Loose Ends (42 page)

Good. He fell back on the pillow.

He’d needed to know that. Whatever Dr. Patterson
had done to that soldier, nobody should ever do it to anyone else ever again.

“Did he hurt you?” He needed to know what she’d gone through, all of it. Monk was dead, but that whole night had been rough on her.

“No,” she said. “Nothing like what happened to you. I got a few bruises, a headache. That’s all. The docs checked me out that night, when I came with you, and I’m fine.”

A weight lifted off of him at her words. She hadn’t been hurt, and suddenly, life was full of grace.

“And Randolph Lancaster?”

“You mean that little old dead guy Monk was dragging around?”

Geezus
. That’s what his life’s work had come down to in the end: a little old dead guy getting dragged around?

“Yeah, that guy.” The one who’d committed countless acts of treason against his country and ruined countless lives.

She shook her head, her smile fading. “A bad end, a real bad end. The chop shop boys mined the elevator shaft with claymores, and Monk tried to escape that way. He took Lancaster with him.”

Ugly, but nothing more than he’d deserved.

His nemesis, the spymaster, Lancaster—dead.

“We’ve been waiting for you to come around,” she said.

“How long?” He didn’t have a clue.

“Two days.”

Not so long.

“I know you,” he said, because it seemed important to tell her.

“You sure?”

Yeah, he was sure.

“You’re Jane Linden, Robin Rulz.” Jane from the streets of Denver, a wild thing always on the run. Jane, sweet Jane, from a long-ago night when he’d turned to
her for solace and been changed by what she’d given him.

Two nights ago, she’d turned to him for the same, and he had not forgotten, not like he’d forgotten so many things.

“And who are you?” she asked.

“Trick question?” He grinned.

“You tell me.” Her eyes were so green, so warm and full of concern.

He let his grin fade. “Intellectually, I know I’m John Thomas Chronopolous, but in my heart, I’m still Con Farrel, and in between knowing those two things, there are a lot of empty places. It’s more like I’ve got a bad memory rather than no memory.”

“Dr. Brandt says it will take time, but since your amnesia was drug induced, it can be drug uninduced.”

“Who is Dr. Brandt?”

“The miracle worker who keeps Red Dog in one piece, the man who brought her memory back.”

Red Dog—that could only be one person.

“The woman who gave me the Klorizapat.” She’d been a redhead.

Off on the other side of the bed, someone cleared her throat, and Jane looked up and smiled.

“Sorry,” she said, then turned back to him. “Someone has been waiting for two days to see you.”

He turned his head to see who was there.

“Scout,” he said, his smile returning so big it almost hurt. His girl looked somehow different, and it took him a moment to realize why. “Nice dress.”

And it was, real nice, real pretty, and unlike anything he’d ever seen her wear.

Scout in a dress.

He lifted his hand toward her, and his girl threw herself into his arms.
Scout
. Looking no worse the wear for having been in the clutches of the dreaded SDF crew for
two months. She kissed his cheek, holding him close, and he shifted his gaze to the man standing next to her, holding her hand.

Oh, hell
. Holding her hand.

“Geez, I missed you, Con,” her sweet voice whispered in his ear. “You were s’posed to meet us at the damn Armstrong. We waited, until I finally had to call the damn
enemy
to find out what happened to you, and … and Red Dog told us you were here.”

Red Dog again. He owed her.

“Jack,” he said over the top of Scout’s shoulder, not bothering to disguise the sternness in his voice.

Jack Traeger was not fazed. He just stood there, grinning like the wild boy he was, letting Con read it all in his face: that he’d won the girl, taken her for his own, and he wasn’t giving her back.

Oh, hell
. Con had seen this coming for years, but it was still a shock, especially with Scout showing up in a dress, a pink and green confection of silk and swirling cabbage roses, sleeveless with a V neck, a summer dress that fit her like a glove, hugging her hips and making her legs look like they went on forever.

Garrett would have been proud.

“Con,” Jack said in greeting. “Or do you want to be called J.T.?”

Hell, he didn’t know.

He wanted to be called “mistaken,” but that wasn’t going to happen. What he was seeing was the real deal—Jack and Scout.

A doctor walked into the room then and came over to introduce himself.

“Dr. Brandt,” he said, taking Con’s hand and giving it a solid shake as Scout disentangled herself with a final kiss and stepped away from the bed. “I thought you might be back with us about now.” The doc was tall and thin, with graying hair and a studious pair of wire-rimmed
glasses perched on his nose. His eyes were a lively blue, very discerning, and with a glance, he let it be known it was time for the business of patient care.

By the time he left, Con was more encouraged about his situation than he had been in the last six years, and especially in the last year, when he’d felt his time running out.

Scout and Jack stayed on for another hour before heading out for dinner with a promise to return later, and then he was alone with Jane.

“Come on up here,” he said, pulling her onto the bed.

She didn’t resist, and he knew why. She needed this, too, to just be close. Any woman who’d sat by a guy’s bed for two days watching him breathe was probably well on her way to falling in love. At least that’s what he hoped.

“The doc says I’ll be out of here tomorrow. There’s going to be a debriefing at Steele Street, and then he wants to see me at Walter Reed the beginning of next week.” For a while, he was going to be Brandt’s primary work in progress, until the doc figured out a medication plan that would slowly wean him off of Souk’s drugs while allowing him to regain his memory and maintain his strength and speed.

She looked up at him expectantly, her hand resting lightly over his heart.

“That gives us a week to go somewhere …”

“Like?” she prompted.

“Like anywhere we want—Paris, Prague, Seattle, Munich, St. Croix, Saigon.”

“Saigon?”

“Sure. You’d love it, and it would love you.” He leaned down and kissed her mouth, and then lingered, loving the taste and feel of her, and wishing they were somewhere besides a hospital bed.

“Mmmmm,” she murmured when he broke off the kiss. “Are you asking me out on a date?”

“Yes.” Yes, he was. “A very long date.” She enchanted him, and he wanted more, a lot more.

“Hmmmmm.”

From
mmmmm
to
hmmmmm
? He wasn’t sure if he was making progress or not.

“Is that a
hmmm
yes? Or a
hmmm
no?” He was gunning for the yes, but she still hedged her answer.

“We had a crazy night …”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Our second crazy night together.”

Her startled gaze flew up to meet his.

“So you
do
remember!” A hot flush of color flooded her cheeks.

“Not the details, but when we made love, it came to me that we’d done it before—you and me—and given how long ago it must have been, that there was a good chance you never heard from me again.”

The color across her cheeks deepened.

“I’m sorry, Jane.” And he was, that he could have hurt her unintentionally. Or maybe he had been a one-night-stand kind of guy back then. He really didn’t know.

But he knew what he felt now. He knew what he wanted now.

“Give me a week, Jane,” he said, looking down into her eyes. “No matter who I am, or who I turn out to be, I want a chance with you, to see what we can be together.”

He’d never spoken truer words, and after a long moment, she seemed to believe him.

“One week,” she said, and a measure of tension slipped away from him.

Everything was good. It was all good.

She was at least half in love with him. He could tell, and so help him, he needed that. It was a good place to start. He needed someone who took him for what he was more than whoever he turned out to be. He needed this beautiful girl to be his.

Two weeks later, 738 Steele Street

“Here’s your bone dope,” Buck Grant said, tossing a classified folder onto Dylan’s desk. “As usual, we’re about a light-year and a half ahead of the dweebs in the lab, but they’ve finally confirmed that it’s not J.T. in that grave. The most the agency will give us is that the man we buried went by the code name Gator.”

Dylan lifted his gaze to the man standing at the window watching the street.

“Danny Gleason,” the man said without turning around. “He was part of a black ops team working for the CIA out of Coveñas.”

“How much of your memory have you gotten back?” Grant asked.

“Enough to know you got that limp eight years ago in Afghanistan,” J.T. said, and looked over his shoulder. “Good morning, Buck.”

A flush of some emotion washed across the general’s face, but Dylan would have been hard-pressed to define it. Relief, for sure, a serious measure of personal redemption for not having lost J.T., to have not “left one of his own behind,” and a good dose of pride that his boy had made it back, mentally and physically, from the hairiest mission to ever consume the team: the six years
of J.T.’s capture and amnesia. Dr. Brandt had brought Gillian back from that brink, and from what Dylan had seen this morning, the doc was achieving those same stellar results with J.T. in record time. J.T. had made significant progress since the grueling debriefing they’d all had in the days after his release from the hospital.

“I heard Brandt was sending you back to us this morning,” Grant said. “When are you going to be ready to get back in the game?”

“I was born ready,” J.T. said with a shit-eating grin curving his mouth.

Stellar results
, Dylan thought.

“Good. We’ve got a mail drop three hundred miles north of Riyadh. I need delivery next week, Thursday.”

“Interesting country up there,” J.T. said.

“Yeah, Hawkins loves it, so you’ll be in good company. The two of you need to be in and out in three days. We’ll have our briefing at fifteen hundred hours here in Dylan’s office.”

“Yes, sir.”

Dylan knew J.T. hadn’t remembered everything about Steele Street, but he hadn’t forgotten anything about being a spec ops warrior. If anything, his years on the run as Conroy Farrel had sharpened his edges and made him even better than he’d been before—and he’d been one of the very best.

Dylan was damn glad to have him back on the team, damn glad to have him home.

“How’s your girl, Jane?” Grant asked, and J.T.’s grin broadened into a true smile.

“Still with me.”

“Glad to hear it, son.” Their eyes met for a moment, then Grant cleared his throat. “Well, I’ve got a lunch date down at that fish shack Loretta loves so much.”

“McCormick’s?” Dylan said, naming one of the city’s premier restaurants.

“Yep,” Grant said. “That’s the one. I’ll see you all back here at fifteen hundred.”

J.T. watched the general leave before turning back to Dylan.

“You okay?” the boss asked—and Dylan
was
the boss. The fact had been proven to him many times over the last two weeks. Dylan was also his friend, and that fact had also been proven to him many times over the last two weeks.

“Yeah. I’ve got a date, too. Upstairs.”

Dylan nodded. “He and Creed got in late last night. I’m sure he’s waiting for you.”

J.T. was sure of it, too. Everybody here was waiting for him. He’d seen it in all of their faces at the debriefing, which had been a very formal, very tough two days with very little personal interaction.

Dr. Brandt had been watching him like a hawk through the whole ordeal, even preempting General Grant a few times—but nobody had been watching him harder than the chop shop boys. Curiosity, anger, hope, distrust, love, confusion, more hope: He’d seen it in all of their faces. They knew what they’d lost. They just weren’t sure what they’d gotten back.

Neither was he. Being J. T. Chronopolous was still pretty damn new.

The elevator shaft had been repaired, and in a few minutes, he was on the twelfth floor, standing in the middle of what had once been his loft.

He slowly circled around. The place was oddly amazing. He hadn’t known surfboards could be made into wall art, or that snowboards could be made into chairs. One wall of the living area was loaded with racks of skis, cross-country skis, downhill skills, twin tips, a few pairs and sizes of each style. Four bicycles were taking up some of the floor space in the dining room, and four
more bicycles were suspended from the ceiling in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows facing the east side of the building.

There was a kayak stuffed behind the couch, ski boots and poles piled here and there, a full-rig climbing harness and bivouac draped across one of the living room walls, and of all things, a life-size painting of a naked man hanging above a large fireplace.

He knew the man.

The guy looked a lot like him, only years younger, and he was sitting in one of the chairs flanking the fireplace, calmly waiting while J.T. looked around.

“So you like to ski,” he finally said.

“You do, too,” the younger man said. “You’re the one who taught me.”

Probably. Sure. That made sense.

“Where did we like to go?” he asked. He was getting his memory back, but there were still plenty of blank spots here and there, some of them damn big.

“A-Basin, the steep and deep, and Vasquez at Mary Jane. Between the two of us, we’ve launched off the gnarliest double black diamonds in the state.”

Yeah, he could see it. A small grin curved the corner of his mouth.

“And lived to tell the tale,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the younger man.

“Or some version thereof, usually embellished,” Kid said with a slight grin of his own, his dark-eyed gaze meeting J.T.’s across the length of the living area.