Cutting Loose (20 page)

CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE

Saturday, 4:00
P.M
.—Paysen, New Mexico

Zach was inside her again, moving slow, staying half asleep, so lazy and sweet. She slid her tongue into his mouth, again and again, and he angled his head for a better fit.

Her body was hot against his, her skin hot. They were both damp with sweat, and he figured if they ever decided to get out of bed—and that was a long shot—they could hit the shower and do the same damn thing, over and over again, except with soap.

Yeah.
That sounded like a great idea.

She lifted her hips against him, rocking into him, and he slid his hand down to cup her ass and hold her close. He was probably in love.

About an hour ago, she'd sutured his shoulder with one of his kits, five stitches across the top. He'd thought he'd only needed three, given the complete lack of anesthetic, but she'd gone the extra mile. Of course, she'd done it naked, so there had been some compensation for the pain. She was so stacked.

He thrust into her again, drawing her leg up over his hip, getting closer.

“You feel so good,” she whispered against his mouth, and yeah, that pretty much summed up all of his thoughts, too—
You feel so good. Better than good
. His brain was melting.

What a perfect day.

Murder, mayhem, a hot car, a hotter woman, a killer on the loose, and the cops on his ass—he could give it up. Sure he could, all of it except the woman, and the car. He needed those. He didn't mind mayhem either, if he was the one instigating it on some lowlife. Murder never bothered him, though he preferred the less litigious and more accurate word “killing.” Sometimes that's what the job took, and he'd never lost any sleep over doing his job. Not that aspect of it anyway.

“Mmmm, Zach.”
She tightened around him, her breath sighing in his ear.

He loved it, the way she whispered his name, the silky wet heat of her.

Bearing her back down onto the pillows, he moved into her faster and harder, until it was all over one more time.

He lay there for a few moments, just breathing in the lovely way she smelled, and trying to get his head back on straight. A smile curved his lips. It was hopeless. She was amazing, and he wasn't going to get his head on straight any time soon. Rolling off of her, he collapsed back on the bed and wondered, honest to God, could they really do this all day long?

Another grin curved his mouth as he settled in next to her and pulled her close. Yeah, he thought, they probably could.

The ringing of his phone told him it probably didn't matter what he wondered.

He reached over and picked his cell up off the nightstand.

“Yes,” he said.

“Ensign, this is SB303 with all the late-breaking news.”

“Go on,” he said, checking his watch. Four o'clock—still midday. They had a few hours to go until dark.

“We think we know who killed Jason Schroder and that he is after the encryption key we believe you are carrying.”

Fuck.
He thought it, but he didn't say it—and he was now, officially, one hundred percent awake.

“Go on.” He wasn't admitting to anything, not without direct orders from Alex.

“According to our source, a lot of sharks are in the water on this, and they're all going to be looking for you, or whoever they think has the encryption key.”

Nothing new there, but how in the hell had SB303 found out about the encryption key? Then again, it was SDF, and Dylan Hart.

“Schroder's killer, we believe, is a man named Spencer Bayonne. He runs with a woman, Mallory Rush. Both of them are contract players, and they specifically do a lot of contract work for a man named Sir Arthur Kendryk.”

“Never heard of any of them.” Which didn't mean much.

“We're hoping they haven't heard of you, either,” SB303 said. “But we can guarantee that they've heard of Lily Robbins.”

He was beginning to wonder who
hadn't
heard about Lily Robbins and her ratty little macramé bracelet with the fate of the free world woven into its knots.

“Who's your source?”

“Family, sent to us by Grant.”

Christ
. It didn't get any better than that, and Zach wondered if Alex knew his case was leaking like an antique sieve.
Shit
.

His case officer had said a lot of people were in on this, a lot of people trying to retrieve the bracelet, and a lot of people trying to cover their asses for the loss of top-secret, foreign-policy-shaking intelligence. Alex had been more worried about the State Department on the “covering their ass” end, but it seemed to Zach that the Department of Defense had a leg up on all of them. SDF sure as hell did.

“What are you recommending?”

“Stick with the plan. You come here. We secure the data, get it to your boss, and once he knows he's won, he can come in and clean up the mess. With everybody at the top happy, nobody is going to care too much about what we had to do at the bottom to make it so.”

Make it so
. Zach couldn't help but grin. How many times had he gotten a set of orders with the unspoken but strongly implied directive of “Make it so.”

“Are you sure you don't want to claim this victory for yourself?” It was possible. It happened all the time, at all levels of the playing field.

“You're the one with your ass on the line and with some very bad people out to kick it. The boss says come home and you can have all the glory.”

Glory
. Zach did laugh at that. There was no glory. That was the point.

“And that's all the good news,” she said.

If that was the good news, he went ahead and braced himself for the bad.

“Go on.”

“Lily Robbins is officially a murder suspect in the killing of Paul Stark at her house this morning. Given the crime scene and that she fled, nobody in Albuquerque is particularly thinking self-defense anymore.”

“They couldn't possibly have the coroner's report yet.” Good God, it hadn't even been twelve hours since Paul Stark had come out of the stairwell.

“Their change of heart, from Ms. Robbins being taken hostage by whoever killed Stark to Ms. Robbins killing Stark, is based on a spent casing they found in her bathroom that matches the casings on a couple of boxes of hand-loaded cartridges they discovered in her gun safe.”

“So we're all fugitives from justice.”

“All three of you,” she agreed, and he knew exactly who she meant—him, Lily, and Charlotte. The cops were looking for all of them.

Suddenly the border seemed a very long way away.

“What coroner's report? Who's a fugitive from justice?” The voice came from behind him, and he could have kicked himself. “Is that SB303?”

He turned to look at Lily, and gave her a short nod. He'd tell her in a minute. He just wasn't going to tell her the truth. She didn't need any more bad news, especially when it was something he could get cleared up.

No, he decided. He wasn't going to tell her she was wanted for murder.

“What can you tell me about Bayonne?” he asked.

“Quite a bit, actually. He's got verified history of international arms sales. He's especially popular in West Africa. He's also moved a lot of heroin out of Asia, usually at Kendryk's bidding. He has an unsavory habit of cutting people up with his knife, which, as far as I've been able to glean from the scuttlebutt on the airwaves this morning, is what happened to Schroder, a clean Wingate. He apparently has a passing resemblance to Bruce Willis, likes the high life, expensive hotels, luxury cars, good food, rare wine, and his woman, Mallory Rush, not necessarily in that order. The woman is important to him. They've been together a long time, over ten years.”

Zach was impressed, and also demoralized. He hadn't been able to keep a woman for ten years, and this scumbag Bayonne had?

There was no justice. Of course, Zach would be the first to admit that he didn't have a passing anything to Bruce Willis, let alone a resemblance.

“We have also verified that he was on a flight from New York to Albuquerque late last night, and no reason to be there except for the same reason you're there.”

Didn't anybody have any secrets anymore?

“I'll watch out for him.” Watch out for Bruce Willis with a knife.

“Good, Ensign, and I can guarantee we'll be watching out for you.”

Yeah, Zach thought, hitting the disconnect and then just looking at the phone in his hand. Yeah, he believed her. For the first time in a long time, he really did believe someone was looking out for him.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO

Saturday, 4:30
P.M
.—Denver, Colorado

Two hours, this time, Cherie thought. It had only taken her two hours to go from bad to worse, much worse. She'd found the breach. It had been a blind opening, where from even a short distance, no more than five feet, the brick wall on the north side of Steele Street's basement looked solid. It was only upon closer inspection that she'd noticed the wall was actually split, with one part of the wall about two feet farther back than the other part, and considering that whoever had come up with the amazingly simple access had put it close to a corner, it truly was almost invisible. The rats knew it was there, and whoever had stolen Charlotte knew it was there, and Dylan knew, and now she knew, too.

“Lucky, lucky girl,” she muttered under her breath, lifting her flashlight a little higher in hopes of seeing something, anything, she recognized.

She did not.

She was lost in a labyrinth of brick walls, and old tunnels, and abandoned utility access ways. For the most part, the tunnels were dry, but in some parts, she'd been slogging through standing water, and in a couple of places, she'd been slogging through running water, which she'd found particularly intriguing. Running from where to where? she'd wondered.

For a moment, she'd also considered following the running water to see where it went. Actually, she'd considered that course of action for quite a few moments, which is how she'd ended up wherever she'd ended up, somewhere in the dark with the rats and a few other things she wasn't going to think about too much.

This is what happened to girls who drank champagne, and stayed out all night, and didn't get enough sleep. They made bad decisions in tight places.

She could die down here, which seemed a particularly cruel fate, to wander aimlessly until she collapsed from exhaustion and starvation, nothing but a skinny pile of bones for the rats to gnaw on.

Her mother was never going to forgive her.

Crap
.

She'd turned on a tracking device Skeeter had given her a few weeks ago that she'd stuffed in her backpack, but she had serious doubts about the signal going any farther than the next tunnel. Her GPS wasn't working, which didn't really surprise her. She had thirteen floors of steel-reinforced building on top of her, and no one “could hear her now” on her cell phone, either. She was in dead space.

Another lovely thought—
dammit
.

Stopping for a minute, she took a swallow of water out of the bottle she always kept in her pack. She also had two granola bars, but she was saving them for later. She needed something to look forward to, besides wandering aimlessly until she died.

What a freaking lousy day.

Pushing on, she decided to go left for a change instead of right. There was a way out, because there was a way in. She just had to find one of those things, the out or the in, and she wasn't too damn particular about which one she ended up with.

         

Saturday, 4:30
P.M
.—north of Albuquerque, New Mexico

“Pull over, Spence,” Mallory said, sliding her cursor across her computer screen. “Up on that rise. I've got something coming in.”

Spencer pulled onto the shoulder of the interstate and waited to see what she came up with. He was hoping for something from Rick Connelly. He wanted the hot-rodder driving the Shelby Cobra. He wanted Lily Robbins, and he wanted the goddamn bracelet, and then he wanted the hell out of New Mexico.

There was nothing here. Absolutely nothing. He'd never seen so much flat, rolling nothing.

He didn't want to end up spending the night in Denver, Colorado, either. What he wanted was to be back in New York, where he and Mallory could enjoy themselves for a few days at Arthur Kendryk's expense.

He'd changed his mind about upping the price on the bracelet. With anyone else, he would come out ahead by pushing a little harder—but not with Kendryk. Gazprom gas leases in the Ukraine would bring Lord Weymouth millions of dollars, but there was more to that deal than just having the bracelet. Kendryk would know Ivan Nikolevna had sent someone after Lily Robbins, and when Spencer handed the bracelet over, with all its incriminating evidence against a Russian scientist colluding with the Iranians on weapons-grade plutonium, it would make a helluva impression on everyone.

Kendryk could get whatever he wanted with that kind of damaging intelligence. Hell, he could not only get Gazprom gas leases out of the Russians, he could get concessions out of the damn Iranians. That would be sweet, to make the Iranians pony up for a change. Kendryk would love it.

Spencer never had any trouble coming up with a contract for a job, but coming out ahead with this piece of work was going to make him the top “go-to” guy in the world.

“What is it, Kitten?”

She was busy over on her side of the car and didn't answer at first, and then she upped the volume.

“We have a sighting in Mora County, in the town of Paysen, on the BOLO out of Albuquerque,” a dispatcher said. “The owner of the Road Runner Motel on Highway 92 heard our bulletin on his police band radio and reported a red Shelby Cobra Mustang to the Mora County Sheriff's Department. The car is parked behind the motel. Be advised, the two people with the car are armed and dangerous. Both are wanted in connection with a pair of murders in Albuquerque this morning.”

“Where's Paysen?” he asked.

“I'm checking, Spence,” she said, her fingers running over her keyboard. “Okay, it's not that far. We've got an exit about ten miles ahead of us.”

He pulled back onto the interstate and gunned the Town Car's motor. Grigori Petrov was out there somewhere, and Spencer could guarantee that The Chechen would have heard the rumor on Somerset Street this morning about the
Bullitt
car, and Spencer could guarantee
Bullitt
played very well in Russia. Petrov would know exactly what he was looking for, and wherever he was, he would definitely be doing what Spencer and Mallory had been doing, listening to the police and waiting for them to find the car.

Mallory reached over and switched on their radar detector. The last thing the two of them needed was to get pulled over. Mallory's record was clean, but Spencer had been walking on the wild side since before he'd turned sixteen, and it had only been in his late twenties that he'd figured out how to play a more lucrative game by contracting his services out to much bigger players.

“Can you give me an ETA?” he asked her.

She looked at his speedometer and keyed the figure into an equation she'd pulled up on top of the map showing their location and the town of Paysen.

She really was amazing, and her computer skills were the least of her attributes. She finished running the numbers and smiled over at him.

“If you can give me another ten miles per hour, Spence, I think we'll be in Paysen in about half an hour.”

That close, he thought, and that was perfect.

“Okay, Kitten, hold on.” He pressed down on the gas, and the Town Car responded beautifully, with all the sleek, silent power he expected, and at a hundred and twenty miles per hour, New Mexico didn't look so bad.

         

Saturday, 4:30
P.M
.—Denver, Colorado

“Okay, Dylan, this is it,” Skeeter said from in front of her communications console. “The cops have tagged him.”

Dammit.

“What have they got?” he asked.

“They're not on him yet. The guy who owns the Road Runner Motel in Paysen called in Charlotte, and they've just dispatched the report. Give him a call, tell him to get out of there ASAP, and I'll see who responds.”

“It's only four-thirty. Still broad daylight.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I'm awfully glad I tuned that girl up last week. He's going to have to run Charlotte hard to get out of New Mexico.”

Dylan was already on the secure line, making the call. He didn't need to say it, but they both knew that in a flat-out run to the border, the police had all the odds on their side, not in speed, but in communication. Charlotte could outrun a POS, a Police Officer Special, any day of the week, but she couldn't outrun a Motorola. Alex Maier's secret op was going to be all over the front page—and that was the good news.

With the call going out on the police band, everybody else who was listening and wanted that damn code now knew exactly where it was: Paysen, New Mexico, at the Road Runner Motel.