On the Loose (4 page)

Yesterday afternoon,
geezus.
Her head had to still be reeling. White Rook had snatched her out of her life and thrown her into this mess in record time—and he wouldn't have done it without a damn good reason.

Tasking civilians with vital missions involving weapons, locked briefcases, and the CIA was the surest road to disaster Smith knew, especially if the civilians were cute-assed blondes with no training and no practical skills.

He shifted his attention back to the briefcase. The design of the letter definitely had that Zorro look to it, but like her, he doubted there were any legendary heroes running around Morazán Province, ready to save the girl and the day. No, that job, if and when it needed doing, was going to be all his, and he could only think of one way to pull it off.

“Plan A, the way you've outlined it, is unacceptable to me,” he said. He didn't give a damn who had put it together. “So we're moving straight to Plan B.”

“Which is?”

“You tell me your half of the combination,” he said, visually checking the briefcase before running his hands carefully over the top, “and I fly into Morazán alone to meet with Campos and Garcia. I'll get the courier's pouch and the flash drive, while you stay here at the Blake, sunning yourself by the pool and drinking piña coladas. Maybe Brett Jenkins can take you out for a nice dinner.”

Not surprisingly, Plan B was met with silence.

Tough. He liked it, and she was just going to have to live with it. He'd given her a way out, and by all rights, she should be grateful.

He finished checking the briefcase by sliding his hands along the edges. He didn't feel anything unusual, but if it was rigged to explode, the thermite and the trigger mechanism would all be inside. When he was finished, he looked over his shoulder at her. She was still standing in the walk-in closet, arms crossed, mouth tight, her rhinestone sunglasses perched on top of her head with the cocktail umbrellas sticking up behind and her hair all wildly topsy-turvy. She should have looked ridiculous.

She didn't.

She looked put-together, not falling apart, her skin like satin, her bikini, what little there was of it, hand-tailored right down to the strings. She looked in over her head, but still holding her own. She looked in control of herself, even if the situation was out of her hands.

She looked like it would take a crowbar and two sumo wrestlers to get the damn combination out of her.

And
goddammit,
she looked like something he'd lost. Something he should have been more careful with—but that was an epiphany he wasn't going to accept delivery on, not here, not now.

“Why me, Honey?” That's the question he needed answered. Contrary to what she'd said, he didn't have a wherefore or a because anywhere in sight, and nothing she'd shown him had a damn thing to do with him, except her.

Without a word, she strode back to the table, the tiny heels of her shoes clicking on the hard-wood floor. Once there, it took her all of ten seconds to blow him up again.

She spread the photographs out with the palm of her hand, then pulled three out of the lower end of the stack.

“This is you standing outside the window of the sacristy that night in San Luis,” she said, handing over the first photo. “Please note the pistol in your hand—both hands, actually—and the intent expression on your face as you watch what's going on inside.”

He glanced down at the picture, and that's all it took to prove her correct and for all the implications of the photograph to become absolutely crystal clear.

“And then here's the same shot again, but zoomed in on the window. Please note the illegal cash transfer taking place on the other side of the window, inside the sacristy, with me and Diego Garcia clearly identifiable. For the record, I hadn't known a camera could take such good photos at night.”

He had, but he hadn't known anyone in San Luis had been taking pictures of him—and he should have, goddammit.

“And the last one”—she handed it over—“is of you and me getting in the cab the next morning, and yes, they know exactly how I got out of the country. In fact, they know more about the pilot and the plane you put me on that morning than I do.”

Yeah, the fucking CIA knew everything, and they'd obviously tagged him when he'd entered El Salvador, which meant that even after the big favor Steele Street had done them four months ago, retiring one of their rogue agents, the CIA was still tracking SDF operators, and it meant—

“You blew my cover,” she said.

Yeah. That's what it meant, and her cover had been perfect: ditzy blond tourist with a tote bag. Perfect, because it had almost been the truth.

Almost, but not quite. She wasn't ditzy, and she hadn't been a tourist. Like him, she'd been in El Salvador on a mission, except hers had been a mission of mercy, taking money to her sister, so Julia could repair an orphanage.

“In essence, then,” she continued, “this is all your fault, and you have nobody to blame but yourself.”

Typical.

“And I'm blaming you, too.”

A foregone conclusion in his life whenever a woman was involved—but she was just getting warmed up.

“Because nobody cares if Honoria York-Lytton hops from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to San Luis, El Salvador, for a few days on the beach, but apparently the CIA cares very much where
you
are, and they cared very much about what
you
were doing that night,” she said, her voice rising a bit, which he knew from a lot of rising female voices in his past was not a good sign. “And because
you
followed me, and they followed
you
”—and the whole “you” thing, that was not good—“
my
butt is in Panama with a bunch of guns I'm supposed to cart into the jungle, and a briefcase full of God knows what, and the next place
my
butt is going to be is back in El Salvador, where I'm supposed to wheel and deal with a group of armed and dangerous political insurgents, and about the only place I can guarantee my butt is
not
going to be is back on a plane to Washington, D.C., not without a courier's pouch, a flash drive, and an agreement between the CNL and Alejandro Campos.”

“Unless you give me the combination and let me do it for you.” The solution to all this was so simple.

But her foot was tapping.

“No,” she said. One word.

And there could be only one reason for her to use that word: her sister, saintly Sister Julia Ann-Marie Bakkert. He'd done some checking on the woman, and Julia had packed quite a bit of saintliness into her twenty-one years before she'd taken the cross—starting a youth mentoring program while at a private boarding school in Europe, food bank work in Washington, D.C., chairing the fund-raising committee for a halfway house for troubled teens in Boston.

She'd dropped out of Harvard after her freshman year to marry the youngest son of Dr. Hans Bakkert, head of the Latin America Chapter of the United Health Organization. Two years later, that youngest son, Carl, had been murdered in the Hotel Langston on the island of Malanca off the coast of Honduras.

Smith had had Skeeter track down the file, including photos, and it had been a bloody mess. The miracle was that Julia hadn't died with her husband. They'd been caught in the hotel's main elevator, real close quarters for an assassination—and Honey had been in the Langston's dining room, waiting for them, when it had happened.

He'd read her statement. She'd seen the killers. They'd walked past her, three men in black balaclavas and black clothes, carrying submachine guns, pushing their way out the front doors of the hotel, and at the other end of the lobby, the elevator, with Julia collapsed in one corner, screaming, and Carl slumped in the other, silent, slaughtered by over thirty rounds of .40 S&W ammo delivered at extremely close range.

According to the file, Honey had been the first to reach the elevator. She'd gathered up her sister and barricaded herself and Julia in her suite, and she'd gotten a three-way phone conversation going between the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and the State Department in Washington, D.C., cobbling together an immediate departure, all before the police had even arrived on the scene.

Looking at her, it was hard to imagine.

He'd seen carnage, up close and personal. He knew the precise terminal ballistics of every round he used in his weapons. He knew what she'd seen in the elevator.

And yet she was here, telling him no.

“Jenkins said you have two days in the highlands.”

“Two.” She nodded.

And four months ago, she'd smuggled a quarter of a million dollars into El Salvador, and then gotten the money across San Luis in the middle of the night, through the middle of a riot, all on her own.

“Forty-eight hours.”

“Yes,” she confirmed.

“Why?”

“Garcia set the timetable. If we don't meet it, he moves his camp, disappears into the mountains, and sells to someone else.”

Fuck.
He was going to do this, and not because of the photos. There was plenty of intelligence in the Central Intelligence Agency, but not enough to get a treason conviction to stick to him. He'd played the game too many different ways, from too many different angles, for too many government organizations, all in the name of whatever mission they'd given him, and he could do it again, as many times as they needed him to, whenever and wherever. Those skills were the reason he'd been tagged by Grant for SDF. Those skills were what made him too goddamn useful to throw away on back-page news and a low-end payoff. So, no, the photos were no threat to him, and given her last name, they weren't a threat to Honey, either, and she had to know it, no matter how heavy-handed they'd gotten with her before they'd put her on the plane to Panama.

No, this was a flat-out opportunity, and everybody from the CIA to White Rook was using the situation to their advantage, including Honoria York-Lytton. He didn't doubt for a second that the spooks wanted their documents and data back, or that Diego Garcia had requested her as the courier for the payoff, but she was here for Julia—and because she wanted something, she'd set herself up to be used.

That's why Smith kept his damn Christmas list to himself. Nobody knew what he wanted.

Nobody.

And White Rook—hell, White Rook knew her value, down to the ounce, and that was why his ass was in Panama and outbound to El Salvador, instead of still in Peru. Brett Jenkins III had been right. This was a personal security detail, with a whole lot of freight on board for the ride.

But his job was to keep her safe.

He let his gaze slide down her again, down all those curves one more time.
Christ
. There wasn't a straight line on her—anywhere.

Yeah, he knew what he wanted. He knew what he'd been wanting for the last four months, her little steel trap of a brain working him over, her body, hot and sweet, working him hard.

Do me, Smith,
she'd whispered to him that night in San Luis, and he'd done nothing but dream about it ever since, fantasize about it, get off on it, and start all over again more times than he cared to remember.

But it wasn't going to happen, not in the next forty-eight hours, and after that, her butt
would
be on a plane back to Washington, D.C.

Inside his pocket, he felt the silent vibration of his phone, and all he could think was that it was about goddamn time. A phone call was the least of what he needed before he got on a plane going anywhere, especially to El Salvador.

He pulled out his phone, checked the number—General Grant—then checked his watch.

“You've got half an hour before we move out,” he said, heading past her toward the door. “Don't be late.”

CHAPTER
FOUR

Exaltación, Colombia

This was the last time he stole a car. Alejandro Campos swore it. He was getting too old to be hot-wiring pieces of junk in rat-infested alleys in flea-bitten border towns, and yet he kept ending up in some damn border town somewhere, usually on the verge of getting his ass kicked, and he hated to think it, but the longer he was in this particular rat-infested alley, the surer he was that he'd been in it before, staring down the same damn rats.

Mierda. Shit.
He lived his life on the border, had been living it on the border for more years than was good for him. It was all getting so fucking obvious.

“Jewel, baby?” he asked.

“Yeah, boss?”

From underneath the steering wheel, he tapped a couple of wires together, and got nothing.

“Why is it again that you left me?” he asked.

Jesus.
He used to be so good at this, one of the best.

True, the car was a piece of junk, a cheap-ass four-banger with rusted-out quarter panels and a hole in the floorboards—but it wasn't like they'd had a whole lot of options after the Mercedes had gone up in a flaming ball of twisted metal and smoking tires, Jewel's car, a pearl gray 380 SL, and oh, hell, yeah, he knew it was going to show up on her expense account.

The girl was ruthless.

“Because you're a head case.”

A ruthless, brutally honest bitch—that was why he loved her.

He fished around for another wire.

But did he still love her like that? Hell, he'd been asking himself that question since she'd walked out of his bedroom door for the last time, two years ago, and he still didn't know. The day she'd gotten married to what's-his-name, and that would have been one year, eleven months, and two weeks ago—and yeah, that had been some kind of clue—anyway, that day, he'd thought he'd known the answer—no. Bon voyage, baby, and all that.

A short burst of gunfire pop-popped into the alley, and Jewel returned fire, precision fire, raising her pistol and squeezing off two rounds aimed toward the roofline on the south side.

A guy fell off the building and landed in a bloody pile in the alley, less than two meters from the car. One solid center-chest hit, and from the looks of what Campos could see, or rather what he couldn't see, like the back of the guy's skull, a head shot. God, she was good—but the bad guys were catching up.

He touched another set of wires, and got another big nothing.

Dammit.

Sure, bon voyage, that's what it had been on her wedding day, but when he was stretched out under a steering column, and she was in the passenger seat, arranged for maximum tactical advantage, and he could see up her skirt—well, it was times like those when he asked himself if he still loved her. And depending on how far he could see up her skirt, the answer could be either yes or no.

Today was a yes.

“Red lace panties?”

“Fuck you.”

He grinned. He loved her. It was a definite yes.

“So how you doing, boss?”

“Bleeding, but not bleeding out.” Not in this rat-infested alley, not in this flea-bitten town, not today. He'd gotten trimmed, that was all, a round catching him across the meaty part of his right thigh during their great escape from a lunchtime drug deal gone bad. The wound burned, but somehow not quite as badly as his brain.

Yeah, his brain was on fucking fire. Some two-bit
chingaletos
had jacked the cocaine shipment he'd been delivering to Exaltación's number-one drug lord, a player named Ray Gonzalez. They'd stolen the damn shit right out from under him and then come after him for good measure—and baby, this week, on this deal, that was a death warrant. Nobody screwed with Alejandro Campos's cocaine deals except Alejandro Campos.

Christ,
the drug trade was so damned complicated these days. Too many players, too much blow, too many people with their fingers in the cocaine pie, and too many people fucking up.

The next ignition wire he tapped against the two he'd already twisted together gave him a spark—
hot damn.
The motor groaned, and whined, and finally turned over.

It was the most pitiful excuse for a getaway, and a getaway car, he'd ever been involved with—he just hoped like hell that it worked. They were a hundred miles out of Barranquilla, and if he didn't get Jewel home in one piece, what's-his-name would probably write some really crappy poem about him and have it published in some really crappy academic journal.

A poet. She'd left him for a fucking poet.

Jesus.
Women.

He levered himself up into the driver's seat and ignored the fact that he was sitting in a pool of his own blood. It was only a small pool, little more than a wet smear now that most of what he'd lost had soaked into the upholstery. Yes, sir, turning his favorite silk tie into a pressure bandage had been a brilliant idea.

The car sputtered when he gave it a little gas, and he swore under his breath. “Come on, you inbred piece of shit. Don't quit on me now.”

Exaltación, Colombia, wasn't that damn big, not so big that Gonzalez shouldn't have better goddamn control of the streets, and not so big that it should have been such a goddamn big deal to get the fuck out of it.

But he and Jewel were sucking air.

He tried the gas again, and when the motor kept running, he jerked the car into gear.

“Buckle up, baby, and reload.”

“Buckle up?” She let out a short laugh and slammed a fresh magazine into her .45-caliber Colt. “We don't have a driver's side door, a back window, or half the dashboard, and you want me to buckle up? Christ, boss. I'm lucky to have a damn seat.” She grinned. “Buckle up. God, Campos, you were always good for a laugh.”

And that was probably the last damn thing a guy wanted to hear, any guy. It was only one step above the utterly demoralizing “You're finished? Already?” Which, admittedly, was a couple of dozen steps above “What's the problem? Don't you like me?”

And yes, he'd been
there
a couple of times.
Dammit.

Once with her—but no guy got left because of an “equipment malfunction,” not when a woman loved him.

So, yeah, that's probably how it had been, with him being in love and her being in something else, like in it for the thrill of the game, because baby, the thrills in the game they played were razor sharp.

“We have to stop meeting like this, boss.”

Yeah, yeah, he knew it.

“I mean it, Campos. It's time for you to jump ship, cash in your chips, and say
hasta la vista.
”

No, it wasn't. He'd know when it was time.

“But you won't,” she said.

Christ.
Was she reading his mind? He hated it when she read his mind.

He glanced over at her: “Jewel”—Joya Molara Gualterio, former U.S. Marine and Austin, Texas, high-school homecoming queen, long legs, long chestnut-colored hair, dark eyes, smart mouth, red business suit with a three-button jacket and a tight skirt.

Hell. She was fucking a poet, and he was good for a laugh. Something wasn't right with the world.

Actually, a whole lot of things weren't right with his world, beginning with these small-time hoods thinking they had something to gain by killing Alejandro Campos instead of doing the smart thing and letting him make good on his deal with Gonzalez. There was plenty of action to go around, always a way for everyone to get ahead.

But nobody got ahead by going after Alejandro Campos. That was a strictly “good way to get fucked” move. He'd spent the last twelve years building the reputation that made it so.

Twelve years, dammit.

Twelve years to go from a street corner drug thug to a major mover with an estate in the Salvadoran highlands and the kind of entourage that was supposed to keep him out of rat-infested alleys.

Not today, though. He hadn't seen this disaster coming, and he sure as hell hadn't expected to get fucking shot and bleed all over one of his best damn suits.

Well, the street thugs had gotten all the blood they were going to get, and it was all soaked into the seat of the POS, the piece-of-shit four-banger.

Yeah, it was a hundred land miles to Barranquilla, but only two to the coast and a go-fast boat running four 250 Mercs. He'd have Jewel back in what's-his-name's good keeping and be sitting in a Beech Baron, flying home to Morazán before Gonzalez's staff finished cleaning up the mess that had started out as an elegant lunch with a little business on the side and ended with Mercedes
flambé
and a firefight in close quarters.

He had a package arriving this evening, a package with his name on it, and he'd be damned if he missed the delivery.