Crazy Love (7 page)

He didn’t need this.

“I think you better stick with calling me ‘sir.’” And put on a parka, or something, anything to cover up all that hot-pink, white-lace, and soft-skin fashion statement she had working from the waist up.

Her fingers slid a little higher.

“This isn’t about lines,
sir.
This is about getting the job done. It’s about coming home safe. It’s about finding out exactly how much valorous action it took to get you a freaking commendation from the secretary of defense.” A smile curved her mouth, slowly, sweetly, and just as slowly, it dawned on him where her fingers were, how much pressure she was starting to exert, and how dangerous she might actually turn out to be.

“You wouldn’t dare,” he said, his gaze narrowing on those silvery blue eyes, the ones with the devil dancing in them.

“Superman calls this the Vulcan Death Grip.” The pressure on his neck increased ever so slightly, and her smile broadened, still so deadly sweet.

“In Bangkok, it’s called the Butterfly Sting,” he said. “Unexpected, lethal.”

“Or merely temporarily paralyzing.”

“And I repeat—you wouldn’t dare.”

She gave him a lift of her eyebrows, except the one with the scar cutting through it only went partway, giving her a slightly quizzical expression, and in the odd way of things between them, it broke his heart, right then, right there.

Twenty stitches. That’s what it had taken to put her back together. She’d lost so much blood that night, Hawkins had given her a unit of his own in the ER.

Dylan let his gaze follow the path of the scar up to where it disappeared under a swath of platinum blond bangs.

He’d put her father in his sights once.

Okay, he’d done it twice.

But he hadn’t pulled the trigger either time. Anders Bang, a godforsaken, brutally twisted, alcoholic meth freak, was still alive on the streets of Denver, which was more than he deserved for breaking a whiskey bottle on his daughter’s face. It hadn’t been the first time her father had hurt her, but it had been the last. Hawkins had seen to it.

Dylan, of course, had been someplace else when it all happened.
Christ.
He was always someplace else.

Except today.

Today, he was sitting next to her, and she wanted something from him badly enough to threaten him.

“I’m the one who taught Hawkins the Butterfly Sting,” he said. “I’m also the one who taught him the countermove.”

“You’re not going to counter me,” she said, sounding awfully sure of herself.

With good reason, he had to admit.

“No. I’m not.” The countermove was a vicious strike, and the last thing in the world he wanted was to hurt her, ever, in any way.

“So you’re at my mercy.” The devilish light in her eyes tipped the corners of her mouth, and he started to get that whole “galvanized” feeling in his balls again.

Geezus.
He really needed to deal with this.

“Yes,” he answered, lifting his hips off the seat enough to reach into his pocket. He had to give her something, and it might as well be something useful.

He pulled out the stainless steel case and popped it open, revealing the line of Syrettes nested inside.

Her smile instantly disappeared.

Removing her hand from his neck, she sat back in her seat.

“Superman isn’t going to like this,” she said.

“No,” he agreed. He didn’t like it, either, but that didn’t change the facts. “I ran into a few pharmaceuticals in Indonesia, or rather, they ran into me. There might be delayed reactions attached to a couple of them. What I’ll need from you, if I need anything, will be help with the yellow Syrette. If I go down, mainline it. Hit a vein.”

She reached out and touched the case, then pulled her hand back, her gaze locking on to his.

“You should be in a hospital.”

“I was, on the U.S.S.
Jefferson.
”

“And you left? With this hanging over your head?” she asked incredulously. “Why?”

You.

Sitting next to her, looking at her, being close enough to breathe her in, the answer was suddenly so stark and clear in his head. With time running out and the future looking so goddamn unreliable, he’d left the
Jefferson
for only one reason—to get home to her.

To see her again.

Fuck.
He was in so far over his head here. She didn’t make sense, in any way, in any part of his life, but it was no accident she was on the plane to Washington, D.C., with him. For all his bitching and moaning and the crap he’d dished out last night, he wouldn’t have left Denver without her—not on a bet. No way. He hadn’t come halfway around the world to spend what might be the last two days of his life without her. He could have stayed in Indonesia for that.

So here he was, running at about half speed, his head a little fucked up, his nerves shredding, dragging her with him into what should be a cakewalk but, given the way his luck had been running lately, probably wasn’t going to be.

“Did you requisition a sidearm for each of us before we left?” he asked, putting the case back in his pocket and ignoring her question. Wanting to be with her, taking her with him, and keeping her by his side did not require a full-out confession of his ulterior motives. They were together. It was enough. He’d save the declaration of undying love until the last—if it came to that.

“Yes,” she said after a long moment, during which he could tell she was deciding just how far to push him. Fortunately, she chose the not-very-far route, at least for now. “I personally called in an equipment list to General Grant’s office. Our gear will be at the hotel when we get there, along with a car.”

“Good.” He went back to his newspaper.

“What is the red Syrette for?” she asked after another long moment of silence.

“Increase in temperature and hallucinations.”

“And the blue?”

“Decrease in temperature and losing my lunch.” He gave her a quick glance.

She had her fingers steepled in front of her face and was staring straight ahead, thinking. He could almost hear the wheels turning inside her head—and that wasn’t such a bad thing.

She was a very smart girl—brilliant, actually. If the heist at Whitfield’s didn’t go well, for any reason, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to have a smart girl on his side, figuring things out.

“It’s not like you to get caught,” she said after a minute, so quietly he wasn’t sure if she was talking to him or not.

Regardless, she was right. In seventeen years of nonstop, out-and-out thievery, he’d only been caught three times. The bust for grand theft auto, at sixteen, had been an inside job, with a guy they’d picked up as a stringer turning them in to the cops. His arrest in Moscow six years later had been a bit more complicated, a setup where he’d fallen for the bait, a choreographed attempt by the CIA to get to his boss, a man even General Grant knew only as White Rook.

And ten days ago had been his third strike.

After months of planning and six weeks in Indonesia to actually put together and pull off the job, he’d been caught with his foot halfway out of the country, on his way to the airport in Jakarta.

Negara’s timing couldn’t have been better. His associates couldn’t have been more professional or the execution of the kidnapping smoother. Dylan had been snatched off the street like a cherry girl hooker.

“Who knew where you were?” she asked, and yeah, he knew what she was getting at. He’d thought it himself a thousand times, but hadn’t been able to come up with anyone who could have set him up—not yet. Broadening his investigation along those avenues was at the top of his list, right after Godwin, right after thirty-six more hours of waiting to see if he was going to have a chance to broaden anything—like his relationship with her.

“Grant, Hawkins, Bill Davies, and probably you,” he said, casting her another glance. Bill Davies was the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, and Grant’s liaison at the Pentagon.

Pale blue eyes met his without a flicker of guilt. “I get paid to know where you are, where all of you are, but even I didn’t have access to your itinerary in Indonesia.”

“Nobody did. I flew low, under the radar all the way.”

“What about the secretary of defense?”

“The mission came from him, but like every mission we take, the method and means of accomplishing it were left to us. The less he knows, the happier he is.”

“Us?” she asked skeptically.

“Me,” he admitted.

“So are you getting sloppy?”

It was a legitimate question, and he’d asked himself the same thing dozens of times over the last ten days. Every time, he’d come up with the same answer.

“No.” He hadn’t left a trail—physical, paper, or in cyberspace. His covers were bulletproof. Dylan Hart hadn’t stepped foot in Indonesia for over five years. John Barr, a banker from Philadelphia, had been there doing business with the Indonesian government and been snatched off the street.

“Then we have a break in SDF’s security, in the chain of command,” she said.

“It’s a damn short chain, and we’ve already listed everyone on it.”

She just looked at him, tapping her fingers together.

“There’s another list,” she finally said.

Yeah. He knew it.

“The Everybody Who Wants to Wax My Ass list.”

She nodded.

“That one’s a bit longer,” he said.

“No kidding.” She flipped up the top of her computer. “Should I open a new document? Or are we going to need a spreadsheet?”

A grin curved his mouth, the first one in over a week.

“Spreadsheet.”

CHAPTER

7

F
ROM THE
living room of an expansive Tudor-style house in Prince William County, Virginia, twenty miles outside Washington, D.C., Tony Royce looked out over a small lake and the green expanse of the heavily wooded grounds beyond. Not so much as a finger twitch betrayed his impatience. He was calm, steady, his anger curbed on a tight leash. He was a pro, a seasoned veteran of twenty years of CIA operations, and hell would have to freeze over twice before he’d let Hamzah Negara rattle his cage.

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 contractor 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.”