Breaking Loose

by Tara Janzen

  But, geezus, what an ass.

  Her second foot hit the pavement, and with just the slightest wiggle, she readjusted the skirt of her dress.

  Slight.

  Right.

  He felt that little wiggle from his heart to his groin.

  He knew better.

  So help him, God, he knew better.

  So why in the hell was he dropping a wad of bills on the table and getting ready to cross the street?

  CHAPTER TWO

  Well, things were going just great, Suzi thought, standing at the entrance of the notorious Galeria Viejo, possibly the dumpiest, dirtiest, most squalid place she’d ever stood in her life. Or at least things had been going great-spectacularly great. She hadn’t had any delays on the flights getting from Dulles to the Guarani International Airport in Ciudad del Este. Her hotel, the heavily guarded Gran Chaco, was first-class, her suite gorgeous and overlooking the luxury establishment’s tropical garden and courtyard pool area. The light lunch she’d had delivered via room service had been impeccably prepared. Jimmy Ruiz had shown up on time, nervous and unkempt, but also well armed and accommodating. She hadn’t had a single problem since she’d left General Grant in his office at the Marsh Annex in Washington -until now.

  This was a problem.

  “No,” she said, very clearly, lowering her sunglasses partway down her nose and giving the ape blocking the door of Galeria Viejo her steeliest gaze. He wasn’t frisking her, not this side of the grave. Oh, hell no.

  Next to her, Jimmy Ruiz was talking a mile a minute to ape number two, but without getting much affect, despite the addition of dramatic hand gestures.

  He needed to get some affect.

  She understood that he’d brought her here under duress. She hadn’t been shy about threatening him with certain agents of the U.S. government, who had been investigating his dealings with a U.S. Treasury agent recently transferred out of Paraguay and currently under indictment for charges ranging from tax evasion to treason.

  But Ruiz needed to make her position clear, crystal clear, or he wouldn’t see the light of day for another twenty years, if then.

  “Who do they work for?” she asked in English, interrupting his tirade. Ruiz had short dark hair, a medium build, a cheap brown suit that fit him like an old paper bag, and a rap sheet a mile long.

  “The two out here, for Esteban Ponce,” Jimmy said, meeting her gaze with a brief glance. “The one just inside the door, staring at us, for Señor Levi Asher.”

  Yes, she thought she’d recognized the hulking man standing in the shadowy interior of the gallery. His name was Gervais.

  “Señor Asher is from New York,” Jimmy was saying.

  New York, London, Athens, Cairo, she thought. She and Levi the Pervert went way back in the art trade, and the minute she’d seen that photograph in General Grant’s office, she’d have laid a thousand dollars down on Levi being in Paraguay. That boy had been after the Memphis Sphinx for as long as she’d known him.

  “Esteban Ponce is a very important man from Brazil,” Jimmy finished up.

  Actually, Esteban Ponce was an idiot, but a dangerous idiot, one of the people she’d meant when she’d told Grant that some people would kill for the Sphinx. The Maned Sphinx of Sesostris III had been a lightning rod for true believers, lost souls, and avaricious charlatans of all stripes for over a century, with immortality as the prize. People got a little crazy when life everlasting was put on the auction block, especially people who were a little crazy to begin with-like Esteban Ponce.

  Both Ponce and Asher had been noted and highlighted in the DIA files she’d read on the plane, along with half a dozen other collectors and dealers, some of whom she knew, some she didn’t. The DIA Moonrise team had compiled quite a number of lists concerning the Memphis Sphinx, not least of which were the things she shouldn’t do if by chance she actually got her hands on it: Do not hold the statue up into the moonlight on the night of the third full moon in the year of Horus, as immortality may be imparted to the holder. Do not drench the statue in blood on the night of the third full moon in the year of Horus and set it on a corpse, as resurrection may result. Do not take the statue apart.

  Easy enough, she’d figured, especially the blood and corpse part-but she could see why some people would get excited about that particular power.

  She didn’t imagine she’d be holding it up in the moonlight either, and she would definitely be doing her damnedest not to accidentally take the thing apart, but she knew the Sphinx had parts, the gold death mask for one, apparently removable crystal eyes for another, and the pièce de résistance, an RFID, a radio-frequency identification tag. The scanner for that nearly invisible piece of technological wizardry had been in her briefing packet and was now in her purse, a pen-shaped gadget that fit neatly in the palm of her hand. If she got within three meters of the DIA’s Sphinx, the scanner would light up and register the location via its built-in GPS. Three meters was an amazing range for an RFID powder chip with an internal antenna, and the DIA was rightly proud.

  “You know whom I represent,” she said to Ruiz, keeping her voice very low, very cold. “Are these Señors Asher and Ponce more important than my client?”

  It was a trick question.

  She was in Paraguay for only one reason-Buck Grant had asked her to be-but Jimmy Ruiz had been led to believe she was on a buying spree for a certain congressman from Illinois, the kind of man who could exert his influence to get the U.S. government off Jimmy’s back, if things went well in Ciudad del Este, if perhaps Ms. Royal came home with a few particularly prized pieces.

  Ruiz’s gaze slid to hers again.

  “There must be someone you can call,” she said coolly. “If not, there’s certainly someone I can call.”

  That did the trick.

  With a furtive glance back at Esteban Ponce’s henchmen, Ruiz pulled his phone out of his pocket and hit a speed-dial number. He lowered his chin and turned away as he spoke-a few quick words.

  In a matter of seconds, one of the henchmen’s phones rang, and in less than another half a minute, both of the bodyguards stepped aside, allowing Ruiz to escort her into the Old Gallery with the 9mm pistol Ruiz had reluctantly supplied her with safely concealed in a shoulder rig under her suit jacket.

  And there she goes, Dax thought, into the lion’s den. Dammit.

  His plan had been to cross the street and head down toward the gallery to get within useful range. Useful for what, he hadn’t precisely determined. He supposed there was an off chance that Ms. Toussi had no clue about the Old Gallery’s less-than-kosher reputation-but he doubted it. She hadn’t struck him as the kind of girl who didn’t have all the angles figured before she got out of bed in the morning. Every angle, every morning.

  No, she knew what was going down in there, and she was part of it. The biggest surprise here was that she hadn’t shown up anywhere in his investigation of the Sphinx. Hell, he’d been investigating her at the same damn time. Somewhere, somehow, some kind of connection should have shown up between her and the Egyptian statue. That it hadn’t meant one of two things. He’d either missed something big, and his answer to that was “Not very damned likely.” Or she was working for one of the other players on his list, which didn’t make a damn lick of sense, not considering her avocation. The list was one scumbag after another: guys like Esteban Ponce, who had too much money and a sense of entitlement to match; an overwrought and high-strung dealer like Levi Asher, whose sexual proclivities ran the gamut from lurid to illegal; and by far the worst of the lot, Erich Warner, his handler on this damn thing, who played hard and fast and under the table for millions of dollars on every deal, running drugs and guns and women and children and stolen art and anything else he could turn for a profit, which included some pretty damn strange things. Half a dozen other world-class con artists and criminals were all in his files as having also been actively pursuing the Memphis Sphinx since it had first started getting some play in the underworld market, and Suzi Toussi�
�s name had not been attached to any of them.

  “Mademoiselle, how kind of you to come to my small shop,” he heard Remy Beranger again through his handset. The man’s voice wasn’t quite as effusive as when he’d been speaking with Ponce, but an American woman looking to make a score in Ciudad del Este was enough to put anyone on edge.

  It sure as hell put him on edge.

  “Mr. Beranger,” Suzi Toussi said, and there wasn’t a damn thing about the sound of her voice that didn’t make Dax’s gut churn just a little bit. He was in the right place at the right time, but she wasn’t, not by a long shot. She had no business being here, not according to everything he knew about her, and he knew plenty. He knew the tragedy of her first marriage. He knew about the girls she brought back from Eastern Europe, and he knew about the one in Ukraine who hadn’t made it three months ago. And really, he had to wonder if the violence and loss of that failure had given her some kind of guilt-induced death wish, because, baby, this was the place, and this was the deal, for people who wanted the odds stacked overwhelmingly against them.

  “Jimmy tells me you are in the market for Incan gold,” Beranger said. “You and your client, a man, I hear, who is placed very highly up in your government.”

  “Incan gold, yes, the congressman is very fond of all the ancient cultures of the world and the artifacts they left behind,” the in-it-up-to-her-neck Ms. Toussi replied. “He’s especially in the market for something unique, a rare and powerful piece perhaps, not necessarily Incan, if you have anything currently in your shop that would qualify.”

  A significant pause ensued, and Dax could just imagine the sweat breaking out on Remy Beranger’s brow. The word “congressman” was making him sweat a little, too, along with that not-so-coy allusion to the damn Memphis Sphinx. Geezus. What in the hell was a U.S. congressman doing in the middle of this deal? And if Suzi Toussi was representing a congressman, he’d sure as hell like to know why and which one.

  “If you’d like to come with me,” Beranger spoke again, “I believe I have a few things that might be of interest. Jimmy, here, take my bag, please, and see to the men in the viewing room.”

  Viewing room?

  Now which, Dax wondered, of all the dozens of squirrel-sized rooms in the gallery was the viewing room? And why in the hell hadn’t he figured that out yesterday morning and gotten a transmitter in there? And what was in the bag Beranger had just handed off?

  “Mademoiselle Royal, if you please.”

  Dax had emplaced four transmitters in the gallery-one each in the entrance, the main ground-floor room, Beranger’s office, and in a junk room full of broken artifacts. He didn’t know where Remy Beranger was “if you pleasing” Suzi Toussi, but after fifteen seconds of silence, and then another twenty, he knew they’d left the entrance, skipped the main gallery room, and hadn’t ended up in Beranger’s office, all the places Levi Asher and Esteban Ponce weren’t either.

  As a matter of fact, of the thirteen people in the gallery, Beranger, Suzi, Ruiz, Ponce, Asher, and enough bodyguards between them to fill everybody’s dance card, he currently had a bead on exactly two-the guys standing outside the front door. Everyone else had disappeared off his grid. Dammit.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Suzi knew junk when she saw it, and she was following Remy Beranger through aisle after aisle of junk, looking at junk from one end of the Old Gallery to the other, nothing but piles of junk and stacks of Galeria Viejo T-shirts. She slipped her sunglasses off and dropped them into her purse, which didn’t do a damn thing to improve the view.

  No one looking for anything of value would come to this place. She’d owned a few galleries, and Beranger’s Old Gallery wouldn’t have made her “B” list on its best day.

  Hell, it wouldn’t have made her “D” list.

  Maybe not even her “Z” list.

  There were plastic blowguns and rubber knives on the shelves.

  “I have recently acquired a few unique items, including a small quantity of very nice Moche pottery,” Beranger said, stopping in front of a heavy wood door and taking a moment to wipe his face with a crumpled-up handkerchief. The man’s cream-colored linen suit hung off his thin frame and had definitely seen better days. His shoes were scuffed, his shirt stained, his face deathly pale with sweat running down the sides. This outfit, combined with his slow, shuffling gait made him look more like a homeless derelict than a businessman, even a shady businessman, and yet the finest intelligence-gathering agency on the face of the earth had sent her here to deal with him, a man whose Rolex all but screamed “knockoff,” who was wearing half a dozen tarnished “goldtone” bracelets on his left wrist and half a dozen chains loaded down with all kinds of religious medals around his neck. He clinked and jangled with every sliding, limping step he took.

  Using a set of keys hanging from a retractable fob off his belt, he undid the locks on the door, then let the fob snap back to his waistband, before leading the way into a long, narrow, poorly lit room.

  “The Chapel Room,” he said in an aside over his shoulder, with obvious pride. “My reliquary, so to speak. The Sacred Heart of the gallery, Sacré-Coeur.“

  Reliquary? As in plastic saints’ bones, and rubber splinters of the Holy Cross? she wondered.

  Well, that would be damned uninteresting.

  Suzi followed him in, the 9mm automatic pistol snugged up against her body under her jacket, and her willingness to use it, keeping her from having any particular concerns about being alone with the Frenchman or about following him into the depths of his odd Old Gallery.

  “The Moche is very rare,” he continued, closing the door behind her and giving his face another quick mopping. His longish dark hair hung down over the collar of his suit in damp, curling locks. “Quite explicit, if your client is truly interested in owning something, shall we say… unusual… something perhaps not to everyone’s taste. Though I must warn you, I do have another buyer.”

  Rare and unusual Moche meant erotica, and Suzi figured Beranger might possibly have a shipment of it, because at first glance, the quality of the Frenchman’s sales goods in the Chapel Room were nominally better than in his main gallery.

  That was the good news.

  The bad news was unnervingly obvious. Despite the comfort of her 9mm, she was now closed in a small, dusty room with a sick little man selling pornography.

  Buck Grant was going to owe her for this-big-time.

  Beranger shuffled on, and she followed, being careful to stay close to him, without getting too close. They passed a heavy oak table covered in dust with an iron cross nailed to its top. Smaller crosses-some iron, some tin, some painted, some bare metal or wood-were haphazardly stacked down the table’s length along with an intricate, if doubtfully ancient, array of Mughal boxes, carved soapstone ankhs, leather flasks, and all-around junk. He even had a pile of small, gold-painted Buddhas, every one of them smiling, all in a jumble with about a gross of neon-bright, pink and blue yin-yang key chains at the end of the table-which, in her book, made Remy Beranger the undisputed king of religious kitsch. He had it all.

  But did he have the Memphis Sphinx?

  That was the day’s question.

  Opening the clasp on her purse, she glanced down and checked inside to see if the light on the RFID scanner was on-and it wasn’t.

  Now, why wasn’t she surprised? Dammit. That would have been easy-and nothing was ever easy, not when she worked for General Grant. Nobody pushed her like Buck Grant pushed her, except herself, to her limit and then some. But Buck always gave as good as he got. She didn’t fail him, and he didn’t fail her. He’d been there every time she’d called in one of her favors-every single time, even though she knew he thought she was playing a losing game.

  Truth was, she thought so, too, but that wasn’t going to stop her. Losing or not, it was the only game in town, the only protection she’d found against the pain.

  Her mouth tightened in fleeting remembrance, and in the same breath, she forced herself to move on,
to think about the heat, the job, the need to stay on red alert, anything. It was the only way to keep going, to never remember.

  In front of her, Beranger came to a stop next to a large, darkened case and reached for a small switch on the side. When the light came on, she knew that the DIA’s intel was getting closer to the mark. She’d been sent to the right place, even if she hadn’t yet been within three meters of the exact right place.

  Chavín, Incan, Lambayeque, Aztec, Mayan- carefully inked signs were set in amongst the hodgepodge collection of pre-Columbian artifacts filling the long case from end to end. A lot of what she was seeing was in bits and chunks, but there were a few whole pieces of at least “ancient-looking” goods.

  “So will it be the Moche?” the Frenchman asked, mopping at his face again.

  The Moche. Sure. And she had a feeling his Moche would look exactly like his Incan, and his Lambayeque-crumbles. He did have one good piece that wasn’t too damaged, a stone Mamacona, a mother figurine in pretty damn good shape, possibly even auction worthy, and where there was one pretty damn good antiquity, there might well be another even better one-within three meters of the case.

  She looked in her purse again and felt the sudden surprise and satisfaction of the perfect score. The scanner was glowing.

  And then it wasn’t.

  And then it was… and then it wasn’t, and wasn’t, and wasn’t.

  What the hell? Two blinks? What was that? The DIA file on the RFD scanner specifically noted two modes of response: light on, with the GPS locking in on a position and signaling completion of the data transfer with a beep; and dead quiet with no light on. There was no “silently blinking” option-and yet the thing had just blinked at her twice.