Breaking Loose Read online

  But he bore it, the way he’d borne the deed while it had been happening, bearing witness.

  “He’s dead, Dylan.” He shouldn’t have had to say it, and in no small way, he hated Dylan for making him voice the horror aloud. “He’s dead. He died on that cross, in the fucking jungle, crucified for reasons I’ll never understand.”

  He lived with brutality. He was more than capable of his own brutality-but watching the NRF crucify J.T. and cut him open had damn near broken his brain.

  Or maybe there was no “damn near” about it. He knew, no matter how he kept going, that he’d never been the same, that as J.T. had left his life and his blood and his screams on that cross in the jungle, Creed had left part of himself, the best part, in the blood and mud at J.T.’s feet. He knew his screams had echoed along with J.T.’s, and that they’d made no difference. None. He had not been able to save John Thomas Chronopolous.

  Yes, he’d been drugged, and sick, and beaten, and tortured, but he knew J.T. was dead. He knew what he’d seen, what he’d witnessed.

  “There are doubts,” Dylan said.

  No, there weren’t.

  He cut his gaze to Dylan’s and held it hard.

  He could take the boss. He knew it. Dylan knew it, too, and Creed wasn’t shy about letting it show in his eyes.

  “There’s a compound upriver, Costa del Rey” Dylan said, his voice strong and calm, his words clipped, delivering information in a steady stream-holding Creed to a line he couldn’t afford to cross, ever. “It’s isolated, at the end of a nearly impassable track, formidably protected. Seven months ago, the CIA got a team up there who sent back photographs. They haven’t been heard from since.”

  Half a dozen heartbeats passed during Dylan’s news flash-but Creed hadn’t moved, not so much as a muscle.

  He was looking at the boss, but he could see the folder lying under Dylan’s right hand. The seals on the folder had been broken, telling him the boss had seen the contents, probably Hawkins, too.

  “I’m not going to tell you what’s in here,” Dylan said, sliding the folder across the table. “But I want you to tell me what you see.”

  Easy enough.

  He didn’t hesitate to reach for the folder, to take control of it, he didn’t dare. It looked like a viper coming toward him across the table, sliding, coiling, ready, and bottom line, he wasn’t going to be beaten by a goddamn folder full of photographs.

  Dylan removed his hand, and Creed flipped to the first picture.

  It was enough.

  Just the one.

  He knew what Dylan wanted, what the boss expected, what the job took, and he gave it to him-endurance. Second by second, moment by moment, he gave the photograph his undivided attention, scanning it from top to bottom, cataloguing the face, and with the utmost deliberation he kept his hands loose, his left palm resting lightly on the folder’s cover, his right resting equally lightly on his thigh.

  There was no one in this room to blame for what he was seeing.

  There was no one to fight.

  There was no motherfucking explanation for the photograph on the table, a photograph taken seven months ago.

  “Grant tagged us for an assassination six months ago,” Dylan said. “This man is our target, a rogue CIA agent they think is holed up at Costa del Rey Hawkins and I believe the same thing. We’ve been on this guy’s trail for six months, and he’s finally come home to roost. His name is Conroy Farrel.”

  No, it wasn’t, and Dylan knew it as well as Creed did.

  Nobody was named Conroy Farrel.

  The name and the identity had been one of J.T.’s covers, and this man looked exactly like him-except J.T was dead.

  Goddamn CIA. What the fuck had they done?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Ciudad del Este

  Dax stood in the front door of the Old Gallery, holding it open, looking in, but not crossing the threshold.

  Geezus. The place was a wreck, but that’s not what held him where he stood.

  Something had happened here, something beyond the obvious destruction. The police had done a number on the place, broken just about every damn thing Dax could see, and that was no shakedown. That was violence of a different character. He could smell it. Nothing moved in the shadows of the main gallery. Dust motes drifted, but there was no sign of life in the room-only the scent of death rising to taint the air, familiar and unmistakable.

  The unfamiliar was harder to catalogue, being no more than a faint, oddly electrical quality in the atmosphere, the aftermath of some kind of disturbance, but he didn’t know what.

  Well, hell. He drew his pistol and crossed into the gallery, keeping the gun at a low ready position, just in case there was another “unexplainable” disturbance in his immediate future.

  Step by step, he cleared the entrance and moved into the main room, into a deeper silence. It took his eyes a few moments to adjust to the low light, but when they did, he very quickly located the source of death.

  Remy Beranger, his small body crumpled on the floor in a pool of blood, the right side of his chest a ragged mess.

  Geezus, the cops had killed him.

  Pistol raised to the ready, Dax moved forward, but there was nothing, no threat and nobody else on the main floor of the gallery-only Beranger lying on a pile of rubber knives and Galeria Viejo T-shirts.

  Dax knelt by the body. He didn’t need to check. The guy was dead. No pulse. No life. Three shots-two in the chest, and one in the gut.

  Geezus. Beranger hadn’t been such a bad guy.

  Dax let out a breath and checked the gallery again, listening carefully, looking into corners. He didn’t mind being one-on-one with the dead, but to the best of his ability, he was never getting involved in anything that would require coming back to this hellhole called Ciudad del Este.

  Immortality, Christ. The damn Sphinx sure hadn’t granted Remy Beranger any immortality.

  He checked his watch. It had been twenty minutes since he’d put Suzi in the cab, and in another twenty-five to thirty, he could be at the Gran Chaco.

  But first he needed to search the gallery, and the best place to start was with the Frenchman, even if chances were that the Sphinx had been snatch-and-grabbed by somebody on their way out the door, maybe even one of the policemen. If he could confirm that the cops had taken it, maybe Colonel Hanson, the man he’d contracted with for this job, could bring some pressure to bear on the good people of Paraguay and get them to loan him the damn thing until he got the information on the sleeper cell in Texas out of Erich Warner. But unlikely. In Ciudad del Este, the terrorists were up on the cops about two to one any day of the week.

  So, hell.

  He finished searching Remy’s jacket pockets, coming up with a few scraps of paper, a couple of pens, a little cash. He kept the paper scraps, putting them in one of his cargo pockets, before moving on to Remy’s pants pockets. He hit pay dirt on the front right, a lading document from an import-export business in Virginia dated two weeks previous, addressed to Remy Beranger, Galeria Viejo, one item listed simply as Orthostat relief. Basalt. h. 20 cm.

  Right. It didn’t say Occult Statuette, Maned Sphinx of Sesostris III, a.k.a. Memphis Sphinx, grantor of everlasting life. Granite. h. 17.5 cm., but somehow it was close.

  Close enough.

  And coming out of Virginia, well, hell, that was damned curious.

  For whatever reason, and there were probably more than a few good ones, he flashed on Jimmy Ruiz hightailing it off the roof of the Old Gallery with that messenger bag slung over his shoulder just as all the commotion had started. Jimmy swinging back around to pick up his damn Land Cruiser. Jimmy Ruiz who had arrived with the lush and lovely Suzi Toussi and who was currently chasing the lovely Ms. Toussi back to her hotel.

  Yeah, there were a lot of coincidences in that little series of events.

  Hell, no wonder she’d been so quick to get out the door of the Posada Plaza and insisting that he not accompany her. While he was standing in the Old G
allery with a dead body, a curious-as-hell lading document, and his you-know-what in his hand, she was collecting her contraband and getting ready to go wheels-up back to the States and Senator Leonard. She was going for the win here. She was taking the Memphis Sphinx to Illinois.

  The hell she was.

  Dax left the gallery at a fast walk, and by the time he hit the alley, he’d busted into an easy run.

  Three or four minutes was all it took for him to be sliding in behind the wheel of his Jeep, firing her up, and leaning over to pop open the glove box. He needed two things to get onto the grounds of the heavily guarded Gran Chaco Hotel-a Cuban panatela, just because, and the press pass he never traveled without, from The Daily Inquirer.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  All Suzi wanted was to get the hell out of Ciudad del Este, but from what she was looking at, she wasn’t going to be getting what she wanted anytime soon.

  Jimmy Ruiz must think she was a total idiot.

  “Twelfth Dynasty, you say?” She looked up from the “Memphis Sphinx” he’d set on the coffee table in her suite, the one he’d taken out of a padded leather bag and carefully arranged next to a thick stack of papers he’d also taken out of the bag. For the record, he looked like hell, even more frazzled than when she’d last seen him at the gallery.

  For the record, she knew she didn’t look much better. She’d torn her skirt, lost a button off her jacket, and scratched her face, up high on her cheek, all while getting out of the gallery window. She’d also broken a nail and had barely had time to wash God knew what off her feet before Ruiz had come knocking on her door.

  “That must make it…how old?” she asked.

  Her beautiful peep-toe pumps, needless to say, had been ruined by their immersion in Paraguayan garbage. She’d lost her hat, and her hair had all but completely fallen out of her French twist.

  She felt absolutely straggly. Cripes.

  “Hundreds and hundreds of years old,” the young man said with amazingly misplaced confidence.

  Try four thousand years old, she thought, refraining from a weary sigh. She’d had a long day, coming off a long night and a long flight, and for a few brief moments, before Ruiz had unveiled his fake statue, she’d hoped her job here was done, and not only done, but done exceptionally well. She wouldn’t have simply located the darn Sphinx, she would have had it in hand, saving Dylan, and Hawkins, and any other wild boy down here running around Paraguay the trouble of stealing it, and from what Dylan had told her when he’d contacted her this morning, she knew there were a couple extra SDF boys in country and headed her way, maybe already in the city, and it was a good chance the two of them would be tagged for the snatch-if she could verify the Sphinx’s location.

  Which she had not done.

  Dammit.

  So much for her moment of mission glory. Ruiz’s fake had sealed her fate. She was doomed to at least one night in Ciudad del Este, and from what she’d seen so far, that was about as sketchy a situation as she’d ever encountered. She was damn glad to have a 9mm. Ruiz at least hadn’t let her down in that department.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, looking at the statue, and that was the truth. The artful amalgamation of plaster, composite something-or-another, paint, and plastic was very sleek, very well executed-except for the flat-out dead giveaway of the bottom of the statue. Anyone who turned it upside down was bound to notice the letters and numbers written in black marker on an unpainted patch of white plaster on the base. This one said GV 3/5, which she was sure meant that Galeria Viejo had ordered five of these babies made. She had to admit that the blue stamp of the Great Sphinx of Giza next to the numbers made the whole thing look very official-if four thousand years ago Sesostris III had commissioned a plaster sphinx.

  He had not.

  The legend of the Memphis Sphinx, and Howard Carter’s notes, distinctly described a granite statue.

  Granite. Not plaster.

  “You have the money?” Ruiz asked.

  God, he really did think she was an idiot.

  “Half a million American? Right?”

  “Así es. This is correct.”

  “It can be arranged.” Not that she was going to bother. “I’ll need a couple of days to authenticate the statue, and also a bank account for the deposit.”

  “No,” he said adamantly, shaking his head and leaning over to pick up the papers he’d laid on the table next to the Sphinx. “No. There is no time for waiting. The documents for the statue are all in order, and the money, it can be transferred through my cambista. Everything inmediatamente.“

  He handed the papers over with a small lift of his head, as if to say, Read them, read them now. This is all very perfect.

  She accepted the documents with a brief smile and quickly glanced through them, duly noting that they appeared very authentic, very official, complete with tea-stained edges and lots of rubber stampings in various colors of ink. He and Beranger must have been busy as a couple of beavers getting their scam together.

  And Ruiz’s plan with the cambista, well, that would definitely speed things up, to use the underworld freeway of cash transactions. Bags of cash given to a cambista entered the cambio pipeline in one country and, with a few phone calls, would be matched by the same amount of cash in another country, minus a sizable commission.

  “I don’t believe the congressman will be willing to deal with…” Hmmm, with a moment’s reflection, she revised her original thought of a bottom-feeding, scum-sucking, money-laundering lowlife to something with a bit more cachet. “With anyone who might be running afoul of the law. He wants the Sphinx, not a scandal.”

  She also didn’t know where in the world Ruiz thought a United States congressman would come up with half a million dollars in cash inmediatamente. That kind of money was always dirty.

  He looked at her with a dubious expression on his face, as if he couldn’t believe whom he’d been stuck with on this deal.

  She knew the feeling.

  “You do know that this statue is worthless after Sunday night?” he asked.

  Actually, the statue on the coffee table was worthless now, despite the little batch of provenance papers he’d given her, but she went ahead and nodded. “Yes, I understand that some people believe a certain alignment of cosmic forces on Sunday night can be channeled through the Sphinx.”

  “And you don’t believe?” For the first time since they’d met at lunch, he sounded impressed.

  “I believe in acquiring for my clients whatever they hire me to find, Señor Ruiz, and I let them believe whatever they want, as long as I get my cut of the deal.”

  He held her gaze for a long moment, and she could practically see the gears turning in his mind.

  “I have the same beliefs, Señora Royal,” he finally said. “And I have a lot of connections for finding these sorts of mystical objects.”

  She just bet he did-starting with Remy Beranger and whoever had manufactured the knock-off Sphinx sitting on her table.

  “What I no longer have is a partner with connections to buyers in the United States.”

  Well, that was damned interesting. General Grant hadn’t mentioned that the U.S. Treasury agent currently in custody for tax evasion and treason had also been hustling antiquities-talk about a mixed bag of felonies.

  “Perhaps if we can negotiate an…arrangement,” he concluded.

  An arrangement. Sure. She could do that, if it enabled her current mission to go forward to a satisfactory conclusion-which it just might. She sure as hell didn’t have the Memphis Sphinx yet, and all signs pointed to the real thing being in this damn town somewhere, despite the fake Ruiz had delivered.

  “An arrangement could be negotiated,” she said.

  “Then you should call your congressman. I can give you the name of someone he can deal with in Illinois, someone who can accept the cash. Chicago or Springfield, his choice.”

  She shouldn’t have been surprised. Given the size of the world’s black-market economy, which was huge
, every state in the Union was probably knee-deep in cambistas shoveling drug money in and out of the country, and her getting the name of one of them from Jimmy Ruiz was not such a bad idea. Half of what she always got for General Grant was somebody’s name, but Jimmy Ruiz getting any money simply wasn’t going to happen. She could make a phone call, though. She could always make a phone call.

  She walked over to the suite’s bar to get her cell phone out of her purse, when the room phone rang, its soft beep and discreet blinking giving her a moment’s pause.

  Present company excluded, to her knowledge, only four people knew where she was: whoever was manning the front desk at the Gran Chaco, General Grant and Dylan Hart, neither of whom would be calling her on the hotel phone, and the man who had put her in the cab in front of the Posada Plaza.

  Dammit.

  “Excuse me,” she said to Ruiz.

  Taking her purse with her, she walked past him and the Sphinx to take the call more privately in the suite’s bedroom. She closed the heavy doors behind her and threw the bolt before going over to the bedside table to answer the phone.

  “Yes?”

  “Señora Royal,” a softly spoken, very officious man said. “This is Rodrigo at the front desk. A reporter from The Daily Inquirer is here to interview you. Should I have the guards pass him through?”

  A discomfiting mix of curiosity and alarm held her firmly in place-a reporter? Here in Ciudad del Este? She couldn’t possibly have screwed up that badly.

  For one, she hadn’t had time to screw up that badly. She’d only left Washington late last night. She hadn’t even been gone twenty-four hours yet.

  “Oh…ah, yes, the interview, I’d almost forgotten,” she said, stalling for a moment, thinking. “Tell me, Rodrigo, what is the reporter’s name again?”

  “Danny Kane, señora. He said to remind you that the interview was arranged through a Señor Duffy in Denver, Colorado, the United States. The guards have him detained at the main gate. Should I have them pass him through?”

  Danny Kane, Dax Killian-the names were fairly obvious, and if they weren’t enough to clue her in, Duffy in Denver sealed the deal. Duffy’s had been the bar where she and Dax had almost had a date six months ago. So what in the world was he up to, and what did she want to do here? He’d been on his way to see Beranger, hoping to score the Memphis Sphinx, at the same time that she’d been zipping back to the Gran Chaco, hoping to score the same damn thing.