Cutting Loose Read online

  She gave Zach another, more careful look. He’d cut his hair since she’d seen him last. He’d worn it tied back in a sleek ponytail in El Salvador, but now it was short, almost severe, still the same silky black, but cropped close. It made him look very dangerous, a promise echoed in his eyes. They were the color of a cold sea—pack ice in green. His face was exactly the same as she remembered, and she seemed to have it chiseled in her memory banks—the underlying elegance of his bone structure, straight dark eyebrows, and a narrow nose leading to a firm mouth. And then there was the scar, a long-healed line of white tracing his hairline down the left side of his face. The story behind it had to be ugly.

  He went by a different name in the States, and of all the damn things in the world to get killed over, the guy with the gray ponytail had chosen a nondescript macramé bracelet, a bracelet Zach had come thousands of miles to get from her.

  If she put her mind to it, she could think of a lot of things that could fit in a macramé bracelet, the most obvious being information. Maybe it was knotted in Morse code.

  “I know how it looks, Lily,” he said, “but I’m doing my best to get you out of the middle of this situation. The pilot put you here, not me, but in his place, I would have done the same thing.”

  She didn’t doubt it. The problem was, up until this exact moment, she hadn’t had a clue what “situation” she was in the middle of, or what situation the pilot had been in, other than they’d both proved extremely dangerous.

  But she’d just gotten her first inkling. Zach was right. This was about the pilot, who had been dragged into the church by guerrilla soldiers of the Cuerpo Nacional de Libertad, a rebel group fighting the Salvadoran government in northern El Salvador. This wasn’t about drugs. Zach had said as much. This was about information coded into a nondescript, therefore easily hidden, bracelet that the pilot had not wanted to fall into the guerrillas’ hands—so he’d given it to her.

  This was about politics.

  And political players with multiple names, who lived well in foreign countries, running drugs, and who owned hot cars in the States with absolute cutting-edge technology sliding in and out of their eight-track tape decks, only brought one thing to mind.

  He was a spy.

  And, oh, God, she didn’t exactly find that comforting either.

  “So you…uh, did get the bracelet back from Schroder? Right? I mean, you did tell the girl—SB303—to tell Scorpion Fire you had it.” She wanted to look at it again, see what she’d missed. She’d had it in her keeping for three weeks, but she hadn’t had a reason to examine it, until now.

  He shot her a curious look across the interior of the car.

  “Don’t get all excited,” she said. “SB303 gave you Schroder’s name, and trust me, I’m paying attention. In my situation, you’d do the same thing. There’s a dead guy in my house, and God only knows what you did to convince Schroder to give up that damn piece of macramé, and now we’re hauling ass to the border, trying to elude the police, who I have always thought of as the people to go find when there’s trouble, and it’s hot, and those two guys tried to kill me this morning, and…and…” She gave it up, her words trailing off into a pool of silence marked only by the white stripes slipping away under Charlotte’s wheels.

  Damn him. She was on the verge of an epiphany or a nervous breakdown, and she was going to hate him if the damn breakdown won out.

  Six hours to Denver. He was crazy, and what was worse, he was right. At the speed they were going, they could get to Denver by lunchtime. She hoped to hell she made it, hoped to God her nerves lasted that long. They were unraveling one by one and simply letting go, bringing her closer to tears, and she wasn’t sure how much longer she could—

  “Let me tell you something about that dead guy,” he said, drawing her attention back to him and away from her tears.

  She took a steadying breath. Good. She was listening.

  “But you need to drink your water first,” he said, gesturing to the bottle she still had a death grip on in her hand. “Before you faint or something, and then, after you’ve had something to drink, I’ll tell you about that guy.”

  “S-so you did know him?” She finished screwing the lid off the bottle and brought it to her lips. The water was warm, but drinking it gave her something physical to concentrate on besides her fraying nerves.

  “No, not him in particular.” He gave his head a small shake. “But I’ve known hundreds of guys like him, and they are all bad. They’ve got bad histories, and bad presents, and bad futures, every one of them. Ninety-nine percent have juvenile records. They graduate up into felonies, working for some street boss somewhere, or they go straight to the mob. Murder is part of their resume, along with extortion, kidnapping, assault of every kind you can imagine and a few hundred you can’t. If they’re out of Las Vegas, they’re into prostitution. They’re mean. They have mean jobs, and they live mean lives, and I can A-one guarantee you that if you had not had the skills and the mind-set to pull the trigger in the situation you found yourself in this morning, you would be dead. If your father is the one who taught you to protect yourself, whatever it takes, and how to do it, then you owe him a thank-you letter.”

  Even as shaky as she was feeling, she knew all that, and her dad was going to hear about it, almost everything about it, and she could pretty much A-1 guarantee she’d be lucky to ever set foot off the ranch again for the rest of her life.

  That had been another of Tom’s big beefs with her father, that her dad had not wanted her to move to New Mexico. She was a Montana girl, Deputy Robbins had said, and Montana girls belonged in Montana, close to their dads, and not hell-and-gone to Albuquerque with some damn foreigner they’d met at a college fraternity party.

  Her father had been right. She’d been a fool to marry Tomaso Bersani, with his exotic accent, and his exotic looks, and his exotic morals.

  And here she was, getting ready to be a fool all over again.

  She took another slow sip before lowering the bottle. “Why do you know so many bad guys like Schroder and his partner? Because of your drug business?”

  He made a small, noncommittal movement with his hand. “I do all kinds of business, and part of any of my businesses is to know guys like them, and all over the world, those guys are the same, whether they’re Asian, Latino, or straight out of Iowa. Honestly, I’ve known some pretty cruel bastards to come out of Iowa.”

  “Is it your business to be mysterious?”

  He let out a short, humorless laugh. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.” He laughed again and slowly shook his head. “Yes. You could definitely say that.”

  He reached out for the bottle, and she gave it to him, and after taking a long drink, he gave it back.

  “I’m going to get you to Denver, Lily, take you to a place where you’ll be safe. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks for word to get out that the bracelet is no longer of any value, that it’s been neutralized. At that point, all the guys like Schroder and his dead partner, they all move on to the next big score, and the name Lily Robbins stops meaning anything.”

  “And what do you do, while I’m busy being safe in Denver, waiting to become blessedly anonymous again?” She really wanted to know.

  “I do what I do best. Disappear.”

  “Back to El Salvador?”

  “No.” He shook his head again.

  Lily took another slow swallow of water from the bottle, watching him. She’d seen how he lived in El Salvador, like a prince, with an elaborate villa, and dozens of servants and soldiers at his beck and call. He’d had a coffee factory, where he’d roasted and packaged his own special brand, AC-130. He’d brought her home on a private jet.

  Nobody built themselves a life like that and walked away.

  “You really aren’t Alejandro Campos, are you?”

  His answer was no answer. He just kept driving.

  “So who’s living in the villa now? And how did you get replaced? Bloodless coup?”
/>   He shot a quick glance in her direction. “What makes you think I got replaced?”

  “The setup down there is too sweet to let it go to waste. If it wasn’t really yours, whoever it does belong to would replace you just to keep the whole place up and running—the villa, and the fields, and the coffee factory—not to mention that whatever you are today, three weeks ago you were the biggest drug dealer in Morazán Province. They wouldn’t want to lose all that.”

  “Jesus.” He swore under his breath, way under, but she heard him.

  “You’re thinking too hard over there, and you’re going to get yourself in trouble,” he said after a while.

  “We already had that conversation, and honestly, do you really think I can be in more trouble than I already am?”

  “Oh, hell, yeah,” he said, keeping his attention on the road. “We aren’t out of this yet, babe. Not by a long shot.”

  She almost smiled. She almost felt better, even though she didn’t know what disturbed her more, that they weren’t “out of it yet,” even at a hundred and twenty miles an hour on their way to Denver with the bracelet in hand, or how much she liked having him call her babe.

  “DEA?” she asked after a few minutes of silence.

  “Excuse me?” he asked, giving her a quick glance.

  “DEA,” she repeated. “The Drug Enforcement Agency.” That’s what made the most sense to her. The DEA probably had agents set up all over Central and South America, monitoring the drug trade, even facilitating it in undercover operations in order to take out the bigger dealers. His profile would fit the DEA.

  But he neither confirmed nor denied her assertion.

  “FBI?” That one seemed like a longer shot to her. Her dad, though, had once been assigned to an international case originating in Canada, and he was just a Chouteau County sheriff’s deputy.

  She took Zach’s silence as a denial.

  All right. There were a dozen more U.S. government agencies with reasons to be involved in Central American drugs and politics, but there was only one with a rich and checkered history running the length of the whole isthmus, one whose undercover, nonuniformed pilots could conceivably be carrying the fate of the free world in a piece of hemp macramé.

  “CIA?”

  He shifted slightly in his seat, and she figured she had a done deal.

  How awful. The CIA. Everybody knew those guys were barely human. They lived shadowy lives, full of secrets they only revealed to each other, and only rarely were the details of their deeds exposed to a larger world.

  She knew about one small but vital deed of his, though. She knew how close her life had come to being a nightmare in El Salvador, and she knew he was the only thing that had stood between her and the very real threat of degradation and death she’d faced. The morning the rebel soldiers had shown up at the villa, their captain had demanded that she be turned over, released into his custody so that she could be brought to justice, his justice.

  She’d seen the captain’s justice, in the church’s chapel where he’d shot and killed one of his own soldiers, and she’d seen it when he’d stripped and beaten one of the nuns and chopped off her hair.

  Alejandro Campos—Zach—had said no to the demand, flatly, succinctly. The deal he was negotiating with the rebel leader would be done without her involved, or it would not be done at all. Her life was not for sale.

  It was one of his finer moments, she’d been told by his cook Isidora, who’d heard it straight from his manservant Max, who had beamed with pride to tell the tale. Isidora had been beaming as well, so proud of her patrón.

  And because of that one fine moment, he’d created the opportunity for another this morning, and now he’d saved her life twice.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CIA?

  Now where had she gotten the idea he was with the CIA? Zach wondered. Nobody outside of a very tightly monitored and controlled group of people knew he existed, let alone was with the CIA, and most of them worked for the CIA.

  She did not.

  At least he didn’t think she did. Was it possible she could be somebody’s deep-cover asset? Somebody buried on some other agent’s payola roll? Somebody who maybe had been planted in El Salvador to watch him? Or it could be some kind of double-agent asset scheme, where Kesselring’s other interested parties had planted her with the nuns to watch the rebels and make sure Devlin’s plane went down and the information he’d been carrying—okay, that was getting a little complicated even for him, especially since she’d actually gotten the damn information Devlin had been carrying and apparently hadn’t had a clue of what to do with it.

  Or so it seemed.

  Fuck. Blood loss was always mildly paranoia-inducing for him, and even though he’d finally stopped bleeding, his shoulder was messed up from his little run-ins this morning. But paranoia didn’t explain away the very real fact of the ten thousand dollars in her suitcase, or the damn plane ticket to Tahiti, which all led him to the question—“Who was out to get his ass this week?”

  Well, hell. That list went on forever, every week, and every week it changed.

  Geezus. Was he getting taken for a ride here?

  CIA. CIA. Maybe the question he should be asking himself was—“Who was out to get Alex’s ass this week?”

  He’d read Le Carré. Hell, he lived Le Carré. Everybody in his business did, and people got set up and whacked every day.

  “You’re thinking too hard over there,” she said. “And you’re going to get yourself in trouble.”

  Oh, she was sweet, all right, throwing his words back at him, and he couldn’t help it—he grinned. The CIA—at least she had him on the side of the good guys.

  “Here,” she said, handing him the bottle of Perrier. “Have a drink, before you faint or something.”

  And at that, he laughed out loud.

  “You have a smart mouth, Ms. Robbins.” Smart and probably sweeter than hell, which was a whole other problem he had with her—she smelled good. He’d gotten close enough to her a few times this morning to know it for a fact.

  Jewel had told him something a long time ago, something she’d read about men thinking about sex once a minute, and he figured he was right on track, or maybe even a little ahead of the game when it came to Lily Robbins. He’d been thinking about having sex with her since the night she’d shown up soaking wet and scared at his villa in El Salvador. She didn’t even need to be in the same country for him to be thinking about her naked and willing and wanting him, and here she was in the same car, giving him attitude and making him want her all that much more.

  If it was a test, he was planning on failing.

  He took the bottle from her, and the computer rolled out of the tape deck.

  More good news, he hoped. The girl had done great so far.

  “Ensign.” Her face washed onto the screen in a stream of pixels.

  “SB303.”

  “You’ve come up on a statewide BOLO out of Albuquerque. New Mexico police and state troopers are looking for you in connection with two incidents that happened this morning. One at Lily Robbins’s house on Somerset Street, a fatal shooting. The other a knife killing at the Sunset Motel. We’re recommending that you get off the interstate, unless you want to answer a lot of questions.”

  A knife? Zach thought. He hadn’t used a knife on Schroder.

  “You’re two miles from Exit 392, which we are highly recommending,” SB303 continued. “Take it and head northeast. There are a few small towns and a lot of empty spaces in that direction where you could hole up for the day. I’m mapping routes out of the area and into Colorado for a suggested midnight run.”

  Yeah, making the run to Denver after dark off the beaten track was by far the better option under the current circumstances.

  “Do you have a name for the vic at the Sunset Motel?” Jason Schroder had been very much alive and in reasonably good shape when he’d left him. It was a long shot, but maybe SB303 was referring to someone besides Schroder, to another incid
ent entirely.

  One could only hope.

  It would make his life so much easier.

  “Jason Schroder,” SB303 said, and his heart sank a bit in his chest. Fuck. What in the hell had happened after he’d left the jerk tied to a chair?

  “He was alive when I left him. He should have lived for another forty years.”

  “Then we have a bigger problem.”

  No shit.

  “Have you contacted Scorpion Fire?” he asked.

  “Yes, and for unnamed reasons, he prefers for the primary operation to remain clandestine.”

  Alex didn’t have to name any reasons, and SB303 knew it as well as he did. Alex didn’t explain his actions to anyone who wasn’t in his direct reporting chain, and he sure as hell didn’t expect to be put in a position where he had to explain the actions of one of his agents to a local police department. The CIA was involved in a lot of operations inside and outside of the United States, and they seldom invited peripheral involvement in any of them. Very seldom.

  Alex wanted the bracelet, and he expected Zach to get it without anyone who hadn’t been in that morgue in Langley knowing what he was doing. It was a compartmented operation. His case officer would expect it to stay that way.

  Well, with two dead bodies and a description of his car floating through the New Mexican airwaves, Zach would say it was getting a little late for clandestine—but he got the drift of the message, and he wasn’t surprised. Alex had made the Company’s priorities clear. Zach was on a salvage mission as much as an information retrieval mission. His primary mission order had been very specific—keep our ass out of a sling and get the bracelet.

  He had the bracelet part of the mission accomplished, but the ass-in-the-sling thing wasn’t looking too good. He didn’t think there was any way to lay two dead bodies on the State Department, despite how much Alex would love it, and he was disinclined to lay them at SDF’s feet, despite Alex’s directive—and he sure as hell wasn’t going to take the fall for them alone against a bunch of New Mexico cops. Luckily, with the bracelet in his possession, Alex shouldn’t have any trouble throwing federal weight around in New Mexico and clearing up any problems the Albuquerque law enforcement community had with two dead bodies of known criminals trying to sell the nation’s top-secret data to foreign interests. But that job would definitely be easier if Zach remained a complete unknown. Give the cops a murder and a suspect, and they inevitably got damned possessive. An anonymous agent of the federal government who nobody had seen was a helluva lot easier to let go.