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  Especially when their whole goddamn problem was Negara’s fault. Royce had fulfilled his part of their bargain. He’d delivered Dylan Hart’s head on a platter, and Negara had lost him, allowed him to escape from a damn-near inescapable island. Royce had been at Negara’s compound on Sumba a week ago, and the place was a fortress, complete with a garrison and around-the-clock guards. Given the condition Hart had been in at the time, Royce found it doubly unimaginable that the man had escaped. The kind of drugs Negara had been pumping into him should have left him comatose.

  So what had happened between the interrogation Royce had witnessed Sunday night and Monday morning when Hart had vanished from the island? Two guards had been found dead, one with his throat slit, the razor still in it, a deed well within Hart’s capabilities under normal circumstances, but the circumstances shouldn’t have been normal. The man should have been down for the count, not overcoming his guards and escaping.

  And Negara had the balls to keep him cooling his heels, after a fuckup like that?

  Royce discreetly checked his watch again. Forty minutes, that’s how long he’d been waiting for Negara to get out of his bath, or off the phone, or finish his lunch, or whatever it was he was doing behind the set of closed doors at the end of the living room.

  “Mr. Royce.”

  Tony turned at the sound of the voice. A slight man in a dark shirt and slacks, one of Negara’s “enforcers,” gestured toward the now-open door. There were two more men of a similar demeanor in the room, both of them armed, both of them lethal, even without the pistols he knew they each carried concealed in shoulder holsters beneath their black suit coats.

  Royce didn’t trust either one of them, any more than he trusted Negara. The only thing keeping his ass in one piece in this den of murderers and thieves was his ability to deliver Dylan Hart—again.

  “Mr. Negara,” he said, entering the office. Two more guards were inside. All of the men he’d seen in the house had tattoos on the backs of their hands, a circle with three long lines running through it—Jai Traon pirates.

  “To-nee,” a small, white-haired man said with a big smile, pushing out of the chair from where he’d been sitting behind a mahogany desk. Hamzah Negara, Butcher of the Sabu Sea, weighed in at one-thirty on a good day, one hundred and thirty pounds of seventy-year-old sinew and bone wrapped around the heart of a despot.

  “It’s good to see you,” Royce said. It wasn’t, but the lie came easily enough. They always did.

  “And you, To-nee.”

  “I trust your flight went well?”

  “Yes, yes, very well.” Negara gestured at a chair in front of the desk, part of a group of three, and Royce moved to sit down.

  “I see you brought your house guards.”

  “Yes, most of them,” the old man said, taking the closest chair and signaling one of his men. “There are more arriving this afternoon, to help with security a little, here and there.” He gave a slight shrug. “As you know, I am an international businessman. Besides my property holdings, I have many current investments and commitments in your country.”

  Bullshit.

  Negara had seventeen million dollars’ worth of current commitments in the United States and not a penny more, not this week. That’s how much of the warlord’s China White cash Hart had gotten away with, under orders. Somewhere, some Foreign Affairs experts in the upper echelons of Washington’s more hallowed halls had decided the Indonesian government’s goodwill was more important to the United States than Hamzah Negara’s in the prevailing world climate, and they’d put forth a clandestine policy change to reflect the new view. Hart had simply been the messenger. Royce knew how the game was played.

  So did Negara. The old barbarian had contributed his “expertise” to more than a few CIA operations over the years, and Royce had seen no reason to let the relationship end on a sour note—not when Negara was willing to pay six figures for him to deliver his enemy into the warlord’s hands.

  “And yet it is important to me to see Mr. Hart again,” Negara continued. “He is here, correct?”

  “Correct.” Or he would be by the time Whitfield’s party started. Royce had made damn sure of it. “He’ll be at Senator Arthur Whitfield’s mansion tonight, for a reception the senator is giving for the visiting British delegation.”

  “And where will he be staying?” the old warlord asked.

  Negara hadn’t exactly paid for that information, but Royce could be generous, especially when he was getting what he wanted.

  “I would post men at the Four Seasons and the Lafayette.” He’d studied his enemy for years, and nine times out of ten, Hart stayed at one of the two most expensive hotels in the city. With this trip having come up so suddenly, Royce figured Hart would be more inclined to fall back on habit, especially considering the shape he must be in—not so good, even after almost a week of recovery time.

  “Thank you, To-nee.” Negara glanced at his nearest guard and made a hand gesture. The man immediately left the room.

  Royce hid a smile. Hart was never going to know what hit him. Royce hadn’t had a doubt when Ambassador Godwin had been assassinated all those years ago that making himself a copy of the files would someday come in handy. Negara’s mistake had created that someday, and twenty years of moving through the shark-infested backwaters of congressional Washington had given Royce the means to deliver the bait to draw out Dylan Hart with precision accuracy. The Godwin affair had been dirty, the dirtiest, just the sort of dirt that sank to the bottom of the Potomac but never went away. All Royce had done was help it resurface in the most likely place to get him what he wanted, in the hands of Arthur Whitfield, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The names on the bottom of the Godwin orders guaranteed a phone call to the Pentagon, and it would have taken only one to stir up a hornet’s nest, the kind nobody wanted to touch with a ten-foot pole.

  Enter General Richard “Buck” Grant, the Department of Defense’s dirty dog of dirty deeds, and his band of renegade operators, known as SDF. His orders would have been cut and dried—get the file back or get another line of work. Either outcome worked for Royce. He didn’t care what happened to the Godwin file, the people who’d signed it, or Buck Grant. He didn’t care what happened to Hamzah Negara’s seventeen million dollars.

  He did care about Dylan Hart.

  The man had been a thorn in his side for years, and their last go-around had cost Royce his reputation and his career. For that, Royce had handed him a one-way ticket to hell—except he’d escaped.

  Hart was going to wish he hadn’t. The second trip Royce had been forced to cobble together made the one he’d spent weeks planning look like a fucking garden party. He was pretty damn proud of it and his ability to produce work of such high quality on such short notice, if he did say so himself.

  “There will be a woman with him this time, a girl, actually. I think you’ll find her very useful in getting Mr. Hart’s cooperation. As a matter of fact, if you can get the girl, I doubt any more drugs will be necessary. Hart will tell you everything, and then he’ll go get your money back himself.”

  Negara’s sharp-eyed gaze narrowed slightly at the mention of a woman.

  “Who is this woman?”

  “No one of any official importance, a punk, a mechanic who hangs around Hart’s office.”

  “Mechanic?”

  “Car mechanic,” he explained further. “She works on automobiles, on the engines. But she is important to Hart.” When Royce’s man in Denver had told him a girl with a long blond ponytail and Chinese tattoos had gotten on the plane with Hart, he had hardly believed his luck. He remembered how protective of her Hart had been the last time they’d met—the night the Dominika Starkova case had blown up in his face. Royce had been the one to actually handcuff Starkova and bring her in, but he’d still ended up looking like a fool, a fact that had been reflected in the grinding halt of his career.

  The fucking CIA. Royce was making ten times more money as a freelance co
ntractor than he ever would have made sticking with an agency that no longer appreciated his talents.

  “Her name is Skeeter Bang,” he said, reaching inside his jacket.

  Two pistols were instantly drawn, both of them leveled at his head.

  He froze, his hand half inside his coat.

  “A photograph,” he explained, willing his heart rate back to a bearable speed. “Just a photograph, so you’ll recognize her. She’ll be easy to identify.”

  At a nod from Negara, he finished pulling the photo free and handed it to the old man.

  “Tell your men at the hotels to ask about her. She’ll be the one people remember, not Hart. If she’s there, he will be, too.”

  Negara looked at the picture for a long time. Royce understood his interest. The girl was custom-made to appeal to a man of varied tastes, and Negara was still that, even at seventy.

  When he’d looked his fill, the warlord gave the photograph to the nearest guard, along with a stream of instructions delivered in Indonesian. Even if Royce hadn’t spoken Negara’s native tongue, he would have understood the tone of voice and the gleam in the old man’s eyes.

  Bring her to me. Untouched.

  It was the same in any language, the wielding of power over lesser men for the spoils of war. Unlike Hart, Skeeter Bang’s usefulness might last out the month. But in the end, no matter what she did, her time would come. Or perhaps, given what Royce remembered of her, she would prove so unyielding that a few drugged encounters would be enough to dull her charms and she wouldn’t make it to Monday morning.

  Either way, her fate was sealed and could be summed up in two simple but profound words—“collateral damage.”

  “Do you have the transcripts?” he asked Negara, nodding his thanks as tea was brought out and set on the table between him and the old man.

  “Yes, yes,” Negara said, lifting his hand to one side.

  One of the guards stepped forward and gave him a sheaf of papers. Negara handed them over.

  Royce flipped through the pages, one by one. They’d been heavily edited, with lots of blank spaces, but he’d expected as much. Whatever information Negara’s medical staff had wrung out of Dylan Hart would have been subject to Negara’s censorship, especially anything concerning his banking practices and the movement of his drug money into his more legitimate investments, which is what Negara had been looking for—how Hart had diverted seventeen million of his dollars, and how the process could be reversed.

  Royce wanted another type of information, and finally, on page five, he found it, for all the good it did him.

  He lifted his gaze to Negara’s. “This is all he said? White Rook?”

  Negara nodded. “Dr. Souk asked the question many times, in many ways—‘Who at the State Department gives you orders? Who saved you from prison after you were caught in Moscow? Who chose General Grant as your commanding officer?’—many ways. Always, as you will see, he only said ‘White Rook.’”

  Disgusted, Royce shifted his attention back to the papers. He needed a real name, not a fucking code name. He wanted to know who to go after next, when he was finished with Hart.

  But he could use “White Rook,” put it out there, let it slide around, see what came up, or if anyone came after him.

  “Ask him again, after you have the girl,” he said. Hart would give up the name then, especially if Negara held true to form and added a few creative twists to his torture. Hart was tough, no doubt about it, but he didn’t have what it took to watch someone work over a teenage girl.

  On page seven, something else caught his eye. The same words had been circled in red ink four separate times.

  He couldn’t help himself—he grinned.

  “Special Defense Force, 738 Steele Street, Denver, Colorado, U.S.A.” He glanced at Negara, his grin broadening. “You’ll never get inside. The place is sealed tighter than a vault. Without the codes, all you’ll be able to do is stand out in the street and look at the building.”

  Royce had been inside, but he’d been let in, authorized by the CIA and routed through SDF’s chain of command at the Defense Department. Last year, rumor had it that Senator Marilyn Decker had gotten in with a squad of Marines, but she was one of the Defense Department’s favorite politicos. She pushed their budgets and their agendas hard, fast, and usually through the opposition. There wasn’t a person at the DOD who wouldn’t give her whatever she wanted, including access to the bad boys at Steele Street at a moment’s notice.

  Hamzah Negara was a different story. Nobody was going to give him anything.

  The old man nodded, but didn’t look perturbed. His words proved why. “Mr. Hart revealed the codes, and my men will be in place tonight. If I do not have my money back by then, they will take Steele Street apart brick by brick, and kill anyone they find inside. It will be a slaughter, my friend.”

  They weren’t friends, and the rhetoric was typical warlord, but Royce knew Negara could and would deliver on his threat. Still, he had to wonder if anyone had ever told Hamzah Negara about Superman, or Creed Rivera, the SDF operator who had not only snatched Dominika Starkova out from under Royce’s nose last January, but married her. Cody Rivera was the woman’s name now.

  Those boys knew slaughter. Royce could guarantee it. He’d seen Creed’s handiwork. He’d never met Peter “Kid Chaos” Chronopolous, another SDF operator, but his reputation was the stuff legends were made out of—legends and bad guys’ nightmares.

  None of which was Royce’s concern. If Negara wanted to sacrifice a few of his guys going up against SDF on their home turf, that was his business. Royce’s business was Hart, and it was personal. He didn’t need to kill the guy himself. He just wanted him dead.

  CHAPTER

  8

  GIVE THEM an inch.

  Dylan couldn’t believe what he was seeing, or how much of it there was to see.

  And they’ll take a mile.

  The invitation to the reception, all the necessary identification, and the gel prints of Whitfield’s fingertips had been waiting for him in their hotel suite when he and Skeeter had arrived. But there was more, ever so much more.

  “What”—he made a flailing gesture at all the gear piled and stacked in the living area between the suite’s two bedrooms—“what is all this stuff?”

  He turned to look at Skeeter, who was standing protectively in front of a small tower of high-impact equipment cases, her arms crossed in front of her chest, looking mutinous.

  “It’s our kit for the mission.”

  Kit?

  She’d turned an elegant three-room suite at the Hotel Lafayette into a freaking armory.

  He walked over and opened the top case in the stack behind her.

  “A submachine gun?” Geezus.

  “It’s an HK UMP45.”

  Obviously.

  He cocked an eyebrow in her direction.

  “A Heckler and Koch Universal Machine Pistol in .45 caliber,” she explained.

  Fine. Great. He didn’t care what she called it, the weapon he was looking at was a submachine gun—in .45 ACP, with a folding stock.

  Okay. That was pretty cool. He wasn’t the shoot-out artist Kid was, but when he did shoot somebody, he preferred to do it with a .45 rather than a 9mm. He liked his terminal ballistics to be as terminal as possible.

  “I requested two from Grant’s office, one for each of us,” she added, “and fourteen 25-round magazines.”

  Two subguns and enough ammo to stage a Third World coup—he squelched a sigh and refrained from shaking his head. She had never worked with him before, not really, not on one of his missions, so she couldn’t have been expected to know how he operated, which was very, very low profile. A laptop, a brain, a cell phone, a concealed sidearm, a pair of gloves, and a few tools for breaking and entering—that was usually enough to get him through a heist.

  He moved the UMP onto the bed and opened the larger case underneath.

  “A sniper rifle?”

  “A Knight Match SR-2
5 in .308 with a PVS-10 day/night scope and infrared light source.”

  He did let out a breath at that, kind of a heavy breath.

  “And a laser range finder,” she added.

  Of course.

  “You are going to be on the ground, in the car, in Whitfield’s driveway, not on a rooftop somewhere, doing overwatch with a badass long rifle trained on the senator’s historic mansion.”

  The thought made his head spin. He’d known he shouldn’t have brought her into this. God only knew what the concierge had thought when Grant’s staff had delivered the stuff.

  He pointed toward two large rucksacks leaning against the couch. “What’s in those?”

  “Tactical gear,” she said, still with that mutinous look on her face. “And a couple of assault vests for carrying our equipment.”

  Just what he needed to go with his tuxedo, a fully rigged-out assault vest.

  “Including threat level II soft body armor,” she continued. “In case we get in a situation where people are shooting at us.”

  That was not going to happen.

  “I have been to dozens of receptions for foreign dignitaries in Washington, D.C., and have never needed soft body armor.” This is what happened when a guy brought a kick-ass girl to a party. She wanted to kick ass.

  “Flex cuffs,” she said, undeterred. “Four each.”

  He looked her square in the eye. “We will not be handcuffing anyone tonight. Guaranteed.” Unless it was each other—but his luck didn’t seem to be headed in that direction.

  “A three-cell blue diode flashlight.”

  Finally, something he could use.

  “Thank you. That will come in handy.”

  “Tac II combat knife.”

  “No.” There would be no mano a mano knife fighting at the senator’s tonight.

  “AN/PVS-7 night vision devices.”

  “Unnecessary.”

  “Ground/air locator strobe with IR hood.”