by Tara Janzen
Nobody could move that fast, could they?
And yet somebody had, somebody with a very expensive house.
She rolled her head a few inches, looking up at an open-beamed ceiling. Soft, subdued light spilled out of a door on the wall opposite the deck. She could see a marble floor and a pedestal sink, and thought there was probably a decadently large jetted tub to go with the sink.
Wow. Where was she?
She felt safe. Her instincts weren’t clamoring for her to leap up and get out.
Quite the opposite.
Her instincts were somnolent, unconcerned about her odd dilemma.
She let her gaze drift back to the fireplace-and in the space of a heartbeat, all those somnolent instincts went screaming into action. She froze in place, her pulse skyrocketing, her attention riveted by the shadowy figure sitting in the corner of the room, a man, his shoulders broad, his countenance very still-and she knew it was him, the man who had taken her from the Posada Plaza.
“You’re awake,” he said.
Very awake. Ultra awake. Her eyes wide open. Her heart pounding.
He leaned forward into the light of the fire, his hands clasped together, his elbows resting on his knees, and for one long, endless second after another, she barely breathed. She opened her mouth to say something, but no words came out.
Confusion warred with perception and kept winning, over and over again. What she was seeing was impossible. There wasn’t any way to comprehend him, the reality of him sitting in this room with her-John Thomas Chronopolous, J.T.
He rose from the chair, and if she’d had an ounce of strength, she would have leaped from the bed and run like hell-somewhere, anywhere. But she didn’t. Her limbs felt heavy.
“Don’t worry, cariño.” He walked with all the lazy grace of the superbly fit, no wasted movements, no “visual noise.” His strides were long, easy. “You’re tired, that’s all. Sleep tonight.” He stopped by the side of the bed and smoothed his hand around the side of her neck to the back of her head. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”
She felt herself falling again, but it was sweet, a release of tension allowing her to drift back down into sleep.
Yes, sir, for a moment there at Vargas’s estate, things had been going completely Dax’s way, and the minute he’d stepped out of the library with Erich Warner, it had all gone to hell. They’d been at this “get the hell up the river” trip for-freaking-ever-and Dax was afraid he was going to start foaming at the mouth.
He felt pretty damn rabid, and Warner was starting to look like a deer in the headlights. This was his gig going down the drain. Hell, Dax didn’t even want to live forever, especially if he couldn’t save Suzi from Conroy Farrel.
Dax had been on completely FUBAR missions that had gone more smoothly than this. For starters, getting twenty armed drug runners onto a boat for an unplanned, middle-of-the-night sortie had taken an ungodly amount of time. Dax truly could have gotten his butt back into the city and down to the docks and stolen half a dozen boats and rented six more in the same amount of time-but that wouldn’t have done him a damn bit of good. He needed frickin’ Erich Warner with him, and Warner seemed to think he needed a small army to protect him.
He was going to need more than Vargas’s twenty goons if anything happened to Suzi-that’s all Dax could guarantee him.
All the time spent at Vargas’s, screwing around getting ready to go, Dax had been painfully aware that Suzi was up on the river somewhere, kidnapped and alone, and in her underwear-which was why his nerves had been sliding along a fine edge by the time they’d launched the mission in an honest-to-God gunboat with two squads’ worth of hardened criminals, no intel, the man he was taking to his death, and one psycho bitch who he swore was eyeballing him like tomorrow’s lunch.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Creed low-crawled into place next to Hawkins and Dylan in their observation post on the ridge above the house at Costa del Rey. Zach was five yards behind him, watching their backs. They’d come in at dawn and were prepared for the long haul, breaking into two-man teams and flanking the compound, clearing their avenues of approach, gathering intel, and waiting for the cover of darkness, when they could use thermal imaging to locate their objectives and get in closer to the house.
They’d come across the two dead CIA agents a hundred yards down the ridgeline in a ravine, or what was left of them. Seven months in the jungle hadn’t left much, and even three months ago, the ravine would have been running with water. If somebody had been looking for those boys, Creed wasn’t surprised they hadn’t found them.
Two dead agents, Suzi Toussi a hostage in the house below, some damn statue causing nothing but trouble, and the astral shields moving into conjunction with the meridian lines of the pre-vernal equinox high tides-the mission had gotten damned complicated. General Grant had offered up the hocus-pocus edition of their intel, and Dylan had immediately passed all of it off to Hawkins to handle.
Despite the pressure bearing down on the general, Creed knew Dylan had one objective here in the jungle this morning-Conroy Farrel. Not magic statues.
“Did you get the girl?” Dylan asked. They were all flat on their stomachs in the dirt, buried into some leaves, Hawkins bagged in behind an M40 rifle and glassing the area through the scope, with Dylan on a pair of binoculars.
Creed got out his own binoculars. He had an M4 carbine slung across his back.
“Yeah. Zach and I tranked her and hauled her down to the boat. She’s secure. Now all we need is Suzi and Farrel.” And then the real work would begin, the finding out who Farrel really was. “You get any more movement down there yet?”
“Not since the girl,” Hawkins said.
It had been a perfect snatch. Creed and Zach had been up on the other side of the compound, their hide closer in than Hawkins and Dylan’s.
Farrel’s girl had exited the house and headed down a trail for one of her perimeter checks, and they’d slipped down the trail after her.
“Have you guys come up with any new ideas on why Conroy Farrel took Suzi?” he asked.
“We’re getting played,” Hawkins said without a second’s worth of hesitation.
“What about a flash of brilliance on why these two completely unrelated operations are both coming down to the same damn place?”
“Played,” Hawkins repeated.
“Played,” he agreed. None of them had a doubt in the world, and getting on the horn with Grant this morning had only bogged them down with all that useless information about the astral meridians.
“Fuck,” Dylan said, and he said it for all of them. “We’ll get answers, guaranteed, but first we have to get Farrel.”
“Played,” Hawkins muttered again under his breath.
Dylan looked over, and his gaze landed on Creed.
“You’re bleeding. What happened out there?”
By “out there,” the boss meant out there on the trail on the other side of the compound, where he and Zach had tracked down Conroy Farrel’s girl and snatched her.
“When I grabbed her, she fought. Hard and well.” And she’d done a fair job of kicking his ass around a little bit. He’d been impressed.
“Glad you came out on top,” Dylan said, giving him a look that plainly said the day Creed couldn’t come out on top up against a twenty-something girl was the day he needed to turn in his jungle boy badge. “When Farrel goes looking for her, we’ll go in, make sure Suzi is okay, and have a nice surprise waiting for him when he comes home.”
“If Suzi’s even there,” Hawkins muttered.
Superman did not like this mission. He hadn’t liked it since Farrel had gotten away with one of his girls-if Conroy Farrel really had gotten to Suzi. One old man’s word wasn’t much to go on, but other than one cryptic call from her in the middle of the night, a phone call during which she hadn’t said a word, they hadn’t heard from the divine Ms. Toussi-and she sure as hell hadn’t been answering any of their calls.
“Okay, we’ve go
t her,” Hawkins said, sounding relieved.
Creed checked through his binoculars and saw two people exiting a door onto the deck. A woman dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of khaki pants and a big man in BDU pants, a gray T-shirt, and a ball cap crossed the deck and entered another door. The man had been holding on to her arm, moving her along.
“Positive identification. That’s Suzi,” Dylan said.
“And Farrel?” Hawkins asked.
“Who looks a lot like our boy,” Dylan said. “A helluva lot.”
Sonuvabitch, Creed thought, and he knew he was thinking it for all of them. No way should Suzi have ended up in the company of a man who’d killed four CIA agents, two of whom were still rotting in the jungle.
“We shouldn’t let this play out all day,” Hawkins said, looking up from his scope at Dylan. “I say we offer this guy a deal, our girl for his girl, and hit him with the tranquilizer gun while we’re talking. We get Suzi, we get this guy, and we go home.”
“Aye, aye,” Creed whispered, flat on his belly, watching everything in the compound and the house below. They were all keeping their voices down. “I’m with Superman.”
“And you’re both with me,” Dylan reminded them, unnecessarily and sounding a little snappish in the heat. “We’ll hold our-” The boss stopped talking and turned his head, listening. They all fell silent.
Dylan signaled for Creed to move out. They could all hear it, a boat coming up the river.
Suzi’s Big Day-God, if she’d kept a diary, she would have written those words at the top of the page.
Costa del Rey, that’s what he’d told her, the name of his home, King’s Coast. He’d also told her his name was Conroy Farrel, but that she should call him Con.
Conroy Farrel, for the love of God.
He pulled a chair out for her, and Suzi sat down to a beautiful meal laid out on an exquisitely crafted teakwood table. Warm croissants, sliced bananas, fresh pineapple, rich coffee with cream, petite filets mignons grilled to perfection, sliced cheeses, scrambled eggs-it briefly crossed her mind that maybe she should get kidnapped more often.
It also, more than briefly, occurred to her that the gray backpack lying on the table might hold the answer to all her problems. It was so out of place on the elegant table, and without a doubt, it was there for a reason.
She took a sip of coffee and helped herself to a wafer-thin biscuit with a tiny dollop of crème fraîche topped with some kind of tropical fruit preserves on it, all while safely ensconced in a beautifully cushioned rattan armchair, under a gently wafting, slowly whap-whap-whapping ceiling fan.
Heaven would be like this-quiet, subdued, wood floors, stone walls, teak paneling, slatted ceilings, white furniture, and big windows framing a tropical forest and a slow-moving river.
She’d woken up to the sound of birds singing, her room flooded with sunlight, and her window open onto a large wooden deck. There had been clothes laid out for her on the edge of the bed, a white T-shirt, khaki pants with a leather belt, and on the rug, a pair of flip-flops and a pair of canvas boots and cotton socks, none of it new, but all of it spotlessly clean, with the clothes pressed.
She’d awakened twice more in the night, and every time he had been sitting quietly in the corner of her room, next to the fire, an oddly comforting presence, and every time, she’d drifted back off to sleep, the day’s exhausting cares and woes lifting off of her, becoming burdens of the past, not of the present.
He had the most soothing voice, deep and calm and certain. The voice had not changed, not since she’d first met him.
There had been a girl in the night, too. A young woman, no more than mid-twenties, by Suzi’s estimation, she’d been tall and lanky with a wild mop of curling dark hair, and Conroy had called her Scout, but Suzi hadn’t seen her this morning.
“Suzi,” he said, “Suzi Toussi,” as if he simply liked the feel of how it rolled off his tongue.
He didn’t smile much, but when he did, it was dazzling-a quick grin, a boyishly lopsided curve of white teeth accompanied by a twinkle in his eye. He had that kind of eyes, dark hazel and utterly depthless, like the stars and the cosmos were in them, and when he grinned, she felt like she could see all of it, all the way down through the ages of the universe.
“I realized last night that I had made a mistake,” he continued. “And I usually don’t.”
She believed him. He wasn’t the type to make mistakes, never had been, and yet things had happened to him, bad things, and they were easy to see-the scars on his arms, the scars on his neck and face. Interestingly, they didn’t mar his looks. He was as beautiful as he’d ever been, and J. T Chronopolous had always been a beautiful man-tall, and strong, and muscular, his face cleanly chiseled, an older, tougher-looking version of his brother, Kid Chaos.
“What mistake?” She wanted to know everything, especially what had happened to him. Just looking at him made her heart pound. He was a friend, a street runner from way back, one of the best of a crew of former juvenile car thieves who had become Special Defense Force. She and J.T. went back years, and yet not even the faintest glimmer of recognition lit his eyes when he looked at her.
“You’re not the one I should have taken last night,” he said.
Well, it was hard not to agree with that, but she went ahead and asked.
“Why not?” Good Lord. She’d gone to his funeral six years ago, and she’d cried her heart out with everyone else who had been at that gravesite, and if he wasn’t dead, then she needed an explanation.
Everyone at Steele Street would need an explanation. She felt like a Saturday morning hero, some kind of intrepid adventurer, to have gone off into the wild jungles of Paraguay in search of an ancient Egyptian statue purported to have the power to grant everlasting life-and to return with the lost chop-shop boy risen from the dead, the one who’d changed them all.
He smiled and reached for the backpack.
Oh, yes, that was her all right, Indiana Jones and some Crystal Temple of the Covenant-type thing, except what he pulled out of the backpack was a granite and gold statue known far and wide as the Maned Sphinx of Sesostris III, the Memphis Sphinx, and he set it down on the table between the coffee urn and the butter, next to the salt and pepper.
The real deal. Just sitting there. Defying all the death and destruction it had left in its wake in Ciudad del Este and probably everywhere else it had been for the last four thousand years. A tingling rush of excitement coursed up her spine.
She would have known it anywhere.
“Go ahead and look it over if you want to,” he said. “It’s lasted for millennia. I don’t think it’s going to fall apart on my kitchen table.”
And he didn’t much sound like he cared if it did.
J. T. Chronopolous and the Memphis Sphinx-Suzi’s Big Day, indeed.
Geez.
She reached out and picked the statue up and immediately felt the weight of it, not just the granite, but the gravitas, the seriousness of it.
“So how long have you been working for the DIA?” he asked.
Her heart took a start, and she looked up from where she was running the tip of her finger over the Sphinx’s paws.
“What in the world would make you think that?” She was shocked, truly. No one could possibly know whom she was working for in Paraguay.
He shrugged. “It’s their statue. They’ve had it for over ten years, squirreled away in a lab, using it for experiments they and the CIA conducted in remote viewing under the code names Stargate and Moonrise. The Memphis Sphinx, in particular, was associated with the Moonrise part of the program.”
Her nerves, which she thought she’d been doing an amazing job of controlling, started to fizzle and spark.
“And you know this because?”
“I think I was part of that program.”
“But you don’t know for sure?”
He shook his head. “I know Erich Warner, though, and I brought you here because I thought you were working for him.” There was
just enough question in the statement that she felt she needed to answer.
“No,” she said. “I’m not working for a world-class degenerate psychopath.”
“Do you know Daniel Killian?” he asked, giving her heart another start.
“Uh…yes.” She returned the statue to the table.
“Is he a criminal, mob connected, cartel connected?”
“No,” she said.
He gave another small shrug, as if he didn’t believe her, and then he checked his watch.
“There were four buyers at Remy Beranger’s yesterday afternoon. Ponce was there for his father. Levi Asher was there for himself. You were there for the DIA, at least you haven’t denied it, and someone was there for Erich Warner,” he said. “Daniel Killian is the only one left.”
A startling conclusion, if he was right, which he wasn’t. A number of the buyers on the DIA’s list had not shown up at Beranger’s.
“What makes you think it’s not me? What changed your mind?”
“Instinct.” He poured more coffee into his cup, and as the steam curled up around his right hand, she noticed a tremor run through it, strong enough to make his hand shake. Some of the coffee spilled onto the table, and he carefully put the urn back down. He was missing half of his ring finger, and she was not going to ask how, or why, but her heart just broke.
What had happened to him?
“And your phone,” he finished. “You have a couple of interesting numbers in it and not much more.”
Her phone, dammit.
“Can I have it back?” She’d looked for her fanny pack first thing when she had awakened, knowing it contained her two best chances for escape: her 9mm and her phone. But she hadn’t been able to find it and would have been shocked if she had.
“No,” he said. “Not yet. Not until after Erich Warner is dead. Then you can have it all, even the Sphinx.”
