Crazy Wild (11 page)

“I know it's cold, baby, but you can
do
this. Come on.”

He was talking to his car, possibly the coolest car she'd ever seen, a cherry red, double-black-striped Chevelle, but the car was not talking back. It was cold, stone cold, dead cold, ain't-gonna-start-in-this-century cold, and Cody didn't blame it. Despite the way it looked, the car was old, the type of car they'd made back in the sixties and seventies, a muscle car. She'd owned a few old cars herself, nothing fancy like this one, but they'd never started either, not once the temperature dropped.

“Angelina, baby. You can do this. You can start for me, baby.”

Angelina?
Cody thought. Now the car had a name? Well, name or not, he was wrong. This car was
not
going to—

Oh, sweet Jesus.
The car started. No, that wasn't right. The car came alive, the whole thing, all at once, from the floorboards to the roof. It turned over, lifted its head, and roared. She could feel the rumble of the engine shimmying through the passenger seat and up her spine, and when Creed pumped the gas, the chassis rocked.

Good God.
She grabbed the armrest and her seat and wondered if Angelina baby was even legal. She couldn't be. No one drove cars like this on the street. And Cody wasn't one to complain, but the cops were only two blocks away, and they could probably hear Angelina growling all the way to the interstate. The library windows were probably shaking. God knew she was.

“Buckle up,” he said, and gunned the engine again, his voice back to all business now that Angelina baby was up and running.

And oh, God,
the car was definitely running. Cody scrambled for her seatbelt. She could feel the Chevelle rocking beneath her, powering up, getting ready to do God only knew what when he shifted it into gear. What in the world had made her think she'd be safer with him? Her nice little Saturn was parked in the garage across from the library, all steady and reliable. She could have figured out a way to escape him and the Brauns and the Iranians and made it to the parking garage. She was so sure of it now that it was too late.

“What's your address?” he asked.

“I'm on P-Platte Street, just south of Fifteenth.” She was so damn cold her teeth were chattering again, but she was still in charge, she assured herself, still in control. They were headed to her apartment, which was exactly what she wanted, and regardless of his car, and the big engine, and all the noise they were making, Creed Rivera was still a step up from Reinhard, Bruno, or Khalesi. She could manage him. He wasn't playing a blood game. The others would kill her once they got the information they wanted. He was only going to put her in jail for the rest of her life.

“South of Fifteenth?” He slanted her a sideways glance. “The old Morrison building?”

“Y-yes.” Okay. She had a change in plan. She absolutely, positively needed to make her escape to someplace warm, really warm, like Mexico.

“I thought they condemned the place,” he said, reaching over and pushing a button next to the glove compartment. Part of the dashboard retracted, revealing a small screen and keyboard. Good Lord, he had a computer built into his old car.

“Just the . . . uh . . . south building.”

After he'd entered a four-digit numerical code—4167, which she wouldn't forget—his gaze came back to her. “I always thought it was the north building that looked like it was falling apart.”

All right. So she lived in a dump. So what? And what was the computer for? she wondered. It looked very high-tech. The screen was dark except for a thin purple line tracking low across it in waves, and the keyboard was lit from underneath.

“They've been remodeling North Morrison,” she said. “I've got one of the new apartments.” Which still wasn't saying much. The best of North Morrison wasn't even close to the great lofts and condos just a stone's throw away on either side of her building. But she hadn't wanted great. She'd wanted cheap and low-profile, and as soon as she got back to her cheap, low-profile apartment in ratty old North Morrison, where paint qualified as a remodel and the elevators were always under repair, she was going to ditch Creed Rivera faster than he could say subsidized housing.

C
HAPTER

10

S
KEETER NO SOONER
sat down and started typing in her access code for the check on Ernst and Edmund Braun than the screen next to her blipped on. She watched as a purple line snaked out of the lower left-hand corner and undulated across the black screen—
Hot damn. It was Creed.
A broad grin split her face.

By typing in his ID number she could pull up a map on the screen and track Angelina. She would know exactly where the Chevelle was and where she was going—but so would everybody else in the room, which probably wasn't what Dylan wanted, not just yet.
Hot damn. He's gotten out of the library and back to Angelina.
Getting back to SDF headquarters would be a piece of cake now. Angelina was heavy, with 454 cubic inches of raw power, a zillion upgrades on her suspension, and some big-ass snow tires to get her through the storm. She'd take Creed anyplace he wanted to go tonight. Skeeter just hoped to hell that was home—or maybe not.

Her glance skimmed over the CIA agent on the far side of the room. Hell, she didn't know what to think.

“I . . . uh—” She cleared her throat and turned around in her chair. “I'll be back in a minute.”

She rose from her chair rather shakily, and slid a hand low across her stomach, giving a damn good imitation of someone in serious gastric distress. Like maybe somebody who was about to lose their lunch because of some really terrible pictures she'd seen.

The concerned look on Dylan's face lasted only as long as it took him to see the computer screen behind her. The sudden narrowing of his gaze and the glint in his eyes told her he saw the act for what it was.

In two steps, Dylan was by her side, his arm coming around her, and it was oh, so amazing, being that close to him. She leaned against his side, playing it up—soaking it up—knowing this was as good as it was ever going to get between them, a fake hug dramatized for the CIA.

Man, if her life was going to get any more pitiful, she didn't want to know about it. To her surprise, his arm tightened around her as they walked toward the elevator, pulling her in closer, as if he thought she really couldn't make it without his support, which was damned interesting, because he'd definitely seen the computer screen. He knew what scam she was running here.

“I'll be right back,” he said over his shoulder to Royce, then added, “Don't touch anything.”

Skeeter had to fight back another grin. Right, she thought. The minute she and Dylan got in the elevator, Royce and his goons were going to be touching everything in sight. She was counting on some truly cosmic odds of probability to keep them from punching 4167 into the tracking computer's keyboard before she could get to her loft and override the main office.

CODY
Stark lived in a dump, but at least it was a dump with heat, and she'd fixed the place up so it had a homey kind of Arabian Nights feel, with scarves draped over her bed and a beaded curtain between the bedroom and the rest of the apartment.

Creed finished checking the room by looking in her closet, moving her clothes first to one side, then the other. When he didn't find anything, he reholstered his pistol.

She was watching him from the doorway, which he thought was a damn good idea. He was watching her, too. If she had a boyfriend, he wasn't home, and if she had a gun, she hadn't gone for it, but he wasn't taking anything for granted.

“Do you want some tea?” she asked.

“This isn't a social visit.” He'd finally figured that out, and maybe he'd even convinced himself of the fact.

Walking back out into the living area, he scanned the combination living room/kitchen, looking for anything unusual, out of place, or incriminating. She had one window, and he walked over to it.

“You were going to tell me about an incident in Karlovy Vary,” he reminded her, pushing the curtain aside. There was nothing outside but the blizzard and a couple of cars moving slowly down the street. “And you were going to show me something here in your apartment.” He dropped the curtain and shifted his attention back to her.

She hesitated, then walked past him into the bedroom and pulled a cardboard box out from under the bed. After a few seconds of searching through some clothing and other items, including what looked like a few small jewelry boxes, she pulled out a notebook.

He followed her over and took it, and immediately wondered what was going on. The cover was made out of heavy purple paper with pressed flowers glued to the top—not exactly the type of document holder he was used to seeing. The first page explained it all.
To Prague and Back Again—The Travels of Cordelia Stark
was written across the top in bright purple letters.

He flipped to the second page, and then the third, and the fourth. It was a freaking photo album, a vacation photo album, with pictures stuck in special slots, and tourist attraction brochures stuffed into the binding, and looking at it, he had to wonder if he'd gone to a whole helluva lot of trouble for nothing. He should have taken her straight to SDF headquarters.

On page five he stopped and turned the album toward her. “Who is this?”

She glanced down at the photograph he was pointing at.

“My father, Dr. Dimitri Starkova.”

Well, there was a news flash.

“He's in Prague?”

She nodded. “That's why I went there, to see him.”

I'll be damned,
Creed thought. No one had mentioned a father. It wasn't in any of the intelligence reports. Starkova wasn't an unusual name, but the only Starkova anyone had connected to Sergei Patrushev was Dominika.

“Prague is a big city, though,” she continued. “Lots of action, lots of trouble to get into, and I fell in with a bad crowd. When things got rough, I cut my visit short and headed home.”

“Rough like the incident in Karlovy Vary?” The scene the CIA agents had discovered in the warehouse had been about as rough as it got.

“Yes.” Cody turned her face aside and hoped he would interpret the move as a sign of distress and regret, and not anger. She couldn't think of her father without getting angry, and she couldn't afford to be angry right now. Cool, calm, collected, that was her, because in the next few minutes, she was going to escape. “My father, well, he'd be devastated if he knew what kind of people I'd gotten involved with.”

But not nearly as devastated as she'd been to realize the kind of people
he
was involved with, people he'd practically sold her to in order to save his own hide. Her mother had tried to warn her, but Cody hadn't listened. In truth, her father was far worse than her mother knew.

“There are other pictures of him,” she said, reaching over and flipping a page. “I left in kind of a hurry, and didn't say good-bye, and I was hoping you could contact him, let him know I'm okay.”

“You're not okay,” he said bluntly.

And her father was dead, which meant he was about as concerned for her welfare now as he'd been the night he'd taken her to Sergei's and signed her life away as collateral against the mountain of gambling debts he owed a whole consortium of the Russian Mafia.

Deliver the bomb,
Sergei had told her father,
or she'll suffer the consequences
—which had been enough to put her in a cold sweat, because by then, it had become obvious that her father's problems far outweighed any parental sentiments he might have harbored.

For years, Dimitri Starkova had lived off the Mafia, untouchable because of the nuclear warhead he had been in charge of moving from a military base in the U.S.S.R. Their destination had been top secret, and Dimitri, as the commanding officer, had always held to the story that he was the only one with the exact coordinates of the missile's final location. Those security precautions had paid off, he'd often bragged. With the government in disarray and the army in transition during the dissolution of the Soviet Republic, he'd retired and taken his information with him.

Dimitri had never committed the location to paper or cyberspace. It was all in his head, he'd said, so his head had been safe—until his loans had begun to exceed his value with or without the rumored bomb to back him up.

With her father's growing debt, a heretofore unknown daughter in tow, and the world market desperate for a rogue nuclear weapon, Sergei had decided the time was ripe to force the issue.

“So your involvement with Reinhard Klein is purely social?”

She nodded. “A bad decision on my part, but I've learned my lesson. If I can give you information that will help put him away, my life will be a lot easier.”

He didn't look like he believed a word she'd said, and she didn't blame him. She wasn't a very good liar.

“So tell me what happened in Karlovy Vary.”

She took a deep breath, as if preparing to tell him a long, painful story, which it would have been, but then she paused.

“Do you mind?” she said, gesturing toward the bathroom. “I'll only be a minute.”