On the Loose (5 page)

CHAPTER
FIVE

Make it four sumo wrestlers, Smith thought, sitting next to Honey in the limo taking them to Howard Air Force Base, where they would board a C-130 to Ilopango. She wasn't giving anything away, least of all the damn combination to the briefcase she'd honest to God handcuffed to her wrist. It was the only flaw in an otherwise flaw-less look. He didn't know how she'd done it, honestly, he didn't, but in the half an hour she'd had to get ready, she'd managed to turn herself from a bikinied bimbette into a Park Avenue princess. All her wild curls had disappeared into a sleek French twist, and all those wild curves had disappeared inside a sleeveless canary yellow dress so simple it almost defied description. There was nothing to it: a front, a back, and a very thin black patent leather belt with a very tiny black patent leather bow in the front. That was it. And yet it looked like it cost more than his car. And it fit her like a glove. Every breath she took registered with a subtle rise and fall of canary yellow material. Every move she made, the dress was right there with her—and so was the damn briefcase.

For her own good, he was going to have to tell her the bad guys had a real quick way of dealing with wrists handcuffed to briefcases, and she didn't know it, but she would freeze her butt off inside a C-130 in a sleeveless dress. Fortunately, being cold was one problem he could fix.

“Our friend at the State Department did not give you a pair of handcuffs to wear,” he said. White Rook knew as well as anyone that in this part of the world, handcuffing yourself to anything worth stealing was a real good way to lose a hand, and the bad guys wouldn't hesitate, not for a second, no matter how pretty her French manicure looked.

“No,” she said, arranging the briefcase more comfortably next to her in the seat, tucking it up against her large canary yellow purse. “The cuffs are mine.”

Great. Just what he wanted to hear. The woman who had written
The Sorority Girl's Guide
to Self-Help Sex,
the woman who had made the covers of the tabloids with headlines about shameless sorority girl sex games, owned a pair of handcuffs—and he'd let her slip through his fingers in record time.

Yeah, about twelve hours, that's how long she'd been in his care, a real hit-and-run hookup, and wasn't that the way of it sometimes.
Hell.

Honey turned a page in the book she was reading and let out a sigh, one of many she'd given in to since they'd left the Blake. Something was all pent up inside her, that much was obvious, and it was probably something he needed to know, like maybe the truth of why she'd let herself be roped into this mission, or maybe exactly how much and what kind of trouble Sister Julia had gotten herself into, and what in the world Honey thought she could do to get Julia out of it.

One thing Smith did know: The CIA didn't give a damn about Julia Bakkert. The station chief at the U.S. Embassy here in Panama City, William Dobbs, had made that much clear when Smith had stopped by, per General Grant's orders, and politely asked him what the fuck was going on. Covert mission gone bad, Dobbs had told him. A plane down. Time-sensitive, classified data floating around loose in the jungle. Guerrilla faction demanding money, weapons, and some woman named Honoria York-Lytton to deliver it all in forty-eight hours or less, or they were going to pack their toys and disappear, and the next time the Agency would see their documents would be on the international black market. Luckily, the Agency had enough dirt on Ms. York-Lytton to make her a malleable asset. Dirt, Dobbs had recalled, that included an unnamed covert operator under the command of General Richard Grant.

Yeah. Dobbs's opening salvo had pretty much summed up everything Honey had told him.

Regardless, the chief of station had gone on, Rydell's involvement had come from the other end of the chain, straight from someone high up at the State Department in Washington, D.C., very high up if they were overseeing the CIA's involvement in the retrieval of their own data. Dobbs had been told to support the mission, and he had, arranging transportation and personnel from Panama City to Ilopango, and from Ilopango to Morazán, and negotiating political expediency in San Salvador, a lot of very expensive political expediency, considering where the weapons were going. In return, Dobbs had been promised that Grant's operator could be counted on to deal with the rebels, retrieve the diplomatic pouch, and recover a 2GB flash drive concealed in the fuselage of the downed Cessna. The Catholic nun connection was purely peripheral and should in no way compromise Rydell's or Ms. York-Lytton's primary objective—as a matter of fact, if any part of the mission failed, Rydell's involvement would be traced back to the State Department, not the CIA, so their meeting was strictly off the books. Brett Jenkins should have briefed him. As a matter of fact, as far as Dobbs was concerned, Jenkins
had
briefed him, and thank you very much for stopping by.

To his credit, Dobbs had produced current intel on the CNL, and current imagery of northern El Salvador, specifically of Morazán Province, and most specifically of the probable plane crash sites. The analysts had pinpointed two, both within a few kilometers of the CNL's camp on the Torola River.

The pilot couldn't have picked a worse place to bury his Cessna.

Next to Smith in the limo, Honey let out another barely audible sigh, and it occurred to him she might be simply flat-out scared, and if she was, he needed to know it, and if she was, sitting next to him being closemouthed and stony-faced probably wasn't helping. Conversation might ease some of her stress, and sure, he had just the thing for openers.

“I came across the
Ocean
magazine you were talking about, the one with you on the cover.” The one with her on the cover re-creating the famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe standing over a grate in the sidewalk with her skirt flying up, the back issue he'd had to buy off some Internet magazine trader in Hell-and-Gone, New Jersey, and pay an outrageous amount of money to get. Yeah, that one.

She'd told him about it the night they'd met in San Luis, and after getting home and spending the following two days thinking about her pretty much nonstop, he'd gone on a mission to find it, alone, bypassing Skeeter, who was so damn good at finding everything anyone at Steele Street wanted. Some things a guy needed to keep to himself, like chasing millionaire heiresses to ground, millionaire heiresses he didn't have a chance of landing.

But hell, it couldn't hurt to know more about her—or so he'd thought.

“The article was interesting, very well done.” For a cupcake extravaganza.

Honey slanted a glance up at him from her book. “I'm glad you enjoyed it.”

Yeah, enjoyed it—not quite.

“Are you still involved with a lot of charity organizations?” Her list of good deeds had taken up a good third of the interview, and he'd been impressed. Good deeds and an overwhelming net worth were a natural combination, but still commendable, even if, every now and then, those good deeds ended in arrest and front-page scandal.

It happened. He wasn't going to hold it against her, but he'd definitely started to understand why someone with newly found saintly inclinations, like her sister, preferred to keep their distance from the family.

And then, after scandalous good deeds and newspaper headlining arrests, there had been the rest of the interview, the other two thirds, the bulk of it, which had given him plenty of pause and way too much to think about, and none of it really any of his damn business.

“A few,” Honey said, turning partly toward him, a note of curiosity in her voice—rightly so. Idle chitchat wasn't Smith's strong point, and if she remembered anything about him—which he had good reason to doubt—she'd remember that, but he didn't have a lot to work with here, at least nothing of substance. The article had been a fluff piece, all fluff. Apparently, she was the queen of it. There hadn't been a hard fact in it anywhere, because there were no hard facts in her life, none that he'd been able to find anyway, and that had been bugging the crap out of him, the fluff and the two thirds of the interview devoted to her famous boyfriend.

Two fricking thirds of a two-page article, more column inches than
Ocean
had given “The New State of Lingerie,” which apparently was Alabama, and a “refreshingly retro” style created by a designer working out of her shop in Mobile—'Bama Mama Brassieres. The designer and her wares were all the rage, and sure, he could dig it. He liked bows on bras, especially if they untied. And 'Bama Mama's did.

“And I didn't know you'd had a job—once.” Smith let the last word drop with a little more weight than he'd intended, and being a quick girl, Honey picked up on it immediately.

“Don't bother to disapprove of me, Mr. Rydell,” she said, turning back to her book. “I'm simply doing the best I can with what I've got.”

Tough work, but he guessed somebody had to do it.

“How many more times are you going to call me Mr. Rydell?”

“As many times as I need to.” She snapped another page over in her book.

Fair enough.

He rearranged himself in his seat and wished he'd eaten a bigger damn breakfast on his last damn flight. It was a long way to El Salvador.

“Look, Mr. Rydell,” she started in again, turning to face him, her tone slightly exasperated. “Being the director of fund-raising for the Kardon County Human Services Foundation was a paid position, and I held it for three years. Ergo, I had a job.”

“And donated your salary back.” Every year, according to the magazine.

“I made a donation commensurate with my salary. There's a difference.”

Only to a tax accountant.

“The picture of you in
Midsummer Night's Dream
was an interesting part of the article. You must have been Titania.”

Honey held his gaze for a second, then sat back in her seat and cleared her throat.

“We made a lot of money on our theater productions,” she said, “especially Shakespeare. The Bard is a solid seller in Kardon County, and I was the one the fairy costume fit.
Ergo,
I was Titania.”

“Costume?” Excuse him, but what costume? “Did I miss something in the photo?” Like an actual costume?

The picture with the article had shown her running across an outdoor stage at night, slipping through a fantastical forest, somehow looking like she was lit from within, trailing two ribbons, three strategically placed leaves, which left her one leaf short of even the most basic modesty, and not a damn thing else, with a bunch of other scantily clad fairies flying out of the trees behind her, all of them doing their part, practically in the frickin' buff, for Shakespeare and Kardon County—and yeah, he'd probably spent way too much of the last four months looking at the photo and thinking about her naked.

“It was a theatrical production,” she explained, unnecessarily, “with creative license.”

“It was Shakespeare in the nude. No wonder you made so much money.”

“It was for charity.”

“It was outrageous.” And that was the goddamn thing. Her whole life had been played out in public, laid out in gossip rags, society pages, and bad news headlines. Hell, it hadn't taken any investigative skills to build a Honey York dossier, only a couple of dozen back issues of East Coast newspapers and a few magazines. And yet, it didn't add up. The woman had graduated from Harvard
magna cum laude,
published two books, one a best-seller, spent three years running fund-raisers for half a dozen different charities, gotten arrested for indecent exposure—and then what? Become a world-class party girl for the rest of her life?

Smith wasn't buying it.

“According to the article, you played the part for three years...despite the reviews.”

“You're working way too hard here.” She didn't even look at him this time, but to his amazement, a faint blush of color washed into her cheeks.

“They were brutal, especially the
Times
critic,” he said, “especially about your performance.”

“Only because I have no talent other than for running around on stage half naked,” she said, flipping another page in her book, the color in her cheeks deepening.

Okay. He'd buy that, even if it did seem a little harsh.

More than a little harsh.

“Well, you must have done something right for them to ask you to play the part three years in a row,” he said, inexplicably coming to her defense.

Honey kept turning pages in her book, snapping them over one at a time. “Like you, Mr. Rydell, I don't live my life based on other people's opinions.”

But she was still blushing. That was one nice thing about being a covert operator—things had to get completely out of hand in a very political way before anyone even knew guys like him existed, let alone what they were doing. Smith didn't just like his privacy; he depended on it for his survival.

And there she was, year after year, splashed all over the front page and the society page.

“So what did you do after leaving the Kardon County Human Services Foundation?” Honey's résumé, if it could be called a résumé, dead-ended after the Shakespeare arrest. She'd disappeared from everything except the society pages.

“I moved on to other things, some new interests.” Which was no answer.

“But kept the same boyfriend all these years?”

Okay, so that didn't sound particularly professional, but too bad; given their personal history, he was curious.

More than curious.

“Boyfriend?” One perfectly arched eyebrow lifted a fraction of an inch.

“The underwear model,” Smith said, getting to the heart of the other two thirds of the article. The
Ocean
writer had all but swooned on the page over the guy and packed the interview with all the juicy details.

Juicy.

Details.