Crazy Love (10 page)

“Perhaps. What do you need?”

Negara’s smile broadened, which was sometimes a deceptive expression. Royce had a feeling this was one of those times.

“Room four eighteen was empty when my men got there, and though there were still items of a personal nature present, I am not inclined to leave any holes in my net.”

Of course not, Royce thought.

“So you’re still planning on posting men at Whitfield’s,” he said. “I think that’s a good idea.”

“Yes, yes,” Negara said. “I knew you would understand a multipronged approach.”

Royce inadvertently reacted to Negara’s statement, allowing a quick, skeptical lift of his brow. Almost as quickly, he schooled his features back into a bland mask.

“You do not approve?” the old man asked. He didn’t miss much.

“Actually, I do,” Royce said, though in truth, it had been the multipronged approach to the Dominika Starkova case that had contributed to his career’s demise. Too many agencies with their fingers in the pie, and his own boss putting other agents in the field without telling him, had all helped make him look like a fool by the end of the day. “I would keep two men at the hotel and deploy the others at Whitfield’s. With men at both places, you’ll greatly increase your chances of success.”

“Yes, yes.” The old man looked happy again. “This is my plan, but now I feel I am—how do you say?—short-handed at the senator’s, especially since I am also covering Hart’s base of operations in Denver tonight. Attacking on three fronts at the same time, I believe, will surely gain us some advantage, and at least one hostage. If you could be at Senator Whitfield’s, strictly in the background, of course, to add your expertise, it would be deeply appreciated.”

Or you can kill me now and be done with it—or so
you think.
Royce knew the difference between a request and an ultimatum. He also knew how exposed Negara was by being in the United States, away from his lair on Sumba. It wasn’t just the money that had drawn him out, it was the need to save face as well. If agents of the U.S. government could get away with seventeen million, they could just as easily get away with seventy million. Negara needed to send a message, and if the agent who had done the deed disappeared and was never seen again—so be it. Having Royce help coordinate the hands-on part of the operation, as he’d done in Jakarta, greatly increased its chances of success.

And for that, no thinly veiled threats were necessary. Royce wanted Hart taken out, and he was willing to ally himself with Negara in the heart of America to get the job done.

“I would be honored to help,” he said, and later tonight, when Dylan Hart was strapped into the dental chair, any risks he’d taken would pale in comparison to the satisfaction he’d feel at having overcome his enemy.

CHAPTER

11

L
OOK FOR
an angel.

Those were her orders, and Gillian “Red Dog” Pentycote was good at following orders—even crazy ones, like “look for an angel.”

Roger that,
she thought, looking for all she was worth. But the only thing she was seeing was hundreds of very unangelic, crabby people trying to find their luggage in the baggage claim area of Dulles International Airport. Everyone arriving on the flight from Denver looked frazzled—businessmen wearing rumpled suits, families who needed their hotel rooms and room service, people at the end of their day who were getting home late to their wives, children, girlfriends, boyfriends, pets, whatever.

But no angels.

She pushed her glasses back up on her nose. She’d give it a couple more minutes, then call Mr. James at the cell phone number Skeeter had given her.

Angel, she thought again, giving her head a little shake. It wasn’t like Skeeter to be so vague.

A small smile curved her mouth. There sure as heck wasn’t anything vague about Skeeter Bang in the flesh. Gillian had never met anyone more “there,” more colorful, distinct, and utterly unique. The voice Gillian had been dealing with over the phone for the last month had not prepared her for someone so young and with ten times her muscle tone. The head-shot photo in Grant’s files showed little beyond a black ball cap with a dragon embroidered on it and a pair of mirrored sunglasses. There was the button nose, but the photograph on whole had been remarkably lacking in information. There had been no clue about the hair, or the tattoos, or the scar across her forehead…or that body.

Gillian instinctively stood a little straighter. She’d had some training, self-defense and weapons, since she’d started at SDF. General Grant had insisted on it, but she was a long way from looking like she could kick somebody’s butt, and even further from actually being able to do it. Skeeter looked like she did it in her sleep.

This “angel” named Travis James probably looked the same way, the way all the guys at Steele Street looked—Hart, Hawkins, Rivera, Younger, and Chronopolous. The file photos she had of the operators were pretty good—well lit, no hats, no sunglasses—and not a one of them looked anything like an angel, except maybe Creed Rivera, if there had been a way to get the feral look out of his eyes. That boy was wild and definitely no angel. They didn’t even have a photograph of Mr. James on file, or even a file on the guy, which just highlighted the reason she’d been hired to tidy up General Grant’s loose ends. He had about a million of them hanging out of his filing cabinets and stashed around his small suite of offices next to the boiler room in an annex nobody else in Washington, D.C., even knew existed. With the boss out of town, she’d planned on working a little overtime to see if she could get ahead of all the general’s junk, especially his top-secret junk, which, inexperienced as she was, she knew was supposed to be secured somewhere, inside something with locks and codes on it. Some of the documents she’d run across in the last month she shouldn’t have seen dead.

Besides, it was the weekend, when her life slowed down to somewhere between a crawl and a full-out stop. No, sirree. Not much happened in Gillian Pentycote’s life between five
P
.
M
. on Friday and nine o’clock Monday morning, other than dinner with her parents and a full dose of relatives on Sunday after church, including her two sisters, two brothers, and various wives, husbands, children, aunts, cousins, and uncles. Not even Skeeter almost instantly hanging her with the really cool handle “Red Dog” when Grant had first hired her changed the basic facts of her social life, but this weekend, fate had stepped in and handed her a mission, at least as close to a mission as she’d gotten. After only a month on the job, she’d spent the afternoon doing a weapons check.

A weapons check—God, she could still hardly believe it, loading submachine guns, checking batteries in equipment, and testing communications devices. It sure beat the hell out of her last job, buried in the Environmental Sciences labs at the University of Arizona, running errands and scurrying around after her VIP—Very Important Professor—husband.

Ex-husband, she reminded herself, and it wasn’t as if her name wasn’t also on the book they’d written, detailing the ecology of the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum. It was, right after his, in smaller print—
dammit.

She would be damned surprised, though, if Dr. Kenneth Pentycote ever managed to see his name on another book. Her organizational skills aside, without her insightful brilliance discerning the underlying correlations between all those facts Ken was so enamored of unearthing and flaunting, there’d be damn little of actual academic significance to make a book of his worth publishing, and he could take that to the bank. Or rather, he couldn’t take it to the bank.

But her past was behind her, the disaster of it, the pain of it. She only hoped the best for Ken and his new wife, and the child they had on the way. Divorce happened. People moved on, and she, for one, had finally stopped moving in circles.

A boy—that’s what Ken and Kimberly were having, a baby boy.

Gillian blinked, then blinked again. She’d stopped crying, too. Oh, man, she’d
way
stopped crying, given it up months ago. Thank God.

She blinked one more time, pushed her glasses up again, and went back to doing what she was getting paid to do tonight—find an angel.

It didn’t take much looking around at this crowd of washed-out, run-down travelers to realize there wasn’t an angel anywhere in the—

Holy Mother of God.
Her heart caught in her throat, and she tightened her hand on her bag.

Angel at two o’clock, coming around the baggage carrel, coming out of the crowd
—and moving in slow motion, she swore it. Everything suddenly seemed to have slowed down, except her pulse. Her skin flashed hot, then cold, and she gripped her messenger bag tighter. An edge of dizziness threatened to take hold. Then she realized she was holding her breath.

Breathe, Gillian Pentycote,
she admonished herself.
Breathe.

But so help her God, it was Travis James. She didn’t have a doubt in her mind. Six feet of power and grace and blond hair pulled back in a ponytail at the nape of his neck. Gray pants, white T-shirt, black jacket, and incredibly blue eyes—Caribbean blue. And the face, so help her God, chiseled, beautiful, the shadow of a beard across an elegant jaw.

Skeeter should have warned her, should have said something—something more than “angel.” “Angel” could mean anything: kind, warmhearted, a comfort in a time of need, somebody with wings. There was nothing about the word that implicitly implied drop-freaking-dead gorgeous.

But he was, completely gorgeous, completely unexpected, and he most definitely looked like a comfort, one of those seriously dangerous and dangerously addicting comforts she hadn’t had in a very long time.

God help her.

He stopped and leaned over to lift a large backpack off the conveyor belt. A woman bumped into him, turned to excuse herself, and instead all but melted into a puddle at his feet. Gillian saw the whole thing, the cool apology ready on the woman’s lips, the stunning moment of awareness, and the complete and total capitulation of her common sense.

Then the angel smiled back, and every synapse Gillian had blew—like fuses.

Sex.
That’s what his smile said.
Hot sex. All over you sex. Inside you sex.

Her mind was suddenly so utterly blank, she was lost. She couldn’t remember her own name. One breath passed, then another, and she was still riveted in place, trying, frantically, to reboot her brain.

TRAVIS
hadn’t been in Washington, D.C., for a few months, but nothing had changed, not in Dulles. It was still crowded, still hectic, still exactly like dozens of other airports he’d been in and out of lately. He looked around the baggage area, looking for five feet five inches of bright-eyed serious in sensible shoes, with red hair.

He almost instantly spotted a likely candidate, but the woman didn’t look particularly bright-eyed or serious. Her wire-rimmed glasses were slightly askew, and she looked a little shell-shocked behind them. He dropped his gaze to her feet and reconsidered. The shoes were right, athletic wear, very sensible, except one of them was coming untied—and the legs were nice, what he could see of them peeking out from under her sensible just-above-the-knee khaki skirt, which matched her sensible tucked-in-at-the-waist khaki shirt, except the shirt was coming untucked, and both items of clothing had a number of cargo pockets stuffed to the gills with pens, pencils, scraps of paper, small notebooks, and even smaller electronics, which gave her kind of a loose-around-the-edges look. Wires snaked from a couple of the pockets to a few others, which gave her kind of a miniature-suicide-bomber look and made him wonder how in the hell she’d gotten into the airport, and made him hope she wasn’t Red Dog.

Starting forward anyway, just in case she was his ride, he sidestepped a couple of young boys wrestling their way through the unclaimed luggage. When he looked up again, the woman’s gaze was clearing and was definitely focused on him.

Well, hell.
Just his luck. She was Red Dog, even though her hair wasn’t red, not in a carrot-top way. It was auburn, chin length, and more than a little tousled, like it had gotten away from her during the fixing stage, the same way her sensible clothes were getting away from her. Or maybe there was a gale-force wind outside the terminal.

She looked to be in her early thirties, which even at twenty-four, he normally considered a very nice age for a woman—
very
nice, for all the right reasons. But Red Dog wasn’t quite fitting into his very-nice-thirty-year-old-woman category. She was fitting into his probably-perfectly-nice-thirty-year-old-urchin category—and she had the lock on it, even with those legs.

But he was here, with Skeeter to hang out with, and he had a driver, and he got to work with the boss, Dylan Hart, which beat the hell out of being home alone and thinking way too much, so things were good.

He’d done his homework on the plane, and the Whitfield/Godwin part of the mission didn’t look too risky or difficult, not with Hart pulling the heist. But the Hamzah Negara crap was nothing but bad. If Skeeter was right, and the Negara boys had followed Dylan to Washington, D.C., this thing could be a goatfuck waiting to happen.

And she’d called him to help out, not Creed, not Kid, who, admittedly, was in Paris, or Quinn, who wasn’t, and not Hawkins, who was still in a cast, but him, the FNG. He liked that, and he wasn’t going to let her down. It didn’t matter that he’d been put on active duty ahead of her, he knew who had the maddest skills.

The urchin was moving toward him now, too, and at about forty feet and closing, he started reevaluating his first impression. She was a bit of a mess, sure, but she was a bit of a cute mess, and very bright-eyed behind her caddywampus glasses, just like Skeeter had said. At thirty feet, he admitted that he liked the way she moved. For someone who wasn’t very big, she had a strong, purposeful stride. At twenty feet, he could tell her eyes were a warm, amber brown. At ten feet, he noticed how sweet her mouth was, very expressive and curving into an unsure smile. At five feet, he could see that she’d missed a buttonhole on her shirt. There was a small gap where the extra buttonhole curved out, and another gap where she hadn’t quite gotten the zipper on her skirt completely closed, and during her short walk, her left shoe had come completely untied.

He liked women, loved them, especially when they were coming undone—and she was, one little loose edge at a time. He smiled, which made her cheeks turn pink, which he loved even more, and at three feet, at a standstill with his hand out, he found himself smiling down at her and wondering what it would take to get a perfectly nice thirty-year-old urchin into bed. He didn’t consider himself a player. He
wasn’t
a player—but he wanted to play with her.

Nothing could have surprised him more. Not only wasn’t she his type, but with her pockets full of papers and wires, and with—no kidding—a small piece of white first-aid tape holding the corner of her glasses together, all of it making her look like Gadget Girl, she was the complete opposite of his type.

“Red Dog?”

“Mr. James.”

“Travis.” He took her hand when she extended it. He also especially liked smart women, gravitated toward them, but he’d never been sexually attracted to the goddess geeks and nerdettes of the world.

Never.

“Thanks for coming down to pick me up,” he finished.

Except once. Regan McKinney, the love of his life, who had married another SDF operator, definitely qualified for royal geekdom. She’d recently finished her doctorate in Geology and spent her days scraping away at dinosaur bones for a natural history museum in Denver, and he knew for a fact that she liked all things that had to do with science, all kinds of science, but especially dinosaur science. The thing with Regan, though, was that she looked like every guy’s favorite sex fantasy, blond and built, with elegant cheekbones, long bangs, and a soft, full mouth. She did not look like anybody’s idea of a dinosaur doctor.