Cutting Loose Page 18

  The small house was very tidy, the outside walls painted a faded rose, the wooden door a sun-bleached robin’s egg blue to match the shutters on the windows. A short rock wall with a big wooden gate enclosed a courtyard at the front of the cabin, and he could see flowers everywhere, fruit trees shading a table, and a water fountain bubbling in the middle of a stone patio, splashing water on the stones.

  “More trouble than you think, Ensign,” J.T. said, slouched back in the driver’s seat, one arm stretched out over the steering wheel. His arms were burned brown by the sun, his white T-shirt coated with a fine layer of dust.

  J.T. worked out, and his muscles were huge, even at seventeen. Zach had been doing the protein drink thing, trying to build a little bulk of his own.

  He glanced at his arm where he’d rested it on the Caddy’s door frame and very casually made a fist. Yeah, he was getting there. Nothing like J.T., not yet, but he was getting there.

  “So what’s the plan?” he asked, looking back over to the other side of the car. “We swoop down, snatch him, and swoop back out?” He hadn’t wanted to admit it to J.T., but the whole idea of going up against a sorceress pretty much scared the crap out of him. He’d given it a lot of thought on the drive down, and he thought clean and fast was the only way to go. Get in. Get Hawkins. And get out.

  “No,” J.T. said, his gaze not wavering from the small, colorful house sitting down below, bathed in New Mexican sunlight. “She’s going to want to have wine.”

  Wine?

  He had to be kidding?

  “Uh, I don’t think drinking with her is a very good idea.” Didn’t J.T. know anything about sorceresses? Geez, Zach did, and they could all be summed up in one word—dangerous, especially to men. The sorceresses didn’t go after the women so much. It was the men they wanted. Hell, they were here to rescue Hawkins, weren’t they? A guy. And weren’t they just a couple more guys?

  Morgan Le Fay, he wanted to say, but somehow, he didn’t think J.T. spent a lot of his time reading about King Arthur.

  Zach did. A lot. And Morgan Le Fay had been that guy’s freaking doom.

  But J.T. didn’t seem to be listening. He was watching the house, and being very still, or maybe he was watching the water splashing out of the fountain, or the wind drifting through the flower beds.

  “You see that table over there under the trees?” he finally said.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s where she’ll bring us food. It’s a nice evening, going into dusk, and she’ll want to eat outside.”

  How in the hell would J.T. know that? And “going into dusk”? What was up with that? It was almost poetic, and coming out of J.T., the biggest and baddest of them all, it didn’t do a damn thing to reassure Zach that they knew what they were doing here. But it did a couple of damn things to make him wonder if the sorceress knew they were sitting up on the road, staring at her place, and she was sending some kind of spell up the hill to confuse them.

  Confusion was a great trick of enchantresses, and they seemed to have a powerful knack for confusing men.

  Dusk. J.T. didn’t use words like dusk. Zach did, but he sure as hell didn’t use them down at the shop.

  He was beginning to think that maybe this was one scrape Hawkins should get out of on his own, or that maybe he and J.T. should have brought a couple more guys with them.

  The place was a trap, and when J.T. reached down and turned the key in the ignition, starting the Caddy back up, Zach didn’t know what alarmed him more, that they were actually going down there, or the huge grin on J.T.’s face.

  Alazne…her name alone was enough to bring a grin to Zach’s face, even after all these years. She’d been twenty-eight the summer she’d cast her spell over him, the summer he’d been seventeen. Dylan had been the first chop-shop boy she’d spirited away, and of them all, Zach thought the boss had come away the least scathed, the least changed. Alazne had met her match in Dylan Hart, and Zach figured that’s how the whole connection between the west side bruja and the Steele Street boys had begun.

  J.T., she’d cut, literally, with a sacred knife over a fire of mesquite and sage, three lines deeply incised in his upper left arm. He was a warrior, she’d said, and he’d needed a warrior’s mark.

  Hawkins, she’d given wings, literally, tattooed them in a great sweep up one of his arms and across his back and down the other arm to past his wrist. He was the dark angel, a savior. She’d kept him longer than all the other boys, over twice as long. Too long, Dylan had said the morning he’d sent J.T. and Zach down to New Mexico to bring him back.

  She’d waited longer for Quinn, until he was almost eighteen, and it wasn’t what she’d given him so much as what she’d taken, some of his anger. He’d had a lot as a kid.

  Then she’d taken Zach, “spirited” him away one night in her old green pickup, making the moonlight ride from Denver to her place in New Mexico for a month of lazy days and long nights, and during those long days, and especially during those long hot nights, she’d given him something he’d had damn little of in life—trust, a hundred reasons and a thousand ways to trust a woman. He’d never forgotten the lesson.

  Last, she’d taken Creed, and she’d taken him young, and of that encounter, all Zach had been able to surmise was that it had been Alazne who had been changed. Or maybe she’d run out of time for saving lost boys. No one knew, they only knew she’d never taken another, not from Steele Street.

  None of the guys ever talked about their time with Alazne. They all knew what happened in New Mexico. That it was magical, and sexual, and profound. For a month each, or two months with Hawkins, she let boys be men, and there wasn’t a one of them who hadn’t thought he’d been up to the task. The experience changed them for life.

  He looked down at Lily sleeping in his arms.

  Life-changing experiences, yeah, he’d had a few. He avoided them for the most part—he bent his head down and kissed her on the forehead—but he sure as hell hadn’t avoided this one.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Saturday, 12:30 P.M.—Albuquerque, New Mexico

  “Spence, I think we’ve got something,” Mallory said from the balcony of their suite at La Paloma, The Dove. The hotel was exclusive, not listed in a phone book anywhere, and, of course, almost prohibitively expensive. Tucked away on forty acres of what had once been a much larger estate, the mansion epitomized the grace and elegance of southwestern architecture. Few concessions had been made to its transformation into a hotel, other than state-of-the-art business amenities and world-class communications in every room.

  Mallory had been using all of them since they’d checked in for what he hoped would be a very short stay.

  “What, Kitten?” he asked, walking out onto the balcony. He’d taken a shower, washing off the day’s dark deed, and had wrapped a towel around his waist.

  At forty-five, he knew he was in his prime, steel-bellied, muscled, at the top of his game with years of experience behind him. He’d been told more than once that he looked like Bruce Willis, and he always thought that Bruce should look so good.

  “It’s a stray conversation on a police band out of Mora County. I set up my audio recognition to cue on the car, just like you suggested, and the word red gave me a hit, some squad complaining about a red car ‘going over a hunnert’ coming off the interstate.”

  She was a genius, and exceptionally beautiful, with chestnut-colored hair and exotic green eyes. She had pale skin, perfectly arched brows, and lush, generous curves, and she’d been solely and exclusively his for the last ten years.

  “Where’s Mora County?” he asked.

  “North of Santa Fe.”

  “A lot of red cars can go over a hundred miles an hour.” It was a lead, but not a good lead, and he didn’t want to find himself north of Santa Fe and then discover he needed to be west of Albuquerque, heading to Las Vegas, and he had a feeling they were going to end up in Vegas. Things happened there. Nothing happened north of Albuquerque, because there wasn’t anythin
g north of Albuquerque. Denver, Colorado, was up there somewhere, he supposed, but what in the hell ever happened in Denver?

  He no sooner asked the question than a couple of answers hit him hard. There’d been a bloodbath in Denver five months ago. Lots of big names getting whacked, Zane Lowe for one, and Tony Royce for another, and a whole team of Royce’s men—and they’d all been killed by Gillian Pentycote, Red Dog. Everybody knew the girl had been gunning for Royce since the day she’d come out of rehab. It was how she’d gotten hooked up with Kendryk. She’d gotten blown on a hit, and then she’d wanted favors.

  Jesus.

  He needed to think.

  “Pull up the intel files Kendryk gave us on the bracelet,” he said. “Especially the information Kendryk got from Irena Polchenko.” Now there was a world-class criminal mind, utterly ruthless; ran her organization with an iron fist and a half-Greek, half-Guatemalan henchman named Ari Poulos and a very scary guy named Hans Klechner, a former East German intelligence officer.

  Over the last year, Irena had coordinated and executed a couple of very lucrative deals for Kendryk in South America. She’d also been the one to give him the heads-up on the CIA plane shot down in El Salvador three weeks ago. When it came to the people with the money, the clout, and the brains to truly run a criminal organization on an international level, the company got pretty rarified. Kendryk ruled the top level of black marketeering, partly because of the legitimate base of his operations, and Polchenko was a definite up-and-comer into the trade at those higher levels.

  In comparison, he and Mallory were very small-time, more errand boys than movers and shakers, which was exactly the way Spencer had planned his career, but which in no way meant he could afford to be careless or sloppy.

  “Got them,” Mallory said, pulling the files up on her computer screen.

  “Give me the names attached to this deal.”

  “Dr. Mila Yanukovich.”

  The Russian scientist, the Nobel laureate, who had sold out her country and the West by colluding with the Iranians on nuclear technology—she was the one who’d gotten this all going.

  “Skip the Eastern Europe data, and go straight to what happened in El Salvador three weeks ago.” That’s where Irena had come into the deal, and her information was the closest they had to the last known location of the bracelet—until he’d gotten more recent intel out of Jason Schroder this morning.

  “Alejandro Campos.”

  Spencer knew of him, but he was strictly small-time. He played well in Central America and northern South America, but he didn’t get much beyond that.

  “Diego Garcia.”

  Dead. Even alive he’d been very small-time on the world stage, but he had been the one tasked with downing the plane, Spencer was now guessing by Ivan Nikolevna, who had plenty of Ukrainian-gas-lease reasons to want the information encoded on the CIA’s macramé bracelet. As low tech as the transportation device was, it was proving very effective. In three weeks, no one had seen hide nor hair of it, and all anybody seemed to have was a name, Lily Robbins, and nobody was having any luck finding her either, even with a goddamn personal address—except for the unknown shooter with the Shelby Cobra Mustang.

  Spencer was going to end up hating that guy. He could already tell.

  “Honoria York-Lytton.”

  She had been one of Irena’s nearly priceless pieces of intelligence. Whatever York-Lytton’s connection to the bracelet happened to be or not be, she was next on Spencer’s list. She was American, a Washington, D.C. socialite, and the bracelet had ended up in America, a fact confirmed by the hapless Jason Schroder mere hours ago.

  From the looks of her, she’d probably take about ten seconds to break. Come to think of it, she was probably the perfect size for Mallory to sharpen her claws on.

  “Miguel Carranza.”

  Big-time on the world stage, very big-time, head of the Cali cartel out of Colombia, business associate of Polchenko’s. He was the one who’d contracted with Polchenko for the hit on Garcia. Spencer wasn’t going to get within a thousand miles of the guy, no matter what Kendryk offered. If Carranza wanted the bracelet, he could have it.

  “C. Smith Rydell.”

  Honoria York-Lytton’s bodyguard, formerly with the DEA; he and Polchenko had worked together in Afghanistan. Polchenko had confirmed his connection to Joint Ops Central in Lima, doing counter-drug operations with the DEA, and that he’d been assigned to York-Lytton through the U.S. State Department.

  And after that, nothing. He’d shown up in El Salvador, and disappeared from same.

  “We’ve got two usable names,” he said.

  “Campos and York-Lytton,” Mallory agreed.

  “York-Lytton is closer.” And the woman’s life was an open book. Every move she made was splashed in a newspaper somewhere. If he and Mallory headed to the airport now, they could probably have York-Lytton tied up, literally, by nightfall. Even if she didn’t know anything about the bracelet, she’d know something about her bodyguard. Any small thing would help.

  “Give me five minutes to get us a flight out of here,” Mallory said, reaching for her keyboard. Then she stopped and looked up at him. “We know from Irena’s report that Rydell and York-Lytton flew into Ilopango when they arrived in El Salvador. She even had the load manifest for the cargo on the C-130 they arrived on. But she doesn’t say how they left.”

  “Chances are it was out of Ilopango. Who do we know there?”

  She laughed. “The only person we need to know is Kendryk. Let me put a call through. Irena has good contacts all over El Salvador, and especially good contacts at Ilopango. Someone in Weymouth can have her give us a call. It shouldn’t take more than an hour or two.”

  “So what are we going to do until then?” he asked, already coming up with a couple of ideas.

  “Well, my love,” she said, a very catlike smile curving her lips, “for starters, you could give me your towel.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Saturday, 2:30 P.M.—Denver, Colorado

  Four hours.

  That’s how long it had taken Cherie and Dr. Shore to put the DREAGAR 454 hard drive back together. Four hours of almost nonstop lecturing on Marsh Annex protocols, and what was and was not allowed when doing contract work for the Marsh Annex, and how he was going to have to write her up for destroying an invaluable piece of Marsh Annex equipment of which there were only twelve in the whole world.

  Bull, she’d thought. If he’d gotten his hands on a supercalifragilistic piece of hardware, he would have done the same thing, she’d told him, and then she’d very politely pointed out to him that the DREAGAR 454 had not been destroyed. That lo and behold, once they put all the pieces back together and tweaked them a bit, the darn thing worked perfectly.

  Probably even better than the one he had in his office at the Marsh Annex—but he hadn’t wanted to hear any of that.

  And he’d driven Roxanne back to Steele Street—the jerk. She couldn’t believe she’d thought he was cute, even for a minute.

  He wasn’t. He was obnoxious, and overbearing, and rather condescending, and she didn’t like him at all, and he and Dylan were in Dylan’s office—with an extra chair, no less—having their very important meeting, with Skeeter and Gillian going in and out, and Cherie being the only one specifically not going in, which left her specifically out.

  She hated him for that, too, just for the hell of it.

  Whatever was going on with the DREAGAR 454 was top secret, and she knew better than to be curious, but it just added to the whole damn day.

  Setting her computer in her lap, she swiveled back around so she could see out her window, and she took another long drag off her cigarette. Her soda can was in plain sight on top of her desk, and they could all just lump it.

  Dammit. If she lost the 2Z8 contract for the DREAGAR 454 Subliminal Neuron Intel Interfacers, she’d never forgive herself. Danny wouldn’t forgive her, either—and to think the day had started out with such promise. She should have just gone
to damn Cabo San Lucas.

  Smoking, and bitching quietly to herself, she scrolled down on her computer screen to the next schematic drawing of Steele Street. The building was old, built way back in the 1940s, but the original blueprints had still been around when she’d first started with Dylan and the boys, and she’d had everything converted to digital. New drawings had been done when Dylan had reinforced the building with steel, and there had been another set done sometime in between those two.

  She was comparing all of the drawings, floor by floor, trying to spot something she’d never seen before—a weakness, a place her security system did not reach. After two hours of looking, she hadn’t found it yet.

  She scrolled to the next page, took another draw off her cigarette, and dropped the old ash in her soda can.

  Everybody in the office was on edge, including Skeeter. Honey had left to go back to Washington, D.C., and Cherie had been sitting in the main office all alone since she and Dr. Shore had gotten back. Normally, she would have gone home, but Dylan had very specifically told her to stay put at Steele Street.

  He’d been a little upset about having to wait four hours to get the download off the DREAGAR. To his credit, Gabriel Shore had not blamed her for the problem. In fact, he’d taken all the heat himself, not even telling Dylan that she’d taken the hard drive apart.

  She didn’t regret it, not for a minute, and everything she’d learned taking it apart, she’d learned twice as well when she and Shore had put it back together. There were still three pieces that she’d kept intact, recognizing them for what they were—the heart and soul of the DREAGAR 454, the “subliminal” part of the subliminal neuron intel interfacer. She hadn’t infringed on his copyright, and she’d been careful to point that out to him as well.

  At least he’d taken the heat.

  She probably owed him for that, though God only knew what someone as uppity and overbearing as Gabriel Shore would want in payment.

  The next set of pages she scrolled to was the basement. She’d been over them half a dozen times, but logically, the basement was the most likely place for a breach, and this time when she looked, going over the damn thing millimeter by millimeter, she saw it, a small break in the line on the north side of the building.