Crazy Wild (25 page)

C
HAPTER

26

S
ON OF A BITCH,
Dylan thought, closing the door behind Tony Royce. She hadn't come back.

Royce had gotten the call from his agent in the field and lit up like a Christmas tree. Without giving anything away, he'd grabbed Bracken and Mathers and hightailed it out of Steele Street, promising to be back.

Dylan doubted it, not tonight. There was enough stuff in the box to keep Royce busy for weeks, with the added bonus of Dominika Starkova's address, which wasn't nearly the priority it had been, because Skeeter hadn't come back. She'd had plenty of time to get home, even if she'd kept the Humvee in first gear. So if she hadn't come home, where had she gone?

He had only one answer for that, and it made his jaw tight.

He crossed over to the computers in the main office. If it had been anyone except Skeeter, he would have said no way. No one else would have so blatantly disregarded a direct order, so willingly disobeyed him, so blithely put themselves in so much danger—all for a tiny piece of electronics.

But this was Skeeter, and she knew where the electronics were, in the bottom of a steam pipe off the fifth floor in South Morrison, and he'd stupidly left her alone with the tracking device that would lead her right to them.

Except it wouldn't be that easy.

And she wasn't the only person who might be after the earrings.

He typed the Humvee's access code into the computer at the same time as he called her cell phone to tell her to get her butt home. Both procedures got him exactly nothing.

Okay. Now she was really in trouble.

He picked up the house phone and dialed the ninth floor.

Really in trouble, like trouble so deep she'd be lucky to dig herself out by the Fourth of July.

“Yo,” Creed answered—thank you very much. Dylan really hadn't wanted to have to go up there and do the bucket-of-water thing, because however skeptical he had been with Skeeter, he figured, unbelievably, that she'd called that one right. Sex with an international criminal. If he hadn't thought Creed was crazy before, he did now.

But that was a whole other set of problems.

“How's it going up there?”

“Good.”

Okay. Fine. Creed never had been very chatty.

“Dominika still under wraps?”

“Got her right here. What's up?”

You tell me
is what Dylan wanted to say, but they had a bigger problem than Creed sleeping with a black-market arms dealer who was trying to sell a multimegaton nuclear warhead to the friggin' Taliban.

Jesus.

“Skeeter went after the earrings.”

Creed swore, one succinct word that pretty well summed up how Dylan felt, too.

“I'll go pick her up.”

“No,” Dylan said. “I'm going after her, but I need you down here, manning the office. If she shows up while I'm gone, I want to know it ASAP.”

“She might not be the only one who went back to South Morrison,” Creed warned him.

“I can handle it.”

“No, I—”

“I can handle it,” Dylan repeated. “And if I can't, I'll call you.” They couldn't leave Dominika Starkova, or Cody Stark, or whatever she wanted to call herself, alone in Steele Street, and they sure as hell couldn't take her with them, and he wasn't willing to turn her over to anyone else, not yet—those facts narrowed down their options to just one.

“I'll be locked and loaded.”

That's all he asked. Creed Rivera locked and loaded was more backup than most people ever needed.

“Has Ms. Starkova volunteered any useful information yet?” he asked, which was about as euphemistic as it got for “Where the fuck is the map we've been busting our asses to find all night?” SDF wasn't in the business of waiting for bad guys to “volunteer” information. They were in the business of
getting
information, and under normal circumstances, they got it any way they could.

“I'm on it,” Creed said.

“Good.” That's what he'd wanted to hear. He hung up the phone, and on his way out of the office, grabbed four extra magazines for his 9mm.

CREED
was as into reality as the next guy, but tonight, reality was a bitch. He was sitting at the bank of computers in the main office, ready to track the Humvee or Skeeter's cell phone, whichever she turned on first, and maintaining a direct feed to General Grant's office at the Pentagon on another.

“The more information I have, the more I can help you, Cody,” he said. It was true, but he still felt like a son of a bitch asking the questions. “You've already told me you were at Karlovy Vary. Why don't you tell me what happened.”

Debriefing—now there was some harsh, cold, stark reality. He was debriefing the woman he'd just had the hottest sex of his whole life with—sex he'd had without a condom.

That was right. No condom. And how was that for some cold stark reality?

He'd flat-out forgotten to use one, but even if he'd remembered, he had a feeling he would have been out of luck.

If he'd thought about it, he could have borrowed a few condoms, he supposed. Kid probably had a couple hundred of the damn things up in his loft, but Creed had been in Kid's loft, and a person's chances of finding anything smaller than a kayak were between slim and none. Kid had only two categories of stuff: things that needed ammo, which he was obsessively careful with, and things that didn't need ammo, and if it didn't need ammo, it could be anywhere.

That would have left Dylan, and Creed could think of few things that would have lit a three-alarm blaze under the boss's butt faster than him calling down for condoms with Dominika Starkova holed up in his apartment.

Of course, it was all moot, because he hadn't remembered to take precautions until they'd hit the cold, stark reality of the SDF office—where, coincidentally, he'd hit a cold, stark wall.

She wasn't giving anything away.

Kissing someone wasn't listed anywhere in the commando interrogation manual as a verified method of softening up a detainee, but he still wanted to do it.

“Cody? Honey?”

Calling a prisoner “honey” also was not listed in the interrogation manual.

“Sweetheart?”
Nada
. Not listed.

He was teasing her a little with the endearments, trying to get a reaction, not that he didn't like them. She could be his sweetheart. He could see it, easy, but she hadn't looked at him since they'd walked out of the elevator, which was driving him nuts.

“
Querida?
” My love.

That one finally got him a flicker. Her gaze lifted to his for a fraction of a second before dropping again.

“I . . . I can't tell you anything,” she said.

“Why not? You're going to end up telling somebody everything, and it really would be for the best if you started with me.” He would protect her any way he could, and he doubted if anyone else would bother. “There might be a way out of this, Cody, but I won't know if you don't help me.”

She let out a weary sigh and finally met his gaze. “I told Keith O'Connell everything, and he ended up dead. That's not a chance I'm willing to take with you.”

And that was good news. Sort of. In a roundabout way that didn't do him a damn bit of good. He didn't mean to brag, but he'd been freakin' unstoppable tonight. She must have noticed.

“I'm a highly trained operative of the United States government, Cody. I can take care of myself, and you, if you'll let me. Keith O'Connell was a State Department attaché who shouldn't have tried to take things as far as he did.”

“No, he wasn't,” she said, taking the misinformation bait. He felt like a jerk for doing it to her, but it looked like it was going to get them off square one. “He was CIA. If you look deeper, you'll find it. I swear. And he was also highly trained, and they hung him up by a rope and shot him until there was nothing left. I
was
there, and I saw it, and he was helpless, and I . . . I was useless.” She looked at him, her frustration palpable. “I tried. I begged, and they killed him anyway, and they kept killing him, over and over and over.”

Well, for someone who wasn't going to tell him anything, she'd just said a mouthful—and he'd just fallen into déjà vu quicksand. He knew all about being helpless and useless.

“Who shot him, Cody?” He needed names.

She shook her head, her frustration turning to anger. “Don't make me do this. I don't want you hurt.”

“You're on home ground, now, with the full power of the U.S. government on your side. If you give me something to work with, we can stop them cold.” He believed it, because that's what he'd been doing for the last ten years, stopping the bad guys cold, without question, except for one godawful failure in Colombia. “If you tell me everything, and I mean
everything,
maybe we can walk away from this together.”

“
You
can walk away now, and that's exactly what you should do.”

God, she could be stubborn.

But he no longer believed she could be a terrorist. No way. And that wasn't just the sex talking. At least he hoped it wasn't. Nothing about the way the night had gone down pointed to anything except her being on the run, without the skills and resources to be successful.

For that she needed him. He had the skills and the resources, and if he decided to make a run for it, there wasn't anybody who was going to catch him. Unbelievably, against every ounce of his better judgment, that's exactly what he was beginning to decide.

“Give me the location of the bomb, and I can use it to cut a deal.” There, it was out in the open. “I'll take you someplace where they'll never find us, not if they look for the next fifty years.” He could guarantee it, but so help him, God, once he crossed that line, if he crossed that line, there'd be no turning back.

She looked up, and he was amazed that such a soft mouth could be set in such a hard line.

“We're having our first fight.” It had just dawned on him. “If you come away with me, we can do this whenever we want.”

From the look on her face, that wasn't the big selling point he'd hoped it would be. “And
why
would I want to go away someplace and fight with a crazy man?”

“Because I make you hot.”

“Other people make me hot, and you don't see me running away with them.”

“Liar.” He moved in close. “Nobody makes you hot the way I make you hot. Come on, Cody, take the chance. It's the only one you've got.”

He needed a chance, too, and it wasn't just because of the sex. He wasn't that big of a fool, and sex had always been easy for him to find. This was something else. He didn't know what, couldn't put a name to it, but whatever he'd seen in her on that rooftop had been profound. It had compelled him. It still compelled him.

“Please.” He didn't want this to end, not tonight, not with her going into lockdown for the rest of her life, and him going into therapy until his teeth fell out.

“Hashemi,” she finally said after a long pause, looking like she already regretted telling him. “And . . . and Akbar. They were the ones who actually pulled the triggers.”

It wasn't a map to the warhead, but it was a start, the start down a long road of no return. If he saved her, he'd be a fugitive, too. But if he didn't, he had no future at all, because he wouldn't be able to live with himself.

“Who else was there?” He reached over and turned off the computer connecting him to General Grant's office and picked up a pencil and notepad. He'd decide later how much information to disseminate and when, and if that didn't smack of high treason, he didn't know what did.

“Sergei Patrushev, Bruno Walmann, and . . . Reinhard K-Klein were all there, and the Braun twins.” The litany of names came pouring out of her, one after another, each one of them marking a man as an accessory to murder.

“Patrushev,” he said when she finished. “Tell me about him. How you got involved with him. The work you did for him.” He'd get back to the map.

“I never worked for him. I was his prisoner. When I was able to escape, I did.”

“Prisoner?” She'd dumbfounded him again. No one had thought to follow that angle. “How? Why?”

“My father, he, uh, owed Sergei a lot of money.”

Which meant what?
he wondered. “He sold you to Sergei?”

Oh, man. This was going to get bad. He felt it in his gut.

“Not sold, exactly. It was more like he used me for collateral.”

Same difference in his book, the bastard.

“If you were a prisoner, how did you end up in the middle of the negotiations for the nuclear deal? We've got photos of you with almost all the buyers, sometimes at a party, but sometimes just entering a building with one or more of them.”

It was what had sealed her fate, her high profile with all the terrorists trying to work a deal with Sergei.

“That's what I was collateral for, not the money my dad owed, but the nuclear warhead he had been responsible for when he'd been a general in the Soviet army. He's the one who took it off the military base in Tbisili and hid it in Tajikistan.”

Tajikistan.

Bingo.
Big, huge freaking bingo. That was it, the information they all needed.