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Rhett himself couldn’t care less. Robinson was a means to an end, a cog in the wheel of Rhett’s own ambition. The Senator was powerful, popular, and held serious sway over the CIA—enough reason to curry the man’s favor using every trick in the book.
And Rhett had written the damn book on cozying up to powerful men and women. He’d been working the Senator and his wife carefully and methodically over the past year, and both Marcus Robinson and Princess Delilah were very much under the spell of his charm.
Enough of a spell that if Scarlet did check back in after killing O’Donnell, Rhett was still tempted to roll the dice by going directly to the Senator. Rhett might get burned himself, but that was not a certainty—unlike Kaiser’s destruction, which would be assured.
Hell, even if Robinson nixed Rhett’s chance to be the next CIA Director, Rhett might salvage enough reputation and position that he’d live to fight another day, take another shot, spin up another game.
And shit, if Rhettdidfall out of the Senator’s favor, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if that guy Diego Vargas showed up and took the Senator off the board, opened up a path for Rhett to take another shot at the brass ring with some other Senator, some other Presidential candidate.
Yes, Diego Vargas was a wildcard that nobody could play yet, a joker still hidden in the deck.
Diego Vargas . . .
Wait a fucking minute.
Now suddenly something clicked inside Rhett’s brain. He blinked rapidly, almost dropping the dry-erase marker. Feverishly he paced the basement, rubbing the back of his head as the image formed in his mind’s eye, a mental photograph he’d snapped from early in that very long day, from when he’d walked from Dupont Circle to Paige’s apartment building in Georgetown.
An apartment building not so far from Senator Robinson’s townhome.
In fact you might just be able to see the Senator’s home from the top floor of Paige’s building—certainly from the roof.
Excitement surged as Rhett finally saw what he’d sensed was there all along. Some hidden piece of information that his spy-trained mind had captured and stored away in the subconscious.
Like any spy worth his salt, Rhett had developed the habit of being hyper-aware of his surroundings at all times. You trained yourself to notice everything about the people around you, always watching for stalkers or assassins, tails or tags.
You also noticed the vehicles around you.
Especially van-sized vehicles.
Like the battered white maintenance van that had been pulling out of Paige’s building parking lot just as Rhett strolled in.
A maintenance van driven by a maintenance man.
A forty-something Hispanic male with longish hair and a thickish beard.
And eyes that Rhett remembered clearly for two reasons:
One, those eyes had been scanning the surroundings like the guy had been trained to be hyper-aware—unusual for a maintenance guy going about his dreary daily routine.
Two, those eyes matched eyes from a photograph that had been circulated amongst a select few CIA men after that most recent Darkwater cover-up with theRivingtonand Northrup Capital.
A photograph of Diego Vargas.
Sure, the file-photo showed Diego clean-shaved with a military-style buzzcut. And according to Benson’s report to Kaiser, his Darkwater guy Hogan had caught a glimpse of a Zeta on board theRivingtonmatching that look. But that was months ago—enough time to change almost anything about your appearance.
Except your eyes.
It was damn hard to change the eyes.
There was always something about the eyes, Rhett thought with feverish excitement. Hell, hadn’t he read somewhere that the eyes are the only part of a newborn baby to come out almost full-sized, virtually fully-developed, all-seeing, all-knowing?
The thought seemed to hit upon something else hidden in Rhett’s subconscious, but he was too excited about this Diego Vargas thing to worry about mining any more nuggets from his unconscious right now.
He hurried back to his desk, logged back into his laptop, got into the local traffic-cams feed he’d been looking at earlier. He’d already located the traffic-cams around Paige’s building, and now he pulled up the footage from earlier that day, around when he’d been walking into the building and seen the maintenance van driving out.
It took several excruciatingly long minutes to find the right time and the correct camera angle, but when the images finally filled the screen Rhett raised his arms in triumph, punched the air in victory, almost whooped in frenzied delight.
It was Diego Vargas, no doubt about it.