Crazy Wild

by Tara Janzen

  Oh, God. Her breath stopped. She'd been caught by—of all people—the angel-faced surfer god from the third floor, the one who'd been reading newspapers all evening.

  “Hey, watch it, buddy,” he said as Bruno pushed by them, heading toward the main doors where Reinhard was waiting, his face a mask of cold anger.

  “Geez.” The surfer guy turned back to her, meeting her gaze. Then he smiled, a blindingly white grin that flashed across his face and lit up the whole atrium. “Where've you been, huh? I've been looking all over for you,” he said, guiding her away from the escalator, his body loose and angled between her and Reinhard, every move he made as smooth as silk, so natural that for a micro-instant even she believed she knew him. “Come on. I just need one more book, and then we can get out of here.”

  Damn, damn, damn. Her mind was spinning. Who was this guy? No one from Eastern Europe. She wouldn't have forgotten him. She wouldn't have forgotten anyone who looked like him. He sounded American. He looked American, pure California beach boy, and when she'd seen him in the reading room she hadn't for a moment considered him a player. He'd been too noticeable with his sun-streaked hair falling to his shoulders, his face pretty enough for magazine fashion ads, and wearing clothes that looked like they came straight out of those ads: casual but very expensive cargo pants and hiking boots, and a fisherman's sweater, all in black. He'd been impossible to miss, and because of it, she'd dismissed him completely, and now he'd caught her—whoever the hell he was.

  Cursing herself as a fool, she fell in beside him, because with Bruno the Bull and Reinhard Klein not twenty feet away, there wasn't a damned thing else she could do, not for the next few seconds. Her only consolation was that out of all the men, the California surf angel had to be the least dangerous of the three.

  She knew what Bruno and Reinhard were capable of doing. She knew how coldly brutal they could be.

  Oh, yeah. The pretty slacker dude saggin' in the designer clothes was easily the least dangerous of the three.

  Easily.

  C HAPTER

  3

  W ELL, THIS WAS GOING pretty good, Creed thought, walking Cordelia Kaplan right past Reinhard Klein and into the fiction stacks. She was stiff as a board beside him, her face perfectly sullen, which he supposed wasn't such a bad thing for the teenaged boy she was pretending to be. Up close, though, the disguise was ridiculous, and he was disappointed in himself for buying it even for a second. True, she'd been sitting cross-legged on the floor at the older woman's feet up in nonfiction, which hadn't given him a very good look at her. He'd seen the dark hair falling over her face, cut short in back like a boy's, and a wrinkled plaid shirt she must have had on under the sweater, and in his eyes he'd seen a boy with his grandmother instead of a female tango—terrorist—dealing in deadly contraband.

  But up close, she was no more a boy than he was the King of Siam. Delicate, that's what she was. He could feel it in the shoulder beneath his hand despite the bulky sweater and old coat. Without the big glasses overwhelming her face, what had looked like a small, unremarkable nose was actually a delicate curve, a very refined curve, and her cheekbones went way beyond classic into exotic. She was Dominika Starkova, all right, and her eyes weren't brown. Up close, they were a dark mossy green.

  His gaze dropped down the length of her body, remembering the picture Dylan had sent, but there wasn't a curve in sight, not a one that he could see with her bundled up in her homeless-boy gear. Given time, she probably could have perfected her transition, looking as much a boy as she'd looked a mousy librarian, but she'd had no more than seconds.

  Damn, she'd moved fast.

  And if he wasn't mistaken, she was getting ready to move fast again. Another level of tension had stiffened her up even more, the old fight-or-flight reaction.

  “Don't,” he said, losing the friendly tone and tightening his hold on her a fraction of a degree. They had just passed out of Reinhard's line of sight. There was a service entrance on the north end of the building, and the two of them were going out of it—ASAP.

  “You've got the wrong kid, mister,” she said belligerently, trying to shrug him off.

  He wasn't having any of it. “I haven't got a kid at all, Ms. Starkova. So let's just keep a low profile until we're out of here.”

  “I don't know what you're talking about.” She started to struggle, trying to break away, but Creed just held on tighter and moved her along faster.

  Then she kicked him, got him right in his bad leg, and a little bit of his self-control snapped.

  Coming to a sudden, tight-jawed halt, he took big fistfuls of old coat and baggy sweater in his hands and hauled her up to meet his glare. Nothing but her tiptoes touched the floor.

  “Don't,” he repeated in his best I'll-eat-your-balls-for-breakfast voice. “Not if you want to get out of here alive.”

  It was a tone and an expression guaranteed to put the fear of God in whoever was on the receiving end of it—except, it seemed, Dominika Starkova.

  Rather than quail and capitulate, she wasn't even looking at him. Her gaze had slid over his shoulder.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered.

  It was the only clue he needed. He whipped his head around, saw what she saw, and wondered how in the hell the flat-faced hired gun on the west side of the hall had beaten them to the service entrance. It didn't make sense, but there he was, still looking every inch the gorilla, guarding their escape route.

  “Ernst Braun,” she continued under her breath. “Or maybe it's Edmund. I . . . I can never tell them apart.”

  Oh, shit, was more like it. “Twins?” he asked, realizing it meant there were four bad guys in the building, not just three.

  “Identical,” she said, her attention coming back to him, and for a second, as their gazes met, it occurred to him that her eyes were like a forest, a dark, richly verdant, mysterious forest, the mossy green centers flecked with the gray of mountain granite and streaked with the colors of the earth and sky.

  Sweet Jesus.

  “I can't believe he's here,” she said, and his momentary lapse came to a halt, leaving him even more unnerved—as if he needed that.

  Well, hell. There was another option, and without a word, he turned her around and headed back down the stacks, toward the far east side of the building, to the stairs. From the stairwell, it was possible to get out onto the roof, and from the roof . . . well, it was a helluva drop from the roof.

  But he'd think of something before it got to that. He always thought of something. At least he'd always thought of something up until the Colombian mission had gone bad.

  There hadn't been just one guy waiting for him and J.T. on that godforsaken jungle trail. They'd been ambushed and captured by a platoon's worth of NRF narco-guerillas, and he hadn't been able to think of anything, not once J.T. had started screaming.

  Nothing.

  There had been nothing but horror and pain—black pain, terrifying, blind horror, and a failure he would never be able to face.

  Never.

  He squeezed his free hand into a fist to stop its sudden trembling, and tightened his hold on the woman. Damn. He'd known he wasn't ready for this, ready to save anyone, let alone a woman who'd sold her soul for money and endangered everything he believed in—not when he hadn't been able to save J.T.

  It wasn't far to the stairwell from the service entrance, but only single-minded determination got him there—for all the good it did him.

  Jerking her back behind him, he swore under his breath, then glanced back around the corner to the stairwell door. Gorilla number one from the main hall had moved to cover the last base.

  “Edmund,” she whispered, looking around him.

  Edmund and Ernst—one of them had to go if he and the woman were going to get out of the library.

  A voice raised in anger with a German accent came from the direction of the service entrance, suddenly making it the least effective line of escape. Fine. Edmund's number had just come up. Creed would be damned if he
got caught between a rock and a hard place because of Dominika Starkova.

  “Come on.” He grabbed her by the arm and started forward. He had his Glock 10mm in a holster at the small of his back and Kid Chaos's pistol-gripped shotgun secured in a long pocket inside his coat. He wasn't planning on using either of them to get by Edmund Braun, any more than he was planning on using the garrote in his pants pocket or the razor-edged Randall fighting knife strapped to his ankle.

  Yeah, he was a paranoid son of a bitch, psychologically unsound. All the head-shrinkers had said so. Post-traumatic stress disorder, the last one had written in his file.

  Yeah, right, Creed had thought, not doubting the doc's diagnosis. He'd found watching the Colombians work over J.T.—fucking massacring him—yeah, well, he'd found that pretty fucking traumatically stressful.

  The Colombians had paid. They'd paid with their lives. The last one had died under Creed's knife in a lake of his own blood in the mountains of Peru, but killing him hadn't been enough.

  Nothing was ever going to be enough.

  But all Creed was going to do to old Edmund was put him down hard, and get him out of the way fast.

  Hard and fast, that's the way he and J.T. had always worked.

  A cold sweat broke out on his brow. Geezus. They'd been invincible for ten years. What in the hell had gone wrong?

  Real life. That's what had gone wrong, and he wasn't ready for it again. All he wanted was to be back at SDF's Steele Street headquarters with Skeeter, with his head under the hood of her Mustang, a sweet little pony car she'd named Babycakes—as if that was any kind of a name for a car, especially a badass GT 350.

  But ready or not, real life was waiting for him less than twenty yards away, and its name was Edmund Braun.

  CODY had made a mistake, a big one, possibly a fatal one. The surfer dude hadn't been her wisest choice. He wasn't safe. He was nuts. Six feet of crazy wild with a look in his eyes that sent a chill down her spine.

  And it had all happened so fast—the change from easygoing guy to whacko boy who was getting ready to take on Edmund Braun of the notorious Braun twins. Their reputation was the stuff of nightmares all over Eastern Europe—with good reason. She knew the stories and had made a second career of staying out of their way, out of their sight, out of any place they might be. Most of the time she'd been pretty successful, but running with Sergei Patrushev's reketiry meant running in a pretty tight circle, and their paths had crossed more than once.

  “Th-this guy, Edmund—” she began, breathless from their hell-bent march toward disaster. “I don't know what you're thinking you're going to do, but Edmund is a . . . a killer.” She couldn't say it any plainer.

  The man with the death grip on her coat, the one dragging her along faster than she could keep up with, slanted her a brief, piercing glance, and with sudden clarity, she understood exactly how much trouble she was in.

  The angel-faced surfer dude was a killer, too.

  Oh, God—just when she'd thought she was safe, she was going to die, and in the library of all places. The irony of it would have been laughable, if she'd had a laugh in her.

  She didn't, not one, and the last thing she needed in her life was more irony. She was drowning in the stuff, had been drowning in it ever since she'd defied her mother's wishes and gone looking for the father she'd never known.

  Well, she'd found him all right. Dimitri Starkova, before his recent demise, had been a professor in Prague—charming, urbane, and highly educated. In short, some of what she'd hoped her father would be. Unfortunately, he'd also turned out to be a former general in the Soviet army with a mountain of debt, close ties to the Russian Mafia, and damn little conscience. Over the planned weeks of her visit, her journey to see him had slowly turned from the trip of a lifetime into the vacation from hell, and then it had taken a turn for the worse and gone downhill from there.

  Since the night he'd died, she'd been lost, trying to juggle the realities of her father's past, the dangerous legacy he'd left her, and the very harsh realities of trying to stay alive—and it was all coming down to this: Edmund Braun was huge. The beach boy was not.

  They were eating up the distance to the stairwell door. Any second Edmund was bound to notice.

  And sure enough he did, his beady-eyed gaze turning on them, zeroing in on them, his simian features clouding up.

  It was said he'd once torn a man in half with his bare hands. Impossible, she'd thought, but three separate accounts of the deadly brawl had surfaced in Prague, with people from all sides claiming to have seen the body.

  Her gaze went to Edmund's hands, big, coarse hands, and she stumbled—but she didn't fall. The crazy man hauling her to her doom didn't let her fall.

  “Wh-what's your name?” she asked. If she was going to die with him, or die because of him, she should know his name.

  “Creed,” he said without slowing down.

  The strangeness of the name barely registered. Cody was too busy recalling another story about Edmund killing a girl with a single blow to the head. She knew that one was true. She'd known the girl.

  Ernst wasn't quite so impulsive, quite so psychotic—but it was Edmund starting toward them, his mouth set, his hands clenching into fists, ready to take on the challenge her captor was telegraphing like an air raid siren. There was absolutely no hesitation in Creed's long, forceful strides, no hesitation in the way he was dragging her with him. Except for that one brief glance, his gaze hadn't wavered from Braun's for an instant, and every inch of him was sending out one signal, loud and clear: “I'm coming down your throat, zhopa.”

  It was insane, and she was caught in the middle of it with no good end in sight. Edmund sometimes forgot himself, sometimes lost track of the big picture—in this case, it being that his boss, Reinhard, would want her alive, at least to begin with.

  God save her. The voices behind them were getting closer, and one for certain was Bruno. He wouldn't let Edmund kill her, not on the spot. Even more than Reinhard, Sergei Patrushev wanted her alive, and Bruno knew why. Sergei needed the map that would lead him into the mountains of Tajikistan, where her father had hidden one of Mother Russia's nuclear warheads.

  And so help her God, she had the map.

  She didn't want it, could barely read it, and wished to hell she'd never seen it, but she knew deep in her heart that the last thing her father had given her, a slim volume of self-published poetry titled Tajikistan Discontent, was a coded map to the warhead, and she was pretty damn sure Sergei had figured it out the same time she had. But by then, she'd slipped his noose.

  At least she'd thought she'd slipped his noose. Tonight had proven her wrong.

  “My name is Dominique Cordelia Stark. Cody Stark,” she said to the stranger, wanting him to know. If bad came to worse, he should know her real name, the one her mother would recognize in the newspapers, and it wasn't Kaplan.

  “Well, Cody Stark,” he said, not sounding like he believed her for a minute, “when I let go of you, I suggest you run like hell for the stairs. Klein has this floor covered.”

  A spark of hope ignited in her breast. He was going to let go of her. Thank God. The one thing she could do was run like hell. She just hoped the beach boy put up enough of a fight to give her a chance to escape.

  She no sooner had the thought than she felt a twinge of guilt. Edmund was going to hurt him, badly, maybe even kill him. She shot her captor a quick look and had the unbelievable thought of “what a waste.” He truly did have the face of an angel, his eyes a pale bluish gray, his brown hair streaked with gold, his face artfully carved and too pretty by half, and he was about to be mangled by a psychopathic brute.

  It was his choice, though. She'd warned him, and she had no intention of sticking around and watching Edmund beat him to a pulp.

  With less than twenty feet left between them and the German giant, Creed released her from his hold with a hissed command to run, and she obeyed, skirting a pair of study carrels and heading fast for the stairwell door.r />
  A gasp and a grunt, both sounding like they came from a cold-cocked bull elephant, preceded a crash behind her. Against every ounce of common sense and good judgment she had, she turned at the door and looked back.

  She'd expected blood and mayhem. What she hadn't expected was to see the surfer boy rising from the wreckage unharmed, and for Edmund to be sprawled across the floor, out cold.

  The California surf angel looked up and caught her gaze, and her breath stopped short. Without looking away, he reached inside his coat and withdrew a wicked looking shotgun. Then he glanced back at Edmund and, using the gun, struck him hard at the base of his skull.

  When his gaze returned to hers, a ton and a half of adrenaline drop-loaded into her system, igniting a panic so pure it damn near paralyzed her.

  He was wild. Crazy, crazy wild. It was all over his face, deep in his eyes. With a gasped breath, she wrenched the door open and took off up the stairs like the hounds of hell were after her.

  C HAPTER

  4

  H E CAUGHT HER at the second landing, his fist closing on the back of her coat and hauling her upright. Oh, God. She damn near had a heart attack.

  “Keep running,” he growled, half lifting her off her feet as he ran beside her, taking the stairs two and three at a time, making sure she kept up with him.

  Below them, the door opened with a commotion. The pack had arrived. The sound of men moving, talking, swearing, of feet pounding, filled the stairwell and spurred her on, caught between the devils behind her and the devil beside her.

  “Did . . . did you kill him?” Edmund had looked dead, lying there on the library floor.

  “Not this time,” he said, racing her across the third landing and hauling her up the next flight of stairs.

  As she ran beside him, growing more breathless and wondering how long she could keep up with him—and what he'd do when she couldn't—it occurred to her, ridiculously, that she'd probably lost her job, damn it. Of course, if she died tonight, her whole library career was going to be a moot point, which was a damned disconcerting thought.