Loose Ends (24 page)

Zach sure as hell had that right, Dylan thought.

“Where are you now?”

“Well, just to be on the safe side, and given what we’re dealing with here tonight, I’m five floors up in the building directly across the street from the India Gate suite in a not-nearly-as-nice hotel called the Mission Inn, room 514. I’ve got some glass but could use better, maybe something in a Schmidt and Bender 4-16 × 50mm PMIIK attached to something with a .308 bore.”

“I’ll send Kid.”

“Have him bring a pizza.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. Tell me what you aren’t telling me, Dylan,” Zach said. “You just authorized a Level One SOTIC sniper to come over here and set up on a guy who eats lunch with the president of the United States.”

“You made the request. What are you thinking?”

“That maybe I know something I’m not sure I really know.”

“Like?”

“I know Walls was in Coveñas when Creed and J.T. were there, and I know he and his team were blacker than black, running so far under the radar I can guarantee they didn’t know who they were working for and didn’t care. And other than Walls, I’m not sure any of them made it out of South America alive. What I am sure of is that they had a contact who had a contact who had a contact—you know the routine.”

Yes, he’d been there and done that more times than he could remember. They all had.

“And?”

“Well, when I looked, the Coveñas deal dead-ended at a guy with a code name that slid around the outside of Lancaster’s world. We could never pin anything on him. All we could do was guess at the connection between Lancaster and this code name.”

“White Rook.” That’s what Skeeter had pulled out of
the decrypted LeedTech files, that all of them, the whole SDF crew, had been made, especially Dylan.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Zach said after a brief pause. “So are you just a better guesser than me, or is this why you’re the boss?”

“A better guesser with a gigabyte of data taken off of a computer owned by a company called LeedTech, which is a subsidiary to World Resources—”

“Otherwise known as Wars R Us,” Zach interrupted. “The go-to guys in a dozen sub-Saharan countries whose idea of government begins and ends with armed conflict.”

“What did you hear about LeedTech?”

“Not much,” Zach said. “Years ago, there was some strange stuff in Bangkok with their name attached, but I was working heroin, straight Golden Triangle, not synthetics, and whatever they were up to, nobody was really talking. What do you have?”

“Hamzah Negara, Erich Warner, Dr. Souk, Tony Royce, Randolph Lancaster, and John Thomas Chronopolous, not to mention myself, and, probably by tomorrow morning, you and everybody else who works here.”

“
Qué carajo.
” Zach breathed the words out in a harsh whisper. “You can tie Lancaster to LeedTech to J.T.?”

“Yes,” he said. “Along with dozens of other soldiers from U.S. services.”

“That’s treason.”

“Abso-fucking-lutely.”

“Who’s on J.T.?”

“Nobody,” Dylan admitted. “We lost him over on the west side.”

“We better find him before Lancaster does.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “I have a feeling he’s the guest of honor at this get-together in Denver. We invited him, and I’m damn sure Lancaster invited us.”

“Uh, we live here, boss. This is our town.”

“Yeah, but White Rook is the guy who put me in charge of SDF fourteen years ago.”

There was a much longer pause on the other end of the radio this time. Dylan could almost hear Prade churning through that boatload of “we’re so fucking screwed.”

“Does Buck Grant know?” Zach finally asked.

“He knows the name White Rook, but I don’t know if he knows it’s Randolph Lancaster. I just found out this afternoon, after Skeeter decrypted the files I got from LeedTech.”

“And you were going to share this intel when?”

“I hit the office about the same time J.T. hit our garage. Regardless of how we disseminate the intelligence, we need to protect him first. I don’t think we can do that on the street.”

“How good is your data?” Zach asked.

“Pristine.”

“Send me Kid, and I guarantee nothing will get by us on this end.”

“He’s on his way.” And if Lancaster had any gut instincts at all, the hair should already be rising on the back of his neck.

No action.

Not a sign of life.

The Star Motel looked dead to the world, like it had gone out of business and forgotten to turn off the lights.

Skeeter took a sip of the chai latte she’d brought with her from Steele Street. She’d been sitting in the garage’s current “Sheila,” a gray, late-model Buick so nondescript nobody ever noticed it. The car was like part of the pavement. She’d been parked up the street from the motel for damn near an hour and hadn’t seen one thing worth reporting. There were two cars in the motel’s off-street parking area, both of them clearly visible from her vantage point, and neither of them could possibly be J.T.’s getaway car. A ten-year-old Jeep Wrangler four-banger was not anybody’s idea of a getaway car, and neither was a Yugo.

Unbelievable.

A Yugo. Just the thought of an underpowered shoebox on wheels was enough to make her stomach churn, which was the last thing she needed.

She took another sip of latte and stretched back into the seat. A lot was going on out there on the streets tonight, but not on this street out in the middle of BFE, Bum Fuck Egypt.

Dylan wanted her out of the way? Well, he’d gotten
her out of the way. The only thing that could rock this place was J.T. showing up out of the blue. That was the score. Maybe she’d get lucky, but just because J.T. and crew had staged from the Star Motel didn’t mean they were coming back. They could go anywhere, drive all night and fly out of Cheyenne, or Colorado Springs, Grand Junction, or even Salt Lake City.

She needed to check the room, and there’d been a time when she would have done that alone, but not now. Dylan had promised her backup, and when it got here, they’d check the room together.

She’d sure like to rescue Jane. A few years ago, she’d been pretty skeptical about a street thief of Jane Linden’s renown being brought into the Steele Street fold, even if it was mostly through the Toussi Gallery, but the girl had proven out, and Skeeter was worried. The former most famous pickpocket in Denver was now a good friend—and J.T. was something else. She didn’t know what.

Juiced. That was for damn sure. God, he’d moved through Steele Street like a storm.

A small green line tracking across the screen of the small computer she’d installed in the Sheila, a Bazo 700 series PC, drew her attention to the dashboard and told her she had a call coming in.

It was about time.

She pressed a button on the unit.

“This is Skeet,” she said.

“Red Dog here, ready to relieve you,” a female voice said.

Red Dog, she thought, wondering if that meant they’d lost J.T. She’d been thinking Dylan would send Quinn or Kid, or both, after the interrogation of Sam Walls.

“Your location?” she asked.

“We’re two blocks behind you and one block over. Come on up and park again on Meldrum, where you
can still see the motel, and we’ll switch cars. You’ll drive Coralie home, and we’ll take the Sheila.”

“We should check the room.” She had the key. It was a no-brainer.

“Got that covered. We’re on it. You’re expected back at home base, and I’m not bucking the boss just so you can tromp around in some dingy old motel in your combat boots.”

She grinned. She’d been wearing heels earlier, but Gillian would know she’d changed before she’d headed out on the street. Good footgear was just good sense, and there was nothing like a pair of combat boots to let people know you were a girl who could do whatever, whenever, to whoever—and she could.

So why let Travis and Gillian have all the fun? Skeeter was beginning to feel like a bookmark in this mission, instead of the operator she was trained to be.

“That’s—”

“Uh, Skeet,” Gillian interrupted her. “Whatever you’re thinking, stop. I noticed the boss is a little tense right now, and I actually think we can all do our jobs just a bit better if you’re safe at Steele Street, and he’s not breathing fire down the back of our necks.”

What a crock.

“I was kicking ass—”

“When I was still shuffling papers,” Gillian interrupted her again. “And since then we’ve taken a lot of names together, but—”

“We had this conversation two months ago, Red.” Skeeter had been the one who’d given Gillian the code name Red Dog, and over the last few years, the two of them had kicked butt from Kandahar to Caracas. They had a reputation, the highest, among a small, intensely skilled group of people, the people who did the same job they did, top-rung, elite military forces. They were the
SDF girls, the Ghost and the Darkness, Hell and Fury, Skeet and the Dog.

“And this time we’re both being overruled. The leader of this pack says you go home, and this is not the time for any of us to step outside the lines. We’ve got a lot at stake.”

Coming from Red Dog, that was quite a statement. That girl had been reborn outside the lines.

“Copy that,” she said, sucking it up. She knew Gillian and Travis wouldn’t miss anything in the room, and if the girl, Scout, and the guy who had rescued her showed back up at the Star Motel, she knew Gillian and Travis would bring them in.

J.T. was another ball game altogether. Even after having witnessed most of it firsthand, she was still set back on her heels by how quickly he’d eluded them at Steele Street. They’d had everybody on him.

“Skeet, I don’t see you moving.” Gillian’s voice came through the Bazo.

Geez
.

“Moving. Roger and out.” She turned the key in the ignition and pulled out onto Meldrum Street.

“
Whoa
 … oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. Don’t turn into the motel,” Scout said, ducking down in the seat next to Jack in the Buick Regal. “Just keep moving. Keep driving and take the next left. We need to circle around again, but don’t come back by the motel.”

Jack didn’t question her orders. She’d obviously seen something.

But he looked, and
yowza
. Whoa, whoa, whoa was right, a gorgeous, bodaciously built blonde in a slinky dress and combat boots was getting out of a car on Meldrum, a couple of blocks up the street from the motel.
Geezus
. He’d died and gone to heaven.

“The blonde?”

“How in the hell?” she answered, which was no answer at all. She peeked up and looked over the seat through the back windshield. “You didn’t happen to drop a motel receipt when you came through that door on the tenth floor, did you?”

“You’re kidding me,” he said, not quite believing it. “She’s from Steele Street?” Scout knew he wouldn’t have left so much as a fingerprint in that building, let alone a forwarding address.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Her name is Skeeter Bang-Hart, a real serious piece of work, and she’s heading up the street. They must have somebody else up there, backing her up.”

Jack didn’t have to work too hard to detect the awe and admiration in Scout’s voice, and he was surprised. They didn’t run into too many women who had what it took to impress Scout.

He made the next two left-hand turns, went up the hill for another two blocks, and started to slow down.

“Keep going,” Scout said. “I see another car that looks like trouble. We need to come in behind it.”

He glanced down the cross street and saw it, too, the tail end of something that looked vintage, well cared for, and muscled under the hood—a gold GTO, undoubtedly Steele Street iron. He kept cruising and took the next cross street over to Meldrum, where he pulled to a stop, far enough away to be discreet but where they could see the gold Goat off on a side street, the blonde walking toward it, and, at the bottom of the hill, the rattrap Star Motel.

This was all just getting too damned interesting for him. How in the hell had they found the Star? He had only one answer, and it didn’t compute.

“They got Con.”
Sonuvabitch
. Now what?

“No way.”

“You got a better explanation?”

“Even if they’d gotten him, he wouldn’t have given us up. You know that.”

And he did.

Torture wouldn’t have worked on Con, and the only two people he cared about were sitting in this Buick Regal on Meldrum. SDF couldn’t have leveraged the information out of him.

“Something sure as hell happened, because they are sure as hell all sitting there waiting for us to show up.”

“Ah, hell,” she whispered.

Yeah, he saw it, too, the woman from the tenth floor, the redhead, got out from the GTO’s passenger side, and a blond man got out from behind the steering wheel.

They’d just tripled their trouble.

Make that doubled.

After a few moments of conversation, Skeeter Bang-Hart slid into the Goat’s driver’s seat and drove off.

Funny how that didn’t make Jack feel any better.

“Her name is Red Dog,” Scout said. “And that’s Travis with her. She calls him the Angel Boy. They’re married.”

How wonderful for them. Married. Hell. The only girl he was interested in marrying was hooking up with a college professor.

“And they’re headed down to the motel,” he said, watching the two operators pass the gray car the blonde had left on Meldrum and keep walking down the hill.

“Did you guys travel clean?” Scout asked.

“We always travel clean.” Red Dog and the Angel Boy wouldn’t find anything in the room that could identify him or Con, but they’d find a few items of interest to folks with an operational turn of mind.

“I could call her,” Scout said.

Ohh-kay
.

He slanted her a curious, disbelieving glance. “And ask her to please not break into our motel room?”

“She gave me a phone,” Scout said, pulling said item out of a pocket in her pants. “It only calls one number. Hers.”

“So you can turn Con in whenever it seems convenient.” It wasn’t a question.

“She says she can help him.”

“Help him what?” He couldn’t believe they were still having this conversation.