Cutting Loose

by Tara Janzen

  God, it was six o’clock in the morning after an all-nighter. She should be going to bed with somebody, not going to work. This was painful. Getting on a plane to Cabo and sleeping her way through the flight had been her plan for the morning.

  Black combat boots and a pair of long legs laminated in black-and-white-striped leggings came into her line of vision, and the next thing she saw was Skeeter’s face, peeking under the desk. A long fall of platinum blond ponytail fell over the girl’s shoulder and pooled on the floor.

  “Dior? At six A.M.?” Skeeter said. “Did you forget to go to bed last night?”

  Cherie shook her head. “It was a conscious decision.”

  “Do you need—”

  “Hacker!” a male voice called her name out, and Cherie groaned.

  “Coffee?” Skeeter finished, her sweet face like a ray of sunshine breaking through the black cloud Cherie felt heading her way, a black cloud named Dylan Hart. The man was ruthless—thank God. The cold calculation of Dylan’s mind was the reason Steele Street existed, and the reason she’d come back after getting Hacker International up and running. She trusted him implicitly, respected him the same.

  Dropping her cigarette into the soda can, she stifled a yawn and nodded her head.

  “Double-shot latte?” Skeeter asked.

  “Triple.” She backed out from under the desk and rose to her full five feet eight inches in height. She was going to need all of it, plus the stilettos, if she was going to face Dylan Hart eye to eye—which was the only way she ever did it.

  Using the desk for support, she toed out of her tactical boots and eased into her Blahniks, making sure the bows didn’t get stuck beneath the vamps.

  Dylan was still in his private office. She could see him standing next to his desk and checking something on his computer. He was hard and lean, with dark hair, choirboy looks, and a street-toughened edge—an impeccably dressed enigma in gray slacks and a black polo shirt. With Dylan, it was all in the eyes, and his were pure arctic gray ice.

  “Don’t worry about that problem with the Bazo, Dylan,” she said, leaning to one side and running her finger around the back of her foot, slipping the back strap up onto her heel. “I’ve got it covered.”

  “Covered or fixed?” he asked without looking up. “I need it fixed.”

  Okay, boss-man.

  “Gillian,” Skeeter said. “I think your brother’s taxi just pulled up in the alley, if you want to go downstairs and do the security check.”

  Cherie watched Red Dog nod and head toward the door into the stairwell.

  Back at the communication console, Skeeter keyed a code into the computer she was working on while simultaneously reaching for the landline phone. It rang just as her fingers touched the handset.

  “Uptown Autos. We only sell the best,” she said into the phone, then looked up at Dylan and nodded.

  “After Gillian IDs him, she can take him up and show him the firing range,” Dylan said. Everyone wanted to see the firing range. Cherie was particularly proud of it herself. “She’s free to visit, until I need her. But she needs to stay here. No going back to the garage in Commerce City until after our scheduled contact with the team in three hours.”

  Skeeter nodded and turned back to the phone. “Yes, sir, Mr. Shore. Gillian is on her way down.”

  Red Dog’s brother—Cherie’s interest was definitely piqued. She wondered which one, the Army Ranger or the brilliant geekazoid from the Marsh Annex? She’d love to meet the geek. Really love it. Good Lord, a guy from the Marsh Annex. She’d been there a few months ago at General Grant’s request, but other than her meeting with the top brass, she’d only been introduced to a girl named Rhonda, who had shown her around. All the actual tech boys had been behind closed doors.

  Perhaps the morning would shape up to be far more interesting than Cabo San Lucas.

  “And you,” Dylan said, and somehow Cherie knew he meant her. She shifted her attention back to his office door. “How long to get the Harlot’s onboard PC up and running to receive?”

  “Half an hour,” she said. “I think we’ve still got a dedicated pair of SJV80s. I’ll switch them out of the computer in the car and here in the office, and—”

  He was shaking his head.

  “No?”

  “No,” he said. “Switching parts out of Charlotte is no good.”

  Yes, it was.

  She opened her mouth to explain in layman’s terms how it would work, something she did an awful lot of, but he beat her to the punch.

  “Somebody broke into Steele Street last night about ten o’clock and stole the Shelby. Skeeter tracked her down in Albuquerque this morning.”

  Broken into? Her building? Not very bloody damn likely. She and Kid had done a security review just last week, and they hadn’t missed a brick.

  But Dylan was staring straight at her, and he’d said “broken into,” which meant she needed to think—fast.

  All right, sure, the building had been breached once, two and a half years ago. An Indonesian warlord, Hamzah Negara, had sent a bunch of his goons to bust into Steele Street and kill all its occupants. Not a good idea.

  They’d gotten in using a code they’d tortured out of Dylan, but Denver had been the last place the Indonesians had ever used their frequent flyer miles, with three of the assassins hunted down in the building and killed by Creed and Hawkins. The fourth had been kept alive for interrogation.

  Cherie had not asked for the details of that particular encounter. But she wanted all the damn details of this incident.

  “Charlotte is in Albuquerque?” she said, starting with one of the worst details. One of Steele Street’s rarest pieces of iron had been stolen, and that black mark was all hers.

  “Running hard, and I want to know why.”

  She thought that over for a full second and a half. “And you want me to get you set up with the Bazo PC so you can call the thief and ask him what the hell he’s doing in Albuquerque?”

  “Exactly.”

  She gave that another half a second of deep contemplation.

  “You got it. Give me thirty minutes and I’ll hook you up.” The rest of the damn details, finding and fixing the security breach, were going to take longer. Because frankly, she didn’t have a clue how in the hell someone had gotten into her building and stolen a damn car without everyone from here to Timbuktu knowing it.

  “Make it fifteen,” he said.

  She slanted him a skeptical look across the main office, but he just held her gaze, cool and steady.

  He wasn’t kidding.

  Of course he wasn’t. She knew a gauntlet when one was thrown down, and the only acceptable response was “Yes, sir.”

  He wanted fifteen? He was going to get fifteen.

  She turned to unzip her backpack, her mind still working over the disturbing fact of a security breach—when all of a sudden, it hit her.

  Her hand stilled on the pack, and her gaze shot back to Dylan.

  “It was an inside job,” she said; she knew it down to her pink-pearl-polished toes. “And you know who did it.”

  His only answer was an indecipherable glance in her direction.

  Somewhere in the office, a phone rang, and she heard Skeeter answer it.

  “Do you know how they did it?” she asked Dylan.

  Again, she got nothing but the look, which didn’t deter her for a minute.

  “Are you going to tell me?”

  At that, he shook his head, and she pursed her lips, looking at him hard, thinking, and trying to read his mind.

  He arched an eyebrow in her direction, and the little moue she’d made of her mouth slid into a true grin.

  “No, you won’t,” he said, reading her mind like an open book, which was way farther than she’d gotten with him. “You won’t find this breach, Cherie.”

  The hell she wouldn’t.

  “That’s an order, Hacker.”

  Her eyebrows rose at that. What the hell? Finding security breaches was her j
ob.

  “Dylan,” Skeeter interrupted. “A Mr. Alex Maier is on the line, asking for you, and I am definitely showing CIA encryption on the call and a point of origin in Langley, Virginia.”

  Dylan didn’t miss a beat. “Record and trace,” he said through his open doorway, reaching for a pad and pen. “And put it through to my office.”

  He moved around the corner of his desk to his chair. The “incoming” light on his console came on almost immediately, and he picked up the phone.

  “Hart,” he said.

  After a minute of listening, a look of satisfaction crossed his face, and he started writing.

  “Skeeter,” he said, still making notes. “I need you to make a call. This name, this number.” He tore a page off the pad and handed it over his desk.

  Baby Bang crossed into his office, took the paper, and headed back toward her communications console.

  “Yes. We can patch you through and keep the line open for as long as you need,” he said into the phone. “And I can guarantee the signal on the tracker will hold.”

  When the conversation ended, he hung up, and his gaze went straight to Skeeter. “Get Charlotte’s tracker up on a screen. I want to be able to transmit that location back to the Harlot in a matter of minutes, not hours.”

  Skeeter gave him a nonplussed look. “So the guy who stole Charlotte, the one still running her tires off in Albuquerque, doesn’t know where he is?” She paused for a second. “He’s in Albuquerque, Dylan, running Charlotte’s tires off. How can he not know that…unless he—”

  “Found your tracker and put it on something else. Something he needs to catch,” Dylan said.

  Skeeter grinned. “Gotcha.”

  “Cherie?” Dylan’s attention came back to her.

  And it was funny, but she didn’t have any trouble reading his mind this time. “Yes, sir,” she said. “Fifteen minutes.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Saturday, 6:15 A.M.—Albuquerque, New Mexico

  Spencer Bayonne stood on the edge of Somerset Street, milling with the crowd of half-awake people who had spilled out of their houses to gape at the police cars and the fire truck parked in front of Lily Robbins’s bungalow.

  Robbins’s truck was in her driveway, but according to the rumors running up and down the street, she was nowhere to be found.

  There had been shots, quite a few, resulting in one dead body, again according to the chatter on the street—and Spencer was not happy.

  Whoever in Sir Arthur Kendryk’s London office had decided to put two wiseguys from Las Vegas on this job needed to be cut out of the chain of command. Spencer would be happy to perform the service for Kendryk himself, the way he’d performed a number of services for the English lord over the years, literally and most recently with a seven-inch Recon Tanto blade. It was a great knife, a prize he’d won off a girl Kendryk had been keeping at his estate in Weymouth, England, a while back. Red Dog had been her street name, though Kendryk had preferred to call her Gillian. He also preferred to call her “his,” and in Spencer’s opinion was going to dangerous lengths to get what he wanted.

  Gillian Pentycote, Spencer recalled; a Yank like him.

  The woman here in Albuquerque was a Yank, too, born and bred, and if the Vegas boys had iced her without getting the bracelet, Spencer was going to ice them. Paul Stark and Jason Schroder had been given a clearly defined job—surveillance; get to Albuquerque and keep an eye on the woman until Spencer arrived on the scene.

  The Vegas boys had overstepped their orders, having gone so far as to break into Lily Robbins’s house, looking for the bracelet and probably to make a name for themselves, and now Spencer had a mess on his hands.

  The sound of another siren approaching had everybody on the sidewalk straining to see down the street, everybody except him and a guy standing on the other side of Somerset, about twenty yards down from one of the cop cars. That guy was watching Lily Robbins’s house like a hawk.

  Spencer pulled his phone out of his pocket, took a photo, and sent it to his partner, who was waiting in their Lincoln Town Car a block away. It took about two minutes for Mallory to text him back, during which time an ambulance pulled up in front of the bungalow.

  GRIGORI PETROV, Mallory wrote, ONE OF IVAN NIKOLEVNA’S LIEUTENANTS.

  Petrov, The Chechen, Spencer thought. He’d heard of the man, and this thing had suddenly turned into a horse race. The potential had been there from the start. A multimillion-dollar piece of CIA-generated Russian/Iranian intelligence going down in the Central American highlands and disappearing off the map became a world-class bargaining chip for whoever came up with it. Sir Arthur Kendryk had hired Spencer to make sure he was that man.

  A wolfish smile curved the corners of Spencer’s mouth. If Nikolevna was throwing his weight into this international game of pickup sticks, the stakes had just gotten higher. He liked high stakes, and Russian Mafia godfathers played for some of the highest on the planet. One of the few who played for higher was his current employer.

  Nikolevna and Kendryk, he thought, now that was a black match. But Petrov versus Bayonne—Spencer’s grin broadened even more—that was no contest.

  Moving deliberately, he separated himself from the onlookers and headed across the street. He needed to know what had happened in the Robbins house. With his phone to his ear, he fell in behind the medical technicians from the ambulance and kept up a one-sided, low-volume, cop-shop-style conversation. One of the policemen they passed in the front yard had his thumb on his mic and was talking into the walkie-talkie on his shoulder.

  “Yeah, an Aston Martin,” the cop said. “The guy is positive, and get this, after the shots, he swears the Bullitt car tore down the street…no, not a ‘bullet’ car, the car from Bullitt, the movie…yeah, a fastback Mustang.”

  Not quite, Spencer thought, checking the guy’s name tag as he passed. Whittington.

  The Bullitt car was a Shelby Cobra—a fastback, sure, but far more than a Ford Mustang.

  “Gonzales is getting a statement from the neighbor now,” Whittington said.

  Spencer catalogued the information and kept walking, keeping up with the guys from the ambulance. Jason Schroder drove an Aston Martin, and Spencer wasn’t happy that the car had been tagged. The Vegas boys had just become a serious liability.

  When the paramedics went through the front door of the bungalow, he stopped. He didn’t need to go inside. Somebody’s viscera were all over the far wall in the living room, a real mess. He checked the floor, where a hallway began, and saw everything he needed to see, a gray ponytail stringing out across the carpet, still attached to what was left of Paul Stark’s head. The guy had a hole in his chest, too, which opened the possibility of a classic Mozambique—two to the heart, one to the head.

  Somebody was a shooter. It was damned unlikely that Schroder had shot his partner, and even more unlikely that some schoolteacher in Albuquerque had pulled a Mozambique on a Las Vegas wiseguy.

  So now he had a fucking mystery on top of a royal screwup, and what he needed was a bracelet. The woman was a negligible pain in the ass—unless getting the bracelet from her proved to be too difficult, for whatever reason. Then she was dead.

  But he had to find her first.

  It was just too damn bad Robbins hadn’t taken Mallory’s offer. Then he’d know where in the hell she was, and she could have at least seen Tahiti before her life took a bad turn. His Mallory was such a romantic, such a softie beneath all her razor-sharp edges. When she’d heard about the poster and all the books in the woman’s bedroom, she’d gotten a sweet idea, and the two of them had laid down a private bet.

  It looked like he’d won. There wouldn’t be any little side trip to Tahiti. The ticket hadn’t been redeemed, and all hell had broken loose.

  He noticed one of the cops inside the house heading in his direction, looking very official and in no mood to be messed with. He lifted his hand, making a point of catching the guy’s eye.

  “I’m looking for Whittin
gton,” he said. “Is he in here?”

  “Outside,” the cop said, his voice gruff, the accompanying gesture he made making it clear the word was an order, not an answer.

  Spencer obeyed immediately, turning away from the door and heading out across the lawn. The day had gotten off to a rough start for the Vegas boys, and an even rougher stop for Paul Stark.

  His phone vibrated in his hand, and he held it out to look at the screen.

  GAZPROM, Mallory wrote, naming the giant Russian natural gas monopoly, having obviously come up with the same question he’d asked himself when she’d given him Petrov’s name, mainly “What in the hell connected Kendryk and Nikolevna?”

  UKRAINIAN GAS LEASES. He’d buy that. Everybody wanted in on Gazprom’s gas leases.

  KENDRYK WANTS SHARES IN THEM. NIKOLEVNA WANTS SHARES IN THEM. THE RUSSIAN SECRET SERVICE CONTROLS A HEFTY PORTION OF THE LEASES AND HAS PUT THEM ON THE BLOCK IN EXCHANGE FOR THE DATA THE CIA COMPILED AND ENCODED ON THE BRACELET. WINNER TAKE ALL. LOSER GO HOME. Spencer’s grin widened. His girl was good. Ukrainian gas leases in exchange for the retrieval of an extremely damaging piece of Russian intelligence proving collusion with the Iranians on their nuclear program was a world-class trade.

  Kendryk had warned him the playing field might get broad on this thing. Spencer had to agree. The future of Ukrainian fuel supplies being decided on Somerset Street in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A., was proof positive of a very broad marketplace, even the black marketplace. It was also a testament to underworld intelligence assets. In that arena, Spencer was dividing his bets straight down the middle between Nikolevna’s Russian reketiry and Kendryk’s far-flung global network.

  He grinned again.

  This party had definitely started, and possibly, the price on the CIA information had just gone up. Way up. Billions of dollars were going to change hands before this was over—and at the middle of it all was one small bracelet and one insignificant woman who didn’t have a rat’s chance against the forces arrayed against her.