Breaking Loose

by Tara Janzen

  “Well, actually,” the beautiful redhead said, “it’s a scanner…for an, uh, RFID tag.”

  To her credit, she dropped that bomb without stumbling around too much, and it was one helluva bomb. Right. A scanner.

  He stopped with the rebar in his hands, just holding it between the bars of the gate, and looked at her.

  Looked at her hard.

  “You’ve been holding out on me.”

  “A little,” she admitted.

  Sonuva-gee-fricking-bitch. There was only one thing in Beranger’s damn gallery worth tagging with a radio frequency identification chip, the Memphis Sphinx, and sure as hell that was the only damn thing she was searching for in this dump-and the lucky girl just happened to have a scanner for it in her pocket?

  Oh, baby, that was a huge can of worms.

  “So where’s the chip?” As if he didn’t know.

  “On the Sphinx.”

  Yeah, she said it with a straight face.

  “Excellent. Great.” He pushed on the rebar again, giving it his all, and the rusted-out lock on the gate gave in and busted apart. “So we’ll be able to find this thing in record time and get the hell back out of here, right?”

  Her answer to that was an elongated pause.

  “Theoretically,” she finally said.

  Theoretically.

  Absofuckinglutely amazing, and geezus, what a cool piece of action she really was-all this time, in possession of a freaking scanner to pick up the signal off a chip someone had adhered to or embedded in the statue.

  And wasn’t that suddenly the biggest mystery in the whole damn day-who?

  No art dealer, no antiquities smuggler, that was for damn sure, and he was betting no senator from Illinois either. He’d known she was lying about a few things, but the sheer scope of her subterfuge had just hit cosmic proportions.

  And she’d been good at it, damn good. She made him look like an amateur. A smart guy would pay attention to a fact like that, but somehow, he knew he’d been smarter earlier in the day, before she’d shown up-and wasn’t that just the damn way of it.

  He pulled a pair of lockpicks out of his shirt pocket and went to work on the main delivery door.

  “Theoretically?” he repeated. “What’s the matter? Doesn’t it work?”

  “I’m not sure. I got a hit when I was in here with Remy,” she said, and he heard her unzip something-and hell, yes, that was enough to get him to turn around and look.

  “Do you want some light on that?” She was pulling a flashlight out of her fanny pack.

  Fanny pack, not her pants. Right. He needed his head examined-and he was starting to get real impressed with her kit, what she’d brought, and what she’d not. Everything she’d pulled out had been damn useful.

  “Yes.” Geezus. “A hit?” And he was filing that under the day’s nearly empty category called “Good News,” about a hundred steps down from where he’d filed “First Kiss.”

  She turned the flashlight on and held the beam on the door’s lock while he slid the picks into the mechanism.

  “More like half a hit,” she said. “We were in his Chapel Room, at the bottom of the stairs where you were on the second floor. I thought the scanner was malfunctioning, that it didn’t work, and then just as the cops were coming in, it signaled a GPS location.”

  “GPS,” he repeated, and felt the locking mechanism release.

  She nodded.

  And he swore.

  RFID scanners, chips, and GPS, hell, she was light-years ahead of him on this deal.

  He opened the door and then just stopped for a second, waiting for the first wave of heat and stench to wash over him. It was bad, old Remy cooking in the heat for a few hours, and if Suzi didn’t lose her lunch in the place, he was going to get her a gold star or something.

  “An RFID tag on a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian statue,” he said, pulling his own flashlight out. “I didn’t realize the ancient Egyptians had that kind of technology.” It wasn’t a question, but he sure as hell expected an answer.

  “They were very advanced.”

  No shit.

  “Not that advanced, Sugar.” He slid the beam of his flashlight down the inside wall, found a light switch, and gave it a flip. Nothing happened, which racked up another el perfecto in his day. This wasn’t going to work. “Why don’t you give me the scanner and just wait outside.” Sometimes he didn’t know much about women, and sometimes he knew even less, but he knew she’d be happier if she didn’t go inside the gallery. It was dark, dangerously haphazard with broken everything all over the floor, and it reeked.

  The only answer he got was a short laugh, very short.

  Okay, she could have it her way-almost.

  He looked over his shoulder and met her gaze.

  “Remy’s dead, Suzi. The cops killed him when they busted in the gallery this afternoon, and from the smell, I’m pretty sure he’s still in here. Are you sure you’re up for this?”

  “Ah, hell,” she said, closing her eyes and suddenly looking very weary.

  Yeah, it had been a long day, and poor dead Remy was just one more hurdle-but it wasn’t enough to send her packing, and she should have been running the other way the minute the cops had first busted into Galeria Viejo.

  “Who are you really working for, Suzi?”

  He needed to know, not just for his sake, but for hers. He hadn’t seen anybody in this damn city trying to save her butt except him, but there was somebody out there somewhere who was responsible for her being in this mess, the same somebody who had tagged the Memphis Sphinx and lost it, and of all the damn things, they’d sent Suzi Toussi to Ciudad del Este to get it.

  Well, that somebody needed to know that the job had gone south.

  “One name,” he tried again. “Just give me a name.”

  That was a question, straight out, and the girl straight-out ignored it, opening her eyes and looking at him, but not moving her lips-geezus, as cool and collected as a cube of dry ice, even in the ninety-plus heat.

  So he put it another way.

  “That name isn’t Skip Leonard, is it? You’re working for somebody else, aren’t you?” he asked, and sweet thing, she ignored him again.

  Actually, she did more than ignore him. She shook her head, like he should know better than to ask.

  “All right, sugar. Have it your way, but the deal we have is fifty-fifty.” No matter who was holding her leash.

  And he was going to find out, guaranteed.

  “Fifty-fifty,” she said, not sounding any more convincing than he probably did. Fifty-fifty on the finding was one thing. Fifty-fifty on the keeping was where their deal was going to get sticky.

  But fine. He was going to let her have it her way for now. He just hoped to hell she was ready.

  “Stay close” was all he said.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Outskirts of Ciudad del Este

  From where he was working out of the back of the Jeep he and Zach had rented, checking his gear, Creed heard footsteps and looked up. The boss was heading his way.

  Yeah, they needed to talk.

  They’d loaded the Jeep and the vehicle Dylan and Hawkins had been using for the last six months, getting ready for their morning recon on Costa del Rey, or maybe it would turn out to be a raid, or a snatch and grab.

  It wasn’t going to be an assassination. He knew that damn much.

  The photograph in the folder had shown a man who looked like J.T., with J.T.’s face, but just a little skewed, not quite right. The basic body build had been J.T.’s, but J.T.’s on steroids. The guy in the photo was big, over six feet and two hundred pounds of ripped muscle and raw power.

  The CIA wanted an assassination, and Dylan and Hawkins had decided to go another way, and that was the kind of independent thinking that got them in trouble and, more often than not, got the job done.

  Creed would have made the same decision. No way in hell could he pull a trigger on that face-not without knowing one of two things: that i
t wasn’t J.T., or that J.T. had turned, and the only way to figure either of those out was to talk to the guy. No one at SDF was going to take the CIA’s word for who the man was, not on a bet, especially not Creed, who would have sworn on his grandmother’s grave that J.T. had died in the Colombian jungle.

  But that face…that face was almost enough to make him doubt what he’d seen-almost, but not quite.

  Dylan stopped next to the vehicle and pulled a cigar out of his pocket.

  “You could have told me,” Creed said, loosening the straps on his rucksack.

  Dylan lit the cigar and got it going before handing it over.

  “Command decision” was all he said.

  “Bullshit.” Creed took a long draw on the cigar, letting the smoke fill his mouth. Dylan always had the best cigars.

  “Throwing that information, and that photograph, down in front of the whole team would have started a riot, and you know it. I still haven’t figured out how to tell Kid.”

  “Bull,” he said again, then blew out a cloud of smoke. “You give the ‘telling Kid’ part to Superman.” That’s what any of them would have done.

  “Yeah,” the boss said, wiping his hand over his face, sounding as weary and worn out as the dump they were using for mission headquarters looked. “But we need better facts than we’ve got.”

  “I figure that’s why you brought me and Zach down here, boss.” He pulled five empty pistol magazines out of one of the pockets on his ruck and started loading them. “Fact. Finding. Mission.”

  “The CIA has those four dead agents on this thing already, and that’s if they’re telling us the truth.”

  “Which they probably aren’t.” And that was a fact he would take to the bank.

  “Yeah, that’s what I figure, too.”

  Taking one last long draw, Creed gave him the cigar back and started in on his second magazine.

  Dylan took a short puff and kept the cigar clenched in his teeth. “The spooks were also saying there’s a girl up there at Costa del Rey. That she’s been seen with Farrel in Bangkok and Berlin.”

  “That’s convenient.” Damned convenient.

  “Hawkins and I thought so, too, and the third time we went up there to run our recon, Hawkins saw her checking the compound’s perimeter. She does that real regular-like.”

  “And?”

  “She’s good in the woods, and she takes Costa del Rey’s security damned seriously.”

  So they were going to grab the girl. Creed was fine with that, whatever it took.

  “I put in a request a couple of weeks ago,” Dylan said, then paused for a moment. “I’ve asked Grant to have the body exhumed for DNA testing.”

  Fuck. He kept on loading, sliding one cartridge in on top of the last, kept on breathing.

  “Body?” he said, when he figured he could do it without chewing up the damn word. “What body, Dylan? We buried bones, burned bones. There was no body.”

  Butchered and burned-that’s what the NRF had done to John Thomas Chronopolous. It had been overkill, none of it making sense, except to some twisted cocaine bastard out of Colombia named Juan Conseco trying to make a point, trying to send a message to the U.S. government.

  Message received and returned in kind. None of them had been left alive. Not kingpin Juan, not his nephew Ruperto, who had delivered the death order, not the fucking guerrillas who had carried it out.

  “Grant’s been working on this thing and coming up with nothing. The file on Conroy Farrel is buried in the Mariana Trench. We’ve got one damn lousy photograph and no corroborating evidence that he even exists. I need some facts, either of who he is or who he isn’t.”

  “Whoever he is, it’s a dirty deal, Dylan.” And there wasn’t a man jack of them who hadn’t thought it, who didn’t know it.

  “That’s why we’re going to bring Farrel in alive.”

  Dylan was right, they needed to capture Conroy Farrel. They needed to talk to the man up close and personal, whatever it took. Nothing else would do. Creed didn’t know what had gone wrong for those four CIA agents, but he didn’t have a doubt in his mind that SDF could bring the guy in.

  “What about this snatch on some antique Suzi Toussi was going to tag for the DIA?” he said. “You said Grant had that mission on his priority list.”

  “Against his will,” Dylan admitted. “Suzi is in Ciudad del Este. She arrived earlier today and is staying at the Gran Chaco, a luxury hotel near the country club. We were in contact this morning, and she had a meeting set for this afternoon with the gallery owner, a man named Remy Beranger, who is supposed to be selling an Egyptian statue, a sphinx with some kind of special powers that was stolen from the spooks over at DIA.”

  Geezus. Creed gave him a look that said he had to be kidding. Dylan just shrugged.

  All right, then. He wasn’t going to ask what in the hell the Defense Intelligence Agency had been doing with a magical Egyptian statue, or how in the hell it was important enough to involve General Grant and SDF, but DIA, CIA, hell, yeah, they were definitely on sinking sand everywhere they stepped in this hellhole.

  “Suzi’s good,” he said. “She’ll get the job done. I helped her and Cody bring one of her girls out of Bulgaria last year. She had everything set up just so.”

  “Yeah, but she lost that one in Ukraine, and I think she took it real personal.”

  She had. Creed knew it for a fact. His wife, Cody, did a lot of footwork for Suzi on the girls, and more often than not provided tactical support. But Cody hadn’t been able to get into Ukraine three months ago, some problems with her passport, the Ukrainians had said. Some problems with her past, was what she and Creed and Suzi had figured, and maybe some trouble with what she and Suzi had been doing the last couple of years in that part of the world. Cody and Suzi had decided to abort the mission-but the girl, some little southern chick, had not been able to keep her cool, and her house of cards had tumbled down on her real hard. She’d ended up dead, and Suzi had ended up finding her, and it was just a big mess, with everybody feeling guilty, except Viktor Kravchuk, the guy who had killed the girl. Creed could guarantee Viktor had not lost a wink of sleep over the murder. There was nothing weighing on that guy’s conscience.

  Suzi, though, she’d gotten herself all locked up over Lily Anne Thompson. She was tough, though, he’d known that about her for a long time. She’d work it out.

  “I don’t like it,” Dylan said, looking at the cigar before putting it back in his mouth and puffing on it quietly, looking around, thinking. That’s what the boss did best, thinking.

  After a few moments, he took the cigar out of his mouth and blew out a large cloud of smoke.

  “I’m changing the lineup,” the boss said. “I don’t care how good she is, I want her out of here. Grant gave her an RFID scanner to pick up a signal off the statue, and I want you to go get the scanner, get Suzi on a plane out of Paraguay, and get back here. We’ll do what we can with the DIA’s magic sphinx business, but Farrel is here, right now, and he is our priority mission.” That was a set of orders, not a string of suppositions, and Creed didn’t misunderstand for a second.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  And that was the right answer, the only answer Creed had, no matter what Dylan asked him to do.

  Suzi followed Dax into the gloomy interior of the Galeria Viejo. She knew she’d shown her hand by taking out the scanner, but she hadn’t had a choice. The day’s events had narrowed her options at a dramatic rate, and she wasn’t about to search this damn place by herself in the dark, even packing a pistol. Oh, hell no, but she still needed a solid hit on the scanner. From there, one phone call would complete her mission-maybe. If the SDF operators wanted eyes-on, she’d give them eyes-on, if she could, but if it got to eyes-on, it was going to be hands-on, and one set of those hands was going to belong to Dax, and her money said he wasn’t going to play nice and let the girl have it, even if he had kissed her.

  Fifty-fifty. Right. He’d been lying, too. Nobody cut a fifty-fi
fty deal on immortality-and that’s what everything was about. Not the inherent value of an ancient antiquity. Not its historical significance. And not its price on the open market.

  Everyone was in Paraguay because of what the statue was supposed to be able to do tomorrow night.

  Carefully picking her way across the floor behind him, she really did wish she was anywhere else in the world. The stench was awful, and she could hear the loud buzzing of flies in the dark.

  God, she didn’t even want to imagine what they were doing.

  Ahead of her, Dax swung the beam of his flashlight around the room, and for a second, it followed along the edge of Remy Beranger’s body.

  Oh…my…God. A wave of heat washed through her, and she was afraid she might be sick.

  Dax had warned her. So help her God, he’d warned her.

  Beranger, that skinny, sick little man, was dead on the floor, his body covered in a flying, buzzing, crawling cloud of flies.

  General Grant was going to owe her tactical support for a year for this.

  “I’m… uh, going to go search the office,” she said, backing away from the body, trying to talk and not breathe.

  “Good idea. If you hear or see anything you don’t like, call out. When we’re done on this floor, we’ll head for the basement.”

  Oh, hell. A basement. She didn’t even want to think about a damn basement.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  There oughta be a law, Dax thought two hours later, tilting his head slightly to one side.

  “You’re shining your flashlight on my ass,” Suzi said, bent over a stack of crates in Beranger’s basement.

  Yes.

  He was.

  “No, I’m not. I’m looking for the Sphinx. Are you sure you don’t want to tell me where you got this scanner?” he said. “Because I think we should file a complaint.”

  “I told you I thought it might be broken.” She sounded even more frazzled than she looked, which was plenty, and yes, she’d given him her opinion on the scanner, but the more he looked around, the more he was beginning to think it was another problem at work here.