On the Loose

by Tara Janzen

  Two things woke Smith from a sound sleep: the erection he’d gotten rubbing up against something so soft and silky and warm, it could only be Honey; and the ringing of his phone. Both of them demanded immediate attention. One was going to get it.

  Dammit.

  He rolled onto his back and grabbed his phone.

  Reception was a wonderful thing.

  Right, dammit.

  “Smith,” he said, reaching over Honey for the radio sticking out of one of the side pockets on his rucksack. “Yes, sir...stand by one.”

  He leaned over her again, digging deeper into the rucksack’s side pocket and pulling out his GPS. He switched it on and reported his location to William Dobbs in Panama.

  “Yes, sir. I’ll change frequencies and make the call. Yes, sir...rain...biblical rain...yes”—he did a quick visual check of the Land Cruiser and located the briefcase next to the case holding his Heckler & Koch submachine gun—“...sir. We’ve got the briefcase...yes, sir.”

  Dobbs went on a bit of a harangue before he gave up the day’s radio codes. Smith didn’t blame him. Getting lost was pretty damn unacceptable, especially for an operator of his caliber.

  “Yes, sir. I’ll make the call,” he said, and hung up the cell phone.

  Swearing softly to himself, he punched the frequency and encryption key into the radio’s numeric pad with one hand, while he shucked into his pants with the other, and hoped like hell that someone was manning the radio at Campos’s plantation.

  Someone would be, of course. Campos had a reputation for running a damn tight ship, but given how things had gone so far, Smith wasn’t taking anything for granted.

  God, the inside of the Land Cruiser was like a sauna, the windows completely fogged over, the humidity about a hundred and ten percent. The sun was up outside, but barely.

  “Come on, baby. Up and at ’em.” He leaned down and bit Honey gently on the butt.

  She let out a long sigh and rolled onto her back, stretching her arms above her head, one knee bending, so beautifully, gorgeously, so erotically naked—fuck. His gaze accidentally slid down the lush curves of her body. The girl was not skinny, not by any stretch of the imagination. What little there was of her had been put in all the right places—some very nice places.

  Yeah. Right. Don’t go there, Cougar, old boy.

  And he wouldn’t. He was a professional.

  And yet his gaze drifted down to between her legs, soft brown curls, soft pale skin, and a sweet little bikini wax job making her oh-so-just-so.

  Right.

  Every cell in his body went on instant alert, and only one thing kept his pants on—duty. Dammit. Garcia was already at the Campos plantation, according to Dobbs, and the negotiations were about to begin, at dawn, of all the damn strange things. The weapons had been delivered last night, but whatever was in the briefcase was still in the briefcase, and it wasn’t anywhere close to where it could be useful.

  Smith didn’t know Campos, except by reputation. The plantation owner had not been in residence the one other time Smith had been in Morazán Province. But on this job, they were on the same team, and Rydell was a team player. He hadn’t needed Dobbs to tell him he needed to get his ass unlost and get to Campos’s coffee farm.

  “Whitewater,” he said into the radio. “Clothes, Honey. Get dressed.”

  “Roger that, Whitewater,” a man’s voice came back at him from over the radio. “Angel Falls fully clothed on this end.”

  Shit. He hadn’t meant to transmit that last part.

  “Smith here.”

  “Jake. My friend said you’d be calling. Give me your coordinates, and I’ll tell you where you went wrong.”

  Smith checked his GPS again, before giving Jake his location.

  The last thing he’d expected in return was for his contact to reply with a short laugh.

  “Well, you’ve got a damn good sense of direction.”

  “How so?”

  “The road you’re on links up with the one you were supposed to be on, in about five hundred meters. And you’re only four kilometers due north of the Cessna.”

  Sonuvabitch. Smith leaned forward and wiped a section of window clean with his hand, and couldn’t see a damn thing. The world was full of fog, inside and outside of the Land Cruiser.

  “How far are we from you?”

  “Half an hour tops.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Smith’s mission priority was the recovery of the flash drive, but with Garcia already at the plantation, adjustments might need to be made in order to accommodate the whole operation. If Campos needed the briefcase, then the briefcase needed to be delivered.

  “Give me five minutes. I’ll call back.”

  “Copy that.” Smith stuck the radio in the cargo pocket on his pants. “Come on, Honey. Let’s go.”

  “Go where?” she mumbled, rolling back onto her stomach and settling in again.

  He dug his T-shirt out from underneath her and pulled it on over his head. Boots and socks came next. He found hers while he was at it and set them next to her.

  “Coffee in two minutes,” he said, grabbing an MRE bag out of his rucksack. “Then we’re moving out of here, babe. You can do it either dressed or naked. I vote for naked, but it’s your call.”

  “Jerk,” she whispered, and he grinned, before kissing her ass one more time.

  Opening one of the back doors, he crawled out of the Land Cruiser and into the day. In the few minutes since he’d woken up, the sun had climbed higher into the sky and was already starting to burn off the fog.

  He held up his GPS, then looked to the south. He didn’t expect to see the plane. He wanted to see the country. It was steep and hilly, and definitely subalpine, not tropical forest, like closer to the coast.

  By the time Honey joined him, looking rumpled and grumpy, he had two cups of a thick rich brew ready—coffee, heavy on the creamer, cocoa, and sugar: breakfast in a cup.

  “Nice green shirt,” he said, noticing she’d gotten something clean out of her suitcase. She’d also secured her handcuffs to her belt loop, which he thought was damn cute.

  “It’s not green,” she grumbled.

  Could have fooled him.

  “It’s chartreuse.”

  Of course it was, and now he knew.

  “You need to tie those boots, or you’re going to end up on your butt, Ms. Chartreuse.”

  She said something crude, which made him grin, and then she knelt down and tied her boots. She was all wild hair again this morning, the same way she’d been the last time they’d spent the night together, and he had to wonder if it was always like this with her—going to bed with a sophisticated, elegantly chic woman of the world, and waking up with Sheena of the Jungle.

  Depending on how tired he was and how awake he needed to be, sometimes he dropped extra caffeine tabs in his cup. He’d had a few cups of coffee that, sipped slow and steady, had kept him going for a couple of days.

  From the looks of her, she could use a little help.

  “Do you want a caffeine tablet or two in your coffee, something to kind of get you going?” And maybe get your eyes open, sweetheart?

  “No,” she grumbled. “Regular caffeine is plenty. I usually drink decaf.”

  Cigars, bourbon, and decaf coffee? So much for her hard-hitting edge.

  She took the cup, when he offered it, and walked around toward the front of the Land Cruiser.

  “You owe me for saving your ass,” she said, and he looked over to where she was standing by the front bumper, looking down the mountain.

  “And what would my ass be worth this morning?” he asked.

  “How about a hundred bucks?”

  He rose from where he’d been kneeling by the small stove he’d set up, and walked to the front of the Land Cruiser.

  Then he reached in his pocket and thumbed off two fifty-dollar bills and stashed them in the front pocket of her pants.

  “Close call,” he said.

  “Damn close,” s
he agreed, and took another sip of coffee.

  The right front tire was hanging by a thread on the edge of the road, a whole lot of which had been washed away. A virtual stream of dirt and road base cascaded down the mountainside.

  “Maybe we should move the car,” she suggested.

  “Yeah.” Not a bad idea.

  “I’m going to wait over there,” she said, pointing to the other side of the road, the one still firmly attached to the mountain.

  “Good idea.” They had spent the night parked in a deep curve, with the mountain track bowing out at each end. In daylight, it was easy to see why so much rain had been funneled on top of them, and why they’d lost their communication reception.

  To his credit, he’d been absolutely right about the fifty meters. If they’d driven out of the curve, without going over the side, she could have called her mother in Adams-Morgan, the reception would have been so good.

  Of course, odds were that they would have gone straight over the side, and careened just that much closer to the Cessna.

  Hell. Considering all the rocking and rolling they’d done in the back of the Land Cruiser, they were lucky to be alive this morning.

  Geezus. That was not the sort of obit he wanted at the end of his résumé, or hers.

  By the time he got the car repositioned farther down the road, the call came back in. He pulled the map out of the driver’s side visor and spread it open on the console. With a pencil in hand, he jotted down the coordinates for the Cessna and got the go-ahead from Campos, via Jake, to retrieve the flash drive, before driving on to the plantation.

  “We have a patrol in place at the crash site,” Jake said. “They’ve been there all night, and have a perimeter set up. I’ll let them know you’re on your way. From where you’re at, you need to follow the road east for another kilometer. There’ll be a trail crossing, and from there, you’re on a footpath, but it’s only about three and a half kilometers to the plane, with a little bushwhacking at the end. Our men will be looking for you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Campos Plantation, Morazán Province, El Salvador

  Well, things were going as well as could be expected—edging toward hell, with a planned side trip to the main warehouse.

  “More coffee, Captain Garcia?” Campos asked, signaling Max to bring a fresh pot to the table. “It is my private roast, and I can guarantee you it is excellent.”

  He and Garcia were sitting alone on the patio, a table full of food set out before them with a television at one end. Two of Garcia’s soldiers were positioned against the patio wall, forming his security detail, and Tomás, hidden on the villa’s roof, would have both the soldiers squarely in his scope. Max had the hot pot of coffee in one hand and his ever-present Walther PPK concealed inside his waistband. Garcia was simply bristling with armament, and Campos was making do with the Para .45 in the shoulder holster under his suit coat and a Beretta Tomcat he’d dropped into his pants pocket.

  The occasion was breakfast, and yes, things would have to deteriorate to an irredeemably grim state before he pulled the combat knife sheathed on his ankle, or, if it became suddenly necessary, stabbed Garcia with the butter knife.

  The whole morning smacked of edginess, and after yesterday, he’d hoped for a calmer slide through his meals for the rest of the week. The amazing thing was that he could eat at all.

  Sinking his teeth into a raspberry-filled croissant, he poured an extra measure of cream into his own still-steaming cup of coffee. Max didn’t let the coffee get cold. Besides his wizardry with the mail, it was the reason Campos kept him on—along with eight years of loyal and dedicated service and the Walther PPK that Max knew very well how to use.

  “No, señor,” Garcia said, sitting stiffly to Campos’s left, exactly where Campos wanted him. If things did start to go poorly, Campos had a better shot with Garcia to his left.

  “You’re not eating, Captain,” Campos pointed out. “Is there something else you would like?” Not that he gave a damn if Garcia ate or not.

  He’d taken one hundred percent control of the situation before he’d ever left his bedroom this morning, and he wasn’t relinquishing an ounce of it. There was no other way to do business in his line of work, not and come out in one piece or get any kind of a decent meal at all.

  So they were eating breakfast, alone, at the place of Campos’s choosing, with no women of any kind anywhere in sight and the rest of Garcia’s men cooling their heels in the compound, under the watchful eyes of Campos’s men and Pablo’s .308.

  “Sí,” Garcia said. “I would like to see the weapons and the money I was promised. If not, we have no deal, and the documents will go to the highest bidder.”

  “Unacceptable, Captain,” Campos said around another bite of croissant. “The gringos made their wishes very clearly known to me, and they have sent both the weapons and the money as they promised, but there has been a new development, which I would be remiss in ignoring, considering the great trust they have placed in me to work with you on their behalf.” And just try to say all that, coherently, no less, on an empty stomach at half past dawn in the goddamn morning.

  “What development?” Garcia said, his whole demeanor suddenly wary, with good reason.

  Campos made a brief gesture with his hand, and Max stepped forward and turned on the television set. A movie was playing.

  “Salvator mundi,” Bettine whispered on the screen, her voice a bare thread of sound. “Salva nos omnes. Kyrie eleison; Christe eleison; Christe eleison...”

  Yes, Campos thought. Christ have mercy on us all.

  He helped himself to scrambled eggs and refilled his orange juice—and he drank his coffee and ate.

  He ate through Teresa’s tear-filled confession, used the remote to skip ahead to her second confession, the one where she mentioned Diego Garcia by name as the father of her child, and continued eating, then fast-forwarded to her beating, and pushed his plate aside.

  Garcia was clearly identifiable in the scene.

  “Congratulations are in order, I presume?” Campos reached for his coffee and took a sip.

  Garcia was livid, but unimpressed. “This has nothing to do with the documents, or my weapons. The United States government does not care about what happens to a disgraced nun.”

  “No, but the people of Morazán care, and the people of El Salvador care. The freedom fighters of the Cuerpo Nacional de Libertad might find themselves personae non grata in the very country they are trying to liberate, if this film was to be released to the media in San Salvador.”

  “You are threatening me with this?” Garcia scoffed. “With hitting a woman?”

  And desecrating a sworn bride of Christ, which was by far the more serious infraction, a fact Garcia well knew.

  Campos shrugged and directed his attention back to the television. In any court of law, the next scene in the film was definitive, and very, very ugly.

  “He was a traitor to the cause, and the price of treason is death,” Garcia interceded on his own behalf, before the young soldier’s body even hit the floor.

  This time, it was Campos who was unimpressed. “Perhaps I should rewind it and turn up the sound, Captain. I believe you stated his crime quite clearly, before you shot him, and it wasn’t treason.”

  Garcia shifted his gaze to his men, and Campos could almost see Tomás’s index finger take up the slack on his SR-25’s trigger. It would take him half a second each to take out Garcia’s men.

  “Your desecration of the St. Joseph chapel will also not go unnoticed by the people of El Salvador,” he said.

  “There are no Catholics in the White House of Washington, D.C.”

  “Not this year,” Campos agreed. “But there are patriots, make no mistake, Captain, even in the back rooms, and they will all be very unhappy to see how the Cessna pilot died.”

  “The man crashed his airplane into the side of a mountain,” Garcia said, letting down his guard ever so slightly, relaxing into his chair and reaching
for his coffee for the first time. “I cannot be held responsible for his death. My men took his body to the priest in Cristobal. This is enough.”

  Campos picked up the remote and used it to reverse the tape to the scene Lily Robbins had filmed on Tuesday—the death of the American.

  “Rumor has it that he was shot down,” he said. More than rumor. His men had found the plane last night and found the bullet holes, including a few especially large ones from armor-piercing rounds.

  “Perhaps this is true,” Garcia agreed. “But it wasn’t the CNL who shot his plane.”

  Campos figured it was, but that was beside the point. The lovely Ms. Robbins had proved his real point for him.

  And she was lovely, and in the wrong place at the wrong time, and in over her head, and he’d hoped to have her out of Morazán before Garcia arrived for their meeting. Everything would be so much simpler if she were already on her way back to Albuquerque.

  He signaled Max to top off his cup.

  The Campos plantation was famous among a narrow group of cognoscenti for its private reserve coffee: AC-130, Alejandro Campos, one, three, zero. He roasted it on the plantation, and packaged it with an AC-130 Black Label skull-and-crossbones trademarked logo. As a side venture, it didn’t bring in much money, but it did add to his legitimacy as a coffee grower.

  “It doesn’t matter who shot him down, Captain,” Campos said, hitting the play button on the remote, “when he died like this.”

  He settled back into his own chair, deceptively relaxed, and slowly sipped his coffee.

  He and Jake had done some editing of the tape last night when they’d made their copies, one of which was already on its way to Dobbs, and another of which he’d sent to the embassy in Guatemala City.

  The scene began with a fast pan across the chapel, the camera noticeably handheld, the picture jumping. Campos could imagine how frightened Lily Robbins had been. The picture quality was fairly good, though, and there was no doubt in his mind whose death he was watching—Hal Merchant’s.

  At least that was the name Campos knew him by.

  “What I’m offering, Captain, are the weapons and this tape in exchange for the documents your men found on the Cessna.”