by Tara Janzen
When in the hell had he been here before?
And if he knew all these damn cars, why didn’t he know the answer to that question?
He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth again, felt his pulse racing, and moved forward, out from the wall and toward the GTO. She was a beast, tough, and she gleamed with dual exhaust and red-line tires. Her windows were rolled down, and coming up on the driver’s side, he leaned on the doorframe and looked around the interior of the car.
“I’ve got movement coming up on Corinna,” Skeeter said at the same time as Dylan heard Creed in his earpiece.
“I have a shot.”
“Can you positively identify the target?” he asked, speaking into his mike while walking over to his computer.
“John Thomas,” Skeeter said.
“J.T.,” Creed confirmed.
“Copy. Stand by.”
There was a slight pause.
“Boss? I repeat. I have a shot.”
Dylan heard the hesitation in Creed’s voice, the hint of confusion, but he gave the same order.
“Stand by. Hold red.” There were risks. The team had debated, considered, and calculated them, but the choice came down to Dylan. This early in the game, he hoped there might be another way, what Dr. Brandt at Walter Reed Medical Center had called the possibility of “memory cognition.” If being in a home environment triggered any kind of memory response in J.T., and if Dylan could talk to him, explain to him that he wasn’t in danger, they might be able to avoid a confrontation.
That would sure beat the hell out of the Halox. The tests Dr. Brandt had been running on the drug had been inconclusive at best. Brandt thought the Halox would work on J.T., sedate him without doing even more harm, but he didn’t know. He had not been able to give Dylan any assurances of how bad it might get if the drug proved toxic to someone whose body chemistry had been altered as severely as J.T.’s.
“Stand by?” Skeeter asked, her confusion more blatantly expressed in the eyeball-to-eyeball look she was giving him.
“Get Brandt on the horn. Now,” he ordered. “I want him available, if we do this thing.”
She immediately punched a number into the closest secure land line. “What’s up?”
“Eight weeks,” Dylan said. “What in the hell took J.T. eight weeks to get his ass to Denver to get the girl back? Hell, he knew exactly where we’d taken her.”
“We came up with three explanations,” she said without missing a beat. “A miscalculation on our part of the girl’s importance to him—”
“Which we now know we got right,” he interrupted her. “He’s here. He wants her back.”
“That he would elevate planning over expediency,” she continued. “That he’d take his time to consider contingencies and recruit a team.”
“Still possible.”
“Or the ketamine put him down hard.”
He could tell from the look on her face that she remembered just exactly how hard he had been put down by the chemical soup Souk brewed up for his Thai syringes.
“The Halo-Xazine might be a real bad deal,” she continued. “We considered that, Dylan, and chose to go ahead with drugging him.”
Of them all, only Red Dog had a physiology even close to J.T.’s, and that girl couldn’t take an aspirin without paying the price. So she didn’t. Not ever.
“Brandt didn’t think it would kill him,” Skeeter reminded him.
“But it might make him wish he was dead,” Dylan said, remembering all too clearly what Souk’s drugs had done to him, and how to a slightly lesser extent than Red Dog it made his reactions to other drugs unpredictable. Gillian only took meds given to her by Dr. Brandt, and over the years, those meticulously researched drugs and dosages had made it easier for her to manage her physical condition.
Dr. William Francis Brandt, the doctor who’d first seen Gillian the night she’d been tortured, had made a new career for himself out of researching her and Dylan, all in hopes of being able to help them and of reproducing the drugs they’d both been given. His lab, equipment, salary, and assistants were all funded by the Department of Defense, who were banking on him to replicate Dr. Souk’s ultimate warrior research while simultaneously overcoming the negative side effects, like memory loss. Dylan hadn’t lost his memory, but neither had he physically become the ultimate warrior in the way that Gillian had become Red Dog.
Over the years, the good doctor and his associates had restored about ninety percent of Gillian’s memory, but they’d only had nominal success in re-creating Souk’s drugs, which was fine with Dylan. The last thing SDF needed was to be going up against a bunch of chemically altered superwarriors.
Like J.T., the realization came to him.
Hell. Nothing was ever easy.
The smell hit Con first, vinyl and gun oil, pizza, a trace of cola, and a chocolate bar or two. Or half a dozen, he decided, seeing the pizza box and a bunch of candy wrappers on the back floor alongside a few empty sports drink bottles and soda cans. Looking forward again, he noticed a small dent in the dash, and an unbidden grin curved his lips. That was where Danielle Roxbury had all but buried the spike heel of her size-six, silver sandal the night they’d been parked out at the…
His face suddenly felt hot. In his mind, he could see where they’d been, the midnight blue GTO pulled up next to a mile-long strip of asphalt that came from nowhere and went nowhere, a stretch of street laid down on the eastern plains, past the city limits and the suburbs, a place to race cars. And there had been cars, dozens of them from all over the Denver area, jacked-up, souped-up, ready to blast down the strip and test their drivers’ mettle, racing for pink slips, cold cash, and glory.
He saw too much—the color of Danielle’s blouse, silky yellow, the tightness of the skirt pushed up around her waist, the headlights of the cars racing at the other end of the dead-end street. She’d been kissing his face, kissing his mouth, and calling him by name …
For a fleeting second, her voice was so soft and wondrous, the memory painfully stark and clear—but he couldn’t hear the name. He could nearly see the shape of it on her mouth, but he couldn’t hear it.
Fuck. Memories were such goddamn unreliable things, dangerous things. At least his were. There’d been a few times in the last six years when he’d thought he remembered something, but none of it ever tied together. None of it had ever given him anything except a frickin’ holocaust of a headache, which he could sure as hell feel coming on. He started to push away from the GTO, when a piece of paper clipped to the driver’s-side visor caught his eye. He reached in and flipped the visor down, and his heart caught in his throat, hard and sudden, holding him stock-still where he stood.
The paper was a picture of three men and a car, the photograph creased and faded where the clip held it to the visor. Corinna was the car, and a man with long blond hair, a rough-looking golden boy with a surfer’s easy smile and a wicked-looking sheath knife on his belt, was leaning back against her hood—the man who’d come after Con in Paraguay. Standing next to him was a younger guy, a good-looking kid with a jarhead’s haircut and a shit-eating grin. And next to the kid was a guy Con recognized without a doubt in his mind. The man was strongly built, ripped, and lean through the waist in a stark white T-shirt. His hair was dark and longer than the kid’s, but not by much. Like the younger guy, he had straight, dark eyebrows and deep-set eyes. Both were broad-shouldered and tall, the same height. Both had dimples when they smiled, especially the younger one.
Both had been cut from the same cloth. And somewhere, at some time between when the photograph had been taken and now, the older one had been cut in a hundred different places and had a scar to mark every wound. Con knew who he was looking at. There was no mistaking what he was seeing, and it made his gut churn.
A brother and my life before … before he’d been butchered and put back together by Dr. Souk.
The heat in his face spread, running down his neck and onto his shoulders, sliding like water down his chest to his
stomach and down his legs to his feet—but doing nothing to thaw the block of ice his heart had become. It was beating hard and slow, feeling like a half-ton weight.
This wasn’t a memory. This was real, the evidence staring him in the face. He had a brother, and they’d been together in this place, standing next to the GTO, along with the guy with the blond hair and the big knife.
He pulled the photo off the visor and stared down at it in his hand, and the longer he looked at it, the tighter the knot in his stomach grew. A brother. Geezus. He needed to wrap his mind around that, but not now, later. He was already edging too close to his own personal disaster.
Way too damn close.
He dug in his pocket and pulled out a fistful of pills, feeling a sick twist of pain eddying into life at the base of his skull—the headache from hell. Green, blue, red, yellow, purple, orange, every color was a path to salvation. All he had to do was choose the right ones, and nobody did that better than he. Skull cracking open was best dosed with two of the red gelcaps, the gut-churning symptom of impending doom needed a yellow.
And over and over and over again, from one month to the next, from one week to the next, and especially since the ketamine, from one day to the next he needed more and more pills just to maintain the status quo.
It wasn’t a good sign, and he knew it.
He picked the brightly colored red and yellow gelcaps out of his palm and tossed them in his mouth before shoving the rest back in his pocket. Geezus. He was so fucked. These guys knew more about him than he did, and he couldn’t think of a better way to get himself killed tonight, because he would not be taken alive. Not ever, not by anyone. Been there, done that for endless eons of pain under Souk’s tender care. Capture was not an option, and yet he was here, in their lair. The fools. Whatever he’d been before, he wasn’t that now, not even close, and this game was played only one way: for keeps. They had Scout, and he’d come to get her back.
The tiny twist of pain in his medulla oblongata curled tighter, squeezed harder, and he closed his eyes.
Yeah, right, focus on the mission—if you can make it through the next couple of breaths. He lowered his chin toward his chest and tried to ease the pain tightening and twisting and exploding in increasingly larger bursts where his spine met his brain. Streaks of light flashed across the darkness behind his eyelids—not a good sign, but not the worst.
Then he got the worst—or damn close to it.
An elevator door opened somewhere off to his right, and he heard the sound of footsteps, of someone entering the garage.
CHAPTER FIVE
Well, hell, Jane thought, coming to a stop and looking around at all the cars parked everywhere. As far as she knew, the elevator from the main entrance only went to one floor, and this wasn’t it. She was supposed to be at the main office, not in the garage, but she was definitely in the garage.
Letting her gaze slide over all the automotive muscle on display, she was impressed as hell, as usual. This was where the big bad boys kept all their biggest baddest toys.
She’d been working at the Toussi Gallery for Superman’s wife for about six years or so, managing it for the last two, but other than her first unexpected visit, she’d only been inside 738 Steele Street a dozen or so times.
The place was very cool, a whole huge floor full of old Chevys, and Dodges, and Fords—oh my—and under any other circumstances, she’d be looking around. But she was here on a mission, and she needed to get up to the office.
Walking over toward a Mustang named Babycakes, she took her phone out of her purse to give Superman another call, let him know she’d ended up in the wrong place, when something caught her eye—movement.
Next to Corinna.
A guy—tall, dark, probably handsome, and probably Christian Hawkins. She started toward him, reaching back in her purse and taking Conroy Farrel’s wallet out, curious as hell to see what Hawkins made of it, especially when he saw the guy’s photo on the Paraguayan driver’s license.
“Do we have Brandt on the phone yet?” Dylan asked, making a point of not pacing.
“No, but I’ve got movement in the northeast quadrant of the seventh floor,” Skeeter said from her console of security camera monitors. “I’m putting it up on your screen.”
Dylan watched the picture appear on his computer and swore under his breath.
“Jane Linden.” Skeeter identified the woman walking toward Babycakes at the same time as he did.
“Hacker!” Dylan called out to the red-haired woman huddled over a computer and a double-shot latte at the far end of the office.
Hawkins was already coming around his desk and heading for the door. “I’ll go get her.”
Cherie Hacker looked up over her computer with the slightly glassy-eyed gaze she got when she was deep in the guts of a program.
“Yes, boss?” she said.
“Did you shut down my elevator?” It was a rhetorical question, and he didn’t wait for an answer. “Get it back up and running—now. Creed, status?” he said, keying his mike.
“I see her, Dylan.” The Jungle Boy’s voice was calm in his ear, smoothly steady. “She’s entering the garage at two o’clock.”
“Do you still have a shot?”
“Affirmative.”
“Superman is coming out to get her. If J.T. moves on her …” He paused, thinking, running through his options at light speed and not coming up with anything he liked, which only left the option he didn’t like.
“Say again, Dylan. I didn’t copy.” He heard Creed in his ear.
Geezus.
“If he moves on her … take him down.”
“Affirmative.”
Hell. He didn’t look over at Skeeter. She knew as well as he did that the risk had to be taken.
“Status all,” Dylan said, speaking to the rest of the team.
“Quinn, second floor clear, coming up to seven in the east stairwell.”
“Travis, third floor clear, coming up to seven in the south stairwell.” The Angel Boy gave his status and location.
“Zach here. I’m still on Wazee, and I think we’ve got company from the Company out here, cruising our neighborhood.”
By “Company,” Zach meant CIA, and that was the last damn thing they needed, but if anybody could have spotted his former employers, it was Zachary Prade.
“We have an enemy at the gate?” Dylan asked.
“Copy, Dylan, a black Mercedes.”
Hell.
“Stay with them. Everyone else, stand by.” He looked over at Skeeter, who was looking at him.
“What enemy at the gate?” she asked.
“CIA,” he said.
“Lancaster,” she countered, and Dylan knew the odds were stacked way in her favor for being right. “What do you want to do?”
It was his call. Bottom line, it was always his call, and this one, like all the others, was about percentages and odds. Dylan didn’t know what the Halox might do to J.T., but he knew J.T. didn’t have a chance if Lancaster got hold of him. None. Randolph Lancaster had shown his hand, and it was death and destruction. Atlas Exports proved his treason beyond a shadow of a doubt.
But he also knew Conroy Farrel, and Farrel had been outrunning and outgunning Lancaster for six years. Odds were, he could do it again today, unless they screwed him up with the Halox and it still didn’t drop him hard enough for them to capture him—like what had happened with the ketamine.
“Creed,” he said into his mike. “Stand by. Unless J.T. poses an imminent threat to Jane or Superman, I want you to hold red. We’re going to have to bring him in the hard way.”
There was another pause.
“Copy. I tried the hard way in Paraguay and got my clock cleaned.”
Yeah, Dylan remembered, but in this game, nothing was ever easy.
CHAPTER SIX
Footsteps, one after the other, drawing nearer.
Female—the gender given away by the light snap snap snap of small, sharp heels.
Gr
itting his teeth, Con covered his face with his hand and leaned against the doorframe of the GTO, everything inside him resisting the disaster building in his head—the trail of pain widening and deepening and plowing a path through his skull, heading toward the soft tissue of his brain. He would not succumb to annihilation—never … never … never. Through that door lay madness.
Been there, done that, not going back.
He drew in a long breath, fighting the pain, waiting for the pills to kick in, and he listened.
She was headed straight for him.
He took another breath, and her scent hit him like a freight train, sensual, female, and feral—wild thing, the woman from the street, the long-haired brunette with the slinky curves and the catlike grace.
His head came up, and he opened his eyes a bare slit. White light streaked across his vision, but he could see her coming toward him—phone held to her ear, her attention on him, a half smile of recognition curving her mouth. She knew him, or thought she did, and for a single, perfectly clear moment, he had only one thought: that he wanted to know her, too. Whoever she was, he wanted the memory of her to come back to him.
And if that wasn’t the kind of crap that could get a guy killed, thinking about a woman when you were in the enemy camp, Con didn’t know what would.
The sound of another door opening, from above and behind the woman, had him lifting his gaze higher, away from her to a man standing at the top of the stairs leading to the offices.
“Jane!” the man called out, and with the one word, Con felt everything inside him shift. The hard, cold thing that was his heart froze solid, and he could barely breathe.
He knew that voice, the quality and the timbre of it. One word, four letters, Jane, and he was transported to a long-ago place, this place. The smell of oil and grease and tires, of gasoline and exhaust, the heat of summer nights and hot cars running fast, stolen cars with the thrill of the boost still jumping him up.
It wasn’t just a memory, a fleeting possibility. He knew he’d stolen those cars, and he’d stolen them with the man at the top of the stairs and brought them here, to this place.