Breaking Loose Read online

  He handed her the water bottle, and after a second, she took it and took a swallow.

  “Cripes,” she said softly, letting her gaze drop to her lap. After a long moment, her hand came up to cover her face, and for the space of a breath or two, she sat very still-except for the trembling she didn’t quite have under control. “I thought you were going back to the gallery. What are you doing here?”

  “I got worried.”

  “That I’d run off with the Sphinx and aced you out?” She looked up at him from over the top of her fingers.

  “No, just about you…in general.” Honesty wasn’t always his strong suit, but she’d just gotten it. Funny how that wasn’t making her look any happier. He understood, though. The truth wasn’t making him any damn happier either.

  “Where’s your car?” she said. “I’ll drop you off.”

  “No.” That wasn’t the way it was going to work. “We’re going to tail Ponce, see where he ends up, then I’m going to stash you back at the Posada and go get the Sphinx.”

  She made a short, dismissive sound that clearly said he was living in a dreamworld.

  He didn’t think so, not on his worst day.

  “You are not in charge here, Killian.”

  And they were back to “Killian.”

  “Yes, I am,” he said. “Ruiz was blasted to hell in your hotel room. That makes me in charge of everything and most especially of you, Ms. Toussi.”

  He was good at being in charge, and if she would just let him do what he was good at, she could save herself a lot of problems.

  But count on a woman not to be all that interested in the “problem-solving” business.

  “I don’t know what you think you need the Memphis Sphinx for-money, personal glory, or-”

  “No,” he said, cutting her off. “None of those.”

  “Then what?”

  To save the free world, he could have told her, if he could have figured out a way to say it without sounding delusional. That was the job he’d contracted for with Colonel Hanson this time, the same kind of job he always did for the man, the same kind he’d done when they’d both been in Special Forces. When Dax had realized what Erich Warner was putting on the block in exchange for an occult artifact, he’d known exactly where to go for backup, exactly where the information would do the most good.

  “I have my reasons” was all he was able to offer, and that didn’t get him very far.

  “Reasons?” One of her eyebrows lifted, and she gave him a considering look. “Right, well, you’ll have to get in line with your reasons…preferably behind me and my reasons.” She sounded pretty sure of herself for someone who looked frazzled right down to her synapses.

  Yeah, she was scared, all right. She was sweating with being scared, but she wasn’t scared enough to get out of the game-and she should be. She should be begging him for his help. At the very least, she should be running hell-bent for leather for the airport. An art dealer picking up an ancient artifact for a buyer, even a wealthy, influential buyer like Senator Leonard, would not be sticking it out, no way, not after somebody had massacred their connection. She was up to something else, which meant she’d flat-out lied to him about what she was doing in Paraguay. He was impressed. He never told people his business either.

  He shifted his attention back to the passenger side mirror. “Okay. They’re pulling out behind us.” He twisted around and looked out the rear window. “And… they’re…heading out of the lot. When I get out, you scoot over.”

  “No,” she said, giving her head another shake.

  No?

  She was, he decided, a real piece of work. He had to admire her grit, but he wasn’t going to let it get her killed.

  “We’re going after Ponce together now,” he said clearly. “Up until the hard part, and I’ll do that alone.”

  “Just because we know each other, and have some mutual friends, doesn’t mean-”

  “Yes, it does.” And it did.

  She let out another exasperated sigh and swore under her breath, way under, but he heard her. Then she dropped her head down onto the steering wheel, burying it in the crook of her arms, and after a moment, mumbled something.

  “Excuse me?” He thought he’d heard what she said, but he didn’t want there to be any doubts, not about this.

  “We don’t need to bother going after Ponce,” she spoke up a little louder.

  “It’s no bother.” Really. Getting the Sphinx was pretty much his whole reason for being in Paraguay.

  She gave her head a little shake.

  “Ponce doesn’t have the Memphis Sphinx,” she said. “Ruiz was selling me a plaster and resin knockoff.”

  Aha, and ah, hell, he thought, wincing. That was rough. The guy had been killed for a hunk of plaster-and he had to wonder, really, how long she would have kept that from him.

  Damn.

  “So where’s the real statue?”

  From where she was draped over the steering wheel, she rolled her head to one side and caught his gaze.

  Yeah, he understood. If he’d known, he’d be there, too, but he didn’t, and she didn’t, and that only left one place to go.

  “Beranger’s,” he said.

  She nodded and slipped her sunglasses out of her shirt pocket and back on her face.

  “Beranger’s.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Oye, listillo.” The words, softly drawled by a sloe-eyed beauty in a red tank top and a miniskirt so small he could have used it for a glove, brought half a grin to Conroy Farrel’s face. Hey, slick.

  Yeah, he was slick all right. Slick enough to get what he’d come for, slick enough to win this game-the way he always won.

  Always.

  He tossed a blue pill into his mouth and kept walking, carrying his breakdown rifle case and watching the traffic, watching the people, watching the corners of the buildings, watching the windows, watching the rooflines. He always watched. He couldn’t not be aware… so intensely aware of everything. He did it instinctively, viscerally.

  He was always watching for someone, and guaranteed, someone was always watching for him.

  In any city, anywhere in the world, there’d be some guy with his picture taped to their dash, someone with his photograph paper-clipped to the top of their “retirement” list, someone with a deep-six computer file for Conroy Farrel, and a whole helluva lot of those guys would be working for a clandestine group of operators buried deep in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America, a private army to the spymaster who ran it. They’d been Con’s homeboys.

  Ex-homeboys now.

  They wanted him dead so badly.

  But the guys they’d sent after him had all gone down, leaving him up by four. Hell, you’d think they’d learn. They knew what he was, the assholes.

  “Hey, gringo,” the next whore said hello. “Adónde vas?”

  Where was he going? A good question, with one good answer-Home, sweetheart, he was always going home.

  He’d been traveling these last few months, chasing his nightmares the way other people chased their dreams, and lo and behold, his nightmares had brought him here.

  Night was coming on, and the girls and the trash were coming out on the streets of Ciudad del Este. The town was full of movers and shakers and big bad ball breakers. Remy Beranger must have known it, and he should have known better than to let himself get killed.

  “Jeemee,” the next girl said with a short laugh, standing hipshot next to a blue door. “Jeemee Hendrix.”

  “Sí, cariño.” He smiled back. Yeah, darlin’-that was the voodoo child on his T-shirt.

  And he kept walking. He’d spent over an hour at Beranger’s, almost two, trying to find the Memphis Sphinx, before he’d finally located the prize inside a well-hidden wooden crate. The lading document he’d found in Remy’s pocket had been a fake, but he hadn’t needed a lading document. He knew who had sent Beranger the Sphinx, and he knew why-bait.

  To catch him.


  The last of his grin faded.

  It was no accident that the Memphis Sphinx had ended up in his backyard. He’d returned to Paraguay four years ago and made Ciudad del Este his home base, and without a doubt, the statue had been deliberately placed here by a knowing hand-a hand compelled by hope, by the hope that it could reach across the waters and the continents and close so very tightly around his throat, tighter and tighter, holding him down and letting him thrash and convulse, to hold him hard to the ground and strangle him, breath by missing breath, until he was dead.

  Fat fucking chance. In this game, the spymaster had bet on the wrong boy.

  But the bait was good-the Memphis Sphinx to lure Erich Warner to Ciudad del Este, and Erich Warner to lure Conroy Farrel back to his Paraguayan lair. Talk about chumming the waters. It all worked for Con, even with the rest of the high-class riffraff coming out of the woodwork for a chance at the ancient statue. Levi Asher, the fat man in the blue suit, and Suzanna Toussi, the auburn-haired woman, were definitely people of interest. He needed to find out about them. And the guy from the Mercado who’d gone in the back, off the second floor, and hauled her over to the Posada Plaza? The man Con had grabbed inside the gallery hadn’t known his name, but the Mercado guy was no street gangster. That guy had been trained to the breaking point. It showed in every move he made. It made him worth watching. But all any of them were ever going to find at the Old Gallery was the crate.

  For what they really wanted, they were going to have to come to him now. He could feel the weight of the statue in the backpack hanging from his right shoulder, all four thousand years of it, and beneath his green shirt, he could feel his.45 on one side, and on the other the long, battery-packed composite barrel of his TacVector, ten pounds of Molecular Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, a maser, a virtual death ray he kept locked on stun, unless he needed it locked into “fry mofo” mode.

  In most cases, if he wanted somebody dead, the.45 more than sufficed.

  Immortality.

  People needed to be more careful with what they wished for, not that he thought anybody was going to get immortality off a hunk of granite and gold with quartz-crystal eyes. No, that’s not the way it worked. Immortality, or damn close to it, came in a syringe these days, a lot of syringes and a pile of pretty pills, and nobody with half a goddamn brain would have asked for it, let alone chased it halfway around the world to Ciudad del Este.

  Except for Erich Warner, who’d seen the syringe method up close and personal and had decided to bet his everlasting ass on the occult.

  Con wished him good luck with that, the best, and given that he hadn’t gotten a shot at the bastard this afternoon, he was going to go all out to make sure Herr Warner had a chance to bask in the moonlit glow of the Sphinx’s rock-crystal eyes tomorrow night. The German needed protection, desperately, hopelessly, but Warner was looking for it in all the wrong places, and frankly, there were no right places. Nothing could protect him from Con, not the German’s whore, no matter how many knives she was wielding or pills she was popping, and not an Egyptian Middle Kingdom statue with a reputation. Quite the opposite. With the Memphis Sphinx baiting Con’s trap, Erich Warner was a shoo-in for catch of the day.

  “Hola, chico,” the next girl in front of the Colony Club said. “Qué sucede?” What’s up?

  Con smiled and shook his head. There was nothing about a fourteen-year-old whore in a Little Mermaid T-shirt and too much lipstick that did anything but make him move on.

  People thought Ciudad del Este was such a hole-and they were right. But he’d seen worse places. He’d been in worse places, inside and out, and he could thank his enemies for that.

  No shortages in that category, including the very cagey bastard in Washington, D.C., who’d sent the Sphinx to Beranger. Without a doubt, he’d stolen it from the Defense Intelligence Agency, because that’s where it had been for the last decade or two, a very ballsy move. Con had seen it there, and he was impressed, though he knew damn well that the spymaster wouldn’t have done it himself. The guy had a legion of pawns to do his bidding, some with that pitch-black CIA group out to kill Con this year, and last year, and next year, if he didn’t get to them first, and other guys with another acronymed group out of the Department of Defense.

  Hell, Con had been one of those pawns once, along with a lot of other good men…good men who…

  Yeah, good men who-that was as far as that thought ever went. He had a lot of thoughts like that, the kind that only went so far and never reached any sort of satisfactory conclusion. He’d learned to let them go, and like everything else, he’d learned it the hard way. It could be his middle name-Conroy Hard Way Farrel.

  Lucky for him, most of his thoughts went the distance these days. Yeah, he was a lucky boy, especially this week. He had the Sphinx-which he knew played precisely into the spymaster’s grasping hand, to get him out of the shadows and into the open.

  Girl Scout at two o’clock, holding up a BMW, all long legs, slim hips, and a serious green-eyed gaze.

  “Con.” The girl pushed off the Beemer she’d been leaning against and fell in beside him.

  “Scout.”

  “You get him?” Her whole life was wound up in those three words, but she didn’t let it show. The question was casual, tossed off.

  “He didn’t come to the gallery.”

  She nodded once, not letting her disappointment show either, and that was just like his girl.

  “What about the Sphinx?” she asked, easily keeping up with him, matching him stride for stride in a pair of camouflage BDUs and a white T-shirt.

  “Got it,” he said.

  She smiled at his news, a bright, wide grin that always did his heart good. The girl didn’t have enough of those.

  “So what do we do now?” she asked.

  “Does Miller have anything for us yet?” Miller was a guy in Nevada, a wounded vet with spooky computer skills. He could not only hack, he could chop, slice, dice, and, when needed, puree databases, all kinds of databases. Four months ago, when word of the Sphinx had first started hitting the streets, Con had tagged him to find and follow Warner’s private jet, to get locations and flight plans.

  Scout checked her watch. “Last time I talked to him, he said to give him another hour, and we’re close to that now.” She pulled a phone out of a cargo pocket on her pants and speed-dialed a number.

  The girl was twenty-two, lanky, brilliant, and tough enough, with café-au-lait skin and a head full of wild dark curls that nothing could tame.

  “Scout,” she said, after a few moments. “You know what I need… Yes… Yes… Good… Yes. I’ll get back to you on that.” She hung up and met his gaze. “Miller’s got a lock on Warner’s location.”

  “Where?”

  “Just about where you said he’d be, within a couple of hours’ range-São Paulo, Brazil.”

  For a second, Con had to work to contain the sharp thrill that ran through him. The monster was close-but not close enough, and there was no victory until Warner was dead.

  “Then he had somebody at Beranger’s,” he said, handing her his camera from out of his pocket. “Send the last group of photos to Miller along with these names-Levi Asher, the fat man in the blue suit; Suzanna Toussi is the woman; and I’ve got one unknown, one other guy in the photos. Tell Miller we’ll get him a name, and tell him we want dossiers, as much intel as he can find.”

  “On it,” she said, taking the camera and fishing a small cord out of her back pocket.

  “Call Jo-Jo, have him find out what he can about every gringo staying at the Posada Plaza-one of them will be our guy-and find out where Asher and Toussi are staying. Those two flew in from somewhere. I want to get to them before they fly back out.”

  “De acuerdo.” Okay. She speed-dialed another number. “Jo-Jo, it’s Scout. I need you on the horn. Two norteamericanos looking to buy some stolen art arrived in the city sometime in the last couple of days, four days at the most, Levi Asher and Suzanna Toussi… Yeah
, Toussi. I need to know where they’re staying and-”

  “Tell Jo-Jo the woman arrived at Beranger’s with Jimmy Ruiz,” Con interrupted.

  Scout nodded.

  “The woman was with Jimmy Ruiz today, this afternoon… Yeah, that Ruiz, and…Yeah…You sure?” She shot him a worried look. “Jesus… Sure, sure. I’ll send you photos. Tell all your guys to be on the lookout-and Jo-Jo… yeah…I need the names and 411 on all the gringos staying at the Posada… Yeah.”

  “What?” he asked, when she ended the call.

  “Ruiz,” she said, using the cord to connect her phone to his camera. “He’s dead. Multiple gunshot wounds in a suite at the Gran Chaco. The room was registered to a Suzanna Royal.”

  Shit.

  “This is getting interesting, Con,” she said.

  Oh, hell yeah.

  “Where’s the woman now?”

  “Not at the Gran Chaco, but the cops are there and asking the same question.” With half a dozen keystrokes, she started downloading the photos and sending them to Miller and Jo-Jo.

  “Have Jo-Jo check the Posada for her. If she’s there, or shows up anywhere on his radar, tell him to put somebody on her and to call inmediatamente.”

  “Roger that.” She watched the screen on her phone, and after a couple of seconds passed, she hit a few more keys. “Miller said the information cost him double the usual price, and he wants three times the agreed-upon amount.”

  Two times the cost meant three times the price? Sure, that made sense.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “I think his girlfriend is pregnant again and-”

  “And that makes what, four? Five kids?” he interrupted.

  “Five, and Paul Detty that jerk, screwed him on his last deal, and I think we could buy a lot of Miller’s loyalty right now for just a few more dollars.”

  Con thought it over for a second, but no longer. It was that kind of game, and Miller actually had quite a bit of loyalty that could be bought for not very damn much cash, and Scout wasn’t really asking. She knew the score on all their deals, sometimes better than he did, especially with the stringers, and she had a soft spot for Miller’s brood of sniveling brats.