On the Loose (7 page)

“Yes,
patrona
.” Hans nodded.

“Ari, you and I are going after this American as soon as we have his location. I'll take care of preparing the Piper. You prepare field gear for the two of us, including back country supplies, the usual weapons, and a long rifle.”

Ari nodded in understanding. The two of them had a history of successful assassinations to their credit. They were a good team.

“Hans, you will remain at the villa as interim director of all other ongoing operations.”

“Yes,
patrona
.” Hans nodded, and she made a brief gesture with her hand, dismissing the two men.

Rydell would have reported his information during the debriefing in Lima, Irena knew, but he would have been out of danger by then, and he would have had time to think things through, and with those thoughts would have come caution. The most damaging information might have been held back, considered, saved for his own government. With that in mind, it was completely possible he'd been the one to pull himself out of Peru, so he could head for the nearest home base—Panama City.

Which made the PSD and the woman at best a ruse, and at the least negligible, or perhaps not. If there was even a grain of truth in the assignment, it could be useful.

Very useful.

“Hans,” Irena said, stopping the German before he could follow Ari through the French doors. Besides being a field agent and case officer for the East Germans, Hans had been trained by the KGB in a variety of combat-oriented martial arts, hostage rescue, and in the eminently practical skill of kidnapping.

“Yes,
patrona
?”

“I want to know everything about this woman, Honoria York-Lytton...everything.”

“Jawohl, patrona.”

CHAPTER
SEVEN

Howard Air Force Base, Panama

Good God, Honey thought, standing next to Smith and watching wide-eyed from behind her sunglasses as eight beautiful pieces of some of the world's most expensive luggage were mushed, and smushed, and scrinched, and scrunched under a section of yellow cargo netting.

Louis Vuitton had to be rolling over in his grave.

“Does everything have to be so tight?” she asked, trying to act more nonchalant than she felt, which wasn't very damn nonchalant with the five big Vuittons getting the stuffing crushed out of them.

“Yes,” Smith said, one word, very curt.

Okay. Fine. Honey repressed a sigh and tucked a loose strand of hair back up into her twist.

It was very gloomy inside the cavernous hangar, and very hot, and she really wanted one of those little Cuban cigarillos she'd bought at the Blake, but from the smell of the hangar, and the contents of the pallet, and given her luck, she figured that's about all it would take to blow them all to hell—her lighting up.

God.

The Air Force ground crew cinched the netting one final time before securing it, and Honey told herself not to panic, it was Vuitton, it would hold—and then they were finished. There it was, the whole thing: a pallet of death and destruction topped off with haute couture, secure and ready to go to Ilopango.

Unless one of the suitcases didn't hold together and split a gut and something, anything, spilled out—oh, and then this party was going to come to a real quick end. Talk about getting “blown” to hell. What was it Smith had said that night in San Luis? Something about watching a cockroach drag half a plantain across a jail cell floor in San Salvador?

Honey had thought about that cockroach a couple of times since that night, and a couple of hundred dozen times since she'd looked in the five big suitcases that had been waiting in the garden bungalow when she'd arrived at the Blake, the ones she'd never seen before with her name written on the luggage tags. By then, Jenkins had already gone over the “coffee plantation tour” itinerary with her, and handed her a sealed envelope with the lading forms documenting the rest of the cargo she was supposed to sign off on. Gestures of goodwill for Honey to dispense at her own discretion, he'd said with a slightly put-upon air of
noblesse oblige,
tokens of the U.S. government's appreciation for the hard work of the noble Salvadoran farmers.

Not quite.

One quick read of the lading documents after Jenkins had left had made Honey wonder if it might be in her best interest to jimmy the locks on the suitcases. The “gestures of goodwill” were nothing short of a death sentence, and she doubted if there was an ounce of her discretion involved in their dispensation. They were all going to the CNL rebels. God only knew what else her “handlers” in Washington were trying to pawn off on her.

Fortunately, she'd had a bit of experience in jimmying Vuitton luggage locks, and one look inside the first suitcase had made her wonder what her chances might actually be against the treason charge, if she had a really good lawyer—or a dozen of them.

Because this was bad, very bad.

And it had already been bad enough.
Dammit.

A beast, Smith had called the cockroach, and Honey didn't doubt it for a second. Neither did she doubt that the Panamanian cockroaches could be equally beastly, or that she was hauling enough contraband to get her locked away in a Central American prison for the rest of her life, and when that sentence ran out, they'd put her in Leavenworth for the rest of her next life.

Oh, yes. This was bad karmic energy of a cosmic nature, the kind that followed souls through countless reincarnations—and she was a Protestant.

Honey took a breath and tried to steady her nerves. She was “in” this thing. She'd made her decision before she'd ever gotten on the plane to Panama, and she was going to be “in,” until she was “out,” on her terms. She'd made it to the air base, and that was a good thing, even if it was all downhill and straight to hell from here. Once she got on the plane to El Salvador, there was no turning back, no escape. It was forward, into the breach, and hope for the best. Her job was clear: Deliver the Vuittons, the briefcase, and the “war in a box” detailed in the lading document to the Campos plantation in Morazán Province. Then, that accomplished, she had to retrieve the courier's pouch, the 2GB flash drive, and do God knew what to convince the CNL not to trample Alejandro Campos's coffee bushes.

Yes. There was something wrong with the picture, like why in the hell she was in it—and yes, there were moments in a woman's life when she simply had to wonder what in the hell she'd done to get herself into so much trouble.

This was one of them.

Even if she knew very damn well what she'd done and very damn well why she'd let herself be railroaded into El Salvador.

“MRE,” Honey said, reading the letters stenciled on the side of one of the cardboard containers on the pallet, while tucking another loose strand up into her hairdo. She was coming apart in the heat, and she really needed to hold together. “What does MRE stand for?”

“Meal, Ready to Eat,” Smith said, and if she wasn't mistaken, he almost said it with a grin. “Three lies in one, but for all the complaining about the quality of the rations, I've never seen a hungry soldier refuse to eat one.”

Okay, this is good,
she thought.
Food.
She could live with that—food for the hungry guerrillas; there were a lot of cardboard containers stamped with MRE. It was the other boxes shredding her nerves. Seeing them written on a lading form was one thing. Seeing the wooden containers stacked on a pallet and knowing she was responsible for them was another. Her gaze went over the containers, reading the stenciled markings on their sides: AMMUNITION, SMALL ARMS, 5.56MM BALL, and AMMUNITION, SMALL ARMS, 9MM BALL, so yes, there was plenty of ammo headed up into the hills; PISTOL, BERETTA MODEL 92 9MM; RIFLE, M16A2, and there were plenty of those, including the ones marked RIFLE, M16A2 W/40MM LAUNCHER, M203, which she knew from the lading forms meant grenades, and yes, she could see how being able to launch a grenade from a rifle would come in real handy.

Her favorite, though, was WEAPON, ANTI-TANK, 66MM.

She doubted if there were many tanks rolling around the Torola River, but she was guessing a 66mm anti-tank weapon could blow a big hole in about anything it hit.

Guerrillas in the mountains, grenades on the pallet, trouble in the suitcases, the CIA and a very stately, white-haired man in the State Department named Mr. Cassle pulling all the strings, and not a word from Julia in four months, not a single word since she'd boarded a truck outside St.

Mary's and headed off into the Salvadoran countryside.

The truth was, Mr. Cassle and the grim-faced CIA man in his grim black suit hadn't had to threaten her even half as much to get her on board for a top-secret mission into El Salvador to parley with the rebels who had been driving the truck that had taken her sister away, especially when the government guys were supplying all the trade goods.

Damn good trade goods. Top-notch.

Did grenades and “WEAPONS, ANTI-TANK, 66MM” scare the holy crap out of her? Yes. But Honey was pretty damn sure Diego Garcia wasn't in the market for a year's supply of Estee Lauder, and Garcia was the only connection she had left to Julia. She just prayed the connection wasn't too terribly close. In a sudden turn to the right, the Catholic Church had abandoned its dissident policies in El Salvador. Most of the clergy had fallen in line, except for a small group of nuns at an isolated outpost in the hills above Cristobal who ran a school and orphanage out of a former coffee plantation. The good sisters of St. Joseph had refused to change course. According to Father Bartolo, whom Honey found alarmist at best, and deranged at worst, there were four—Sister Bettine, Sister Rose, Sister Teresa, and Sister Julia Ann-Marie—none of whom had been seen or heard from by the St. Mary's priest in over twelve weeks.

Except for one outrageous rumor coming out of Morazán that Father Bartolo, for one, refused to believe, even for a second, and would not repeat for even a million dollars, but would apparently shout about for free until he'd worked himself into such a lather that he'd hung up in her face.

Honey hadn't been the same since.

So yes, Mr. Cassle's threats had almost been superfluous. As for the rest of it—hell, Washington, D.C., was full of strings and the people who pulled them, but only a fool thought the strings only went one way, and Honey was no fool. In the District, the strings always went both ways, and she had her fingers wrapped around more than a few—enough to see her through this mess, if push came to shove.

At least she hoped she did, and if push came to shove back and shoot—well, that was why she had C. Smith Rydell.

At least she hoped she did.

She slid a glance in his direction, which did nothing to reassure her. The man did not look happy. Neither did he look like the elegantly dressed bodyguard who had shown up at the Blake.

He'd changed his clothes immediately upon their arrival at the air base, and now looked like what she was beginning to realize he actually was: a soldier. Not some fly-by-night gun for hire who'd washed up on the shores of San Luis with a beer in one hand and a .45 in the other, just in time for a riot and to save her butt. But a real soldier who followed orders and had been trained to fight, very highly trained. It showed in the way he moved, and it showed in the way he thought—clearly, concisely, and tactically, always looking for the win. He'd had a map to a secret airstrip in his pocket the night they'd met, and an official-looking ID from an agency called IRIS, issued by the U.S. Embassy in Panama, allowing him to carry a concealed weapon throughout Central America. She'd researched the organization when she'd gotten home, and about the only thing the Institute for Regional and International Studies did, apparently, was hand out concealed carry cards—but the part about the embassy had been real.

Honey knew people, was good at reading them, and the man at State, Mr. Cassle, had recognized C. Smith Rydell when the CIA man had handed him the photographs taken at the sacristy. It had been in the almost imperceptible tightening of the older man's lips, in the long ten seconds he'd spent looking at the picture, and in the one, very brief phone call he'd made: “Get me Grant on the horn.”

Honey didn't know who Grant was, yet, but she'd bet Smith did, and she couldn't help but wonder if Grant was part of the dead end of Smith's résumé at someplace notated only as SDF. It didn't seem to matter how many strings she'd jerked and pulled last night and this morning, she still didn't know what SDF meant, and the most she'd been able to find out in the last four months about 738 Steele Street, the address on his driver's license, was that it was an old garage with a shady past where people sold cars in Denver, Colorado.

Honey wasn't buying it.

Her glance slid over Smith again.

Nope. No way. There wasn't a square inch on him anywhere that said “car salesman.”

CHAPTER
EIGHT

Smith stood off to the side of the pallet, regarding the load with a mixture of disapproval, apprehension, and disbelief.

66mm Light Anti-tank Weapons? What the hell was he doing taking LAWs into Morazán? Rifles with 40mm grenade launchers? Just what the hell kind of war was the CIA thinking it wanted to start? And what in the hell could have gone down in the Agency's Cessna to get all this ordnance, personnel, and transportation rocketing through the system a hundred times faster than his last reimbursement check?

Smith had a feeling he was never going to know, which was fine with him. He wasn't a policy maker. He was a policy implementer. Whatever was in the courier's pouch, if they even got the damn thing back, would be encrypted; the same with the flash drive. More than likely, they both contained the same information, the hard copy being a backup in case the electronic one got zapped—standard procedure. But that was the only standard thing in the whole operation.

Smith shifted his attention from the LAWs to the suitcases on top of the pallet and almost sighed like Honey. Those things were never going to be the same. He didn't give a damn, not really, not about the suitcases, but they were as out of place in the hangar as Tweety Bird standing there next to him, and it would be all too easy for her to end up in the same mangled condition.

He gave her a quick once-over, and got stuck on her shoes.
Cripes.
They were getting ready to board a C-130, and she was wearing black patent leather peekaboo T-straps with three-inch heels.

But not for long, not if he had anything to say about it—and he did. T-straps, hell. He was guessing Prada, the spring collection, and yes, he was spending way too much time with Skeeter in her shoe closet. All he could say in his own defense was that half the Steele Street crew was spending too much time in Skeeter's shoe closet since she and Kid had put in a movie screen, a sound system, and a small section of stadium seating with leather recliners.

Yeah, it was a helluva closet, supersized, and it was exactly where Honey York needed to be: settled into a recliner, watching a movie in a shoe closet. Safest damn place for her.

The ground crew finished tying off the netting, and there it all sat, everything from designer luggage to explosive ordnance, and the longer he looked at it, the more unacceptable it became.

“Give me the briefcase and go home,” he said, not even bothering to look over at her. She knew who he was talking to.

“No.”

Dammit.

“Why not? And don't bother to tap your foot; I expect an answer this time.”

“It's my chip,” Honey said after a moment, not sounding any too happy with his ultimatum. “The only chip I've got, my bargaining chip to get into El Salvador and up into Morazán.”

Yeah, he'd figured as much, and the “incriminating” photographs be damned. It probably took a helluva lot more than the CIA and the United States State Department to intimidate Honoria York-Lytton. And she was right about the briefcase. It was her bargaining chip, all hers. He'd asked Dobbs for the combination, but Dobbs hadn't known it, and the chief of station hadn't at all liked being reminded of the fact.

“Whatever is inside the briefcase isn't yours,” Smith said, stating what he was sure was another unpopular fact.

“No, but the ability to
get
whatever is in it is mine, and this briefcase doesn't get opened until I get what I want.”

“Which is?”

She hesitated.

“Honoria?”

“My sister,” she snapped. “Face-to-face. So I can see she's safe.”

Finally, the truth came out, not that it was exactly a news flash.

“Where is she?”

“She was assigned to St. Joseph Orphanage and School near Cristobal, but I've been told she spends a lot of time at the CNL camp up on the Torola River.”

“Told by who?”

Honey's expression, which hadn't been happy to begin with, turned even grimmer. “Diego Garcia.”

“That was the correspondence?”

“Yes,” she admitted.

Well, hell.

“When was the last time you heard from her directly?”

“The last time I saw her. The morning you put me on the plane.”

Well.

Hell.

Smith wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and stared at the pallet.

The damn guerrilla camp.

“What about the priest in San Luis? The one who was in the room with you, and Julia, and Garcia. Father Bartolo? Right? He must be in contact with her.”

“Father Bartolo has washed his hands of the nuns at St. Joseph. They've defied the church by continuing to support the CNL. He says he can't afford to be associated with them. It's too dangerous, so he's turned them over to the priest in Cristobal.”

That rankled. The guy sure hadn't had any trouble taking the money and handing it over like he'd been the one to come up with a quarter of a million dollars for the “Liberators.”

“You need to let me go in alone and close the deal. I'll find Julia and bring her back to Campos's.”

“That won't work.”

Yes, it would. Smith was very good at finding people and bringing them back, from wherever to wherever, clean deals, every one. He had a dozen of them to his credit.

“Why not?” he asked, which turned out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer. After about a minute of watching her mind work without a word coming out of her mouth, he began to wonder if he was going to get an answer. Any answer.

“I have reason to believe,” she started to say, then stopped for another couple of seconds, before beginning again. “It's possible Julia doesn't want to leave the CNL camp.”

“Because?” She needed to help him out a bit on that one.

But she wasn't going to help him out on it. He could tell by the silence. It went on, and on, and on.

Hell. If Honey got hurt, Smith was going to have a hard time living with himself, but had anyone in Washington, D.C., thought of that when they'd gotten this ball rolling? And did they give a damn?

Finally, two questions he could answer on his own, the first with “It didn't matter,” and the second with “No,” no one gave a damn if Honey got hurt. Despite her net worth and family connections, he was afraid all the Park Avenue princesses in Morazán Province this week were classified as expendable assets.

Diego Garcia might trust her to deliver his payoff, but Smith didn't trust Diego Garcia, or Alejandro Campos, or the CIA, and as of two hours ago, White Rook was at the top of his “sketchy” list.

Outside the hangar, he heard the familiar drone of a C-130 approaching, which did absolutely nothing to improve his mood. The Air Force loadmaster finished checking the pallet, then walked over and pressed a switch on the hangar wall. Two twenty-foot-high doors began sliding apart on greased rails, revealing the transport aircraft with its aft end facing the hangar, and its ramp coming down. In short order, a fork-lift operator was moving the pallet onto the ramp.

Ready or not, he thought, and the answer to that was “not.”

A serious-looking young man wearing tropical BDUs stepped off the airplane's ramp and headed inside the hangar, approaching him and Honey. The soldier's uniform was completely devoid of unit insignia or any other identification—one more sign that Smith and Honey were heading into no-man's-land.

“I'm Smith,” the young soldier said with a quick wink.

“Yeah, so am I,” Smith admitted, grinning in spite of himself and the whole rotten situation.

“Two to Ilopango,” the soldier continued. “Transload and handoff to Salvadoran army at hangar T-195, correct?”

“That's us,” Rydell confirmed. “I need a set of BDUs for my civilian package. Do you have anything that'll even come close to fitting her?”

“Yes, sir,” the soldier said, his gaze flicking over Honey before returning directly to Smith. “We were warned of a civilian VIP, female, short, size four with size five shoes.”

Short. Smith's grin widened. He couldn't imagine she liked that.

“We're setting up a dressing screen now.” The younger man continued, pointing to the right of the doors, where another member of the aircrew was busy rigging a poncho with some suspension line. “The uniform and a pair of boots will be behind the screen.”

Smith nodded, then shifted his attention back to the pallet being winched aboard the C-130. Yes, sir, he was going to be wondering for a long time what the CIA had promised the Salvadoran government in order to get their cooperation on a load of weapons being delivered to the CNL.

Talk about politics and bedfellows. That kind of information either never showed up anywhere, ever, or someday, some headline would catch his eye, and he'd think, “So that was what that was all about.” It had happened to him a couple of times, but he couldn't say he'd ever gotten any satisfaction out of it. The CIA ran their own game, their own way, and anybody and everybody was grist for their mill.

“Your cargo will be secure in ten more minutes,” the soldier said. “I need you on board as soon as possible after that, since we have runway priority. Wheels up in fifteen.”

“We'll be ready and standing by, inside the left edge of the door,” Smith said. “It would be nice if the aircrew could help us give the other passenger some visual screening between the hangar and the ramp.”

The soldier gave Honey another brief glance and returned his attention to Smith, again without a single expression crossing his face—pure professional, all the way.

“Already arranged,” he said. “See you in a few.”

“BDUs?” she asked, as soon as the younger man had walked away.

“Battle Dress Uniform, a camouflage shirt and trousers, cotton twill. You'll be glad you're wearing them,” he said, immediately launching into the hard sell in order to avoid an argument they didn't have time to have. “They'll be warmer and more comfortable on the plane, and less conspicuous—”

“Okay.”

“—especially when we get to El Salvador and head up into the mountains.”

Okay?

“Over there? Right?” she asked, pointing toward the poncho.

“Uh, yes, and if you could hurry it up, that would be...uh, great.” The last few words were spoken to himself, because Honey had already started across the hangar toward the “dressing room,” the briefcase still firmly in hand, locked around her right wrist.

He really needed to take care of that.

“Fifteen minutes, right?” she said over her shoulder.

“Ten would be better.”

“Roger that.”

Roger that?

“Five would be best,” he said after her, and it couldn't take more than five. She had on one piece of clothing and was putting on two, a quick switch. He hoped.

“Then I'll do it in five,” she assured him.

Well, okay, then.

She disappeared behind the poncho, and he felt an unexpected glimmer of hope. If he could get that kind of cooperation for the next forty-eight hours, they might actually have a chance of pulling this off and coming out in one piece. He'd already decided that at the first opportunity, he was “requisitioning” one of the Beretta 9mm pistols on the pallet for her personal use. A lot of guys might have chosen not to arm her, thinking it would mean there would be one less person likely to shoot them—and yeah, he appreciated that reasoning.

But she'd graduated Ivy League,
magna cum laude,
and she'd gotten a quarter of a million dollars across San Luis in the middle of the night. Those two deeds required two completely different types of intelligence. No one looking at her would think she had an ounce of street smarts, but she'd been smart on the street that night, and those had been bad streets.

Yeah, he trusted her to be smart enough to safely handle a weapon without accidentally shooting him or herself. Campos had a firing range on his estate, and hitting it was going to be the first order of the day.

In less than five minutes, she was coming out from behind the poncho—and looking good. She shouldn't have, honestly. BDUs were utilitarian, except on her. On her they were a fashion statement.

He watched her cross the hangar, somewhat dumbfounded, knowing there was a lesson to be learned here, but he'd be damned if he could figure it out. They'd given her a small tactical vest, too, and he'd be damned if he could figure that out, either. But she was loving it, opening all the pockets, looking inside, checking the straps and clips.

He supposed, to her, it might look like a portable makeup bag or something. A year from now they'd be selling them in Saks along with the rest of her “outfit.”

She'd rolled the trousers up enough to expose a bit of leg, and she'd rolled the gray army-issue socks down into two small, perfect cuffs on top of her black combat boots. Her dress was folded over her arm, but she'd threaded the narrow black patent leather belt through her French twist like a headband, with the bow in front. It was the finishing touch, tying the whole outfit together—black boots, black headband. The BDU shirt was open to the waist, exposing a light brown T-shirt. He hadn't really noticed her gold chain necklace against the yellow dress, but it stood out nicely against the BDU T-shirt, and, of course, matched her gold earrings.

She didn't make sense.

Nothing about her made sense.

Him noticing every little thing about her didn't make sense.

He worked with women. He worked with Skeeter Bang Hart, who was a
fashionista
of the highest order. That girl had the clotheshorse sensibilities of a street urchin and a bottomless pocketbook to make her wildest dreams come true. But even dressed in a fuzzy pink sweater dress and pink suede go-go boots, Skeeter looked like she could kick a guy's butt—and she could.

And so could Red Dog, though she wouldn't have been caught dead in a pink anything, let alone a sweater dress or suede go-go boots. Red Dog liked black and lots of it, and enough red to earn her name. She liked supple fabrics and sleek designs. Neither one of the female SDF operators looked cute in BDUs. Skeeter always looked competent. Red Dog always looked dangerous.