Loose Ends Page 18

  “Hey, babe,” she whispered back, and kissed his lips, so lightly, but it made him smile, and then he was really kissing her, his arms coming around her more tightly, one of his hands sliding up between her legs.

  Making out, that’s what they were doing, with him still half asleep and her loving the taste and feel of him, the incredible strength of his arms, the way he was exploring her body with his hands. She got lost in it, and in the low light of the flickering flames, their clothes came off, piece by piece, a zipper here, a button there, every move meant to reveal more skin, make their bodies more accessible.

  The more naked they got, the more awake he became, his mouth moving all over her, getting her hot, then hotter, until his name was all she was thinking, and that she wanted more.

  Pressing her down onto the rug, he came up between her legs, his shaft hard and searching, his kiss consuming her, his hands so hot on her body, molding her to him.

  “Jane,” he sighed her name and pushed into her, and he held himself there for a long moment, kissing her mouth, his body gently rocking.

  It was her first time, and it was wonderful, no pain, only need. She shifted her hips and he sank home, and she never wanted it to end—the sweet hard rhythm of his lovemaking. When he found his release, she wrapped her legs around him and held him close, wanting everything he had to give.

  “God, you are so beautiful … so beautiful,” he murmured. “We shouldn’t have done that, but I’m glad we did, so glad. I’ll take you with me.” And he’d fallen back asleep, still holding her close.

  The next time she’d woken up had been when he’d carried her into his bed. It had been early morning, and he’d been dressed all in camouflage, and there had been a couple of huge packs stacked by the door.

  “I’ve got to go, babe,” he’d said. “Remember where we had lunch the other day, Mama Guadaloupe’s?”

  She’d nodded.

  “Mama and a crew will be here later to clean the apartment. Stay here until then, and they’ll take you home. If you need any help at all while I’m gone, any kind of help at all, call this number and ask for Christian Hawkins. He’ll take care of anything while I’m gone. Anything. God, I’m sorry, Jane. That shouldn’t have happened last night—and yet I can’t regret it.”

  And then he’d left, and then she’d cried, and when Mama had showed up with her crew, she’d left Steele Street for the first time.

  He’d been right about Christian Hawkins. Superman had come straight to her rescue the night she and Sandman had hit the wall.

  She’d spent years wondering what might have been, if J. T. Chronopolous hadn’t died in Colombia—but she’d moved on, only to end up here, smack-dab in the middle of trouble.

  For as far as she’d come from her beginnings, and all the changes she’d made, at heart she was still a street rat, and street rats had only one reaction to a bunch of cops bearing down on them.

  Run.

  It was instinct, and she did it like a gazelle. Fear burned all the shakiness out of her and put wings on her feet. The alley was dark, and the farther she ran, the darker it got, until a pair of headlights and flashers beamed down its length behind her. She didn’t turn and look. She didn’t need to—the weight and momentum of the police car coming down the alley after her felt like a force field, tires rolling, engine running, lights flashing, and somebody squawking on the radio. Seconds, that’s all she had before they caught up to her.

  Nearing the restaurant, she told herself not to look at the men collapsed in the doorway. She’d done a lot of damage there, and it made her feel a little sick. Her survival instincts prevailed, though, and she did look, to make sure neither of them lunged for her as she darted past—but what she saw made no sense.

  They’d been moved.

  It hit her in a flash, the whole scene.

  King had been sitting back against the wall, anesthetized into oblivion by that needle full of something, and Rock had been sprawled across King’s legs, bleeding and twitching and very much alive.

  But neither one of them was alive now. The slumped look of death was unmistakable, as unmistakable as the oddly contorted angles of their bodies.

  Someone had snapped their necks, twisted their heads sideways, and broken their limbs, all of them. Arms and legs were sticking out all over, and one of King’s arms had been ripped clean off his body and was just lying there on the asphalt, a couple of feet away from the rest of him. She saw bone jutting through skin and blood pouring out everywhere. It was more than she could comprehend. Nothing about what she saw made sense.

  Jesus, sweet Jesus. She kept running, faster and faster, a scream lodged in her throat, choking her. Oh, my God.

  Away, away, away … every instinct she had told her to get away. My God. She was going to be sick.

  She raced past the kitchen door, arms pumping, heart pounding, and ran even faster. Where was J.T.? Where had he gone? God, what had happened? Could he have done that to those two men? Stopped as he’d run by and mutilated them?

  It didn’t make sense. If he’d wanted them dead, he could have done it before they’d left the doorway. He’d already had his knife at Rock’s throat.

  Jesus, sweet Jesus. The cops were going to lock her up and throw away the key. This wasn’t the first time she’d been in an alley with a dead man, and the Denver police were going to find that out in about two seconds flat once they ran her name.

  But this was crazy … and she … she was doomed. She needed away faster, to get away faster.

  A new burst of light hit her in the face, and she skidded to a stop, her heart in her throat. Oh, damn, damn, damn. Another cop car had turned into the other end of the alley and was picking up speed, coming at her full bore, flashing, rolling, and wailing.

  Even if there was a way to the street, she wouldn’t take it. That’s where the other cops were piling in. And she couldn’t go back. The alley behind her was full of cops, and gore, and mind-numbing horror.

  She squeezed her eyes shut for an instant and shook her head, as if she could rid herself of what she’d seen, and she stumbled.

  My God. Scrambling now, she looked for a way out. The other side of the alley was blocked by a high chain-link fence with strips of vinyl woven through the links. She couldn’t see past it, except to know that it was dark on the other side. A few trees poked above the top. Maybe she could find some cover over there, but there was no way through it, and she knew she couldn’t climb over the fence fast enough to get away.

  But she had to move, and she had to move now, before she was completely trapped between the two cars. They’d both hit their sirens, just to scare the crap out of her. It was overload. She was already terrorized. The noise and flashing lights and the undeniable impending doom racing straight at her from both directions rattled her down to her bones.

  She gulped in a breath, her sides aching from her run. Panic was consuming her, getting ready to drag her under, when she saw it: a dark slash in the fence.

  Without a thought, she ran like hell and dashed through the opening. The cop cars came screeching to a halt behind her. She could smell them, the burning rubber and exhaust. When the car doors opened, she put on another burst of speed, her feet pounding on a dirt track—running straight into the dark and gloom.

  “What do you want first, Dylan, the good news, the bad news, or the worst news?”

  “Good news,” Dylan said, manning the communication console in the Steele Street office and listening to Zach Prade come in over their secure radio frequency.

  “The fifth-floor maid at the Kashmir Club hotel downtown would sell her own mother for fifty bucks,” Zach said.

  “Sam Walls mentioned the Kashmir Club when we picked him up tonight.”

  A short laugh came over the phone. “Yeah, I bet he did.”

  “The bad news?” Dylan asked.

  “A guy named Tyler Crutchfield arrived late this afternoon. He checked into their India Gate suite, which takes up about a fourth of the fifth floor and
has a master bedroom and three smaller bedrooms—smaller only in the sense that each bedroom comes in at just under three hundred square feet with two queen-size beds and a private bath. Crutchfield’s party filled the India Gate suite with only one bed left empty. Do you want me to do the math for you?”

  “A six-man team.”

  “Actually, Crutchfield’s a lawyer, so he’s useless for any mano a mano, and the guy in the master bedroom is older than dirt and has a reputation for hiring all his muscle.”

  “Randolph Lancaster.”

  “Bueno,” Zach said, nice work. “Must have been a helluva party you had with Sam Walls. Sorry I missed it.”

  “It was pretty low-key, no food, no booze, though I did serve a couple of cocktails.”

  Zach laughed again. “Sodium Pentothal?”

  “Walls’s luck wasn’t running that good,” Dylan said. “Give me the worst news.”

  “Lancaster isn’t CIA. We tracked him from the agency a few times, but he’s a lot bigger than spookville. He comes up all over the place, one of those guys in the shadows of places like the State Department and the Pentagon who wield way more power than the folks making the headlines. He’s slick, very smooth, nobody can lay a hand on him, but a few people here and there are starting to think somebody should, like the Justice Department and a few of the guys and girls over at my old stomping grounds.”

  “I’m not sure he can be touched through the Justice Department.”

  “Yeah, that seems to be a real concern down on the Farm, too. The guy makes Teflon look like Velcro. He’s a real slippery bastard.”

  Zach sure as hell had that right, Dylan thought.

  “Where are you now?”

  “Well, just to be on the safe side, and given what we’re dealing with here tonight, I’m five floors up in the building directly across the street from the India Gate suite in a not-nearly-as-nice hotel called the Mission Inn, room 514. I’ve got some glass but could use better, maybe something in a Schmidt and Bender 4-16 × 50mm PMIIK attached to something with a .308 bore.”

  “I’ll send Kid.”

  “Have him bring a pizza.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. Tell me what you aren’t telling me, Dylan,” Zach said. “You just authorized a Level One SOTIC sniper to come over here and set up on a guy who eats lunch with the president of the United States.”

  “You made the request. What are you thinking?”

  “That maybe I know something I’m not sure I really know.”

  “Like?”

  “I know Walls was in Coveñas when Creed and J.T. were there, and I know he and his team were blacker than black, running so far under the radar I can guarantee they didn’t know who they were working for and didn’t care. And other than Walls, I’m not sure any of them made it out of South America alive. What I am sure of is that they had a contact who had a contact who had a contact—you know the routine.”

  Yes, he’d been there and done that more times than he could remember. They all had.

  “And?”

  “Well, when I looked, the Coveñas deal dead-ended at a guy with a code name that slid around the outside of Lancaster’s world. We could never pin anything on him. All we could do was guess at the connection between Lancaster and this code name.”

  “White Rook.” That’s what Skeeter had pulled out of the decrypted LeedTech files, that all of them, the whole SDF crew, had been made, especially Dylan.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Zach said after a brief pause. “So are you just a better guesser than me, or is this why you’re the boss?”

  “A better guesser with a gigabyte of data taken off of a computer owned by a company called LeedTech, which is a subsidiary to World Resources—”

  “Otherwise known as Wars R Us,” Zach interrupted. “The go-to guys in a dozen sub-Saharan countries whose idea of government begins and ends with armed conflict.”

  “What did you hear about LeedTech?”

  “Not much,” Zach said. “Years ago, there was some strange stuff in Bangkok with their name attached, but I was working heroin, straight Golden Triangle, not synthetics, and whatever they were up to, nobody was really talking. What do you have?”

  “Hamzah Negara, Erich Warner, Dr. Souk, Tony Royce, Randolph Lancaster, and John Thomas Chronopolous, not to mention myself, and, probably by tomorrow morning, you and everybody else who works here.”

  “Qué carajo.” Zach breathed the words out in a harsh whisper. “You can tie Lancaster to LeedTech to J.T.?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Along with dozens of other soldiers from U.S. services.”

  “That’s treason.”

  “Abso-fucking-lutely.”

  “Who’s on J.T.?”

  “Nobody,” Dylan admitted. “We lost him over on the west side.”

  “We better find him before Lancaster does.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “I have a feeling he’s the guest of honor at this get-together in Denver. We invited him, and I’m damn sure Lancaster invited us.”

  “Uh, we live here, boss. This is our town.”

  “Yeah, but White Rook is the guy who put me in charge of SDF fourteen years ago.”

  There was a much longer pause on the other end of the radio this time. Dylan could almost hear Prade churning through that boatload of “we’re so fucking screwed.”

  “Does Buck Grant know?” Zach finally asked.

  “He knows the name White Rook, but I don’t know if he knows it’s Randolph Lancaster. I just found out this afternoon, after Skeeter decrypted the files I got from LeedTech.”

  “And you were going to share this intel when?”

  “I hit the office about the same time J.T. hit our garage. Regardless of how we disseminate the intelligence, we need to protect him first. I don’t think we can do that on the street.”

  “How good is your data?” Zach asked.

  “Pristine.”

  “Send me Kid, and I guarantee nothing will get by us on this end.”

  “He’s on his way.” And if Lancaster had any gut instincts at all, the hair should already be rising on the back of his neck.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  No action.

  Not a sign of life.

  The Star Motel looked dead to the world, like it had gone out of business and forgotten to turn off the lights.

  Skeeter took a sip of the chai latte she’d brought with her from Steele Street. She’d been sitting in the garage’s current “Sheila,” a gray, late-model Buick so nondescript nobody ever noticed it. The car was like part of the pavement. She’d been parked up the street from the motel for damn near an hour and hadn’t seen one thing worth reporting. There were two cars in the motel’s off-street parking area, both of them clearly visible from her vantage point, and neither of them could possibly be J.T.’s getaway car. A ten-year-old Jeep Wrangler four-banger was not anybody’s idea of a getaway car, and neither was a Yugo.

  Unbelievable.

  A Yugo. Just the thought of an underpowered shoebox on wheels was enough to make her stomach churn, which was the last thing she needed.

  She took another sip of latte and stretched back into the seat. A lot was going on out there on the streets tonight, but not on this street out in the middle of BFE, Bum Fuck Egypt.

  Dylan wanted her out of the way? Well, he’d gotten her out of the way. The only thing that could rock this place was J.T. showing up out of the blue. That was the score. Maybe she’d get lucky, but just because J.T. and crew had staged from the Star Motel didn’t mean they were coming back. They could go anywhere, drive all night and fly out of Cheyenne, or Colorado Springs, Grand Junction, or even Salt Lake City.

  She needed to check the room, and there’d been a time when she would have done that alone, but not now. Dylan had promised her backup, and when it got here, they’d check the room together.

  She’d sure like to rescue Jane. A few years ago, she’d been pretty skeptical about a street thief of Jane Linden’s renown being
brought into the Steele Street fold, even if it was mostly through the Toussi Gallery, but the girl had proven out, and Skeeter was worried. The former most famous pickpocket in Denver was now a good friend—and J.T. was something else. She didn’t know what.

  Juiced. That was for damn sure. God, he’d moved through Steele Street like a storm.

  A small green line tracking across the screen of the small computer she’d installed in the Sheila, a Bazo 700 series PC, drew her attention to the dashboard and told her she had a call coming in.

  It was about time.

  She pressed a button on the unit.

  “This is Skeet,” she said.

  “Red Dog here, ready to relieve you,” a female voice said.

  Red Dog, she thought, wondering if that meant they’d lost J.T. She’d been thinking Dylan would send Quinn or Kid, or both, after the interrogation of Sam Walls.

  “Your location?” she asked.

  “We’re two blocks behind you and one block over. Come on up and park again on Meldrum, where you can still see the motel, and we’ll switch cars. You’ll drive Coralie home, and we’ll take the Sheila.”

  “We should check the room.” She had the key. It was a no-brainer.

  “Got that covered. We’re on it. You’re expected back at home base, and I’m not bucking the boss just so you can tromp around in some dingy old motel in your combat boots.”

  She grinned. She’d been wearing heels earlier, but Gillian would know she’d changed before she’d headed out on the street. Good footgear was just good sense, and there was nothing like a pair of combat boots to let people know you were a girl who could do whatever, whenever, to whoever—and she could.

  So why let Travis and Gillian have all the fun? Skeeter was beginning to feel like a bookmark in this mission, instead of the operator she was trained to be.