Breaking Loose Read online

  He sure as hell hoped so, because there were hundreds of crates in Beranger’s basement, a lot of them sitting in water, and he’d be damned if he wanted to be down here long enough to look through all of them.

  “Dammit,” she muttered, sorting, and bitching, and griping, and moaning.

  She was on the edge.

  He was, too, actually. The day was getting too damn long to be trying to get through it on what he’d had for breakfast and a bag of chips.

  She tossed another piece of junk off to the side, and he got hit with the splash-not that it made any difference, not at this point.

  On its lowest level, the Old Gallery had turned out to be a swamp. He and Suzi had been sloshing their way through floating junk and whatnot for half an hour, after spending two hours searching the upper floors, and in his book it was all starting to be about two and a half hours too long.

  He slid the beam of his flashlight off her lovely backside and up to the ceiling. It took effort. Looking at her ass was the closest thing to a pick-me-up he’d had since they’d gotten here.

  “Tell me again the sequence of events when you were standing next to Beranger in the Chapel Room.” There was something here, something niggling at him.

  Three meters, that’s what she’d given him as the scanner’s range-nine feet, ten inches.

  “It blinked twice, then I took a couple more steps, stopped, and after a minute or so, the GPS locked in a position.”

  He swung his flashlight back to her. She was standing outside one of two floor-to-ceiling wire mesh cages in the basement, one cage for each concrete cistern built into the floor-the overflowing cisterns. Both of the cages had stacks of crates and boxes and junk piled around the outside and nothing inside besides the cisterns. When he shone his flashlight down on them, he could see the pumps that should have been emptying the water out. Of course, if those things had been working, his boots would be dry.

  Still, it was the wire cages that finally clicked into place.

  “Well, Sugar, it could be that the statue was here when you first arrived.” He sloshed over to where she was standing and stepped inside the open door of the first cage with the scanner in his hand.

  Nothing registered, and he waded over to the other cage. The mesh was too fine for him to stick the scanner through, so he swung that wire door open as well and checked to see if the scanner registered anything inside.

  It didn’t.

  He looked back up at the ceiling. It was low, seven feet maximum, which when she’d been standing next to Remy had given her a range from the floor of the basement to almost three feet above the floor of the Chapel Room. He swung his flashlight beam back to where she was standing, plenty of room to catch a signal, and the door on the cage she was next to had been open when they’d entered the basement.

  “You got mixed signals, because when you first arrived at the gallery, the Sphinx was inside the cage where you’re standing now,” he said very matter-of-factly even though he was impressed as hell with himself.

  She’d left her Spa Monterey ball cap in Ruiz’s Land Cruiser, and her hair was a mess, fallen down around her shoulders and starting to curl in the oppressive humidity of the basement. It gave her kind of a wild-woman look, very erotic, very nice.

  He liked it, the same way he liked watching her bend over something-anything.

  “Well, that’s a brilliant piece of deduction, Sherlock.” She straightened up from the crate she was looking through and stretched her back. “Or should I be calling you Karnak?”

  Without giving him a glance, she leaned over the crate again and went back to work sorting through the rest of the junk inside-obviously not impressed at all, but he was sure that was just because he hadn’t explained all the science to her yet.

  “Sherlock Holmes,” he said confidently. “You’re standing next to a Faraday cage, and your scanner would have picked up the electromagnetic signal off the chip as you walked across the floor upstairs. At a certain angle over the open cage door, the signal wouldn’t have been blocked by the wire cage.” He sloshed back over to her side of the basement, using his flashlight like a laser pointer, happy to be giving her this little primer on radio signals. “At the next angle, your next step, the signal would be blocked. Any enclosed metal cage, even mesh, depending on the gauge and the wavelength of the frequency, will shield electromagnetic radiation, in this instance the radio signal sent by the transponder on the Sphinx. That’s why you got blinks instead of the steady light you were expecting. It’s why when you stood still for a moment, directly above the open cage door, the scanner’s GPS kicked in. But I think the Sphinx is gone now.”

  “Gone?” she asked, sounding like she wanted to believe him, if for no other reason than to get the hell out of the slimy water and the grim basement.

  “Positi-”

  He stopped, cut off in mid-word by a loud clanging, and the quickly subsequent thumping, straining, running-up sound of the cisterns’ pumps kicking into gear. All the crates and junk started to shimmy and shake, and the water to ripple.

  “Oh, my, God,” she gasped. “What was…what was-”

  He swung his light back on her.

  “Geez, oh, geezo, cripes.” She was scrambling, high-stepping, trying to get through the water, moving away from the cage. “Ohmigod-”

  “It’s okay, Suzi. It’s okay,” he said, forging forward. “It’s just the pumps to drain the water out of the cisterns.”

  “No, no, no, no, not that, not-ahhh!” She jumped. “That!”

  He swept the flashlight beam around her, but didn’t see anything.

  “That… that… snake!” She jumped again, sideways this time, her voice rising in panic.

  He followed her gaze to the top of the water, and thought, Oh.

  “Ahh!” She squealed again, loud enough to be heard above the horrendous racket-and then she let out a yelp and in a flash had drawn down on a piece of rubber tubing, her 9mm firmly in hand, her gaze raking the water, her jaw tight. Her right arm was straight, her left hand cupping her right on the grip, her left elbow pulled in.

  Geezus, he was impressed. The girl was fast, damn fast, and she was solid on her gun, her draw needing no improvement whatsoever. She looked good, deadly, like that piece of rubber tubing floating around had better be saying its prayers. She looked like she knew exactly what she was doing, except for the fact that they were in a rather cramped space, and she’d be shooting into a couple of feet of water onto a concrete floor.

  “Uh…no, no, sugar,” he said, slogging forward, talking fast. “Don’t shoot. I got it. Everything’s okay. It’s just a length of tubing.”

  “Where is it?” she asked, her gaze glued to the top of the water. “It was moving.”

  “Everything down here is moving,” he pointed out. The water was rippling and streaming, and starting to eddy up against stuff, and all around them was the echoing clang and thump of the pumps and the gurgling, rushing sound of the swamp draining away down through the cisterns.

  As a first date, he had to admit that this one had pretty much sucked, except for the kiss. They’d gotten that right, and for a moment, as he came up next to her and quietly but firmly told her to holster her weapon, he got to thinking about a better date, something with cold beer, fresh limes, and expensive tequila. Something with live, sultry music, spicy food, and a warm evening breeze.

  Something that didn’t involve mud, blood, and other people’s guts spilling out all over would be a real step up. Something they could negotiate without a flashlight or a.45 would be a huge improvement.

  Not that he ever went anywhere without a.45.

  The sound of water rushing down the cisterns eventually started to slow, until it was no more than a trickle, the last few gallons of the overflow sliding toward the openings in the floor and getting pumped into the main line, and as soon as the water was gone, the great clanging and thumping of the pumps stuttered and clanked to a halt.

  He shifted his gaze and the beam of his
flashlight back to the cage, to see if they’d missed something while the place had been underwater.

  And lo and behold, he’d be damned. There it was, the prize, a small wooden packing crate tucked up under the iron grate on the cistern, the perfect size for the Memphis Sphinx, and the perfect hiding place for something of inestimable value. With the cistern flooded, no one would ever know it was there, and the smell and looks of the place made it obvious that it flooded quite regularly.

  “Do you see something?”

  “No.” He kept the beam of his flashlight moving, swinging it across the floor and up to her. He’d only been on the crate for a second, but he knew what he’d seen.

  She slid her hand back through her hair. She had mud on her arms, a streak of mud on her face, mud on her clothes. God, she looked like hell, like he’d put her through the wringer.

  “Come on, let’s get back to the Posada. I’ll go get us something to eat, and we can come up with a Plan B.” He took her by the arm and headed for the stairs.

  Yeah, he had a conscience, but fifty-fifty was never going to work. Erich Warner wanted the Sphinx, and it wasn’t a cash deal. Whoever Suzi was working for was just plain out of luck.

  He’d make it up to her, if he got the chance. But first he needed the name of some asshole in Texas who thought he was going to take his shot at the U.S.A.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Costa del Rey

  Con loved this time of night.

  Crickets chirping, tree frogs singing, and Scout’s pretty patio lights illuminating the Costa del Rey compound. The river was running dark and deep, heading toward Argentina and the Iguazú Falls. A soft wind soughed through the trees.

  Leaning back against the cool stone wall of the house, looking out over the deck to the water and the jungle beyond, he took a heavy draw off his cigar. For a long time, he held the smoke deep in his lungs, longer and longer, until slowly, he began to let it out.

  Softly, he opened his mouth in an O and blew smoke rings, one after the other, each more perfect than the last, and he watched as, ring by ring, the smoke settled like the loops of a necklace around the statue he held in his hand. A small fortune in gold was draped in a headdress from the Sphinx’s brow to its leonine shoulders, slivers of regal lapis lazuli decorated the frontispiece of the crown, and rock-crystal eyes caught the light of the waxing moon and reflected a glittering shimmer deep into the beast’s granite skull.

  Tomorrow night the deed would be done.

  He took another draw off the cigar and felt a subsiding flicker of pain in his arm.

  He was running out of time. He felt it with each passing day, and he wanted Erich Warner dead. The fact would bring him a small measure of peace, and if he should triumph over the spymaster as well, he could die a happier man. It was the only doubt he had, that he could get to the man in Washington, D.C.

  He held his last inhalation of smoke in his lungs-longer, and longer, and longer, seconds passing one after another. At a minute, the smoke started drifting out of his nostrils.

  He certainly didn’t doubt that he would die-probably badly, considering what he’d seen in Bangkok, considering how Scout’s father, Garrett, had died.

  Hopeless.

  Hopeless.

  Helpless.

  If Con could have reached him, he’d have slid a knife up into the back of Garrett’s skull and severed his brain stem, would have given him instant death, anything rather than watch the slow, twisting devastation that had allowed Garrett Leesom to linger and suffer.

  But they’d been more than a cage apart, and the man in the cage between them had been dead for days by the time Garrett’s meds had started to fail.

  Fuck.

  It could just as easily have been him.

  Since then, Con had learned how to control his situation, but not without some failures of his own-and the failures weren’t worth the living it took to get to them. So he kept his meds close, and he kept his supplier very close, and he kept his.45 closest of all. The fools who touted “no pain, no gain” didn’t have a fucking clue what pain was all about, or how long it could last.

  Long enough to make a man fear that even death wouldn’t stop it-and, baby, that was taking fear right down to the soul. What if… what if even death won’t stop it?

  What then, kemo sabe? What then.

  Religion, of course.

  Con loved religion. It was so damned fearless, not only answering his biggest, scariest question about life but throwing it right back at him, utterly fearless. Pain, pendejo? it said. Live right, or we’ll show you pain, guaranteed everlasting pain, Promethean pain.

  No matter what he sometimes thought, pain had not been invented in Bangkok by Dr. Souk.

  But it could be alleviated by the pills and by the brujo in Danlí, Honduras, who hand-rolled the cigars for him. A brujo, a shaman, a witch doctor-God only knew what the man put in the things. Con didn’t, but neither did he care. The long filler was dark, almost oily, and the wrappers were faintly green, and whatever blessings Mario Sauza Orlando chanted over the cigars, they worked.

  He let the rest of the smoke drift out of his mouth and took another long draw, feeling the sounds of the night wash over him.

  Tobacco was a drug-his favorite.

  “Con?”

  He’d heard her coming, the soft tread of slippered feet on the cool tile floor.

  “Scout.”

  “I’ve got those names for you from Jo-Jo, the gringos staying at the Posada Plaza, and the intel you wanted on Levi Asher and Suzanna Toussi.” She was standing in the light of the doorway onto the deck, and there wasn’t a thing about her that didn’t fill him with pride. He wasn’t sure how it had happened, this love he had for her, that her welfare was so important to him, sometimes even more important than the justice he sought-and that was saying a lot.

  She’d been such a lost little wild thing when he’d finally found her, living on the streets of Bangkok, seventeen years old and looking about twelve, but most definitely Garrett’s daughter, with her father’s warrior spirit running true. It was the only thing that had saved her.

  Jack Traeger wasn’t good enough for her, but Con had a feeling Scout was of a different mind.

  What she saw in the hellion was beyond him, except Jack was a lot like he used to be-before Bangkok.

  He needed to talk to the boy, set him straight about a few things, let him know that once Scout was his, there’d be no more riding the edges of the rails. And as for all those wild oats Jack had been sowing-well, that was going to come to a screeching halt.

  Or maybe not.

  Con had a feeling that was the only reason Scout hadn’t given in to the boy yet, and he was all for Scout not giving in to the boy.

  “Start with Levi Asher,” he said.

  “A well-known dealer in the art world,” she began. “Famous, or infamous, depending on a person’s perspective, for brokering substantially profitable sales. Buyers love him because he knows where all the good stuff is and who’s willing or being forced to sell, and the collectors love him because he always has access to people with money to spend. He works mostly out of Europe and has run some major pieces through Sotheby’s, London.”

  “Not our guy. Too high-profile for Warner.”

  “More than that,” she said. “Asher has given three pieces of sculpture to Yad Vashem, for their grounds.”

  He understood, and she was right. Even if Warner had contacted Asher about the Memphis Sphinx, anyone who donated works of art to the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, would not work for a man like Erich Warner, a man whose political views were decidedly anti-Semitic along with being anti-everything else.

  So Levi Asher was off the hook.

  “What about the woman?”

  “Suzanna Toussi, a very wealthy American art dealer, also known for brokering major deals and for finding the rarest of antiquities for her clients, but she likes to keep her deals private and doesn’t work through the auction houses. She’s been to
Eastern Europe a number of times over the last few years, most notably in and out of Bulgaria.”

  A damning résumé in this game, and why in the hell that would demoralize him was beyond Con. Beautiful women could be as bad as anybody else on the planet, sometimes worse.

  She was definitely still on the hook.

  “And the gringos at the Posada?” One of the out-of-towners was Warner’s proxy on the deal. The German had somebody here.

  “There are three,” Scout began. “George Teller, a tire salesman from Detroit. The description Jo-Jo got from the concierge-

  “Wait a minute.” Concierge? There was no concierge at the Posada Plaza. “Do you mean that pimp behind the front desk?”

  “He prefers the term ‘concierge.’” She gave him a look. “And he says Mr. Teller weighs in at two-fifty and about five foot eight inches.”

  “Not our guy.” The asshole probably was a tire salesman, down here for the whores.

  “Victor Bradley from Savannah,” she continued with the list. “He bills himself as an investment broker, and he’s connected in Ciudad del Este, doing business with Lorenzo Mamoré, trying to score a container of high-end electronics.”

  “No.” Mamoré’s customers weren’t in the same league as Erich Warner. The German wouldn’t have trusted some low-end hustler to represent him at an auction for the Memphis Sphinx.

  “Last, we’ve got Daniel Killian. Jo-Jo says he’s just another gringo looking for a deal and a whore, but Miller says otherwise.”

  Con’s money was on Miller.

  “What’s the wizard got to say?” he asked.

  Scout was still backlit in the doorway, reading from her notes.

  “Miller says he’s definitely the guy in the photos you took at Beranger’s. When he slapped the name Jo-Jo got from the Posada onto that picture, he came up with a former U.S. Army soldier, Special Forces, highly decorated. His last couple of tours were in Afghanistan. And Miller wants ten times the normal price for that bit of information. As you can well imagine, he says, tagging an SF guy took a Herculean effort on his part and every favor he ever had coming to him.”