Loose And Easy Read online

  7:27 A.M. She felt like an idiot for wanting to see him again as soon as possible, like maybe this morning, about nine-oh-five or so, right after his meeting-but there she was, Esme the Impatient, Esme the Insatiable, Esme Maybe in Love.

  Duffy’s made great coffee, and it was a great summer morning in the Mile High City after one helluva night, but it was 7:28 A.M. and Dax’s time was running out.

  He had the place to himself, and that hadn’t been his plan, or his wish. One of Duffy’s cooks had just finished watering the pots and pots of flowers filling every corner of the outside patio, geraniums and petunias still fresh with morning dew, and another cook had brought out the coffee pot to give him a refill and another chocolate croissant to fill him up, and it was all just great, but damn he’d hoped to be sharing it with her, the her, Suzi Toussi.

  He hadn’t been hit that hard by a woman in a long, long time. It wasn’t something a guy was going to forget.

  He pushed back from the table and tossed a ten next to his plate. The next time he ran into Suzi Toussi, he wasn’t going to let her get away. All he had to do was make sure there was a next time.

  He could do that. He could make damn sure there was a next time.

  Suzi slipped out of her black 1955 Porsche Speedster, the one she’d bought off Kid Chaos, Nikki’s husband, over at 738 Steele Street, and quickly walked to the side door of Duffy’s Bar. Everybody used the side door if they wanted into Duffy’s before eleven o’clock in the morning, except for those brave souls who hazarded the alley, and the crumbling brick steps, and the wrought-iron gate into the patio. She hurried down the hall past the bathrooms, and ducked behind the coat closet to get to the door leading to the patio from inside the bar.

  For a second, her heart soared ridiculously high. There was a cup of coffee on a table, a plate with a half-eaten chocolate croissant-and a ten-dollar bill lying between the plate and a small bouquet in a vase.

  He’d already paid and gone.

  Her smile faded, and she just stood there and stared at the empty table, the sense of loss she felt completely out of proportion with the circumstances. But there it was, taking the air out of her.

  She was late, and he was gone. Dax Killian. God, what a name.

  She looked to either side of the patio, just in case… just in case-but no luck. She’d missed him.

  Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. He probably hadn’t even shown up. The coffee could have been anyone’s, and even if it was his, by any test of reason, it was impossible to feel a sense of loss over missing someone a person didn’t even know, or had barely met.

  And yet it was there, weighing on her in an odd, sad way.

  She looked around the patio again, then walked over to the iron gate leading into the alley. There was no one, only the bricks of the surrounding buildings warming up with the morning sun, the damp alley where one of Duffy’s busboys would have hosed it down-and a table where someone had been just minutes before she’d arrived.

  She went over to the table and sat down in the chair where that someone had been sitting, and told herself she’d never been this ridiculous in her life.

  She touched the coffee cup. It was still warm.

  Oh, hell, she really had just missed him, or someone.

  They’d barely met, she assured herself. She’d spent more time talking to the surveillance cop last night than she’d spent talking to Dax Killian.

  He shouldn’t matter, not to a reasonable woman, not at all. Yet she found herself running one finely manicured finger along the edge of the croissant plate, and when she looked at the flowers in the vase, she saw the note.

  Duffy, it said. If she doesn’t show, would you see that these get to Suzi Toussi at Toussi Gallery on Seventeenth. And it was signed-Dax.

  Unbidden, a thrill went through her, and a very pleased, cat-in-the-cream smile curved her lips. The flowers were gorgeous, fresh and dew-kissed, picked right out of Duffy’s pots, a bright red geranium surrounded by a dozen or more purple and white double petunias, but the vase-ah, the vase. Upon closer inspection, it was exquisite, and she had to wonder where in the world Dax Killian had found a Chihuly vase between one and seven-thirty on a Saturday morning?

  The only reasonable answer was that it was his, and he’d left it, this lush little piece of art, on a patio table for her.

  He’d come into her gallery last night looking for Johnny, and that connection was more than enough.

  With a name and a connection, she could find anybody.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Dylan Hart’s office always left Buck Grant cold. It was so damned austere, like the man himself, coldly efficient, everything expensive and in its place. A guy didn’t feel good even bringing a cup of coffee into the room. As a matter of fact, he didn’t think he’d ever seen anybody drinking coffee in Dylan’s office. He’d sure as hell never seen anybody set a coffee cup on Dylan’s desk.

  Which was Buck’s problem. He’d brought a cup of coffee with him into Dylan’s private lair, already slopped a little over the edge, and now he didn’t know what in the hell to do with his cup. The finish on the damn desk probably cost more than the wood to build it. Buck was no connoisseur of anything that didn’t have a caliber and require a cartridge, but he was no cretin either.

  “Sir,” Dylan said, setting an extra chair down in front of the desk and taking the cup out of his hand.

  Hawkins brought his own chair in, too, and shut the door behind him.

  Buck got the good chair, and Dylan put his cup on the desk, sloppy drips and all-problem solved. That’s what a second in command did, solve the commander’s problems, and nobody was better at it than the two men in front of him.

  Good. They were going to need to be better- better than they’d ever been if they were going to solve the problem he’d brought with him from Washington, and even better than that if they were going to do it without losing the team.

  He dropped a pair of files on the desk and sat down. Nothing about the damn thing was going down any easier this morning than it had yesterday afternoon when he’d first seen it. If anything, the longer he’d had to think about it, the more disturbing it had become.

  In half an hour, the rest of the team would be assembled in the main office, but Grant had wanted to see Dylan and Hawkins first. They needed to be told first, and there was no easy way to do it.

  “We’ve been tagged for an assassination in South America,” he said. Nothing unusual there; that was all in the normal course of SDF’s business, of any Special Ops business. “If you can bring him in, the powers that be would like to talk to the guy, but bringing him in is secondary to retiring him. Four agents have been lost trying to do one or the other, so the idea has been put forth to send in a team, your team.”

  Still business as usual-SDF often got tasked with missions other entities had failed to successfully accomplish.

  Grant pushed the top file across the desk, but kept his hand on it.

  “No matter what you think, this guy is not who you think he is,” he said, and after a moment, during which he hoped to hell those words sunk in, he removed his hand.

  He saw the look that passed between the other two men, and he was glad of it. His guys didn’t get paid to be delicate, but the file was asking a lot of anyone-a goddamn helluva lot.

  Dylan reached for the file and opened it without hesitation-and then he froze, turned to absofuckinglutely stone. Not a flicker of emotion showed on his face. Nothing. But within that complete stillness, Buck was reading a maelstrom. Dylan’s breathing had missed a beat and started back up too shallow, too fast. Buck didn’t have to guess what his subordinate was struggling with. He knew-utter disbelief, total denial, and fast on its heels, confusion, and in about thirty more seconds, it was all going to coalesce into anger-cold, glacially cold anger.

  And then fury, hot, and dangerous, and unacceptable.

  Hawkins leaned over, took a look at the photograph stapled inside the folder, and sat back in his chair. Afte
r a couple of quiet seconds, he brought his hand up and rested it on his chest, open, relaxed, as if he was feeling the beat of his heart.

  He well could be. It was a lot to take in.

  Dylan was looking at the photograph, frozen in his chair, and Hawkins was looking at the floor, his hand over his heart-and Grant could have heard a fucking pin drop in the room.

  The next move wasn’t his, and he had to wonder why in the hell he’d brought a cup of coffee with him. Hope, he guessed, that somehow this wouldn’t be so goddamn awful that he wouldn’t even be able to drink a goddamn cup of coffee.

  Fat chance, and he couldn’t remember a time when he’d hated the politicos in Washington, D.C., more than this moment. He was pretty sure the two men in front of him were feeling the same way, and he could A1 guarantee they were both contemplating assassination-but not of the guy they’d been tasked with killing. No, they’d both be wanting the one who had dreamed up this goatfuck in the first place.

  They could do it. Grant’s job was to make sure they didn’t.

  Their gazes met again on the other side of the desk, and this time, Grant didn’t have a clue what was passing between them.

  When Dylan’s gaze returned to the folder, and he started reading, Grant guessed the coast was nominally clear for a discussion of the situation, or at least a recap of the information he’d already read three times.

  “The guy’s name is Conroy Farrel, which, as you will both remember, was one of J. T. Chronopolous’s code names, a situation which was carefully created by one of our government’s darker agencies. It’s a case of identity theft, if you can call it that when it reaches this level and has been sanctioned by the government. He was put into Paraguay by the CIA, though they aren’t the ones who created him. Although, as you may well suspect, I have reason to doubt that denial.”

  Neither of his guys was talking, which was the exact situation Grant wanted to avoid. He wanted them to talk, a lot, to figure out how to explain to the rest of the team-to Kid, who’d lost his brother; to Creed, who had almost died losing J.T.-how and why Conroy Farrel had been set in J.T.’s place by their own government, with J.T.’s connections, and J.T.’s clearances, and worst of all, with what looked very much like J.T.’s face. The similarities were eerie, not complete, but eerie. For most dealings, Conroy Farrel could undoubtedly pass as SDF’s first dark angel without batting an eyelash.

  Dylan finished reading the first page of the file and handed it over to Hawkins, silently-and so it went, page after page.

  “Farrel has gone rogue,” Grant continued. “And the CIA is having a helluva time trying to take him out. The prevailing opinion is that SDF, who knows more about the real J.T. than anyone on the planet, is the team to go get this guy.”

  Dylan shook his head. “Not the team,” he said.

  “No,” Hawkins agreed, accepting the next page.

  Well, that was the last thing Grant had expected, that they would out-and-out refuse to take the mission.

  “Hawkins and I will go in and get him for you,” Dylan said, finally lifting his gaze from the folder and meeting Grant’s eyes with his own. “Just the two of us.”

  Grant looked to Hawkins, who nodded. “Nobody else needs to be involved.”

  Grant knew what they were doing, trying to protect the rest of the team, and he couldn’t fault them for it, but neither could he allow it.

  “The CIA has already lost four other agents. I can’t authorize sending another two guys in, when it was the team that was tagged for this. Success is mandatory.”

  Dylan’s gaze grew very cold.

  “They’ll get their success,” he said.

  “But we go in alone,” Hawkins added.

  “If funding is an issue-”

  “We’ll use the CHF,” Hawkins finished Dylan’s sentence for him.

  Oh, hell, the CHF.

  “You mean the Contraband Holding Facility?” Grant asked. “That coffee can full of diamonds in Quinn’s kitchen?”

  A mission a few years ago involving a load of contraband dinosaur bones had netted the team a cache of diamonds nobody had bothered to officially report, and the windfall had gone into their emergency fund, the CHF.

  anything.”

  Another glance passed between the two men.

  “Nobody needs to know we went in alone,” Dylan said. “Let Hawkins and me do the recon on this thing. That’s all, just the recon. We’ll report back to you with what we find, and the three of us can decide what to do from there.”

  “You know that’s the best way,” Hawkins said, seconding the plan. “We can’t use CIA intel to catch a rogue CIA agent. We need boots on the ground. Two people, not a team, not at this stage.”

  Grant considered the compromise and knew he’d just been handed a solution to his biggest problem with the tasking. He wasn’t likely to lose his whole team, if the whole team wasn’t involved. He didn’t have to figure out how to control Creed and Kid, if Creed and Kid didn’t know about Conroy Farrel.

  On the other hand, he couldn’t think of a better way to get the guy killed than to put his fate in the jungle boy’s and Kid’s hands-and yes, he knew that might have been exactly why this thing had landed on his desk. Plenty of folks in Washington didn’t think he kept a tight enough rein on his SDF operators. Some of those folks might be counting on them to run wild, do the deed, and then take the fall for good.

  “I’ll expect a report in eight weeks,” he said, coming to his decision. He didn’t have to worry too damn much about controlling Dylan Hart and Christian Hawkins. He’d never seen either one of them not in control of themselves.

  “We need twelve, minimum, for an initial evaluation,” Dylan said. “Especially if we’re going in cold. We’ll need time to set up a network.”

  “Prade?” Grant asked, and Hawkins nodded.

  “Is connected from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego.”

  “Then you’ve got twelve weeks,” Grant said. “And I’ve got the whole team waiting out there for something.”

  “Did you get us Ramos?” Dylan asked.

  In answer, Grant slid the second folder across the desk. “He’s all yours.” And he was another one who was nothing but trouble, another independent thinker. SDF was full of them, and Grant wouldn’t have had it any other way, but by any standards, according to some information he’d gotten, Johnny Ramos was coming off of one helluva night.

  Something was up, something big. Johnny felt it as strongly as anyone else in the room when General Grant, Dylan, and Hawkins came out of Dylan’s office.

  Sitting on top of the snack table, Skeeter stopped with a Sugarbomb doughnut halfway to her mouth. Standing next to her, Creed shoved the last bite of his in his mouth, and Kid set his back on the tray, uneaten.

  Smith and Quinn were sitting at a table with a chessboard between them, and though they stopped playing the game, they both kept eating, and Zach was sitting at Cherie Hacker’s desk, smoking with the window open and drinking coffee, and specifically not eating a Sugarbomb doughnut.

  Johnny chewed and swallowed and rose to his feet.

  Something was up.

  He couldn’t read Dylan very well, but the guy looked a little gray. Hawkins he could usually read a little better, but Superman wasn’t giving anything away, other than the seriousness of his expression.

  General Grant, Johnny couldn’t read at all. No matter what catastrophe hit, the guy was always the same. He always moved at the same pace, talked at the same pace, and both of those could be a little on the slow side. He was a measured guy, and when the general’s gaze landed on him, Johnny felt measured, too-measured up.

  “I heard you had a busy night last night,” General Grant said to him, and Johnny felt his heart drop all the way to the soles of his feet. It took everything he had not to look at Skeeter, who’d been called by the cops last night, questioning his whereabouts.

  Hell, if he got arrested while Grant was in town, he could damn well forget about being part of SDF, and there wa
s a damn good chance he was going to get arrested. He had a call in to Lieutenant Loretta. He’d saved a couple of women from being kidnapped to Mexico, but he’d killed a guy while doing it, and the lieutenant was going to want a full accounting, if not his ass in her jail, before this was finished.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “I heard you and Dax Killian can both be placed at the scene of a cocaine sting set up by the Denver Police Department this morning.”

  Oh, shit.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The old man looked him over again. Everybody else was looking at him, too, Skeeter looking like she wanted to bust the tar out of him for being an idiot.

  “If you have any other civilian sins on your head, Ramos, you better confess it all to Lieutenant Loretta, and if you can manage to keep your name out of the paper, you’ll report here to Dylan, Wednesday morning.”

  That sounded like good news.

  He angled a glance over at Hawkins, who gave him a nod, and although Johnny felt the thrill of that acceptance go all the way through him, he felt the gravity of Superman’s thoughts even more strongly.

  He shifted his attention back to Grant.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. This was what he wanted, a chance to be part of all this, and that’s what he’d be, one part. The team was the thing, the whole of it. The parts could come and go, but the work of the team was what mattered. It stretched out in the years of missions behind them, and it stretched forward in the years of missions ahead of them, and for a while, if he could keep his name out of the paper, he was going to get to be a part of it.

  He would never tell a soul, but in his heart, he was just so goddamned proud of himself, he could bust.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “Hey, baby.”

  “Hey.”

  “This is your idea of fun, right?”

  “Not quite,” Esme admitted, feeling the mud and the rain soak into her pants where she and Johnny were huddled together under a makeshift shelter he’d lashed together out of sticks and branches in the middle of the woods. “Actually, I’m kind of a city girl at heart.”