Loose Ends Page 11

  With luck, Dylan would have him pulled back out, but deep down in his heart, where the truth mattered, he didn’t really think this was one of Sam Walls’s lucky days.

  “How many missions have you been on for Lancaster?”

  “Fuck you.” Succinct, but not brilliant.

  “How long can you hold your breath?”

  “Longer than you think.”

  “Have you ever been to Coveñas, Colombia?”

  “You don’t know shit about where I’ve been.”

  Torture was an ugly word and even uglier in practice. Dylan knew. He’d been tortured. In some ways, it made him more sympathetic to Walls’s situation, but in most ways, it didn’t, especially when he needed real answers and not misplaced bravado and insults.

  “You may turn out to be a lucky guy, after all, Sam,” he said. “I’m going to give you one more chance before I get serious.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small stainless steel case. The sequence of impending events was very clear in his mind. Yes, he remembered exactly how Souk had tortured him: first by injecting the drugs, an agonizing procedure, and second by half drowning him. The combination had been specifically calibrated to intensify the primordial terror of the hallucinations associated with Souk’s chemical concoctions. It was as close to death, or praying for death, as Dylan had ever been.

  Sam Walls didn’t look impressed with the small stainless steel case.

  But Dylan hadn’t opened it yet.

  “After I show you what’s in here, I’m going to ask my questions again, and if I don’t get your best answers, your very best, Sam, I’m going to … well, you’ll understand everything in a minute.”

  “You have no idea what you’re dealing with,” Walls said.

  “Maybe not,” Dylan agreed. “But then again, maybe I do.”

  He opened the case and showed Sam Walls the beautiful array of colorful Syrettes inside, each one safely nested in a square of foam rubber. He literally had a rainbow of the drugs, the whole spectrum compliments of Dr. William F. Brandt’s research lab at Walter Reed Medical Center.

  “Have you ever heard of a Thai syringe?” he asked.

  And by the blood-draining look of horror on Sam’s face, Dylan knew that he had.

  Poor bastard.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “I really should stay with the car,” Jane said, because “stay with the car” was a helluva lot easier for her to say than “stay with you.”

  He let his gaze drift over her, shaking his head, like he couldn’t believe what she’d decided, then went back to watching the street.

  She let out a short breath and tried to look like she knew what she was doing.

  “Your name isn’t Con,” she said, because, by God, she did know that.

  “That’s not exactly a news flash, honey.” He slanted her a long gaze from over on his side of the car.

  “So you know you have amnesia?”

  A short laugh escaped him. “Yeah, I figured it out pretty quick the day I woke up strapped to a gurney and couldn’t remember my own name.”

  Oh, God, she’d been right about the amnesia, and that meant the odds were good she was right about the torture.

  Oh, geezus. He’d woken up strapped to a gurney. Oh, God.

  “We should … I mean, I need to … no. No, what you need to know is that these guys chasing us are your friends.” That’s what she meant to say. “The best friends you’ll ever have. They can help you. We should go back to the garage right now. You’ll be safe there.”

  “I’m safe now,” he said, his voice so cool and steady.

  Of course he was. What was she thinking?

  “These boys are going to try to run me to ground,” he continued. “And I’m not going to let them do that, whatever it takes. Do you understand?”

  She nodded. “Whatever it takes.” Whatever the hell that meant. “Maybe you should let me drive.”

  The grin he flashed her was brief and devastating, a crooked curve of boyish dimples and white teeth that erased the years and the scars and made him what he once had been.

  He shrugged out of his jacket, and her gaze dropped lower, to his chest. He was wearing a black Jimi Hendrix T-shirt with the words “Voodoo Child” across the middle, below the drawing of Hendrix.

  Voodoo child for sure, she thought, witchy and wild, popping his pills and Corinna’s clutch, dark and dangerous and beautiful, and lost to himself. So lost.

  “You got your seat belt cinched real tight?” He finished pulling off the jacket and laid it next to him on the console.

  Yeah, tight. She gave the belt another tug and wondered if it was time to start with the Hail Marys: Hail, Mary, full of grace …

  Oh, sweet Jesus—she glanced over at him.

  Talk about tight. The Jimi Hendrix T-shirt defined the word, and the word defined everything about his arms from the breadth of his shoulders, to the hard, sculpted fullness of his biceps and the confluence of veins running under his skin down the inside of his forearms. He had no tattoos, only the fine, incised tracks of his scars.

  With her gaze riveted to him, to the hard line of his jaw and the straight line of his nose, to the softness of his cotton T-shirt and the even softer worn denim of his jeans, she tightened her hold on her zebra purse.

  Touching him was not a good idea. She’d remembered it too many times for her own good, what it was like to wrap her arms around him, to be held by him, how he’d tasted when they’d kissed, how he’d felt inside her, the aching loss of it all when he’d left—and then he’d up and died, and she’d been forced to put her childish dreams away.

  But here they were, despite death and everything, sitting in a car.

  If this was fate, she was buying.

  Yes, she was starting to see the bright side to the day. Her ears had stopped ringing, her nerves had calmed, and two of the greatest guys in the world were ready to do God only knew what to them the instant they moved off this corner at 30th and Vallejo.

  What were Creed and Hawkins thinking? she wondered.

  Then she knew. The sound of another set of perfectly tuned headers rumbled into earshot before Coralie made her appearance at the intersection with the rest of them. Now the board was set, but for what?

  “Okay, time to get out of here,” J.T. said, looking over at her with his oh-so-calm gaze. “Last chance, Jane. You in or out?”

  “In,” she said without hesitation, whatever “in” turned out to be.

  He stretched his hand out to grasp the back of her seat and shifted around so he could look over his shoulder, out the rear windshield.

  “The, uh, next run is going to be in reverse?” Maybe she needed to rethink her decision.

  “Only the first stretch. Then we’re sliding off the map, and these guys can spend the rest of the night chasing each other.”

  He seemed awfully sure of himself for somebody who didn’t know Denver was his hometown, and what the hell did “sliding off the map” mean? It sounded like something she should know about—like something she was going to find out about the hard way, unless she bailed on him, and she wasn’t bailing. She couldn’t bear the thought of watching him disappear and wondering if she’d ever see him again—because, baby, that seemed like a real damn long shot.

  “Still in?” he asked, slanting his gaze back to her and gunning the motor.

  Oh, geezus.

  She gave a short, quick nod, and he pressed down hard on the gas. The engine roared. The tires smoked, and when he checked through the rear window and released the clutch, Corinna took off like a shot, wheels rolling, headers growling. It was all flash. It was shock and awe, a rocket launch backward, crossing lines of traffic. It was a neighborhood in reverse. Some people honked, most slammed on their brakes, snarling the traffic and turning it into a maze for the Steele Street crew to navigate—and through it all she held on.

  He made his first turn while still in reverse, with an instant 180-degree pivot of the car’s front end
around the brake-locked rear wheels, swinging them into forward motion and pressing her back into her seat with pure heart-pounding g-forces. Then he started up through the gears. The second turn was into a frighteningly narrow alley. She gripped the armrest on the door, her knuckles growing whiter with each passing second.

  They weren’t sliding off anything. Oh, hell, no. They were flying, nearly airborne on the turns.

  They whipped past trash cans, dumpsters, and through a section where lines full of clothes flapped and billowed in the breeze behind chain-link fences, where people were out in their backyards, watching in consternation and flashes of horror as Corinna flew down the small, rutted road.

  This was a car crash waiting to happen. She knew it down to her belly.

  The next turn had her pressed up against the door, a hard, chassis-rocking left back onto pavement. Fifty yards later, he downshifted, double-clutching into a hard right, and they tore down another alley just like the last one. He might not know who he was, but he sure as hell knew this part of town, and he sure as hell knew how to drive.

  Up ahead, she could see the parking lot of an industrial site, a conglomeration of big, rattletrap-looking, multistory metal buildings all crammed together, and she knew, if they could just get to the parking lot without hitting a dumpster, or somebody’s garbage can, or, heaven forbid, somebody, they’d be okay.

  She was wrong.

  Corinna caught some air launching off the slightly higher dirt alley onto the asphalt of the parking lot, and while Jane was literally absorbing that bit of automotive rock and roll, Con accelerated around the corner of the first abandoned building and cut a sharp left, then a sharp right into a U-shape recess. A dark, empty space in the far wall loomed up in front of them, and he headed straight for it, double-clutching his downshifts again, smoothly and quickly easing back on the speed, but not nearly enough.

  Oh, no, not even close.

  The building came rushing at them, the empty space in the wall looming closer. They roared past the words TATSUNAKA PRODUCE painted in large, fading letters above the loading docks. Ahead of them, on either side of the opening, large, metal sliding doors were hanging off their tracks, looking like the open maw of a car-crushing, street rat–eating shark monster.

  Holy cripes. Holy, holy … She sucked in a breath and held it. Holy, oh, hail, Mary, full of grace. Holy, oh, holy, holy…

  They passed through the door into darkness.

  Mary, Mary, Mary, Mother of God, O Mary, pray for us sinners.

  He finally hit the brakes, really hit the brakes, and Corinna’s front end slanted down steep-steeper-steepest with Jane backpedaling like crazy, virtually crawling backward over the top of her seat, until a strong arm came across the interior of the car and held her in place.

  “You’re fine” were the last words she heard before she and the amnesiac and the rocket-hot GTO fell into an inky black abyss.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “Alpha One, come in,” Jack said, trying to raise Con for about the tenth time, and failing again. Hell. “Alpha One, come in. We’ve got a bearcat on the loose.”

  This was no good. He and Scout were parked in a restaurant parking lot not too far from Coors Field, Denver’s baseball stadium, and not too far from Steele Street, still in lower downtown.

  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 cho
pped 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.