On the Loose

by Tara Janzen

  No surprise, not really. A couple of “recent events” in the Salvadoran highlands had made the back page of the world news section in The New York Times, and there had been casualties, with both instances being part of the “all hell breaking loose on the border” situation he’d been monitoring for the last four friggin’ months.

  So, okay, he could almost buy it. Honey had hand-delivered a quarter of a million dollars to the bad boy. Throw in a saintly sister saving highland village orphans, and there was definitely enough to grease a few wheels and set up a relationship, and odds were that Garcia and the CIA had hit a few rough spots in their dealings with each other over those “recent events.” So, sure, he could see a murdering rebel bastard asking for a sweet-assed gringa to deliver his payola next time.

  Fuck.

  Somebody at the CIA needed to be shot.

  “How much money are you carrying?”

  Her brow furrowed. “About four thousand dollars. For incidentals and things.”

  Yeah. Sometimes, when he was out of town for a couple of days, he needed a few incidentals, too, but four grand’s worth of incidentals would have to include his mortgage.

  “I mean for Garcia.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Great.

  If there was anything else he was going to hate about this mission, he’d like to know it now, while he still had a chance to bail out.

  “I have a lading document for the equipment that’s supposed to be waiting for me at the air-base, and half the combination to a black briefcase they gave me marked with the letter Z,” she continued. “Nobody told me what was in it.”

  Lading document?

  Okay, he hated that—and the whole briefcase thing? He hated that, too.

  “Who has the other half of the combination?”

  “Alejandro Campos.”

  And he definitely hated that.

  “Why Campos?”

  She just looked at him, long and hard, her gaze narrowing on him like a very angry...very angry kitten. It sucked, it really sucked, but that was about all the “big bad dangerous me” she could generate. And it wasn’t enough. Not for what she was expected to do.

  He needed Red Dog. She was a sweet-assed gringa, too, but that girl could deliver a heart-stopping boatload of “big, bad, and dangerous” on demand, in one second or less—literally.

  But he didn’t have Red Dog. He had Honey-pie.

  “I am sure, Mr. Rydell,” she said, planting her hands on her hips, “that when you’re given a job to do, you’re also given all the wherefores and whys, all the how-comes and this-is-the-reason-becauses—but I was not. All they gave me was a rather frightening lecture on the legal parameters of treason, an hour to pack, a one-way plane ticket, half the combination to a briefcase, and a scurrilous threat tacked on to a warning not to fail.”

  A scurrilous threat. She was right. He’d never been given one of those. All the threats he’d been given could be measured in calibers.

  And geezus, she’d packed all that crap in the closet in an hour? That had to be some sort of record.

  “Jet lag?” he asked.

  “Whiplash,” she said.

  Yeah. He could imagine. Whiplash with a bullwhip—and she still looked good enough to eat.

  Fuck.

  “Let me see the lading document.”

  She handed him a standard U.S. Air Force load manifest from off the table, and the farther down he read, the tighter his jaw got.

  There was enough gear on the damn list to outfit a recon platoon for a week. Cases of it, as in gun cases. Boxes of it, as in ammo. Rucksacks of it, as in no way could one of them possibly be meant for Honey York to carry. And ordnance. Christ. His gaze strayed to the closet and all those damn Louis Vuitton suitcases, then came back to the list of military weapons and supplies. Yeah, he knew what this was—a Paris Hilton black op.

  Sure. A Paris Hilton black op looking for a place to happen, a Paris Hilton black op that was not going to happen in El Salvador, not with Honey York attached to the luggage.

  He swore under his breath, one succinct word. Whether she knew it or not, she had an international arms deal on her hands, which would make another, and far more serious, treason charge for somebody, like maybe the CIA, to hang over her head.

  “Show me the briefcase,” he said, folding the manifest and slipping it inside his suit jacket. Geezus.

  She stepped by him and unzipped one of the smaller suitcases. By his estimation, she rustled through half a ton of clothes, the kind of girl stuff with lots of tiny straps and tricky closures, before she uncovered the briefcase.

  “It’s heavy,” she said, dragging it upright.

  He reached down and took it from her, then set it on the table and checked the locks—cipher locks, two of them, one on each side of the handle, a custom piece. The damn thing looked beat to hell and was surprisingly heavy, which he knew might have more to do with what it was made of—leather-covered sheet steel—than with what was in it.

  Anything could be in it.

  And he didn’t like not knowing what.

  The being beat to hell could mean a couple of things: a rough passage, or a whole lot of rough passages. Given who had the rest of the combination, his money was on the briefcase having been taken back and forth over a whole helluva lot of borders a whole helluva lot of times.

  He didn’t know what to make of the capital letter Z hand-tooled into the top in an ornate, flowing script. It wasn’t production work, but another purely custom feature, which meant he had a mystery on his hands, and he hated mysteries.

  “Do you know what the Z stands for?” he asked.

  She crossed her arms over her chest and gave him another considering look. “I’m hoping Zorro, but given the way my luck has been running since yesterday afternoon, I’ve got serious doubts about a masked man showing up at Campos’s plantation.”

  Yesterday afternoon, geezus. Her head had to still be reeling. White Rook had snatched her out of her life and thrown her into this mess in record time—and he wouldn’t have done it without a damn good reason.

  Tasking civilians with vital missions involving weapons, locked briefcases, and the CIA was the surest road to disaster Smith knew, especially if the civilians were cute-assed blondes with no training and no practical skills.

  He shifted his attention back to the briefcase. The design of the letter definitely had that Zorro look to it, but like her, he doubted there were any legendary heroes running around Morazán Province, ready to save the girl and the day. No, that job, if and when it needed doing, was going to be all his, and he could only think of one way to pull it off.

  “Plan A, the way you’ve outlined it, is unacceptable to me,” he said. He didn’t give a damn who had put it together. “So we’re moving straight to Plan B.”

  “Which is?”

  “You tell me your half of the combination,” he said, visually checking the briefcase before running his hands carefully over the top, “and I fly into Morazán alone to meet with Campos and Garcia. I’ll get the courier’s pouch and the flash drive, while you stay here at the Blake, sunning yourself by the pool and drinking piña coladas. Maybe Brett Jenkins can take you out for a nice dinner.”

  Not surprisingly, Plan B was met with silence.

  Tough. He liked it, and she was just going to have to live with it. He’d given her a way out, and by all rights, she should be grateful.

  He finished checking the briefcase by sliding his hands along the edges. He didn’t feel anything unusual, but if it was rigged to explode, the thermite and the trigger mechanism would all be inside. When he was finished, he looked over his shoulder at her. She was still standing in the walk-in closet, arms crossed, mouth tight, her rhinestone sunglasses perched on top of her head with the cocktail umbrellas sticking up behind and her hair all wildly topsy-turvy. She should have looked ridiculous.

  She didn’t.

  She looked put-together, not falling apart, her skin like satin, her bikini, wh
at little there was of it, hand-tailored right down to the strings. She looked in over her head, but still holding her own. She looked in control of herself, even if the situation was out of her hands.

  She looked like it would take a crowbar and two sumo wrestlers to get the damn combination out of her.

  And goddammit, she looked like something he’d lost. Something he should have been more careful with—but that was an epiphany he wasn’t going to accept delivery on, not here, not now.

  “Why me, Honey?” That’s the question he needed answered. Contrary to what she’d said, he didn’t have a wherefore or a because anywhere in sight, and nothing she’d shown him had a damn thing to do with him, except her.

  Without a word, she strode back to the table, the tiny heels of her shoes clicking on the hard-wood floor. Once there, it took her all of ten seconds to blow him up again.

  She spread the photographs out with the palm of her hand, then pulled three out of the lower end of the stack.

  “This is you standing outside the window of the sacristy that night in San Luis,” she said, handing over the first photo. “Please note the pistol in your hand—both hands, actually—and the intent expression on your face as you watch what’s going on inside.”

  He glanced down at the picture, and that’s all it took to prove her correct and for all the implications of the photograph to become absolutely crystal clear.

  “And then here’s the same shot again, but zoomed in on the window. Please note the illegal cash transfer taking place on the other side of the window, inside the sacristy, with me and Diego Garcia clearly identifiable. For the record, I hadn’t known a camera could take such good photos at night.”

  He had, but he hadn’t known anyone in San Luis had been taking pictures of him—and he should have, goddammit.

  “And the last one”—she handed it over—“is of you and me getting in the cab the next morning, and yes, they know exactly how I got out of the country. In fact, they know more about the pilot and the plane you put me on that morning than I do.”

  Yeah, the fucking CIA knew everything, and they’d obviously tagged him when he’d entered El Salvador, which meant that even after the big favor Steele Street had done them four months ago, retiring one of their rogue agents, the CIA was still tracking SDF operators, and it meant—

  “You blew my cover,” she said.

  Yeah. That’s what it meant, and her cover had been perfect: ditzy blond tourist with a tote bag. Perfect, because it had almost been the truth.

  Almost, but not quite. She wasn’t ditzy, and she hadn’t been a tourist. Like him, she’d been in El Salvador on a mission, except hers had been a mission of mercy, taking money to her sister, so Julia could repair an orphanage.

  “In essence, then,” she continued, “this is all your fault, and you have nobody to blame but yourself.”

  Typical.

  “And I’m blaming you, too.”

  A foregone conclusion in his life whenever a woman was involved—but she was just getting warmed up.

  “Because nobody cares if Honoria York-Lytton hops from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to San Luis, El Salvador, for a few days on the beach, but apparently the CIA cares very much where you are, and they cared very much about what you were doing that night,” she said, her voice rising a bit, which he knew from a lot of rising female voices in his past was not a good sign. “And because you followed me, and they followed you”—and the whole “you” thing, that was not good—“my butt is in Panama with a bunch of guns I’m supposed to cart into the jungle, and a briefcase full of God knows what, and the next place my butt is going to be is back in El Salvador, where I’m supposed to wheel and deal with a group of armed and dangerous political insurgents, and about the only place I can guarantee my butt is not going to be is back on a plane to Washington, D.C., not without a courier’s pouch, a flash drive, and an agreement between the CNL and Alejandro Campos.”

  “Unless you give me the combination and let me do it for you.” The solution to all this was so simple.

  But her foot was tapping.

  “No,” she said. One word.

  And there could be only one reason for her to use that word: her sister, saintly Sister Julia Ann-Marie Bakkert. He’d done some checking on the woman, and Julia had packed quite a bit of saintliness into her twenty-one years before she’d taken the cross—starting a youth mentoring program while at a private boarding school in Europe, food bank work in Washington, D.C., chairing the fund-raising committee for a halfway house for troubled teens in Boston.

  She’d dropped out of Harvard after her freshman year to marry the youngest son of Dr. Hans Bakkert, head of the Latin America Chapter of the United Health Organization. Two years later, that youngest son, Carl, had been murdered in the Hotel Langston on the island of Malanca off the coast of Honduras.

  Smith had had Skeeter track down the file, including photos, and it had been a bloody mess. The miracle was that Julia hadn’t died with her husband. They’d been caught in the hotel’s main elevator, real close quarters for an assassination—and Honey had been in the Langston’s dining room, waiting for them, when it had happened.

  He’d read her statement. She’d seen the killers. They’d walked past her, three men in black balaclavas and black clothes, carrying submachine guns, pushing their way out the front doors of the hotel, and at the other end of the lobby, the elevator, with Julia collapsed in one corner, screaming, and Carl slumped in the other, silent, slaughtered by over thirty rounds of .40 S&W ammo delivered at extremely close range.

  According to the file, Honey had been the first to reach the elevator. She’d gathered up her sister and barricaded herself and Julia in her suite, and she’d gotten a three-way phone conversation going between the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and the State Department in Washington, D.C., cobbling together an immediate departure, all before the police had even arrived on the scene.

  Looking at her, it was hard to imagine.

  He’d seen carnage, up close and personal. He knew the precise terminal ballistics of every round he used in his weapons. He knew what she’d seen in the elevator.

  And yet she was here, telling him no.

  “Jenkins said you have two days in the highlands.”

  “Two.” She nodded.

  And four months ago, she’d smuggled a quarter of a million dollars into El Salvador, and then gotten the money across San Luis in the middle of the night, through the middle of a riot, all on her own.

  “Forty-eight hours.”

  “Yes,” she confirmed.

  “Why?”

  “Garcia set the timetable. If we don’t meet it, he moves his camp, disappears into the mountains, and sells to someone else.”

  Fuck. He was going to do this, and not because of the photos. There was plenty of intelligence in the Central Intelligence Agency, but not enough to get a treason conviction to stick to him. He’d played the game too many different ways, from too many different angles, for too many government organizations, all in the name of whatever mission they’d given him, and he could do it again, as many times as they needed him to, whenever and wherever. Those skills were the reason he’d been tagged by Grant for SDF. Those skills were what made him too goddamn useful to throw away on back-page news and a low-end payoff. So, no, the photos were no threat to him, and given her last name, they weren’t a threat to Honey, either, and she had to know it, no matter how heavy-handed they’d gotten with her before they’d put her on the plane to Panama.

  No, this was a flat-out opportunity, and everybody from the CIA to White Rook was using the situation to their advantage, including Honoria York-Lytton. He didn’t doubt for a second that the spooks wanted their documents and data back, or that Diego Garcia had requested her as the courier for the payoff, but she was here for Julia—and because she wanted something, she’d set herself up to be used.

  That’s why Smith kept his damn Christmas list to himself. Nobody knew what he wanted.

  N
obody.

  And White Rook—hell, White Rook knew her value, down to the ounce, and that was why his ass was in Panama and outbound to El Salvador, instead of still in Peru. Brett Jenkins III had been right. This was a personal security detail, with a whole lot of freight on board for the ride.

  But his job was to keep her safe.

  He let his gaze slide down her again, down all those curves one more time. Christ. There wasn’t a straight line on her—anywhere.

  Yeah, he knew what he wanted. He knew what he’d been wanting for the last four months, her little steel trap of a brain working him over, her body, hot and sweet, working him hard.

  Do me, Smith, she’d whispered to him that night in San Luis, and he’d done nothing but dream about it ever since, fantasize about it, get off on it, and start all over again more times than he cared to remember.

  But it wasn’t going to happen, not in the next forty-eight hours, and after that, her butt would be on a plane back to Washington, D.C.

  Inside his pocket, he felt the silent vibration of his phone, and all he could think was that it was about goddamn time. A phone call was the least of what he needed before he got on a plane going anywhere, especially to El Salvador.

  He pulled out his phone, checked the number—General Grant—then checked his watch.

  “You’ve got half an hour before we move out,” he said, heading past her toward the door. “Don’t be late.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Exaltación, Colombia

  This was the last time he stole a car. Alejandro Campos swore it. He was getting too old to be hot-wiring pieces of junk in rat-infested alleys in flea-bitten border towns, and yet he kept ending up in some damn border town somewhere, usually on the verge of getting his ass kicked, and he hated to think it, but the longer he was in this particular rat-infested alley, the surer he was that he’d been in it before, staring down the same damn rats.

  Mierda. Shit. He lived his life on the border, had been living it on the border for more years than was good for him. It was all getting so fucking obvious.