Crazy Wild (3 page)

Creed swore under his breath. Dylan had sent him this guy's picture, too: Reinhard Klein, one of the nuclear warhead buyers identified by the CIA and the DIA. If Bruno was working for Klein, he was working pretty high up the ladder. Reinhard Klein owned and ran an international conglomerate that included everything from the controlling interest in an oil refinery in Azerbaijan to a fashion house in Milan, a string of hotels from Bern to Berlin, a lot of pricey real estate in the Czech Republic, and not a damned thing in Denver, Colorado.

Suddenly, things were getting complicated. Why would Dominika Starkova be hiding from one of her buyers, a guy she was supposed to be bringing in on the big deal? And why was Reinhard out in a blizzard, instead of holed up in a plush downtown hotel, waiting for Bruno to buck the cold and bring him the girl?

The whole setup smacked a little too much of desperation to do anything but put Creed even more on edge.

Shit
. The frickin' fate of the free world was
always
hanging in the balance. Always, and God knew he'd done his part to save it at least twenty times in the last ten years. But the price for saving the free world had gotten too damn high, costing him more than he was willing to pay ever again.

Ever.

He'd left his blood and sweat on all seven continents for Uncle Sam, and unknown to anyone but himself, he'd left a bucketful of gut-wrenched tears on one—for all the good it had done him or his partner, J.T.

His best friend, J.T., who was dead.

Well, hell—he dragged in a deep breath—
that
was a place he definitely wasn't going to go tonight.

He scanned the library again, wondering whether or not Dominika Starkova had already gotten out, when she suddenly came into view—a dark-haired “boy” wearing an ugly brown sweater and a nondescript gray coat, riding down the escalator with her nose stuck in a book.

Hell, the escalator was going to dump her right at Reinhard's feet. He started across the lobby, determined to get to her first.

CASTING
a quick glance up from underneath her lashes, Cordelia “Cody” Kaplan saw and instantly recognized Reinhard Klein. She swore under her breath, her already racing heart taking a quantum leap into overdrive.

Relax. Relax. Relax, damn it,
she told herself, trying to ignore the sudden sick feeling churning to life in her stomach.
Stay cool. Don't give in to panic.
The moment she'd seen Bruno the Bull, she'd known Reinhard would be somewhere in the library, waiting for her. Bruno was Reinhard's favorite dog, and the two were never very far apart.

So suck it up and tough it out.
All she had to do was act natural, make no odd movements or show any interest in anything other than her book, and slip into the fiction stacks as quickly as possible. She could make her escape through the service entrance on the north side of the building. Chances were Reinhard wouldn't recognize the scruffy kid on the escalator as Sergei Patrushev's club princess from Prague.

It would be a helluva stretch for anyone. Really. She knew what she looked like, and she did not look anything like Dominika Starkova. Not tonight.

Not ever again—so help her God.

Chances were she'd get out of this mess alive.

She swore again, silently, not inclined to self-delusion. She was in up to her neck, and the chances of her getting out of her current mess in one piece were slim and getting frighteningly slimmer. How in the world had they found her? Denver, Colorado, was nowhere, and she was clean as Cordelia Kaplan, perfectly clean, an all-American girl living an all-American life on a set of perfectly forged papers.

An all-American girl who was running out of places to hide.

A little cover might have helped, but the snowstorm outside had kept people away from the library. The place was practically deserted, which left her alone to run the Reinhard gauntlet.

Her stomach clenched at the thought.

They'd danced together one night in Prague, at a club called Radost FX, and she'd turned down his offer of a more intimate association. But Reinhard Klein was used to getting what he wanted.

The warehouse in Karlovy Vary.
A trickle of fear ran down her spine. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his gaze shift. Suddenly, he was looking right at her . . . but he wasn't seeing who he was looking for, not yet.

She considered running back up the escalator, but discarded the idea as too risky. It would only draw attention to her, and she figured she had a better than fifty-fifty chance of cruising by Reinhard as an ill-kempt boy.

God, even one other person in the main hall would have been helpful. Someone, anyone, to draw attention away from her, even if only for a couple of seconds.

In the next moment, she got her wish, but in the worst possible way. A noisy commotion above her drew her head around and made her blanch. Bruno had boarded the escalator and was pounding his way down the moving stairs behind her.

The natural reaction would be to get out of the big man's way, but for the space of a heartbeat she was frozen, the last of the stairs slipping out from under her and Bruno bearing down on her.

“Hey, kid,” someone said at the bottom of the escalator, the voice casual and friendly, low-pitched.

She jerked her head around, the stairs came to an end, and a large hand came down on her shoulder, making sure she didn't fall.

Oh, God
. Her breath stopped. She'd been caught by—of all people—the angel-faced surfer god from the third floor, the one who'd been reading newspapers all evening.

“Hey, watch it, buddy,” he said as Bruno pushed by them, heading toward the main doors where Reinhard was waiting, his face a mask of cold anger.

“Geez.” The surfer guy turned back to her, meeting her gaze. Then he smiled, a blindingly white grin that flashed across his face and lit up the whole atrium. “Where've you been, huh? I've been looking all over for you,” he said, guiding her away from the escalator, his body loose and angled between her and Reinhard, every move he made as smooth as silk, so natural that for a micro-instant even she believed she knew him. “Come on. I just need one more book, and then we can get out of here.”

Damn, damn, damn. Her mind was spinning. Who was this guy? No one from Eastern Europe. She wouldn't have forgotten him. She wouldn't have forgotten anyone who looked like him. He sounded American. He looked American, pure California beach boy, and when she'd seen him in the reading room she hadn't for a moment considered him a player. He'd been too noticeable with his sun-streaked hair falling to his shoulders, his face pretty enough for magazine fashion ads, and wearing clothes that looked like they came straight out of those ads: casual but very expensive cargo pants and hiking boots, and a fisherman's sweater, all in black. He'd been impossible to miss, and because of it, she'd dismissed him completely, and now he'd caught her—whoever the hell he was.

Cursing herself as a fool, she fell in beside him, because with Bruno the Bull and Reinhard Klein not twenty feet away, there wasn't a damned thing else she could do, not for the next few seconds. Her only consolation was that out of all the men, the California surf angel had to be the least dangerous of the three.

She knew what Bruno and Reinhard were capable of doing. She knew how coldly brutal they could be.

Oh, yeah. The pretty slacker dude saggin' in the designer clothes was easily the least dangerous of the three.

Easily.

C
HAPTER

3

W
ELL, THIS WAS GOING
pretty good, Creed thought, walking Cordelia Kaplan right past Reinhard Klein and into the fiction stacks. She was stiff as a board beside him, her face perfectly sullen, which he supposed wasn't such a bad thing for the teenaged boy she was pretending to be. Up close, though, the disguise was ridiculous, and he was disappointed in himself for buying it even for a second. True, she'd been sitting cross-legged on the floor at the older woman's feet up in nonfiction, which hadn't given him a very good look at her. He'd seen the dark hair falling over her face, cut short in back like a boy's, and a wrinkled plaid shirt she must have had on under the sweater, and in his eyes he'd seen a boy with his grandmother instead of a female tango—terrorist—dealing in deadly contraband.

But up close, she was no more a boy than he was the King of Siam. Delicate, that's what she was. He could feel it in the shoulder beneath his hand despite the bulky sweater and old coat. Without the big glasses overwhelming her face, what had looked like a small, unremarkable nose was actually a delicate curve, a very refined curve, and her cheekbones went way beyond classic into exotic. She was Dominika Starkova, all right, and her eyes weren't brown. Up close, they were a dark mossy green.

His gaze dropped down the length of her body, remembering the picture Dylan had sent, but there wasn't a curve in sight, not a one that he could see with her bundled up in her homeless-boy gear. Given time, she probably could have perfected her transition, looking as much a boy as she'd looked a mousy librarian, but she'd had no more than seconds.

Damn, she'd moved fast.

And if he wasn't mistaken, she was getting ready to move fast again. Another level of tension had stiffened her up even more, the old fight-or-flight reaction.

“Don't,” he said, losing the friendly tone and tightening his hold on her a fraction of a degree. They had just passed out of Reinhard's line of sight. There was a service entrance on the north end of the building, and the two of them were going out of it—ASAP.

“You've got the wrong kid, mister,” she said belligerently, trying to shrug him off.

He wasn't having any of it. “I haven't got a kid at all, Ms. Starkova. So let's just keep a low profile until we're out of here.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.” She started to struggle, trying to break away, but Creed just held on tighter and moved her along faster.

Then she kicked him, got him right in his bad leg, and a little bit of his self-control snapped.

Coming to a sudden, tight-jawed halt, he took big fistfuls of old coat and baggy sweater in his hands and hauled her up to meet his glare. Nothing but her tiptoes touched the floor.

“Don't,” he repeated in his best I'll-eat-your-balls-for-breakfast voice. “Not if you want to get out of here alive.”

It was a tone and an expression guaranteed to put the fear of God in whoever was on the receiving end of it—except, it seemed, Dominika Starkova.

Rather than quail and capitulate, she wasn't even looking at him. Her gaze had slid over his shoulder.

“Oh, God,”
she whispered.

It was the only clue he needed. He whipped his head around, saw what she saw, and wondered how in the hell the flat-faced hired gun on the west side of the hall had beaten them to the service entrance. It didn't make sense, but there he was, still looking every inch the gorilla, guarding their escape route.

“Ernst Braun,” she continued under her breath. “Or maybe it's Edmund. I . . . I can never tell them apart.”

Oh, shit, was more like it. “Twins?” he asked, realizing it meant there were four bad guys in the building, not just three.

“Identical,” she said, her attention coming back to him, and for a second, as their gazes met, it occurred to him that her eyes were like a forest, a dark, richly verdant, mysterious forest, the mossy green centers flecked with the gray of mountain granite and streaked with the colors of the earth and sky.

Sweet Jesus.

“I can't believe he's here,” she said, and his momentary lapse came to a halt, leaving him even more unnerved—as if he needed that.

Well, hell. There was another option, and without a word, he turned her around and headed back down the stacks, toward the far east side of the building, to the stairs. From the stairwell, it was possible to get out onto the roof, and from the roof . . . well, it was a helluva drop from the roof.

But he'd think of something before it got to that. He always thought of something. At least he'd always thought of something up until the Colombian mission had gone bad.

There hadn't been just one guy waiting for him and J.T. on that godforsaken jungle trail. They'd been ambushed and captured by a platoon's worth of NRF narco-guerillas, and he hadn't been able to think of anything, not once J.T. had started screaming.

Nothing.

There had been nothing but horror and pain—black pain, terrifying, blind horror, and a failure he would never be able to face.

Never.

He squeezed his free hand into a fist to stop its sudden trembling, and tightened his hold on the woman.
Damn
. He'd known he wasn't ready for this, ready to save anyone, let alone a woman who'd sold her soul for money and endangered everything he believed in—not when he hadn't been able to save J.T.

It wasn't far to the stairwell from the service entrance, but only single-minded determination got him there—for all the good it did him.

Jerking her back behind him, he swore under his breath, then glanced back around the corner to the stairwell door. Gorilla number one from the main hall had moved to cover the last base.

“Edmund,” she whispered, looking around him.

Edmund and Ernst—one of them had to go if he and the woman were going to get out of the library.

A voice raised in anger with a German accent came from the direction of the service entrance, suddenly making it the least effective line of escape. Fine. Edmund's number had just come up. Creed would be damned if he got caught between a rock and a hard place because of Dominika Starkova.

“Come on.” He grabbed her by the arm and started forward. He had his Glock 10mm in a holster at the small of his back and Kid Chaos's pistol-gripped shotgun secured in a long pocket inside his coat. He wasn't planning on using either of them to get by Edmund Braun, any more than he was planning on using the garrote in his pants pocket or the razor-edged Randall fighting knife strapped to his ankle.

Yeah, he was a paranoid son of a bitch, psychologically unsound. All the head-shrinkers had said so. Post-traumatic stress disorder, the last one had written in his file.

Yeah, right,
Creed had thought, not doubting the doc's diagnosis. He'd found watching the Colombians work over J.T.—fucking massacring him—yeah, well, he'd found that pretty fucking traumatically stressful.

The Colombians had paid. They'd paid with their lives. The last one had died under Creed's knife in a lake of his own blood in the mountains of Peru, but killing him hadn't been enough.

Nothing was ever going to be enough.

But all Creed was going to do to old Edmund was put him down hard, and get him out of the way fast.

Hard and fast, that's the way he and J.T. had always worked.

A cold sweat broke out on his brow.
Geezus
. They'd been invincible for ten years. What in the hell had gone wrong?

Real life. That's what had gone wrong, and he wasn't ready for it again. All he wanted was to be back at SDF's Steele Street headquarters with Skeeter, with his head under the hood of her Mustang, a sweet little pony car she'd named Babycakes—as if that was any kind of a name for a car, especially a badass GT 350.

But ready or not, real life was waiting for him less than twenty yards away, and its name was Edmund Braun.

CODY
had made a mistake, a big one, possibly a fatal one. The surfer dude hadn't been her wisest choice. He wasn't safe. He was nuts. Six feet of crazy wild with a look in his eyes that sent a chill down her spine.

And it had all happened so fast—the change from easygoing guy to whacko boy who was getting ready to take on Edmund Braun of the notorious Braun twins. Their reputation was the stuff of nightmares all over Eastern Europe—with good reason. She knew the stories and had made a second career of staying out of their way, out of their sight, out of any place they might be. Most of the time she'd been pretty successful, but running with Sergei Patrushev's
reketiry
meant running in a pretty tight circle, and their paths had crossed more than once.

“Th-this guy, Edmund—” she began, breathless from their hell-bent march toward disaster. “I don't know what you're thinking you're going to do, but Edmund is a . . . a killer.” She couldn't say it any plainer.

The man with the death grip on her coat, the one dragging her along faster than she could keep up with, slanted her a brief, piercing glance, and with sudden clarity, she understood exactly how much trouble she was in.

The angel-faced surfer dude was a killer, too.

Oh, God
—just when she'd thought she was safe, she was going to die, and in the library of all places. The irony of it would have been laughable, if she'd had a laugh in her.

She didn't, not one, and the last thing she needed in her life was more irony. She was drowning in the stuff, had been drowning in it ever since she'd defied her mother's wishes and gone looking for the father she'd never known.

Well, she'd found him all right. Dimitri Starkova, before his recent demise, had been a professor in Prague—charming, urbane, and highly educated. In short, some of what she'd hoped her father would be. Unfortunately, he'd also turned out to be a former general in the Soviet army with a mountain of debt, close ties to the Russian Mafia, and damn little conscience. Over the planned weeks of her visit, her journey to see him had slowly turned from the trip of a lifetime into the vacation from hell, and then it had taken a turn for the worse and gone downhill from there.

Since the night he'd died, she'd been lost, trying to juggle the realities of her father's past, the dangerous legacy he'd left her, and the very harsh realities of trying to stay alive—and it was all coming down to this: Edmund Braun was huge. The beach boy was not.

They were eating up the distance to the stairwell door. Any second Edmund was bound to notice.

And sure enough he did, his beady-eyed gaze turning on them, zeroing in on them, his simian features clouding up.

It was said he'd once torn a man in half with his bare hands. Impossible, she'd thought, but three separate accounts of the deadly brawl had surfaced in Prague, with people from all sides claiming to have seen the body.

Her gaze went to Edmund's hands, big, coarse hands, and she stumbled—but she didn't fall. The crazy man hauling her to her doom didn't let her fall.

“Wh-what's your name?” she asked. If she was going to die with him, or die because of him, she should know his name.

“Creed,” he said without slowing down.

The strangeness of the name barely registered. Cody was too busy recalling another story about Edmund killing a girl with a single blow to the head. She knew that one was true. She'd known the girl.

Ernst wasn't quite so impulsive, quite so psychotic—but it was Edmund starting toward them, his mouth set, his hands clenching into fists, ready to take on the challenge her captor was telegraphing like an air raid siren. There was absolutely no hesitation in Creed's long, forceful strides, no hesitation in the way he was dragging her with him. Except for that one brief glance, his gaze hadn't wavered from Braun's for an instant, and every inch of him was sending out one signal, loud and clear: “I'm coming down your throat,
zhopa
.”

It was insane, and she was caught in the middle of it with no good end in sight. Edmund sometimes forgot himself, sometimes lost track of the big picture—in this case, it being that his boss, Reinhard, would want her alive, at least to begin with.

God save her.
The voices behind them were getting closer, and one for certain was Bruno. He wouldn't let Edmund kill her, not on the spot. Even more than Reinhard, Sergei Patrushev wanted her alive, and Bruno knew why. Sergei needed the map that would lead him into the mountains of Tajikistan, where her father had hidden one of Mother Russia's nuclear warheads.

And so help her God, she had the map.

She didn't want it, could barely read it, and wished to hell she'd never seen it, but she knew deep in her heart that the last thing her father had given her, a slim volume of self-published poetry titled
Tajikistan Discontent
, was a coded map to the warhead, and she was pretty damn sure Sergei had figured it out the same time she had. But by then, she'd slipped his noose.

At least she'd thought she'd slipped his noose. Tonight had proven her wrong.

“My name is Dominique Cordelia Stark. Cody Stark,” she said to the stranger, wanting him to know. If bad came to worse, he should know her real name, the one her mother would recognize in the newspapers, and it wasn't Kaplan.