by Tara Janzen
“Not the details, but when we made love, it came to me that we’d done it before—you and me—and given how long ago it must have been, that there was a good chance you never heard from me again.”
The color across her cheeks deepened.
“I’m sorry, Jane.” And he was, that he could have hurt her unintentionally. Or maybe he had been a one-night-stand kind of guy back then. He really didn’t know.
But he knew what he felt now. He knew what he wanted now.
“Give me a week, Jane,” he said, looking down into her eyes. “No matter who I am, or who I turn out to be, I want a chance with you, to see what we can be together.”
He’d never spoken truer words, and after a long moment, she seemed to believe him.
“One week,” she said, and a measure of tension slipped away from him.
Everything was good. It was all good.
She was at least half in love with him. He could tell, and so help him, he needed that. It was a good place to start. He needed someone who took him for what he was more than whoever he turned out to be. He needed this beautiful girl to be his.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Two weeks later, 738 Steele Street
“Here’s your bone dope,” Buck Grant said, tossing a classified folder onto Dylan’s desk. “As usual, we’re about a light-year and a half ahead of the dweebs in the lab, but they’ve finally confirmed that it’s not J.T. in that grave. The most the agency will give us is that the man we buried went by the code name Gator.”
Dylan lifted his gaze to the man standing at the window watching the street.
“Danny Gleason,” the man said without turning around. “He was part of a black ops team working for the CIA out of Coveñas.”
“How much of your memory have you gotten back?” Grant asked.
“Enough to know you got that limp eight years ago in Afghanistan,” J.T. said, and looked over his shoulder. “Good morning, Buck.”
A flush of some emotion washed across the general’s face, but Dylan would have been hard-pressed to define it. Relief, for sure, a serious measure of personal redemption for not having lost J.T., to have not “left one of his own behind,” and a good dose of pride that his boy had made it back, mentally and physically, from the hairiest mission to ever consume the team: the six years of J.T.’s capture and amnesia. Dr. Brandt had brought Gillian back from that brink, and from what Dylan had seen this morning, the doc was achieving those same stellar results with J.T. in record time. J.T. had made significant progress since the grueling debriefing they’d all had in the days after his release from the hospital.
“I heard Brandt was sending you back to us this morning,” Grant said. “When are you going to be ready to get back in the game?”
“I was born ready,” J.T. said with a shit-eating grin curving his mouth.
Stellar results, Dylan thought.
“Good. We’ve got a mail drop three hundred miles north of Riyadh. I need delivery next week, Thursday.”
“Interesting country up there,” J.T. said.
“Yeah, Hawkins loves it, so you’ll be in good company. The two of you need to be in and out in three days. We’ll have our briefing at fifteen hundred hours here in Dylan’s office.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dylan knew J.T. hadn’t remembered everything about Steele Street, but he hadn’t forgotten anything about being a spec ops warrior. If anything, his years on the run as Conroy Farrel had sharpened his edges and made him even better than he’d been before—and he’d been one of the very best.
Dylan was damn glad to have him back on the team, damn glad to have him home.
“How’s your girl, Jane?” Grant asked, and J.T.’s grin broadened into a true smile.
“Still with me.”
“Glad to hear it, son.” Their eyes met for a moment, then Grant cleared his throat. “Well, I’ve got a lunch date down at that fish shack Loretta loves so much.”
“McCormick’s?” Dylan said, naming one of the city’s premier restaurants.
“Yep,” Grant said. “That’s the one. I’ll see you all back here at fifteen hundred.”
J.T. watched the general leave before turning back to Dylan.
“You okay?” the boss asked—and Dylan was the boss. The fact had been proven to him many times over the last two weeks. Dylan was also his friend, and that fact had also been proven to him many times over the last two weeks.
“Yeah. I’ve got a date, too. Upstairs.”
Dylan nodded. “He and Creed got in late last night. I’m sure he’s waiting for you.”
J.T. was sure of it, too. Everybody here was waiting for him. He’d seen it in all of their faces at the debriefing, which had been a very formal, very tough two days with very little personal interaction.
Dr. Brandt had been watching him like a hawk through the whole ordeal, even preempting General Grant a few times—but nobody had been watching him harder than the chop shop boys. Curiosity, anger, hope, distrust, love, confusion, more hope: He’d seen it in all of their faces. They knew what they’d lost. They just weren’t sure what they’d gotten back.
Neither was he. Being J. T. Chronopolous was still pretty damn new.
The elevator shaft had been repaired, and in a few minutes, he was on the twelfth floor, standing in the middle of what had once been his loft.
He slowly circled around. The place was oddly amazing. He hadn’t known surfboards could be made into wall art, or that snowboards could be made into chairs. One wall of the living area was loaded with racks of skis, cross-country skis, downhill skills, twin tips, a few pairs and sizes of each style. Four bicycles were taking up some of the floor space in the dining room, and four more bicycles were suspended from the ceiling in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows facing the east side of the building.
There was a kayak stuffed behind the couch, ski boots and poles piled here and there, a full-rig climbing harness and bivouac draped across one of the living room walls, and of all things, a life-size painting of a naked man hanging above a large fireplace.
He knew the man.
The guy looked a lot like him, only years younger, and he was sitting in one of the chairs flanking the fireplace, calmly waiting while J.T. looked around.
“So you like to ski,” he finally said.
“You do, too,” the younger man said. “You’re the one who taught me.”
Probably. Sure. That made sense.
“Where did we like to go?” he asked. He was getting his memory back, but there were still plenty of blank spots here and there, some of them damn big.
“A-Basin, the steep and deep, and Vasquez at Mary Jane. Between the two of us, we’ve launched off the gnarliest double black diamonds in the state.”
Yeah, he could see it. A small grin curved the corner of his mouth.
“And lived to tell the tale,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the younger man.
“Or some version thereof, usually embellished,” Kid said with a slight grin of his own, his dark-eyed gaze meeting J.T.’s across the length of the living area.
J.T.’s smile faded.
“I remember you,” he said. “But not the way I wished I did.” So help him God, he didn’t, even with his own face staring right back at him.
“Don’t worry. We’ll just take it slow and see what comes up,” Kid said. “It’s early yet. Hang around long enough, and I guarantee I’ll do something to piss you off, and then it’ll all come back to you, what a pain in the ass I am. By the time you remember me, I’ll probably be wishing you didn’t remember quite so much.”
“Yeah,” J.T. said, and looked away, out the huge expanse of windows fronting the loft. Over the last week, he’d spent hours going over every aspect of his life for the last six years with Dylan and Hawkins. In return, along with Zach, they’d told him his life story eight ways from Sunday, all the known facts, all the dates, everything except the missions. Those would remain classified until he could tell them what, when, and w
here they’d all done their jobs for the eight years before he and Creed Rivera had been ambushed in Colombia—if he ever could.
With Dr. Brandt’s help, he was looking for memories of his life, doing regressions, using relaxation techniques, and taking a meticulously charted series of cutting-edge medicines, psychopharmaceuticals created by Dr. Brandt to counteract and mitigate Dr. Souk’s drugs. They’d helped Red Dog get back nearly a hundred percent of her memory, and Brandt was optimistic that they could help J.T. regain his whole life, too.
But while he was looking for memories, he knew other members of the SDF team had a few they wished they didn’t, especially Kid and Creed. They’d witnessed the brutality of his “death” firsthand, Creed in the rebel’s camp and Kid when he’d gone down to Colombia to recover his brother’s bones.
“I heard about you in Bangkok,” he said, “through the grapevine, about this guy named Kid Chaos and the run he made through South America a few years back.”
The young guy acknowledged the accolade with a slight nod of his head, accepting the praise with as much subtlety as J.T. had used to deliver it. Kid Chaos was a legend among the world’s most elite soldiers. His mission to avenge his brother’s death, and the consequent destruction of a whole cadre of narco-guerrillas from Colombia, was a story told on bases and in bars around the world.
Now J.T. knew he’d been part of that story, and that felt so damn odd.
“I’m sorry about what you went through on my account,” he said, wishing like hell that he had more to offer. From everything he’d been told, starting with the firebombing of the cantina where Kid had been waiting to take his brother’s body home, to the deadly deeds in South America, it had been a miracle the guy hadn’t been killed himself.
“You can make it up to me,” Kid said, and when J.T. looked, he was grinning again, a real shit-eating curve of nothing-but-trouble. It was amazing. Kid Chaos Chronopolous had dimples, just like J.T., and a helluva lot of sheer guts, just like J.T.
“If we both live long enough,” he agreed, hoping like hell that they did.
“Whatever it takes.” Kid’s gaze was steady, his voice calm. “One way or another, we’ll get it done.”
Looking at him, J.T. could believe it. Kid wasn’t like Jack Traeger, who had whisked Scout off to Paris and hadn’t shown any signs of coming back anytime too soon. Kid was older, without a wild streak anywhere in him. He wasn’t a loose cannon. The guy was solid, absolutely calm, absolutely assured, and J.T. was damned proud of him, whether he remembered having a reason to be or not.
The guy inspired confidence.
J.T. shifted his attention to the painting over the fireplace. “So your wife paints naked men.”
What else was there to say when you were looking at a guy spread out over eight feet of canvas, wearing nothing but a pair of wings and looking like he had been personally infused by the hand of God with almighty grace?
“A lot of naked men,” Kid elaborated without a trace of self-consciousness that J.T. could detect. “She even painted you.”
Oh, hell, no.
J.T. turned to face him.
“You’re kidding, right?” he said, then remembered Jane had told him the same thing.
Kid shook his head, his grin returning even wider than before. “Twice life size, a dark angel with a sword. She calls it The Guardian, and you’re in wings, just like the rest of us.”
“Naked?” Jane hadn’t mentioned naked, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t so.
“Nah,” Kid said. “You and Creed both got to keep your pants on.”
He looked around the loft again, at all the gear and the great view.
“So where do we go from here?” he asked. He still wasn’t comfortable with himself and all he was trying to absorb. It made it hard to be comfortable with anyone else—except Jane. The wild girl wasn’t about memories. She was about now.
“The firing range,” Kid said without missing a beat, as if where in the hell else would a couple of guys with an afternoon on their hands go. “We got some really cool guns in last week, and nobody’s been up there yet to try them out.”
Hoo-yah, J.T. thought, because really, where else would a couple of guys go, especially guys with cool new guns to shoot?
Hours later, after a long session of gunpowder therapy and the briefing on the operation with Dylan, Hawkins, and General Grant, J.T. headed for home, which to his ever-loving pleasure was Jane’s place on Blake Street. So far, he and the Wild Thing had a damn good thing going.
The elevator door on the office floor closed, and just as he reached out to press the ground-floor button, he heard something that changed his mind. Someone else had moved onto the firing range, and he knew who.
Hell. He knew where he needed to go, and he knew it wasn’t going to be easy.
The elevator stopped on the armory floor, and J.T. took a pair of ear protection muffs off a row hanging inside the car and slipped them on. When the door opened, it was onto the range and Creed blasting away with short bursts of a customized Para-Ordnance P14.
Creed emptied two more magazines and put a fresh one in before he acknowledged J.T.’s presence with a brief glance. He slipped the gun in his shoulder rig and put a light jacket on to conceal it before he looked up again.
“We’re going for a walk,” Creed said, picking up a small backpack. “Do you have all the meds you need for the night?”
When J.T. nodded, he headed down the stairwell.
J.T. didn’t hesitate to follow him. Something about this man compelled him, more even than Kid, or Dylan, or any of the other operators of SDF. Creed Rivera was a breed apart, even in the wild bunch of Steele Street.
The sun had been down for an hour when they hit the alley, but the day’s heat was everywhere, rising off the bricks and steaming off the asphalt. They fell into an easy stride together, and J.T. didn’t think too much about where they might be going, until from one block to the next, they crossed from the busy, upscale section of historic Denver, into the railyards between Union Station and the South Platte River. From there on, the terrain took a decidedly uncivilized turn.
And so it went for hours, with Creed on point, a night march following the winding course of the river through concrete corridors and industrial wastelands, through low-end neighborhoods and natural areas where the trees grew thick and the bushes thicker.
By midnight, they’d reached the outskirts of the city—and still Creed kept leading him on, to what, J.T. didn’t have a clue. But the guy was good, easy to follow, and sure of his direction, north.
A few times Creed signaled him, alerting him to other creatures and men moving in the night and changes in their course, and the communication was seamless, so fluid. They moved well together, with far more ease than he’d ever managed with Scout or Jack. It was like slipping back into his skin.
In a small clearing with a fire ring, Creed stopped, and J.T. could tell the Jungle Boy had been there before. That maybe these long walks through the wild side of Denver to the back of beyond happened fairly frequently, and probably at night.
Creed started a fire in the stone ring, and J.T. added sticks and dried brush to the flames—and he sat down and waited.
If this was all there was, he was fine with it. The march had been a good one on a long spring night. His muscles were warm and tired, his head clear, and he liked being outside.
“I remember the guy who cut you,” Creed said, glancing up from stirring the fire with a stick. “If you want, I can tell you the story of how Kid and I tracked him to Puerto Blanco.”
“Puerto Blanco,” he said. “That’s a tough town.” Oh, yeah. He wanted to hear this. Sitting cross-legged at the side of the fire, he leaned forward—and Creed began.
“It started in Colombia, right after your funeral, when Hawkins and Kid lit out for South America. They’d gotten the go-ahead from the Defense Department, the Colombian government, and the Peruvian government to do whatever it took to get rid of the NRF rebels. So it was on
e of those no-holds-barred–type deals.”
Yeah, he knew about those. He’d been running no-holds-barred for the last six years, and he had a feeling that he’d learned a lot of what he knew from this man.
“I think we did our share of those together,” he said, watching Creed’s face in the firelight.
The Jungle Boy smiled but the expression was fleeting.
“More than our share, brother, saving the world in spite of itself most every time.”
Yeah, J.T. understood that, too. He watched Creed take something out of his pack, and he grinned when he recognized what the SDF guy had brought.
“Tobacco.”
“Honduran cigars,” Creed said. “From Danlí.”
That set him back.
“Orlando’s?” He’d smoked many Danlí cigars over the last few years. Handmade in the Honduran highlands, chanted over by Mario Sauza Orlando, the brujo who rolled them, they’d often been his first line of defense against the pain wrought by Dr. Souk’s drugs.
“I found a box of them in your house on the Tambo River, sorting through the wreckage after you and I had our little run-in down in the boathouse.” Creed handed him one of the cigars, then bit the end off another and stuck it in his mouth. “And I swore, so help me God and the Virgin Mary, that someday, somehow, someway, you and I would sit down and have a smoke together.” He pulled the stick out of the fire and lit his cigar then held it over the flames for J.T. to do the same.
After they both got their cigars going and were puffing away, Creed slipped out of his coat and rolled up one of the sleeves of his shirt, exposing the three lines of scar tissue on his upper left arm.
“Alazne?” J.T. asked, surprised. The information on the scars he bore on his left arm had been part of his debriefing with the guys, but he hadn’t expected to see the same scars on anyone else.
“No, not the witch,” Creed said, a trail of smoke escaping with his words. “Kid and I marked each other in Peru, while we were chasing the NRF.” He finished blowing out a stream of smoke. “Let me see your arm.”
J.T. complied, pushing up the sleeve on his left arm, knowing Creed wanted to see the three stripes incised into his skin, the only scars on him that hadn’t come from Dr. Souk.
