Cutting Loose Read online

  “To provide personal security for my sister.”

  That’s what Dylan had thought he’d heard, and nothing could have made less sense.

  “A PSD, a personal security detail, for Gillian?” For Red Dog?

  “Yes, sir.”

  Amazing. The kid was standing right next to her and must have noticed a few things, like she was ripped, armed, and had a natural low level of threat constantly emanating from her, a threat Dylan guaranteed she could deliver on. As under the radar as SDF kept, he knew people in their business were aware of his top-notch, first-class female sniper. Grant got enough requests for her services to keep her busy twenty-four/seven. Dylan made sure that didn’t happen. Despite her superior skills and lightning-quick mind, she had her weaknesses, and he took them very seriously, and very personally. He demanded she take downtime between missions, even on the short rotation he allowed, or he’d lose her. It was as simple as that.

  “And what makes you and General Grant think she needs a bodyguard?” He hadn’t made his report to Grant yet, and there was no way in hell for some kid working at the Commerce Department to have heard the information Dylan had been given two days ago in Japan. And yet Gabriel Shore had come halfway across the country in the middle of the night. Dylan didn’t know what could have spooked him, but he knew nothing spooked Buck Grant.

  “That information is classified, sir,” the kid said, “and you have a couple of women in the main office, one I don’t know, and one who is a reporter for The Washington Post.”

  Dylan leaned to one side, to see past the guy, and sure enough, Honey was still on the couch, reading the morning papers.

  “Honey,” he called out, and the small blonde looked up. “We’re open for business.”

  He didn’t need to say more. She immediately rose from the couch and headed for the elevator. Dylan could have told the young Mr. Shore that Honoria York had very recently returned from a mission for the State Department in El Salvador, carrying highly classified material, but like most things, those facts only concerned the people who were involved.

  “The woman at the communications console is one of SDF’s operators,” he said, referring to Skeeter. “She’s clear.”

  “Yes, sir, I recognized her. It’s the other one I don’t know. The one in the white dress.”

  That was Cherie, but Dylan couldn’t exactly see her anywhere.

  “I’ll vouch for her as well,” he assured the guy. “So tell me what brought you here.”

  In answer, the younger guy’s gaze shifted to his sister, his reluctance to speak almost palpable.

  Again, Dylan was amazed.

  “I don’t keep anything from her, Mr. Shore, ever.” It was another way he protected her.

  “Yes, sir, I understand,” the guy said, but he didn’t take his eyes off Gillian. If he was intimidated, he should have been. After another long second, he dropped his gaze and reached up to loosen his tie.

  Dylan watched, intrigued, as the guy unbuttoned his collar button and then pulled a lanyard out from under his shirt and slipped it off over the top of his head. A flash drive dangled from the other end, a very unusual-looking flash drive.

  “General Grant assured me that you had the appropriate hardware to download the files on this drive.”

  If he did, it was news to him. Shit.

  “Is there a reason Grant didn’t call and tell me about any of this?”

  “Given my connection to Gillian, and that I was the one who created the files, he thought it safer to send the information by courier under the guise of a family visit. No one will question my being here.”

  Except me, Dylan thought.

  “I thought you worked for the Commerce Department, Mr. Shore.” He didn’t bother to hide the deeper question implied in the statement.

  “Yes, sir, I do. But I’m in the Marsh Annex, where General Grant’s offices are, as you know.”

  Apparently, Dylan didn’t know jack.

  “And you’re here to protect Gillian?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “With that?” He pointed at the flash drive, a small, multiported polyhedron studded with half a dozen USB-style connectors in a configuration Dylan hadn’t seen anywhere, let alone in his own damn offices.

  “Yes, sir, and I…uh, I brought my gun.”

  “Gun?” Well, that unnerved Dylan a bit. Pencil pushers with guns were dangerous things. “Where is it?”

  In answer, Gabriel’s gaze slid to his sister—and thank God for that.

  “A .40 caliber Beretta,” she said. “I put it in the safe.”

  “Good.” Dylan was succinct. Visitors did not bring firearms into his building. “Now give me the short version of what’s on that drive, and we’ll see where we go from here.”

  The kid nodded. “A businessman under the scrutiny of the Commerce Department, Sir Arthur Kendryk, who is the head of Kendryk Worldwide Enterprises, has offered a two-million-dollar bounty to anyone who can bring him Gillian alive. I entered that piece of data into the files myself shortly after midnight last night.”

  Well, that was definitely to the point, and exactly what Dylan had been told in Tokyo two days ago, and exactly what he’d told Gillian. Apparently, word of the bounty was spreading fast.

  He glanced at his operator to get her reaction, and got just about what he would have guessed—a slight tightening of her mouth, a narrowing of her gaze, and a glint in her eye that said “Bring it on.”

  Fuck.

  He’d planned on talking to her today, obviously the sooner the better, and he was going to have to sit the Angel Boy down and read them both the riot act. The rest of the team was going to have to be alerted as well. A threat to one of them was a threat to all of them. They worked together. There were no Lone Rangers at SDF—except him. He was the boss. It set him apart.

  “How did you come across this information?” he asked, turning his attention back to Gabriel.

  “I’ve been investigating Kendryk for the last year, and have developed a few assets who specifically report to me on his actions. Combining their intelligence with the data I receive from my more general contacts at various places around the globe enables me to positively confirm certain facts.” The kid paused for a moment, and Dylan could almost feel the utter sincerity of his next statement building up inside him. Whatever came out of Gabriel Shore’s mouth next, he wanted to be believed.

  It was enough to unnerve Dylan all over again. He had never, not even at fifteen, been as young and earnest as the twenty-seven-year-old man in front of him—and he was not at all sure, even at the ripe old age of thirty-six, that he had the kind of contacts this kid was talking about.

  Multiple assets tracking Kendryk and reporting to him? Global contacts, again in the multiple numbers? Who was this guy? And how many pencils was he pushing just to keep up with all his informants?

  “Mr. Hart.” Here it came, the utterly sincere revelation. “I can one hundred percent guarantee the validity of my information on the bounty. He is after her. He is ruthless, and he will not stop until he gets her, whatever the cost.”

  He was right. Dylan’s informants in Japan had said exactly the same thing. But like the informants, Dylan knew Gabriel Shore had misinterpreted Kendryk’s intent. Lord Weymouth was ruthless, true, but it wasn’t murder he had in mind when it came to Gillian—quite the opposite.

  He swore silently to himself. Murder was exactly what Travis James, the Angel Boy, would have in mind when he heard about the bounty. In his mind, Kendryk had taken advantage of Gillian in a way no man who loved her could tolerate, and Travis loved her.

  Well, hell, this was a fine fucking tangle.

  “And you came to offer yourself as her bodyguard? To protect her from anyone out to collect the bounty?”

  “Yes, sir. I believe I’m the only one who can.”

  “Explain yourself.” The kid looked physically tougher than Dylan had expected, but nobody could look at Red Dog and think she couldn’t take care of herself. She
did it on a daily basis in places a helluva lot more dangerous than 738 Steele Street.

  “The only way to neutralize Kendryk is to kill him or isolate him,” Gabriel said.

  Those were terms Dylan understood.

  “An assassination is unlikely to be authorized in this instance, not without Kendryk posing a bigger, more violent threat to our national security, which I can assure you he is capable of doing. If it comes to that,” Gabriel continued, “if he allies himself more clearly with terrorist elements, if he sells nuclear technology to our enemies, which is the biggest threat he currently poses, the solution would, of course, come under your jurisdiction before it came under mine.” And that was a very unexpectedly calm and cool-headed summation of potential assassination from a pencil pusher. “Isolation, on the other hand, is something I believe I can create with the information I brought with me on the flash drive.”

  “How?”

  The younger guy cleared his throat. “Historically, there are three ways to isolate a despot, which for the sake of this argument is an appropriate description of Arthur Kendryk. Politically, financially, and physically. Financially, Kendryk has about ten percent of his working capital tied up in arbitrage right now. The current climate in currency is edging toward the kind of volatility that lends itself to unexpected outside influences. If he were to lose big on his next trades, it would create an opportunity for—”

  Dylan leaned back against his desk and just let the kid run. He understood the theory of manipulating the markets, but Gillian’s brother was talking about actually doing it, on a very large scale. By the time the guy got through with the other two parts of his three-part lecture on how to dismantle a billion-dollar worldwide conglomerate and throw the head guy in jail, Dylan was convinced—of everything, whatever the kid was selling.

  “Well, Mr. Shore,” he said when Gabriel was finished. “I—”

  “Actually, it’s Dr. Shore.”

  Of course it was.

  “Economics?” Dylan asked.

  “Yes, sir. Cornell, and I did my computer work at MIT, also on the doctoral level.”

  It took a lot to impress Dylan.

  And he was impressed. The kid had packed a helluva lot of stuff into twenty-seven years. Two doctorates? Dylan was definitely impressed.

  “Well, Dr. Shore, my question to you is why now? Putting a bounty on a Defense Department operative isn’t enough to get this ball rolling. Not on a target the size of Arthur Kendryk.”

  “No, sir, it isn’t. But we’ve been after Kendryk for a long time. Me, personally, for a year. The guy before me for over five years, trying to build a case. I found the key to doing that in the Gul Rashid/Uzbekistan Afghan opium deal you requested the files on five months ago.” He paused, and Dylan felt another very important revelation coming, and he could pretty much guess what it was if it had come out of the Uzbekistan file. “I also found Gillian’s name in that file.”

  Dylan nodded, glad the kid had gotten that weighty piece of information out of his system. It was a good thing the guy worked in an office in an annex somewhere. He wouldn’t last an hour on the street.

  “She was working for me in Uzbekistan, in all capacities of her involvement,” he said, and it would take a Senate subcommittee to get more out of him than that.

  “Yes, sir.” The guy was visibly relieved, and Dylan wondered briefly if he ever played poker. He hoped not.

  “The work she did in Uzbekistan couldn’t be the key to isolating Kendryk,” Dylan said. “Kendryk’s ties to that deal were thinner than smoke.”

  “No, sir. The key is a man named Spencer Bayonne. You connected him to Kendryk, and I can lay half a dozen illegal arms deals in western Africa directly at Bayonne’s feet.”

  Sometimes, every now and then, things just went a person’s way. This was one of those times. General Grant had sent Dylan to London five months ago to investigate Kendryk, especially to investigate his involvement in the global arms trade. Grant had wanted facts he could take to the undersecretary of defense.

  Gabriel Shore had just supplied them.

  “Gillian?” He turned to his operator. “What do you know about Spencer Bayonne?”

  “I met him a few times; very professional, very cool-headed. He has a solid reputation, well deserved.”

  In other words, he was dangerous.

  He returned his attention to Gabriel. “I don’t recall coming across anything that would connect Kendryk to a sale of nuclear technology.” Dr. Shore was right. If they could tie Kendryk to nuclear espionage, the undersecretary of defense would have what he needed to go straight to the top, the very top. Kendryk would become an enemy of the state.

  “That’s a very recent development,” Gabriel said. “Dr. Mila Yanukovich, one of Russia’s and the world’s leading nuclear scientists, has been secretly going in and out of Iran for the last two years. We have documented—or rather we had documented proof of her involvement in the Iranians’ successful conversion of yellowcake into uranium hexafluoride gas, and in the sale of a dozen centrifuges for their underground enrichment plant in Natanz, south of Tehran. Unfortunately, the data was compromised. It disappeared in transit, and even though it was recovered, we don’t know who all else might have it now.”

  “Wasn’t it encrypted?”

  “Yes, but the encryption key was also lost in transit, which has started a feeding frenzy. All the sharks are in the water on this, everybody putting their resources into finding it, including our government, the Russians, the Iranians, of course, and every major player in the international black market, including the Russian mob. The code is worth millions of dollars, but its real value is as a political bargaining chip. Whoever comes up with it and decodes the documents has the potential to reshape foreign policy in half a dozen countries. And that is unacceptable. Our government will authorize assassination before it lets some thug dominate any kind of political arena within our sphere of influence.”

  Dylan took a moment to breathe, because the kid hadn’t.

  “And you work for the Commerce Department?” he asked. Gabriel Shore did not sound like any Commerce guy he’d ever met.

  “Yes, sir, their Security Division in the Marsh Annex.”

  Well, that had to be one helluva division over there at the Marsh Annex. He needed to ask General Grant what the hell went on next to his office on the other side of the boiler room.

  “And Kendryk is one of the sharks?”

  “A great white.” The kid’s glance strayed back to his sister. “And he’s here. He entered the country three days ago with Spencer Bayonne. There’s been a lot of activity up and down the Potomac and into Virginia over the last few days, a lot of those major players slipping into the country. We at Marsh think the code is going to surface, and I think Kendryk is here to claim it when it does.”

  “And Bayonne? What does he do?” Dylan didn’t look at Gillian, but he’d felt her reaction, felt her kick everything up a notch. He’d never asked her doctors over at Walter Reed, but he’d been wondering for a while if the drugs they’d both been given had created some sort of synergy between them. He couldn’t read her mind or anything, but he could read her to a far greater extent than he could any of the guys, and they’d all been together for a very long time.

  “Given the importance of the code, my guess is that Kendryk hired Bayonne specifically to retrieve it. You have to understand, a man like Kendryk has an intelligence-gathering system that exceeds most Third World countries’ abilities, and in some areas, his network can almost rival our own.”

  “And where are Kendryk and Bayonne now?”

  “New York.”

  “I think we need to take a look at your files,” Dylan said. “Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ve got a piece of hardware that can accommodate your—”

  “Yes, we do,” Gillian said, and Dylan gave her a curious glance, a damned curious glance.

  “Good.” Jesus. He always thought he should spend more time at the office, but he never did, an
d things happened here. Important things, and they happened a lot faster since Skeeter had taken over the place. “Then we’ll—” He gestured to the main office, but Gillian interrupted again.

  “It’s not here, sir. It’s at the Commerce City Garage, one floor up from my place.”

  “Why?” he asked. Weapons, languages, tactics—those were Red Dog’s areas of expertise, not computer systems.

  “Hacker International took over the third floor a couple of months ago. I think you were in Singapore at the time. Cherie and Danny are working out of there, until they can get into their new office space,” she said. “Hopefully, next week.”

  “And she’s got what we need?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  And that made perfect sense. Computers were the forte of the Bitch Musketeers, and anything advanced enough to hold Gabriel Shore’s attention was guaranteed to hold Hacker’s.

  “You’re storing a Marsh Annex DREAGAR 454 Subliminal Neuron Intel Interface in a garage?” Dr. Shore looked highly skeptical and more than a little appalled.

  Kids these days, Dylan thought, and their damn Subliminal Neuron Intel Interfacers. Jesus. The flash drive was hanging back around Dr. Shore’s neck and looked like something he could have gotten out of a cereal box.

  “It’s a very secure installation, Dr. Shore. The Commerce City Garage is our version of an annex,” he said, which seemed to appease the guy.

  “Then we can download there and send the files over a secure line to you here at Steele Street.”

  Dylan liked people who could think on their feet. They only needed one more ingredient to make the plan work.

  Walking over to his door, he yelled out into the office. “Hacker! Get your butt in here.”

  Cherie had drifted off.

  She’d finished her cigarette under her desk, gotten back in her chair to think about the best way to approach Dylan—and she’d drifted into dreamland, where there was this guy who looked like Henry Stiner, surfing on the ocean, and her on the beach, waving at him, but he never got any closer. He just kept surfing, out on the ocean, and never came in to the shore, and then he yelled at her.