Loose Ends

by Tara Janzen

  There had been a time when he and Scout had been easier with each other, when she’d been younger, and they’d been friends. Not that he’d ever wanted to be just her friend, but as badly as he’d wanted to kiss her, he’d never gotten the job done, not even when he might have had a chance, and now he wished he had—before she’d gone and gotten herself a damn boyfriend named Karl.

  God, he was such a sap.

  Turning on his blinker, he eased the Buick back into traffic and headed toward the motel.

  Such an idiotic, star-crossed, ridiculous, romantic sap.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Randolph Lancaster was good at his job, all of his jobs, and he had a good half a dozen on any given day of the week. In all of his various high-ranking endeavors, he was always the smartest guy in the room, no matter who else was present, and he’d played some of the toughest rooms in the world, from the Oval Office to Number 10 Downing Street.

  The room he was in at Denver’s newest luxury hotel, the Kashmir Club, was no different. His assistant, Tyler Crutchfield, a young Harvard-trained lawyer, was a particularly brilliant protégé destined to work himself into a cabinet position someday.

  But today was not that day.

  Today, Crutchfield still worked for Randolph, still had a lot to learn, and still had a job to do.

  “Skeeter Bang has a reputation for being tough and smart,” Randolph said. “But she’s got a soft spot when it comes to her husband, Dylan Hart. We threaten him, and she’ll come around, guaranteed.”

  “Yes, sir.” Tyler Crutchfield was East Coast born and bred but had the blue-eyed blond good looks of a California surfer, if California surfers ever wore handmade Italian suits.

  “You cut her from the herd, get her to meet you, and we’ll have this game on our turf. But watch yourself, and I mean physically. She’s an operator, an independent thinker, as tough as the rest of that crowd, a wild card. That’s why we’re here to rein them in.”

  “Yes, sir,” Crutchfield said. “What about Traeger and the girl, Scout Leesom?”

  “Traeger’s a mercenary, plain and simple. If he’d stayed in the Army longer, he might have become a contender for LeedTech’s export program, but as a civilian, he doesn’t pose a threat, and the girl matters only if she gets in the way. Karola and Walls will make sure she doesn’t. All we need is Conroy Farrel, and if we can do a hostage trade, Skeeter Bang for Farrel, then Ms. Bang can go to bed at night dreaming of her happily-ever-after.”

  For all the good that was going to do her in the end. She was his leverage in the deal, nothing more. If his guys could capture Farrel without him getting his hands dirty with the woman, all the better. If not, she was his backup plan. Either way, her fate was sealed, but she wouldn’t know it, until it was far too late.

  “Don’t worry,” Crutchfield said, his smile and his gaze filled with all the confidence conferred by inherited wealth and an Ivy League degree. “We’re offering her a good deal. She either meets with me, or her husband ends up in Leavenworth for life, and she probably right along with him. I’ll convince her we can make the case for treason, because we can.”

  Randolph almost returned the smile—almost, but not quite. The boy was like a bulldog with the prime directive, pumped up with self-righteous conviction, focused on the goal of shutting down a rogue team of black ops warriors, dark shadow warriors who had tapped into American taxpayer dollars to fund their own skewed vision of the nation’s defense. Assassins, Randolph had told him, operating outside the bounds of the military and intelligence communities that had spawned them. Special Defense Force, SDF, needed to be wiped off the face of the earth as if it had never existed.

  That last part was true. Randolph had started SDF, and he was going to end it tonight, right here in Denver. LeedTech was turning into a disaster for him. His house of cards was slipping out from under him. He needed distance, and he couldn’t get it from LeedTech with Conroy Farrel breathing down his neck, and he couldn’t get distance from Conroy Farrel with SDF breathing down Farrel’s neck. So they all had to go. Their total annihilation was the only victory that offered him any protection.

  “Where’s Walls?” he asked. “I want him backing you up. She might not go with you willingly.”

  “I can handle a woman, Randolph,” Crutchfield said, not bothering to hide his irritation. “I was the captain of my water polo team for two years running.”

  Clueless, Lancaster thought. Crutchfield was absolutely clueless about what it meant to be an operator of SDF’s caliber.

  “She’ll be armed.”

  “So am I.” The lawyer opened the jacket on his Italian suit to reveal a semiautomatic pistol in a shoulder holster. “Don’t worry. Once I have the meet set up, I’ll contact Walls and pull him off Steele Street. He’ll be there to make sure she cooperates.”

  “Are King and Rock locked on a target yet? Or are they still chasing their tails?” he asked.

  He’d brought four operators with him, and he damn well expected them to do their jobs. He had especially high expectations for King Banner and Rock Howe, the last two LeedTech soldiers to come out of Souk’s lab. They were the pinnacle of the good doctor’s twisted art.

  Rick Karola and Sam Walls were the flotsam and jetsam of Souk’s lab—not quite whole, a couple of mistakes, but skilled and exceptionally loyal. Basic, true loyalty went a long way with Lancaster. It made up for any number of other deficiencies.

  And then there was MNK-1.

  He pulled a handkerchief out of his coat pocket and dabbed at his upper lip.

  Monk, the doctor had called it. Monk the mistake is what Lancaster had called it, the Bangkok disaster. Dr. Souk hadn’t been the only doctor experimenting with creating the ultimate soldier, and after Souk’s untimely death, a man named Greg Patterson had risen to the top of the heap. If the MNK-1 thing had functioned, it would have gone a long way toward redeeming Patterson, the Bangkok bungler, a half-American, quarter-German, quarter–mad genius Irishman. Lancaster hesitated even to call the man a doctor or scientist, not after what he’d come up with. Certainly Patterson wasn’t getting any more contracts or money out of him. He needed distance and plenty of it between him and … and the abomination Patterson had tried to foist off on him as the world’s ultimate warrior.

  The very thought of the thing made his skin crawl, made him feel unclean.

  God, he’d been there when Patterson had woken the creature up, and he hoped never to have such a shock again. Those weird albino eyes snapping open and locking onto his with such painful intensity, that mouth gaping wide, then wider, words choking in its throat. Its hair had been long and streaked, platinum blond and pale gray, almost silver, and crazily matted in twists and knots. The creature had looked human, remarkably still like the young man Lancaster had recruited in San Diego, but along with adding strength and speed and cunning and fifty more pounds of sheer muscle mass, Patterson had turned something inside out in the man, and it showed. What Patterson had been left with was not a soldier of any kind Lancaster could bear to have on board his LeedTech juggernaut, which made MNK-1 useless except as combat fodder, like a rabid wolf to be carted around in a cage and let loose to kill and feed.

  He’d walked out on the deal and gone back to the basics, to the tried and true, good guys like Rock and King. They’d been following the Mercedes in an SUV, and when four cars had exited Steele Street like bats out of hell, Lancaster had sicced his good guys on them. But they’d lost the one car they’d almost caught, and now they were cruising the city, checking out the chop shop boys’ old haunts.

  His two knuckle draggers sure as hell had better have caught something by now. Failure was not an option.

  Crutchfield pulled a cellphone out of his pocket and punched in a speed-dial.

  “Status report,” he said. After a moment, he met Randolph’s gaze. “King says they picked up another one of the cars, a GTO. They think it’s Farrel, and they’re closing in.”

  “Good.” He wasn’t impressed. He e
xpected results. “Remind them of their rules of engagement. No lethal force. I want him alive, and I want him here. I have questions. When they’re answered, Rock and King can have him back and take him apart.” He meant it literally, and knew that’s exactly what he’d get, Conroy Farrel, his most dangerous mistake, utterly destroyed to the point where no amount of drugs and pills and elixirs could bring him back to life.

  He refused to take the blame for MNK-1. That was Patterson’s mistake, not his. He’d divorced himself from the Thai lab and its line of products. No one could tie him to Dr. Patterson’s creation, and now it was dead. There were no records of the transaction anywhere. He’d made certain of it. To the world’s knowledge, MNK-1 had not and did not exist. Only Lancaster and the Bangkok bunglers knew what they’d done—and perhaps Crutchfield had a slight supposition.

  Genetic imprinting, Patterson had called his great breakthrough, a loyalty gene, a small chromosomal reconstruction way down in the double helix, a way to assure absolute obedience.

  Lancaster hadn’t seen obedience or obeisance, or whatever the hell Patterson had wanted to call it. What he’d seen was far more disturbing.

  He’d seen love—passionate, absolute, sickening. The creature had longed for him. Not sexually, but with such intensity that Lancaster had still felt dirty and threatened, as if the last little push into unnaturalness could happen at any time.

  Patterson had assured him it would not. He’d engineered all sexual motivation out of MNK-1. In essence, while scientists and engineers all over the world were trying to make robots more human, Patterson had made a human into a very cunning robot, literally programmable, and MNK-1 had been programmed to brutalize anyone Lancaster chose, better than a whole army of slaves. The buyer’s will alone ruled the creature.

  Fucking nuts, that’s all Lancaster had thought. Souk had been demented, but Patterson was nuts.

  He had arrived back at the hotel in a state of disorientation, his mind reeling from the sight and the smell and especially the sound the creature had made.

  Lan-castaaa, it had cried out after him, the eerie sound of its voice chasing him down the hall. Lan-castaaa—he still heard it in his sleep sometimes. So he’d stopped sleeping. Mix that with a few drinks, and he might have blubbered more than he’d meant to, though God only knew what. He’d woken up the next morning with the hangover from hell and headed back to the States with Crutchfield by his side—his hands clean, his conscience clear, and his course set.

  And so help him God, he still could not believe Patterson had told that bastardish thing his name. Kill it, he’d told the doctor. Destroy it and dispose of any and all evidence that it had ever existed. Christ. MNK-1 had been a Navy SEAL, and Patterson had utterly ruined him.

  “There’s a woman with Farrel,” Crutchfield said, still on the phone. “Neither of them recognize her. She’s not one of the SDF women.”

  “Bring her in. Rock and King can have her, too.” There would be no loose ends on this mission, not a black heart left beating.

  He looked down at the chessboard set up in front of the windows overlooking the city’s lower downtown. He’d done a lot of good work in Washington, D.C., over the last forty-five years. At seventy years old, he’d spent his whole life in service to his country. If at one point he’d seen a way to further the interests and better protect the United States of America, by God, he’d taken it, and if he’d benefited financially from his vision and his efforts, by God, he’d earned his money the hard way.

  But he could feel the noose tightening around his neck. Too many things weren’t going his way, too much unfinished business from too many missions was starting to accumulate in all the wrong places, and here and there around Washington, people were starting to notice that it was all sliding in his direction.

  It shouldn’t have turned out that way. Expanding LeedTech’s business to include a few dozen transactions with Atlas Exports shouldn’t have gotten away from them. There shouldn’t have been any mistakes, and there hadn’t been—until J. T. Chronopolous. He’d gone rogue almost from the get-go, losing his memory and taking the name Conroy Farrel and setting out on his grand quest to destroy everything Randolph had worked for all his life.

  He wasn’t going to let that happen.

  Randolph looked down at the chessboard again, and picked up one of the heavy pieces, his favorite, for good luck. It was a rook, the white rook. He slipped it in his pocket and lifted his gaze back to Crutchfield.

  “It’s time,” he said. “You’ve got Skeeter Bang’s number. Go ahead and make your call.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Keeping Corinna to a low rumble, Con turned onto the street fronting the Tatsunaka Produce buildings and headed back into the neighborhoods of the west side. He knew what he was looking for—a restaurant, or some other public place where Jane could either call a taxi or make a phone call to get picked up, a place where he could dump her. Without the Steele Street guys on his ass, he could take the time to get the job done, to just get out of the car and physically pry her out of the passenger seat.

  The sooner the better. This deal was done, the escape over. He needed to check in with Jack and Scout, see where they were, what their ETA was for the Star Motel, and then head there himself.

  Or he could drive all night long … just drive, on and on and on.

  He reached up and rubbed the side of his arm where the Halox dart had gotten him through his coat. His skin was hot at the injection point, and fuck, there was swelling, tenderness, just like with the damn ketamine.

  Well, hell.

  He could fire Corinna up and try to outrun the drug. Jack knew as much as he did about maybe saving his ass one more time, if he could get to the motel and his med kit. But geezus, he was tired of running.

  Fucking Halox. He didn’t know if he had it in him to get through another stretch of the kind of hell ahead of him—physical collapse, the endless twisting pain, the anguish, the fucking doubts of whether he’d make it and what kind of condition he’d be in even if he did survive, if he’d be too physically destroyed to function, or if his mind would finally break.

  He’d seen all that and worse happen to stronger men than he at Souk’s.

  A wave of heat pulsed to sudden life across his upper chest, raising his body temperature a dangerous number of degrees for the space of a heartbeat. Sweat broke out on his brow. Then as quickly as it had come, the heat was gone, but probably not for long.

  Fuck. Stronger men than he.

  He shoved his hand in his pocket, pulled it out full of pills, bet the house on one of the blues, and shoved the rest back—and he kept driving, taking the turns slow, looking over the city and wondering about every damn thing in his life. At least the greenies had finished off the headache the reds hadn’t quite killed. Time alone would tell if all that and a blue were going to do him a damn bit of good.

  Yeah, time would tell, but he was running out of time. He felt it with each passing day.

  A small beep coming from his jacket had him reaching for his cellphone. He pulled it out of the jacket’s inside pocket and quickly read the text message: Mission accomplished. Report.

  A smile almost curved his mouth. He’d report in as soon as he dropped off his passenger, but his boy had done good, damn good. Scout was safe, and she was going to be a treasure trove of intel. She’d been with these Steele Street guys for eight weeks, and he knew her. She wouldn’t have forgotten a word, not a fact, not a breath any of them had taken.

  But hell. He had to let that girl go, too.

  He’d done plenty of private bitching over the last four years about Jack Traeger, plenty and then some, but Jack was who she’d need in the months ahead, and Paris was where she’d go. He had an apartment there she loved, and he’d put her name on the lease.

  Jack knew where most of the money was, and Con had encrypted the data on the accounts Jack didn’t know about and put it all on a flash drive he’d left with a tech stringer they used out of Nevada, a U.S. Army vet n
amed Miller. He’d get it to Scout.

  Garrett Leesom’s girl was smart. She’d figure out the account codes, and when she looked at the numbers, she would know she was set for life. No more hanging on the edge, no more skirting the dark side. No more missions.

  Reaching up, he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and then turned on the car’s windshield wipers. While they’d been underground, night had fallen, bringing a drop in the temperature and a late spring rain. The cool drizzle ran down Corinna’s glass and was swept away in long, curving arcs by the wiper blades. Water pooled in the gutters. Steam rose from the streets.

  He’d known he was an American citizen. Jack had told him. But he hadn’t known Denver, Colorado, was his hometown—not until today.

  Maybe he wouldn’t leave the city.

  Maybe he shouldn’t.

  Christ. He had a brother.

  A brother he didn’t really remember, so what did it really mean?

  Not much, he decided. Not enough. No matter how much he wished it could be otherwise. It was too late. Whatever life he’d lived in this place, it was gone. Denver was an interlude, not a change in direction. The mission was still Randolph Lancaster, destroying the man and his company, LeedTech.

  He pulled to a stop at a red light and checked the cross traffic going by, looking for big-block monsters, any trouble headed his way, and a place to say good-bye to Wild Thing. There were a few businesses at the intersection, but none of them met his criteria. The junk and stuff store was closed for the night. The bar was a hole-in-the-wall dive. The gas station looked like it was just waiting to get knocked off, and the other corner was an empty field.

  He could play this game all night long, trying to find the perfect place to let her go, when what he needed was to just do it and move on.

  “Where are we going?” she asked him from the other side of the car.

  Good question, he thought, turning and looking at her, giving in to an impulse he’d been trying to resist. He let his gaze drift over the shadowed delicacy of her face, the curves highlighted by the golden sheath of her dress, and down the long silky length of her legs.