On the Loose Read online

  The picture with the article had shown her running across an outdoor stage at night, slipping through a fantastical forest, somehow looking like she was lit from within, trailing two ribbons, three strategically placed leaves, which left her one leaf short of even the most basic modesty, and not a damn thing else, with a bunch of other scantily clad fairies flying out of the trees behind her, all of them doing their part, practically in the frickin’ buff, for Shakespeare and Kardon County—and yeah, he’d probably spent way too much of the last four months looking at the photo and thinking about her naked.

  “It was a theatrical production,” she explained, unnecessarily, “with creative license.”

  “It was Shakespeare in the nude. No wonder you made so much money.”

  “It was for charity.”

  “It was outrageous.” And that was the goddamn thing. Her whole life had been played out in public, laid out in gossip rags, society pages, and bad news headlines. Hell, it hadn’t taken any investigative skills to build a Honey York dossier, only a couple of dozen back issues of East Coast newspapers and a few magazines. And yet, it didn’t add up. The woman had graduated from Harvard magna cum laude, published two books, one a best-seller, spent three years running fund-raisers for half a dozen different charities, gotten arrested for indecent exposure—and then what? Become a world-class party girl for the rest of her life?

  Smith wasn’t buying it.

  “According to the article, you played the part for three years...despite the reviews.”

  “You’re working way too hard here.” She didn’t even look at him this time, but to his amazement, a faint blush of color washed into her cheeks.

  “They were brutal, especially the Times critic,” he said, “especially about your performance.”

  “Only because I have no talent other than for running around on stage half naked,” she said, flipping another page in her book, the color in her cheeks deepening.

  Okay. He’d buy that, even if it did seem a little harsh.

  More than a little harsh.

  “Well, you must have done something right for them to ask you to play the part three years in a row,” he said, inexplicably coming to her defense.

  Honey kept turning pages in her book, snapping them over one at a time. “Like you, Mr. Rydell, I don’t live my life based on other people’s opinions.”

  But she was still blushing. That was one nice thing about being a covert operator—things had to get completely out of hand in a very political way before anyone even knew guys like him existed, let alone what they were doing. Smith didn’t just like his privacy; he depended on it for his survival.

  And there she was, year after year, splashed all over the front page and the society page.

  “So what did you do after leaving the Kardon County Human Services Foundation?” Honey’s résumé, if it could be called a résumé, dead-ended after the Shakespeare arrest. She’d disappeared from everything except the society pages.

  “I moved on to other things, some new interests.” Which was no answer.

  “But kept the same boyfriend all these years?”

  Okay, so that didn’t sound particularly professional, but too bad; given their personal history, he was curious.

  More than curious.

  “Boyfriend?” One perfectly arched eyebrow lifted a fraction of an inch.

  “The underwear model,” Smith said, getting to the heart of the other two thirds of the article. The Ocean writer had all but swooned on the page over the guy and packed the interview with all the juicy details.

  Juicy.

  Details.

  Smith had marched the damn thing up to the thirteenth floor at Steele Street and shown the article and its accompanying “young stud in his underwear” photo to Skeeter, to get a girl’s opinion.

  Baby Bang had taken one look at Honey’s boyfriend and grinned like the Cheshire cat. “Sex on a stick” had been her girlish opinion. “Something women like to lick,” she’d added—which was way more opinion than he’d wanted.

  So what. It was none of his business, not really, and he didn’t know why in the hell it bothered him.

  Yes, he did.

  “Robbie MacAllister?” Honey asked.

  Yes, according to The Washington Post’s society page the week Smith had gotten back from El Salvador. There’d been a nice picture of the two of them at some fashion gala, the guy with his arm around her, holding her close, looking very protective, which had bugged the crap out of him. Smith had been the one protecting her in El Salvador, and doing a damn good job of it under circumstances a helluva lot more threatening than a friggin’ fashion show.

  “He looks young.” Damned young, and immature, and dissolute, especially in the picture of what was apparently his most famous underwear ad, the one included in the Ocean article. The young guys Smith worked with didn’t have the luxury of pouting in their underwear for a living, but he couldn’t see Honey York dating an Army Ranger. Never in a million years. And he couldn’t see her dating a DEA agent.

  Or an SDF operator.

  Hell. What had happened between them had been a fluke, a point that had hit home hard when he’d seen the society page and realized it had taken her all of a day and a half to bounce back into a social whirl complete with a boyfriend—a very young, very rich, celebrity boyfriend. It was enough to make a guy wonder if he’d made any kind of an impact at all.

  And then she’d made the society page again, the next week, on the arm of a French count, which had especially rankled. European royalty, in general, didn’t sit well with Smith. Quasi-famous, polo-playing, race-car-driving, champagne-sipping French royalty didn’t sit well at all. But hell, he wasn’t the boss of her.

  That job, apparently, belonged to the guy she’d shown up with in Manhattan two weeks later, the hedge-fund king of Wall Street, a guy much older than her who looked like anything that happened between him and his underwear needed to be kept private. Very private. They’d lasted a whole weekend, and then, the next week, it had been back to the underwear model, and then back to the hedge-fund king for another fun-filled weekend of opera openings and charity fund-raisers.

  The last time Smith had checked the society page, the day before he’d left for Peru, she’d been with a whole new guy who went by the unbelievable name of Kip-Woo, but whose real name apparently was Elliot Fletcher-Wooten III.

  Geezus. She made his head spin.

  “Well, he was young when he started in the business, and the underwear campaign took him straight to the top. Actually, the whole campaign was considered a turning point in male fashion photography,” Honey said. “But why in the world are we talking about Robbie MacAllister?”

  At least the guy wasn’t Robert MacAllister III, and they were talking about him because the guy kept showing up in her life. The Ocean article was four years old, which meant Honey had held on to a boyfriend twice as long as Smith had held on to a wife, which galled the hell out of him, plus she was seeing all those other men on the side.

  “I own some of that underwear.”

  “Well, that’s very nice,” she said, shifting her attention back to her book and snapping over another page. “It’s very high quality, more expensive, but worth it.”

  And wasn’t that interesting—he’d actually shocked himself with his own idiocy. Where had that come from? About the underwear?

  “My girlfriend bought it for me.” And that wasn’t much of a save. Not really.

  She snapped another page over in her book, but didn’t comment.

  He didn’t blame her. Some things didn’t deserve conversation—his underwear being a prime example.

  Dammit. Smith had done nothing but think about Honey for four damn months, and now that he was sitting right next to her, the last damn place he would have ever expected to be when they’d dragged him out of his Lima hotel room in the middle of the night and given him this damn mission, the very last, he was overthinking the situation and letting his imagination get the better o
f him.

  And he was angry.

  Mostly at himself for thinking about her for four damn months. San Luis should have been a one-night stand, not an obsession. They had nothing in common.

  And yet, here they were again, off on some wild-ass adventure. Geezus, it felt like fate, but he wasn’t buying goddamn fate. Free will, plain and simple, was the only thing he believed in. Give him free will and a .45, and he’d take care of himself, thank you.

  But his free will had been usurped at three A.M., and he was stuck with Honey, and a briefcase, and a whole boatload of useless information that was none of his business.

  Shakespeare in the nude. Geezus.

  Smith shifted in his seat, and stared out the window, and let another mile roll by before he finally gave in to what had really been sticking in his craw for the last four months—dammit.

  “I owe you an apology.”

  His admission was met with silence.

  “For what?” Honey asked after a moment.

  He glanced in her direction and found her watching him with a mixture of wariness and curiosity. He didn’t blame her for the wariness. Anyone with any brains used at least a modicum of caution when dealing with him.

  “I was a little rough on you that night in San Luis.”

  Her eyebrow went up again, and sure enough, the blush returned.

  He almost grinned. He hadn’t meant it like that.

  “I mean with tossing you into my room and taking your weapon, and just generally...well...”

  “Just generally bossing me around and threatening to break my neck?”

  “Yeah.” Christ. He had threatened to snap her neck. He’d kind of forgotten about that part. “I’m sorry. Sorry if I hurt you.”

  “I’m not,” she said, shifting her attention back to her book, but without flipping any more pages. “I was in over my head, Smith, way over, and if you hadn’t tossed me into your room, I probably wouldn’t have made it through the night. I don’t know who those men were, but I think you do, and I think they’re a lot scarier than Diego Garcia.”

  She had that part right. Tony Royce’s guys had all been handpicked from the scum of the earth, chosen for their brutality and sociopathic tendencies. She wouldn’t have lasted four hours in their hands, and God forbid something should have happened to her like what had happened to Smith’s friend and SDF partner, Red Dog.

  The thought sent an unnerving chill down his spine.

  Yeah, he’d been rough—expedient, getting the job done the best way he knew how—and yeah, she’d gotten a little knocked around in the process, but she’d survived.

  And then she’d turned out to be someone he cared about more than he should. Life was so damned unexpected sometimes—most of the time.

  “I’m glad you understand.” Most people, especially in her social circles, didn’t understand. They didn’t know what it really took to make the world go round. They didn’t know about guys like him, and worse, they didn’t want to know.

  “I’m glad I understand, too,” Honey said, glancing up and meeting his gaze. “Robbie MacAllister isn’t my boyfriend anymore. We just go to fashion events together.”

  Well, he didn’t know what in the hell to make of that, not precisely, not with all those other guys literally in the picture.

  “The girl who bought my underwear is long gone, too.” Just a fact, nothing more, but what the hell, he’d throw it into the mix and see what happened—and he did hope something would happen, and really, he should have known better, a whole lot better. He’d thought he was smarter than that.

  Apparently not.

  Dammit.

  What happened was a small smile, and more of the soft blush, and a sliding away of her gaze, and hell, he didn’t know what to make of that, either.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sona, Colombia

  From her luncheon table on a second-story veranda, Irena Polchenko watched a black sedan drive slowly up the tree-lined lane leading to the main gate of her villa and the surrounding compound.

  Good, she thought, pushing the remainder of her pollo con arroz aside and reaching for a fresh lime from a bowl on the table. Ari was late, Aristotle Alexandar Poulos, her chief of security, but he was finally here, and with the right news, all would be forgiven.

  Or there would be hell to pay. Time would tell.

  Sitting back in her chair, she rolled the fruit between her palms, then brought it close to her nose. The scent was fresh with the tang of citrus, the lime warmed by the sun and warm in her hands, the day’s moment a lush and sultry reminder of why she lived in the tropics: She was a reptile at heart, cold-blooded, and she needed the heat.

  With a practiced move, Irena slid a folding knife out of her pants pocket, her thumb extending the blade the instant it was clear. Two concise cuts into the fruit’s green flesh got her what she wanted, a thin, perfect wedge of lime to drop into the long neck of her bottle of Corona. She pocketed the knife and waited until the amber liquid foamed up to the lip.

  When it was finished, she brought the bottle to her mouth and took her first sip, still tracking the car with her gaze.

  Afternoon sunlight glinted off the slow-moving sedan and threw shadows across the backdrop of the green valley below, a verdant expanse of farmland extending for miles between the hills bordering her property to the east and west. Her three-story, Spanish-style home was tucked up against the base of the western slope, four miles from the small village of Sona. Outwardly, the villa and compound looked like a typical Colombian landowner’s residence.

  But looks were deceiving.

  The lane leading to the villa’s front gate was a straight half-mile section of hand-laid paving stones lined with tall, stately trees on either side. The two rows of decorative trees had ten-meter breaks in them, spaced exactly one hundred meters apart. Should the need arise, a sniper in the villa, or on the slope above it, could use the trees as ranging markers to judge the distance of an approaching vehicle.

  The black sedan was five hundred meters out and closing—an easy shot for one of her long gunners, an easier shot for her.

  Irena took another short swallow of beer, her gaze sliding past the lane to the valley beyond, watching for anything unusual, anything out of place. She’d been compromised, the previous day’s mission ending in near disaster, and she was on edge. The fact of the failure was bad enough, the reasons yet to be determined, but there was something else...something as yet unknown that had triggered a warning in the deepest recesses of her brain, and it made the edge she was on very sharp, very dangerous.

  The car came to a stop below her in the circular drive, and she heard the doors open.

  Setting the beer aside, Irena knocked a Turkish cigarette out of the pack she always kept on hand. The lighter she pulled out of her back pocket was sterling silver inlaid with gold, the Gila monster passant crest and the motto hers: Vincit Qui Se Vincit, He conquers who conquers himself.

  She held the flame to the end of the cigarette and inhaled deeply. The lighter had been a gift from an English lord for services rendered and a profit beyond his expectations. She knew her business, and she knew how to turn circumstances to her advantage. Without a doubt, yesterday’s failure would be rectified.

  Exhaling a long plume of smoke, waiting for Ari to make his way to the veranda, Irena let her gaze travel back along the tree-lined drive. To an aviator’s eye, the carefully paved lane served another purpose. The surface of the path was dead level, rather than crowned, and the stones in the center of the lane were a distinctly lighter shade than the others. The trees were laid out precisely fifteen meters from the centerline, roughly three light aircraft wingspans. Lantern pedestals were placed between each tree-line break, dead center. Along with the lanterns, the pedestals contained ILS beacons, an instrument landing system, which could be activated by an approaching aircraft with the correct transponder codes. Day or night, the lane could be used as an all-weather, emergency landing strip.

  And there were other run
ways on the estate. Irena’s property extended almost a mile beyond the main gate, with three separate areas of buildings. The structures appeared to be single-story Colombian farm shacks with adobe siding and thatched roofs.

  They were not.

  Despite their ramshackle facades, the buildings were steel-frame structures containing vehicles, aircraft, maintenance facilities, warehousing, weaponry, and troop barracks. Higher up on the hill, two buildings housed her communications center. The rambling dirt roads connecting the areas were actually compacted roadbase faced with three-quarter-inch gravel, strong enough to support heavy vehicles and medium-lift aircraft. Some of the strategically placed buildings were mounted on skids, and could be rearranged to align the roads into more landing strips.

  It was all hers, every last stick of it, every board, every stone, every inch, all hers, accumulated by the force of her will and a mind that did not rest or accept defeat. She’d done it by herself, alone. No man had ever given her anything of value—except once.

  Irena took another long drag off the cigarette and pushed the thought aside. Sona was not the place for such thoughts.

  The French doors opened behind her, and a very trim, athletic-looking man with finely chiseled European features and blond hair stepped onto the veranda, taking care to move into her line of peripheral vision before he approached the table—with good reason. She was never unarmed, and she never missed, not with her rifle, and not with the custom Model 1911-variant .45 in a holster on her thigh.

  “Guten Tag, patrona,” he said. Good afternoon.

  “Hans.” Irena nodded, her attention already moving toward the man coming in behind him. Ari Poulos was nearly six feet in height and weighed in at a little over two hundred pounds. Half Greek and half Guatemalan, he was forty-three years old, had served as a Guatemalan soldier in the civil war, and had been trained by Israeli military advisers in small unit tactics and weapons, including antiaircraft missiles and snipercraft.

  “You’ve had twenty-four hours since Cuzco,” she said evenly, her gaze taking in both men. “What do you know?”