar full of matchbooks from the restaurants and hotels she’d visited sat in one corner. Postcards from friends’ journeys and drawings by her nieces and nephews crowded the clippings on her refrigerator, all tucked under kitschy magnets she’d picked up in airports.
She’d just nestled into her favorite chair with a mug of coffee and her laptop when her doorbell rang. Expecting a family member because almost everyone else would call first, she was surprised to see a stranger through the peephole in the front door. Mid-twenties, cleancut, holding a large manila envelope.
“Yes?”
“Hayley Ward?”
“That’s me.” She opened the door.
He handed her the envelope. Her name and address were neatly typed on a stick-on label, and that was all. No return address, postage, shipping instructions, or tracking numbers. The deliveryman had already turned away and taken several steps before she suspected anything.
“Hey,” she called as he neared the stairs that led to the parking lot, one floor below. “Who sent this? What delivery service are you from?”
But he disappeared as though he hadn’t heard.
She walked back into her apartment and cautiously opened the package. It contained a VHS tape and a typed note—no signature. The note read:

Enclosed you will find the only copy of the securitycamera video of the assassination of Cuban Information Minister Juan Carlos Guerrero in Miami on Monday. It was removed from the Miami Police Station in an effort to ensure that the truth about the assassination would be told. If I had not worked to protect the tape, Miss Ward, it would have disappeared within hours or been altered or damaged.

The assassination of Guerrero was carried out by a member of the EOO, the Elite Operatives Organization, whose training facilities are located in a remote area of Colorado. This covert organization has far-reaching, illegal influence in the government, law enforcement, the media, and elsewhere. No one can be trusted. They are expert at covering their tracks.

You must not show this tape to authorities, either state or federal, or a cover-up will follow and the people responsible for Guerrero’s death and countless others will remain at large to kill again.

I am sending you this tape, Miss Ward, because I have been following your career, and I know you have the tenacity and talent to do this story the justice it deserves, to ferret out the truth about the EOO and expose it. Consider it a gift.

Hayley had to read the note twice before the enormity of what she’d just been given began to sink in. The missing tape had been all over the news since late that morning, and now she held it in her hand. Turning it over, she studied the label, which certainly looked authentic. A variety of markings covered it, including a Miami PD evidence number, the words Guerrero assassination
,
and yesterday’s date.

As she slid it into her tape player, questions assaulted her mind. Who could have sent this? And why did they select her?
Like most surveillance videos she had seen on television, the quality of the tape wasn’t great. It was black-and-white, grainy, and a bit out of focus. And the sound was weak and mostly unintelligible. But though the tape lacked clarity, it oozed significance.
The camera showed a wide-angle view of the underground garage’s main aisle, so it had captured all four of the victims going down. The female assassin was out of view, however, during much of the incident, and when she
was
in the frame, she was maddeningly indistinct.
In the woman’s first appearance, Hayley briefly saw the top of her head and her back as she crossed the bottom of the screen in a crouch. She reappeared after the others had fallen, and she shot Guerrero up close. Then she crept to her apparent accomplice and knelt over him, almost tenderly—holding his hand and exchanging a few words, none of them audible. When he slumped back and lay still, she took some things from him, then disappeared briefly again when a Jeep appeared on the scene. Finally, she reappeared, crouching again, and left the way she came. Hayley never saw her face clearly.
The person who’d sent the tape wanted Hayley to expose the group that trained this woman. The Elite Operatives Organization. She picked up the letter and read it again while the tape played for the tenth time.

This covert organization has far-reaching, illegal influence in the government, law enforcement, the media, and elsewhere. No one can be trusted. They are expert at covering their tracks.

If the note was accurate, if this organization existed and was able to buy or threaten or deal its way out of something this big, if it had politicians and cops and who knows who else in its pocket, then someone
should
bring it out in the open. And why shouldn’t that someone be her?

Whoever had managed to send her this tape was certainly resourceful, or powerful, or both
.
She had to know this informant, because she didn’t believe in coincidence. He couldn’t have picked her randomly. If they had met, and that seemed most likely, she must have made an impression on him. Or her.

But she had interviewed hundreds of people, including celebrities, dignitaries, politicians, and law-enforcement officials. She wondered how her mysterious benefactor knew about this organization, and why the hell he hadn’t given her more to work with.

What should she do with the tape?
She needed to make a copy, so she popped a blank DVD into her dual VCR/DVD player and recorded a backup duplicate, labeled it
Madonna HBO Special 2003,
and hid it among her hundreds of music CDs. The original needed to be somewhere more secure, like her safedeposit box. Or maybe at her brother Ted’s house—he had a big heavy gun safe in his basement.
Hayley decided not to tell anyone at the
Dispatch
about the tape. Aside from the note’s
No one can be trusted
warning, if she alerted her bosses, they would assign a more senior reporter to the story, and she couldn’t let that happen. So what if she didn’t have the connections and years of experience some of the others had? She more than made up for those advantages with her determination, hard work, and resourcefulness.
She wouldn’t sleep much tonight, not like that was anything out of the ordinary. First stop: the Internet. She didn’t expect to find anything about the EOO online, but she could begin by searching for other cases of unsolved murders of a national or international political figure.
Hayley allowed herself to imagine her page-one headline and how the story would play on the evening news if she could pull this off. “A tenacious Baltimore newspaper reporter has solved the murder of Cuban Information Minister Juan Carlos Guerrero…while uncovering evidence of a covert training school for assassins located in Colorado…”