by Tara Janzen
Disobeying Dylan was probably worth a warning skitter or two, she decided, which was why she'd taken the precaution of turning off her cell phone and the onboard computer in the Humvee. Disobeying him was one thing, getting caught was another—and she had no intention of getting caught. He hadn't precisely told her not to go to South Morrison, but that would be a damn poor defense if he ever found out.
As far as the tangos they'd been up against earlier were concerned, well, she was the one who belonged on Platte Street on a Saturday night, not them. She looked like every other girl at the party, a little Goth, a little punk, and like more than a little bit of trouble. The tangos were the ones who would stick out like sore thumbs. If they were even still in the building, she'd see them long before they saw her. Besides, there was no reason for them to be looking for an ex–street rat prowling the halls. The bunch of wild Germans and miscellaneous terrorists Creed had been after all night didn't know Skeeter Bang even existed. She didn't show up on anybody's radar. Dylan and Hawkins had made sure of that. Up until Dylan had used the title of personal secretary to describe her, even Royce had figured she was just the kid who swept out the garage.
Now she was here to sweep out South Morrison and sweep up a pair of earrings.
Creed had said he'd dropped them down a steam pipe on the fifth floor, and all the steam pipes in South Morrison eventually ended up in the boiler room in the basement. She'd start there and work her way up.
Snapping the tracker around her wrist, she hit the “on” switch and headed for the stairs.
UP on the fourth floor of North Morrison, in Cordelia Stark's apartment, one half of the group known as the Zurich 7, code name Hansel, glanced at the GPS tracking device on his wrist.
“Son of a bitch,” he said under his breath, looking over at his partner, Gretel.
“What?” The woman rose from where she'd taken a small jewelry box out of a cardboard box on the bedroom floor. It had the name Olena in gold script written across the top.
“Hashemi's tracker just came back on board.”
“Where?”
“Close,” he said. “Damn close. Like maybe back in the building we just got out of by the skin of our teeth.”
“Well, it sure as hell isn't Hashemi carrying it around. He's dead.” She opened the jewelry box, then closed it and dropped it back in the cardboard box with a short sigh. The jewelry box was empty, and they hadn't found a trace of Tajikistan Discontent, not even after tearing the dingy little apartment apart. Nothing had been overlooked or left untouched.
“Akbar said the guy who waxed Hashemi took his tracker.”
“The same guy who took down Edmund Braun and just led all of us on one big wild-goose chase?” Gretel asked, a small grin playing on her lips. “Now there's a bad boy I'd like to meet.”
“Rein in the hormones, babe. We're only assuming it's all the same guy, and the only thing we need to meet is a nuclear bomb.”
“You always did know how to show a girl a good time.” She smiled, then walked over toward the man standing by the front door. Two Denver policemen were lying on the floor near his feet. “Well, Reinhard. You've lost her.”
“We've all lost her,” Reinhard said, and Hansel watched the older man's gaze go over her from top to bottom. “She's either ditched the earrings, or they've stopped transmitting.”
“They wouldn't stop transmitting,” Gretel said. “The signal might have gotten too weak to read for some reason, but it's still there. I can guarantee it. Our best man made those earrings for Sergei to give her.”
“Your best man,” the German grouched. Reinhard Klein was made of money, and it showed. And as Sergei Patrushev's right-hand man, he held Hansel and Gretel's deal of a lifetime in his hands, but if the bastard hit on Gretel one more time, Hansel was going to clean his clock. He'd liked dealing with the guy over a secure Internet line a lot better than face-to-face—but once Dominika Starkova had flown the coop, the whole game had changed. Suddenly, he and Gretel had been forced out of their cozy Eastern European apartment, and sent front-and-center into the action.
Gretel, the wily, wonderful witch, just smiled. “We've just gotten a new lead. You're welcome to play it out with us . . . for the price of consideration.”
That was a good way to put it, Hansel thought. For the consideration of making damn sure that Sergei Patrushev blew off all the other buyers and sold his friggin' nuclear bomb to the Zurich 7—Hansel and Gretel, who were most definitely not lost babes in the woods, not when the woods involved black-market arms deals. They were the masters of the trade, and this was the deal of the century.
“Consideration?” Reinhard repeated, one aristocratic eyebrow lifting. “That you've gotten this far proves both Sergei's and my consideration.”
“We want the warhead, Reinhard, a fact we believe we've proven with our offer,” Gretel said. “No one else can meet it. Certainly not Hamas or Jemaah Islamiah. Patrushev isn't going to sell it to the Chechens and have it blow up in his backyard—and the same goes for the Taliban. The only way they'll meet his price is by partnering with al-Qaeda—and he's not that big of a fool. The Iranians didn't get out of the library, which has to make you wonder if either one of them could even pull off this deal. The Zurich 7 are the only ones you can count on to make it to the closing table and to continue to protect both your and their best interest long after the deal is done.”
“You didn't kill the policemen,” the man standing behind Reinhard Klein said.
Hansel noticed that Gretel didn't blink an eye or shift her attention away from Reinhard. Bruno Walmann could suck eggs. It would take more than he had to throw Gretel off her stride.
“Anywhere in the world,” she said, “people who kill policemen suddenly exist. They're hunted. Zurich 7 survives by not existing. We are the hunters, Mr. Klein, always—never the hunted.”
“What's your new lead?” Reinhard asked, bypassing Walmann's dissent and Gretel's barb.
“The man who killed Hashemi,” Gretel said. “We believe he's still in the building next door.”
“And Dominika?” Reinhard asked.
“We don't know for sure, but he's still our best bet for finding her.”
That was for damn sure, and Hansel had only himself to thank for being the only one with the capability of tracking not only the earrings, but the other tracking devices. It didn't pay to play in the black market arms trade without a lot of connections. There wasn't an aspect of this deal that he and Gretel hadn't brainstormed and controlled to the limit of their ability. The only thing they didn't know, the only thing Hansel was afraid nobody knew, was the location of the missing warhead.
But if he could get his hands on Dominika Starkova, it wouldn't take him long to get his hands on the book Sergei was certain contained the warhead's location.
“If you can bring me Dominika, I'll reconsider your offer,” Reinhard said, which was as close to a commitment as they'd been able to get out of the bastard in three long months. But by anybody's estimation, the deal had reached a crisis point.
Hansel caught Gretel's eye; she was smart enough not to give anything away, but he saw the satisfaction in her gaze. They weren't going to lose this game, no way in hell.
“Let's go find our lost girl, then, gentlemen,” she said, lifting her hands and gesturing for the door.
Hansel fell in behind her, stopping only to retrieve the tranquilizer darts she'd used on the cops to clear their way into the apartment.
DEEP in the bowels of South Morrison, the “lost girl” was following her nose and the tracking device through a maze of rusted out pipes and corroded machinery. The party was long behind her, but the pounding beat of the music resonated through all the metal, and she could still hear the crowd and a few people here and there above her on higher floors. South Morrison was fairly porous with all the holes in its infrastructure, walls that just weren't there anymore, big gashes in the floors and subfloors. The basement itself had turned out to be a whole helluva lot bigger than s
he'd thought—or at least it looked that way in the beam of her flashlight, like there were whole worlds lost in the shadows.
As a bonus, she was ankle-deep in rats. Beady eyes shined at her out of dark corners. The scrabbling patter of little feet rushed away in front of her, which she appreciated, but it also closed in behind her, which was definitely creeping her out. She was starting to feel a little herded.
Oh, great. Now there was a thought to give a person the heebie-jeebies—being herded by a bunch of rats to God knew what end.
She took a breath and tried to let the idea go.
There was ice on the floor in some places and standing water in others, which kind of mystified her. She was freezing her ass off. It occurred to her that the entrance to Hell might be in South Morrison's basement, with a few hot spots leaking through.
Another comforting thought.
Geez. She just needed to find the damn earrings and get out.
C HAPTER
26
S ON OF A BITCH, Dylan thought, closing the door behind Tony Royce. She hadn't come back.
Royce had gotten the call from his agent in the field and lit up like a Christmas tree. Without giving anything away, he'd grabbed Bracken and Mathers and hightailed it out of Steele Street, promising to be back.
Dylan doubted it, not tonight. There was enough stuff in the box to keep Royce busy for weeks, with the added bonus of Dominika Starkova's address, which wasn't nearly the priority it had been, because Skeeter hadn't come back. She'd had plenty of time to get home, even if she'd kept the Humvee in first gear. So if she hadn't come home, where had she gone?
He had only one answer for that, and it made his jaw tight.
He crossed over to the computers in the main office. If it had been anyone except Skeeter, he would have said no way. No one else would have so blatantly disregarded a direct order, so willingly disobeyed him, so blithely put themselves in so much danger—all for a tiny piece of electronics.
But this was Skeeter, and she knew where the electronics were, in the bottom of a steam pipe off the fifth floor in South Morrison, and he'd stupidly left her alone with the tracking device that would lead her right to them.
Except it wouldn't be that easy.
And she wasn't the only person who might be after the earrings.
He typed the Humvee's access code into the computer at the same time as he called her cell phone to tell her to get her butt home. Both procedures got him exactly nothing.
Okay. Now she was really in trouble.
He picked up the house phone and dialed the ninth floor.
Really in trouble, like trouble so deep she'd be lucky to dig herself out by the Fourth of July.
“Yo,” Creed answered—thank you very much. Dylan really hadn't wanted to have to go up there and do the bucket-of-water thing, because however skeptical he had been with Skeeter, he figured, unbelievably, that she'd called that one right. Sex with an international criminal. If he hadn't thought Creed was crazy before, he did now.
But that was a whole other set of problems.
“How's it going up there?”
“Good.”
Okay. Fine. Creed never had been very chatty.
“Dominika still under wraps?”
“Got her right here. What's up?”
You tell me is what Dylan wanted to say, but they had a bigger problem than Creed sleeping with a black-market arms dealer who was trying to sell a multimegaton nuclear warhead to the friggin' Taliban.
Jesus.
“Skeeter went after the earrings.”
Creed swore, one succinct word that pretty well summed up how Dylan felt, too.
“I'll go pick her up.”
“No,” Dylan said. “I'm going after her, but I need you down here, manning the office. If she shows up while I'm gone, I want to know it ASAP.”
“She might not be the only one who went back to South Morrison,” Creed warned him.
“I can handle it.”
“No, I—”
“I can handle it,” Dylan repeated. “And if I can't, I'll call you.” They couldn't leave Dominika Starkova, or Cody Stark, or whatever she wanted to call herself, alone in Steele Street, and they sure as hell couldn't take her with them, and he wasn't willing to turn her over to anyone else, not yet—those facts narrowed down their options to just one.
“I'll be locked and loaded.”
That's all he asked. Creed Rivera locked and loaded was more backup than most people ever needed.
“Has Ms. Starkova volunteered any useful information yet?” he asked, which was about as euphemistic as it got for “Where the fuck is the map we've been busting our asses to find all night?” SDF wasn't in the business of waiting for bad guys to “volunteer” information. They were in the business of getting information, and under normal circumstances, they got it any way they could.
“I'm on it,” Creed said.
“Good.” That's what he'd wanted to hear. He hung up the phone, and on his way out of the office, grabbed four extra magazines for his 9mm.
CREED was as into reality as the next guy, but tonight, reality was a bitch. He was sitting at the bank of computers in the main office, ready to track the Humvee or Skeeter's cell phone, whichever she turned on first, and maintaining a direct feed to General Grant's office at the Pentagon on another.
“The more information I have, the more I can help you, Cody,” he said. It was true, but he still felt like a son of a bitch asking the questions. “You've already told me you were at Karlovy Vary. Why don't you tell me what happened.”
Debriefing—now there was some harsh, cold, stark reality. He was debriefing the woman he'd just had the hottest sex of his whole life with—sex he'd had without a condom.
That was right. No condom. And how was that for some cold stark reality?
He'd flat-out forgotten to use one, but even if he'd remembered, he had a feeling he would have been out of luck.
If he'd thought about it, he could have borrowed a few condoms, he supposed. Kid probably had a couple hundred of the damn things up in his loft, but Creed had been in Kid's loft, and a person's chances of finding anything smaller than a kayak were between slim and none. Kid had only two categories of stuff: things that needed ammo, which he was obsessively careful with, and things that didn't need ammo, and if it didn't need ammo, it could be anywhere.
That would have left Dylan, and Creed could think of few things that would have lit a three-alarm blaze under the boss's butt faster than him calling down for condoms with Dominika Starkova holed up in his apartment.
Of course, it was all moot, because he hadn't remembered to take precautions until they'd hit the cold, stark reality of the SDF office—where, coincidentally, he'd hit a cold, stark wall.
She wasn't giving anything away.
Kissing someone wasn't listed anywhere in the commando interrogation manual as a verified method of softening up a detainee, but he still wanted to do it.
“Cody? Honey?”
Calling a prisoner “honey” also was not listed in the interrogation manual.
“Sweetheart?” Nada. Not listed.
He was teasing her a little with the endearments, trying to get a reaction, not that he didn't like them. She could be his sweetheart. He could see it, easy, but she hadn't looked at him since they'd walked out of the elevator, which was driving him nuts.
“Querida?” My love.
That one finally got him a flicker. Her gaze lifted to his for a fraction of a second before dropping again.
“I . . . I can't tell you anything,” she said.
“Why not? You're going to end up telling somebody everything, and it really would be for the best if you started with me.” He would protect her any way he could, and he doubted if anyone else would bother. “There might be a way out of this, Cody, but I won't know if you don't help me.”
She let out a weary sigh and finally met his gaze. “I told Keith O'Connell everything, and he ended up dead. That's not a chance I'
m willing to take with you.”
And that was good news. Sort of. In a roundabout way that didn't do him a damn bit of good. He didn't mean to brag, but he'd been freakin' unstoppable tonight. She must have noticed.
“I'm a highly trained operative of the United States government, Cody. I can take care of myself, and you, if you'll let me. Keith O'Connell was a State Department attaché who shouldn't have tried to take things as far as he did.”
“No, he wasn't,” she said, taking the misinformation bait. He felt like a jerk for doing it to her, but it looked like it was going to get them off square one. “He was CIA. If you look deeper, you'll find it. I swear. And he was also highly trained, and they hung him up by a rope and shot him until there was nothing left. I was there, and I saw it, and he was helpless, and I . . . I was useless.” She looked at him, her frustration palpable. “I tried. I begged, and they killed him anyway, and they kept killing him, over and over and over.”
Well, for someone who wasn't going to tell him anything, she'd just said a mouthful—and he'd just fallen into déjà vu quicksand. He knew all about being helpless and useless.
“Who shot him, Cody?” He needed names.
She shook her head, her frustration turning to anger. “Don't make me do this. I don't want you hurt.”
“You're on home ground, now, with the full power of the U.S. government on your side. If you give me something to work with, we can stop them cold.” He believed it, because that's what he'd been doing for the last ten years, stopping the bad guys cold, without question, except for one godawful failure in Colombia. “If you tell me everything, and I mean everything, maybe we can walk away from this together.”
“You can walk away now, and that's exactly what you should do.”
God, she could be stubborn.
But he no longer believed she could be a terrorist. No way. And that wasn't just the sex talking. At least he hoped it wasn't. Nothing about the way the night had gone down pointed to anything except her being on the run, without the skills and resources to be successful.
