“Toby, I told you. I’m taken.”
“I don’t see a ring on your finger.”
“Look, I’m going to be nice here, all right? This is the new millennium. People don’t always wear rings to be together.”
“So, you’re not at least going to give me a shot?”
“I’ll tell you what,” she turned to Toby and feigned a smile. “How about if I introduce you to him, so you can tell him how you feel about me? And then we’ll see what happens. If you’re still standing, then I’m all yours. Deal?”
Toby was a slender man with a thin face, pointy chin, and a badly receding hairline. And it wasn’t that he was obnoxious or assertive, but Shari had learned long ago that such advancements in the workplace needed to be stopped in its tracks before momentum could be gained.
“So, what do you say?” she asked Toby. “You want to meet him or not?”
Toby swallowed. He had tried to put the moves on her by embellishing his history and, laughably so, puffed out his chest whenever he was around her in an attempt to make him appear more masculine than he really was. It didn’t work, however. And he knew it.
“I’m getting your vibes,” he finally told her.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m sure, Toby, there are plenty of women willing to be with you. I’m probably one of the few who can’t.” She maintained her artificial smile.
“Yeah, I hear you.”
After he walked off with his shoulders slumping with the crookedness of an Indian’s bow, Shari returned to her screen.
Saheem Baghdadi—perhaps a man who knew too much, she thought. And something to consider. Since she had worked with the Company as a field operative and knew the values as to what an operator did to protect his or her country, she realized that Baghdadi was a starting point for those who needed questions answered. And since he resided somewhere within the West Bank, she knew that the Mossad would deal with the situation through experimental interrogation. When the Mossad wanted answers, they got them.
Working in collusion with other intel agencies, Shari contacted numerous bureaus to apprise them of the Vatican’s findings. Some of the organizations had already made the possible link between Baghdadi and the transaction, though the probability of a connection at this point, though credible, was low. Nevertheless, the Mossad would run interference and try to locate Baghdadi and mine him for all the worth they could get.
Now that the wheels were in motion on a global scale, Shari continued to track down the trail of Ahmed Jaziri’s transfer of funds. Surely, five hundred million had to leave an imprint somewhere. But when she failed to register a cyber foot- of fingerprint like other agencies, she focused on Jaziri, the Yemen financier.
She studied his history and his alleged atrocities, such as the bombings of Jibla Hospital, the U.S.S. Cole, the Limburg Attack, the attack on the U.S. Embassy and many more. But Ahmed Jaziri was a faceless enemy, or perhaps the enemy with too many faces, depending on how one looked at the situation. In some of the photos his beard appeared either too short or too long, even when the photos were taken hours apart, meaning that the man changed beard styles like women changed wigs. And with the hat and sunglasses, recognition photos were hard to come by. The man was a true chameleon whose lifestyle was just as complex and mysterious, the man entering a surveyed scene and then disappearing, like magic, from the eyes of those who were watching him.
There was no known address.
There was no known IP address that could be traced.
There were no known associates outside of a few, with the Bangladeshi one of them. But like Jaziri, the Bangladeshi was just as elusive and just as invisible. Both men were like trying to catch smoke within the grip of a closing hand.
As the hours came and went, as Toby passed her cubicle many times hoping that she would initiate a conversation, the sky outside her window grew dark. Rome, at night, was absolutely gorgeous, she considered.
And romantic.
Sending off notes regarding Jaziri to colluding agencies through encrypted and protected lines, Shari grabbed her light jacket, her purse, and left the consulate. What she didn’t know, however, was that she was under the keen observation of spying eyes who watched from afar.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Outside the U.S. Embassy, Rome
In a parked car approximately fifty yards from the Palazzo Margherita, two men were surveying a woman who had exited the main entryway of the consulate, this being their second night in a row of observation. She was athletically built, pretty, and she walked with fluid grace. As she started west, the passenger in the vehicle wrote down the time of her exit: 6:12 p.m. When she started to put distance between them, the driver started the sedan and began to pull forward to keep pace.
Shonn McKinley shook his head after penning the time into a small book. “Why don’t we just take her now instead of doing all this cloak-and-dagger crap.”
“Antle operates under the command of her handler, whoever that may be,” answered Mannix, as he continued to drive slowly with the purpose of not being spied by the mark. “If we take her now and the timing for whatever reason isn’t precise, the last thing we need is to engage the Vatican Knights. Take notes and let the plan develop.”
McKinley remained silent for a long moment before saying, “We can take the Vatican Knights. I don’t know why she’s so afraid to put her foot forward.”
“She’s not afraid. She’s being cautious. She was there when her D.C. program was taken out. Her mistake was that she believed too much in her team—that they could withstand any assault from any specialized force. But the Vatican Knights
