Breaking Loose

by Tara Janzen

  “Yeah. I’ve been talking to Grant.”

  “Good.” SDF was always running just a little shorthanded it seemed lately, at least to Creed. The world needed saving eighteen times a day some weeks.

  “So what can you tell me about Farrel?”

  “I saw him.” Up close and personal.

  “And?”

  “And we need to bring him in. No assassination. And if the CIA sends anybody else after him, we need to take them out.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the phone.

  “Okay then…got it.”

  Yeah, Creed knew how the boss was suddenly feeling, gut-punched, and sick, and maybe elated, except he’d be too confused to get very far with that one, and edging up behind all that, moving in fast, like a frickin’ freight train, would be the anger.

  Yeah, Creed knew all about it. What he didn’t know was what to do with all of it-except put each overwhelming emotion in a box, and put each box someplace where none of them would get mixed in together, because man, that was one toxic brew. Compartmentalization-it was the only way.

  “We’ve got his girl,” Dylan said. “If we can’t find him, he’ll come to us.”

  And they’d sure as hell better be damn good and ready for when that happened.

  “Stay where you are,” Dylan continued. “We’re at the boat. The package is still in good shape, and we’ll be there in about five minutes. We’ll check the compound, rifle through Farrel’s house, steal everything we find, and then go see what happened to that gunboat.”

  Hell.

  “Sounds like a long night, boss.”

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart. I’ll have you home before dawn.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Ciudad del Este

  “Ouch.”

  “That’s the last one.” Dax smoothed a small bandage over one of Suzi’s cuts. He’d paid double for super-service in this dump, so he’d had no qualms about letting her soak her heart out in the Posada Plaza’s bathtub, and now she was all warm and steamy and clean, and wrapped in a towel he couldn’t wait to take off of her, and this time it really wasn’t about sex.

  He’d been in the bathtub with her, and he knew she was as exhausted as he was, which was bordering on dangerous. They’d moored Conroy Farrel’s ultra-expensive boat at the public docks, paid four kids to watch over it for the night, and eaten on the way back to the hotel.

  All they had to do now was sleep.

  “Come on, let’s get you into bed.”

  Her hair was wet and stringy. Her makeup was long gone. She had a bruise the size of a pistol grip along her temple and cheekbone. She was almost trembling she was so tired and had so much emotion to work through-and she’d never been more beautiful to him in her life.

  Yeah. He’d racked up a whole day and a half in her company, and somehow she was his, lock, stock, and barrel, one hundred percent, all his, the whole girl.

  His.

  Only his.

  The rest of the world could go take a flying leap.

  He’d moved furniture in front of the door, paid Marcella, Marceline, and the pimp at the front desk each a hundred bucks for security backup. He’d moved more furniture in front of the balcony doors, and he’d cocked, locked, and loaded every damn firearm they had between them.

  Everything about this little oasis they were in said “Do Not Disturb.” And he expected the world to respect that for at least twelve hours.

  Once he got her all tucked in and comfy, he got in on the other side and pulled her in close, letting her wrap her legs in with his and rest her head on his shoulder, and breathe on him and make him feel secure.

  She was his.

  * * *

  “They look pretty comfortable.”

  “Too damn comfortable.”

  “Why in the hell did you make us work all night, if everybody else got to go to bed?”

  Suzi heard the voices from a long distance, like maybe she was dreaming them, but then she realized she wasn’t dreaming.

  She knew those voices, and with a soft groan for her aching body and her pounding head, she slowly opened her eyes to a narrow squint.

  It was like old home week in room 519 of the Posada Plaza. Zach was leaning up against the open balcony door. Creed was sitting cross-legged on top of the table, eating something covered in sugar. Dylan had the chair, and Hawkins was sitting on top of the dresser closest to the bed.

  “Looks like you won the fight, Suzi,” he said. “Good girl.”

  “Thank you.” He was proud of her, she could tell, and it did her heart good.

  There had been a time when she’d ruled these boys just by being beautiful, and a little sad, and sometimes, in private, a lot sad, until Hawkins had found a place for her.

  She’d thought he was crazy at first. Her? Do work for General Grant? But the job had been perfect for her, to wine and dine her way through a series of embassy parties in Prague and let Buck know who talked to whom.

  Piece of cake.

  And now look at her. Five years later, she was getting the crap beaten out of her and still coming out on top.

  “What’s wrong with Killian?” Dylan wanted to know. “You slip him a Mickey, or does he always sleep like that?”

  She looked over at the man sound asleep in the bed with her. He was out like a light.

  “He had a big day,” she said, shifting her attention back to the boss. “Two big days.”

  “Thought he was tougher than that,” Zach said from over by the balcony.

  “He’s gonna have to be tougher than that,” Creed said, and took another big bite of deep-fried doughnut.

  “He’ll be fine,” she assured them, and for a moment, the room fell silent.

  “You were with him,” Dylan finally said, breaking the silence. “What do you think?”

  She knew who he was talking about, and it wasn’t Dax Killian.

  “J.T.,” she said. “His memory is gone. He’s been tortured. It looks like many, many times. Half of his ring finger on his right hand is missing. He’s got scars on his face, his neck, his arms… probably everywhere, but that’s all I could see with him dressed.” The memory of how he looked played in her mind as she told the guys about Conroy Farrel, John Thomas Chronopolous, and it wasn’t until the tears ran down the side of her nose and pooled on her lips that she realized she was crying.

  A pall had fallen over the room.

  She understood. What she’d told them was awful, maybe even more awful than what they’d believed all these years.

  “We’ve got his girl under lock and key,” Dylan said. “We’re taking her out of here with us, on a transport plane that leaves in two hours. I expect you and Dax to be on that plane. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.” She got it. She’d just been given orders by the boss.

  “We’ll debrief at Steele Street, before you go to Washington to see General Grant. That’s the way we work. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He wasn’t Dylan anymore; if she wanted what she’d just earned the hard way, he was “sir.”

  “Then get your boyfriend up, Suzi. We’ll see you at the airfield.”

  “What about J.T.?” she asked. “What happens next?” She knew her guys, and this was far from over.

  A look passed between the men.

  “We left him a business card,” Hawkins said. “He’ll know where to find us.”

  Yes, he would, Suzi thought. There was only one business card in this group, and it said: DYLAN HART, UPTOWN AUTOS, WE ONLY SELL THE BEST, 738 STEELE STREET, DENVER, COLORADO.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Marsh Annex, Washington, D.C.

  Buck Grant was impressed as hell.

  He sat back in his chair, his phone to his ear, looking at Suzi and seeing his pension grow by leaps and bounds. The girl had done him good. But somebody somewhere had a whole helluva lot of answering to do, and Buck was going to damn well find out who. The Conroy Farrel mission and the Memphis Sphinx mission should ne
ver have intersected, let alone meshed like two halves of a whole-but they had, and that meant there was a connection higher up the ladder. In Buck’s experience, the higher up the ladder things went, the more dangerous they became, which in this instance wasn’t going to slow SDF down for a second. He and Dylan were already tearing this thing apart, event by event, line by line, and they were going to find the bastards who had turned J. T. Chronopolous into Conroy Farrel, and Buck didn’t have a doubt in his mind that the search would also reveal who had stolen a top secret artifact from one of the most secure laboratories in the world.

  Buck also didn’t have a doubt in his mind that it was going to cost him everything-least of all the pension Suzi had just helped become a little more secure. This thing was big, and dark, and dirty, and everybody was on Buck’s list of possible perpetrators, including the guy he was calling.

  “Bill,” he said when the phone was answered, and he meant William Davies, who’d been the assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict when SDF had first been created and put under Grant’s command, William Davies who since then had been kicked so high up into the stratosphere of government that his missives and his orders came from places he most certainly wasn’t at-like the Department of Labor or the Department of Education.

  “Buck,” Davies answered.

  “I’ve got that item the DIA lost a few months ago, the one their buddies over at Langley asked SDF to go get back for them.”

  “That statue they were screaming about?”

  “That’s the one.”

  There was a slight pause on the other end of the line.

  “Good job, Buck. A couple more like that, and you might actually work your way back into the Pentagon.”

  Buck doubted it, but it was nice to hear.

  “Do you want to send somebody over to get it, or do you want my team to take it back over to DIA?”

  There was no pause this time.

  “I’ll take care of it. No need for you and your guys to bother. I’ll have some people there in half an hour.”

  Like Buck hadn’t seen that coming.

  “Good enough, Bill. The package is ready to go.” He grinned. Business as usual. Don’t rock the boat, not yet. Let the big boys have the glory-that was his motto. All Buck wanted was the truth.

  He hung up the phone and looked over at the woman sitting on the other side of his desk.

  “Rough go?” he asked. She was still beautiful, still wearing an outfit that dared him to look, but she’d been hurt. Her face was bruised and scratched, and he could see a couple of Band-Aids on her arms here and there.

  “Not too bad,” she said. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

  Right. That’s what he had Dylan Hart for-to tell him the whole truth, and his girl had been pushed to the wall on this one. They’d all been pushed to the wall, his whole team.

  “Glad to hear it.”

  She was damn proud of herself. He could tell, no matter how cool she was playing it. She always held herself well, but her shoulders were just a little bit straighter, and he noticed.

  “More than likely, given your success here, and that you pulled this thing off in record time, they’re going to want to use you again,” he said.

  “You mean the next time they lose something?” She gave him a very skeptical look. “I would think the DIA wouldn’t go around losing things very often.”

  “No,” he agreed. “They don’t. But they do spend a fair share of their time accumulating items of interest. Are you up for it, or should I tell them to go take a flying leap?”

  He meant it. If she wasn’t on board, the DIA and the CIA could take their business elsewhere. It was all Grant could do to keep Bill Davies happy. SDF needed another team. He was running his operators ragged most of the time. They needed some downtime, and he was doing his damnedest to figure out how to build his unit in order to give it to them, if there was a unit by the time they finished with Conroy Farrel.

  Suzi met his gaze, and he could tell she was thinking.

  He liked that. She’d just come off a helluva mission, unlike anything he’d ever given her, though honest to God, he’d had no idea at the time. She needed to think, weigh the possibilities-weigh her commitment.

  “Yes, sir, I’d like another go,” she said, and the conviction in her voice didn’t leave a doubt in his mind. His girl was ready for another go.

  Well, he could pretty much damn well guarantee that she was going to get one.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Nepal-eight weeks later

  “Hey, sugar. How do you want your tea? Hot or cold?”

  “You’re hilarious,” Suzi said through chattering teeth.

  They were a two days’ trek out of Pokhara, Nepal, staying in a flat-roofed stone house euphemistically described as a “hotel.” Their room had a stone floor with a fire pit in the middle and came inclusive of a set of cooking pots. Miracle of miracles, there was a bed with plenty of blankets. The view in the mornings of the sunlight hitting the Himalayas was breathtaking-literally. By dawn, the room temperature would be hovering in the hypothermia zone, until Dax got up and stoked the fire back into a blaze.

  Suzi’s job at that time of day was to keep the bed warm.

  She was good at her job, but this morning, the job took more than she had to give in the way of body heat.

  Shivering, she watched Dax pour steaming water into two metal mugs.

  “I’ll take that as a ‘hot’ request,” he said. “I think you’re getting in a rut.”

  “I think I’m going to give Noble Faith two more days to get here with the Paitza of Abd Hasan, and then I’m heading back to Kathmandu and hot running water.”

  The Moonrise team of the Defense Intelligence Agency had gotten a line on an ancient artifact of the Golden Horde of the Eurasian Steppes-the Paitza of Abd Hasan, a gold plate from the thirteenth century-not nearly as old as the Maned Sphinx of Sesostris III, but in certain circles considered even more powerful. The Paitza purportedly granted life everlasting and untold riches. Suzi’s job, if she had chosen to take it-which she had-was to meet with a man named Tam-cho, Noble Faith, in this godforsaken middle of nowhere, and cut a deal. Rumor had it that the Paitza had been discovered in the ruins of Shekar Dzong, the Shining Crystal Monastery in Tibet, somehow transported there over the centuries from Mongolia.

  Dax carefully set her tea on a bedside table, then crawled under the covers with her with his own mug.

  Grant had asked her who she wanted on backup for the mission, and she hadn’t thought twice.

  “Should we go down to the dining room later and have brown bread and cheese for breakfast?” he asked.

  “How about quiche and croissants with a cappuccino?”

  “And for lunch, I guess we’ll go back to that little café-”

  “Hovel,” she interrupted.

  “Café,” he repeated, “and have-”

  “Pea soup and rice.”

  “Daal bhaat,” he translated.

  She took a sip of her tea. With the hot liquid going inside and her hands wrapped around the mug, she was warming up, and for each degree of warmth, her mood improved two degrees.

  “Actually, that was pretty good,” she admitted.

  He leaned over and kissed her cheek.

  “Do you still have your book to read?” he asked.

  “Yes.” There was little else to do, except hike around looking at astounding mountains that she could easily see just by going outside and turning her head in any direction. This was the Mountain Kingdom.

  “Or we could hike over to that little stream again.”

  He meant the half-frozen, rock-filled trickle that wound its way down the village’s eastern boundary.

  “We could,” she agreed, taking another sip of hot tea.

  “Or we could do what we did yesterday,” he suggested.

  He looked so innocent, sitting there next to her, propped up on the pillows, drinking his tea with one hand whi
le his other was under the covers, sliding up her leg.

  She could just see the top of the tattoo running down the side of his hip, Conqueror in Chinese, and she couldn’t help herself-a grin curved her mouth. “We do that an awful lot.”

  “Because we’re good at it.” He gave a little shrug. “Stick with your strengths, that’s what I say.”

  “Oh, you do, do you?” Her grin broadened.

  Good Lord, if anyone had ever told her she would wake up in a bed in Nepal with the man of her dreams, she would have told them they were nuts. But here she was, with Dax Killian, who was actually more man than she had dreamed she would find. He was solid, like a rock, emotionally, psychologically, physically, and he shared that strength with her. She trusted him like no person she’d ever known before. It was just there, trust down to the core, and it made her feel so safe, like she’d finally found home base.

  A woman would never leave a man who made her feel like that.

  “Absolutely. It’s one of my rules to live by.”

  “Got any more of those rules?” she asked, looking at him from over the top of her mug.

  “Only one,” he admitted.

  “And that is?” She was curious. From what she’d been able to find out, he didn’t have many rules, and even fewer that he hadn’t broken at one time or another.

  “If you ever find yourself lying in bed with a woman in Nepal drinking hot tea at dawn, you should marry the woman.”

  She just looked at him, completely nonplussed.

  “It’s not a rule that gets invoked very often,” he admitted, taking another sip of his tea before setting his mug on the bedside table. “But every time I’ve done it, it’s worked out real well for me.”

  “Uh…every time?” She finally got a few words out. “How many times have you invoked that rule?”

  “Only once,” he said. “This is actually the first time, but I’ve got high hopes on it working out.”