Crazy Hearts

by Tara Janzen

  Nothing about the Ice Queen made sense. She was half spook, half sniper, and all gorgeous. Agents like her usually ended up in European embassies, carrying a pocket pistol and collecting intelligence from tuxedoed diplomats.

  This girl was in the middle of the big, bad nowhere, sweating her guts out and toting a M40, a fully accurized .308 with a scope that cost more than his first car.

  “So, do you ever take a day off?” Yep, that was him, all right, a real smooth guy.

  “Not in this lifetime,” she said dryly.

  “Maybe you should try it, with me.”

  “Maybe not.” Without an instant’s hesitation, she turned him down, but he was a U.S. Navy SEAL and SEALs never gave up. Never.

  “I could take you fishing.” He was good at fishing.

  Her little snort of derision implied that fishing might be a long shot.

  Grinning, he popped the last cookie into his mouth and glanced over at her. “If you’d tell me what you’re looking for, maybe I could help you find it.” After eight times of getting dropped into this hellhole and bushwhacking their way to the same damn hillside to stare down at the same damn abandoned farmhouse, and getting nowhere doing it, he figured she might be ready for a little professional guidance.

  He’d figured wrong.

  “That’s real sweet of you, Squidbreath,” she said, keeping her gaze focused through the scope and for damn sure looking like she knew what she was doing. “But if I told you what I’m looking for, I’d have to kill you.”

  He grinned again, and checked his watch. Squidbreath?

  “We’re running out of time,” he told her. “We need to get to the LZ.” If all had gone according to plan, the helo designated to pick them up was on its way.

  “Five more minutes,” she said. “Then we’ll pack it in, which means we’ll be right back here doing this again next week.”

  That was all right by him. He’d had worse missions, far worse than being teamed up with Little Miss Blondie.

  “So when are you going to tell me your name?” he asked.

  “You know my name.”

  “Oh, yeah, Smith, Jane Smith,” he recalled. “Or was it Johnson? Jane Johnson?”

  “I always heard SEALs were real smart,” she said. “You got it right the first time. Smith Jane Smith.”

  “So should I be calling you Smith or Jane?”

  “You can keep calling me what you’ve been calling me—‘Yes, ma’am.’”

  She had that right. He’d been “Yes, ma’aming,” Little Miss Blondie from the moment they’d met.

  “Two o’clock,” she whispered, going very still next to him on the jungle floor.

  Yeah, he heard it, too, the soft cough of an engine coming off the mountain pass north of the abandoned farm. He angled the spotting scope in that direction, following the winding path of the dirt road up through the trees until he saw an old deuce-and-a-half lumbering toward the valley below.

  “Delivery time?” he asked.

  “I sure as hell hope so,” she said, and for the first time, he detected an honest, unguarded emotion in her voice—naked anticipation. She wanted this, whatever “this” was. It could be anything, weapons, drugs, a squad of narco-guerillas. For sure, it would be trouble.

  “You’ve got a plan for whatever comes out of that truck, right?”

  “Right.” She nestled in closer to her rifle.

  “Want to tell me what it is, in case I need to step in and save the day?”

  “You just keep doing what you’re doing, Corday, and everything will be just fine.”

  Oh, man, he could hardly believe the size of her cojones. But when he’d been given this assignment, his commanding officer had made it crystal clear that he was going to be working for “Jane Smith,” not the other way around. She called the shots. She gave the orders, and he got her where she wanted to go and got her back out.

  The minutes ticked by in silence, both of them watching the truck slowly rumble its way down the gullies and over the rocks in the road. Sweat ran down his face. Doubt edged into his mind. Wasn’t it just like a damn C.I.A. agent to drag him into something without telling him what in the hell was going on? PSD, he’d been told, a Personal Security Detail. But who in the world ever did a PSD for a fricking sniper?

  No one, that’s who.

  The truck started across the valley, heading for the farmhouse. When it reached the path leading to the adjoining, ramshackle barn, it stopped. A man wearing jungle boots and camouflage got out of the cab and headed around to the back of the deuce-and-a-half, no doubt getting ready to unload whatever it was Smith was hoping to score.

  Jack did a quick mental check of all his gear, which most definitely included an M4 carbine and a .45 caliber pistol with plenty of extra magazines for both. He was ready. He was always ready.

  But nothing came out of the back of the truck—no drugs, no weapons, no narco-guerillas. The driver kicked the tires, checked a load strap, looked at the farm and empty pastures for a few seconds, then came back around to the front of the truck, got into the cab, and started up the deuce. The engine sputtered and coughed, and finally turned over a couple of times, and then it died.

  Jack didn’t move, not so much as a muscle twitch. Beside him, Smith had gone pure mannequin, her gaze glued to the scope, her breathing so soft as to be damn near imperceptible.

  Down below, the driver gave another long go of cranking the engine, and just when Jack was thinking it was time for the guy to give up, the old truck roared to life. Mission accomplished—or maybe not. Next to him, he caught the slight movement of Smith’s finger sliding onto the trigger.

  The driver sure as hell had screwed up something, and it was going to cost him his life. At four hundred meters with no wind, the girl wasn’t going to miss. She’d been dialed in on the guy’s location for the last five hours. But the truck didn’t move, and she didn’t shoot. Everybody was waiting for something, but he’d be damned if he knew what, until the driver reached out the window with a red rag in his hand and cleaned off the side mirror. Next to him, Smith eased her finger off the trigger. When the driver followed up the red rag with a bright yellow one, giving the outside mirror a real thorough polishing, she whispered one, succinct word.

  “Bingo.”

  She’d gotten what she wanted, and he knew it was more than just a clean mirror on some damn paramilitary deuce-and-a-half. A message had been passed, and Smith liked the news.

  Down below, the driver finished with the mirror and started grinding the gears, looking for first. When he got it right, the truck took off with a lurch and a roll and continued down the valley.

  Jack glanced over and caught Smith looking at him with a big, sweet grin on her face, a wide curve of soft lips, perfect white teeth, and so-help-him-God dimples that for a second turned him just a little bit inside out, but just for a second. Then he recovered.

  Just in time for her to jerk his chain again.

  “Are you ready to kick this game up a notch and have some fun?” she asked, her pale green eyes lit with excitement. Her grin broadened, deepening those so-help-him-God dimples, and all of a sudden he was just a little bit inside out again.

  Oh, yeah, he silently answered. He was ready for just about anything with Little Miss Blondie, had been for weeks, and oh, yeah, he was in trouble here—real trouble.

  “Born ready,” he said with a curt nod, ignoring whatever emotion was getting all churned up in his chest. Or maybe whatever was getting churned up was a little farther down his anatomy. “But I’m damned curious about what just happened, and about what didn’t happen. If the guy hadn’t cleaned his mirror . . . ” He let the question trail off.

  “I had him in my crosshairs with a half pound of pressure on a two-and-a-half pound trigger,” she said, confirming exactly what he’d thought. “If he wasn’t my messenger boy, then we’d been compromised, and he was a bad guy in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Good enough for Jack—and he was impressed as hel
l. He liked working with people who knew what it took to get the job done and get out in one piece.

  “So what have you got in mind?” He was up for damn near anything.

  “Drinks,” she said. “At Las Palmas in Casco Viejo.”

  For a moment, all he could do was look at her, completely caught off guard. Weeks of ignoring him, and now she was asking him out for a drink? Highly trained operative that he was, he recovered quickly and gave her another nod.

  “What time would you like to be picked up?” Having a drink together wasn’t his numero uno hot, green-eyed blonde fantasy. In his numero uno fantasy, he and secret agent Jane Smith spent the night tearing up the sheets in the downtown bungalow where he always stayed , compliments of a buddy of his, J.T. Chronopolous. But she had definitely nailed the far distant number two or three spot on his current personal hit parade—Las Palmas, an elegant waterfront hotel in Panama City’s historic district, Casco Viejo, drinks to start, maybe moving onto wine and dinner, and her, Little Miss Blondie, illuminated by candlelight without any visible firearms at the table.

  But she was shaking her head.

  “I’ll meet you there, at midnight. I’ll be bringing you a small gift, but don’t feel obliged to return the favor. Just take a seat at the bar and order a drink. I’ll come up and set my cigarette case down next to your glass. When I leave, pick up the case, and deliver it to Benjamin Neville’s office at the U.S. Embassy, where we met. He’ll be expecting you.”

  From bodyguard to delivery boy—she’d done it again, caught him off guard and put him in his place.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Apparently, they’d gotten everything they’d come for, and he was ready to blow this pop stand, but she wasn’t finished.

  “How long have you been with the SEALs?” she asked, sizing him up, cool and steady with her green-eyed gaze. It didn’t make him uncomfortable in the least. He knew who he was, and he could take all comers, including beautiful C.I.A. agents.

  “Five years, ma’am.”

  “Seen a lot of action?”

  “Some.” A whole lot of “some.” Iraq, Afghanistan, all over Central America, and a dozen other places, but somehow ending up in Panama enough that it felt like home. The surfing was great, the beer was cold, and every now and then something damned interesting landed in his lap—like Smith Jane Smith, a.k.a. Little Miss Blondie. Not that he’d be calling her that to her face anytime soon.

  “I need you watching my back tonight in Casco Viejo,” she said, her gaze still so cool and steady. “Get to the bar an hour before me and keep your eyes open.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Amazingly, not one lewd, smart-ass thought even went through his mind about watching her back or her backside. She was damned serious, and rightly so. Las Palmas was a classy place, but beyond its elegant walls, the neighborhood of Casco Viejo was dangerously sketchy after dark.

  “Powell,” she said, obviously coming to a decision about him. “Alanna Powell, but you can call me Lani.” She stuck out her hand.

  “Lani.” He took her hand in his and gave it a firm shake, grinning. “Corday. Squidbreath Corday, but you can call me Flipper.”

  Her smile and her dimples returned, and there the two of them were, sweat-stained and mud-streaked, holding hands in the jungle and grinning like a couple of hormone-addled teenagers instead of two of Uncle Sam’s finest and brightest.

  Right in the nick of time to keep him from doing or saying anything too stupid, the sound of the helo coming in over the mountains broke the silence, and the two of them got to work. In less than a minute, they’d stowed their gear and were heading down the trail.

  Chapter 2

  Casco Viejo, Panama City

  She was late.

  Lani stepped out of the smoke-filled Club Firenze and moved quickly across the cobblestone street, tucking a small silver case into the bodice of her mini-dress. Zebra-striped and strapless, the dress had a built-in underwire bra with a secret pocket for the case and enough spandex to fit her like a second skin. With her short blond hair spiked up, black leather cuffs on each wrist, big white hoop earrings, and a small black clutch purse slung over her shoulder she was perfectly camouflaged for the Panama City dance-club scene, equal parts urban-punk lion tamer and Sheba, Queen of the Jungle.

  Behind her, hard rock music blared out of the packed club. Ahead of her, two blocks away, she could see Las Palmas, the pale stucco of its Spanish Colonial façade rising above the shops and restaurants clustered around the upper-end condominium buildings on the waterfront.

  Casco Viejo was part slum, part construction site, part trendy tourist attraction, and no place for a gringa walking alone at midnight. But it wasn’t the sullen-faced group of young men eyeing her from the corner that set her on edge. Oh, no.Her contact had done that quite nicely at their meeting.

  A quick glance behind her proved Vasily Nikolayevich was still on the second-floor balcony of the club where she’d left him, watching her. Their meeting had gone longer than planned, with him stepping out twice to take a phone call, and Lani’s unease had increased with every delay. She’d come to Panama to close a deal with Nikolayevich, a former KGB agent turned illegal arms dealer, a deal she’d been working on for over a year. In exchange for a substantial cash payment, and to put himself in the good graces of the U.S. government, should he ever need them, he had offered her a cigarette case electro-magnetically encrypted with the port designation, arrival date, and the BIC-Code of a shipping container transporting a load of shoulder-fired surface to air missiles, SAMs, destined for the Taliban from their comrades in arms, the Colombian guerillas known as the National Revolutionary Forces, the NRF—a deal guaranteed to fan the flames of the global war on terror.

  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.