Cutting Loose Read online

  This is what happened to girls who drank champagne, and stayed out all night, and didn’t get enough sleep. They made bad decisions in tight places.

  She could die down here, which seemed a particularly cruel fate, to wander aimlessly until she collapsed from exhaustion and starvation, nothing but a skinny pile of bones for the rats to gnaw on.

  Her mother was never going to forgive her.

  Crap.

  She’d turned on a tracking device Skeeter had given her a few weeks ago that she’d stuffed in her backpack, but she had serious doubts about the signal going any farther than the next tunnel. Her GPS wasn’t working, which didn’t really surprise her. She had thirteen floors of steel-reinforced building on top of her, and no one “could hear her now” on her cell phone, either. She was in dead space.

  Another lovely thought—dammit.

  Stopping for a minute, she took a swallow of water out of the bottle she always kept in her pack. She also had two granola bars, but she was saving them for later. She needed something to look forward to, besides wandering aimlessly until she died.

  What a freaking lousy day.

  Pushing on, she decided to go left for a change instead of right. There was a way out, because there was a way in. She just had to find one of those things, the out or the in, and she wasn’t too damn particular about which one she ended up with.

  Saturday, 4:30 P.M.—north of Albuquerque, New Mexico

  “Pull over, Spence,” Mallory said, sliding her cursor across her computer screen. “Up on that rise. I’ve got something coming in.”

  Spencer pulled onto the shoulder of the interstate and waited to see what she came up with. He was hoping for something from Rick Connelly. He wanted the hot-rodder driving the Shelby Cobra. He wanted Lily Robbins, and he wanted the goddamn bracelet, and then he wanted the hell out of New Mexico.

  There was nothing here. Absolutely nothing. He’d never seen so much flat, rolling nothing.

  He didn’t want to end up spending the night in Denver, Colorado, either. What he wanted was to be back in New York, where he and Mallory could enjoy themselves for a few days at Arthur Kendryk’s expense.

  He’d changed his mind about upping the price on the bracelet. With anyone else, he would come out ahead by pushing a little harder—but not with Kendryk. Gazprom gas leases in the Ukraine would bring Lord Weymouth millions of dollars, but there was more to that deal than just having the bracelet. Kendryk would know Ivan Nikolevna had sent someone after Lily Robbins, and when Spencer handed the bracelet over, with all its incriminating evidence against a Russian scientist colluding with the Iranians on weapons-grade plutonium, it would make a helluva impression on everyone.

  Kendryk could get whatever he wanted with that kind of damaging intelligence. Hell, he could not only get Gazprom gas leases out of the Russians, he could get concessions out of the damn Iranians. That would be sweet, to make the Iranians pony up for a change. Kendryk would love it.

  Spencer never had any trouble coming up with a contract for a job, but coming out ahead with this piece of work was going to make him the top “go-to” guy in the world.

  “What is it, Kitten?”

  She was busy over on her side of the car and didn’t answer at first, and then she upped the volume.

  “We have a sighting in Mora County, in the town of Paysen, on the BOLO out of Albuquerque,” a dispatcher said. “The owner of the Road Runner Motel on Highway 92 heard our bulletin on his police band radio and reported a red Shelby Cobra Mustang to the Mora County Sheriff’s Department. The car is parked behind the motel. Be advised, the two people with the car are armed and dangerous. Both are wanted in connection with a pair of murders in Albuquerque this morning.”

  “Where’s Paysen?” he asked.

  “I’m checking, Spence,” she said, her fingers running over her keyboard. “Okay, it’s not that far. We’ve got an exit about ten miles ahead of us.”

  He pulled back onto the interstate and gunned the Town Car’s motor. Grigori Petrov was out there somewhere, and Spencer could guarantee that The Chechen would have heard the rumor on Somerset Street this morning about the Bullitt car, and Spencer could guarantee Bullitt played very well in Russia. Petrov would know exactly what he was looking for, and wherever he was, he would definitely be doing what Spencer and Mallory had been doing, listening to the police and waiting for them to find the car.

  Mallory reached over and switched on their radar detector. The last thing the two of them needed was to get pulled over. Mallory’s record was clean, but Spencer had been walking on the wild side since before he’d turned sixteen, and it had only been in his late twenties that he’d figured out how to play a more lucrative game by contracting his services out to much bigger players.

  “Can you give me an ETA?” he asked her.

  She looked at his speedometer and keyed the figure into an equation she’d pulled up on top of the map showing their location and the town of Paysen.

  She really was amazing, and her computer skills were the least of her attributes. She finished running the numbers and smiled over at him.

  “If you can give me another ten miles per hour, Spence, I think we’ll be in Paysen in about half an hour.”

  That close, he thought, and that was perfect.

  “Okay, Kitten, hold on.” He pressed down on the gas, and the Town Car responded beautifully, with all the sleek, silent power he expected, and at a hundred and twenty miles per hour, New Mexico didn’t look so bad.

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

  “Okay, Dylan, this is it,” Skeeter said from in front of her communications console. “The cops have tagged him.”

  Dammit.

  “What have they got?” he asked.

  “They’re not on him yet. The guy who owns the Road Runner Motel in Paysen called in Charlotte, and they’ve just dispatched the report. Give him a call, tell him to get out of there ASAP, and I’ll see who responds.”

  “It’s only four-thirty. Still broad daylight.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m awfully glad I tuned that girl up last week. He’s going to have to run Charlotte hard to get out of New Mexico.”

  Dylan was already on the secure line, making the call. He didn’t need to say it, but they both knew that in a flat-out run to the border, the police had all the odds on their side, not in speed, but in communication. Charlotte could outrun a POS, a Police Officer Special, any day of the week, but she couldn’t outrun a Motorola. Alex Maier’s secret op was going to be all over the front page—and that was the good news.

  With the call going out on the police band, everybody else who was listening and wanted that damn code now knew exactly where it was: Paysen, New Mexico, at the Road Runner Motel.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Saturday, 4:30 P.M.—Paysen, New Mexico

  “Come on, babe. We’ve got to move. We’ve been made.” Zach swung up off the bed, hanging up his phone and pulling Lily with him. “The cops are going to be here in about ten minutes. Let’s go.”

  He didn’t need to say it twice. She was grabbing clothes and shucking into them, almost before her feet hit the floor.

  “Ten minutes?” she said.

  “Nine, now.”

  She tossed him his shoulder holster from next to the sink. He caught it and returned the favor with her jeans. It was commando all the way. Nobody bothered with underwear.

  “Get the gun bag,” he said, since it was closer to her. He did a quick mental check for his pistol, holster, phone, wallet, and then he was heading out the door and grabbing one of the grocery bags as he went. He hadn’t brought her suitcase in with them, or his duffel.

  She was right next to him, with a shirt and her jeans on, her feet in her boots, and the gun bag over her shoulder. He also noted that she had her pistol in her hand.

  Good girl, he thought, right along with Zach, you better watch your ass.

  Two minutes later, he was firing Charlotte up, and for a moment, it looked lik
e a clean getaway. Then it went to hell.

  The old guy who ran the motel came running out the back of the damn store, toting a damn shotgun.

  Shit! He jammed Charlotte into reverse and slammed on the gas. Goddammit. If that old fart shot his car, he was going to come back and run over him twice. Goddammit.

  Ka-boom!

  That old sonuvabitch. So help him God, Zach was going to—Ka-boom!

  Dust was flying. Tires were squealing. Charlotte’s engine was roaring—and that old sonuvabitch had just hit a goddamn Shelby. Right front quarter panel, goddammit. Zach had felt the hit as he’d spun the wheel to get around the goddamn building. He slammed on the brakes, spinning the wheel the other direction, and when Charlotte came around a hundred and eighty degrees, he slid her up into first and started power-shifting them the hell out of the goddamn Road Runner Motel.

  They hit pavement in third gear.

  Ka-boom!

  But by then the old fart was shooting at air, and Charlotte was streaking toward the horizon at a hundred and twenty miles an hour in less than fifteen seconds.

  A mile later, he slowed her down and hit the eject button on the tape deck. The Bazo computer came sliding out.

  “SB303, I need a road.” They had to get off Highway 92. Any deputy who was answering the call at Paysen would be coming one way or the other down Highway 92.

  “You’re on it,” SB303 said.

  “Ninety-two is it?” There had to be another road.

  “For the next twenty miles.”

  Shit.

  “I’m seeing a few going here and there,” he said.

  “Paved?”

  “No.” It might be a shit-for-brains idea to get off on an unpaved road, but right now anything looked better than the highway.

  “It’s a bad idea, but it’s the only idea,” she said. “I’ll do what I can on this end to keep you from getting rimrocked.”

  Rimrocked, corraled, ambushed—whatever, it was all bad. The old sonuvabitch at the Road Runner could tell the cops they’d gone north, and it wasn’t going to take a rocket scientist to realize they’d gotten off the highway on one of these goddamn gravel roads throwing up a rooster tail of dust. All the authorities needed was one freaking helicopter, and it was all going to be over.

  Getting caught by the cops in New Mexico wasn’t going to look very good on his resume. As a matter of fact, it could be a career-ender. He didn’t have any illusions about that. One deep-cover agent showing up on the radar was an easy sacrifice, if it helped smooth ruffled Potomac feathers.

  But it wasn’t really the cops he was worried about. It was the guy who’d killed Jason Schroder. He was out there, this Spencer Bayonne, and from everything SB303 had told him, Bayonne was a professional. The cops wouldn’t shoot him or Lily on sight, not without provocation, which they weren’t going to get. But somebody like Bayonne was a different story. If killing them was the quickest way to stop them, then he was going to go for it, or at least do his best. All Bayonne wanted was the CIA intelligence on the Russian scientist and the Iranian nuclear program, and if he’d gotten this far, he knew exactly what he was looking for, that damn piece of macramé that had been knotted into a bracelet.

  He glanced over at Lily.

  “Are you okay?” he asked her. She had the gun bag at her feet and a strong, two-handed grip on her pistol, finger off the trigger, straight along the slide. She was so ready—and for a second, she reminded him of Jewel.

  “Yes,” she said. “But I think we lost Charlotte’s right headlight.”

  Yeah, he thought so, too.

  “What do you want? On or off the highway?” he asked her, open to another opinion.

  “Off,” she said, and he realized she probably felt like him, like a sitting duck on this strip of pavement.

  Hell. His instincts were screaming at him to get off the damn highway.

  So he did, taking the next left onto a dirt road that, after a hundred meters, slid off behind a low-rising bluff.

  Saturday, 5:00 P.M.—Paysen, New Mexico

  There were three Sheriff’s Department cars, one unmarked car, five deputies, and one old man with a shotgun standing in the parking lot of the Road Runner Motel when Spencer and Mallory cruised by at five miles an hour under the speed limit. A man in a suit was coming out of the room on the end of the motel, and there was a deputy and another guy in a suit on the other side of the highway, talking to two people who were sitting at a picnic table in the shade of a canopy hanging off the side of a trailer.

  “Well, there’s the motel,” Mallory said. “Where’s the town? Up ahead, do you think?”

  “No, Kitten. This is it, the whole kit and caboodle, Paysen, New Mexico.”

  “There’s no red 1968 Mustang.”

  “No.” There sure wasn’t.

  A car crested the rise on the horizon, a silver Mercedes, coming from the other direction and heading down Highway 92 toward the motel. Spencer kept his speed even at five below the limit.

  “Oh, my god,” Mallory said when the car was almost upon them. “Do you see who that is?”

  Yes, he did. Dammit.

  “Grigori Petrov.” The Chechen. Ivan Nikolevna’s man.

  The Mercedes passed on by, but not before Spencer felt laser-raked by the driver’s gaze.

  Two miles farther on, there was a blue Buick parked by the side of the road. One man was inside the car. Another was standing by the rear bumper with a cell phone, talking. The car was nondescript, but the men were anything but average. They looked like a couple of hoods in bad suits. Spencer could actually see the bulge of a shoulder holster under the jacket of the guy standing outside.

  “I know that car,” Mallory said. “It was parked a block down from Lily Robbins’s house this morning.”

  “A blue Buick?” Spencer asked. “How do you know it was that one?”

  “It has a University of Texas bumper sticker on the rear windshield and a broken antenna.”

  It sure did. He was impressed.

  “Texas license plate number LV-3971,” she said aloud as they passed by. “I’ll send it to Rick Connelly and see what he gets.”

  His girl was the best, but not even the best was going to find a red Shelby Mustang in this huge expanse of empty landscape, not without some help. And the only help Spencer could think of that had a chance in hell of spotting the car was a helicopter, which he wasn’t going to be able to get his hands on. If the cops managed it, he and Mallory, and Grigori, and the Texas hoods would all keep doing what they’d been doing—following the cops and coming up empty-handed.

  Dammit.

  “Remind him we still need names and addresses in Denver for the red ’68s.” He was beginning to feel like he was in the middle of a pack of vultures, and there was only one piece of meat on the ground, the damn Shelby Mustang. He didn’t know where all these guys were getting their information, but for the first time today, he didn’t feel like he was ahead of the game.

  He needed to switch that around.

  Mallory had her phone out and was keying in a number. “What are we going to do here, Spencer?”

  “Keep heading north.” These guys could hang around New Mexico all day and half the night, but whoever was driving that damn Shelby was getting the hell out of New Mexico and heading north, and that’s exactly what Spencer was going to do.

  Saturday, 5:00 P.M.—Denver, Colorado

  Gabriel stood in the main office of Steele Street, staring at Cherie Hacker’s desk and wondering where she was for about the thousandth time. Her shoes were on the floor in front of her chair, as if she’d just slipped out of them. Her dress was a big white pile in the seat of her chair, as if she’d just slipped out of it, and her motorcycle jacket was draped over the back of the chair—exactly as if she’d just slipped out of it.

  So where in the world had she slipped to?

  Dylan Hart had told her to stay put after the almost disaster with the DREAGAR 454, and Gabriel couldn’t imagine that she would disobey
a direct order, not from Hart. But she wasn’t in the break room/kitchen area, and she wasn’t in any of the bedroom suites he’d discovered farther back on the seventh floor, and she wasn’t in the office.

  He supposed she could be down in the garages somewhere.

  That’s what made the most sense.

  He supposed.

  Or actually, he didn’t. What made the most sense was her staying in the office, which he was certain was what Hart had meant. This operation they had going with Bayonne, and the encryption code, and the bounty on Gillian, not to mention the whole thing with trying to bring an agent in from New Mexico, was the type of mission where everybody needed to be ready to do their part. Going off somewhere in the building to pout was unacceptable.

  And he was positive that’s what she’d done. He knew girls like her. Bossy girls who acted like they knew everything, because compared to most people, they did know everything. Brilliant girls who had gone to college before they’d gone out on a date.

  Brilliant, bossy girls had been the bane of his existence. He’d been trapped in countless schoolrooms, budding genius camps, and innumerable hopeless social situations with them, because they were his peers. They were the world’s biggest pains in the butt, and the most fascinating creatures on earth. He had a real love/hate thing going with brilliant, bossy girls.

  They were a personal weakness, but one he usually didn’t have too much trouble keeping at a distance, because it was so seldom that he met one he thought was beautiful.

  Cherie Hacker was beautiful.

  And she should be at her desk.

  But she wasn’t.

  “What’s he doing out there, staring at Cherie’s desk?” Dylan asked, leaning on his own desk and looking out his office door.

  Skeeter tilted her head sideways to look him in the eye, and said, “I think he’s got a little thing going for Cherie.”

  Dylan fought a grin and almost kissed his wife. He had a little thing going for her.