Breaking Loose Read online

  Breaking Loose

  Tara Janzen

  SIN AND DANGER COLLIDE WHEN THE WORLD'S HOTTEST SECRET AGENTS COMPETE FOR THE PRIZE EVERYONE'S LUSTING AFTER…

  No one's ever seen it. Everybody wants it. That's why the government has just unleashed its secret weapon. Drop-dead-gorgeous art dealer Suzi Toussi has been tapped for the toughest mission of her career: to locate the Memphis Sphinx, an ancient artifact rumored to possess otherworldly powers. Tracking it to Paraguay means going up against Dax Killian, the sexy special ops agent who's planning to snatch the coveted relic right out of her hot little hands. If he can find it first.

  Dax first spotted her outside a seedy bar – in three-inch heels and a too-tight dress. He'd know those curves anywhere. But what was Suzi doing in a hellhole like Ciudad del Este? Dax knows the answer: the Sphinx. Suddenly the game is on – and only one of them will walk away with the prize. With the Sphinx surfacing and passion taking Suzi and Dax under, they're headed for a showdown that could reveal the secrets of the ages.or expose them to the hottest danger of all.

  Tara Janzen

  Breaking Loose

  The fourth book in the Steele Street – Loose series, 2009

  PROLOGUE

  Marsh Annex, Washington, D.C. -Friday afternoon

  Elegant.

  The woman sitting across from General Richard “Buck” Grant in his office absolutely, positively owned the word-lock, stock, and barrel.

  It was impossible for a guy to keep his eyes off her, so Buck didn’t even try. What he did do, what he always did, was try not to let his gaze drop below her chin. If she was fascinatingly beautiful from the neck up-and she was-then she was nothing but trouble with a capital “T” from the neck down.

  Dangerous, dangerous territory-he let the thought cross his mind with just the slightest downward glance.

  Hot damn.

  She did it on purpose-a hint of cleavage, the curves of her magnificent breasts always draped in some kind of soft material, her clothing perfectly fitted to a waist he knew he could nearly span with his hands. Any further than that, he never went, not unless she was walking away from him. The last thing he could afford, under any circumstances, was to get mired in the fantasyland of Suzi Toussi’s hips. She was just too damned important, his secret weapon.

  “Stargate?” she said, repeating the word he’d dropped between them like a small atom bomb. “Sure, Buck. I remember Stargate, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s experiments in remote viewing, the psychic spies, the ones trying to gather intelligence using ESP.”

  She, at least, could say it with a straight face. That was the great thing about Suzi, her smooth coolness. She was always gracious, always unfazed, always somewhat imperious.

  Okay-he paused and backed up to his last thought-she was always damned imperious. She knew the effect she had on men-which was the point, one of the reasons Christian Hawkins had recruited her five years ago to do a piece of contract work in Eastern Europe for Special Defense Force, SDF, Buck’s unit of black-ops shadow warriors based in Denver. She’d done good, damn good, so he’d used her again and again, until one day she’d turned the tables on him and started using him.

  Smart girl like her, he should have seen it coming. No complaints, though. She was a topflight paid asset, his sleeper, and the tasking that had landed on his desk last night had been tailor-made for her. Personally, he thought the whole Stargate thing was a holy crock of crap and a criminal waste of the American people’s tax dollars and the military’s budget, but nobody had asked him.

  Nobody ever asked him anything-except when it came to doing the deed. Then they asked plenty of him, and especially of his team. They asked for guts and gave no glory-and his operators wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  “The DIA initiated and performed another set of experiments associated with the Stargate program,” he said. “Moonrise, as they called it, is still classified.” And in his opinion, if Stargate had been a holy crock of crap, Moonrise had been an unholy crock.

  He picked a folder up off his desk and leaned forward, handing it over to her.

  “Moonrise dealt with the use of… special objects to achieve the same goals,” he said, knowing that wasn’t quite as descriptive as it might have been, but finding himself stumbling over the more accurate word. To his way of thinking, the words “military” and “magic” were diametrically opposed, nonexistent on the same plane, nonsensical to the point of absurdity. “To that end, the program had an inventory of these…uh, special objects, and one of them, in particular, has gone missing.”

  “Missing?”

  “Disappeared,” he clarified… sort of.

  “Stolen?”

  “Teleported.” He cleared his throat. “Officially.”

  Even the cool Ms. Toussi lifted an eyebrow at that-thank God. He’d known he could count on her.

  “Are you sure you don’t want Skeeter on this?” she asked. They all knew SDF’s blond bombshell, Skeeter Bang-Hart, had more…psychological empathy, Buck liked to call it, than the other operators.

  “No,” he said. “We have a line on it. Regardless of how it might have gotten there, telepathically or airfreight, two days ago the DIA intercepted some chatter that leads them to believe the object has surfaced in Paraguay.”

  Both of the lovely Ms. Toussi’s perfectly arched eyebrows rose this time. “It seems a lot of things are surfacing in Paraguay lately.”

  She shouldn’t know that.

  “Do I have a security breach at Steele Street you need to tell me about?” Steele Street, an alley in Denver’s lower downtown, was where the SDF team was housed in a state-of-the-art, steel-reinforced old brick building, along with every techno gadget and classic American muscle car known to man.

  “No.” She shook her head, sending a fall of richly auburn hair sliding over her shoulders. He shouldn’t have noticed, but he did. “Dylan had me do some legwork for him the last time I was in San Francisco. Contact some people, strictly off the books. Paraguay came up over lunch, very casual, that’s all. It’s in my report.”

  Strictly off the books.

  Right.

  Everything Suzi did for the team was strictly off the books. It was the reason he used her. No one on either side of the Potomac knew the drop-dead-gorgeous art dealer reported to him, or in the case of her lunch dates, apparently, to his second-in-command, Dylan Hart.

  Hell, he only knew the simplest, most basic, least damaging parameters of how Dylan was conducting SDF’s current top-priority mission, and that’s the way he needed to keep it. If Suzi had written a report to Dylan about some “casual” lunch in San Francisco where the word “ Paraguay ” had come up, it was the last damn thing he wanted to read. To the very best of his ability, he didn’t want to know Dylan had been going in and out of South America, and in and out of Paraguay in particular. Hawkins had been doing the same damn thing, and Buck didn’t want to know that either, and all he could hope was that one of them knew where in the hell Zach Prade was going in and out of-Buck sure as hell didn’t. And if anyone knew where Creed was, well, hell, Buck actually did want to know that. The jungle boy hadn’t shown up on SDF radar for three weeks, which was just about two weeks and six days too long in Buck’s book. Crap. What a way to be running a command. All he knew for sure was that everybody knew where in the hell he was, where in the hell he always was, next to the damn boiler room in the hell-and-gone Marsh Annex, and if anyone needed him, the codes were in place and the gloves would come off.

  The CIA had certainly known where to find him, and they’d known he had guys already in place in Paraguay, which told him plenty about whose hands were in this Moonrise-and-magic cow pie. He didn’t know why they’d sicced the DIA on his ass, when his team was cleaning up one of their
messes, a rogue agent the CIA had not been able to bring to heel, but he was sure they’d gotten something for the trade-and that would probably bite him in the ass, too. Both agencies would have been better off sending this mess somewhere else. Dylan and Hawkins were in too deep to break cover over a damn crystal ball or whatever the DIA thought their “teleported” knickknack was-but if Suzi could find it, his boys could snatch it, done deal, everybody happy. Of course, the whole damn request begged the question of why the Moonrise geeks didn’t just have their own psi guys “teleport” the damn thing back to their lab. Which, of course, was no question at all, not in Buck’s mind. Teleport, his ass. Somebody had plain old stolen Moonrise’s hocus-pocus doodad.

  “All I want you to do is go down there and verify the rumors,” he said, getting the conversation back on track. “If it pans out, and if you can locate the item, I’ll send in a team to retrieve it.”

  Tele-freaking-ported, geezus. What in the hell was this man’s army coming to, Buck wondered, when teleportation became an officially acceptable designation for theft? The quacks over at the DIA must have pulled strings from here to Langley and back to get this landed on his desk, because if there was one thing he’d learned in his fifty-four years, it was that things didn’t simply disappear-not without somebody’s hot little hands on them. If Suzi could find the object, Dylan and Hawkins would damn well find those hands. Then, whoever had screwed up over at the DIA would find themselves “teleported” into the psychic unemployment line.

  “I’ll do my best, Buck,” the beauty across from him said, turning her attention to the folder and opening it.

  One perfect auburn eyebrow arched again, and yeah, he understood. The DIA’s hootchie-kootchie was a weird-looking thing, spooky, and that from a guy who didn’t spook, easily or otherwise.

  “It’s called-” he started to say.

  “The Memphis Sphinx,” she finished for him, her voice slightly confused, her gaze fixed on the first-page photo. “What the hell, Buck. This is the Maned Sphinx of Sesostris III, Twelfth Dynasty, Middle Kingdom, supposedly found by Carter in the Valley of the Kings during the excavation of King Tutankhamen’s tomb, though some accounts have it recovered much earlier and from either Memphis or Tanis.” She lifted her gaze to meet his. “This is a photograph.”

  Obviously, he thought, and a damn fine one, full color, with good lighting to reveal every detail of the thing.

  “So you’re familiar with the object,” he said.

  “No,” she corrected him, shaking her head, her attention shifting back to the open folder, her brow furrowed. “I’m familiar with the rumor of the object, the myth of the object, and the stories, most notably of the Theban dynasty using it to expel the Hyksos from Egypt at the beginning of the New Kingdom, and the twelfth-century slave kings of Delhi subjugating the people of northwest India with its powers. In this century, it was supposedly in the hands of the Nazis, who apparently had quite a bit of trouble controlling the forces they unleashed, but this…this is a photograph of an actual statue, a sphinx of about the right size, five by five by seven inches, sculpted out of black granite with a gold death mask, a gold and lapis lazuli lion’s mane in place of a royal headdress, and clear crystalline quartz eyes, which fits every description I’ve ever come across of the Memphis Sphinx, and in my business, a person comes across quite a few. There are people who would kill for this thing, Buck.”

  There usually were in their business, but that was no reason to back off, ever. Suzi had been playing with the big boys since he’d first sent her into Eastern Europe.

  “So you’ve never actually seen it?” he asked.

  She gave him a brief glance before rising to her feet and moving a step closer to his desk.

  “No one has,” she said, leaning forward and holding the photograph under the desk lamp, letting the light fall on it. “Not ever, not publicly. It’s a legend, four thousand years’ worth of hearsay, a rumor, but a damned persistent rumor. No one has ever published a paper on it. It’s never been exhibited, or documented, or authenticated, or anything. The only proof of its existence was a drawing reportedly from Howard Carter’s notebook, along with a few notes on its supposed powers.” She turned the photograph this way and that under the light.

  “So maybe this one is a fake?” he suggested. And that would certainly solve his problem of finding it. He could just have the whole mess couriered back to the DIA. Except, of course, however unorthodox the mission felt to him, the DIA was a damned serious piece of business. If they wanted him to find the thing, it didn’t matter if the Sphinx was a fake or not. And honestly, if anyone could have come up with a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian statue with magical powers, it would have been the Defense Intelligence Agency of the United States of America.

  “I doubt if the folks over at the DIA would get this excited about a fake,” she said, echoing his sentiments. “But I’d have to see it to know. Check with some people, have them run some tests.” She bent further over the photograph, and Buck just completely ignored what that did to his view of her cleavage.

  Just completely ignored it.

  Completely.

  “Good Lord, Buck,” she murmured, her gaze going over the picture. “The Memphis Sphinx, the Maned Sphinx of Sesostris III.” She gave her head another small, disbelieving shake. “How long has our government had it?”

  “I don’t know, but they lost it four months ago, and they’re damned serious about getting it back.”

  She nodded. “I would be, too. This looks good. Real good. But I’d have to get my hands on it to know for sure.”

  “Your job isn’t to get your hands on it. If you can confirm the object’s location, your government will be grateful.”

  “To the tune of?” She glanced up from the photograph.

  “An all-expense-paid vacation to Paraguay.”

  “And?” she prompted.

  “You don’t do this work for the money any more than I do, Suzi.”

  “No,” she agreed. “But I still like to get paid, in cash, and the next time I need help with one of my Czech couriers, I’d like to know I can continue to count on you.”

  Her “couriers,” right. The girl was single-handedly moving art and women out of Eastern Europe at the rate of twelve paintings and six “couriers” in the last two years. The paintings were legitimate purchases and went on to galleries or private collections. The women were pure contraband, trafficked from the United States into prostitution, virtual slaves who’d been lucky enough to show up on Suzi’s radar. He never asked about her couriers, but he knew of at least one occasion where a girl had been returned to her family in South Carolina. Another girl, he knew, was working at the Toussi Gallery in Denver as an assistant, and he knew about Lily Anne Thompson, the girl who had not made it out of Ukraine three months ago.

  Papers were what Suzi usually wanted from him, and transportation, if something was available, along with the necessary documents to get her courier on whatever secure plane or truck he knew was moving through the right area at the right time.

  Fair enough.

  She needed to save somebody, to make up for someone she’d lost a long time ago, and she’d found a bottomless pit of girls in Eastern Europe who needed to be rescued. He wasn’t going to begrudge her, not when she did good work for him.

  “Ten thousand.”

  “Twenty,” she countered. “The Sphinx is worth millions, if it’s authentic. Twenty is a tenth of what I’d charge a private collector.”

  “Twelve. You don’t have to recover it, just find it.”

  “Fifteen. Paraguay, Buck. It’s dangerous down there.”

  “Fifteen,” he conceded.

  “Deal,” she said and smiled. “So, where exactly are you sending me? Asunción?”

  Asunción was the capital, a logical supposition, but no such luck.

  “Ciudad del Este.” City of the East-to the best of his ability, he said it without any inflection. Truth was, though, that particular name didn’t need
any inflection.

  Her smile faded, and for a long moment, she just looked at him.

  He understood, and for a moment of his own, he wondered if he was expecting too much this time.

  Drugs, guns, money laundering, rampant smuggling, and every form of vice and corruption in between-the City of the East seethed with them all. No street was safe. Millions of dollars of illegal trade took place in its markets and warehouses every day, billions of dollars a year. It was a haven for criminals, from street hustlers to cartel heavyweights. After World War II, Paraguay had granted sanctuary to the worst of the Nazi war criminals. These days, terrorists from Hezbollah to al-Qaeda had cells of true believers in the city.

  And he was sending Suzi Toussi into the middle of it, into one of the most depraved and violent cities in the world.

  “Twenty thousand, and that’s if I’m back in five days or less,” she said, when she finally spoke. “It’ll be a thousand a day every day longer that I’m there, and don’t even think about quibbling on the price. Ciudad del Este is a hellhole, and you know it.”

  Yes, he did, and he didn’t like it either, but it was what it was.

  “Twenty,” he agreed. “And you don’t have five days. The DIA needs their Sphinx secured by Sunday, which means our courier either needs to have it in a lockdown situation or be on a plane out of Paraguay with it in hand. Factor in a minimum of twelve hours for our team to recover the object, and it means you need to do your part in one day or less, preferably less, which means you leave tonight. I’ve got you booked on a seven-thirty flight out of Dulles.”

  “That’s pretty damn short notice, Buck, for me and your team. What’s the rush? Why Sunday?”

  It was a legitimate question, but the answer was definitely filed in Buck’s BS deck.

  “Things are lining up Sunday night, some planets and things, like meridian lines and the tides, and some…uh, energy planes, and the guys over at Moonrise want the Sphinx back to…uh, channel some kind of astral… uh, shield to…uh-oh, hell, Suzi, it’s all in the file. Read it on the plane.”