Cutting Loose (4 page)

CHAPTER
FIVE

Saturday, 5:20
A.M
.—Denver, Colorado

“What's this? The Bad Girls Breakfast Club?” Dylan Hart asked, stepping off the elevator and onto the roof of the SDF building at 738 Steele Street. The SDF crew called the roof retreat “The Beach,” but that was being kind. Two lawn chairs and a wooden crate bolted on top of a patch of Astroturf did not make a beach. It did make a helluva place for a private conversation, though, and The Beach hosted plenty of those, including the one obviously in session.

“Skeeter says something's up,” one of his operators said, rising to her feet. Five feet five inches of sleek and lean in a pair of cowboy boots, skin-tight jeans, and an olive-drab tank top, Gillian Pentycote was the strangest, and probably the most deadly, of all the people on Dylan's team.

Without a doubt, she was the most dangerous, with a reputation that had been made on the long gun as Red Dog, a code-name takeoff on the wild mop of auburn hair she kept professionally disheveled. Dylan deployed her frequently, on a short rotation, but never alone. Whatever the assignment, he teamed her with one of the guys: Hawkins, who had practically built her from the ground up; Kid Chaos, who wouldn't hesitate to shut her down if things got out of hand and she couldn't do it herself; Rydell, who had enough years under his belt to make sure things
didn't
get out of hand; or Travis, her lover, a.k.a. the Angel Boy, and probably the only person on the planet who really knew what went on inside her head. Dylan had never yet let her loose with just SDF's jungle boy, Creed Rivera, holding the leash. Creed knew where the lines were, and he'd never crossed them. But he pushed them. He pushed them hard, and Gillian pushed them even harder.

She was a case history in experimental psychopharmaceuticals, highly classified: the drug—XT7, a real mind-bender, a memory destroyer straight out of Thailand; the means of delivery—injection during torture, two and a half years ago; the results—a physically and mentally enhanced human being with an infrequent but statistically measurable tendency toward sudden instability.

That's what made her dangerous.

That's why Dylan never deployed her with Skeeter.

Yes. He most definitely played favorites, and his most favorite was the baby-faced blond bombshell standing on the rooftop wearing combat boots, black-and-white-striped leggings, and a dark pink satin bustier. Her legs went on forever, and not having them wrapped around him in bed is what had woken him up.

Dawn was barely breaking the sky, and for some reason, all the Steele Street girls currently in residence were on the roof, including the newest little bit of millionaire heiress fluff to wash up on SDF's shore—Honoria York-Lytton, also known as Honey York, no code name, just one of those things.

Dylan knew her. They'd met in Washington, D.C., at a State Department reception for the Prince of Brunei a few years back. She was easy to remember, warm, funny, and drop-dead gorgeous—usually. This morning she looked like someone had put her through a blow dryer backward. He never would have guessed that her hair could stick out that far, or that it kind of had a life of its own.

And he never would have guessed that Rydell would have landed himself a blue-blooded, Harvard-educated, East Coast socialite with markedly feminist leanings, let alone put a ring on her finger. As he recalled, Rydell's first marriage had cost him everything, down to and including his socks.

But there it was, an engagement ring, on Honey York's left hand.

“Something good, or something bad?” he asked the group at large, but his gaze had definitely strayed to the satin bustier. Skeeter hadn't been wearing it, or anything else, when he'd gotten in about midnight and crawled into bed with her.

“We don't know yet,” Honey said around a yawn. “Gillian and I just got here. Her brother called an hour ago and is on his way in from the airport, and I…I don't know. I've got a flight out later, but for now I just needed some air.”

“Which brother?” he asked, his gaze going from the piece of blond fluff curled up on one of the lawn chairs next to Gillian. Red Dog had two brothers; one was an Army Ranger who'd just come off a tour of duty in Iraq, and the other was—

“Gabriel,” Gillian said.

The other was Gabriel Shore, a pencil pusher and data analyst with an obscure division of the Commerce Department, whose office wasn't too far down the hall from General Richard “Buck” Grant's in a hell-and-gone annex east of Washington, D.C. Buck Grant was Special Defense Force's commanding officer, a job no one had expected to last longer than SDF's first mission. Eleven years later, Grant was still in the hell-and-gone Marsh Annex, next to the boiler room, and the SDF team was busier than ever. Gabriel was the one who had helped Gillian get her job with Grant after her divorce, the job she'd been doing when she'd been kidnapped and tortured.

Everyone who'd been involved on SDF's end of that mission felt responsible for what had happened to her, none more so than Dylan himself. He'd been the boss, and he'd been the target. But he doubted if the facts of that night set very well on her brother's conscience either.

Still, visiting Red Dog couldn't be on too many people's list of fun things to do. The girl didn't “visit” well. She was better at just “doing,” and the tougher the doing, the better she was at it.

“I didn't know you were expecting family,” he said.

She gave him a clear-eyed look. “I wasn't.”

Dylan held her gaze, waiting for more of an explanation. He didn't have to wait long.

“He called from the airport,” she said, giving him what he wanted, which was the way things worked best. She'd learned that lesson the hard way, but she had learned it. “He came in on the red-eye from Washington and is on his way to see me.”

Dylan checked his watch. It was five-thirty now; an hour ago would have been four-thirty in the morning, technically the middle of the night. Personally, he wasn't much of a family guy. All the family he had, he'd created here, at Steele Street. Even so, brothers coming to visit in the middle of the night seemed odd, even for Red Dog. Maybe the red-eye flight was all he could get.

“Is everything okay with your parents?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“And our other situation?”

“Copacetic.”

Good. He'd called her from Tokyo two days ago with an odd rumor he'd picked up from some of his most trusted Japanese assets, and he trusted her to stay on top of it. The two of them had a meeting scheduled for later in the day to evaluate the information.

As for Honey, he knew what her problem was, and it wasn't air. Rydell had left yesterday for a mission in Afghanistan. It was his first deployment since El Salvador, and she was nervous and wearing his clothes, trying to stay close to him with an old gray T-shirt and a pair of black running shorts, both five sizes too big. Dylan wouldn't say it didn't help, and she wasn't the first woman he'd ever seen cling to whatever was on hand, but from a guy's point of view, the outfit's only redeeming quality was the lacy black bra strap revealed by the T-shirt falling off her shoulder.

Not that he was looking. But he did remember a time, not so long ago, when there had been no women in the building. Skeeter had been the first, and the whole idea of women living at Steele Street had just snowballed since then, absolutely snowballed.

Dylan shifted his attention to his wife. She was standing with her back to the rest of them, looking out across the city to the south.

“Skeeter?” he asked.

“The Harlot is gone,” she said without turning around. “Poof. Unlawfully Absent. No longer on board. AWOL.”

The Harlot is gone…Charlotte
—a slow grin eased its way across his mouth.

He'd been right.

Zachary Prade was alive and well, and three weeks ago he'd been in Denver, standing on the tarmac in the shadows of a private jet.

Goddamn.

Prade.

Rydell had called him by another name, Alejandro Campos, a name Dylan and everyone else who had ever worked Central America knew well. Campos was connected in a hundred different directions, from governments to cartels, guerrillas to mercenaries—and one look at him had been enough for Dylan to understand why he hadn't heard from Zachary Prade since he'd bailed out of Laos eight years ago.

So he'd sent a message, going through SDF's State Department connection to try to access a deep-cover agent for the CIA. It had been a long shot, but Zachary Prade had been a long shot from the beginning—and it looked like Dylan had succeeded. His message had gotten through.

“Since when?” he asked.

“Sometime last night.”

“Who was on security?”

She hesitated, and he thought he knew why.

“It's okay, Skeet.” Prade knew Steele Street inside and out. She wouldn't have known he was in the building, not even while Zach was snatching Charlotte, which couldn't have been complete stealth, not with four hundred and twenty-eight cubic inches of Cobra Jet displacement under her hood.

“I never heard or saw a thing,” she said, finally turning around. “No breach was noted on the security grid. I didn't even know the car was gone until about an hour ago, when I woke up thinking something was wrong and that I better go find out what in the hell it was. I never expected to be missing a car, a whole damn car.” And she wasn't happy about it. He could tell by the cool, measured tone of her voice and the stance she'd taken at the edge of the Astro Turf. Forget the bustier; she was all about the combat boots this morning. “Dylan, Charlotte and Charlene are the only Shelby Mustang Cobra GT500KRs we own, and the Harlot is currently running her ass off in Albuquerque, New Mexico.”

“Albuquerque?” What the hell was Prade doing in Albuquerque? And it had to be Prade. Only a chop-shop boy could have gotten past Skeeter. Prade had been one of the very best—an exemplary thief.

“Albuquerque,” Skeeter confirmed. “I had a SAT tracker on her. After I realized she was gone, I booted up my system, and that girl has been running at over a hundred miles per hour since late last night, all of it heading south. I lost the signal for about half an hour, but it's back up now, and still in Albuquerque.”

Albuquerque
. There was something about Albuquerque, something recent.

“What's in Albuquerque?” he asked.

“Lily Robbins,” Honey said.

“Robbins?” He turned back to the little blonde wearing her fiancé's clothes. She'd either get used to Rydell's job, or she'd get out. There was no in between. “The woman from El Salvador?”

The SDF report on the incident in Morazán Province had been detailed and complete, inasmuch as Rydell had been involved—and Honey was right, it had mentioned a woman named Lily Robbins, a schoolteacher from Albuquerque who had been taking a sabbatical in Central America and filming a documentary.

Yeah. That was right. She'd been making a movie about nuns, which, in terms of the current situation, meant…what? A schoolteacher was definitely not Prade's type, so Dylan was crossing love affair right off the top of his list, and that left business, but what possible kind of business could Prade have with a schoolteacher?

“She was visiting the orphanage where my sister works,” Honey added. “St. Joseph's.”

Where the CIA's pilot had died.

There were no coincidences, and it never took more than the three letters C, I, and A in a row to set off Dylan's alarm. They'd been after his ass for years, and twice they'd almost gotten it. Skeeter was right. Something was up—and the one guy who might be able to fill in the blanks, Smith Rydell, was gone, incommunicado, out of sight, out of contact, out of the country, hell-and-gone to Afghanistan, and not just Rydell, but Creed and Travis, too, on a reconnaissance mission to set up a missile strike near the Pakistani border. The American government, of course, was not involved.

Johnny Ramos was in Iraq with his U.S. Army Ranger regiment out of Fort Benning, Georgia, on his second tour of duty. Kid was conducting a training mission at a Defense Department camp west of Steamboat Springs, and Hawkins, hell, Superman had packed up the wife and kids and hauled all their cute little butts to Disneyland.

Which left Dylan with the girls, two of whom could kick major ass, and one who…honestly, he wasn't sure what Honey York was good for, other than the obvious.

Not that he was too worried about getting into an ass-kicking situation. Prade could handle himself, and Albuquerque wasn't known as a hotbed of international intrigue.

It was just the CIA thing, that faint connection tying Rydell, and therefore SDF, to Albuquerque through the Morazán incident—which had been more about a downed Cessna carrying top-secret documents than the original orders for a Personal Security Detail had implied, or even hinted at—and then the Cessna had ended up belonging to the CIA instead of the State Department, which had called SDF in on the job, and then the pilot had died in a chapel where a schoolteacher from Albuquerque had been filming a documentary on nuns.

And now, after eleven long years of being someplace else, anywhere else, Prade had shown up in the middle of the night and reclaimed Charlotte for a midnight run to New Mexico.

Screw it.

“Do you still have your SAT connection up and running?” he asked Skeeter. Prade could fill in the blanks, if he was so inclined, and Dylan understood that he might not be. The chop-shop years were far behind them, and Zach's loyalties would have changed. He'd be a “Company” man. Dylan not only understood that, he respected it.

But he also understood Prade, and he was making the call.

“Yes.”

“What else besides a tracker did you put in the Shelby?” He knew Skeeter, too, and it would have been something. An exquisitely cherry GT500KR or not, one lone tracking device did not create a home base communication link in her book. She would have bolted something else onto the car, or built something into it. She liked to know where people were, her people, who were everybody who belonged to 738 Steele Street, and by whatever means necessary, be they devious, convoluted, or out-and-out just grabbing onto them, by God, she kept in touch. She was actually pretty damn pushy, and pretty damn nosy that way. He knew for a fact that she'd broken into every deep-sixed confidential file in SDF's database, including all the juvenile records.