On the Loose

by Tara Janzen

  Geezus. He’d loved her. Or at least he’d thought it was love. And the baby—he’d actually thought that part was sweet, even if he hadn’t been the father. And then a couple of times, he’d wondered if he was the one, if she was carrying his child. The timing had been so damn close, her body growing riper and more lush every time they’d made love.

  In his mind there had always been two deaths that day, not one.

  And now there were none.

  He wiped his hand across his mouth, and looked away, out over the hills and the valleys with their wisps of low-lying fog.

  She was alive, and she’d know she’d been spotted, and that made her very, very dangerous.

  She would also be a mother by now, and the longer he thought about her having a child, the more he realized how the information could be used against her. She’d know it, too, and suddenly he realized just how much damn trouble he might be in, if she ever found out who had been on that mountainside in Peru—and considering the leaks in the Lima office, he didn’t think it would take too damn much effort for her to find out whatever the hell she wanted.

  Perfect. Just what he needed to get the day off to a good start—one more goddamn thing to worry about.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “Well, this sucks,” Honey said a half hour later.

  It sure as hell did, Smith thought. They’d made it back to the Land Cruiser from the crash site in two-thirds of the time it had taken to hike the other way, and had been on the road less than ten minutes before they’d come to this crossroad.

  Smith had been on the radio with Campos’s man, Jake, and he knew the plantation was to the right. But the sign on the post said “Saint Joseph Escuela y Asilo de Huérfanos—7km,” and the arrow pointed left. St. Joseph School and Orphanage.

  “We can’t do it.” They didn’t have a choice. It wasn’t just a matter of seven lousy kilometers. “She might not even be there.”

  “I know.”

  Dammit.

  If Honey York was going to have hot sex with him in back seats, and follow orders, and be reasonable, he was going to fall in love.

  “I’ll make it up to you.”

  Crap. Had he just said that? He couldn’t believe he’d just said that.

  If “I don’t like to sweat” was her mantra, “I’ll make it up to you” was his. He had a lifetime of saying that to women who had obviously not waited around long enough for him to ever do it.

  But he could do it this time.

  “Okay, here’s the truth: If you want Julia going home with you today, I can make that happen.” Sure, he could. He’d been on a couple of two-man “snatch and grab” teams, and even working alone, he didn’t think he’d have too much trouble kidnapping one smallish nun, putting her under wraps, and getting her butt on a plane to Washington, D.C., especially since, by the time they got done with today’s business, he figured Dobbs and White Rook were going to owe Honey York the moon.

  Him, they only owed a paycheck. But she was definitely in the above-the-call-of-duty category.

  He looked over at her, and it looked like she was thinking. Fine by him. She could think on the way to Campos’s.

  Spinning the steering wheel to the right, he headed the Land Cruiser toward the plantation. Given Garcia’s presence, and what Jake called the pace of the negotiations, he’d been told to come in the back way and lie low. Five kilometers due south, he would come to a sign for AC-130 coffee with a skull and crossbones on it, and yeah, from everything he knew about AC-130 gunships, a skull and crossbones fit. He’d grinned when Jake had told him about the sign.

  There would be a locked gate, but the guards were authorized to let them pass.

  Following the directions would take him along the river and eventually lead him to an old factory on the plantation. His orders were to wait there. If they were needed, they’d be close enough to be handy, and if they weren’t needed, they’d be well enough out of it.

  Smith was starting to like Alejandro Campos. He liked how carefully he was moving. If the man could manage to get the Agency’s documents back without involving Honey any further or putting her in the same room with Diego Garcia, Smith was going to like him even more.

  And Zorro’s black briefcase? Hell, Smith didn’t know where it was fitting in, or how in the hell Campos was getting along without it. But if it really was full of money, and Campos didn’t need it to pull off this deal, then he was going to be as impressed as hell.

  “I’ll talk to her,” Honey said. “See if I can convince her this time to come home.”

  Talk, talk, talk. Personally, he thought there’d been enough talk. A few years of it between Honey and Julia, and little sister was still in the thick of trouble.

  “You should just let me grab her,” he said. “You two could talk at home.”

  “Grab her?”

  He glanced over, and she was giving him a look—a highly skeptical look.

  “Grab. Literally.” He wasn’t going to sugarcoat it for her. Kidnapping often involved a straight-out grab, and it certainly was the method he was inclined to use with Julia. If that woman had an ounce of reason in her, he sure hadn’t seen it.

  “You can’t just go and grab her.”

  “Why not?” It was a time-tested method. There were some tactics and techniques involved, sure, but he knew them. He knew them well enough not to—

  “She might be pregnant.”

  —hurt her.

  Stop the presses.

  “Pregnant?” He slowly and carefully brought the Land Cruiser to a stop. “What do you mean pregnant?”

  “With child.”

  Geezus. And he meant no disrespect.

  “Whose child?”

  “I shouldn’t say.”

  To hell with that.

  “You’d better say.” For the love of God Almighty. When in the hell had El Salvador become such a hotbed of chaos?

  “Diego Garcia.”

  Well, that made his skin crawl, but finally—finally—he understood why Honoria York-Lytton was sitting next to him in a car on a back road in Morazán Province.

  He took a breath and stretched back into his seat.

  Fuck.

  “You weren’t planning on shooting him, were you?” Please say no, he thought.

  But she didn’t say anything.

  “You were planning on shooting him, weren’t you.” It wasn’t a question anymore.

  “Julia would never have consented to sex,” she said, tight-jawed. “Never.”

  He believed her, and that pretty much tied up the whole mission for him, at least her part in it.

  “You’re going to give me the combination, now, or I’m turning this car around and driving you straight back to San Salvador,” he said, and he meant every damn word. He wasn’t letting her anywhere near Garcia. “The choice is yours, Honey.”

  A long stretch of silence ensued.

  Fine. He could wait all day, if that’s what it took. She wasn’t going anywhere, except under his terms.

  “Seven, eight, zero, four, four, two,” she finally said—and he took his foot off the brake, stepped on the gas, and eased them down the road.

  Great. Perfect.

  Whatever was going to happen at Campos’s, from here on out, would not be happening with Honey York in the middle of it.

  He needed Honoria York-Lytton.

  Campos had played all his cards, and he still needed Honoria York-Lytton and his briefcase. He had dazzled and amazed Garcia with the pallet of weapons and ordnance. Nobody did weapons and ordnance better than the U.S.A., and to see a stack of the government’s finest offerings lying out for the taking was enough to turn any insurgent’s head.

  It had certainly turned Garcia’s. The bastard’s eyes had been alight with greed. The captain wanted LAWs and grenade launchers—but not enough to cut the deal on weapons alone.

  The threat of the videotape was real. Leaked to the press, the images of Garcia killing the soldier and beating Sister Teresa could perma
nently damage his career as a captain in the Cuerpo Nacional de Libertad.

  But ideology could be difficult to hold on to under the best of circumstances. Guerrilla soldiers bound by a common cause were nearly an anachronism in the reality of today’s world. Drugs were the easier way to grasp fortune by the throat. If Garcia could no longer lead an armed resistance to the government, he could undermine it by facilitating the drug trade in his country. He didn’t need to be a CNL captain, when the title of Salvadoran drug lord fit him just as well. His infrastructure was in place, and the uniform was practically the same. Very little alteration was needed. An extra epaulet or two, and he’d be on his way.

  Campos knew it. Garcia knew it. And so there was a need for cash to sweeten the deal, a half a million to be precise, and Campos had certainly seen men sell out for a whole lot less.

  On his side, Garcia had produced ten pages of the stolen two-hundred-page document, and through Dobbs, Campos had been able to verify its authenticity. Garcia did have the Agency’s intelligence, and the deal was getting closer.

  Half a million—he grinned. For a day that had gotten off to such a rough start, this one was working out just fine.

  All parties had fallen back to their camps, Garcia with his armed men and troop trucks by the front gate, and Campos and Jake on the second floor of the warehouse with the weapons housed on the ground floor with a full cadre of guards.

  “Where are they?” Campos asked, glassing the dirt track from the main road to the AC-130 factory.

  “They should be coming into sight in a few minutes,” Jake said, lifting his radio to his mouth. “Smith, your location?”

  Campos heard the man reply and turned to Jake to find out what was said.

  “They’re two kilometers from the river road now.”

  Campos nodded.

  Raising the binoculars back to his eyes, he ran his gaze over the AC-130 building.

  The factory where he roasted and packaged the coffee beans was a concrete, rebar, wooden plank, and corrugated steel fortress located a half a mile from the villa, close to the river and the coffee fields. Small outbuildings sprawled on either side of it. The main building was old, too huge to keep in full production, and a bit of a maze, having been added onto dozens of times over the years.

  He glassed the road again, then moved the optics for a brief peek at one of the villa’s second-floor balconies, knowing exactly what he’d see. Lily Robbins was having croissants and coffee with Sister Julia, and for the second time since he’d noticed her up there, he wished he was having breakfast with Lily Robbins, too.

  But then he let the moment pass.

  He was not holding a torch for Jewel, not in any sense of the word, but he had somehow gotten stuck in the aftermath of their breakup. It wasn’t that he hadn’t moved on, he just hadn’t...moved. At all.

  Sofia was right. He needed to leave El Salvador.

  “They’re here,” Jake said a moment later, and when he looked, Campos saw the black Land Cruiser breaking the trees to the south and making its way toward the old factory.

  “I’m going down there,” Campos said. “When I have the money, we’ll invite Garcia here, to this office, and make the exchange. We’ll allow him to bring in one of his trucks and four of his soldiers to pick up the weapons. No more.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jake said.

  “Black Land Cruiser heading north on the river road,” Ari said.

  “Red Toyota pickup leaving the villa compound, moving east.” Both vehicles were heading toward a sprawling concrete, wood, and corrugated steel factory down by the river with a big AC-130 skull-and-crossbones sign on one side of it.

  “Something’s up.”

  “Campos is driving the red truck. Can you see who’s in the Land Cruiser?” Irena asked, focusing her spotting scope on the SUV.

  “No. I can’t see through the windshield at this angle.”

  She couldn’t see inside either, but she was sure it was Rydell and York-Lytton. They were the only players out of place. Everyone else was here, at Campos’s villa, and York-Lytton had a black briefcase she’d brought with her all the way from Panama. Something was in it, and Irena couldn’t imagine that anything dangerously handcuffed to the blonde wasn’t of vital importance to the current transaction.

  “Let’s switch,” she said, low-crawling to Ari’s other side. Two-man sniper-observer teams typically relieved each other at regular intervals, to ease up on eyestrain and keep a fresh shooter on the long gun.

  Mostly, though, for this shot, Irena wanted to be on the rifle. The optics on the Steyer had every bit as much resolution as those on her spotting scope. Once in place behind the rifle, she trained it on the Land Cruiser and carefully followed the car up the road, and all the while she was following it through her scope, she was settling in, quieting down, slipping inside the “cocoon” of awareness that would include only her, the rifle, and the target, all three entities bound by a single thread of existence.

  “Give me data for the factory,” Irena said.

  Next to her, Ari measured the distance and the slope angle to the front of the AC-130 building with a laser range finder, and quickly calculated her elevation and spindrift. The ambient conditions were holding steady.

  “Set four point nine,” he said, and she dialed the elevation in. “Set left zero point one.”

  She adjusted her windage knob, settled in to her scope, and waited for him to call the wind, the last adjustment made just before the shot.

  And they waited, watching the Land Cruiser and the pickup crawl through the ruts of the road and slowly come to a stop in front of the sprawling old factory.

  Her finger slid to the trigger. “Shooter ready,” she said softly.

  Ari made his call. “Right zero point eight.”

  She prepared to make the reticle correction as soon as she was on target.

  Campos pulled up to the factory, got out of the pickup, and motioned for the Land Cruiser to follow him.

  “That’s not good,” breathed Ari, looking through the spotting scope.

  Not at all good, Irena silently agreed, watching Campos open a large sliding door and motion the Land Cruiser into the factory. The vehicle made a left turn, and through the open passenger window, over the head of a blond-haired woman, she caught a fleeting glimpse of the driver—C. Smith Rydell, ID positive.

  It wasn’t enough. A half-second exposure with a clean line of sight didn’t give her enough time to compensate for the target’s lateral motion.

  Fuming, she followed the Land Cruiser’s progress with her sights and watched the angle of the vehicle block her shot. Then the SUV disappeared completely inside the factory.

  She took her finger off the trigger and swore under her breath. Not firing had been the correct decision. Head shots at six hundred meters were tricky things, even on a stationary target. But damn, she’d been close, so close to accomplishing her mission.

  “Stay on the door,” Ari said. “I’ll give you another wind call if he comes out.”

  “Da,” she said, not moving. Yes.

  But the odds were against them getting another shot. Ari knew it as well as she did. Rydell and his passenger had been taken into the building to get them under cover, and that’s probably exactly where they would stay—under cover.

  After ten minutes, Ari leaned back on his elbow and gave her a long look.

  “How do you wish to proceed?” he asked.

  “We need to get down there,” she said. “The odds will be better close in.”

  They hadn’t gotten the long shot, and she wasn’t prepared to spend hours or days waiting for another. Their position was vulnerable. Their rental car was parked in a market where it wouldn’t be noticed for one day, but would surely draw attention for two.

  “Then we need to find a way in—and back out,” he said.

  “Da,” she said, putting her eye back to the scope and scanning the terrain down by the factory. “Do you see the opening in the low bluff above the riv
er? Seventy meters from the factory’s back door?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “Some sort of opening, about a meter across, maybe a drain into the river.”

  “It’s bricked, looks like a tunnel. We’ll enter there.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Honey stepped out of the Land Cruiser into the cool, dark interior of the AC-130 building and was immediately awash in the soothing scent of coffee. Good thing, because the old place was a little creepy from the outside, too big, and really old and broken-down in a lot of places. Smith was right behind her, carrying his rucksack and a wicked-looking weapon he’d told her was a sub-machine gun.

  They entered a large, open room, which immediately put her more at ease. Wooden-floored, with concrete walls painted a warm, rustic yellow, the place had a certain rough-hewn elegance. A set of double doors opened toward the back, leading into the rest of the factory. Thick, multipaned windows looked out toward the river.

  There were a number of large wooden trestle tables in the room, and Smith immediately commandeered one, laying his rucksack on it and opening the pack to pull out the briefcase.

  That’s what they were here to do, to finally make the delivery she’d been recruited for, or blackmailed into, depending on her mood, by Mr. Cassle less than forty-eight hours ago.

  She was running out of time.

  Jake, the man on the radio, had let them know Alejandro Campos was on his way. With the money delivered, and the flash drive retrieved, she wondered if she’d be released from any further duty. Campos had the weapons, and he was already dealing with Garcia, who had the documents. She wasn’t sure there was any place for her in that part of the deal, or if there should be any place, considering her feelings.

  She needed to get to St. Joseph.

  And she wanted to nail Garcia’s ass to a wall and ask him what he’d done to her sister.

  Smith was right. Shooting the rebel captain had crossed her mind more than once, more than twice. There had been a couple of nights since her talk with Father Bartolo when she’d thought of little else. The old priest had been so self-righteous in his accusations, adamant and horrified, and full of threats and bluster, all of it directed at the sisters of St. Joseph, the whores of Cristobal. Julia, having once been married, had come under especially virulent attack—and then, after he’d worked himself into a lather, he’d screamed “The whore is pregnant!” and hung up.