Cutting Loose Read online

  Ten thousand dollars in a FedEx envelope packed inside the suitcase of a woman in possession of an internationally volatile encryption code only said one thing to him: trouble. If anyone was going to get arrested in Albuquerque this morning, it might well be Lily Robbins, and it just might be him doing it.

  He belled open the envelope, looked over the airline ticket, skimmed a very short letter written on expensive paper, and dropped it all back inside the suitcase.

  “Wh-what are you doing?” she asked.

  Wondering who in the hell you really are, he thought. And wondering who in the hell made you that offer. There’d been no signature on the letter, and the return address on the mailing label was a Ship and Go Store in New York City.

  The cash was preliminary at best, nothing more than traveling expenses. The bracelet was worth millions on the open market.

  “I need the macramé bracelet you were wearing at my villa the night of the rainstorm,” he said. Ten thousand dollars in cash, and Buzz-cut Boy had left it untouched in the suitcase. Considering what the real prize was this morning, Zach would have done the same thing. “That’s the one you still have, correct? That’s the one you put in your suitcase? The pilot’s bracelet?”

  “Yes. But…” She was straining to see into the backseat, but with the lid up on the suitcase, he doubted if she could see much.

  Tahiti?

  And ten thousand dollars in cash?

  Who in the hell made that kind of deal? And what was going to be that guy’s next move?

  He had a feeling those were questions with answers he wasn’t going to like. He and Alex had gone over Lily Robbins’s dossier before he’d ever left Langley, and even to the world-class analysts at the CIA, she’d looked to be precisely what she presented herself as—a schoolteacher in Albuquerque, born and raised in Montana on a ranch called the Cross Double R that had been in the Robbins family for nearly a hundred years, some of them damn lean, including most of the years since she’d been born. High-country, hard-scrabble ranching was not for the faint of heart or will.

  He figured that’s where she got her grit—and she did have grit, and impeccable aim under pressure, two things he tended to like in a woman. Considering how many people were already on to her, it couldn’t hurt for her to have plenty of both, even with him on her side.

  And he was on her side. For now.

  “Once I’ve secured the bracelet, I’ll take you someplace where you’ll be safe.” All he had to do was figure out exactly where that might be. He had one idea, and it wasn’t in Albuquerque.

  “H-how did you know about the pilot’s bracelet?” she asked. “That he gave it to me?”

  Gave? He stopped with his hand around a charcoal gray T-shirt and looked up from the suitcase.

  That was his first mistake. He should have kept his attention on her clothes, not let it stray all over the place and get caught in her cleavage. Big mistake.

  Mistake number two was not catching himself in time to keep from glancing up into her eyes.

  He knew blue, but he’d never seen anything as blue as her eyes, crystalline sapphire blue, with dark rims and light shot through the middle—and with him stretched back between the front seats, and her leaning over the passenger seat, trying to see in the back, they were quite close to each other. Quite. Much closer than he’d actually realized.

  He cleared his throat and went back to sorting through her clothes. Mark Devlin had never given a woman anything except grief and more inches than Zach personally believed—but the rumors were rampant.

  “Why don’t you tell me why he gave the bracelet to you. Did you know him, at all, even just casually?” That was what he needed to know, not “How did your eyes get so mother-loving blue?”

  “No.”

  “He hadn’t stopped at St. Joseph’s while you were there? Maybe you spoke in passing?”

  “No. I never saw him until the soldiers dragged him into the chapel.”

  “Then why did he give you the bracelet?”

  “I—I don’t know. I think he knew he was dying. Sister Theresa and I ran over to help him, and when I knelt down next to him, he grabbed hold of my hand. He…he held it so tight. I was surprised at how tightly he held me. He was…he was…so…” Her voice gave up, and she slid back into her seat, facing forward, her free hand coming up to cover her face.

  Broken up. That’s what Devlin had been—so broken up. After seeing the body, Zach’s respect for the guy, which had already been high, had skyrocketed. That Devlin had lasted as long as he had was a testament to how tough he’d been—tough enough to do the job for a dozen years, and tough enough to die for it.

  Dei gratia. He crossed himself, the action nearly unconscious—nearly. He knew the risks of what he did. He knew how easily and how quickly he could end up just like Devlin. By the grace of God.

  “Did he say anything to you? Anything at all?” He’d asked her that question before, the night at his villa, and she’d said no.

  By the slow shake of her head in the front seat, he guessed she was saying it again. For her sake, he hoped she was telling the truth. Even a New Mexico schoolteacher would be tempted by the kind of money in her suitcase, let alone by the fortune promised by the bracelet. If Devlin had told her what he was giving her, he figured Lily Robbins was smart enough to figure out what to do with it.

  Which made him wonder again about what in the hell was up with the FedEx envelope. If she’d worked fast, and if she’d been connected, she’d had three weeks to put wheels in motion and get her name and product out into the marketplace. Plenty of time for an interested buyer to make an offer, and if the deal was to be finalized in Tahiti, well, then he had a believable scenario that put her at the top of the U.S. government’s Most Wanted List.

  But nothing in her file had pointed to the kind of person who had the kind of connections necessary to put together a piece of high-order espionage in under a month. Hell, it would have taken him three weeks, at least, and he was connected from Manila to Mazatlán to Mozambique.

  He went back to the suitcase. Closer to the bottom, things started looking more promising—and less promising. Her jewelry and whatnot and makeup bags had been dumped, and lots of small stuff had settled in the bottom. He’d found the mother lode, but he was afraid the true treasure had been lost.

  “Did you put the bracelet in one of your jewelry bags?”

  “Yes.” The word was spoken quietly, but firmly.

  He liked that in a woman, too, being on the verge of tears, and still being able to pull it together.

  He sifted through everything—every earring, every eye shadow box, every necklace, every teeny brush and doodad—and got nothing.

  There was no macramé bracelet.

  Fuck. Buzz Boy and the Aston Martin had just locked in the top spot on Charlotte’s chase it, shake it, and eat it for lunch list—and there was only one way for her to do it.

  Sliding back into the front seat, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and started to dial. The audible intake of Lily Robbins’s breath stopped him in mid-number.

  He looked up, and immediately felt like the bastard she’d accused him of being.

  “Th-the, the…the—” She was stuttering, and her face had gone deathly pale. Rightly so. And truly, he was a bastard.

  “There’s no bomb,” he said, the look of terror in her eyes more than enough clue to remind him of his threat. He went back to dialing his number. “I lied about the cell phone.”

  “Y-you…”—she took a breath—“you lied?”

  He nodded. Yep, he sure had, and considering how effective that little bit of subterfuge had been, he’d do it again in a heartbeat.

  He finished up with the sequence of numbers guaranteed to get him what he needed. Alex was his best bet for a quick communications patch anywhere in the world. This morning, he only needed to go about three hundred miles due north.

  “Lied?” she repeated. “There was no bomb?”

  “No.” He brought the
phone to his ear and waited for his coded entry to route through to Langley. When Alex answered, he got straight to the point.

  “I need a secure line to SDF, Steele Street in Denver. Can you put me through…Albuquerque…yes, sir…no…I’ve got a tracker that belongs to SDF on a car I need to find, an Aston Martin, silver, Nevada plates, 01B-4381. One of the guys from the car is now dead in Robbins’s house…yes, sir. I’ve got her…Yes, sir. Scorpion Fire. I’ll wait for your call. Thank you.”

  He pressed the “end call” button on his phone and checked his watch.

  “And I fell for it?” she asked.

  He slid her a glance. He was pretty sure the question was rhetorical, especially since the answer was obvious. So he didn’t say anything.

  But she did, muttering something under her breath over on her side of the car.

  He didn’t quite hear the words, but it had definitely sounded derogatory, and might have had something to do with his lineage or the lack thereof. He wasn’t offended. He was impressed. She had a real theme going with the bastard business, and in less than fifteen or so minutes of hanging out together this morning, she’d nailed his lineage dead-on.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Saturday, 6:00 A.M.—Denver, Colorado

  Six oh freaking clock in the morning. Cherie Hacker flicked her smoked cigarette into the alley ahead of her and mashed it into the pavement with her next step. Her boots were speed-lace, lug-soled, desert tan, and tactical with sidewall traction. In her hand, she carried a pair of spike-heeled sling-backs in gold leather with gossamer chiffon bows. Dior had made her cocktail dress—white silk, ruched, and strapless. The backpack slung over her shoulder was desert camo, expensive, and complicated, holding everything from her powder brush to her canned air and screwdrivers.

  Her jacket was black leather.

  With zippers.

  Dylan Hart owed her for this.

  Behind her, she heard the limo pulling away from the curb, and her dream of waking up on the warm sands of Cabo San Lucas pulled away with it.

  Hart really owed her for this.

  She was supposedly on vacation this week, waiting for the final phase of construction to finish on Hacker International’s new luxury offices, and she’d almost—almost—made it out of town.

  Yawning, she adjusted her grip on her small piece of carry-on luggage and kept walking.

  The opening she’d attended at the Toussi Gallery last night had spilled over until morning, with a group of die-hard Rocky Solano fans deciding to move the party south to Cabo for the weekend. The plan was going forward, with the limo heading to the airport, but she wasn’t heading anywhere except the seventh floor of 738 Steele Street and a late-breaking disaster of untold proportions, which Skeeter had not exactly explained in those terms, but why in the hell else would everyone be up at six oh freaking clock in the morning, calling her?

  Cherie stopped in the alley, set down her carry-on bag, and rustled through one of the smaller pockets on her pack, looking for another cigarette. When she found one, she flipped her windproof lighter and bent her head over the flame. She inhaled, got the darn thing going, and snapped the lighter shut.

  The sun was barely up.

  At one end of the alley known as Steele Street, dawn was lighting the sky and bringing on the day. At the other, night still ruled the streets.

  Hefting her bag, she blew out a long stream of smoke and continued walking.

  She passed the ironclad door next to the “WEATHERPROOF” sign and kept walking. Steele Street had a main entrance set back into the corner of the building and a rather elegant lobby, but she was the only one who used it. Everyone else came and went through the garages.

  Well, hell. She wasn’t going through the garage in Dior, and she wasn’t slopping through the alley in her gossamer-bowed Blahniks to get to 738’s front door. Age-darkened brick, with a huge, mechanical, neo-Victorian freight elevator crawling up its outside wall and looming over the narrow stretch of pavement that was its namesake, the thirteen floors of SDF’s home base were—

  Wondrous.

  Steel-reinforced.

  Hardwired and softwared to within an inch of their lives.

  The building hummed for her. It breathed with information, digibytes, code, encryption sequences, and a million interlocking highways into cyberspace. She, and Kid, and Skeeter had made it so—but it was mostly hers. She was its creator. She’d had the vision of what it could be, and she’d made it hers. The once-infamous chop shop, home of a wily crew of teenage car thieves, had been transformed into a world-class computer-geek playground, with a BCH-designed state-of-the-art firing range. BCH, an acronym affectionately referred to as “Bitch,” stood for Bang, Chaos, and Hacker. There were a lot of Bitches in the building, and more security goodies than Fort Knox.

  At the front entry, she keyed a ten-digit personal identification number into the lock, and a massive set of mahogany doors opened in near silence. As she passed through to the marble-tiled foyer, she noted the extravagant bouquet of fresh flowers on a delicately proportioned console set against the wall.

  The flowers were always fresh. If they weren’t, she was supposed to step back outside, key a lockdown code into the door, and disappear off the street. Those orders were straight from Dylan, the big boss. In the eight years that she’d been doing contract work for him, the flowers had always been fresh.

  The elevator on the ground floor only went to the offices on the seventh floor, and she rode up with the familiar winding clacks and clangs, trying not to think about Cabo. She was due a little downtime, a little fun, instead of facing Saturday night alone.

  Again. Hell. She let out a sigh and then took another long drag off her cigarette.

  She needed a new habit.

  Sex would be nice.

  She leaned back against the elevator and thought that idea over a bit—then wished she hadn’t.

  Damn. Cabo had looked promising. She’d been getting along pretty well with this guy from one of the big law firms up on Seventeeth, a guy named Henry Stiner. He’d been cute and blond, a little pudgy, but with that whole surfer-boy thing working for him, except surfer boy in a Burberry suit. He was also on his way to Cabo San Lucas for the weekend with everybody else from Toussi’s, including Suzi Toussi’s new gallery girl, Wanda.

  Cherie swore under her breath, watching the floor numbers light up, one after another. Wanda and Henry—oh, yeah, she could see where that was all going to end up.

  She swore again, and sucked another long drag off her cigarette.

  Dylan owed her.

  The elevator came to a grinding stop on the seventh floor, and the doors opened to a familiar scene: Red Dog prowling, pacing a stretch of turf in front of a bank of television screens, each turned to a different news channel, half of them foreign.

  The auburn-haired woman gave her a laser-sharp glance when the elevator opened, a look capable of unnerving even the hardened guys who worked with her.

  Cherie wasn’t fazed.

  She exhaled and entered the office in a cloud of smoke. To her credit, it did cross her mind to spend a little more time at the gym.

  Yeah, like that was going to happen. One totally ripped redhead in the office was probably enough.

  “Hey, babe,” she said, heading for a desk she’d long claimed as her own. It was off in a corner, all by itself, and had a fabulous view of the mountains through one of the floor-to-ceiling double-hung windows lining the north wall. It was also the only place in the office where a girl had a chance of sneaking a smoke.

  “Hey, Hacker.” Red Dog’s amber-eyed gaze softened for a moment, and a brief smile curved her mouth, before she went back to monitoring the news.

  A smile, Cherie thought. Good. Red Dog didn’t always smile, but she was damn good at saving people’s asses, not that Cherie ever ended up in those my-ass-needs-saving situations. She was definitely of the office-support-staff, part-time-contract-employee variety, not the save-the-world-or-die-trying operator-type emplo
yee.

  “Hack, over here,” a tall blonde working on a keyboard said.

  “Hey, Baby Bang.”

  Anything could be up when Skeeter was working a keyboard. The girl could jack a hard drive’s innermost secrets almost as quickly as Cherie could herself.

  “Come check the download off that Bazo number eight, the one we’ve been having trouble with. We need to get it up and running ASAP.”

  The Bazo? Cherie lifted her eyebrows. She’d been called in at six A.M. for the number eight Bazo? She and Skeeter had been working on the compact PCs for the last couple of months, and the number eight had been giving them fits. She’d figured it out, though, last night between the champagne and the canapés.

  But still, geez, the number eight Bazo was in a car nobody even drove—and Henry Stiner was on his way to Cabo San Lucas with Wanda the gallery girl.

  There was no justice.

  She dropped her carry-on next to her chair and set her backpack on top of the desk. Crap. No justice, and technically, no smoking in the office, so she inhaled a last drag and looked for the damn soda can she kept for these occasions. When she didn’t see it anywhere, she knelt down to sort through the papers in her trash, thinking she might have accidentally thrown the empty can away.

  “Hi, Cherie,” the not-so-tall blonde on the couch behind her said. “Love the Dior.”

  Cherie had noticed Rydell’s fiancée when she’d gotten off the elevator, and the cute thing was half buried in newspapers spread out around her on the couch and lying on the table in front of her—The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor.

  “Thank you, Honey. Nice, uh, gym shorts.” Honoria York was from back East, very smart, very connected, and obviously getting off to a rough start today. A baggy old gray T-shirt and University of Wyoming basketball shorts? Those had to be Rydell’s from way back.

  Spying the soda can, she reached a little farther under her desk, wondering how it had gotten so far away, and then, once she was under there, decided to take an extra drag off the cigarette, before she ground it out in the can.