Loose Ends (15 page)

When they’d reached the Buick Regal, Jack had pulled off his black watch cap and put on a Rockies baseball cap and a pair of clear glasses with silver frames. He’d handed Scout a blue bandanna, and she’d done one of those hippie-girl-cruising-through-Thailand-and-the-islands things, roping it through her hair and tying it all up on top of her head. He’d seen her do the same thing with a silk scarf, add a pair of dangly earrings, and look like she’d just walked off the cover of a fashion magazine.

But he’d never seen her in a dress—which was just one of those things that bugged him every now and then.

They’d been cruising the area, keeping a low profile in the nondescript gray Buick, on the lookout for Karola, Walls, and Lancaster—especially Lancaster, the bearcat—and trying to contact Con. He should have checked in as soon as he was clear and away.

But he hadn’t, and the game had changed. Jack couldn’t leave Con with Lancaster and his men this close.

“The people who took me, Special Defense Force, they aren’t out to kill him,” Scout said from her side of the car.

So what?

“They didn’t want to kill him last time, and he barely survived.” Killing him with kindness, darting him with damn ketamine, like he was an animal. Jack had been curious as hell about why these assholes had done what they’d done to Con. More often than not, in their business, when the going got tough, somebody usually got killed—and the going had been as tough as it could get in Paraguay. Con’s whole house had been destroyed. Everything had been shot, the walls, the deck, the windows, the furniture, and quite a few people—everything except Con.

No, they’d darted him, and just about killed the boss that way.

After seeing the guy in the Porsche, Kid Chaos, at least now Jack knew why they’d done it, and he knew why they’d kidnapped Scout, and he was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they weren’t working with Lancaster. But now the spymaster was here, the man who’d been hunting Con for six long years with only one goal: to kill him.

“They took you, Scout,” he said, a small warm-up to the questions that had kept him stone-cold focused every day for the last two weeks. “Did they hurt you? In any way?”

It would change everything if they had, no matter whose brother was whose.

“No.” She shook her head. “They only want one thing, that’s all. They want to help him. Geez, Jack, they’ve got pictures of him as a kid, pictures of his family, of when he was in the Marines, pictures of all of them together, and a thousand stories to go with the photos. They know things about him that we’ve only been able to
guess at, and they want him back. They say he’s theirs, and he is; you saw Kid.”

Yeah. Kid. There was always something about coming up against an operator his age, a young guy still kicking thirty in the back, that brought out the worst of Jack’s knuckle-dragging tendencies, of which he had plenty—but not this time. Peter “Kid Chaos” Chronopolous simply blew him away. Drop a few years on him, and the guy could be Con’s twin, except for the scars.

When Jack had seen Con for the first time, in Bangkok, he’d been a mess. Brutalized. With hundreds of stitches in him.

Everything in Bangkok had been crazy, and Jack had been a too-smart-for-his-own-good kid with more balls than brains coming off a hitch with the U.S. Army Rangers. He’d gone looking for adventure in Southeast Asia and found nothing but trouble of the worst kind.

Transportation services, courier services, protection services—after Jack cashed out of the Army, he’d set himself up to provide all three to foreign investors and businessmen working from Myanmar to Vietnam, China, and Taiwan. Things had gone great for a year, until he’d had problems with a package and been sent by a securities trader in Taipei to Bangkok to pick up a replacement
.

“
Tuberculosis sanitarium” was what he’d been told. Dr. Souk ran a convalescent hospital in Bangkok for people suffering from TB
.

Bullshit
.

“
Overzealous Colombians,” Souk murmured with obvious distaste, looking down at the injured, dark-haired man on the gurney with all those hundreds of stitches in him
.

Jack didn’t know what the fuck was up. He’d come for a package, not to go on rounds with some creepy doctor
.

Souk adjusted Con’s IV, then ordered a team of orderlies to take him below. The South Americans had all but ruined his patient, Souk complained, but he’d done his best to save the man
.

“
Every time I fix him, he gets better,” Souk added, which begged the question
.

“
How many times have you fixed him?
”

“
Dozens,” the thin, sallow-faced doctor said, looking up at Jack through a pair of thick, black-rimmed glasses. His lab coat was stained. His hair was chopped short and dirty. “It’s what I do with the good men. Fix them, then fix them better, though usually only from the inside out.
”

Geezus, Jack thought, looking back at the guy, and this time noticing that the man was wearing dog tags just like his—which sure as hell gave his heart a start, seeing a U.S. soldier in a way-too-strange TB sanitarium in Thailand
.

By the time the doctor finished showing Jack around, he’d seen over a hundred of the patients under Souk’s care and noticed that a good portion of them were American, but Con was the one Jack had remembered, him and a black Marine officer who’d looked to be dying
.

“They want me to help them,” Scout said, bringing him back to the problem at hand.

He turned and looked at her.

“Help them capture Con?”

She nodded, and he looked back out the windshield, swearing under his breath.

After a second, he turned and looked at her again.

“Betray Con?” he asked. “Set him up so these operators can what: Lock him down somewhere and ‘rehabilitate’ him?” He shook his head, growing angrier by the second, then shifted back into his seat and looked out
the windshield again. “You know he’s never going to willingly give himself up to these guys, no matter who they are.”

It was too damn late for rehab, and the boss knew it, but Jack didn’t want to be the one to tell Scout.

“No, we don’t know that,” she insisted. “We won’t know until I make my report to him. Once I tell him everything I know, he might want to talk to these guys. I only want what’s best for him, Jack. I’m just not sure what that is yet.”

He understood. It was hard to know what was best for Con, because it was damn near impossible to know what all had been done to him.

Twice he’d been hired by the broker in Taipei to pick up packages at Dr. Souk’s in Bangkok. The first time, he’d seen Con and the Marine officer who’d been in such damn bad shape. The second time, there’d been nothing left of Souk’s “hospital”—and for whatever harebrained reason he’d come up with and long forgotten, he’d decided to check the situation out.

Even years later, the memory of Souk’s basement was enough to make him sweat, but he’d found Con and gotten him out of there alive.

“All I’m saying is that maybe we should be the ones to figure that out,” Scout continued. “That maybe we should be the ones to decide what’s best for him.”

Geezus
.

“If you want to do that, babe, then you’ve got more balls than I do.” The two of them going behind Con’s back and setting him up for these assholes?

Jack didn’t think so.

Con Farrel was the toughest son of a bitch Jack had ever met in his life, and Jack had been around the block with some of the world’s best.

Con was also the most incisively tactical person Jack
had ever known. Calm, articulate, intelligent, he’d taken Jack’s courier and protection business and shot it into the stratosphere. He’d known how to score bigger commissions off of larger, multinational companies and wealthier private clients. He was a fixer. He knew where to lay money down and where to pick it up, how to hot-wire anything with an engine, and how to fight—definitely knew how to fight—and over the course of the first few months of their partnership, they’d built a war chest.

When Jack had asked him for what, Con had given him a succinct answer: the hunt.

They’d been hunting ever since, and it had all gone down real well, just the way they’d planned, until Con had decided it was time to hunt down Garrett Leesom’s daughter. It had taken them two years to find her, and nothing had been the same for Jack ever since.

A Boy Scout, that’s what he’d been, a damn Boy Scout, curious as hell, wondering what in the world two U.S. Marines had been doing in that hellhole, and wondering if he should check to see if maybe they’d been left behind when Souk had packed up his “hospital” and disappeared off the map.

One had been left behind: Con.

The other had died: Garret Leesom, Scout’s father.

Hell
. He’d never told her that he’d been one of the last people to see her father alive.

He shot her a quick glance—and decided that, once again, today was not the day to broach that subject.

Hell
.

He reached for his prepaid cellphone.

“Alpha One, come in,” he said into his radio mike, his finger jabbing a curt text message into the phone. “Alpha One, this is Alpha Two. Where the hell are you, Alpha One?”

“I might throw up.”

“No. You won’t.” It was an order, not a medical opinion.

Screw him.

“Yes, I might.” And Jane meant it. Her stomach was in her throat, and her heart was down in her gut. She’d hit her head, and her legs were shaking, and the thin line of terrified horror that had shot through her when Corinna had taken her dive was still thrumming through her body.

She’d thought it was the end. That he’d forgotten where he was and taken a wrong turn. No one, she’d thought, who remembered that there was no floor in a certain warehouse would drive into that warehouse at eighty miles an hour, just hitting the brakes after it was damn well too late.

“You’re fine,” he said calmly.

“That’s what you said when we crashed.”

“We didn’t crash.”

The hell we didn’t
.

God
, it was dark.

What in the world had she gotten herself into? she wondered. The scraping sound of metal. The vertigo-inducing angle of their descent into this black pit. The rolling of her stomach. The awful sinking feeling of
thinking she’d come to her end—the fear, stark and terrifying … 
Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death
.

Three years at the Immaculate Heart School for Young Women in Phoenix hadn’t left her particularly prayerful. The whole time she’d been there, a good ninety percent of her prayers had been to get out. But tonight she’d found a reason to petition the Sacred Virgin.

“If you turn on the lights, we can see where we are,” she suggested.

“I know where we are.”

Good. That was great—for him, king of the one-line response. For the record,
she
didn’t know where they were, enough reason for her to want to shed a little light on the situation, that and the trembling she couldn’t seem to control.

“We can’t just sit here in the dark.” Really, she couldn’t, not pitch dark, not tomb dark, and if he’d remembered anything about her, he would have remembered that.

“Yes, we can.”

Okay. Fine. If he wanted to play it that way, she could sit in the dark as long as he could, maybe longer … maybe not.

The last time she’d seen him, the night before he’d left and not come back, they’d ended up in a place this dark. He’d taken her out east of the city, to the Midnight Doubles, a place she’d heard about lots of times but had never seen. They’d watched the races and wagered a meal on the outcome, and as much as she’d known she was going to miss him, she was glad to have the bet: win or lose. She’d wanted to know she would see him again, and he’d promised her she would. That he’d be gone for a few months, but probably not six months, and that he’d be thinking about her while he was gone to wherever
he was going, which he’d never said. She’d found out later, at his funeral, when the country of Colombia had been mentioned during the service.

Colombia—she’d thought at the time that she’d never heard of such an exotic place, and that she’d never so hated a place, because J. T. Chronopolous had gone down there and died.

But the night before he’d left hadn’t been about dying—it had been about living…

Wynkoop and 18th, eight p.m.—Jane hurried along the street, excitement running through her veins, happy. She was meeting J.T. again. Two days after their breakfast at Duffy’s, they’d had lunch at a great Mexican restaurant in town, Mama Guadaloupe’s. The whole thing had been very cool. He was practically famous at Mama’s, and everyone had made a big fuss over him and over her, and tonight they were meeting for dinner
.

They weren’t dating. There was nothing date-like about the meals they shared. She very much got the feeling that he was feeding her—and she had no complaints. Great food served hot was always welcome
.

But he thought she was beautiful. He’d said so that first night, and they were headed out to the car races at the Midnight Doubles
.

Three more blocks to go and right on time. She came around the corner onto Wynkoop from 15th and ran into a man coming out of the bookstore with a bag of books. It was nothing, just a small run-in, an accident, the sort of thing that happened hundreds of times a day on every block in the city—but she got the guy’s wallet
.

She ran into people all the time, at least four or five times a day when the conditions were right, and she always got the wallet
.

But she was losing her touch, or getting too big to pass unnoticed, or something, because just like that night
with J.T. and Christian Hawkins, this guy immediately noticed something was wrong
.

“
Hey!” he yelled, and the chase was on
.

Jane didn’t look back. She poured on the speed, wondering what in the world would have made her do something so dumb as to pick a pocket and get caught on her way to meet J.T
.