Internal Affairs (15 page)

It was simultaneously an intricate plan and a damnably simple one, Romo thought, still unable to figure out why the terrorists wanted him there. Vengeance was certainly a possibility, but it seemed a risky conceit at this point in al-Jihad’s plan. Regardless, Romo kept the gas pinned to the floor, sending the truck hurtling up the dirt road because there wasn’t another option as far as he was concerned. He’d left Sara twice before, once when he’d betrayed her with another woman, and again when he’d faked his own death. He wouldn’t do it a third time. He was done running away.

By the time he was within sight of the tunnel mouth,
he was a good twenty minutes over the time he’d been given. Short of hijacking a helicopter, there hadn’t been any way to get there sooner, though. He hoped to hell the terrorists recognized that, and had given him the deadline to ensure that he left the Cell building in a hurry.

The tunnel mouth was empty, though. There didn’t seem to be anyone waiting for him. Had they decided he wasn’t coming? Had they—

“No,” he said aloud. “Don’t even go there.” Palming the cheap phone, he tried to return Sara’s call, but couldn’t get a signal. No doubt the phone she’d called out on had been a slicker model with a stronger signal—a satellite phone or the like.

Muttering a curse, he jammed the disposable phone in his pocket and parked the truck. After hiding the key, he strode toward the tunnel, hoping to hell nothing had gone badly wrong in the nearly hour and a half it’d taken him to reach the meeting point.

“Hello?” he called when he reached the tunnel, which proved to be a rocky conduit liberally braced with timeworn timbers that had been reinforced with new-looking metal, presumably when al-Jihad took over the tunnel system. When there was no answer but the echo of Romo’s own voice, he moved into the tunnel. “Sara?” he called softly. “I’m here, sweetheart.”

A rustle of motion from behind him had him spinning and raising his fists in defense. He found himself staring down the barrel of an autopistol held by a stone-faced man in tan fatigues.

He nearly leaped at the guy, as his blood drummed with the need to get to Sara, to make sure she was okay.
But he controlled the impulse and forced himself to hold out his hands, showing that he was unarmed. “I’m just trying to get to my meeting, understand? I’m not looking to make trouble. I just want my woman back.” It was partly a lie, partly the truth. He most definitely did intend to make trouble, but he intended to get Sara to safety before he did. “Take me to Jane Doe. Please.”

A hard blow caught Romo from behind, driving him to his knees. He bellowed in pain, tried to spin and meet the new attack, but lost his equilibrium and fell instead. The next few seconds were a blur of kicks and punches, with Romo taking far more of them than he managed to dish out. He cursed and scrabbled, fighting dirty, but the two guards subdued him, binding his hands behind him and securing the knot to a tight nylon rope that ran around his throat, biting into his windpipe. It was a simple system, but all too effective. If he didn’t keep his bound hands high up between his shoulder blades, the rope dug in and he started choking. Add in the pain from his healing wound, and he was unable to do much more than curse as the guards searched him roughly, pocketed his phone, then dragged him into the tunnel system. As the artificial light of the fluorescent tube-lit tunnel closed in around him and the view of blue skies and freedom disappeared, Romo found himself hoping to hell that Chelsea was as good as her word, because he had a feeling he was going to need backup badly, and soon.

After a forced march of five minutes, maybe longer, during which he tried to keep track of his location relative to the schematic in his head, the guards yanked
him to a halt just outside a steel-paneled doorway. One held a gun on him while the other unlatched the door and swung it open.

A blur erupted from the other side of the doorway, screaming and swinging something in a lethal arc. There was a sick thud and the guard nearest the door went down.

Part of Romo froze in shock and fear when he realized the blur was Sara, that she’d just ambushed one of al-Jihad’s guards with what looked like a leg off a damned folding chair. Fortunately, though, the instincts that had brought him through months of treacherous undercover work were still close to the surface, and had him head-butting the second guard even as the first one went down. He caught his guard in the split second of shocked distraction when Sara attacked. The guy’s gun went flying. A second head butt sent him folding to the ground, though Romo nearly choked himself to death in the process.

He folded, gagging.

“Romo!” Sara was at his side in a second, quickly untying his bonds.

“Thanks,” he said, his voice rough with a whole lot of emotions that had no place just then, as he and Sara grabbed the guards and dragged them into the cell where she’d been held. “Nice job.”

“Thanks,” she said, breathless. “Are they—”

“They’ll live.” At least until al-Jihad or Jane Doe learned of their mistake. Then all bets were off. He didn’t say that, though. Instead he said, “Help me get their uniforms off.” She frowned but didn’t argue, and they quickly pulled the tan fatigue shirts on over their own.

“Pants, too?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Shirts only, in case we need to lose them quickly.” As in, he didn’t want to be mistaken for the wrong side if—no, when—backup arrived, whether it was Fax and the others, or the entire Cell-backed response, traitors and all.

Once they had their disguises in place, Romo guided Sara back out into the hallway and shut and locked the door on the unconscious guards. Then he turned to her and gave himself a second to stare, memorizing the sight of her and beginning to believe he’d made it this far, at the very least. “You’re okay?”

“Scared and furious, but generally unharmed.” Her words were flip, but she was staring at him with an intensity equal to his own. “You came alone?”

He was tempted to tell her that backup was theoretically on the way, but he didn’t dare tip his hand if there was surveillance. And besides, that wasn’t what he wanted to tell her in the scant seconds before they had to be on the move. So he said simply, “I came for you.”

“Oh,” she said on a quick inhale. A wash of color touched her pale face, and she lifted the broken chair leg, which was wickedly pointed at one end. “I was coming out to help you.”

“I think that makes us even.” Knowing it wasn’t the time or place for deeper revelations, he dropped a quick kiss on her lips, scooped up the men’s guns and handed her one. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

They moved through the tunnels without incident, with Romo leading the way. They were less than halfway out when sirens erupted and all hell broke loose.
The tramp of booted feet rang out nearby, along with men’s shouts of alarm, with a cool, commanding female voice rapping out orders over the din, then snapping, “I don’t care.
Find them!”

Sara grabbed Romo, dragging at him. “That’s Jane! She must’ve realized we escaped.”

He nodded, heart and mind racing. Sara’s safety was his priority, but what if their escape had just created a larger problem? What if al-Jihad decided the risk was too great, and triggered the bomb outright? If that happened, there wouldn’t be any place safe within a dozen miles of the tunnels.

“We’re going to have to run for it,” he said, hefting the autopistol and hoping to hell he didn’t have to kill anyone on the way out. He didn’t want her to see that side of him, had hoped to never have to use it again.

She tightened her fingers on his. “I’m right behind you.”

He moved out, and didn’t look back.

They hurried along a long hallway that paralleled the one the guards had brought him down. Romo heard the shouts and footsteps of search parties, and the rumble of what sounded a great deal like heavy equipment, which made him wonder if the terrorists still had digging to do, or if they had moved up the prison break for some reason. Thinking of O’Reilly’s timetable, he cursed under his breath. If Fax didn’t come through—

No, he couldn’t worry about that now. He had to concentrate on getting him and Sara the hell out of the tunnels.

When they reached a crossway, Romo hesitated, then turned away from the loudest noises of search and pursuit,
even knowing it tacked them away from the surface. His mind raced as he went over the map in his head, trying to figure out where they were, where they could go. If they were where he thought, then there should be another cross tunnel—there! Moving fast, he tugged Sara toward what ought to be a shortcut to the surface.

He rounded the corner, leading with the autopistol. Seeing nothing in the dim tunnel ahead, he moved into the smaller shaft, ducking to clear the single string of bare bulbs that lit the space. “Come on,” he whispered almost soundlessly. “This should lead out.”

The sounds of pursuit faded. Hope started to stir in his chest, hastening his steps. He kept his weapon up, though, stayed alert for problems as they sped along the tunnel.

Moving too fast, he passed a cross-tunnel that shouldn’t have been there, at least according to the map. Motion blurred in his peripheral vision and his instincts shrilled a warning, but it was already too late. A shadowy figure lunged out of the tunnel as he spun. The tan-clad guard slammed into him, grabbed his wrist and bashed his gun hand against the rock wall of the tunnel, sending the weapon skittering away.

Growling near-feral denial that their escape had been foiled so close to success, keeping his voice low so they wouldn’t attract attention from the other searchers, Romo grappled with the guard and hissed, “Go, Sara. Run!”

But he heard her shriek, heard another struggle nearby and realized she’d been grabbed, too. Knowing there was nothing to be gained from silence now, Romo howled and fought his attacker, shouting rage and fury
at the top of his lungs, in the hopes that Fax and the others would hear.

But there was no response, no backup. The guard slammed a stiff-armed punch into Romo’s temple, leaving him dazed. His head spun and the world lurched as the guards dragged him to his feet and he was once again force-marched back into the warren of tunnels, this time with Sara right behind him. He cursed bitterly in his soul, hoping to hell he could figure a way out of this mess, fearing he might not be able to.

That fear intensified to near certainty when the guards shoved him through a doorway into a larger, well-lit room that held two men—al-Jihad and Lee Mawadi—one woman—Jane Doe—and one seriously nasty-looking piece of machinery…the incendiary bomb.

Sara’s head spun and her stomach pitched at the sight confronting her and Romo. If she’d been free to move, she would’ve grabbed his arm and clung, not out of terror, though she was thoroughly terrified, but to prevent him from breaking away from the man who held him, and flinging himself at the assembled group in some sort of mad suicide rush. He didn’t, though. He stood fast and glared at the man in the center of the room.

Al-Jihad was square-shouldered and dark-eyed, and carried an aura of command like a second skin. Jane Doe stood on one side of the terrorist mastermind. On his other side was a blond, good-looking man who wore tan fatigues along with an air of deadly menace. Sara was pretty sure he was the last of the escapees, terrorist Lee Mawadi, whom Fax had described as being somewhat lacking in initiative, but not in killer instincts. More, since Mawadi’s ex-wife, Mariah Shore, had been put well out of his reach under the watchful eyes of her new lover, FBI task force agent Michael Grayson, Mawadi had been increasingly associated with the most
deadly of the smaller incidents in and around Bear Claw. Sara had heard Fax say that Mawadi was on a downward spiral. She could easily believe that, based on the mad glee in the man’s eyes and his possessive stance near the huge missile-like contraption that took up half the room and could only be, even to her disbelieving, untrained eyes, a bomb.

Sara clamped her lips against a whimper that came from both fear and discomfort as the man holding her twisted her arm a little higher behind her back.

Not looking at her, Romo faced al-Jihad, his jaw set. “I came like you told me to. Let the woman go.”

It was Jane who answered coolly, “That wasn’t the deal.”

Romo flicked a glance at her. “Then what
was
the deal?”

“O’Reilly is planning an attack,” she said. “I want the details, and I want them now.”

“You’ve got someone inside the Cell already. Why not ask them?”

“Your girlfriend’s guards were the last two upper-level operatives loyal to me, and I needed them to bring me my leverage.” Jane nodded in Sara’s direction. “Even at their level, O’Reilly wasn’t bringing them in on the really hot stuff—he kept that to him, Fairfax and a few others. My one remaining asset inside is way out of the loop—she told me there were meetings, maybe a plan, but couldn’t get anything more. That’s why you’re here. We needed someone inside the circle of trust.”

“You…” Romo trailed off, expression firming. “Son of a—this was what you were planning all along, wasn’t it?”

Al-Jihad said, “This was one of the eventualities, yes. We projected that once you escaped, you would eventually return to O’Reilly, and that he would bring you into his confidence once we added the pressure of the flash drive. We didn’t care about the maps. We wanted you back inside the Cell Block, and that was the simplest way to get you there.” His eyes flicked to Sara. “And we knew you were vulnerable. Since Fairfax put his woman out of our reach, you were the next best option.”

“Plans within plans,” Romo muttered. “We knew that much, but didn’t see where they were headed.”

“The same place they’ve been going all along,” Mawadi said with a sneer on his face and in his voice. “Toward victory. In less than an hour, we will have breached the ARX. With the help of our men on the inside, we’re going to unleash hell on your earth.” His lips turned up in a smile of pure joy that looked so very wrong on a man who had grown up in a middle-class family and gone to an Ivy League school, where he’d found a series of anti-American groups that had provided an outlet for his anger and sociopathic tendencies.

Sara shuddered involuntarily. She’d been afraid before, when Jane had forced her to make the phone call. Now, though, she knew they were at the end of things, and she was terrified. The immediate future of Bear Claw and many of the people she loved rested on what she and Romo did in the next few minutes.

“Don’t tell them anything,” she blurted. “Don’t.”

After a glance back at the man who held him with an autopistol stuck in his side, Romo turned to her. His
eyes were cool and steady, though she saw a layer of anguish beneath. “I won’t let them hurt you. I love you.”

At times in the past, she would’ve given anything to hear those words, under any circumstance. Now, though, she found herself flaring. Anger spiked. “Don’t you
dare!
” she blazed, taking a step toward him. The guard holding her must’ve been surprised—or amused—by her response, because he let her go, though kept his gun trained on her. Sara continued, her volume increasing. “Don’t even think you can make this be about you and me. I’m not asking you to tell them anything. Hell, I forbid it. You say you love me? Well, that’s too little too late, given that you’ve spent the past couple of years proving otherwise. So prove it now. Don’t tell them a damn thing.”

“Sara, listen—”

“Stop it!” Heart thudding sickly in her chest, she rounded on him, moving in and getting in his face, keeping the attention centered on their fight, knowing they didn’t have much more time before the guards broke it up. Almost screaming now, hoping the flare in his eyes meant that he’d caught on, she railed, “And don’t you dare say you love me now.”

He took a step back, face blanking as he jostled against his guard. “Look, sweetheart, I didn’t mean—
get down!”
Breaking off, he spun on his guard and went for the autopistol.

Sara flung herself flat and scrambled behind the big machine as shouts rang out and men grappled. Only then did it occur to her that she’d taken shelter behind a really big bomb. She didn’t know what would trigger it, hoped it wasn’t twitchy.

“Don’t shoot!” Jane snapped, apparently thinking the same thing. “Not in here.”

The guards piled on Romo, punching and kicking, while Jane and Lee Mawadi broke for the door. Al-Jihad, though, headed straight for Sara. Or rather, straight for the bomb.

She saw the mad fury in his eyes, along with a calm fatality that scared her far more than almost anything else she’d seen or experienced in her life. Once before, when she’d been unable to avoid hearing her friends talking about the case, Fax had said, “There’s nothing more dangerous than a true believer.” She hadn’t gotten it at the time. Now she understood.

Al-Jihad was not only willing to kill thousands of Americans on behalf of his cause. He was willing to die for it himself, and thought he was doing what was right and just.

His eyes met hers as he reached for a keypad inset into the side of the device. She saw in his expression, disconcertingly, a profound and gentle sadness. He tapped a couple of keys, and a subsonic whine began.

He was going to kill them all.

“No!” Sara lunged out from behind the machine and slammed into al-Jihad, sending him staggering a few steps back.

Taller and bigger than she by far, the terrorist leader bellowed and grabbed her, tossing her aside. She hit the wall hard and slid down it. Dazed, she heard gunshots out in the hallway, and a commotion.

Romo roared her name and fought his way toward her. Dragging her up, he gripped her tight for a moment, his
skin hot against hers. Then he pushed her at someone else. “Take her. Get her out of here. Get
everyone
out of here!”

Her head cleared as someone grabbed her and started hustling her away. She saw the guards motionless on the ground, one bleeding, saw Lee Mawadi hissing and spitting, struggling as a tall, gray-eyed man in a suit and Kevlar cuffed him roughly, his face etched with hatred. Jane Doe, unconscious and handcuffed, was being hauled out over the shoulder of a big man in SWAT gear.

The cavalry had arrived, Sara realized, and they were in mop-up-and-retreat mode. Which meant they thought the bomb was going to go off.

Yet Romo was staying behind.

“No!” She struggled and fought, trying to get back to Romo as he lunged for al-Jihad, who had returned to the keypad.

Then she was being dragged through the door and out into the hallway and someone was shouting her name. It took a moment for that to penetrate, another for her to focus and recognize the man who held her.

“Fax!” She gripped his forearms, saw him wince. “What are you doing here?”

“Your boyfriend finally wised up and called in a favor.” Fax looked to where the others were hustling Jane Doe and Mawadi out of the tunnel system under a six-man guard. Gunfire barked intermittently in the distance, and she heard shouts and screams. “We got here just ahead of O’Reilly, and made a few adjustments to his plan.”

“The bomb!” Sara said in horror, as the door to the bomb room swung shut and locked.
“Romo!”

“Go!” Fax shoved her after the others. “Get out of here. I’ll help him.”

She wavered, knowing she couldn’t help, but needing to be there, wanting, crazily, to be with him if the worst happened. “I don’t—”

“Trust me,” Fax said stolidly. His eyes darkened. “If you can’t do that, then trust him. If anything happens to you that could’ve been prevented, dead or alive he’ll never forgive himself.”

She looked at Fax. “I thought you didn’t like him.”

“I don’t have to like him. You’re the one he’s in love with.”

Romo had said the words only moments earlier, and she’d tucked them next to her heart. Now, hearing it again, even from an outside source, the words expanded into a burgeoning warmth that suffused her, flowing through her on a burst of belief. “Yes,” she said, a smile touching her lips. “I am.” She sucked in a deep breath, pulled herself together and nodded. “I’m going. You help him.”

She took off, and she didn’t look back. She had to trust Romo, trust Fax, to bring down the terror leader who had kept Bear Claw locked in a state of suspended panic for nearly a year.

As she fled the tunnels, she passed other operatives coming in. One made a grab for her, no doubt because she was wearing the tan uniform shirt, but a woman’s voice called, “Don’t, she’s with us!” Then Chelsea was there, short and curvy as ever, but these days wearing Kevlar and a tense, businesslike expression. Sara’s former assistant waded toward her, grabbed her and pulled her outside, into the light of day, where the sun
still shone down from a perfect blue sky, despite the danger down below.

“Romo’s still in there.” Sara gripped her friend’s arms. “Fax is with him! We have to—”

“We have to let them do their jobs,” Chelsea said, but her eyes were full of fear and anguish.

A gray-haired man Sara guessed was O’Reilly stood just outside the tunnel mouth, shouting orders. Vehicles were headed away from the site, undoubtedly racing to get outside the blast radius. Sara and Chelsea, though, looked at each other and stayed put, Chelsea shaking her head in a firm negative when O’Reilly sent a glare in their direction.

They were waiting for the men they loved, Sara thought, realizing that the word really, truly applied to her for the first time. She loved Romo. She didn’t want to live without him. Been there, done that. More importantly, she believed in him, and in Fax. She believed, maybe for the first time, in love.

Fax and Chelsea had met because of al-Jihad. Sara and Romo had been separated because of him. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—believe it would end because of the terrorist leader.

Please,
she thought in a prayerful moment, tightening her fingers on Chelsea’s as the minutes ticked down and the activity at the tunnel mouth stilled. Nearby, terse reports filtered to O’Reilly’s radio, noting that the new warden and his henchmen had been taken into custody, and the digging party poised to break through into the prison confines had been stopped and subdued. Helicopters lifted off on the other side of the low moun
tain, bearing the agents and terrorists wounded in the skirmish.

Then there was a flurry of activity at the tunnel mouth. Sara’s heart leaped at the sight of two bedraggled men, one wearing Kevlar, the other a tan uniform shirt, emerge from the tunnel, dragging the limp form of al-Jihad between them.

“Romo!” she cried, with Chelsea only seconds behind her, shouting Fax’s name. The women broke and ran to their men as a cheer went up at the sight of al-Jihad, recaptured at long last.

Bodies jammed the tunnel entrance as O’Reilly’s trusted agents took control of al-Jihad, escorting him to a nearby vehicle under heavy guard. Sara was dimly aware that two other vehicles held Jane Doe and Lee Mawadi, while knots of tan-clad men, with a sprinkling of women, were being held within rings of armed agents, each overseen by a key member of the task force.

Those were peripheral inputs, though, far secondary to Sara’s focus on the tall, dark-haired man who had moved to the edge of the scrum, gladly relinquishing control of his prisoner. He wasn’t at the edge of the crowd because he didn’t belong, though. Not anymore. No, he’d worked his way free because he was anxiously scanning, looking for someone. Looking, Sara knew, for her.

She called his name, but her words were lost in the din. Chelsea dove into the crowd, headed for Fax, and Sara angled to the edge, toward Romo.

He saw her and went still, his eyes locked on her.

She hesitated fractionally, unable to read his expres
sion, which was somehow simultaneously fierce and gentle, angry and elated. As he moved to close the distance between them, anxiety rose from deep within her—old fears, old insecurities. Not about his commitment to her—she was finally past that, finally believed that he wouldn’t just stay faithful to her, he wouldn’t just die for her, he’d live for her, too. But about her own ability to make a long-term relationship work.

Then he reached her and they finally stood opposite each other, close enough to touch, as the chaos of the official response ebbed and flowed around them, somehow yielding an island of calm in the middle of the craziness.

“It’s over,” he said. “Thank God it’s finally over.”

“I trust you’re referring to al-Jihad’s reign of terror in Bear Claw, and not us,” she said, her stomach knotted on the utter certainty that it was now or never for them.

Heat flared in the depths of Romo’s eyes and he moved closer, seemed to grow larger, until he blocked out everything else around them with his presence, and with the certainty in his expression. “We are most definitely not over,” he said, then paused with a quirk of one eyebrow, as though daring her to argue.