Cutting Loose Page 19

  It was either a breach, or it was a small widget in the drawings where someone had merely forgotten to connect the dots, and there was only one way to find out which it was—breach or widget.

  Go look.

  Fortunately, technically, wherever the widget break was would still be in the building. So fortunately, technically, even if she went looking for it, she’d still be staying put at Steele Street, and fortunately, she had a pair of cargo pants in her carry-on.

  It took her all of two minutes to shimmy into the pants under her dress, another minute to get her Dior off over the top of her head, all behind the relative privacy of her big swivel chair, and about fifteen seconds to drag a T-shirt on. Her gold Blahniks went on the floor, next to her chair. One pair of socks and her desert tan tactical boots later, and all she needed was her backpack and her very own personal palm-sized Bazo VJX-UZ468 700 series PC.

  She downloaded the drawings onto her Bazo, tightened the laces on her boots, slung her pack over the shoulder, and followed orders. She stayed put at Steele Street. She didn’t go anywhere—except down.

  Saturday, 2:30 P.M.—Albuquerque, New Mexico

  Spencer woke to the distinctive ringing of Mallory’s cell phone—the opening riffs of B.B. King and Lucille doing “The Thrill Is Gone.”

  The thrill was never gone with Mallory. Smiling, he watched the sheet slide off her body as she leaned over the side of the bed, reaching for her phone. Pretty kitty, she was all curves, and she was all his.

  “Yes,” she said, answering the phone, and a moment later, she said it again. “Yes.”

  He slid his hand over her hip, loving the silky feel of her skin. He pampered her, and it was his pleasure.

  “Thanks, Rick,” she said, and he knew she was talking with Rick Connelly, the head of Kendryk’s intel and information network in Weymouth, England. “Let Kendryk know how helpful Irena Polchenko has been. She’s saved us hours on this job, and go ahead and narrow your Shelby Cobra Mustang search down to Denver. The more quickly you could get us those names and addresses, the better. Photos would be helpful, but I know that’s a lot to ask.”

  She laughed then, a throaty, sexy sound, and Spencer leaned over and gently bit her on the butt. She worked men with her voice, and Rick Connelly wasn’t immune.

  “That would be great, Rick,” she said. “I won’t forget.”

  She set the phone down and rolled back over to face him. “Three weeks ago, Alejandro Campos ordered up a private jet in Ilopango. The first stop was Albuquerque.”

  Which was no surprise.

  “After Albuquerque, there was a change in the flight plan from Washington, D.C., to Denver, Colorado.”

  “So we head north,” he said, and she smiled.

  “We head north.”

  Saturday, 3:30 P.M.—Denver, Colorado

  The damn CIA.

  There was a reason Dylan and the damn CIA had been at loggerheads for the last fourteen years, and it wasn’t only because they’d caught him unofficially “couriering” a few of their documents out of Moscow back when he’d been too green to stay out of their clutches. They’d used the word “stealing” back then, but as with most things concerning the CIA, it was a murky designation and had more to do with point of view than a viable prosecution.

  They hadn’t changed. Murky was still their calling card.

  “What do you mean, he doesn’t want to play?” he asked Skeeter, who was standing next to his desk with a very unhappy look on her face. Gabriel Shore had stepped out of Dylan’s office to take a phone call, but Gillian was present, and she didn’t look happy either.

  “Alex Maier says his boy is good and can handle himself,” Skeeter said. “That he’s not running interference with the New Mexico cops, and that he’s not letting us in on the deal, and he thanked us for hooking Zach up with the tracking device, but this was under his jurisdiction, and we were to stay out of it.”

  “Have you done a background check on Lily Robbins?”

  “She’s clean, Dylan. One hundred percent schoolteacher, born and raised in Montana, divorced for a year, went to El Salvador to film a documentary on nuns, just like Honey said.”

  “At the church where the CIA pilot died,” he said. “They could have had contact.”

  “Which opens up a can of worms big enough to pull a deep-cover agent out of Central America and send him to Albuquerque to talk with the woman.”

  “Only to run into two guys with mob connections from Las Vegas already there ahead of him,” Dylan filled in the next blank.

  “Those guys both end up dead, real quick,” Skeeter finished. “And whoever killed the second one is looking for the deep-cover agent, has his car identified, and isn’t too far behind.”

  Yes, Zach was definitely taking care of himself.

  “Dylan,” she said. “We figured this all out hours ago. If we’re really going to help him, if we’re going to get ahead of this instead of just chase our tails, we need to know why he went after Lily Robbins, why the Vegas guys went after Lily Robbins. And the only thing that makes sense is that the CIA’s pilot gave her something, either something physical, or some kind of code, which she may or may not even know she has.”

  “General Grant is working on it.” And Grant had come up with the same damn idea: There had been contact between the schoolteacher from Albuquerque and the CIA pilot. It was the only plausible connection.

  “We need more than Grant working on this, or we’re going to end up with a dead chop-shop boy and wish we’d tried harder.”

  Dylan, apparently, had a little more faith in Zach than Skeeter did.

  “He survived four years in Asia and eight in El Salvador without us,” he said.

  “And now he’s knocking on our back door with a pack of wolves on his ass.”

  She was right.

  He looked at Gillian, and she said the one thing they were all thinking.

  “White Rook. Tell him to get on Alex Maier and get us what we need.”

  And then she said something nobody else was thinking. “Until then, I’ll fire up Corinna and head to Paysen, New Mexico. That’s where you’ve got the Bazo holding, isn’t it, Skeet?”

  “Uh, yes, but no, I—”

  “No,” Dylan echoed the sentiment. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “I could go,” Skeeter said.

  He gave her a look that very clearly said no, she wasn’t going anywhere either, thank you very much—and again, for the record, what in the hell was Hawkins doing in Disneyland?

  “Nobody’s going anywhere,” he said. “Skeeter, you stay on the police bands. If he’s spotted, he needs to know immediately. I’ll contact Grant again, see if he’s been able to rattle any cages on his end.”

  “Tell him to rattle Alex Maier,” Gillian said.

  Gunners, he thought. He was surrounded by gunners on estrogen.

  “We’ve got a problem,” Gabriel Shore said, rushing back into the office.

  They had more than one, Dylan could have told him.

  “One of my contacts who covers Kendryk just called to confirm that Spencer Bayonne left New York late last night on a flight heading to Albuquerque, New Mexico.” The young man looked distressed—whereas a quick look around the office showed everyone else looking pretty much flabbergasted. “I don’t know what would make Bayonne think Gillian is in Albuquerque, but that’s too damn close to discount it as a coincidence. He has no connections anywhere in New Mexico. Albuquerque has never shown up anywhere in his files. I think he’s going for the two million, not the encryption code. He’s closing in on her.”

  Bayonne was closing in on somebody, all right.

  “That’s it,” Skeeter said.

  “We’ve got him,” Gillian added, a wicked smile curving her lips. “Now we can get ahead of the game.”

  Gunners, Dylan thought, looking at his two female operators, and suddenly, the day didn’t look quite so goddamn long.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Saturday, 4:00 P.M.�
�Paysen, New Mexico

  Zach was inside her again, moving slow, staying half asleep, so lazy and sweet. She slid her tongue into his mouth, again and again, and he angled his head for a better fit.

  Her body was hot against his, her skin hot. They were both damp with sweat, and he figured if they ever decided to get out of bed—and that was a long shot—they could hit the shower and do the same damn thing, over and over again, except with soap.

  Yeah. That sounded like a great idea.

  She lifted her hips against him, rocking into him, and he slid his hand down to cup her ass and hold her close. He was probably in love.

  About an hour ago, she’d sutured his shoulder with one of his kits, five stitches across the top. He’d thought he’d only needed three, given the complete lack of anesthetic, but she’d gone the extra mile. Of course, she’d done it naked, so there had been some compensation for the pain. She was so stacked.

  He thrust into her again, drawing her leg up over his hip, getting closer.

  “You feel so good,” she whispered against his mouth, and yeah, that pretty much summed up all of his thoughts, too—You feel so good. Better than good. His brain was melting.

  What a perfect day.

  Murder, mayhem, a hot car, a hotter woman, a killer on the loose, and the cops on his ass—he could give it up. Sure he could, all of it except the woman, and the car. He needed those. He didn’t mind mayhem either, if he was the one instigating it on some lowlife. Murder never bothered him, though he preferred the less litigious and more accurate word “killing.” Sometimes that’s what the job took, and he’d never lost any sleep over doing his job. Not that aspect of it anyway.

  “Mmmm, Zach.” She tightened around him, her breath sighing in his ear.

  He loved it, the way she whispered his name, the silky wet heat of her.

  Bearing her back down onto the pillows, he moved into her faster and harder, until it was all over one more time.

  He lay there for a few moments, just breathing in the lovely way she smelled, and trying to get his head back on straight. A smile curved his lips. It was hopeless. She was amazing, and he wasn’t going to get his head on straight any time soon. Rolling off of her, he collapsed back on the bed and wondered, honest to God, could they really do this all day long?

  Another grin curved his mouth as he settled in next to her and pulled her close. Yeah, he thought, they probably could.

  The ringing of his phone told him it probably didn’t matter what he wondered.

  He reached over and picked his cell up off the nightstand.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Ensign, this is SB303 with all the late-breaking news.”

  “Go on,” he said, checking his watch. Four o’clock—still midday. They had a few hours to go until dark.

  “We think we know who killed Jason Schroder and that he is after the encryption key we believe you are carrying.”

  Fuck. He thought it, but he didn’t say it—and he was now, officially, one hundred percent awake.

  “Go on.” He wasn’t admitting to anything, not without direct orders from Alex.

  “According to our source, a lot of sharks are in the water on this, and they’re all going to be looking for you, or whoever they think has the encryption key.”

  Nothing new there, but how in the hell had SB303 found out about the encryption key? Then again, it was SDF, and Dylan Hart.

  “Schroder’s killer, we believe, is a man named Spencer Bayonne. He runs with a woman, Mallory Rush. Both of them are contract players, and they specifically do a lot of contract work for a man named Sir Arthur Kendryk.”

  “Never heard of any of them.” Which didn’t mean much.

  “We’re hoping they haven’t heard of you, either,” SB303 said. “But we can guarantee that they’ve heard of Lily Robbins.”

  He was beginning to wonder who hadn’t heard about Lily Robbins and her ratty little macramé bracelet with the fate of the free world woven into its knots.

  “Who’s your source?”

  “Family, sent to us by Grant.”

  Christ. It didn’t get any better than that, and Zach wondered if Alex knew his case was leaking like an antique sieve. Shit.

  His case officer had said a lot of people were in on this, a lot of people trying to retrieve the bracelet, and a lot of people trying to cover their asses for the loss of top-secret, foreign-policy-shaking intelligence. Alex had been more worried about the State Department on the “covering their ass” end, but it seemed to Zach that the Department of Defense had a leg up on all of them. SDF sure as hell did.

  “What are you recommending?”

  “Stick with the plan. You come here. We secure the data, get it to your boss, and once he knows he’s won, he can come in and clean up the mess. With everybody at the top happy, nobody is going to care too much about what we had to do at the bottom to make it so.”

  Make it so. Zach couldn’t help but grin. How many times had he gotten a set of orders with the unspoken but strongly implied directive of “Make it so.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to claim this victory for yourself?” It was possible. It happened all the time, at all levels of the playing field.

  “You’re the one with your ass on the line and with some very bad people out to kick it. The boss says come home and you can have all the glory.”

  Glory. Zach did laugh at that. There was no glory. That was the point.

  “And that’s all the good news,” she said.

  If that was the good news, he went ahead and braced himself for the bad.

  “Go on.”

  “Lily Robbins is officially a murder suspect in the killing of Paul Stark at her house this morning. Given the crime scene and that she fled, nobody in Albuquerque is particularly thinking self-defense anymore.”

  “They couldn’t possibly have the coroner’s report yet.” Good God, it hadn’t even been twelve hours since Paul Stark had come out of the stairwell.

  “Their change of heart, from Ms. Robbins being taken hostage by whoever killed Stark to Ms. Robbins killing Stark, is based on a spent casing they found in her bathroom that matches the casings on a couple of boxes of hand-loaded cartridges they discovered in her gun safe.”

  “So we’re all fugitives from justice.”

  “All three of you,” she agreed, and he knew exactly who she meant—him, Lily, and Charlotte. The cops were looking for all of them.

  Suddenly the border seemed a very long way away.

  “What coroner’s report? Who’s a fugitive from justice?” The voice came from behind him, and he could have kicked himself. “Is that SB303?”

  He turned to look at Lily, and gave her a short nod. He’d tell her in a minute. He just wasn’t going to tell her the truth. She didn’t need any more bad news, especially when it was something he could get cleared up.

  No, he decided. He wasn’t going to tell her she was wanted for murder.

  “What can you tell me about Bayonne?” he asked.

  “Quite a bit, actually. He’s got verified history of international arms sales. He’s especially popular in West Africa. He’s also moved a lot of heroin out of Asia, usually at Kendryk’s bidding. He has an unsavory habit of cutting people up with his knife, which, as far as I’ve been able to glean from the scuttlebutt on the airwaves this morning, is what happened to Schroder, a clean Wingate. He apparently has a passing resemblance to Bruce Willis, likes the high life, expensive hotels, luxury cars, good food, rare wine, and his woman, Mallory Rush, not necessarily in that order. The woman is important to him. They’ve been together a long time, over ten years.”

  Zach was impressed, and also demoralized. He hadn’t been able to keep a woman for ten years, and this scumbag Bayonne had?

  There was no justice. Of course, Zach would be the first to admit that he didn’t have a passing anything to Bruce Willis, let alone a resemblance.

  “We have also verified that he was on a flight from New York to Albuquerque late l
ast night, and no reason to be there except for the same reason you’re there.”

  Didn’t anybody have any secrets anymore?

  “I’ll watch out for him.” Watch out for Bruce Willis with a knife.

  “Good, Ensign, and I can guarantee we’ll be watching out for you.”

  Yeah, Zach thought, hitting the disconnect and then just looking at the phone in his hand. Yeah, he believed her. For the first time in a long time, he really did believe someone was looking out for him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Saturday, 4:30 P.M.—Denver, Colorado

  Two hours, this time, Cherie thought. It had only taken her two hours to go from bad to worse, much worse. She’d found the breach. It had been a blind opening, where from even a short distance, no more than five feet, the brick wall on the north side of Steele Street’s basement looked solid. It was only upon closer inspection that she’d noticed the wall was actually split, with one part of the wall about two feet farther back than the other part, and considering that whoever had come up with the amazingly simple access had put it close to a corner, it truly was almost invisible. The rats knew it was there, and whoever had stolen Charlotte knew it was there, and Dylan knew, and now she knew, too.

  “Lucky, lucky girl,” she muttered under her breath, lifting her flashlight a little higher in hopes of seeing something, anything, she recognized.

  She did not.

  She was lost in a labyrinth of brick walls, and old tunnels, and abandoned utility access ways. For the most part, the tunnels were dry, but in some parts, she’d been slogging through standing water, and in a couple of places, she’d been slogging through running water, which she’d found particularly intriguing. Running from where to where? she’d wondered.

  For a moment, she’d also considered following the running water to see where it went. Actually, she’d considered that course of action for quite a few moments, which is how she’d ended up wherever she’d ended up, somewhere in the dark with the rats and a few other things she wasn’t going to think about too much.