On the Loose

by Tara Janzen

  Alarming, to say the least.

  He’d only accepted her subsequent phone call through the intervention of his prelate and with a promise of a hefty donation to St. Mary’s Parish. All she’d gotten for her trouble and her cash, though, was a guise of normalcy, prayers for her soul, and an assurance that God’s will would prevail—another extremely alarming pronouncement.

  And Julia in the middle of all of it, alone and isolated in the mountains of El Salvador with whores and rebels. Honey had seen no choice but to come. In truth, she couldn’t have gotten here fast enough—and look at her, tumbled and muddy, with secret briefcases, and armies at the gates, and hiding out in old buildings with a man named Cougar.

  He looked every inch a soldier this morning, armed with a pistol he’d holstered on his thigh and with a knife sheathed on his belt.

  Honey had a greeting prepared for their host, something cool and professional, but when Alejandro Campos strode through the door into the main room, all she could do was stare.

  Oh, my, she thought. Oh, my dear God, my.

  “Campos.” Smith stepped forward and held out his hand, and the most beautiful, and most beautifully flawed, man in the world took it in his grip.

  “Rydell,” Campos said, then shifted his attention to her.

  She did a quick check and confirmed that yes, indeed, her mouth had fallen open, and she closed it. There was nothing to be done about her sweaty shirt and her wild hair.

  “Ms. York-Lytton.” He made a slight bow. “Encantado.”

  She didn’t speak Spanish, but she knew exactly what he’d said: I’m charmed.

  So was she, ridiculously charmed. The last thing she’d expected was a gorgeous man in Armani.

  Good Lord, he was tailored to perfection: black suit, crisp white shirt, even in this humidity, and a red silk tie that looked as if an artist had poured watercolors down it.

  He had green eyes shot through with brown and gray, chiseled features, and dark, midnight-colored hair pulled back at the nape of his neck and held in place with a discreet band. He also had a scar running the length of his face.

  “If you will?” he said, gesturing at the briefcase and getting straight to the point. “Por favor.” Please.

  She most certainly did please, feeling an unexpected sense of excitement. She’d dragged the damn thing with her all the way from Washington, D.C., without a clue as to what exactly was in it—and now she was about to find out.

  She stepped forward and entered the six digits she had of the combination, three numbers for each of the cipher locks on the briefcase. Money was the likely contents, but she didn’t know for sure. When she was finished, Campos stepped around the table and looked at what she’d done, and then he picked up the case and left, disappearing up a set of stairs at the far end of the room.

  Her mouth fell open again.

  That was it?

  “But—” she said, turning to look at Smith. “But...but—”

  He was grinning. “Did you think he was going to let you see what was inside?”

  “Yes.” Yes, she had. Most definitely. “I’m the one who brought it all the way here.”

  “For which I’m sure he is very grateful.”

  She couldn’t believe it.

  “So what’s in it?” she asked.

  “Money, I’d guess.”

  “But how much?”

  “You’re too curious.”

  “And you aren’t?” She couldn’t believe it.

  He shook his head. “Not about the contents of cipher-locked briefcases. In this business, Honey, it’s important to concentrate on your own job. It was your job to get it here, my job to protect you, and his job to deal with whatever is inside and use it. Next week, for me, it could easily be another briefcase, and another guy, and another deal going down.”

  Intellectually, she understood exactly what he was saying. It made perfect sense—and she still wanted to know what was in the black case marked with the letter Z. Dammit.

  “What about another woman?” The words came out of nowhere, surprising her—and disappointing the hell out of her. Good God, how could she have said something so...so juvenile?

  He let out a laugh. “I think it’s going to take me more than a week to recover from you, sweetheart.”

  She gave him a look of pure annoyance, doing her best to salvage an embarrassing moment, and was about to ask him what in the world he meant—he had so much nerve—when his radio came to life.

  At the same time, Campos came back down the stairs with the briefcase, almost at a run.

  “We have troop movement,” he said.

  Smith nodded, said, “Yes,” into the radio, and listened intently, while moving back to where he’d left his rucksack and the submachine gun on the table.

  Campos strode to the front window, looked out, and swore under his breath. Then he turned to her.

  “It has been a pleasure, Ms. York-Lytton,” he said. “But if you would be so kind as to leave. Now.” He gestured toward the doors leading into the building, before turning to Smith. “There is a passageway in the basement boiler room that leads to the river. I highly recommend you use it. And Ms. York-Lytton”—he glanced in her direction again—“your sister is at the villa. She arrived this morning with Garcia and the other nuns from St. Joseph.”

  The man had the most interesting way of reducing her to poleaxed surprise. Julia was here?

  The news made her heart race, but it was also just more disaster piled on a disaster. This was the last place she wanted Julia to be, in the middle of all this.

  She looked back out the window, and was amazed how quickly things had gone to hell. Hadn’t she just thought her part in all this was over? And now she had to wonder if maybe the whole shebang was over.

  Three trucks full of soldiers had roared up outside, one coming all the way to the factory, the other two trucks stopping about a hundred yards away. Dozens of men were piling out of the distant vehicles. Only five exited the truck stopped at the door—one of them Diego Garcia.

  Whatever he was planning, she doubted if it was going to be to the advantage of anyone in the coffee plant—a point brought suddenly and graphically home by the appearance of the strange-looking shotgun-like weapons wielded by the soldiers with Garcia.

  “M-79s,” Smith said. “Forty-millimeter grenade launchers.”

  Grenades?

  Dear God.

  “Go,” Campos ordered, unnecessarily. Smith had already shrugged into his rucksack, grabbed the submachine gun, and had ahold of her arm. He hustled her through the double doors, and Campos slammed them shut.

  She heard a bar drop on the other side, which was not a comfort, not when she turned around.

  No.

  The one word was very clear in her mind, very succinct, and very, very true.

  No, she was not going into any basement, not in this place.

  Sunshine streaked through holes far up in the top of the building, but the contrast of the bright shafts of light only served to deepen the shadows surrounding the stories of rafters, catwalks, and freight elevators looming up on either side of the cavernous room. Down on the main floor, smoke rose from the depths of an old iron machine as it squealed and rumbled, and groaned with moving parts, the whole thing sounding like it was on the verge of exploding or breaking down.

  There were cobwebs.

  Big ones—and she knew exactly what that meant.

  Spiders. Big ones.

  There were bats.

  She couldn’t see them, but she knew they were there. The place was a damn cave, damp and dark and eerily still. Oh, there was noise from the machine, but nothing else moved in the whole place.

  It looked like it was waiting.

  Probably for her.

  Oh, yeah.

  She took a step back, an inadvertent retreat.

  “I think—”

  “Don’t,” Smith said, taking hold of her and moving her along at a quick pace. Their footsteps echoed on the wooden landin
g above the factory floor. Flights of stairs snaked down the walls everywhere she looked.

  Snakes.

  She couldn’t believe it had taken her thirty seconds to think of snakes—and they’d be in the basement, probably hanging around any secret passageway to the river.

  This was insane.

  “I have a better plan,” she insisted, having to half run to keep up with him.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I’m not going down into any basement in here. This place is...is—”

  “That’s how we get to the river.”

  Us and the snakes, she thought.

  “Let’s just go out one of these windows, or find a door, and—”

  He pulled her to a quick stop and stared down at her for the space of a breath, then two, and she realized he didn’t look like the man she’d made love with in the back of the Land Cruiser. He looked like the man she’d met four months ago in the Hotel Palacio. Hard.

  “There are soldiers out there, Honey, and the best way for us to evade them is by getting as far away from here as possible without being seen, which means the basement passage to the river.”

  She didn’t care. She had a bad feeling about the basement.

  “I have a bad feeling about the basement.”

  He didn’t look happy to hear it.

  “Bad feeling?”

  “Yes.”

  He gave a short quiet nod. “Okay, well, I’ve got a bad feeling, too, and my bad feeling is all about getting blown to friggin’ smithereens by a goddamn grenade.”

  “That sounds pretty bad.”

  “It is.” Guaranteed. He’d seen it. “Now let’s move out.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  That was the problem with small delays, Campos thought. They turned into huge problems. If Rydell and York-Lytton had not gotten lost, he would have had the cash at the villa and been able to expedite this damn deal, and be done with it by now.

  But no. The short drive he’d had to make to the factory had turned the whole thing into a disaster. Give some people time to think, people like Diego Garcia, and you could bet they’d think up something stupid.

  What was the captain planning out there? A Salvadoran standoff?

  “Jake,” he said into the radio, “what have we got here?”

  “The other half of Garcia’s army.”

  So this wasn’t the group from the front gate. Garcia had dreamed up this piece of strategy long before he’d shown up at dawn. There was just no trusting some people.

  Most people.

  What a pain in the butt.

  “If I end up having to give him all two million to save my ass, we’re going to have to go in there tonight and get it back.”

  “I know, boss.”

  Goddammit. The last place he wanted to spend his evening was farther north on the Torola River, sneaking and crawling around in the woods, trying to steal two million dollars he should have been able to hold on to without so damn much trouble.

  Diego Garcia had been a good CIA asset for the last ten years, but this whole deal with the plane, and the money, and the courier’s pouch, not to mention the weapons, had the ring of a final hurrah, and this move, with the soldiers and the grenades, that was a pure, no-holds-barred and burn-your-bridges exit strategy. The man must have let a few good drug deals go to his head.

  Rebel insurgency could be a good business, sure, but it paled in comparison to the money to be made in drugs. Nobody would deny it, but Campos wasn’t at all sure Garcia comprehended the intensely competitive nature of cocaine.

  As a Salvadoran guerrilla leader, his enemies numbered two: the Salvadoran government and, give or take on any day of the week, the U.S. government. As a narcotraficante that number extrapolated and exploded.

  Hell. The pendejo had made a bad decision, and if Campos couldn’t get his end of it worked out real damn quick, he was going to get burned.

  Or he could call it quits right now, have Jake lock everything down on his end, get out the LAWs, and start this party.

  But first he needed to get those damn documents. That was the job.

  “Señor Campos!” Garcia called from outside, demanding and getting his full attention.

  Goddammit, this was going to cost him.

  “Hold steady on your end, Jake. If I’m not back at the villa in an hour, or if anything blows up over here, I expect to be avenged in great style. My memoirs are in the wall safe in my office.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said. “That’s where I’ve been keeping mine, too.”

  Campos almost grinned, but the situation was just too damn grim.

  “He’s got three trucks here, big ones,” he said. “They’d make great targets.”

  “Roger that.”

  Half a friggin’ mile, and he’d gotten ambushed in his own backyard.

  He slipped the radio into his pants pocket and pulled out his phone.

  Oh, yeah, this was going to cost him, all right.

  He punched in a coded number and waited for a long series of connections to be made.

  When the call was finally answered in Cali, Colombia, he sold himself down the river to save Uncle Sam one more time.

  “Tell Miguel Carranza it’s Alejandro Campos.”

  If anyone could call off the dogs at his door, it was the head of the Cali cartel.

  “Did you see that?” Honey asked.

  “Yes.” Smith had, a sudden movement below them on the factory floor.

  “I-I don’t think it’s just the wind or something. I don’t think there is any wind in here.”

  No, there wasn’t. Not a breath of it.

  Peering down into the gloom, he was betting on rats, quite a few, like about a hundred or more, a slow-moving wave of a hundred or more rats who probably owned the mortgage on this place.

  Rats. Okay. He didn’t mind rats.

  “Just stay behind me,” he said.

  Campos had said the passageway was in a boiler room, which shouldn’t be too hard to find once they got to the basement. Smith bet the flight of stairs disappearing under the floor on the other side of the factory was just the ticket.

  “Did you see that?” she asked, almost tripping over him in her haste to get closer.

  Yeah, he’d seen it—more rats, a couple dozen scurrying through the shadows cast by a tower of crates at the bottom of the stairs. Fifty- and hundred-pound sacks of coffee beans were piled every which way on the main floor, stacked against pylons, making small mountains against the walls, and providing excellent cover for the furry little bastards.

  “Stay close.” He loved giving orders she didn’t have any trouble obeying.

  She was good for another thirty seconds.

  “What was that?”

  “What was what?” If they were going to talk about every rat she saw, this was going to be the chattiest escape in the history of the world. He had a plan. Once they made it to the river, they’d circle back around to the villa. He’d seen a Beech Baron parked in a hangar close to the main house, and where there was a plane, there was bound to be a pilot. Flying out of Morazán would beat the hell out of driving.

  Of course, his plan only worked if the whole place wasn’t going up in flames and smoke by the time they got there.

  “That.” She grabbed onto his waistband, the word ending on a whispered squeal.

  “There might be a couple of rats in here.” Okay, more than a couple, more than a hundred, more than a couple of hundred.

  Her hand tightened on his pants. “Rats?”

  “Honey, rats are the least of our problems.”

  The rattling of the doors above them proved his point. An explosion outside slammed his point home with a vengeance. He doubled their pace, loosening her hand from his pants and taking hold of her arm.

  Weapon at the ready, he hustled her across the main factory floor, breaking into a run when the way was clear, keeping as much machinery as possible between them and the stairs they’d just come down.

  When voices
sounded above them, he pulled her in front of him and gave her a small push.

  “Go go go,” he commanded.

  “Alto!” The command came from above them. Stop!

  And then somebody goddamn shot at them, the bullet pinging off the wall above his head.

  Shit.

  “Go! Now!”

  She started down the stairs, him hot on her heels, until she made an abrupt about-turn and started back up at double speed, trying to push by him, her breath coming fast, her face white.

  “Oh...oh, God, oh, so help...help.” Her words were barely coherent. One look down explained it. She’d started a riot.

  A rat riot.

  They were streaming by her, running over her boots, running over each other, half crawling up her legs, squeaking and pitter-pattering, sharp nails scraping on the stairs, bodies piling over each other, scrambling, hundreds of the beasts.

  Okay. Whatever. He didn’t change directions, not for a second, and he didn’t miss a step. He kept going down, sweeping the damn things off the steps with his boots, and crushing the ones that didn’t move quick enough, and by God, he took Honey with him, hauling her close to his side, lifting her off the stairs.

  When he put her down, he kept her moving despite her gasped protests and her ineffective attempt to stay on her tiptoes. Above them, booted feet pounded across the factory.

  At the top of the stairs, some pendejo took the initiative and squeezed a few bursts of automatic weapon fire off into the basement.

  Goddammit. Guerrillas behind them, rats in the middle, and no boiler room or secret passage-way in sight, he couldn’t believe he’d allowed himself and Honey to get caught like goddamn rats in a—

  Rats.

  When he heard feet hit the stairs, he pushed her behind a piece of rusting machinery and returned fire.