by Tara Janzen
Without another word, he slipped across the hall, moving swiftly, silently, keeping low. Forty seconds later, he let loose with his first shot and heard Reinhard and his posse take the bait, coming after him.
WHAT the hell is that?” Tony Royce asked, his head swiveling from side to side as every computer in the Steele Street office suddenly went off like an alarm clock on steroids. He could even hear the computers in Hart's office going off.
Mathers leaned over the nearest keyboard. The other agent, Bracken, moved to the computer nearest him. Royce looked from one screen to the other, watching as flashing horizontal lines disintegrated into a city map. It took him all of five seconds to figure out what he was seeing.
“Somebody's in a shitload of trouble and sending out an SOS,” Mathers said.
“Yeah.” Royce grinned. “I'd say we've got our guy. Let's just hope to hell he's got Dominika Starkova. Get a lock on his position and let's go.”
“What about Hart?” Bracken asked.
“Screw Dylan Hart. He can play catch-up for a change.” Royce knew the stories, and in his book, Dylan Hart should have been locked up years ago, right about the time he'd gotten nailed in Moscow carrying way too many U.S. government classified documents. Hart had been twenty-two at the time, plenty old enough to take a fall. As for SDF, it shouldn't even exist. A bunch of car thieves and ex-cons. That's all they were, all they'd ever be. Royce knew General “Buck” Grant. He knew the kind of pull the old man had, but not even a legend like Buck Grant could have been solely responsible for saving Dylan Hart's ass and setting up Special Defense Force. That had taken some real power, and someday Royce was going to find out who had been wielding that power.
“What about Ms. Bang?” Mathers asked.
“Screw Ms. Bang.” Skeeter Bang was nothing but a Grade A juvenile delinquent, straight off the streets with more attitude than she had a right to claim.
“Yes, sir,” Mathers said with just a shade too much enthusiasm for anybody to miss his point.
“Hot, very hot,” Bracken agreed.
“Torturously hot.” Mathers's grin was a mile wide.
Dickheads, Royce thought, giving them both a cold, blank stare guaranteed to get them back on track. He asked for agents, and they sent him dickheads.
YOU quit smoking,” Dylan said as he turned the Humvee onto Platte Street.
Behind her sunglasses, Skeeter's eyebrows went up half an inch. She slanted him a quick glance—about her eight hundred and twenty-eighth quick glance since they'd gotten in the monster vehicle. How in the hell had he known she'd quit smoking? She never had smoked in the office, only in the garages, which had been no skin off her nose considering that the SDF headquarters was nothing but one garage on top of another with a couple of floors of lofts and offices on top. Okay, half a dozen floors of lofts and offices, but still, the building was mostly filled with tires and iron.
“Uh, yeah. Superman and I, we decided it was bad for our health.” Actually, Superman had decided it was bad for her health, a conclusion he'd come to a few months after he'd decided it was bad for his health and quit—which coincidentally had been the exact same time that he'd found true love.
Skeeter didn't much buy into coincidence of any sort, so even though it had been sort of a stretch of the laws of probability that not smoking and true love were somehow connected, she'd gone ahead and quit anyway, to get Superman off her butt and on the off chance there was something to the love thing—and lo and behold, here she was in a car at night with Dylan Hart.
“Well, congratulations. I know it's not an easy thing.”
“Thanks.” She'd done tougher. They both knew it, but her smoking career was a far more comfortable subject than her family life or her graffiti convictions or those months she'd spent on the street. And as far as she knew, Dylan didn't have any of those things to talk about—no family life, no convictions, and no actual time on the street. According to all she'd ever been able to get out of the guys, it was as if Dylan Hart had dropped into lower downtown from out of nowhere at the ripe old age of fifteen with plenty of cash and a plan in hand. He'd culled Sparky Klimaszewski's garage and the craps games for his crew, and set himself up in business selling chopped car parts across the western United States from Chicago to L.A.
“You know, you're welcome to have your friends over,” he spoke up again. “You don't have to just hang out with the operators and SDF stringers. I've been thinking about putting a pool table and maybe an ice-cream fountain down on the second floor, move some of Quinn's Chevys up to the third.”
Eyebrows angling toward the stratosphere, she slanted him glance number eight hundred and twenty-nine. Move Quinn's first-generation Camaros? Was he nuts? She had most of those cars broken down to their frames. The last thing she wanted was to start frickin' moving them anywhere. And ice cream? What was that all about?
“Uh, thanks.” Honestly, they had more important things to be thinking about right now.
Or so she thought.
To her everlasting amazement, her answer brought a relieved-looking smile to his mouth, as if he'd been worried that she'd been pining for the gang-bangers, streetwalkers, and cokeheads she'd done her best to avoid when she'd bottomed out on Wazee.
“Great,” he said. “We'll get started on it right away.”
Over her dead body.
“How's your coffee?”
And now her coffee?
“Uh, fine. How's yours?”
“Great. Really great.”
Oh-kay. This conversation was going nowhere fast, which flat-out fascinated her. Dylan Hart was not one for small talk, but here he was, chitchatting his way right into a dead end, a fact she would have loved to explore, but right then the computer alarm in the Humvee went off.
Her heart instantly dropped to her stomach. Oh, damn. Oh, crap. Oh, double damn crap. It could only be Creed, and he had to be in it up to his neck to have dialed in a 911.
“Son of a bitch,” Dylan swore.
She leaned forward and quickly worked the keyboard to pull up the incoming map. She should have gone with him. She'd known it. So help her God, she'd known it. She should never have let him go alone.
She'd read the files. She knew how many bona fide international crime lords and terrorists were trying to buy the nuclear missile. Way too many, if Creed Rivera was calling for help. Shit.
She and Dylan had been tracking Angelina through the Humvee's onboard computer, but a 911 call shot the night's mission directly into the personnel-in-peril category, and what she needed now was a lock on Creed's GPS cell phone. She didn't need his car anymore. She needed him.
“There's Angelina,” Dylan said.
Sure enough, the Chevelle was parked in front of North Morrison with snow drifting up to her rims.
“Keep going,” she said, connecting her customized PDA handset to the computer and running a quick program to download the coordinates of the call's origin. “He's farther west.”
The Humvee's tires crunched on through the snow.
“Take a right,” she said, keeping her eye on the computer screen and silently urging the program to download faster.
It finished in seconds. She quickly unhooked her handset and looked up through the windshield—and there it was in all its dilapidated glory. South Morrison.
Damnit.
“He's at the party,” she said. At the party with untold hundreds of party rats and at least one terrorist with enough firepower to back him into a corner.
“Stick close to me,” Dylan said, pulling to a stop and throwing the Humvee into park.
Like white on rice, she thought, jumping out of the Humvee and taking off at a run, pacing him as he headed toward South Morrison's front door.
C HAPTER
17
C ODY FLINCHED AT the shot. She hadn't moved, and she needed to move. She needed to hide, but the gun Creed had given her felt like a long lead weight in her hands, heavy, unmanageable—like the death of her.
Reinhard s
houted out in the hall, swearing at his men to go, go, go, and the sound of his voice was enough to finally startle her out of her inertia.
She'd lost seconds, precious seconds.
Head pounding, her arm aching, she forced herself into action, heading for the pile of junk and trash in the room's far corner. The biggest piece of junk turned out to be an overturned cast-iron bathtub. Sinking down behind it, she pulled a couple of pieces of cardboard close around her, making sure she could still see the door. Finger on the trigger, she rested the barrel of the gun on the edge of the tub.
Six shots—all of them with Reinhard Klein's name on them, if he came through the door. She swore it.
Please, she thought, but couldn't have said if it was please keep him away or please bring him into her sights.
She wouldn't miss. She knew that. Creed had told her she'd hit something, everything.
A wave of dizziness and nausea washed through her, making her hands shake. She tightened her grip and gave her head a shake, trying to clear it.
Reinhard Klein—she needed to concentrate. She needed some grace, an angel to exorcise him out of her memories, to get the taint of him off her skin, but the only angel she'd ever met was sacrificing himself to save her pitiful life.
Another shot sounded from her end of the building, followed by a barrage of shots coming from down the hall. A man cried out, and a sob caught in her throat. Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.
She tightened her hold on the pistol grip of the shotgun with both hands, her fingers stiff and cold, trying to hold it steady and keep the muzzle up.
Another shot was fired off. God help her. She couldn't do this, couldn't live like this anymore, hiding, running . . . losing. Karlovy Vary had stripped her to the bone, taken her last ounce of innocence and shredded her self-respect into nothing. She didn't have a fragment of it left. Now she knew what she'd do to survive, how low she'd sink, and it was as sordid as anything she'd ever imagined.
A gust of wind blew through a broken window behind her, bringing a sweep of snow inside to swirl around her feet. She glanced down, barely a second's worth of inattention, and it was all over.
A hand grabbed hers on the gun, disarming her, another went over her mouth, and she was hauled to her feet. The person who had her pulled her out from behind the tub and into the light coming in from the hallway.
Good Lord. She hadn't seen anybody enter the room. Hadn't heard anyone. They'd moved like shadows.
“Creed's coat,” a woman said.
“Creed's gun,” a man answered.
They were frisking her, patting her down. A hand went into the coat pocket and came up with his cell phone.
“Creed's frickin' phone.” The woman didn't sound any too happy about that piece of information.
“But no frickin' Creed,” the man added, handing the woman the gun while he continued frisking Cody down. She thought about struggling, but didn't have the strength or the energy to give it more than a thought. There were two of them, and they were both bigger than she, stronger, and sounded very sure of what they were doing. “A few hundred in cash and miscellaneous documents. Keys. A tracking device.”
She heard the man flip through the money. Creed had found her stash. She'd known he would.
“Where is he?” the woman demanded, addressing her directly for the first time.
“And who the hell are you?” the man asked.
“It's Starkova,” the woman answered before Cody could, sounding damn sure of herself.
“Not according to the photographs I was given.”
“It's her,” the woman insisted. “I've got a vibe a mile wide on this one.”
Cody was trying to see their faces in the faint light, but it wasn't easy. The man was behind her, holding her, and the woman was dressed in black from the top down, the only noticeable break in the darkness being the long, platinum blond ponytail trailing over her shoulder and hanging to her waist.
Oddly, she was wearing sunglasses and had a ball cap pulled low on her face.
“An ice-cream fountain?” the woman asked from out of nowhere as she opened the chamber on the shotgun, checked it, and closed it again. The whole process was one smooth action.
“For milk shakes and things.” The man sounded slightly defensive.
The woman snorted.
What in the hell were they talking about? Cody wondered.
“He . . . he needs help,” Cody finally got out. These had to be the “good guys” he'd told her were coming.
“Can you handle her?” the man asked.
“Can Superman kick your butt with one arm tied
behind his back?” the woman replied. “She's half dead, Dylan, and the other half of her is in shock. I can handle her.”
“Go back the way we came. It's clear. Take the Humvee,” the man said, and then he was gone, as invisibly as he'd shown up, like a shadow.
“Okay, babycakes,” the woman said. “Let's get you home before you croak on me.”
C HAPTER
18
S KEETER BANG.
The woman's name was Skeeter Bang, except she was a girl, not a woman, little more than a teenager, but built like an Amazon—sleekly muscled, slim-hipped, and amazingly curved from the waist up. Cody was completely done in, weak from the inside out, and Skeeter looked like she pumped iron in her sleep.
More importantly, Skeeter was who Creed had sent after her, the only connection she had to him—and she had no place left to run, no reason to escape. She felt that truth down to her bones. She'd come to the end of the road.
The place they were going—Steele Street, Skeeter had called it—was her last stop before the CIA hauled her off to Langley and whatever fate awaited her there. It wasn't going to be pretty, or pleasant, or necessarily legal. Not with a nuclear warhead on the auction block. She knew that much. And when the CIA was done with her, Sergei and Reinhard would find a way to get to her.
And then her nightmares would all come back to life.
An involuntary tremor went through her.
She clenched her hands together and glanced out the window. The streets around South Morrison had been dark, but Skeeter had driven back into downtown and all the city lights, the Humvee churning through the snow as if it wasn't even there. Inside the huge vehicle, she was finally thawing out. The huge four-wheeler had heated seats, and her butt was warm, an odd blessing to be granted when she felt like her whole world had been torn apart.
Skeeter had handcuffed her, real handcuffs, not the plastic things Creed had been using all night.
Creed Rivera.
She dragged in a shuddering breath, holding back a well of emotion she couldn't begin to explain. He'd kissed her again, really kissed her this time, and she felt confused as hell about it.
What had he been thinking?
For that matter, what had she been thinking? And why had his kiss felt like a moment of hope in all the bleak awfulness of the night?
She was almost too miserable to care. She'd lost everything. Been lucky to get out with her life—if she had. She really wasn't sure, didn't know who Creed and Skeeter and the man in the shadows—Skeeter had called him Dylan—represented. Creed never had confirmed a connection to the CIA, and he'd told her to turn herself in to the FBI first, then the police. Skeeter sure didn't look like a government agent. For that matter, neither did Creed Rivera.
But there had been that kiss.
Creed.
Her next breath caught in her throat, and she tightened his coat around her. It smelled like him, which surprisingly brought her some comfort—and she couldn't explain that, either. Her life had been a roller-coaster since he'd shown up in the library.
But if he hadn't shown up, she'd probably be dead. He'd saved her life how many times tonight? She'd actually lost count.
From where she was huddled in the passenger seat, she looked up through the window. The weather had changed since they'd been on the fire escape. The snow had stopped. A warm wind had blown up from the south
, and the temperature had risen. She'd felt it when she and Skeeter had crossed the courtyard. The storm was over, and the streets would be running wet come morning.
“There was a lot of shooting before you showed up,” she said.
“We heard some of it,” the girl said.
“I . . . I heard a man cry out, as if he'd been hit.”
“With Creed shooting, I'd be surprised if a whole lot of guys didn't get hit.”
“So you don't think it was him who was hurt?” That had been the burden in the back of her mind. That he'd been shot, maybe even lay dying in South Morrison. The thought was too horrible to bear, so she'd just been shoving it to the back of her mind, right along with the question of why she cared so much.
“No,” the girl said without hesitation. “It wasn't him. If Creed had been hurt, I'd know it, and you and I wouldn't be moseying our way back to Steele Street.”
The utter certainty in her voice made Cody almost believe her, although she would have begged to differ on the word “moseying.” Skeeter Bang drove like a bat out of hell, with the Humvee well suited to her tank-girl style.
“Why not?” she asked.
Skeeter cut a sharp right into a darkened alley. Cody barely caught the street sign out of the corner of her eye. It said “Steele Street.”
“Because we'd be too busy kicking ass and taking names in South Morrison,” Skeeter said. “Don't worry. Dylan will get him out of there in one piece.”
Cody prayed so, even as she wondered where they were going. There wasn't anything of any note in the alley, and it was getting darker, feeling narrower by the second. She didn't think it had been built with Humvees in mind. Skeeter reached up and pressed a control on the visor, and a large square of light opened up ahead of them on one of the buildings. A garage door, Cody realized. Beyond it, she could see an amazing, open metalwork contraption attached to the side of the building and disappearing along with the top floors into the darkened sky. It was girders and cables and thick mesh cages, a platform that looked to be made out of steel plate, the whole of it reminding her of an upended suspension bridge, if a suspension bridge could have been dropped into lower downtown and bolted onto the side of one of LoDo's historically old brick buildings.