On the Loose

by Tara Janzen

  “And you called yours ‘Sanctioned Oppression in Patriarchal Societies.’ ”

  She was quiet for a long time, real quiet, and just looking at him, and he began to wonder if he’d really jumped the gun.

  “We’re having an awful lot of fun together,” she said.

  “It’s more than fun, Honey, and you know it.” And it was. He didn’t know how to describe what he felt for her, except it was different from all the wild hormone lust he was used to calling love. For all the hot sex, it was the connection he craved with her. Watching her think had become his favorite pastime. Ninety percent of the women he’d ever dated had been smart, and funny, and beautiful, and the other ten percent simply hadn’t been funny—and okay, yeah, there were a few in there who maybe simply hadn’t been smart.

  But that wasn’t it with Honey. She was everything any guy would want, and none of that was why he wanted her.

  “I have something kind of crazy to tell you,” he said.

  “Crazier than us getting married?”

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “It’s about the day we met.”

  “That wasn’t crazy,” she said. “That was kismet.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I mean. I remembered something a couple of weeks ago, about my mother, and it got me thinking about the day we met.”

  “Thinking what?” she asked, when he paused.

  “Well, normally, I am not the sort of operator who leaves his observation position to save a woman who isn’t a part of my mission. But when I saw you there, I barely even thought. I just moved. I mean, I love how it worked out, but I’ve always wondered why I got out of my chair and left my beer.”

  She looked a little skeptical at that. “And?”

  “And it was because of the dress, the polka-dot dress. My mother was wearing a polka-dot dress in the photograph I told you about, the one I looked at hundreds of times as a kid, the one that shows where she was hurt, and there you are, another woman in a polka-dot dress, and man, I can see the hurt coming for you from a mile away. So I just get up and move.”

  “Wow,” she said softly.

  “But that’s not the amazing thing.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No,” he said. “The amazing thing is that you turned out to be the perfect person for me.”

  Her arms came around him really tightly. “And that’s why you think we should get married?”

  “No,” he said, holding her closer and smoothing his hand up the satiny curve of her back. “I think we should get married because I love you, Honey, and I want to be there for you through all the thick and thin of it.”

  “I want to be there for you, too.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  She stretched up and kissed him, once, sweetly on the cheek. “It’s a yes for now, but after we’re married, I think we should go steady for a while, until we get through the break-in period.”

  “Break-in period?” He liked the sound of that. “Isn’t that what we’ve been doing for the last three weeks? Breaking in?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But we’ve got a ways to go, yet.”

  “Here,” he said, leaning over the side of the bed and fishing around in his pocket until he found the ring. “Maybe this will help.”

  “Ohmigosh, Smith,” she gasped. “It’s beautiful.”

  Yeah, he liked the way it looked. It was platinum, with a couple of stones in one spot, and kind of a bigger stone in the middle.

  “I thought this part was neat,” he said, pointing out a sweep of really tiny diamonds encrusted on the band. He’d loved all the concentrated sparkle of it, and he’d figured she would, too. It reminded him of her, the cool platinum and brilliance of the ring, and then the unexpected part, the hot center and the sparkle of all the tiniest diamonds.

  “The pavé,” she said, slipping it on her finger and holding it up into the light.

  Yeah, the pavé, he thought. He was all about the pavé—but he wasn’t going to tell her just yet. He’d spilled enough of his heart on the table for now. He’d save the pavé part for later, after the break-in period.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TARA JANZEN lives in Colorado with her husband, children, and two dogs, and is now at work on her next novel. Of the mind that love truly is what makes the world go ’round, she can be contacted at www.tarajanzen.com . Happy reading!

  ALSO BY TARA JANZEN

  Crazy Hot

  Crazy Cool

  Crazy Wild

  Crazy Kisses

  Crazy Love

  Crazy Sweet

  CUTTING LOOSE

  ON SALE WINTER 2008

  CHAPTER ONE

  Langley, Virginia

  Alejandro Campos slowed his rented black Mercedes to a crawl, carefully negotiating a serpentine series of heavy gray concrete pylons approaching the security checkpoint at the main entrance to CIA headquarters. The positioning of the barricades looked haphazard.

  It wasn’t.

  NASA’s astrodynamics lab in Huntington had designed the maze. At four miles an hour or less, traffic flowed smoothly through the pattern. Anything over four mph guaranteed smashing a quarter panel against a pylon at an angle guaranteed to put a vehicle broadside to a guaranteed line of fire from the armored guard station at the end of the serpentine.

  The CIA liked their guarantees.

  They liked their double guarantees, like the mirrored third-story windows in the main building overlooking the approach. Behind the windows was another NASA-designed product, an array of computer-directed weaponry with a broad range of capabilities, from putting a bullet neatly through a single driver’s eyeball to turning an armored vehicle into a smoking tangle of twisted metal—or to do anything in between, depending on the perceived threat level. In terms of firepower, the imposing guard station at street level was mostly for show.

  Even so, the security officer at the checkpoint was carrying a custom single-action .45 caliber sidearm in a tactical SWS polymer holster with four spare magazines on his duty belt. The pistol’s rosewood grips showed wear marks, an indication of the amount of use it got—plenty, probably at one of the agency’s off-site high-tech qualification ranges.

  Campos pulled the Mercedes to a stop, and the officer approached the driver’s window, simultaneously pressing a switch on his multi-function communications device. Everything that happened during the officer’s contact with the vehicle, both audio and video, would be transmitted in real time to the control center’s computer inside the main building.

  Campos rolled his window down and deliberately placed both hands, palms open, on top of the steering wheel.

  “Good morning, sir,” the officer said pleasantly. “Could I see your entry authorization?”

  The guy was hard and lean, about thirty-five, with a layer of Kevlar soft body armor just visible inside the open collar of his uniform shirt.

  “Certainly,” Campos said, reaching onto the dash, securing a business card, and handing it over. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that besides being courteous and efficient, the guard was capable of handling most situations without third-story assistance.

  The man entered the numeric sequence written on the back of the card into a PDA and viewed the response on the screen.

  “Look directly at me,” he instructed, then aimed the lens of the PDA’s digital camera toward Campos. He compared the image with whatever else was on the screen. “Is there anything more you would like to tell me, sir?”

  “Zachary,” Campos said, just loudly enough for the officer to hear him clearly.

  Zachary Prade—the name he’d used the first time he’d come to Langley, and according to his orders, the name they were giving back to him, at least for a while. Alejandro Campos had served its purpose.

  It was the way of things.

  The guard nodded and handed him a visitor’s pass.

  “I’m clearing you for building entry, but not through security screening. Park your vehicle in the Alpha Two section on your right, proceed inside the
main entrance, and wait outside of screening for your escort. Should pick you up within ten minutes. Any questions?”

  “No,” he said, and put the Mercedes in gear.

  A few minutes later, he was heading for the building, and it occurred to him that in all his years with the CIA, this was the first time he had ever, literally or figuratively, walked in through the front door.

  Four sublevels down, his escort swiped a keycard through the cipher-lock reader on a door marked “Forensics.” The temperature inside the room was a good ten degrees cooler than the hallway, which made his suit jacket almost comfortable.

  Campos noted three rows of what appeared to be oversized stainless-steel filing drawers set into the wall on the left, an assortment of analytical instruments along the remaining walls, and a steel examining table in the center of the room.

  Perfect. A morgue.

  He wasn’t surprised.

  Given his involvement in a recent debacle in El Salvador and his report, he could even guess who the guest of honor would be. Hell.

  There were three individuals already in the room, two men and a woman. They were standing close to the table and the thick black body bag laying on top of it, unzipped. He recognized the woman and one of the men immediately, then recognized the other man, but only just barely. Despite an active, some might say hyper -active, history of correspondence between the two of them, conducted through various cut-outs, intermediaries, and back channels, he hadn’t actually seen the man who had recruited him in over twelve years.

  “Hello, Zach,” the man said, turning to face him but leaving both hands inside the deep pockets of his lab coat.

  “Alex,” he said, acknowledging the case officer. “Are you planning on telling me what’s important enough to terminate my cover?”

  On the flight up from San Salvador, all by himself, he’d compiled a pretty good short list of reasons for Alejandro Campos to disappear, and his partner, Joya Molara Gualterio, could probably add, oh, a million or so even better reasons why his butt had needed to be pulled out of Central America. Even his doctor had thought it was time for him to go. He had no problem with that part. He’d get reassigned.

  Okay, “no problem” was stretching things a bit. He had a couple of problems with it, all of them personal. But this little trip to Langley had required a catalyst beyond any reason to pull him out of deep cover—and that’s what had been eating him since he’d gotten the call. A lot of shit had hit the fan in El Salvador three weeks ago, and suddenly, after twelve years, he was face-to-face with his boss. It wasn’t a coincidence, not in his business.

  “Yes, of course,” Alex answered, a look of weariness passing over his features. “But, as always, first things first.”

  “Right. And what exactly might those be?” he asked evenly, already knowing at least part of the answer. Hell, it was stretched out on the table.

  “First of all, Zach,” Alex said, “allow me to introduce Charles Kesselring and Amanda van Zandt. Charles is Deputy Director, Operations, and Amanda is Deputy Director, Intelligence.” The two senior officers each gave Zach a polite nod, which he returned.

  The introductions were required by agency protocol, but were completely unnecessary. He knew perfectly well who the current DDO and DDI were, and he knew that having the two of them in the same place, especially this place, at the same time, probably meant a situation serious enough to have foreign policy implications—the catalyst, and the reason he’d been popping antacids since he’d gotten on the plane early this morning.

  “And,” Alex continued, “may I regretfully direct your attention to the body of Mark Devlin, recently killed while on assignment in Central America.” The body bag. The guest of honor, literally.

  Zach recognized the dead man as one of the agency’s contract aviators, a hardcore former Marine who had been a frequent visitor at Alejandro Campos’s plantation in northern El Salvador. He had known the man by another name, a name that would never again be spoken by anyone inside the agency.

  “Your most recent field report included a videotape of Devlin’s death at the hands of CNL guerrillas after his Cessna was shot down in Morazán,” Alex said. “This tape was filmed by one Lily Robbins, an American schoolteacher from Albuquerque, New Mexico, whose return to the States you expedited at the conclusion of the Morazán incident. We are here to discuss Robbins’s possible connection with the flash drive from Devlin’s downed aircraft.”

  Zach recalled the incident in painful detail. Smith Rydell, a DOD operator, had recovered a classified flash drive from the CIA’s Cessna, days after the critically injured Devlin had been captured by the CNL. No one on the U.S. side had been aware of the pilot’s fate until the guerrillas, in an uncharacteristic gesture of decency, had delivered his body to the Catholic mission in San Cristobal for transport back to the States. After that, the entire incident had exploded into a violent tangle of conflicting agendas involving more actors and intrigue than an Italian opera, including cocaine smugglers, arms dealers, international assassins, and Salvadoran insurgents, not to mention deep-cover CIA intelligence assets. The agency had at first suspected Lily Robbins of being an agent for at least one of the players in the drama, but eventually agreed with Zach’s assessment that she had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  At least they had been in agreement, but now—well, now he wished he had a couple more antacids to pop.

  “What kind of connection are you thinking?” he asked evenly.

  Van Zandt picked up the conversation, speaking with a clear, refined eastern accent.

  Zach guessed Vassar, or maybe Yale, definitely not Albuquerque.

  “We have downloaded and analyzed the contents of the flash drive,” she said. “The files are extensive, mostly routine field reports and other regional data. The largest file, however, initially downloads as an overwritten area of the device’s memory, appearing to contain only random bytes with no recoverable data.” She paused, her gaze holding his.

  “I’m guessing ‘appearing to contain’ is the operative part of that sentence,” he prompted.

  “Correct,” she said. “Using the appropriate algorithm, the file can be reordered into random character strings. That, by itself, doesn’t accomplish anything of value. When paired with the proper literal key, however, the file becomes readable. In this case, the encoded file was created using a true random one-time literal key.”

  Zach knew about literal keys. The cryptographic method was centuries old, and had fallen out of favor in the computer age. The technique involved mapping plain-text characters through random characters to create encoded text. If done properly, the only thing a cryptographer could tell from the encoded text alone was that each character was somewhere in the alphabet from A to Z, with each letter being equally probable, assuming that the plain-text had started out as English. In other words, a computer could make the encoded text mean anything at all, with equal odds of success for each decryption version. Systematic computer codes, including computer-generated pseudo-random keys, could eventually be broken by other computers. Codes using true random keys, however, could be broken only if the same key were used repeatedly. If the key was only used once, computer analysis could not recover the plain text.

  Kesselring spoke next. “Normally, of course, both the originator and the recipient would possess the same literal key. In this case, for reasons that are not pertinent to this discussion, the only copy of the key accompanied the encoded file. One of Devlin’s transport options for such data was a macramé bracelet with a polymer strand containing a series of microdots woven into it. Very low-tech in this modern age, but still quite effective, especially since so few examiners even look for it.” He activated a laptop computer screen on a table next to Devlin’s body. “Our medical examiner scanned Devlin’s wrists and found a pattern of hemp fibers embedded into the skin on the left one. Here’s a color-enhanced image of the pattern.” Kesselring paused to let Zach take a close look at the purplish chain-link outlin
e. “Your report states that Ms. Robbins was in physical contact with Devlin just before he died. Her tape shows clearly that Devlin had nothing on his wrist at the time of his death. The report also states that she was wearing various items of personal adornment when she arrived at your residence. Could a fiber bracelet such as this have been one of those items?”

  Zach drew a long breath. “Yes,” he said finally. Lily Robbins had been wearing all sorts of jewelry the night she’d shown up at his plantation, soaking wet from a rain storm, packing a guerrilla capitán’s engraved pistol, and obviously in more trouble than he’d thought—and he’d thought she’d been in plenty.

  And dammit, he’d found the catalyst, the connection, and the reason he’d been called all the way back home—a damn piece of macramé.

  “It’s entirely likely Ms. Robbins has your key,” he finished, even as he wondered why in the hell a schoolteacher would have taken a cheap bracelet off a dying man.

  “Likely enough to send you to find her and look for it,” Kesselring agreed. “There are a few more things you need to be aware of, though. First, the only individuals on this end who know of the key’s existence are the four of us in this room. Second, we consider it entirely possible that Devlin was photographed after he was captured. Third, there are some pretty clever folks who serve—ah—other interests, and those folks just might figure out that he left without something he arrived with. If we can guess what it is and where it is, then so can they. Best case, you locate Ms. Robbins, recover the bracelet, it turns out to be what we think it is, you return without incident, and that’s the end of it. Worst case...”

  “I get it,” Zach said. And he did, dammit.

  “You’ll maintain your current identity and use your existing resources for this, at least to begin with,” Van Zandt said. “Alex will brief you on the risk assessment, operational details, and options. Do you have further questions for Charles or myself?”