Mission accomplished.
Except Nikolayevich had been two months late getting to Panama—two months he’d spent holed up in Colombian jungle with the damned NRF. Two months when her superiors had started to doubt the veracity of her information and her ability to get Nikolayevich to the table. Today, the tide had turned in her direction. The red flag at the farmhouse had told her Nikolayevich had finally crossed the border into Panama. The yellow flag had been the code for a meeting in Panama City.
And the sudden rising of the hair on the back of her neck told her she was being followed. It wasn’t Nikolayevich. Grossly overweight and out of shape, he couldn’t have fought his way through the crowd gyrating on the Club Firenze dance floor without giving himself a heart attack.
But there was a chance he had sold her out. He might not have come to Panama City alone. But neither had she. Lieutenant Jack Corday, U.S. Navy SEAL, nearly six feet of rock-hard brawn and Mensa caliber brains nicknamed Panama Jack, all of him honed and trained to a razor’s edge of operational skill, was on her side.
And on her mind way too much since the first day he’d walked into Benjamin Neville’s office at the U.S. Embassy and been introduced as her assigned escort. In his dress whites, he’d been impossible to ignore, dark-haired and blue-eyed, and so supremely self-assured that he’d just about broken her heart without doing a damn thing but stand there. When he’d flashed her a cocksure grin during their briefing, the deed had been done—Yes, ma’am, I can take care of you, one hundred percent guaranteed. Sure, she’d kept her cool, but a week later she’d made mistake number one: She’d requested him by name when she’d found herself back in Panama. He was irreverent and intelligent, and gorgeous, and hot, and interested, and so help her God, she knew better. Eight separate times, she’d known better, and eight separate times, when Benjamin Neville had asked who she wanted, she’d said Lieutenant Corday. She called him Squidbreath to keep herself in line, not him.
In five more steps, she reached the well-lit entryway of Las Palmas and passed under the pale pink arch into the luxurious hotel. Inside, crystal chandeliers cast a soft golden glow over marble floors and paneled teak walls. Without breaking her stride or looking anywhere except dead-ahead through the French doors leading to the bar, she pulled a cigarette case out of her purse and opened it. The case had a built-in lighter, and after selecting a cigarette and putting it between her lips, she stopped, seemingly by happenstance, next to a super-sized bouquet of tropical flowers and lit up. Cupping the flame, she inhaled, then blew out a long breath of smoke and with a slight flick of her wrist, dropped the case into the elaborate flower arrangement.
Whoever was following her was practically required by secret agent law to pillage the bouquet, giving her time to make the real drop in the bar, and that would be that. Sayonara, Navy SEAL. Adios, Corday. Goodbye, Flipper, and hello promotion. The lieutenant would head for the embassy, and she’d be on the next flight to Virginia.
Passing through the open glass doors, she picked him out of the crowd jamming the long, mahogany curve of the Las Palmas bar, and damn but the boy cleaned up good. Crisp, black T-shirt under a white suit jacket with black slacks, and swear to God, Italian leather loafers all but shouted “GQ.” Add his chiseled jaw, deep-set blue eyes, the scar cutting across his left eyebrow, and that damn crooked grin of his, and all she could see was “Heartbreaker.”
She wasn’t the only one. A leggy redhead in tight gold pants and a green halter top was sidled up close to him, bending in close for Jack to light her cigarette. It was the perfect cover for the drop—and perfectly annoying.
Repressing a sigh, she worked her way up to the bar and leaned in next to him.
“Mojito,” she called out to the bartender, flashing a twenty dollar bill she’d pulled out of her purse and completely ignoring the broad back she was brushing up against.
Sure she was.
She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray next to his beer. She needed a life. Something more than just a job that kept her on the road and on the run twelve months out of twelve. Honestly, she did.
Hell, for all she knew, she might like fishing.
Glancing back, she took note of the man digging through the tropical bouquet in the lobby—gray-haired and pock-marked and unquestionably Slavic. It had occurred to her more than once that the Russians might be keeping track of Nikolayevich, the same way they kept track of so many of their former comrades, especially those in the arms trade.
But this old guy didn’t have a chance against her. Even at five feet, five inches and a hundred and twenty pounds she was one of the agency’s big bad girls—and most of the time she had enough sense to stay away from the big bad boys. Why Corday was different, she didn’t even want to know.
Her mojito came, and in between paying for it and pocketing her change, she slipped the silver cigarette case out of her bodice and set it next to Jack’s beer with her hand covering it.
Or maybe all she needed was a vacation, just a little time off to recharge.
“Thanks, sugar,” the redhead drawled on Jack’s other side. “Or should I be saying muchas gracias, azúcar?”
Despite her best efforts, Lani’s damn annoyed sigh escaped her.
Squidbreath did not seem to notice.
“It’s no problem, ma’am,” he said. “I’m happy to help.”
Lani didn’t doubt it for a moment. Every guy she knew was happy to help redheads who were practically falling out of their halter tops.
“I like a helpful man,” the redhead said, her voice a low, intimate purr. “Maybe we could get together later and party.”
“Maybe we could, ma’am.”
Oh, for crying out loud, Lani thought.
With the cigarette case on the bar between them, it was time for her to pick up her drink and wander off. Instead, in her estimation, and much to her irritation, Panama Jack was far too distracted by the redheaded woman to be left alone with the case. Damn Benjamin Neville for bringing a tradecraft rookie in on her mission, and why in the hell hadn’t she noticed Lieutenant Corday’s shortcomings earlier?
Because you spent too much time staring at his butt, Lani girl.
Well, hell. She couldn’t deny it.
Stalling, she took a sip of the mojito and let her gaze drift across the mirror behind the bar—until it slammed into a black-eyed gaze locked onto her like a tractor beam, Alek Zhivkov, a.k.a. Zhivkov the Butcher. She swore one succinct word. She had eleven rounds in an XDM Compact .45 in her purse, and if this deal got salty, his name was going on the one she kept in the chamber. Zhivkov had a long, sordid list of international crimes as a Russian Mafia enforcer, mostly in human trafficking, and she hated to see him branching out into her neck of the woods, illegal arms sales. As for Nikolayevich, if Zhivkov was checking up on him, she gave him a month on the outside, before he was dead.
It was time to run, and the smart money said she should take the case with her, but she no sooner closed her hand around it, than Corday’s hand came around hers, holding onto her like he was never going to let her go.
Twenty minutes, Jack thought. That’s how late she’d been getting to Las Palmas, twenty minutes of hell, and now she thought she was going to skip out on him?
He didn’t think so. A minute ago, she could have left as planned. Thirty seconds ago, he might still have let her go, but not now, not under the current circumstances.
“Later then, sugar,” the flirty redhead said, turning and walking away, thankfully at an angle that didn’t impede his line of sight to the lobby.
Jack turned back to his beer, shifting his gaze to the mirror to keep everyone in sight, including his hand-holding partner. The light in the bar was dim, but he still got an eyeful.
Zebra stripes. Wow. If he’d thought she looked good in muddy camos, Lani Powell flat-out owned him in a strapless, black and white-striped mini-dress, and here he was again, just a little bit upside down and inside out.
“You were followed,” he said. Despi
te the redhead trying to distract him, he’d known the instant Lani had entered Las Palmas, and he’d known the instant she’d slipped in next to him at the bar, but he hadn’t known that the bare curves of her shoulders and the upper curves of her breasts were so creamily, silkily beautiful, or that her skin had a golden glow. He hadn’t known he had such a weakness for bad-girl make-up and leather cuff bracelets.
He had known he had a weakness for her, and the damned torturous twenty minutes he’d spent wondering where in the hell she was had proved it the hard way.
“Roger, that,” she acknowledged.
“And the guy who followed you, the one lost in the flowers back in the lobby, has called in his reinforcements. The black-haired man coming in through the French doors and staring a hole in your back looks like rough trade, and the bald guy walking in from the rear of the bar is planning on cutting off your escape.”
He saw her shift her gaze beyond the bar to the far corner of the room.
“Rough trade’s name is Alek Zhivkov,” she said, “also known as Zhivkov the Butcher. Baldy is Dmitri Yudin.”
Somehow, her knowing all these guys didn’t improve his mood.
“Anglo-Saxon jungle queen doing business with old-school Russians in the heart of Panama City, I guess that’s what globalization is all about,” he said, trying to keep the tightness out of his voice, and failing. “We can either fight our way out of here or give them what they want. How important is the silver case under your hand?”
“It’s electro-magnetically encrypted with the BIC-code of a shipping container holding a load of stolen, third generation SAMs, French Mistral, Russian SA-18, and Stinger B missiles headed toward Afghanistan.”
Fight to the death, then, dammit. Their deaths, not his, and sure as hell not hers, which meant run.
“There’s a stairway on the balcony that leads to the rooftop restaurant, and—”
“A fire escape down the back of the hotel,” she interrupted him.
Good, he thought. They’d both done their homework, and with enough speed, they should be able to get some distance on the Russians.
“You take the case, babe, and run like hell.”
Smart girl, she didn’t waste a second buying into his plan. Scooping up the case, she turned away from the bar and slipped into the crowd. He was right behind her—and right behind them were the Russians. He heard the commotion of them bulling their way through the people packing the room.
Quick on her feet, his girl made it to the balcony five yards ahead of him. In the few extra seconds it took him to get outside, she had already covered the open ground to the broad, stone staircase and was halfway to the first landing, darting her way through people heading upstairs to dine. At midnight, the restaurant would still be busy, and there was a good chance they could slip onto the fire escape before the Russians spotted them.
He caught her on the second landing, and as unobtrusively as possible, the two of them breezed past the hostess and crossed through the maze of tables and diners, heading to the north wall of the building. When they reached the fire escape, Lani quickly stepped over the side, onto the top rung, and started down. He followed, damned impressed that they’d shaken the bad guys.
But then someone swore and she stopped.
“Oh, excuse me,” she said between a rapid-fire stream of angry Spanish. “I’m sorry, oh . . . excuse me.”
What in the hell was going on, he wondered, trying to look below him. He couldn’t see much, staring down into darkness, but she at least started moving again, even though she was still murmuring apologies and someone else was still swearing. A few more rungs down, when he reached the first landing, the situation became crystal clear. Anywhere else in the world, a metal ladder bolted to the side of a building and occasionally interspersed with small metal landings was called a fire escape. In Casco Viejo on a Friday night fueled by seco con leche and rum, it was called Lover’s Lane.
Clothing was coming off here and there, a jacket, a scarf, a shoe, and buttons were coming undone on every landing all the way to the street.
So much for the afternoon he’d spent planning escape routes. He shrugged out of his too-damn-easy-to-spot white suit jacket and left it hanging on the railing with the other folks’ clothes.
When they reached the second landing, someone from above shouted down in thick, Russian-accented Spanish, “Alto!” Stop!
Not very damn likely, Jack thought. Some of these folks were past the “stopping” part of the evening. Except he stopped, and Lani stopped, and in the instant of silence between the shouted command and the torrent of verbal abuse directed back up from the people crowding the fire escape, he had a brilliantly tactical idea—camouflage.
Pulling her close, he wrapped her zebra-striped curves in his arms and pressed her up against the building. Instinct more than brains brought his mouth down on hers, and pure, unadulterated pleasure, sweet and intense, kept it there, moment after lush, sensual moment as her lips parted, welcoming him inside, and so it would have gone, an endless kiss into something more, with her hot body pressed up against his, if the Russians had left.
They did not.
Over the side they came, pushing and shouting for the lovers to get out of their way.
He obliged, pushing Lani ahead of him down the last rungs of the fire escape. Back on the ground, he took her hand in his, and they ran down the nearest alley. In less than a block, they’d left the elegant and brightly lit world of Las Palmas behind and entered the maze of cobblestone streets and narrow walkways that made up the barrio section of the historic old town. He held to a northwest course, making for one of the main streets where they could catch a taxi to the embassy.
The music coming from the hotel’s bar grew fainter with every step they took, giving him ample opportunity to silently wonder what in the ever-loving world had he be thinking? He’d manhandled a C.I.A. agent, kissed a spy, ran his hands up the side of her amazing curves and loved every second of it. And in the middle of a rocky escape, way too much of his brain was wondering how to do it again.
The sound of a gunshot zipping down the alley cleared all that nonsense out of his mind in a nano-second. He shoved his shoulder hard against the first wooden door he saw, wrenching the door handle at the same time, and the two of them burst into the overgrown courtyard of an abandoned house.
One thing he really liked about working with her, besides the rare opportunity to kiss the stuffing out of her, was that the two of them thought a lot alike. If this was going to turn into a shoot-out, they needed cover, which she spotted the same time he did, a set of large iron doors hanging half open on the ground floor that must have served as the home’s service entrance. She all but dove inside, with him right behind her, almost on top of her, with another shot whacking into the door behind them.
“Cripes!” she swore, breathing hard, her face dirt-streaked, her dress ruined. She was low to the ground, crouched behind the door, looking out the door with a semi-auto pistol in her hands that looked to be .45 caliber—his favorite.
“We’ve got two problems,” he said, his gaze quartering the part of the courtyard he could see without exposing himself. He could tell she was doing the same over on her side
“The Russians and the cops,” she said.
“Exactly.” Neither of them wanted to explain their situation to the Panamanian government, local or otherwise. “There’s got to be a door that opens onto the street, and we’re less than a block off the sea wall. If we can get to the water, we can get to a boat.”
“You’re thinking like a SEAL.”
He almost grinned. “Sweetheart, I am a SEAL.”
Another shot hit the iron door, and he aimed for the muzzle flash, squeezing off a round that hit something that grunted and moaned.
“Down by one,” she said, then fired. “Make that two.”
Yeah, he’d heard something else collapse out there with a groan, but there was still a lot of rustling and stumbling going on in the courtyard.
>
“I think there are more than just the three guys we saw in the Las Palmas,” he said.
“I agree. We need to move out, if we’re going to get out.”
God, they were good together.
“I’ll lay down some fire, try to hold their attention back here while you go out the front.”
“I’ll meet you at the sea wall.” Once again, there was no debate. She took the plan and ran with it, literally, and after a moment’s hesitation at the front door to check out the street, she disappeared into the darkness.
He fired a couple more rounds into the courtyard to give the Russians something to think about, and followed her out. They were going to make it.
Then he heard a shot.
Lani heard it, too.
Worse, she’d felt it burn a path across her shoulder. Halfway over the sea wall, she dropped like a stone onto the beach, shocked into losing her grip. She’d never been shot before, and the pain was disorientating. She tried to catch her breath and check herself out, and cursed herself for losing her gun. Before she’d even begun to think straight, let alone decide if she’d done more damage to herself by falling than by getting shot, Jack was there by her side, grim-faced and serious.
“Lani?”
“Flipper?” Okay, she wasn’t dying, and a few tentative moves convinced her she hadn’t broken anything. “Help me up.”
SEAL of My Dreams Page 19