Cutting Loose (15 page)

Nobody built themselves a life like that and walked away.

“You really aren't Alejandro Campos, are you?”

His answer was no answer. He just kept driving.

“So who's living in the villa now? And how did you get replaced? Bloodless coup?”

He shot a quick glance in her direction. “What makes you think I got replaced?”

“The setup down there is too sweet to let it go to waste. If it wasn't really yours, whoever it does belong to would replace you just to keep the whole place up and running—the villa, and the fields, and the coffee factory—not to mention that whatever you are today, three weeks ago you were the biggest drug dealer in Morazán Province. They wouldn't want to lose all that.”

“Jesus.”
He swore under his breath, way under, but she heard him.

“You're thinking too hard over there, and you're going to get yourself in trouble,” he said after a while.

“We already had that conversation, and honestly, do you really think I can be in more trouble than I already am?”

“Oh, hell, yeah,” he said, keeping his attention on the road. “We aren't out of this yet, babe. Not by a long shot.”

She almost smiled. She almost felt better, even though she didn't know what disturbed her more, that they weren't “out of it yet,” even at a hundred and twenty miles an hour on their way to Denver with the bracelet in hand, or how much she liked having him call her babe.

“DEA?” she asked after a few minutes of silence.

“Excuse me?” he asked, giving her a quick glance.

“DEA,” she repeated. “The Drug Enforcement Agency.” That's what made the most sense to her. The DEA probably had agents set up all over Central and South America, monitoring the drug trade, even facilitating it in undercover operations in order to take out the bigger dealers. His profile would fit the DEA.

But he neither confirmed nor denied her assertion.

“FBI?” That one seemed like a longer shot to her. Her dad, though, had once been assigned to an international case originating in Canada, and he was just a Chouteau County sheriff's deputy.

She took Zach's silence as a denial.

All right. There were a dozen more U.S. government agencies with reasons to be involved in Central American drugs and politics, but there was only one with a rich and checkered history running the length of the whole isthmus, one whose undercover, nonuniformed pilots could conceivably be carrying the fate of the free world in a piece of hemp macramé.

“CIA?”

He shifted slightly in his seat, and she figured she had a done deal.

How awful. The CIA. Everybody knew those guys were barely human. They lived shadowy lives, full of secrets they only revealed to each other, and only rarely were the details of their deeds exposed to a larger world.

She knew about one small but vital deed of his, though. She knew how close her life had come to being a nightmare in El Salvador, and she knew he was the only thing that had stood between her and the very real threat of degradation and death she'd faced. The morning the rebel soldiers had shown up at the villa, their captain had demanded that she be turned over, released into his custody so that she could be brought to justice, his justice.

She'd seen the captain's justice, in the church's chapel where he'd shot and killed one of his own soldiers, and she'd seen it when he'd stripped and beaten one of the nuns and chopped off her hair.

Alejandro Campos—Zach—had said no to the demand, flatly, succinctly. The deal he was negotiating with the rebel leader would be done without her involved, or it would not be done at all. Her life was not for sale.

It was one of his finer moments, she'd been told by his cook Isidora, who'd heard it straight from his manservant Max, who had beamed with pride to tell the tale. Isidora had been beaming as well, so proud of her
patrón.

And because of that one fine moment, he'd created the opportunity for another this morning, and now he'd saved her life twice.

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

         

CIA?

Now where had she gotten the idea he was with the CIA? Zach wondered. Nobody outside of a very tightly monitored and controlled group of people knew he existed, let alone was with the CIA, and most of them worked for the CIA.

She did not.

At least he didn't think she did. Was it possible she could be somebody's deep-cover asset? Somebody buried on some other agent's payola roll? Somebody who maybe had been planted in El Salvador to watch him? Or it could be some kind of double-agent asset scheme, where Kesselring's other interested parties had planted her with the nuns to watch the rebels and make sure Devlin's plane went down and the information he'd been carrying—okay, that was getting a little complicated even for him, especially since she'd actually gotten the damn information Devlin had been carrying and apparently hadn't had a clue of what to do with it.

Or so it seemed.

Fuck
. Blood loss was always mildly paranoia-inducing for him, and even though he'd finally stopped bleeding, his shoulder was messed up from his little run-ins this morning. But paranoia didn't explain away the very real fact of the ten thousand dollars in her suitcase, or the damn plane ticket to Tahiti, which all led him to the question—“Who was out to get his ass this week?”

Well, hell. That list went on forever, every week, and every week it changed.

Geezus.
Was he getting taken for a ride here?

CIA. CIA. Maybe the question he should be asking himself was—“Who was out to get Alex's ass this week?”

He'd read Le Carré. Hell, he lived Le Carré. Everybody in his business did, and people got set up and whacked every day.

“You're thinking too hard over there,” she said. “And you're going to get yourself in trouble.”

Oh, she was sweet, all right, throwing his words back at him, and he couldn't help it—he grinned. The CIA—at least she had him on the side of the good guys.

“Here,” she said, handing him the bottle of Perrier. “Have a drink, before you faint or something.”

And at that, he laughed out loud.

“You have a smart mouth, Ms. Robbins.” Smart and probably sweeter than hell, which was a whole other problem he had with her—she smelled good. He'd gotten close enough to her a few times this morning to know it for a fact.

Jewel had told him something a long time ago, something she'd read about men thinking about sex once a minute, and he figured he was right on track, or maybe even a little ahead of the game when it came to Lily Robbins. He'd been thinking about having sex with her since the night she'd shown up soaking wet and scared at his villa in El Salvador. She didn't even need to be in the same country for him to be thinking about her naked and willing and wanting him, and here she was in the same car, giving him attitude and making him want her all that much more.

If it was a test, he was planning on failing.

He took the bottle from her, and the computer rolled out of the tape deck.

More good news, he hoped. The girl had done great so far.

“Ensign.” Her face washed onto the screen in a stream of pixels.

“SB303.”

“You've come up on a statewide BOLO out of Albuquerque. New Mexico police and state troopers are looking for you in connection with two incidents that happened this morning. One at Lily Robbins's house on Somerset Street, a fatal shooting. The other a knife killing at the Sunset Motel. We're recommending that you get off the interstate, unless you want to answer a lot of questions.”

A knife?
Zach thought. He hadn't used a knife on Schroder.

“You're two miles from Exit 392, which we are highly recommending,” SB303 continued. “Take it and head northeast. There are a few small towns and a lot of empty spaces in that direction where you could hole up for the day. I'm mapping routes out of the area and into Colorado for a suggested midnight run.”

Yeah, making the run to Denver after dark off the beaten track was by far the better option under the current circumstances.

“Do you have a name for the vic at the Sunset Motel?” Jason Schroder had been very much alive and in reasonably good shape when he'd left him. It was a long shot, but maybe SB303 was referring to someone besides Schroder, to another incident entirely.

One could only hope.

It would make his life so much easier.

“Jason Schroder,” SB303 said, and his heart sank a bit in his chest.
Fuck.
What in the hell had happened after he'd left the jerk tied to a chair?

“He was alive when I left him. He should have lived for another forty years.”

“Then we have a bigger problem.”

No shit.

“Have you contacted Scorpion Fire?” he asked.

“Yes, and for unnamed reasons, he prefers for the primary operation to remain clandestine.”

Alex didn't have to name any reasons, and SB303 knew it as well as he did. Alex didn't explain his actions to anyone who wasn't in his direct reporting chain, and he sure as hell didn't expect to be put in a position where he had to explain the actions of one of his agents to a local police department. The CIA was involved in a lot of operations inside and outside of the United States, and they seldom invited peripheral involvement in any of them. Very seldom.

Alex wanted the bracelet, and he expected Zach to get it without anyone who hadn't been in that morgue in Langley knowing what he was doing. It was a compartmented operation. His case officer would expect it to stay that way.

Well, with two dead bodies and a description of his car floating through the New Mexican airwaves, Zach would say it was getting a little late for clandestine—but he got the drift of the message, and he wasn't surprised. Alex had made the Company's priorities clear. Zach was on a salvage mission as much as an information retrieval mission. His primary mission order had been very specific—keep our ass out of a sling and get the bracelet.

He had the bracelet part of the mission accomplished, but the ass-in-the-sling thing wasn't looking too good. He didn't think there was any way to lay two dead bodies on the State Department, despite how much Alex would love it, and he was disinclined to lay them at SDF's feet, despite Alex's directive—and he sure as hell wasn't going to take the fall for them alone against a bunch of New Mexico cops. Luckily, with the bracelet in his possession, Alex shouldn't have any trouble throwing federal weight around in New Mexico and clearing up any problems the Albuquerque law enforcement community had with two dead bodies of known criminals trying to sell the nation's top-secret data to foreign interests. But that job would definitely be easier if Zach remained a complete unknown. Give the cops a murder and a suspect, and they inevitably got damned possessive. An anonymous agent of the federal government who nobody had seen was a helluva lot easier to let go.

“Contact him again, and tell him I need to know who on his end is connected to Banning, Schroder, and Stark. I need to know who sicced them on Lily Robbins. They're the ones who killed Schroder, not me.” And they'd killed him for fucking up.

“Who do you think sicced the cops on Charlotte?” she asked.

It was a damn good question, with all sorts of repercussions.

“She could have been seen at the Robbins house this morning.” If anybody on the block had been up and looking, which was very likely.

“What about at the Sunset?”

That was more of a mystery.

“Less likely. I parked on a different side of the building from where Schroder's room was located.”

“Could Schroder have identified Charlotte for whoever killed him?”

Aye, and there was the rub.

“Possibly, even probably.”

“Then your bigger problem just got bigger and more personal, and if they're listening to the cops this morning like the rest of us, you're going to wish you had more ammo.”

She was right. She couldn't possibly know how much ammunition he had, but there was no such thing as too much.

“We're almost to the exit, and we will be taking your recommendation and disappearing into the wilds of New Mexico.” Truthfully, he couldn't get his ass off the interstate quick enough at this point.

“We'll be watching everything from our end,” she said. “Tracking you and listening to the police. If you're spotted, I'll contact you immediately.”

“Thank you, SB303.”

“Roger.”

On his screen, Zach saw the girl swivel around on her chair and get up to walk away—and then he saw her walking away.

Geezus
. Combat boots, pink bustier, all that platinum blond hair in a ponytail, a waist-length skein half twisted up and half falling down, and a pair of skintight black-and-white-striped leggings hugging the most perfect ass he'd ever seen.

Geezus
. This was Dylan's wife?

A guy's face suddenly loomed into view, obscuring the whole screen.

It was Dylan, and the odd sensation he'd felt in his chest when he'd first seen SB303 slammed into him again, only more intense.

“Come home,
pendejo,
and I'll introduce you,” Dylan said.

Home. Yeah, Steele Street had been his first home, the first place he'd ever been safe, and it had probably been the last place he'd ever been safe. He sure as hell hadn't lived anyplace safe during the Asian years, and in El Salvador, his life had been on the line every day. His budget for that job had included a big line item for hiring and maintaining a security force, his own small army, because the job required a small army—and even that wasn't enough to guarantee safety. No one in the drug trade lasted long without a paramilitary force backing them up.

Hell, no one in the drug trade lasted long, period.

“I'd like to meet her,” he said, his voice uncomfortably gruff with an emotion he would prefer to keep to himself.

“She wants to know how you got in the building last night,” Dylan said, and Zach let out a short laugh.

“You didn't tell her?”

Dylan shook his head.

“Then she isn't getting it out of me.” The steel grate in the street led down a rabbit hole.

“Just watch yourself,” Dylan said. “That's all I'm saying. The girl can read minds.” The look on his face said he was serious, and Zach was instantly intrigued.

“You know what it's like down there. Tell her the route is dark, dirty, and dangerous.” No one who looked like SB303 wanted to be crawling around under the streets of Denver.

“Dangerous and dark doesn't scare her. She's worked with Creed for too long.”

Well, the day was getting jam-packed with surprises. Cesar Raoul Eduardo Rivera, Creed, had always been a night hunter, even at the ripe old age of thirteen, when Zach had first met him under the steering wheel of a 1968 Mercury Cyclone GT that had been “Fast-backed, 4-stacked, and Radial-tracked.” Dylan had been watching the car for months, and when an order had come in, he'd sent the new boy, Creed, and one of the older, more experienced thieves then working for the chop shop, a street rat named Kenny, to go pick her up.

The two kids had found the Cyclone in a warehouse complex up in Commerce City, on a moonless night so still, the city had been under a pall, steaming from the day's record-breaking heat and smelling of grime. By the time Zach had gone looking for the pair, Creed had been on his own…

“Hey, kid,” he said, hunkering down next to the Cyclone's open driver's side door. “Where's Kenny?”

“Spooked,” the scrawny boy with a mop of blond hair said. He was stretched out under the steering wheel, skinny legs poking out of the car, his T-shirt torn and greasy, with a penlight stuck behind his ear, shining on the steering column.

“That asshole ran off and left you?” Kenny's ass was grass.

“He got scared.”

“I thought he was 'sposed to be teaching you the ropes.” Whatever the kid was doing under the steering wheel, he wasn't being very effective, and honestly, stealing cars was a very, very time-sensitive career.

Zach rose up a little on his feet and looked over his shoulder, checking out the parking lot. Except for the Cyclone, it was deserted, and more than a little creepy. If the car was here, where in the hell was the driver? There weren't any lights on in any of the warehouses. They were all just looming up into the night, their outlines visible only because of the bright lights of Denver to the south.

But this was the address on Dylan's sheet, all right, and they had found the car.

Now they needed to get it the hell out of there.

But first, a word of warning to the kid.

“You need to pay better attention to what's going on around you. If you don't have a lookout, then you need to do it yourself. I could have been anybody sneaking up on you.”

“No, you couldn't,” the kid said, still working under the steering wheel, his little penlight a weak-ass tiny glow above his ear, which couldn't be doing a damn bit of good. “You could only be you.”

Whatever the hell that meant.

“Pay attention, or you're going to get hurt.” Dylan had dragged this one in too young, and Zach was going to tell him.

“Fuck you,
pendejo.
I knew it was you, 'cuz I heard you coming a mile away.” Pale green eyes cut toward him from under that tiny light. “You got those deep-tread boots, and something's stuck in the left one, a rock or something, and every time you take a step, I hear a snick. So snick, step, snick, step—that's nobody sneaking anywhere, asshole. That's you.”

Zach just stared at the kid. Sonuvabitch. That was good. That was damn good.

But whatever he was trying to do under the steering wheel was getting him nowhere. That asshole Kenny was out. This was the last job he screwed up.