Crazy Wild (6 page)

C
HAPTER

7

T
HIS IS BAD,
Skeeter thought. As a matter of fact, from where she was sitting in the elegantly appointed office on the seventh floor of SDF headquarters on Steele Street in Denver's lower downtown, the situation was worse than bad. It was skirting on disaster.

Three CIA agents were milling around the Scandinavian-designed furniture and a million dollars' worth of SDF's high-tech office equipment, and the one thing they were looking for wasn't anywhere in sight: Creed Rivera.

They wanted his ass, and if Dylan Hart, SDF's head honcho, didn't show up pretty damn quick, she was afraid they might just get it. She'd tried to call Creed and warn him not to come home, but—typically—his phone was turned off, and he hadn't bothered to check in. In truth, he hadn't really checked in since his partner, J.T. Chronopolous, had been killed in Colombia last summer. He was checked out, way out, and in Skeeter's opinion, Dylan had been crazy to put him on tonight's stakeout of Dominika Starkova.

She'd offered to go herself. Hell, she could do a stakeout or track somebody as well as the SDF operators, and she was a helluva lot more stable than Creed right now, which was a pretty scary turn of events as far as she was concerned. The guys were supposed to be rock-solid, and she was supposed to be the loose cannon, the spooky little wallbanger Hawkins had dragged in off the street. But she wasn't the one who woke up in a cold sweat every night, and she wasn't the one rebuilding a 1969 Chevy Nova into a 427-cubic-inch quarter-mile death machine.

She shifted her gaze out the window overlooking the seventh-floor garage. The damn Nova was parked in the first bay, taking up a piece of prime real estate. The paint on her was so black it looked blue. Her Rally wheels gleamed in the low light. She was wicked, absolutely lethal with a zero-to-sixty mph in under four seconds—and her name was Mercy, of which she had none.

Skeeter swore under her breath and forced herself to focus on what the head CIA agent, a man named Tony Royce, was saying.

“If you know where he is, Ms. Bang, it would be to your advantage to quit wasting our time and just tell us.” Royce had short brown hair, pale blue eyes, and a serious personality deficit, and by her count, that was his fourth not-so-veiled threat, each and every one of them delivered in a flat monotone voice that was really starting to grate on her nerves. Of the three agents, Royce was the one playing “bad cop,” but she didn't doubt for a second that the other two had it in them. “Believe me when I tell you I am
not
in a mood to be screwed with tonight.”

Yeah, she believed him all right.

“Creed Rivera is a danger to himself and to others,” Royce gritted the words out between his teeth, standing not two feet from where she was sitting, looming over her in what she was sure he thought was an intimidating posture.

Well, she wasn't intimidated, not in the least, but he didn't have to know that.

She tugged on her ball cap, pulling the bill down a little lower, until it almost rested on the rims of her sunglasses. Yeah, it was dark outside, but she never went without her shades, a fact which seemed to bug the hell out of Royce. He'd asked her to remove them—twice. She shifted in her chair, crossed her legs, and noticed that while Royce didn't bat an eyelash, the youngest agent, a dark-haired, dark-eyed rookie named Mathers, quickly dropped his gaze down the length of her body, taking in her black muscle shirt with the silver lightning bolt streaking across her breasts, her waist-length platinum ponytail, her skintight black leather pants, and her sturdy pair of black lace-up work boots. She'd been about to go out and look for Creed herself when the CIA had shown up—unexpected, unannounced, and unwelcome.

“That's his job,” she said, keeping her voice as flat as any trained CIA agent. “To be dangerous.”

“I know he's been highly trained to be a danger to others, to our country's enemies,” Royce agreed. “But there are limits even in that arena. We all operate under certain rules of engagement, even in extreme situations, and Creed Rivera has overstepped those rules. We feel certain he'll do it again. He's not to be trusted, Ms. Bang, not by anyone. To put it bluntly, he's a danger even to you.”

And that's where Agent Royce was wrong. No matter how many evaluations he'd read on Creed Rivera, he didn't know SDF's jungle boy the way she did. The only person Skeeter worried about Creed hurting was himself.

“I've seen your file . . . Skeeter, isn't it? Trying to protect him is just another bad choice in a life full of bad choices,” Royce said, his voice losing its monotone in favor of a thick dose of condescension. “Do yourself a favor and help us out here.”

God, she hated the CIA. If Dylan hadn't told her to let them in, she wouldn't have, not on a bet. And if Royce had seen her file, he knew she was a helluva lot older than she looked, twenty as of last summer, but he was still treating her like she was twelve. It was her face. Despite her five feet eight inches of height, she had one of those too-cute button noses and the kind of soft little cheeks that most people outgrew by the time they hit their teens. But not her. Oh, no. She was kicking twenty-one in the back and still had a baby face. Instead of the riot girl she was, she sometimes looked like a freakin' fairy princess, even in black leather.

“You saw the pictures,” he said, and then, just to drive his point home, he picked a stack of photos up off the desk and dropped them into her lap.

She didn't need to look; she'd seen them. But her gaze dropped anyway—and there was Pablo Castano, looking pretty rough with his throat cut, the ground around him dark with his blood.

It was bad, but Castano's death had been deemed justice by three governments who had paid for him and Garcia to die. She'd read the reports. Neither Creed nor Kid had left anything out. Royce had to know the facts of the mission as well as she did, probably better. He was in the same business.

She picked the photos up and slowly flipped through them, one by one. They hadn't improved in the twenty minutes since Royce had first pulled them out. Kid and Creed had left a mess on that mountainside—and a message that had run the length of South America and gotten all the way back to the Department of Defense of
los asesinos fantasmas,
the ghost killers. Somehow, in the jungles of Colombia and in the mountains of Peru, in people's minds, Hawkins and Creed and Kid had become the vengeful reincarnations of Kid's brother, their sole purpose to bring death to everyone with the American soldier's blood on their hands.

And so it had come to pass. All the NRF rebels who had tortured J.T. to his death had been killed. None was left alive. The U.S. Department of Defense had ordered the deaths, and the CIA hadn't been too bothered by any of them—not until tonight, when Creed had suddenly gotten orders to stake out Dominika Starkova and pick her up. He hadn't been gone two hours before the CIA had shown up.

Skeeter could add well enough to put two and two together and come up with twenty-eight reasons why the CIA would want the Blonde Czech Bimbo who was selling a nuclear warhead on the black market.

“The way I heard it,” she said, “Castano and the rest of the NRF were your responsibility, and your guys couldn't get the job done. So you called us in, and your screwups got our guy killed. You sent Creed and J.T. into an ambush.”

“Us, Ms. Bang? Are you running ops with SDF now? Is this something else I need to write up in my report?” Royce asked.

“Probably not,” another voice interjected, cutting the agent off.

Skeeter slanted her gaze toward the door.
Finally.

She no sooner laid eyes on the man walking into the office than a soft flush of awareness washed into her cheeks—
damn it
.

That was one thing she
had
to get under control. This ridiculous crush she'd allowed herself to get on Dylan Hart had absolutely no future in it. Worse, she had a terrible suspicion that he knew, and that her ridiculous crush was the reason he'd been pretty much avoiding the SDF headquarters on Steele Street ever since last summer. He'd been coming in, doing his work, and leaving—usually in the dead of night. She hadn't seen him in weeks.

He looked tired—tired and beautiful, and at least as dangerous as Creed.

Royce knew it, too. She could tell by the way he stepped away from her. Dylan and the CIA went way back, and none of their history was good.

“Hart,” Royce said, acknowledging Dylan's arrival.

“Royce.” The barest hint of a smile curved Dylan's lips as he met the agent's gaze and walked on by. He stopped next to her, and Skeeter felt her blush deepen.

Damn it.

“What's this?” he asked, pulling the photographs out of her hand.

“Castano and Garcia,” she said.

He went through the pictures, slipping each one to the bottom of the stack after he'd seen it. He had silky dark hair and refined features, elegantly carved, but the underlying lines of his face were too hard for him to ever qualify as pretty. Dylan Hart, like all the SDF guys, had been one of the city's most notorious juvenile delinquents before he'd grown up and come into his own, and those years had left their mark inside and out.

“Where'd you get these?” he asked Royce, effortlessly achieving a perfectly bland tone of voice. He wasn't giving anything away, but Skeeter could tell he was furious. There was a stillness about Dylan when he was angry, and he was suddenly very still.

“We had a paid asset in Puerto Blanco. As for finding Castano and Garcia, your boys didn't do much to cover their tracks. Everyone north to the Colombian border knows what happened in the Cordillera mountains.”

Dylan nodded once, glanced at the top photo again, then lifted his gaze to meet Royce's. “I think that was the point.”

“They've gone rogue on you, Hart,” Royce said. “Chronopolous and Rivera both. You know it, and I know it. Hell, you can't even get Chronopolous to come home.”

“He's on temporary assignment with the DEA in Colombia, which I'm sure you know more about than I do,” Dylan said.

“Then what in the hell is he doing going in and out of Peru? He's been in Cuzco four times in the last three months.”

One of Dylan's eyebrows arched upward. “He won't like you following him.”

“My boys don't care what he likes or doesn't like. They want him out of their territory. All he has to do is show up in a town and everybody gets spooked. What is it you all call him? Chaos? Kid Chaos? Well, you've got it right, and I want him out of there. And I want Creed Rivera now. I want to know what he's working on.”

“And I'd like you to think twice before you ever show anything like these photographs to my personal secretary again.” Dylan lifted the pictures, his tone absolutely even, his message more than clear. To Skeeter's surprise, Tony Royce actually clenched his jaw.

“You're in way over your head, Hart—especially if you've got Dominika Starkova. The case is ours. We've been on it for months, and I don't care if it was General Grant or the secretary of defense himself who sicced you on her tail. I want SDF to back off. I've got signed orders from Director Alden himself that says she's ours.”

Well, the truth finally comes out,
Skeeter thought. Things were definitely moving now. General Grant was the two-star who had created SDF nine years ago to conduct clandestine operations—a bone that stuck in everybody else's craw, especially the CIA's, especially since Alden had taken over.

“You had your chance in Eastern Europe,” Dylan said coldly, “and you lost her.”

To Skeeter's surprise, Royce let out a short laugh. “If you think you can hold onto her any better than we did, you're only fooling yourself,” the agent said. “She's smart, dangerously smart, and if Rivera has her, he needs to turn her over now—before this thing gets any more out of control.”

Dylan shifted his gaze to meet Skeeter's, and she shook her head.

“We don't know what he's got,” Dylan said, returning his attention to Royce. “But I can guarantee you, if Creed has her, she's not going anywhere.”

CODY'S
solo flight through the old library's new construction lasted all of two seconds, but it felt like forever, and even after she landed on the floor and crumpled into a shivering heap, the spike in her adrenaline kept her emotions at full throttle.

He'd dropped her, the bastard, thrown her over the edge and dropped her, and her heart was never going to be the same. Her right cheek was pressed against the floor, her bound hands stretched out in front of her, clinging to the wood parquet.

“Are you okay?”

Damn!
She jerked her head around and found him crouched over her. He must have landed like a cat. She hadn't heard a thing.

“N-no,” she managed to croak out. She wasn't okay. She was half frozen, and half scared out of her mind, and half sick, and handcuffed for crying out loud.

“Who in the h-hell are y-you?”
she demanded. With Bruno and Reinhard momentarily out of the way, she felt pretty safe venting her anger and frustration out on wild boy. Discretion be damned. The guy had been manhandling her from the instant they'd met.