by Tara Janzen
“What is that?” she asked.
“A lift,” Skeeter said. “A freight elevator. We use it to get cars off the streets and to move them between garages.”
Garages? Cody looked more closely, and sure enough, could see what looked to be black metal garage doors opening onto the lift on every floor. Ice clung to their edges and frosted their fronts, giving them a dull shine in the low light.
They passed an alley-level door with the numbers 738 above it, an iron door with bolts in a grid pattern across its face. Next to the door was an old metal sign with the word WEATHERPROOF painted across it.
“Seven thirty-eight Steele Street,” she murmured.
“Home sweet home,” Skeeter replied, then cranked the wheel hard, barely bothering to slow down as she turned the Humvee into the lit opening. They were no sooner inside than the garage door slid shut behind them, blocking out the night.
The only concession Skeeter made to being inside was to turn off her lights. She didn't slow down, just drove like a maniac through the rows of cars, until she apparently found a spot she liked and turned the Humvee in for a sudden, jarring halt.
Cody's heart was halfway to her throat, but they hadn't hit anything, and they were now stopped.
Home sweet home, indeed, she thought, looking around her at all the cars, and in at least one case, the skeleton of a car.
“What happened to that one?” she asked, nodding toward the blackened wreck. It looked melted from the inside out and charred from the outside in.
“Jeanette?” Skeeter asked, turning in her seat to see the burned-out hulk. “Jeanette the Jet gave up her life last summer in a warehouse at the old Stapleton Airport. She blew up when she hit a rack of fuel barrels. Come on, let's get you upstairs.”
From where they came out of the elevator, Skeeter directed her toward a bank of well-lit offices cantilevered half a floor up over the garage floor—a garage floor full of cars, expensive cars with gull wings, European cars, a whole row of Porsches, cars that looked like Angelina, classic muscle with big tires and probably even bigger engines.
“The CIA was visiting earlier,” Skeeter said, keeping them in the shadows on the far side of the Porsches, “not very nice guys, so it's probably best if we go in the back way and you stay out of sight, at least until I can figure out if they're still here or not.”
Cody couldn't have agreed more, but Skeeter's advice only increased her questions about who these people were, and who they really worked for—which apparently was not the CIA, thank God.
“What do you do with all of them?” she asked, gesturing with her cuffed hands at the seemingly endless expanse of automobiles.
“Drive them, fix them.” Skeeter shrugged. “Maybe race them on Saturday nights, but you didn't hear that from me. And we sell them.”
Car salesmen—right. Now Cody had heard it all.
Warmed up, she was reconsidering her options, starting to believe she actually had options. Skeeter was strong, but Cody might be faster. There was the problem of the handcuffs, but that wasn't enough to stop her. They'd come through downtown, so the library wasn't too far away, and her car was there, and she had the money Dylan had left in Creed's coat.
“Don't,” Skeeter said, guiding her up a set of back stairs.
“Don't what?”
“Don't try it.”
Was the girl reading her mind?
“Creed is big enough to stop you without hurting you, but I'd have to hurt you, and it looks to me like you've already been hurt a few times tonight.”
Definitely reading her mind.
At the top of the stairs, Skeeter opened a door onto one of the offices. It was separate from the offices Cody had seen overlooking the garage. Its only windows opened out onto the alley, not the cars. The room was exquisitely spartan, luxurious in the quality of the furniture and materials used. Two black laptop computers commandeered a center desk made out of pale beech, which matched the filing cabinets and the bookcase. There was only one chair, and it took Skeeter less than a minute to release one of Cody's hands and handcuff her to it.
“Stay put,” she said.
Can do, Cody thought, but as soon as Skeeter left the room, even though the girl didn't close the door, she opened the desk drawer and started looking for something to use as a lock pick, or a screwdriver. The drawer was incredibly tidy, like the office, but there was a letter opener. Sterling silver and gold inlay, she'd say, with a heart monogrammed on it, along with the letter H.
The trouble was the chair. The frame was one long extruded piece of bent aluminum without a screw on it, so even if she got the cushions off, she'd still be dragging around a chair frame. She had a feeling Skeeter had known that when she'd handcuffed her to it. Jiggling a paper clip in the cuffs' lock didn't get her anywhere either.
And maybe, just maybe, that isn't such a bad thing, she thought, tossing the paper clip on the desk with a sigh. No one at Steele Street was out to kill her, or torture her, and the streets of Denver were crawling with people tonight who wanted to do both.
God. Letting out another weary sigh, Cody laid her head on the desk—and that's when she saw it, the stack of photographs lying on the other side of the two laptops. There were a lot of them, all eight and a half by eleven inches, black-and-white, a little grainy from the looks of them.
Curious, she reached out and pulled the stack closer, turning it so the top photograph was right side up—and instantly wishing she hadn't.
The image hit her like a wall of painful, searing heat. Her face flushed with the force of it. Her mind balked. For a few seconds, she couldn't breathe, and then her breath left her all at once on a strained gasp.
Karlovy Vary had been a nightmare, but this . . . this was inconceivable.
There were three men, one nailed to a cross and cut open, his whole chest; another with the knife still in his hand, blood running off the blade; and the third chained on his knees in the mud, naked and bleeding from three long gashes across his upper arm and a deep cut down the side of his leg.
Her gaze skittered from one man to the next and back again, her heart racing. The killer was grinning, his nose flat and broken, his skin pockmarked, a deep, disfiguring scar running from the corner of his mouth and along his jaw. At the bottom of the page was a name, written in black ink—Pablo Castano/NRF/Colombia S.A.—and a date from last summer, in early July, digitally imprinted on the frame by the camera. The dead man was identified as J.T. Chronopoulous.
And the third man, she knew. Without even looking at the name, she knew—Creed Rivera. He was smeared with mud, his face and hair caked with it, but there was no denying who it was, and there was no denying his anguish. His pain was palpable, his mouth slack, his gaze straight ahead . . . watching, watching the other man die . . . blood and sweat running down his face and body. His shackles were thick and heavy, on both ankles and wrists, chaining him to a vehicle sunk into the mud behind him—and still he strained toward the crucified man, his muscles tight with tension, his fists clenched.
Dear Christ.
In the next picture, she could tell he was screaming. His mouth was open, his teeth bared, his expression terrifyingly fierce—his body language the epitome of frustration and rage.
She kept going, moving each picture to the bottom of the stack, held by the horror of them, like Creed, bearing witness to the inhuman deed, except it was a human deed. It was Hashemi and Akbar in Karlovy Vary, only worse, bloodier, more barbaric.
She stopped at a close-up shot of Creed and felt her heart break in a thousand different ways. Desperation marked every curve of his face, desperation and panic and agony.
This, then, was the man who had saved her. This was Creed Rivera stripped to the bone. Sweet Jesus.
It was more than she ever would have wanted to see. Creed so defenseless, so utterly destroyed. How did he bear it?
She kept sorting her way down through the stack. A new series started in color, and again there was a name, place, and date at the bottom o
f each of the pictures: Manuel Garcia/Peru S.A./December. He'd been shot between the eyes and was lying in a road. Part of a tire and the front of an automotive grill were visible in the photograph. The second photograph was more gruesome: Pablo Castano/Peru S.A./December. He was lying in the dirt, with small patches of snow caught in the sparse vegetation surrounding him—and his throat had been cut. Blood darkened the ground around his head and shoulders.
His throat cut with a knife—a sharp blade wielded with lethal skill.
She pushed the photographs away, heartsick. No one lived through that kind of an ordeal without being changed forever, down to their soul, the way Karlovy Vary had changed her.
Trying to force the horror from her mind, she looked around at the office again. The room was sparsely decorated, but every piece was exquisite, expensive. From what she could see through the open doorway, the rest of the offices were even more luxurious. And the cars—there must have been hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of cars on the lower floors, maybe millions.
Skeeter Bang was in the outer office, standing in front of a bank of computers, actually working two keyboards at once, with no sign of the CIA, or anybody else for that matter, in sight, and for that Cody was grateful.
Despite her youth and her appearance, Skeeter and the man in South Morrison had sounded like a team. He'd treated her like an equal.
She was definitely one for the books with her leather pants, fur-lined black jacket, ball cap, sunglasses, and lightning-bolt T-shirt. The fur looked like sable, very expensive. She had a sheathed knife on her hip and was wearing clunky, thick-soled work boots, but even those looked designer made. She'd certainly known her way around Creed's gun.
And the attitude. Man, she had it in spades, calling the CIA “not very nice guys.” The fact that she even knew a CIA agent put her in a category most kids her age couldn't claim.
A small pain tightened in Cody's chest. Keith O'Connell had been a nice guy, smart, professional, and he'd done his best to bring her in from the cold. She'd told him everything, all about Tajikistan Discontent and her father's death while he'd been leading Sergei's men into the Tajikistan mountains, and she'd given O'Connell the names of all the buyers who had come to the house to deal with Sergei.
How much of her information had gotten through before O'Connell had been killed, she didn't have a clue. Enough, she guessed, that the CIA had shown up here, looking for her. Enough to put Creed Rivera on her trail.
She'd learned her lesson from O'Connell's death, though. Learned it well: Don't talk. Run.
Out in the main office, Skeeter grew suddenly still, her head coming up, her gaze seeming to fix on some point out in the garage. It was another full minute before Cody heard it—the sound of cold metal grinding, screeching, of cables straining and shuddering against a great weight being lifted.
The freight elevator.
C HAPTER
19
O KAY, HE WAS FREEZING his ass off, and Dylan wanted to talk about ice-cream fountains? What the hell was up with that?
Creed wrapped his arms more tightly around himself and vowed to put a little more effort into Angelina's heater, instead of spending all his time porting her heads and tuning her to within an inch of her life.
“Yeah,” Dylan said, relaxing back into the Chevelle's passenger seat as they slowly crawled up the side of 738 Steele Street in the old freight elevator. The new get-you-to-the-top-in-sixty-seconds-flat freight elevator, the one with heat, was deep into repairs. “A regular, old-fashioned soda fountain, banana splits, sundaes, milk shakes, the works.”
“I'd rather have a Scotch.”
Creed didn't want to hear about milk shakes. He'd just tagged and bagged a Taliban terrorist and gotten away from God only knew how many of the rest of them by the skin of his teeth, all on a mission where there hadn't been any clearly defined Rules of Engagement, because he wasn't supposed to have actually engaged anybody.
Hell, he'd done nothing but engage all frickin' night long.
Dylan slanted him an annoyed look. “Not everybody at Steele Street is old enough to drink.”
Yes, they were. Everyone except Skeeter.
His gaze narrowed, and he looked over at Dylan, looked very carefully. Skeeter?
He wasn't going there. No way. And Dylan shouldn't go there, either. Not Skeeter. Geezus.
“So what's the score tonight?” They'd gone over it twice already on the drive home, but Creed needed to hear it all again.
“The CIA has come up empty-handed. The Denver Police Department's finest, the lovely Lieutenant Loretta Bradley, is claiming Edmund Braun, and she picked up two Iranians in the stacks—so she's pretty damn pleased with the night so far. I think she's going to go for a Homeland Security Award or something. It's a toss-up over who's going to get the Afghans, but nobody who was after you in South Morrison is going to have time to go back and get the wounded one without getting busted.” Dylan had put a call in to Loretta, who, it seemed, was having trouble shaking the CIA agent she'd had to arm-wrestle for Edmund Braun. A dead Taliban terrorist was really going to have them at each other's throats, but Creed's money was on Lieutenant Loretta. He'd given Dylan the address to Cody Stark's apartment, and Dylan had passed it on to the good lieutenant and suggested she pass it along to the CIA to soften them up a bit. They were definitely going to want a piece of that action.
“Tony Royce is the agent who showed up at Steele Street tonight?”
Dylan nodded. “With his name written all over Dominika Starkova. He wants you to back off and turn her over.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to follow orders, which means she goes to General Grant, not the CIA.”
That sounded damn good to Creed, but there was a problem. There was always a problem. “She was in Karlovy Vary. I think she saw the whole thing; she said Reinhard Klein was there. She even offered to tell me all the details if I'd let her go and give her some spending money.”
Dylan winced at the news and brought his hand up to rub the bridge of his nose.
“Damn it,” he swore under his breath. “Keith O'Connell. So this isn't just business for the Agency, this is personal.”
“Real damn personal,” Creed confirmed. Everyone knew what had been done to O'Connell.
“She must have talked,” Dylan said, lifting his gaze to meet Creed's across the inside of the Chevelle. “O'Connell must have been trying to bring her in, and she must have talked. That's got to be where the Pentagon got the information we have about the arms buyers. Maybe the CIA is way ahead of us on this.”
“Not tonight, they aren't,” Creed said. “Because we've still got her. Right?” That's the part he'd actually needed to hear again, the only part. He needed to hear it until he saw it with his own two eyes: Cody Stark safe in SDF's headquarters at Steele Street.
“Yeah, we've got her,” Dylan said. “As of Skeeter's last call, she's still handcuffed to the chair in my office.”
“Good.” Damn good. She was out of his hands now. He could live with that, but he damn well wanted to know she was out of Klein's hands as well, and Walmann's, and everybody else's. “If she talked to O'Connell, then she was cooperating. Make sure Grant knows that when you hand her over.” Considering what was on the line, it wasn't going to buy her out of the mess she was in, but cooperation was always worth something.
Geezus. He'd kissed her. Again. What was up with him?
“And she's American?” Dylan asked. “You're sure?”
Creed nodded. “Cordelia Stark of Wichita, Kansas, but we need to double-check the details. She went to visit her father in Prague, a Dr. Dimitri Starkova, who also definitely needs to be investigated.” He lifted his hips off the seat and pulled a photo out of his back pocket. “This is her school picture.”
“Damn.” Dylan swore again and looked down at the photo. He was quiet for a second, then asked, “Are you sure this is her?”
Creed knew what he meant. There was no resemblance between the school pho
to and the picture they'd been sent of Dominika in her ass-hugging little silver dress. Neither was there much resemblance between the photo and the punked-out raver Dylan had picked up in South Morrison. Creed hadn't really had a chance to fully describe the beauty of her mousy-librarian and homeless-boy incarnations.
“It's her,” he said. “Look at the eyes and the cheekbones, forget the hair.”
Dylan studied the photograph for a moment, then glanced up. “I'll get Skeeter to morph them.”
“Sure,” Creed agreed with a shrug. “Then maybe you can take her out for a milk shake or something.”
His comment hit a wall of silence.
“Kids like milk shakes,” Dylan finally said, sounding far too defensive to be anything except defensive.
Creed hated to be the one to burst his bubble, but Dylan had obviously fallen out of the loop on this one.
“Skeeter is no kid.”
“Sure she is.”
“No,” Creed corrected him. “No, she's not. No more a kid than you were at her age. But she is Superman's baby chicken.”
“Which means?”
“Absolutely nothing, except if I was fishing for shark, I'd keep one hand on my cojónes.”
Nothing but the sound of the old elevator straining up to the seventh floor filled the ensuing silence.
“So when did you get so friggin' inscrutable?” Dylan asked after a moment.
“Three hours ago.” On the roof of the Denver Public Library. He knew it to the minute.
“Christ,” Dylan said, dropping his head back on the seat and letting out a short burst of laughter. “It's been a crazy night.”
“Fucking insane,” Creed agreed, shaking his head and fighting back a grin.
FIVE minutes later, he was in no condition to alter that statement.
He'd steeled himself all the way across the garage, parking Angelina at the far end of the seventh floor and walking the length of the bays toward the main offices—and he still felt gut-punched when he walked in and saw Cody Stark sitting in Dylan's chair, handcuffed to the frame.
