Crazy Wild

by Tara Janzen

  And he sure as hell didn't want the cops to see Dominika Starkova. When Dylan said clandestine, he meant clandestine, and this op was as black as they came. That meant Ms. Starkova was his. He'd found her; he'd tailed her; and he'd saved her from Reinhard Klein. By jungle law, even the urban jungle, that made her his.

  She still hadn't moved when he finally got to her, and he swore under his breath. He reached down, and in the next second found himself flat on his back, scrabbling to keep a hold on her, any kind of hold on any part of her, to keep her from getting away.

  Kee-rist. She'd kicked him. In his bad leg. Again. His frigging bad leg, and it hurt like hell with pain shooting through his knee up to his hip, not to mention how badly it hurt to fall flat on your back on a frozen slab of icy roof—for the second frigging time.

  He grabbed for her, and she rolled. He lunged, and she dodged, but with the roof slick, and her flailing on the ice, and him de-term-ined, it was a done deal, and in another couple of seconds he had her firmly under him, a squirming, Czech-swearing, very angry woman.

  And that was his problem. She was a woman. He would have done whatever it took to put a man down, but he didn't have it in him to hit her. He didn't. No matter how many nuclear warheads she was selling. Not after he'd kissed her.

  And if he was going to get any stupider tonight, he didn't want to know it. Not right now.

  Using his weight to hold her down, he reached in his coat pocket and pulled out a flex cuff. In one smooth move, he had her wrists bound, which pushed her over the edge of angry into ballistic. He didn't know what language she was chewing him up in, but it sounded like she'd gone beyond just Czech, maybe into Russian with a little German on the side. He was reaching for another cuff to do her ankles when the stairwell door slammed open.

  Time was up.

  With a superhuman effort, he hauled both of them to their feet and slung her over his shoulder, capturing her legs with his arm and completely ignoring the searing pain that shot up into his hip. Behind him, he heard men coming out onto the roof.

  Taking off at a limping run, he headed for the north side of the building and the ladder rail he'd seen curving up over the edge. There was no way to the street from the new library roof except down the stairwell and through the building, but the old library was a warren inside and out, including the roof, and it butted up against the new library. All he had to do was climb down two floors on the outside of the building, clinging like a limpet to a frozen ladder—without dropping her.

  Piece of cake.

  C HAPTER

  6

  W HO IS THIS GUY? The question tore around Cody's brain as she hung upside down over his shoulder, staring death in its cold, dark, ugly face. Two stories of sheer emptiness gaped below her, a swirling vortex of wind-driven snow spiraling down into a visually fathomless abyss.

  An abyss—and he wasn't holding on to her. Not at all.

  He was holding on to the ladder, leaving her balanced—balanced—on his shoulder like a bag of feed.

  She had a hold on him, though. Oh, God, did she have a hold on him. Her frozen fingers gripped his coat with every ounce of strength she had left—which wasn't much. She couldn't see the old library below them, but she knew it was there, and despite her desperate desire to reach it in one piece, it was the last place she wanted to go with anybody involved with the warhead.

  How long had he been following her? Days? Ever since she'd arrived in Denver?

  Long enough to know what she'd done?

  No, she told herself. She would have seen him if he'd been following her around while she worked, especially in the old library. He was impossible to miss. Every librarian and research assistant on the third floor had noticed him the moment he'd gotten off the escalator. The newspapers had been straightened so many times tonight, there wasn't a page left out of place, not even in The New York Times. There was no way he could have been following her without her knowing. In Prague, by necessity, she'd become an expert at watching her back, because there had always been somebody there, watching her, guarding her, keeping her from escaping—except once, and once had been enough.

  He slipped on a rung, and her heart, which was already lodged in her throat, stopped for a long, painful second until he steadied himself.

  So help her God, it was a long way down. Even squinting against the snow, she couldn't see the roof of the old library, and suddenly she was filled with an unreasonable panic that the building had disappeared. That it simply wasn't there anymore, and they would climb forever—or until she fell, whichever came first.

  She started to tremble deep down inside, her body shaking, and a strong arm immediately went around her legs—which meant he had only one hand left on the ladder, which didn't really help.

  “I'm not going to let you fall,” he said, his voice rough-edged, but calm. She didn't feel calm. She felt scraped and frozen and raw. Fifteen minutes ago she'd been calm, and warm, and gratefully going about her job. Fifteen minutes ago she'd thought she was safe.

  Unexpectedly, he stepped down off the ladder to solid footing, and relief flooded through her. She hadn't died . . . yet.

  But nothing else was right. Nothing. The night had spiraled out of control—and the only thing that could keep her alive was being in control. Helplessness meant death, and the psycho-surfer had handcuffed her.

  A soft curse escaped her lips. She couldn't even control her body. She was shaking like a leaf, and the tips of her fingers were going numb.

  “Y-you, you . . . we h-have to . . .” she ground out between chattering teeth, then gave up on a long explanation and cut to the chase. “I'm f-freezing.”

  CREED heard her and knew exactly what he had to do—get them off the roof and inside. He was cold, too, freezing, and his leg hurt like a bitch. Geezus—she'd practically crippled him.

  Above them, a light cut down through the wind-driven snow and strafed the roof, crisscrossing the darkness. He glanced up; sure enough, a couple of cops were coming down the ladder, with a few more lined up along the roof ready to follow.

  Okay, it was official now. Things were going to hell. The cops were taking the situation damn seriously, and he'd bet his Chevelle's pink slip that Reinhard, Bruno, and Ernst would be waiting for them on the street, if they'd gotten out of the library.

  Something told him they had. They didn't seem like the kind of bad boys to get cornered by a few cops.

  Neither was he.

  Limping across the roof he headed into an alley of ventilation units, knowing there were a number of doors and windows that led inside. He'd been on a lot of downtown Denver roofs as a kid, messing around with his friends, hiding from the cops, and the roof of the old public library, overlooking Civic Center Park and the gold-domed capitol building, had been a favorite.

  Halfway across the roof, he found what he was looking for, a skylight with a broken latch that led into an attic, but when he opened it and looked down inside, he got a bad feeling—real bad.

  “What's going on in the old library?” he asked her. All he could feel was emptiness gaping below them in the dark.

  “R-remodel,” she chattered. “B-building an atrium, like in the n-new library.”

  As his eyes adjusted, he began to make out scaffolding along the edges, and what remained of the floor running along the walls. But it was the big hole in the middle, plunging four floors down, that kept snagging his attention. If they jumped and didn't land on what was left of the attic floor, they were looking at a thirty-foot-plus drop.

  It was a chance he was willing to take. He could handle the heat of getting busted. Even if Lieutenant Bradley wanted to lock him up and throw away the key, she wouldn't. But the Prague princess was something else. It wouldn't take the Denver Police Department long to figure out she was a case for the feds, and once the CIA got ahold of her, or the FBI got involved, her life was going to take a very bad turn—and that was a chance he wasn't willing to take, not yet.

  The woman calling herself Dominique Co
rdelia Stark had a really convincing American accent, and her school uniform in the photo he'd lifted off Bruno just happened to have the words Wichita Day School embroidered on the insignia—a little bit of information he'd been realizing, and assimilating, and shuffling around in his brain over the last few minutes. If she was Cody Stark of Wichita, Kansas, her whole Blonde-Bimbo-with-a-Bomb profile got shot right into the high-treason category, which, as he recalled, still carried a death penalty.

  Before he let the feds have her, he'd like to get the facts. He knew for sure that Dylan would want them, even before they handed her over to General Grant—and Dylan was on his way home tonight. All he had to do was hold onto her and hold everybody else off for a couple more hours.

  So it was going to be the drop into the attic. It wasn't that far, not really. With the extra flex cuffs in his pocket, he could make a rope and put her exactly where he wanted her. If it had just been him, he wouldn't have second-guessed it for a minute.

  “Okay. You're going in first, and I'll follow,” he said, lowering her off his shoulder and standing her on her feet.

  “Wh-what?” she gasped, staring at him.

  He took hold of her hands and began methodically looping one flex cuff after another together, starting with the one securing her wrists. Her skin was ice-cold, her body trembling. Cops or no cops, he had to get her off the roof.

  “I'm going to lower you over the edge and swing you toward the wall. Once I get you over the floor, I'll let go of the rope and be right behind you.”

  “N-no,” she said, giving her head a hard shake, her eyes wild. “N-no. You c-can't—”

  But he could.

  “Stay loose. Bend your knees,” he advised, then lifted her up and put her over the side.

  OH, SWEET Mary, Mother of God. Cody couldn't believe this was happening to her. She was dangling—dangling!—in the dark over an open construction site in an old building with nothing to stop her fall except a whole lot of thin air and the lunatic who was holding on to the other end of a rope he'd made out of plastic handcuffs.

  And oh, so help her God, he was starting to swing the rope. She held on tighter and gritted her teeth, because her jaw was simply locked up in anger and fear. She couldn't see anything except the faintest grid of the scaffolding, but that was because she was right on top of it. She didn't know how he could see anything. As a matter of fact, she doubted if he could see anything, which meant he was swinging her blind, and he was going to drop her blind, and she was going to die—die like a homeless dog.

  At the apex of her arc, her stomach flipped, and she thought Oh, God, I'm going to be sick, which was going to be the absolute worst thing.

  But then the real absolute worst thing happened, and she realized being sick was way off base.

  He let go of her.

  Just let go and sent her flying through the air.

  C HAPTER

  7

  T HIS IS BAD, Skeeter thought. As a matter of fact, from where she was sitting in the elegantly appointed office on the seventh floor of SDF headquarters on Steele Street in Denver's lower downtown, the situation was worse than bad. It was skirting on disaster.

  Three CIA agents were milling around the Scandinavian-designed furniture and a million dollars' worth of SDF's high-tech office equipment, and the one thing they were looking for wasn't anywhere in sight: Creed Rivera.

  They wanted his ass, and if Dylan Hart, SDF's head honcho, didn't show up pretty damn quick, she was afraid they might just get it. She'd tried to call Creed and warn him not to come home, but—typically—his phone was turned off, and he hadn't bothered to check in. In truth, he hadn't really checked in since his partner, J.T. Chronopolous, had been killed in Colombia last summer. He was checked out, way out, and in Skeeter's opinion, Dylan had been crazy to put him on tonight's stakeout of Dominika Starkova.

  She'd offered to go herself. Hell, she could do a stakeout or track somebody as well as the SDF operators, and she was a helluva lot more stable than Creed right now, which was a pretty scary turn of events as far as she was concerned. The guys were supposed to be rock-solid, and she was supposed to be the loose cannon, the spooky little wallbanger Hawkins had dragged in off the street. But she wasn't the one who woke up in a cold sweat every night, and she wasn't the one rebuilding a 1969 Chevy Nova into a 427-cubic-inch quarter-mile death machine.

  She shifted her gaze out the window overlooking the seventh-floor garage. The damn Nova was parked in the first bay, taking up a piece of prime real estate. The paint on her was so black it looked blue. Her Rally wheels gleamed in the low light. She was wicked, absolutely lethal with a zero-to-sixty mph in under four seconds—and her name was Mercy, of which she had none.

  Skeeter swore under her breath and forced herself to focus on what the head CIA agent, a man named Tony Royce, was saying.

  “If you know where he is, Ms. Bang, it would be to your advantage to quit wasting our time and just tell us.” Royce had short brown hair, pale blue eyes, and a serious personality deficit, and by her count, that was his fourth not-so-veiled threat, each and every one of them delivered in a flat monotone voice that was really starting to grate on her nerves. Of the three agents, Royce was the one playing “bad cop,” but she didn't doubt for a second that the other two had it in them. “Believe me when I tell you I am not in a mood to be screwed with tonight.”

  Yeah, she believed him all right.

  “Creed Rivera is a danger to himself and to others,” Royce gritted the words out between his teeth, standing not two feet from where she was sitting, looming over her in what she was sure he thought was an intimidating posture.

  Well, she wasn't intimidated, not in the least, but he didn't have to know that.

  She tugged on her ball cap, pulling the bill down a little lower, until it almost rested on the rims of her sunglasses. Yeah, it was dark outside, but she never went without her shades, a fact which seemed to bug the hell out of Royce. He'd asked her to remove them—twice. She shifted in her chair, crossed her legs, and noticed that while Royce didn't bat an eyelash, the youngest agent, a dark-haired, dark-eyed rookie named Mathers, quickly dropped his gaze down the length of her body, taking in her black muscle shirt with the silver lightning bolt streaking across her breasts, her waist-length platinum ponytail, her skintight black leather pants, and her sturdy pair of black lace-up work boots. She'd been about to go out and look for Creed herself when the CIA had shown up—unexpected, unannounced, and unwelcome.

  “That's his job,” she said, keeping her voice as flat as any trained CIA agent. “To be dangerous.”

  “I know he's been highly trained to be a danger to others, to our country's enemies,” Royce agreed. “But there are limits even in that arena. We all operate under certain rules of engagement, even in extreme situations, and Creed Rivera has overstepped those rules. We feel certain he'll do it again. He's not to be trusted, Ms. Bang, not by anyone. To put it bluntly, he's a danger even to you.”

  And that's where Agent Royce was wrong. No matter how many evaluations he'd read on Creed Rivera, he didn't know SDF's jungle boy the way she did. The only person Skeeter worried about Creed hurting was himself.

  “I've seen your file . . . Skeeter, isn't it? Trying to protect him is just another bad choice in a life full of bad choices,” Royce said, his voice losing its monotone in favor of a thick dose of condescension. “Do yourself a favor and help us out here.”

  God, she hated the CIA. If Dylan hadn't told her to let them in, she wouldn't have, not on a bet. And if Royce had seen her file, he knew she was a helluva lot older than she looked, twenty as of last summer, but he was still treating her like she was twelve. It was her face. Despite her five feet eight inches of height, she had one of those too-cute button noses and the kind of soft little cheeks that most people outgrew by the time they hit their teens. But not her. Oh, no. She was kicking twenty-one in the back and still had a baby face. Instead of the riot girl she was, she sometimes looked like a freakin' fairy princess
, even in black leather.

  “You saw the pictures,” he said, and then, just to drive his point home, he picked a stack of photos up off the desk and dropped them into her lap.

  She didn't need to look; she'd seen them. But her gaze dropped anyway—and there was Pablo Castano, looking pretty rough with his throat cut, the ground around him dark with his blood.

  It was bad, but Castano's death had been deemed justice by three governments who had paid for him and Garcia to die. She'd read the reports. Neither Creed nor Kid had left anything out. Royce had to know the facts of the mission as well as she did, probably better. He was in the same business.

  She picked the photos up and slowly flipped through them, one by one. They hadn't improved in the twenty minutes since Royce had first pulled them out. Kid and Creed had left a mess on that mountainside—and a message that had run the length of South America and gotten all the way back to the Department of Defense of los asesinos fantasmas, the ghost killers. Somehow, in the jungles of Colombia and in the mountains of Peru, in people's minds, Hawkins and Creed and Kid had become the vengeful reincarnations of Kid's brother, their sole purpose to bring death to everyone with the American soldier's blood on their hands.

  And so it had come to pass. All the NRF rebels who had tortured J.T. to his death had been killed. None was left alive. The U.S. Department of Defense had ordered the deaths, and the CIA hadn't been too bothered by any of them—not until tonight, when Creed had suddenly gotten orders to stake out Dominika Starkova and pick her up. He hadn't been gone two hours before the CIA had shown up.