On the Loose

by Tara Janzen

  “Well, then you know as much as I do,” she said, and hoped they’d reached the end of the conversation.

  No such luck.

  “She’s funny, but in a very sharp, biting way, very insightful. She skewers everybody, the Right, and the Left. She even goes after the Centrists.”

  “Politics is easy satire. Everybody knows that.” At least Darcy Delamere made it look easy. In truth, Honey knew it was a helluva lot of work to be scathing when it was called for, ruthless with the truth, to wrap it all in the fluff of Washington’s social whirl, and still make people laugh—and who better to do that than an A-list, Harvard-educated sorority girl?

  “People on the Hill credit her with breaking the Lundt-Creasy scandal,” he said, smoothing his hand up her thigh and hip, until he came to rest with his palm on the side of her breast.

  She almost purred, his hands were so warm. His whole body was warm, putting out heat like a furnace. She loved it.

  “Sex and politics is the easiest satire of all,” she said, scooting even closer. “Everybody looks foolish and culpable, and at least a little perverted, if not out-and-out bent, and it’s always there, somewhere.” And those were the bare naked facts. Darcy Delamere’s particular genius was in finding the worst of the culprits, the venal ones, the ones peddling their influence for sexual favors, and in the case of the Lundt-Creasy affair, the hypocritical ones pounding political pulpits to hide their own sexual quirks and hijinks. She didn’t care what people did in their private lives, unless it threatened to affect everyone else’s private life.

  “She also exposed the Pittsburgh-Cayman Brac-Potomac connection between government contractors banking offshore and funneling their money through the rust belt.”

  So she had. Rather brilliantly, Honey had thought. The whole exposé had come about through an offhand comment overheard in the ladies’ room of the upscale District Lounge, a cigar and martini bar on the Hill and a personal favorite of Honey’s. There were no secrets in Washington, only items of interest people were too afraid to shout in public. The society pages of The Washington Post made a great megaphone.

  “Scandal and double-dealing are also very easy to find and blow the whistle on in Washington,” she said around another small yawn, “if you’re not afraid of losing your job or stepping on toes that can step back hard.”

  “Apparently, she isn’t.”

  “She’s not.” Darcy Delamere wasn’t afraid of anything. She didn’t need to be. Nobody knew who she was; no one knew her real name. Plenty of people had their suspicions, but too many people in Washington fit Darcy’s profile for anyone to nail the pseudonym on her.

  Actually, one person did know the truth.

  Okay, two: Kurt Miller, Darcy’s editor, who had first approached Honey four years ago, and had actually come up with the name Darcy Delamere; and the man who had gotten Honey into El Salvador so fast it had made her head spin, Mr. Cassle, the white-haired gentleman with an office in a little-used corridor far up in the highest reaches of the Department of State. He’d known everything, including Honey’s social calendar for the next six months and the last two years, and how she’d become Darcy Delamere.

  “She dated an underwear model once,” Smith said.

  She slanted him a wary glance.

  “How in the world do you know that?”

  Honestly. She wanted to know. How in the ever-loving world did he know Darcy Delamere had dated an underwear model?

  “She mentioned it once in a column.”

  About a thousand years ago, maybe.

  “Well.” What could she say? “Underwear models are very popular guys.”

  “And she went to Nepal.”

  Her eyebrows rose nearly into her hairline.

  “How long did you say you’ve been reading the society pages?”

  The Nepal column had run eighteen months ago, but it had been six years since the giant ammonite adventure. No one had made a connection between the two—until now.

  “Not very long,” he said. “But I looked through her archives.”

  Oh, dear.

  “I hope she had as nice a time as I did. The mountains, the Himalayas, are so—”

  “Elemental?”

  “Yes,” she said, lifting her head and giving him a quizzical look. “Exactly. Profoundly elemental.”

  “You use that word a lot in your writing—‘Elemental Female Orgasm: Privilege or Right? A Primer for Men.’ ”

  A small laugh escaped her. “You read the rest of Sorority Girl.”

  “The whole thing,” he admitted. “And then I toughed it out through that Yoke of Political Tyranny thing you wrote with Dr. Barstow, although I might have slept through a few of those middle chapters, and I noticed you used ‘elemental’ a few times in there, too.”

  “How amazing.” And how darn near unbelievable. Very few people outside of feminist studies academia had ever gotten through Women’s Sexuality Under the Yoke of Twenty-first Century Political Tyranny, asleep or awake. She could probably count them on one hand.

  “And then I remembered the chapter in Sorority Girl titled ‘Postorgasmic Mind State: Getting There Is Half the Fun—Enlightenment through Bliss,’ ” he said, turning his head to better see her. He’d flipped the flashlight on to find his shirt to cover her with, and left it propped in a manner to cast a faint glow over the darkened back seat. “You write a lot about orgasm.”

  “Well, you know what they say,” she said, leaning down to whisper in his ear. “Write what you know.”

  He laughed, and kissed her, and gathered her close.

  And he kissed her again.

  Outside the Land Cruiser, the rain was still falling, but in bucketfuls instead of a continuous sheet. The weather was lightening up.

  “And then one Sunday, I was reading Darcy Delamere,” he picked up where he’d left off, “and she was drawing blood through the Right and the Left over something she called EBM.”

  Oh, crap.

  “And I kept wondering, what in the hell is EBM? And I wondered right up until the end of her column, where she spelled it out in big capital letters—ELEMENTAL BELTWAY MIND STATE—and something clicked in my brain. But it wasn’t a big click. The lightbulb didn’t really go on until a few minutes ago, after you mentioned Nepal earlier. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Nepal. I haven’t met many people who have been to Nepal.”

  Lying by means of omission was not considered a sin north of the Potomac, so she decided to keep her mouth shut.

  He was quiet, too, for a long time, while the rain poured down and the lightning flashed and the wind barely buffeted them at all.

  “So,” he finally said. “You’ve got a job.”

  She wasn’t admitting anything.

  “You’re notorious, you know that, right?” he said.

  Yes.

  “And you know you’re right about the EBM.”

  Okay, she couldn’t resist. She gave her head a small nod.

  And he swore.

  “Goddamn. I knew it. I’m on a top-secret intelligence mission with a damn newspaper reporter.”

  Yes, he was.

  “Unfu...unbe—this is...this is unbelievable.” He was stammering, which simply fascinated her. “Didn’t they check you out, before they sent you down here with a damn briefcase belonging to the fricking CIA? I mean, geezus, don’t you have to have ‘Journalist’ tattooed on your passport or something?”

  “I write a column for the society page.”

  “Bull,” he said. “You are a highly political animal, have been ever since that damn sorority girl book. That thing is pure political feminism, and dammit, I read where Darcy Delamere is the first thing the Secretary of Defense reads on Sunday mornings.”

  She couldn’t help herself; she smiled and settled in closer to him. She’d loved being mentioned by the SECDEF. Miller had given her a raise and grinned like a fool for a week.

  “But, dammit, the thing you said about EBM being a blind way to conduct a country’s business,
putting politics and power ahead of common sense or the truth,” he continued, “and it being dangerous, except to the people doing the conducting, the politicians—that was dead-on. It works out great for them, keeps them in office, gives them the power they want. And you were right when you said the people actually doing the country’s business, guys like me, the ones on the ground implementing the government’s policies, that we can get burned real badly by the Elemental Beltway Mind State. I’ve seen it happen more than once, oblivious politicians expecting incredibly daunting missions to be accomplished at the drop of a hat. Too many of them don’t have a clue about how the real world works, where men bleed, and men die.” He slid his leg between hers and moved his hand down and wrapped it around her thigh. “Dammit. Darcy Delamere.” He let out a soft laugh. “I’ll be a sonuvabitch...a damned impressed sonuvabitch.”

  Okay. Maybe it was love. Every word he said turned her to mush. But she couldn’t take full credit for the column he liked. Her research assistant, Mindy Brighton, came from a military family and had married a Special Forces soldier. She knew about the men on the ground, the guys doing the job, and the risks they were tasked with taking. Honey hadn’t spent much time with any “men on the ground,” until one of them had chased her down in San Luis and locked her in a hotel room.

  Nothing in her life had been the same since.

  She wasn’t complaining.

  “Are we doing this again, Cougar?” she murmured in his ear, getting comfortable on top of him, loving the feel of him, his broad chest a wall of hard muscle and soft hair, his arms iron-bound, and yet so gentle with her.

  “Cougar, hell.” He let out another soft chuckle. “Not yet, Darcy, baby. I need to get some sleep, that’s all, and I want you close.”

  Darcy, baby. She grinned and kissed his mouth, and then she kissed his jaw. She kissed his cheek, running her fingers back through his hair, and by the time she kissed his temple, he was asleep, out like a light, gone.

  She sighed and relaxed into him.

  She’d been in love twice, and it had not worked out very well for her. The first time had been during her literary period, between the publication of Sorority Girl and the publication of The Yoke of Tyranny. The second time had been between Shakespeare in the nude and Calvin Klein underwear models, between not-quite-misspent youth and getting a real job, one that gave her the kind of connections she could have used to keep her out of the cargo area of a Land Cruiser on a back road in El Salvador.

  She wasn’t sure she was ready for love a third time. It could hurt so badly—but she wouldn’t have missed this, not for the world.

  The flashlight cast him in harsh shadows, made the angles of his face even more stark, and still he was so beautiful.

  She pressed her lips to his shoulder, then reached over and turned the flashlight off, and with his heart beating next to hers, with his breath in her ear and his arm so strong around her, she drifted off to the sound of the rain.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Campos Plantation, Morazán Province, El Salvador

  Dawn was not Campos’s favorite time of day. For his money, dawn could have been done away with completely, and days would start about tennish or so, after coffee and pastries and sex, a civilized hour, with civilized pastimes, for a civilized life.

  Dawn was the hour of barbarians. Literally.

  All he had to do was look out his second-floor bedroom window at his front gate to prove it. Diego Garcia had arrived for their meeting, far, far too early, and in far, far too great force.

  Garcia had brought half of his whole damn army, half of the CNL soldiers in Morazán. The contingencies of his job aside, Campos tended to follow the party line when it came to the politics of Central America, and his party, the United States government party, was in support of the Salvadoran government, not the ragtag band of rebels blowing up coffee plantations, rallying landless villagers behind a populist front, and, in some part at least, creating a cover for a lucrative, if not yet world-class, drug trafficking business.

  After three years of unqualified support, the Catholic Church had changed course and thrown in with the government as well—except for the three religiosas standing at the gate with Diego Garcia.

  Sister Teresa, and Campos used the term lightly, looked very much the worse for wear. Her vestimentas de monja had been taken from her, and Garcia had put her in a modest skirt and peasant blouse accessorized with a hefty length of rope. Her wrists were loosely bound, a statement, Campos supposed, if not exactly a restraint, and her hair had been chopped off.

  Campos was not shocked at the sight. He’d watched the styling session on Lily Robbins’s tape last night, seen the tears and recriminations and the beating. It could have been worse. Teresa was standing and walking unaided.

  She wasn’t dead, and for her crime, death was not uncommon. Her young lover had certainly paid the ultimate price. Campos had watched his death as well and been deeply disturbed by all of it, the act itself, the location—Garcia had gunned him down in the chapel for God’s sake—and the reason behind the rage, an unfaithful woman. The CNL captain was out of control, a true murdering bastard who needed to be dealt with, before he ran amok over the whole damn province.

  So, of course, Campos would be giving the guy light anti-tank weapons this morning. Some days, in his dictionary, the words “irony” and “insanity” were listed as synonyms for “politics.”

  Today was one of those days.

  Of the other nuns, Sister Rose, despite her youth, had visibly taken up the mantle of Bettine’s authority. Even in the company of thugs, she exuded an air of calm control, as if she knew, truly, that God was on her side.

  Campos didn’t doubt it for a second.

  No less could be said of Sister Julia. She was undaunted. But the thing with Julia, the odd thing he never failed to notice and be somewhat unnerved by, was her aura.

  Yes, the woman had one, and it was golden, as pure as sunlight on a clear day.

  He’d grown up on the streets of America, stealing and cheating, lying and scamming, and skating the edge of felonies, until he’d skated over the edge. He’d stolen enough cars by the time he was sixteen to do a little real estate investment on the side. His life had included a few years cruising through the seamy underbellies of the world, and yeah, that was as bad as it sounded. To his credit, he’d done some good in those underbellies, such as it was, considering nothing he’d ever done had changed the course of anything for too damn long. The world, it seemed, was on a constant, inevitable, gravity-enabled slide into anarchy and vice.

  And then for no reason, against the odds, there would be a woman like Julia Ann-Marie Bakkert somewhere, and of course, she would be a nun.

  Campos didn’t know why Garcia had brought the good sisters of St. Joseph with him at this hour, but Sister Julia and Sister Rose weren’t who he was worried about this morning. He wasn’t even particularly worried about Sister Teresa.

  He looked down at the letter Max had handed him a few minutes ago. The script was blockish and straight on the page, the prose wordy, the phrases couched in false praise and subtle threats. Regardless, the damn thing boiled down to a single barbaric command: Give up the woman.

  Give up the woman. Jesus. Who in the hell did Diego Garcia think he was?

  This morning’s meeting had been set up for one reason: an exchange of weapons and money for a courier’s pouch with its documents intact. There was no “give up the woman” part.

  Of course, there was no money, either.

  Goddammit.

  To their credit, even in torrential rain, last night’s patrol had located the downed Cessna and had set up a perimeter around it. No one was getting near the plane, what was left of it anyway, except the missing hotshot team of Rydell and York-Lytton.

  Campos had planned on sending another patrol out this morning to find them, but from the looks of the small army camped on his doorstep, he needed all his men for security.

  Because he sure as hell wasn
’t giving up Lily Robbins.

  Rather than housing her in one of his elegant guest suites, he’d had Isidora keep Ms. Robbins with her and her children in the servants’ quarters. Isidora’s rooms were fairly elegant in and of themselves, and Campos had figured a school-teacher from Albuquerque would be more comfortable surrounded by another woman and a passel of kids.

  According to Isidora’s latest report, he’d been right. Ms. Robbins was still asleep.

  Just as well.

  He handed the letter back to Max, and straightened the knot on his tie.

  His leg hurt like hell.

  “Jake?”

  “Yes?”

  “Who has the high ground this morning?”

  “We do. Pablo and Tomás are on the rooftops, Pablo on my frequency, and Tomás as your dedicated shooter.”

  “Good.” Both men were expert marksmen. “How many men do you have in place in the warehouse?”

  The pallet of weapons wasn’t going anywhere, until Campos had the Agency’s documents in his hand. Entering into negotiations without the money might have been an insurmountable problem for someone else—for anyone else. Campos had it covered.

  “Five guards.”

  “Where in the hell are Rydell and York-Lytton?”

  “We’re still trying to raise them on the radio or Rydell’s secure phone.”

  Campos swore under his breath and shrugged into the suit jacket Max was holding for him.

  Fucking dawn. The sun had barely broken the horizon, and he was already in Armani.

  He had a feeling if anything happened to the two Americans, he was going to get the heat for it. Dammit.

  “Try again, and keep trying, until we find them. Call Dobbs in Panama. Maybe he knows where in the hell they got off to.”

  That was the problem with fast-breaking incidents and rushed missions. Things got misplaced—like two million dollars, two full-grown people, and a whole goddamn Land Cruiser.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Morazán Province, El Salvador