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“Come on, come on, come on,” Rhett whispered urgently, his trembling fingers barely able to pinch the touchpad to zoom in on the van’s license plate. It took a couple of tries, but finally he got a clear-enough image to read the plate.
It was a Maryland registration. Within moments Rhett was in the Maryland Department of Motor Vehicles database. He typed in the license plate number, punched the ENTER key, then curled his fingers into claws poised above his keyboard like an anxious panther waiting to pounce.
The search came back with a generic-sounding name of some maintenance company in Baltimore. Rhett took a screenshot of the address, printed out a copy, then sat back and tapped his chin.
Vargas wasn’t going to be anywhere near that address, of course. The guy had been Mexican Special Forces in his younger days, before moving to the infamous Zetas. The Maryland maintenance business was probably legitimate—hell, maybe even the job was legitimate through some of Vargas’s connections in the States.
It wouldn’t be a straight line from the van registration to the elusive Vargas. But the guy was on the map now. Rhett had turned up a solid lead and a recent photograph. Even the bumbling FBI would be able to track him down in days with this kind of information. Maybe faster, now that the NSA had those supercomputers that combined all traffic-cam footage from around the country, used automated image-recognition to read the license-plate numbers from the footage, then ran highly sophisticated Artificial Intelligence programs to give almost real-time locations for any vehicle’s last-known position.
Hell, with that new tech the FBI could track down Vargas inhours, not days.
And shit, Rhett had access to NSA search from his basement setup, didn’t he?
He could find Diego Vargas right now if he wanted!
Rhett exhaled hard, trying to catch his breath after the rush of almost euphoric excitement. His mind spun into high gear, calculating if this sudden breakthrough changed things with the O’Donnell thing.
At first Rhett was tempted to immediately put out an alert, get the FBI on it, then make sure Senator Robinson knew it was Rhett’s work that got the bust. That would certainly buy Rhett some serious brownie-points with the Senator and his wife—after all, he’d just gotten their entire family out of mortal danger!
But Rhett held off on the alert.
Some instinct told him to keep this to himself right now.
Vargas didn’t know he’d been made. And the Senator and his family were out of town campaigning for the primaries, so there was no immediate danger. Rhett could sit on it for now, see how this O’Donnell thing played out.
Because maybe Vargas would come in handy if Robinson did need to be taken off the board, assassinated just like Diego wanted.
Rhett now had the wildcard in his pocket, the joker up his sleeve.
“It’s all coming together,” Rhett muttered, rubbing his temples, his eyes wide with adrenalized excitement. He’d experienced this strange confluence of breakthroughs before on missions—not often, but enough to recognize the shiver of serendipity, the chill of coincidence. It usually meant things were turning in his direction—but at the same time Rhett couldn’t rush it, needed to wait and see if any other pieces of this puzzle clicked into place.
Other pieces like . . . Scarlet, perhaps?
Oh, hell, wouldn’tthatbe a gift from the gods if Scarlet’s name popped back into the NOC database now, signaling that O’Donnell was dead and done. It would still be a roll of the dice going to Robinson, but this time the dice would be loaded in Rhett’s favor. Diego Vargas would be a trump card that Rhett could play if things weren’t going his way in the he-said-she-said with Robinson. He could hold on to it until the very end, use it to either make himself look good and swing Robinson’s opinion, or else keep it a secret to be used later in case Robinson needed to be eliminated.
The pieces were lined up now, Rhett thought with almost frenzied anticipation as he checked into the NOC database once more, scanned the list with burning eyes for Scarlet's name, that oddly coincidental name that still tickled something in Rhett’s brain.
No Scarlet.
“Fuck!” Rhett shouted, refreshing the screen twice more and then pushing the laptop away. He took a harsh breath, rubbed his face, exhaled hard. His heart hammered in his chest as that name spun through his mind again, triggering that same nagging sense like there was something he might be missing here too. Too many coincidences, all of them popping up together.
Just around the time Benson had popped up again.
He pushed his chair away from the desk, stood and stretched again, then strode back to his whiteboard diagram. He wrote the names BENSON and SCARLET in red ink, then stepped back and zoomed out.
But although his eyes zoomed out, his mind kept zooming in closer.
Closer on those names.
Rhett recalled that he’d immediately been suspicious of the name Scarlet when Paige mentioned it out loud. It had sounded like something Benson would plant in the NOC database just to make a point, flip his middle finger at Rhett, maybe even throw down the gauntlet with an audacious dare, a cheeky challenge.
That suspicion had faded when Paige had gone behind the scenes on her computer, worked her hacker-magic, verified that Scarlet had been in the NOC system for years, was most certainly not a recent recruit, couldn’t possibly be a last-minute trap set up by Benson—even if Benson did have access to the NOC system, which was unlikely.
But now Rhett remembered Paige saying Scarlet had been in the NOC system for decades, almost thirty years.
Just like Rhett himself.
A chill passed through him as he let his mind drift back to that time when he’d been put into the NOC database as a new agent codenamed Rhett. Benson had been tickled by the name. And wasn’t it possible Benson had recruited more than one NOC operator back then?