by Tara Janzen
She was such a lovely mess, her spiked hair falling over her face and going every which direction in the back and on the sides, glitter drifting onto her skin, her cheeks pale, mascara smudged beneath her eyes—but still so beautiful it was all he could do to drag his gaze away from her.
Not good, he thought, taking in a deep breath and forcing his attention to Skeeter, who was striding toward Dylan's office, a concerned look on her face, her brows knitted together beneath the brim of her hat. She breezed through the doorway, shrugging out of her jacket and tossing it on Dylan's desk, disturbing a pile of papers or photos or something, then all but throwing herself into his arms.
“Creed,” she said, wrapping her arms around his neck.
“Baby Bang.” He held her close, thinking back to those fifteen phone calls he hadn't bothered to answer and feeling a little guilty. She must have been more worried than he'd thought. He didn't like to freak her out. She was too good a kid to deserve that.
Okay, so he thought of her as a kid, too, but he really did think of her as a kid, and only a kid—regardless of her absolutely amazing body, which was pressed up against him all over the place.
He looked up and found Dylan's gaze boring into him like a laser beam on Death Blast, and he couldn't help himself. He grinned.
Skeeter pulled away after giving him a tight squeeze, and they slid their palms off each other. A quick slap and a tap of their fists later, the formalities were over.
They were both so full of the street.
Creed knew his name was still whispered in lower downtown's darkest alleys, and that suited him just fine, but he'd never killed anybody until Uncle Sam had put a gun and a seven-inch Randall knife in his hand and taught him how. He'd be the first to admit that it hadn't taken much. He'd been a natural.
“Where's Royce?” Dylan asked.
“On your butt.” Skeeter turned to him. “I pulled him up on the computer, and you barely beat him back. Creed's 911 must have sent them racing out of here like rabbits at the track. I show them hitting South Morrison about twenty-five minutes after we did and turning tail about three minutes later. I'm thinking they didn't even get out of the car, unless they left somebody behind.”
“You put a tracker on a CIA agent's car?” Creed asked.
“You bet,” Skeeter said. “SOP.” Standard Operating Procedure.
“And they're headed back here?” Dylan asked.
Skeeter looked out toward the garage. “Any second now we're going to get a call to open the alley garage door and let those bad boys back in.”
“Three minutes at South Morrison and they leave?” Dylan looked over at him. “When there's live fire and they think Dominika Starkova is inside with you?”
Creed knew what he meant. It didn't make sense. The party boys and girls in the basement wouldn't have heard the gunshots, but anybody outside the building would definitely have heard the pistol fire.
“Somebody jerked their chain, hard,” he said.
“Only one person can jerk Tony Royce's chain that hard,” Dylan said. “Daniel Alden, the director himself. But why would he pull his men off the case? They wouldn't use a retirement option, unless . . .” His gaze slid to Cody Stark for the barest split of a second, while everything inside Creed ground to a sudden, wrenching halt.
Unless they were just going to let the terrorists have her. Unless they wanted her dead—and that really didn't make sense, because unless something had drastically changed in the last three hours, she was still their best bet for finding the bomb.
Geezus. The CIA wouldn't walk away from her. They couldn't let Reinhard have her—but even as he thought it, he knew they could.
“Well, they sure didn't waste any time getting back here,” Skeeter said, forcing a bright note into her voice and looking everywhere except at Cody Stark.
Geezus.
The phone rang, and Skeeter glanced at Dylan, who nodded. She picked up the receiver.
“Uptown Autos, we only sell the best,” she said, keying a code into Dylan's laptop and firing it up.
Dylan turned his attention to Creed, whose heart had started back up on a painful, unsteady beat. He didn't know how long he could protect her if the CIA wanted her dead, but he knew she deserved better than to be shoved out in the cold so Reinhard Klein or some Middle Eastern bastard could gun her down and do the Agency's dirty work for them.
“So what's changed since I was sent out four hours ago?” he asked. Four hours ago, she'd been a top priority capture-and-recovery—and now they wanted her eliminated?
“Maybe nothing,” Dylan said. “Maybe it is what it was.”
That was no answer. If they'd wanted an assassin, they wouldn't have sent him. They would have sent one of those never-seen-them-because-they-don't-exist CIA spooks whose pasts were so shady they couldn't have gotten a job before 9/11, the kind of guy whose résumé was half rap sheet. General Grant knew the score. And if they'd wanted somebody to screw up enough that the tangos would get her—well, they wouldn't have sent SDF.
His mission had been to recover and protect, and he'd done it—and he wasn't at all inclined to stop doing it now.
“We've got a potential ID on Klein, Walmann, the Braun twins, and the fact that there were two Iranians in the library tonight,” Dylan said, ignoring the questions burning between them and getting back to the answers they already had. Creed agreed with the tactic. Cody didn't need to hear that her government might want her dead. “We're assuming the Iranians the Denver police picked up are Khalesi and Hafiz. The two guys speaking Dari and interrogating Dominika Starkova with a knife have got to be Hashemi and Akbar. They were all known buyers.” He turned his attention on Cody. “Can you verify any of those names?”
Her gaze slid to his, looking for something Creed wasn't sure he could give her. She looked scared, and she had every right to be as scared as she could get if what Dylan had suggested was true.
“You've lost,” he said, foregoing reassurance in favor of unadulterated bluntness. They were hell-and-gone out of time for reassurance if the CIA wanted her dead. “All we can do now is control the damage.” And maybe make a run for Mexico.
When she still didn't say anything, he gave her the best advice he could.
“Tell us everything, Cody, and maybe I can help you. Without your cooperation, there's nothing I can do.”
After another long silence, she finally spoke. “Everyone you mentioned is in Denver. Every man you listed, except maybe Hafiz. I don't know for sure about him,” she said, glancing back at Dylan after another slight hesitation. “He never spoke during any of the meetings with Sergei Patrushev. So I wouldn't recognize his voice, and I didn't actually see the two Iranians in the old library. I can only confirm that someone who sounded like Khalesi was there with another man and they were speaking Persian.”
Creed was impressed. That kind of discriminating analysis was just what they needed. They just needed more of it, hopefully the kind of analysis that would include the location of a nuclear warhead.
“What about in South Morrison? Who was threatening you with the knife?” Dylan asked. “Hashemi or Akbar?”
“Ahmad Hashemi. He's the one who was killed.” Her gaze slid back to him, and he wasn't sure what he read there—relief, revulsion, or maybe gratitude. It hadn't been a pretty death, and she'd been trapped right in the middle of it, a bad bit of timing on his part, but he'd had that little problem with the freakin' flashback.
“So, basically, Denver is Tango Central tonight.” There was no ambivalence in Dylan's expression. He was disgusted. “That must have been one helluva tracking device on your earrings, to have pulled people all the way from Prague.” Creed had given his boss a complete rundown of the night. “Is there anybody who isn't here tonight? And that is not a rhetorical question.”
“I haven't seen Hamas, Jemaah Islamiah, Prince Abdullah, the North Koreans, or the two men from Chechnya, but Hashemi said the Zurich Seven were in Denver, and there were people speaking German with Kl
ein in South Morrison.”
Dylan grew noticeably quiet in his body language as Cody spoke, which Creed did not take as a good sign. True, she was talking her head off, confirming everything Dylan asked, but he hadn't asked her for anything other than what they'd already guessed or knew from the files. But that was all just the warm-up, and Creed could tell everything was about to change. “Bad cop” Dylan was about to make his appearance.
“A global signal tracking device on a pair of earrings?” Skeeter asked, turning away from the phone for a second and putting her hand over the receiver. “I'd like to see them.”
“I dumped them down a steam pipe on South Morrison's fifth floor,” he said.
“Holy crap, Creed,” she said, a look of disappointment crossing her face.
“Sorry, Skeeter. I didn't have time to debug them.” A weak excuse in her book, he knew. Skeeter loved tracking devices. She collected them like stamps, and liked nothing better than to stick them on something and find out where they went.
She gave her head a sad little shake and turned to Dylan. “What do you want me to tell these guys?” she asked, holding up the phone receiver. “They've made it clear that they don't want to buy a car, but they still want to see the merchandise.”
Yeah. Creed bet they did, but he hoped like hell Dylan wasn't going to show it to them. The situation was going to get real complicated real fast if Dylan decided to wash his hands of this mess and hand her over to the CIA. He wouldn't blame the boss, not really. O'Connell's murder had been bad, bizarre, and Cody Stark was the one who could tell Royce and his team exactly what had happened and who had pulled the trigger. That made her theirs.
He did know one thing. He wasn't going to let Tony Royce have Cody Stark. No way in hell. Witness or no witness, he couldn't let her go, not tonight, with the city in chaos and the mission looking damned ambiguous. Ambiguous missions were fucked missions. People got hurt—and he wasn't going to let one of those people be Cody.
“Whoa,” Skeeter said, her hand coming up to her chest, the brim of her hat turning toward him. “Creed?”
Hell, this was a fine time for Skeeter to go all spooky and clairvoyant on him. He was having trouble breathing. Too many things were crashing in on him, and he was just about ready to grab Cody and run.
Of course, there was the one little problem of the handcuffs. Shit! Now he really couldn't breathe.
“Give him the key, Skeeter.” Dylan's voice cut through the clamoring in his brain—steady, measured, utterly calm. “Creed, get Ms. Starkova out of here. We'll sort this out later, after Royce and his agents are gone. Leave your coat.”
Skeeter pressed the key into his hand and kept her fingers against his palm a little longer than necessary, long enough to remind him that he wasn't alone here tonight.
“Sure, come on up,” Skeeter said into the phone, letting him go.
He had Cody released in seconds.
“You should see door number two opening now,” Skeeter continued, working the laptop's keyboard.
He helped Cody as she shrugged out of his coat, knowing full well why Dylan wanted it. The pockets were stuffed with the night's work.
And he tried not to stare as the coat came off—but it was impossible. In full light, her fishnet cat suit left very little to the imagination, and she had more curves than a pony car on slicks.
His gaze dropped down her body, from the slope of her shoulders, over breasts and hips and the sleek length of her legs, and he felt poleaxed. Here was Dominika, club scene princess and punk rock baby, all sex and come-on with her spiky hair and kohl-rimmed eyes. The mousy librarian had been a first-class illusion. The lost boy had never existed.
But Cody Stark did, and she still looked scared.
“Skeeter,” Dylan said, his voice sounding strangely far away. “Remember, as far as Royce is concerned, we never left the building tonight. We came back downstairs, and they were gone. We're still waiting for Creed to bring in Dominika Starkova.”
“Sure.” Skeeter sounded kind of far away, too.
But Cody was close, where he needed her. Her hand in his. Her gaze locked onto his.
He wasn't going to kiss her again, no matter what she looked like, no matter how poleaxed he felt. Hell, he could hardly breathe, and kissing her wasn't what this was all about. She was a target. She needed protection, and that's what he did better than anybody, protect, whether it was Uncle Sam's best interests or a life put in his care.
Keeping hold of her hand, he quickly led her out into the main office and toward the elevator.
Yeah. Close was where he needed her. Close and going home with him.
C HAPTER
20
W OW,” SKEETER SAID as soon as they were gone. “Did you feel that? What was that?”
“A guy who has had enough for one night,” Dylan said, knowing exactly what Skeeter was talking about. Creed had been about ready to jump out of his skin. “We send him down to the library to pick up a woman, and nobody seems to know that half the tangos from Berlin to Tehran have invaded the country? Or if they did, they forget to tell us. Geezus.”
“Who killed this Hashemi guy?” Skeeter asked.
“Who do you think?” Shit. If he'd known how screwed up the night was going to get, he would have picked up Dominika Starkova himself. He hadn't been that late getting in from D.C.
“You think that's what's bothering him?”
Hell, no.
“It never has before.” Killing bad guys was what they did, and there wasn't a commando in the employ of Uncle Sam who couldn't do it coolly, calmly, with utter precision and no fucking regrets all day long, including every one of the SDF operators. Winning the gunfight or the knife fight was always a good thing—and Creed had won every fight he'd been in tonight, for which every cop in the city of Denver owed him one huge thank-you.
“So what's up?” She was concerned. Rightly so. Creed had been a little wild-eyed there for a minute.
But the jungle boy wasn't that complicated. Right, wrong. Good guys, bad guys. More than any of the rest of them, Creed had a certain innocence about him, a purity of purpose—not that Cesar Raoul Eduardo would ever have seen it that way. But Dylan knew it, just like he figured he knew what had set Creed off.
“Hashemi had Ms. Starkova down with a knife to her ear, right on the vein, threatening to cut her up from here to Sunday and send her home in pieces, the same way J.T. was sent home.”
Skeeter's face fell, her skin turning even paler than normal, her soft mouth softening even more.
“Geez,” she said, swallowing.
“Yeah. Geez. And I don't think he can take anybody else dying on his shift—especially if they're butchered by some psychopath with a knife. That would be enough to push anybody a couple of degrees south of normal.”
“Not you,” Skeeter said, sounding so very sure. “Nothing pushes you over the edge.”
Except you, he thought, dragging his gaze away from her. She'd been superb in South Morrison, the perfect partner: followed orders, held up her end, done the deed, and fulfilled her mission. Christian Hawkins was doing one helluva job training her, but Dylan still wasn't happy about it.
True, she didn't spook as easily as she used to, wasn't nearly as jumpy, and he was glad about that. Really, he was. He'd hated seeing her live inside a nervous shell—but maybe Hawkins had gone too far, the way she'd strapped on that 9mm like it was a second skin. He'd heard she'd pulled a knife on Gino Cuchara last summer and lived to tell the tale. When she'd been tagging, she and her crew had been more like shadow wraiths than graffiti vandals. No one had seen them, not the cops or the gangsters. The police had gotten lucky a couple of times, but mostly it had been as if SB303 had shown up out of nowhere, painted all over the city, night after night, all on its own.
But now. Hell, she had more balls than Toys “R” Us.
Baby Bang, Creed had called her, a name she'd brought with her off the street. He knew both Hawkins and Creed had laid down the law from West Denver
to East Colfax: Mess with Baby Bang at your peril—your guaranteed peril.
Well, it was a warning he needed to heed, pronto. This ache he had for her, it needed to go away.
He wanted her. There was no denying it. He wanted her lightning-bolt tattoo and long legs wrapped around him. He wanted her under him and his mouth on hers. He wanted all that spooky psychic energy focused on him, getting under his skin, figuring him out, letting him in. He wanted to be so incredibly close to her it scared the hell out of him—but it would reach an end, and when it did, there would be way too much hell to pay.
So he stayed away—a tactical strategy that had been working really damn well for him, up until tonight. He felt burned just looking at her.
“Thanks for that . . .” He gestured at the desk, where she'd thrown her jacket over the photographs from South America. The coat had been a present under the tree to her from Santa Claus this year. He'd seen it in a shop on Larimer Square, sable and leather, and known she would love it. He'd been right. From himself, he'd gotten her a set of wheels for her 350 Boss Mustang, Babycakes.
“Yeah, well, he doesn't need to see that,” she said. “Not ever again.”
Santa Claus. That was him all right. And as long as Santa stayed out of Victoria's Secret, he might be able to maintain his cover.
“Did you . . . uh . . . happen to see her butt?” Skeeter asked.
A grin flashed across his face. Yes, he'd seen her butt.
“Saturday,” he said, his grin widening.
Skeeter grinned back. “Yeah. Saturday.”
CREED wasn't going to kiss her.
Right.
He was so glad he had that straight in his head. So little was straight in his head these days.
He'd held her hand all the way up the elevator. It hadn't been necessary. She hadn't offered any resistance. She had no place to go, and actually, holding someone's hand, while incredibly effective as a defense move, wasn't exactly the best way to hustle someone down a hallway. A firm grip on their upper arm gave a person a lot more leverage, a little more control over a perp's speed and direction.