Crazy Love (5 page)

CHAPTER

5

O
R NOT,
Dylan thought for the hundredth time in the last ten hours—including all the wee hours of the night during which he’d gotten damn little sleep and a little too much of his second bottle of Scotch.

He was sitting perfectly still at the conference table in SDF’s main office, waiting for the briefing to begin, his sunglasses firmly in place, trying to keep his head from going off like a Titan missile, and trying to keep from staring at Skeeter as she downed her third doughnut.

He was failing on all counts, and the whole doughnut thing was making him queasy, not to mention the fact that she hadn’t gotten home until four o’clock in the morning.

Four o’clock
A
.
M
.—
ante meridiem.

He’d left her at the Doubles about ten o’clock. So what in the hell had she been doing between ten and four? And how in the hell did she look so fresh and rested—and did he really want to know the answer to either one of those questions?

No, he decided, because she obviously hadn’t been up all night drinking Scotch and worrying about somebody. That’s what he’d done, and he looked like hell.

Christ.
He’d been insane to give in to all that juvenile angst at the track last night. He had no business taking her anywhere.

And now she had sugar on her nose, and on her lips. It was enough to fry a couple more dozen of his brain cells—and his brain cells were in damn short supply this morning. Great. Running out of brain cells, running out of nerve, he should never have come home.

“Goddammit, Dylan,” Hawkins said from across the room. “Goddammit.”

Well, that didn’t sound very auspicious.

With effort, he slanted his gaze toward the fax machine, where Hawkins was reading a transmission as it came over the line.

Superman did not look happy.

“It’s a goddamn commendation from the secretary of defense.” Hawkins pulled the fax free, still reading. “A goddamn commendation.”

Shit.
That’s all he needed at eight o’clock in the morning.

“Jakarta…Jemaah,” Hawkins muttered, scanning the page. “Valor in action under the direst circumstances…tenacity…subsequent es—”

Abruptly, Hawkins stopped, his gaze frozen to the page. Then he shot a rapier-sharp glance across the office.

“Escape”—that was the word Superman had choked on, and quite frankly, Dylan didn’t want to talk about it. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t going to talk about it, especially in front of Skeeter.

With a softly muttered curse, Hawkins shifted his attention back to the fax and continued reading.

“Sumba,” he said after a moment, speaking the word in a voice so cold, Dylan felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.

He took a careful breath, told himself to calm down. He wasn’t surprised the island of Sumba was mentioned in the report. He just didn’t like being reminded of the damn place, not that he wasn’t thinking about Sumba and Hamzah Negara, the bastard who owned it, twenty-five out of every twenty-four hours in the day right now.

Hawkins didn’t say another word, just stood there, staring at the fax, until finally, after an endless, tension-filled minute, he folded the piece of paper and put it in his pocket.

“Shouldn’t I, uh, make a copy of that for the files?” Skeeter asked. “Maybe scan it into a documents folder?”

“No,” both Dylan and Hawkins said at the same time, then looked at each other.

“No,” Hawkins repeated, shifting his attention back to the plans.

Dylan hazarded a quick glance in Skeeter’s direction. She was poised like a cat on the edge of her chair, doughnut paused in midair, curiosity damn near perking up her ears, and her gaze locked on Superman’s pocket.

“But it’s a commendation,” she said. “General Grant likes to stockpile those things, use them for budget fodder.”

“Not this commendation,” Dylan said in a tone that would brook no argument. He wasn’t too worried. The girl was nothing but trouble, but she was hell and gone out of luck if she thought she could lift that fax off Superman without him knowing it. Nobody was that good. His secret was safe, at least from her. Hawkins was another story, and Dylan could tell by the grim expression on Superman’s face that he was going to want to talk about the Jakarta mission—a lot.

Too bad.

“I know just where to put it,” Skeeter said, interrupting his train of thought.

He slanted her another glance. He obviously needed to work on his brook-no-argument tone.

“No.”

“We have half a dozen folders on him, including the black ones, the ones that need top-secret clearance. If you don’t want to see the commendation again, we could deep-six it into one of those, but it should be archived.”

Deep-sixing into black files? Since when had she had access to SDF’s top-secret documents?

He no sooner thought the question than he knew the answer: since she’d damn well figured out how to access them herself, that’s since when. The girl ran wild at Steele Street.

And who in the hell “him” was she talking about? “Half a dozen files on who?”

“Negara,” she said. “Hamzah Negara, the Indonesian warlord whose fortress is on the island of Sumba in the Sabu Sea.”

If she’d meant to freeze him into place, she’d done a damn good job, and suddenly he regretted every ounce of Scotch. It was churning in his stomach, and if he got sick, he was going to feel like a royal fool.

“He’s billing himself as an Islamic jihadist these days,” she continued. “But he’s cut more than a few deals with the CIA when it was to his advantage. His legitimate businesses include controlling interest in the Java Resorts Group, and he’s big into vice, with high stakes in prostitution and gambling. A lot of people think he’s the power behind the Jai Traon pirates harassing the shipping lanes in the South China Sea, but his major source of income is still China White—Southeast Asian heroin.”

And who in the hell, he wondered, had been briefing Skeeter on his missions?

He angled his gaze at Hawkins, who gave him a slow shake of his head.

Good God. Just how deeply had the girl gotten herself into the secrets of Steele Street and SDF? The potential answer to that question unnerved him. There were things she really shouldn’t know—including what she’d just said.

“The commendation stays where it is.” Nonexistent, nothing but a piece of paper in a pocket.

Jakarta was behind him, and Washington, D.C., was here and now. They had the Godwin file to deal with, and after he stole the Godwin file, there’d be another mission, another job, and then another, until Negara was nothing but old business, best forgotten, and that’s the way he wanted it. He did not want the damn Jakarta thing hanging over his head like a friggin’ guillotine—but it was, ready to drop without a moment’s notice.

But that was just him, and a little residual paranoia, which, really, was to be expected, considering where he’d been last week—at least where he thought he’d been, mostly.

Shit.

He brought his hand up and wiped it across his mouth. The cramped cell on the hillside was clear in his mind, the filth, the smell, the shackles, and his neighbor—the guy hanging next to him, dying. He’d been thrown into that cell, and he’d made his escape from that cell, but in between those two events, sometime between the dark days and darker nights, there had been someplace white, and clean, and excruciatingly bright.

It hurt even to think about it, how bright the place had been, the light almost blue, searing into his brain, making time stop. There had been nothing to hold on to in that place, no handhold for reality, and maybe there hadn’t been any reality at all. Maybe the white place had been a drug-induced hallucination.

Because there had been drugs. God only knew what. God and the doctors on the U.S.S.
Jefferson,
he hoped.

After his escape, a Navy medical team had checked him over, inside and out, and told him he was fine—probably just fine. If the injections Negara had given him had been lethal, he would have already dropped over dead, probably. That had been five days ago, plenty of time for their antidotes to counteract the warlord’s chemical soup—probably.

A week would be the true test.

Probably.

Shit.

He didn’t have to look to know the bruises were still there, two of them up the inside of his right forearm, each with a tiny pinprick in the center where Negara’s needles had gone in, three more where the Navy had run their counterattack. As an added—but probably unnecessary—precaution, the doctors had given him a series of backup antidotes, three injectable Syrettes safely nested in a square of foam rubber inside a small stainless steel case—red if his body temperature started to rise over the hundred-degree mark and/or he started hallucinating; blue if his temperature dropped below normal and/or his guts started turning inside out; and yellow if his heart stopped. So it was red—hot and whacked; blue—cold and puking; and yellow—dead. He felt like freaking Alice in Wonderland.

And, yeah, injecting himself with the yellow Syrette if his heart stopped was
probably
going to be a real good trick. He’d meant to tell Hawkins about the potential necessity for that particular procedure as soon as he’d walked into Steele Street last night—but he’d gotten distracted.

His gaze strayed back to Skeeter. Hell, he was still distracted, which made him wonder if instead of harboring a time-delay component, Negara’s chemicals hadn’t already taken full effect, simply making him stupid—because it was nothing but stupid to be so wound up about things, especially being so wound up about her. He had no business taking her anywhere. Stealing things was his business, his real business. Beautiful punk-rock girls and delayed-reaction toxic chemicals with names like NG4, XT7, and XXG2 were new fields for him—fields he wanted to get the hell out of as quickly as possible, preferably with all his parts still in working order.

Two more days.

That’s all he needed.

He did not need Skeeter Bang driving him crazy and Hawkins giving him the evil eye. The commendation was a done deal, no matter what the two of them wanted.

“So how’s Kat?” he asked, changing the subject to Superman’s wife and hopefully taking the heat off himself.

And it worked. Something damn close to a smile actually came across Hawkins’s face.

“Still pregnant,” his friend said, the almost-smile broadening into the real thing.

“
Very
pregnant,” Skeeter added. “She could go any minute.”

“Not any minute,” Hawkins disagreed, glancing over at the girl. “Kat’s cervix is softening, but she’s only dilated to two.”

O-kay.
So much for that subject. The last thing Dylan wanted to talk about was Katya Hawkins’s cervix—ever.

“So what are we dealing with at Whitfield’s?” he asked, moving things along.

“A Halloran-Jenks security system for the estate,” Hawkins said, returning his attention to the plans and running his finger over a scale drawing of the mansion. “Including video surveillance, with banks of cameras here, here, and here, a two-story office with keypad entry, and a biometric wall vault hidden behind a bank of bookcases on the second-floor loft.”

“Biometric? Hell.” That was going to take some preparation. It was going to take time. Something they didn’t have.

“Yeah, I know, but Grant said he had Whitfield’s fingerprints. He’ll have them sent to your hotel,” Hawkins said.

And that was the advantage of having a renegade general for a commanding officer. Grant knew how to get things like a senator’s fingerprints. Hell, he’d probably lifted them himself last night, off of something in Whitfield’s office.

“Wasn’t that a Halloran-Jenks system we breached in Montreal?”

“The same, but Whitfield doesn’t have the T-21 upgrades.”

“Even better.”

“The loft is semicircular,” Hawkins continued. “It rings half the upper floor and overlooks the main-floor office below. Access is via an open-cage elevator or a circular staircase. There are floor-to-ceiling windows on each end of the loft, looking out over the back of the estate. Access to the small room containing the vault is through Chaucer.”

At Dylan’s inquiring glance, Hawkins shrugged.

“Whitfield is old school, and he’s hosting a reception for the British ambassador tonight. You’ll be going as Michael Deakins, a State Department aide. The invitation for you and your wife, Jeanette, will be waiting for you at the hotel, along with—”

Whoa.
Dylan held up his hand.

Whoa. Whoa. Whoa.

“—the appropriate identification, and a—” Hawkins’s voice ground to a halt. “What?”

Wife?

He couldn’t even get the word out. He pushed his sunglasses down on his nose, his gaze zeroing in on Hawkins. Superman couldn’t possibly be thinking what Dylan thought he was thinking.

“Jeanette?” he finally managed to say. “There is no Jeanette.” Because there was only one possible Jeanette, and she had sugar on her nose.

“Yes,” Hawkins said. “There is a Jeanette. She’s part of your cover.”

No. No, she wasn’t.