Crazy Love

by Tara Janzen

  Travis flipped the pistol’s safety on and put it in the holster strapped to his thigh. He’d been pretty fucking ruthless himself.

  He’d known what the job was when he’d first started coming to Steele Street to work out with Skeeter, not just in the weight room and on the mats, but in here, on the firing range, shooting thousands of rounds of ammo. Every time he’d pulled the trigger, he’d known exactly what the real-life goal had been: to trade paper targets for flesh and bone. No one knew better than he did what a bullet did when it hit a chest cavity. He’d been an EMT long enough to have been called out on a few shootings. He’d seen death. He’d picked it up off the street and scraped it off the highway.

  But to become an instrument of death—he hadn’t seen that in his future a year ago, and he sure as hell hadn’t seen himself doing what he’d just done in Colombia, not what he’d done with a knife.

  Fuck.

  He stretched out his right arm and rolled his shoulder, trying to release the kinks he’d gotten during the long plane ride home without moving his left side too much—and he waited.

  Hawkins had trained Skeeter so she could protect herself. But Travis had come to Steele Street with a different goal in mind—to protect others. He was no Kenshi the Avenger like Skeeter drew him in her comic books, but if some badass wanted to go mano a mano with someone, especially someone Travis loved, like a Colombian drug lord had done last year with his friend Nikki McKinney Chronopolous, they were going to have to go through him first—and he’d made himself damn hard to go through.

  The screen color changed on the computer, and he stepped up to the firing line.

  He took a breath, relaxed, and let the anger leave him. Shooting was both a science and a skill, and both were best practiced with cool, calm deliberation. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

  It wasn’t the deaths in Colombia that bothered him, not most of them. When he shot at somebody, he damn well expected them to die. That was the whole plan. He was no one-shot, one-kill, thousand-yard, cold-zero sniper, but he spent a helluva lot of time making damn sure he could hit what he aimed at with a handgun.

  Without warning, the lights snapped on at the other end of the range, starting the timer and revealing the random pattern of targets he’d asked the computer to position. With smooth, gunfighter-fast precision, he drew his pistol and started unloading his first magazine. When it was empty, a smooth, tactical reload gave him another thirteen cartridges to run through his Glock—Bam! Bam! Bam! The .45 caliber bullets smacked through the targets, one shot after another. His second reload found him cleaning up on the moving targets, trying for at least three shots on each. Four on every target was the goal, as tightly grouped as he could get them, but he hadn’t done it yet, not with moving targets in the drill.

  When he’d run through his ammo, he released the pistol’s slide, flipped on the safety, holstered the gun, and walked down the range to get his targets.

  He’d never pulled a trigger in anger, not even in combat. It was the main reason Creed put up with him, the FNG, the Fucking New Guy, on his missions, Travis’s Zen-like imperturbability.

  Still, he didn’t think Creed wanted to know his Psych-major partner had minored in Mediation and Conflict Resolution, not when Creed’s idea of conflict resolution more often than not involved a seven-inch, military issue, combat knife—just like Travis’s.

  Fuck.

  He reached in his pocket for a handful of extra cartridges and began methodically reloading one of his magazines.

  There was nothing cool and calm about a knife fight.

  He slid the last cartridge into the magazine and then reloaded his pistol, performing the same procedure as last time, as every time—racking one into battery, then releasing the magazine and sliding in an extra cartridge.

  His sidearm was always loaded plus one—always. And he was never without it.

  He stepped over to the computer to restart the drill, when his phone rang. A quick look at the screen brought a smile to his mouth.

  “Hey, Baby Bang. How’s tricks?” It was good to be home, with Skeeter being one of the main reasons. “And where are you?” He’d really been looking forward to seeing her when he’d gotten to Steele Street. But the only people in the building had been Hawkins and Katya, a very, very pregnant Katya, and Cody Rivera, Creed’s wife.

  “Am I roaming at twenty gazillion bucks a minute,” she asked, “or are you back in Denver yet?”

  “Denver.”

  “Then tricks are good, even if you didn’t tell me that Dylan had authorized you for active duty.”

  “I was going to,” he said, feeling a pang of guilt, but not much of one. “Eventually.”

  “Have you been with Creed in Colombia?”

  “Yes.” And Baby Bang would have had no business being there.

  There was a short pause, while she digested his answer. She’d never been on one of Creed’s jungle trips. She’d always gone with Superman, which typically was a different kind of mission, but she’d know what it had been like up there on the border. She’d been around Steele Street long enough to know. She knew the history better than he did.

  “You okay?” she asked, her voice making the question so much more than the obvious.

  “I will be,” he said honestly. Experience was what he lacked, not courage or the commitment to get the job done. With experience, he’d have more resources for putting things in perspective. He knew how it worked. It was just tonight that was rough, coming home to the real world and being alone.

  “Then how fast can you get on a plane to Washington, D.C.?”

  A welcome sense of relief washed through him. That’s what he needed, to get the hell out of Dodge.

  “Half an hour, if there’s a flight. What’s going on?” His bags were by the eighth-floor elevator, still packed. Creed had gone upstairs to his jungle loft and his wife, but Travis had headed straight for the firing range. Nobody needed a third wheel for their postmission reunion with their sweetheart, which was always a guy’s first priority. It would have been Travis’s, too, if he’d had a sweetheart, but he was batting a big zero in that department. He seemed to be on the most amazing streak of bad-luck love, never wanting the women who wanted him and never being able to hold on to, or even get his hands on, the women he wanted. The last “love of his life” he’d fallen for, a wild girl with a lot of issues she hadn’t been able to give up yet, had moved to the coast, the West Coast. She went to school during the day, worked in Katya’s Los Angeles art gallery at night, and always answered his e-mails—but that was as far as he’d gotten in five months, which looked like a strike-out to him.

  So he was giving it a rest, swearing off love, working hard instead, and trying not to think too much about sex—because he wasn’t getting much, and he sure wasn’t getting any tonight, which broke his heart. He could use sex tonight, something to take the edge off. Colombia had been such a fucking mess.

  “There’s a flight,” Skeeter assured him. “And I need backup. Log on to a computer and download the Whitfield/Godwin file and all the Hamzah Negara files. You’ll find the access codes to the black files on Negara engraved on Babycakes’s headers. That’ll get you up to speed. The problem we’ve run into here is the possibility that Negara’s Indonesian pirates were less than a block from Senator Whitfield’s mansion in Georgetown this afternoon. I’ll make your reservation from this end, pull some strings if I have to. You just get your butt out to DIA. Red Dog will pick you up at Dulles.”

  “Red Dog?”

  “General Grant’s new assistant. She’s damned efficient, a real go-getter. Wants to get into State.”

  Travis knew Skeeter meant the State Department. He also knew that General Grant’s office in a hell-and-gone annex about a thousand light-years from the Pentagon was a place people hit on their way down, not on their way up. Somebody should probably fill Red Dog the Go-getter in on the facts—somebody other than him. He was done with being the nicest guy on the block.

 
“So what does Red Dog look like? Who will I be looking for?”

  Skeeter let out a short laugh at the questions, and yeah, he understood.

  “She’ll find you,” Skeeter confirmed. “But just in case she goes temporarily blind, you’ll be looking for five feet five inches of bright-eyed serious in sensible shoes, with—you guessed it—red hair. Have a good flight, and I’ll see you tonight.”

  Red hair, of course, and Travis figured she probably looked like a dog. That’s just the way his life had been going.

  IT was going to be a long night, Tony Royce thought, looking at the rows of surgical tools neatly laid out on a gleaming, stainless steel table in the center of the room—a long, endless night for Dylan Hart.

  The table was set up next to a dental chair bolted to the white-tiled floor. The walls were also tiled in white. Even the ceiling was covered in white ceramic tiles. Everything, everywhere was tiled and white, for easy washdowns and quick cleanups.

  He was quite impressed. The room was an exact copy of one in Negara’s medical building on Sumba, right down to the drain in the floor. This building was so well hidden in the trees on Negara’s Virginia estate, Royce hadn’t even seen it when he’d arrived.

  “You will stay for the festivities?” Negara asked.

  It wasn’t a question, and Royce didn’t assume for a second that it was.

  “Of course. I wouldn’t miss them.” Not often, but every now and then he felt a small pang of remorse for the turn his life had taken, but it never lasted long enough to make much of an impression, and it was never these situations that generated the emotion. He’d been in rooms like this many times over the years, officially, under orders, and righteously assured that he was one of the good guys—one of the good guys strong enough to stomach what it sometimes took to keep the world safe for democracy.

  Then, somewhere along the road, he’d started thinking he was keeping the world safe for capitalism, and from there it had been a very short jump to keeping the world safe for current political expediency. It hadn’t been too much of a leap from there into independent contractor status and keeping the world safe for his own financial gain.

  None of it ever made him lose sleep. Tonight’s “festivities” wouldn’t, either.

  “You were right about the girl,” Negara said. “She is quite memorable, and for a small fee, she was remembered checking into room four eighteen at the Hotel Lafayette.”

  God, he was good.

  Royce smiled. “I’m pleased the information was useful.”

  “Quite.” Negara also smiled. “And perhaps you can be of further use to me.”

  He didn’t like the sound of that, but was very casual in his reply.

  “Perhaps. What do you need?”

  Negara’s smile broadened, which was sometimes a deceptive expression. Royce had a feeling this was one of those times.

  “Room four eighteen was empty when my men got there, and though there were still items of a personal nature present, I am not inclined to leave any holes in my net.”

  Of course not, Royce thought.

  “So you’re still planning on posting men at Whitfield’s,” he said. “I think that’s a good idea.”

  “Yes, yes,” Negara said. “I knew you would understand a multipronged approach.”

  Royce inadvertently reacted to Negara’s statement, allowing a quick, skeptical lift of his brow. Almost as quickly, he schooled his features back into a bland mask.

  “You do not approve?” the old man asked. He didn’t miss much.

  “Actually, I do,” Royce said, though in truth, it had been the multipronged approach to the Dominika Starkova case that had contributed to his career’s demise. Too many agencies with their fingers in the pie, and his own boss putting other agents in the field without telling him, had all helped make him look like a fool by the end of the day. “I would keep two men at the hotel and deploy the others at Whitfield’s. With men at both places, you’ll greatly increase your chances of success.”

  “Yes, yes.” The old man looked happy again. “This is my plan, but now I feel I am—how do you say?—short-handed at the senator’s, especially since I am also covering Hart’s base of operations in Denver tonight. Attacking on three fronts at the same time, I believe, will surely gain us some advantage, and at least one hostage. If you could be at Senator Whitfield’s, strictly in the background, of course, to add your expertise, it would be deeply appreciated.”

  Or you can kill me now and be done with it—or so you think. Royce knew the difference between a request and an ultimatum. He also knew how exposed Negara was by being in the United States, away from his lair on Sumba. It wasn’t just the money that had drawn him out, it was the need to save face as well. If agents of the U.S. government could get away with seventeen million, they could just as easily get away with seventy million. Negara needed to send a message, and if the agent who had done the deed disappeared and was never seen again—so be it. Having Royce help coordinate the hands-on part of the operation, as he’d done in Jakarta, greatly increased its chances of success.

  And for that, no thinly veiled threats were necessary. Royce wanted Hart taken out, and he was willing to ally himself with Negara in the heart of America to get the job done.

  “I would be honored to help,” he said, and later tonight, when Dylan Hart was strapped into the dental chair, any risks he’d taken would pale in comparison to the satisfaction he’d feel at having overcome his enemy.

  CHAPTER

  11

  LOOK FOR an angel.

  Those were her orders, and Gillian “Red Dog” Pentycote was good at following orders—even crazy ones, like “look for an angel.”

  Roger that, she thought, looking for all she was worth. But the only thing she was seeing was hundreds of very unangelic, crabby people trying to find their luggage in the baggage claim area of Dulles International Airport. Everyone arriving on the flight from Denver looked frazzled—businessmen wearing rumpled suits, families who needed their hotel rooms and room service, people at the end of their day who were getting home late to their wives, children, girlfriends, boyfriends, pets, whatever.

  But no angels.

  She pushed her glasses back up on her nose. She’d give it a couple more minutes, then call Mr. James at the cell phone number Skeeter had given her.

  Angel, she thought again, giving her head a little shake. It wasn’t like Skeeter to be so vague.

  A small smile curved her mouth. There sure as heck wasn’t anything vague about Skeeter Bang in the flesh. Gillian had never met anyone more “there,” more colorful, distinct, and utterly unique. The voice Gillian had been dealing with over the phone for the last month had not prepared her for someone so young and with ten times her muscle tone. The head-shot photo in Grant’s files showed little beyond a black ball cap with a dragon embroidered on it and a pair of mirrored sunglasses. There was the button nose, but the photograph on whole had been remarkably lacking in information. There had been no clue about the hair, or the tattoos, or the scar across her forehead…or that body.

  Gillian instinctively stood a little straighter. She’d had some training, self-defense and weapons, since she’d started at SDF. General Grant had insisted on it, but she was a long way from looking like she could kick somebody’s butt, and even further from actually being able to do it. Skeeter looked like she did it in her sleep.

  This “angel” named Travis James probably looked the same way, the way all the guys at Steele Street looked—Hart, Hawkins, Rivera, Younger, and Chronopolous. The file photos she had of the operators were pretty good—well lit, no hats, no sunglasses—and not a one of them looked anything like an angel, except maybe Creed Rivera, if there had been a way to get the feral look out of his eyes. That boy was wild and definitely no angel. They didn’t even have a photograph of Mr. James on file, or even a file on the guy, which just highlighted the reason she’d been hired to tidy up General Grant’s loose ends. He had about a million of them hanging out of
his filing cabinets and stashed around his small suite of offices next to the boiler room in an annex nobody else in Washington, D.C., even knew existed. With the boss out of town, she’d planned on working a little overtime to see if she could get ahead of all the general’s junk, especially his top-secret junk, which, inexperienced as she was, she knew was supposed to be secured somewhere, inside something with locks and codes on it. Some of the documents she’d run across in the last month she shouldn’t have seen dead.

  Besides, it was the weekend, when her life slowed down to somewhere between a crawl and a full-out stop. No, sirree. Not much happened in Gillian Pentycote’s life between five P.M. on Friday and nine o’clock Monday morning, other than dinner with her parents and a full dose of relatives on Sunday after church, including her two sisters, two brothers, and various wives, husbands, children, aunts, cousins, and uncles. Not even Skeeter almost instantly hanging her with the really cool handle “Red Dog” when Grant had first hired her changed the basic facts of her social life, but this weekend, fate had stepped in and handed her a mission, at least as close to a mission as she’d gotten. After only a month on the job, she’d spent the afternoon doing a weapons check.

  A weapons check—God, she could still hardly believe it, loading submachine guns, checking batteries in equipment, and testing communications devices. It sure beat the hell out of her last job, buried in the Environmental Sciences labs at the University of Arizona, running errands and scurrying around after her VIP—Very Important Professor—husband.

  Ex-husband, she reminded herself, and it wasn’t as if her name wasn’t also on the book they’d written, detailing the ecology of the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum. It was, right after his, in smaller print—dammit.

  She would be damned surprised, though, if Dr. Kenneth Pentycote ever managed to see his name on another book. Her organizational skills aside, without her insightful brilliance discerning the underlying correlations between all those facts Ken was so enamored of unearthing and flaunting, there’d be damn little of actual academic significance to make a book of his worth publishing, and he could take that to the bank. Or rather, he couldn’t take it to the bank.