Cutting Loose (21 page)

CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE

Saturday, 4:30
P.M
.—Paysen, New Mexico

“Come on, babe. We've got to move. We've been made.” Zach swung up off the bed, hanging up his phone and pulling Lily with him. “The cops are going to be here in about ten minutes. Let's go.”

He didn't need to say it twice. She was grabbing clothes and shucking into them, almost before her feet hit the floor.

“Ten minutes?” she said.

“Nine, now.”

She tossed him his shoulder holster from next to the sink. He caught it and returned the favor with her jeans. It was commando all the way. Nobody bothered with underwear.

“Get the gun bag,” he said, since it was closer to her. He did a quick mental check for his pistol, holster, phone, wallet, and then he was heading out the door and grabbing one of the grocery bags as he went. He hadn't brought her suitcase in with them, or his duffel.

She was right next to him, with a shirt and her jeans on, her feet in her boots, and the gun bag over her shoulder. He also noted that she had her pistol in her hand.

Good girl,
he thought, right along with
Zach, you better watch your ass.

Two minutes later, he was firing Charlotte up, and for a moment, it looked like a clean getaway. Then it went to hell.

The old guy who ran the motel came running out the back of the damn store, toting a damn shotgun.

Shit!
He jammed Charlotte into reverse and slammed on the gas.
Goddammit.
If that old fart shot his car, he was going to come back and run over him twice.
Goddammit.

Ka-boom!

That old sonuvabitch. So help him God, Zach was going to—
Ka-boom!

Dust was flying. Tires were squealing. Charlotte's engine was roaring—and that old sonuvabitch had just hit a goddamn Shelby. Right front quarter panel,
goddammit.
Zach had felt the hit as he'd spun the wheel to get around the goddamn building. He slammed on the brakes, spinning the wheel the other direction, and when Charlotte came around a hundred and eighty degrees, he slid her up into first and started power-shifting them the hell out of the goddamn Road Runner Motel.

They hit pavement in third gear.

Ka-boom!

But by then the old fart was shooting at air, and Charlotte was streaking toward the horizon at a hundred and twenty miles an hour in less than fifteen seconds.

A mile later, he slowed her down and hit the eject button on the tape deck. The Bazo computer came sliding out.

“SB303, I need a road.” They had to get off Highway 92. Any deputy who was answering the call at Paysen would be coming one way or the other down Highway 92.

“You're on it,” SB303 said.

“Ninety-two is it?” There had to be another road.

“For the next twenty miles.”

Shit.

“I'm seeing a few going here and there,” he said.

“Paved?”

“No.” It might be a shit-for-brains idea to get off on an unpaved road, but right now anything looked better than the highway.

“It's a bad idea, but it's the only idea,” she said. “I'll do what I can on this end to keep you from getting rimrocked.”

Rimrocked, corraled, ambushed—whatever, it was all bad. The old sonuvabitch at the Road Runner could tell the cops they'd gone north, and it wasn't going to take a rocket scientist to realize they'd gotten off the highway on one of these goddamn gravel roads throwing up a rooster tail of dust. All the authorities needed was one freaking helicopter, and it was all going to be over.

Getting caught by the cops in New Mexico wasn't going to look very good on his resume. As a matter of fact, it could be a career-ender. He didn't have any illusions about that. One deep-cover agent showing up on the radar was an easy sacrifice, if it helped smooth ruffled Potomac feathers.

But it wasn't really the cops he was worried about. It was the guy who'd killed Jason Schroder. He was out there, this Spencer Bayonne, and from everything SB303 had told him, Bayonne was a professional. The cops wouldn't shoot him or Lily on sight, not without provocation, which they weren't going to get. But somebody like Bayonne was a different story. If killing them was the quickest way to stop them, then he was going to go for it, or at least do his best. All Bayonne wanted was the CIA intelligence on the Russian scientist and the Iranian nuclear program, and if he'd gotten this far, he knew exactly what he was looking for, that damn piece of macramé that had been knotted into a bracelet.

He glanced over at Lily.

“Are you okay?” he asked her. She had the gun bag at her feet and a strong, two-handed grip on her pistol, finger off the trigger, straight along the slide. She was so ready—and for a second, she reminded him of Jewel.

“Yes,” she said. “But I think we lost Charlotte's right headlight.”

Yeah, he thought so, too.

“What do you want? On or off the highway?” he asked her, open to another opinion.

“Off,” she said, and he realized she probably felt like him, like a sitting duck on this strip of pavement.

Hell. His instincts were screaming at him to get off the damn highway.

So he did, taking the next left onto a dirt road that, after a hundred meters, slid off behind a low-rising bluff.

Saturday, 5:00
P.M
.—Paysen, New Mexico

There were three Sheriff's Department cars, one unmarked car, five deputies, and one old man with a shotgun standing in the parking lot of the Road Runner Motel when Spencer and Mallory cruised by at five miles an hour under the speed limit. A man in a suit was coming out of the room on the end of the motel, and there was a deputy and another guy in a suit on the other side of the highway, talking to two people who were sitting at a picnic table in the shade of a canopy hanging off the side of a trailer.

“Well, there's the motel,” Mallory said. “Where's the town? Up ahead, do you think?”

“No, Kitten. This is it, the whole kit and caboodle, Paysen, New Mexico.”

“There's no red 1968 Mustang.”

“No.” There sure wasn't.

A car crested the rise on the horizon, a silver Mercedes, coming from the other direction and heading down Highway 92 toward the motel. Spencer kept his speed even at five below the limit.

“Oh, my god,” Mallory said when the car was almost upon them. “Do you see who that is?”

Yes, he did.
Dammit
.

“Grigori Petrov.” The Chechen. Ivan Nikolevna's man.

The Mercedes passed on by, but not before Spencer felt laser-raked by the driver's gaze.

Two miles farther on, there was a blue Buick parked by the side of the road. One man was inside the car. Another was standing by the rear bumper with a cell phone, talking. The car was nondescript, but the men were anything but average. They looked like a couple of hoods in bad suits. Spencer could actually see the bulge of a shoulder holster under the jacket of the guy standing outside.

“I know that car,” Mallory said. “It was parked a block down from Lily Robbins's house this morning.”

“A blue Buick?” Spencer asked. “How do you know it was that one?”

“It has a University of Texas bumper sticker on the rear windshield and a broken antenna.”

It sure did. He was impressed.

“Texas license plate number LV-3971,” she said aloud as they passed by. “I'll send it to Rick Connelly and see what he gets.”

His girl was the best, but not even the best was going to find a red Shelby Mustang in this huge expanse of empty landscape, not without some help. And the only help Spencer could think of that had a chance in hell of spotting the car was a helicopter, which he wasn't going to be able to get his hands on. If the cops managed it, he and Mallory, and Grigori, and the Texas hoods would all keep doing what they'd been doing—following the cops and coming up empty-handed.

Dammit
.

“Remind him we still need names and addresses in Denver for the red '68s.” He was beginning to feel like he was in the middle of a pack of vultures, and there was only one piece of meat on the ground, the damn Shelby Mustang. He didn't know where all these guys were getting their information, but for the first time today, he didn't feel like he was ahead of the game.

He needed to switch that around.

Mallory had her phone out and was keying in a number. “What are we going to do here, Spencer?”

“Keep heading north.” These guys could hang around New Mexico all day and half the night, but whoever was driving that damn Shelby was getting the hell out of New Mexico and heading north, and that's exactly what Spencer was going to do.

         

Saturday, 5:00
P.M
.—Denver, Colorado

Gabriel stood in the main office of Steele Street, staring at Cherie Hacker's desk and wondering where she was for about the thousandth time. Her shoes were on the floor in front of her chair, as if she'd just slipped out of them. Her dress was a big white pile in the seat of her chair, as if she'd just slipped out of it, and her motorcycle jacket was draped over the back of the chair—exactly as if she'd just slipped out of it.

So where in the world had she slipped to?

Dylan Hart had told her to stay put after the almost disaster with the DREAGAR 454, and Gabriel couldn't imagine that she would disobey a direct order, not from Hart. But she wasn't in the break room/kitchen area, and she wasn't in any of the bedroom suites he'd discovered farther back on the seventh floor, and she wasn't in the office.

He supposed she could be down in the garages somewhere.

That's what made the most sense.

He supposed.

Or actually, he didn't. What made the most sense was her staying in the office, which he was certain was what Hart had meant. This operation they had going with Bayonne, and the encryption code, and the bounty on Gillian, not to mention the whole thing with trying to bring an agent in from New Mexico, was the type of mission where everybody needed to be ready to do their part. Going off somewhere in the building to pout was unacceptable.

And he was positive that's what she'd done. He knew girls like her. Bossy girls who acted like they knew everything, because compared to most people, they did know everything. Brilliant girls who had gone to college before they'd gone out on a date.

Brilliant, bossy girls had been the bane of his existence. He'd been trapped in countless schoolrooms, budding genius camps, and innumerable hopeless social situations with them, because they were his peers. They were the world's biggest pains in the butt, and the most fascinating creatures on earth. He had a real love/hate thing going with brilliant, bossy girls.

They were a personal weakness, but one he usually didn't have too much trouble keeping at a distance, because it was so seldom that he met one he thought was beautiful.

Cherie Hacker was beautiful.

And she should be at her desk.

But she wasn't.

         

“What's he doing out there, staring at Cherie's desk?” Dylan asked, leaning on his own desk and looking out his office door.

Skeeter tilted her head sideways to look him in the eye, and said, “I think he's got a little
thing
going for Cherie.”

Dylan fought a grin and almost kissed his wife. He had a little
thing
going for her.

“He needs to get over it and get back in here.”

Gabriel Shore was the expert in residence on Spencer Bayonne, the guy who'd killed Jason Schroder and the one who was after Zach. Dylan would like for him to concentrate on the job at hand, which was helping SDF know its enemy.

As far as what had brought Gabriel Shore to Steele Street, the bounty on his sister, well, that wasn't quite the crisis the boy thought. Dylan understood the kid's guilt, and his sense of responsibility, but if anyone could take care of herself, it was Red Dog, no matter what kind of money was on the table. That said, Dylan wasn't going to take any chances. He'd learned enough about Kendryk to be very wary of the guy. Two million dollars was nothing to Lord Weymouth, but it was more than enough to complicate Gillian's life. More than enough reason for Dylan to want to take him down—and for that, he could use a little help from Gabriel Shore.

“Dr. Shore,” he called out. “If you don't mind, I'd like to go over Kendryk's intelligence network files again.”

“Yes…uh, sir,” the guy said, and with a last look at Cherie's desk, he turned around and headed back to Dylan's office.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR

Saturday, 6:00
P.M
.—northern New Mexico

Zach had been wrong.

Paysen had not been the middle of nowhere.

This
was the middle of nowhere, wherever this was.

An hour and a half of driving along dry, rutted tracks and washed-out roads had brought them to someplace he'd never been before: lost. Twice, he and Lily had found themselves creeping down the side of a canyon on a road so narrow, he'd been afraid Charlotte was going to completely balk.

Before, he'd always been of the mind that as long as there was a road, a person was not lost.

Well, he'd been wrong about that, too. He and Lily were on a road, they'd been on half a dozen in the last hour, and he was clueless, although he did have a growing suspicion that they were going around in circles.

He couldn't confirm the circle theory, because he'd lost SB303, and that was a hardship. He'd gotten attached to the girl and spoiled rotten by her intel. The road, and he used the term loosely, kept bottoming out in dry creekbeds and arroyos and killing their reception.

Where in the hell were they, he wondered, and why couldn't they get the hell out of here?

“You must have something to say,” he said, throwing Lily a glance. She was yawning, just waking up.

No woman could possibly have nothing to say in this situation.

“We're lost,” she said after finishing her yawn. “I'm hot, and I'm tired, and I'm hungry for something besides crackers, and this place kind of reminds me of home, all the wide open space. And you never have told me why we're running our asses off and why people keep shooting at us. You haven't told me what's on or in the bracelet that's worth dying for, or who in the hell you really work for.”

Well, that was more than she'd been saying. She'd actually drifted off after the first half hour of driving, just slipped into sleep over on her side of the car, and he'd let her.

“I'm not sure we're heading north anymore,” he said, making the only appropriate comment.

“We're not,” she confirmed, and pointed straight out the windshield. “That's west.”

Smart-aleck Montana ranch girl,
he thought.

“Uh…thanks,” he said.

“So why are we getting shot at all over the place?” she asked.

“I think the better question is how do we get out of here and back to a paved road?”

To her credit, she didn't harp on the shooting, and she accepted his question at face value. She evaluated it, taking another look around at the road, and the scrub, and the dirt, and the low rolling hills that just seemed to keep rolling no matter how long he drove.

“Well, for starters,” she said, “we could stop going around in circles. We have definitely been in this exact spot before. I think just before I fell asleep.”

Finally, he'd gotten something right.
Dammit
. He should have been a Ranger. U.S. Army Rangers never got lost. Well, almost never.

“Got any ideas on how to get out of this spot?”

“Higher ground. We need to get the big picture,” she said, and pointed to the left, yawning again. “Pull over up ahead, about a hundred yards on the left, at the top of that rise.”

“I tried the higher-ground theory while you were snoring.”

“I
don't
snore.”

“Dream on, babe.”

He drove the hundred yards or so and pulled over anyway, parking them on the rise in the same place he'd parked earlier, and then the two of them got out of the car and moved to the front. They both leaned back on the hood and took in the view. If it wasn't for the bracelet hidden in the heel of his shoe, a real tradecraft touch, Zach might have been able to relax and enjoy the view a lot more, because there was something familiar about it. Maybe it was just that so much of this part of northern New Mexico looked the same—exactly the same. Quiet, and still, with not much moving besides the wind and the mirage. Heat shimmered off everything, blurring the distinction between land and sky. A lizard darted from one rock to the next, the only sign of life.

And he meant
only
. There was nothing else out there moving, not in the heat of the day. The road they were on snaked across the landscape below, intersecting with two other dirt tracks before they all meandered over the horizon or disappeared behind a bluff. He'd turned right at the first intersection the last time they'd been down there, and they'd ended up here again, after five long, hot, dusty miles. He mentally checked it off the list of choices.

“This is nice,” she said, leaning into him and taking his hand.

Nice because of her, he thought, and he was crazy—leaning back against Charlotte, looking at New Mexico, and feeling fairly content. What the hell was up with that? And what in the hell was he doing slipping his fingers between hers? Sleeping with her? There were no tactical advantages in the acts. They were personal, and he wasn't in any place to be getting personal.

He usually had better sense.

Correction: He
always
had better sense.

And yet he didn't let go of her hand.

“We're running because people are shooting at us,” he said, watching the wind kick up dust devils on the scrubby terrain. “But you already knew that.”

She turned her head and looked up at him, and he continued.

“They're shooting for one of two reasons: either to stop us, like the manager at the Road Runner, or to kill us, like the men in your house, which is just another way of stopping us.” He looked down and caught her gaze. “You already knew that, too.”

“Go on.” A small smirk of a smile touched the corner of her lips, and he was tempted to just kiss it off her.

“You know they want to stop us so they can get the bracelet, and you know why the bracelet is worth dying for.”

“I do?” A slight breeze ruffled her hair, and she reached up to tuck it back behind her ear.

He held up two fingers. “Power and money. They're what makes the world go round, and the bracelet is loaded with both.”

“And that's it? The answers to my questions?”

He nodded. “That's it.”

“What about love?” she said, her gaze holding his. “I thought love was what made the world go round.”

Yeah, love.

Love was a good question. Confusing as hell, but a good question. Love didn't make sense. He hardly knew her, but he had this damned compelling urge to find out everything he could about her. Not the dossier stuff Alex had given him, all the facts of her life. No, he wanted the good stuff. He wanted the inside stuff.

“Your mom died when you were eight,” he said. “That must have been tough.”

She gave a small shrug. “Sure it was. I still miss her sometimes. But I have an older sister who filled in pretty well, taking care of me, and I've got three older brothers, and my dad, and a place where I always belong.”

“The Cross Double R,” he said.

“Yes, and that's a lot more than some people have. Maybe even more than most people.”

She was right.

“So you're the baby of the family?”

She let out a soft laugh. “So to speak. I do have seven nieces and nephews now. But overall, I think I still own the ‘most likely to get into trouble when you least expect it' spot in the family.”

“Like running off to El Salvador?”

She shook her head. “I
planned
that trip. There was no running off.”

“There was plenty of getting into trouble.”

She couldn't deny it, and she didn't.

“Bad timing on my part,” she admitted. “I picked the week St. Joseph's self-destructed. Believe me, if I'd seen Diego Garcia coming, I would definitely have gone the other way.”

“What about Tom Bersani? You must have seen him coming.” It had been part of her file—the divorce, the marriage. It had only lasted six years, not very long in the scheme of things.

“What I saw was tall, dark, handsome, and exotic, someone from someplace besides Trace, Montana. Somebody who didn't talk about horses and cattle, and who didn't wear slant-heeled boots.”

“He's Italian.”

“Very Italian, complete with an Italian mama who thinks he can do no wrong—but how do you know about Tom? And where in the world did you find out about my mom dying when I was eight? Or do I already know the answer to those questions, too?”

He didn't say anything.

She let out a heavy sigh. “I bet one of the first things they teach you is how to answer questions without telling anybody anything they don't already know.”

He almost smiled, then leaned down and kissed her instead.

“So why the divorce?” he asked after a moment of sweet, brief contact with her mouth.

“Donna,” she said, and he gave her a quizzical glance. “Donna, and Debra, and Karen, and Tina. To my credit, I didn't know about Debra and Karen and Tina until after we'd already filed for divorce. I thought I was leaving him because of Donna, one of the secretaries at the law firm where he was an up-and-coming star. It was only after we filed that I realized it wasn't just one secretary, but the whole damn secretarial pool he was fooling around with.”

How awful.

“I've been cheated on—twice, as far as I know. It made me crazy both times.” Somehow, he'd never really blamed Jewel for leaving him. But he'd never had any confirmation that she'd been sleeping with the poet she'd ended up marrying within weeks of walking out on him. Consequently, there'd never been any confrontation.

And he'd been bad for her. In his heart, he'd been almost glad she'd gotten away. Not so with Sonja, a Swedish aid worker he'd lived with in Laos. He'd been hard in love with the blond beauty and could have killed her for screwing around on him. He'd left Laos instead.

“Have you ever been married?” Lily asked.

Finally, a question he could answer straight out.

“No.”

“Girlfriends? Besides the two who cheated?”

“A few.” He grinned. “How about you? How many hearts did you break before you married Bersani?”

“A few.”

His grin broadened. “You're a quick learner.”

“I have lots of other things I couldn't tell you.”

“Like?”

“Like Shelby Cobra Mustangs are my favorite car. I could keep that to myself.”

“Do you want to drive again?”

“Without the handcuffs?”

He at least had the decency to look sheepish. “I didn't have time to talk you into anything this morning.”

“The cell-phone bomb thing really sucked.”

“But it worked,” he said. “It got you out of the line of fire and kept you exactly where I needed you to be.”

She didn't say anything, only rolled in closer to him, bringing her body up against his, her head resting in the curve of his neck and shoulder. He felt a sigh leave her, felt her relax against him.

“I don't even know you,” she said after another long moment of silence. “And I don't really understand what we're up against, no matter how much I can figure out or guess at.”

And he'd probably already said too much.

“There are lots of things I can tell you, Lily, just not about the job. When we're out of this, maybe we can—”

“
Hola, pendejo.
” The Bazo came to life inside the Shelby. “If you're there, come in.”

That was
not
SB303, he thought. He kissed Lily on the top of the head, then quickly walked back to the driver's door and leaned down through the window. SB303 had way too much class to be calling him an asshole.

“Jefe,”
he said.
Boss.

“Where have you been?” Dylan asked.

“You tell me,” he said, hoping to hell Dylan actually could tell him where he'd been.

“We found a place for you to wait out the day, not too far from where you're at,” Dylan said, looking ridiculously pleased with himself. “It's on a route we're mapping to bring you in the back door to Denver, keep you off the interstate as much as possible. It'll take longer, but it will be safer. As long as the cops know where you are, Bayonne knows where you are, and anybody else out there.”

“Sounds good,” Zach said. “But we haven't seen anything out here, and we've been looking.” For almost two hours, he could have told him.

“This place is hard to find, which has always been the point of it, but you won't have any trouble.”

Okay, he was hooked.

“What have you got in mind?” he asked.

“An oasis,” Dylan said, a grin spreading across his face. “Sanctuary. Alazne's.”

Alazne's?

“You're kidding.” No wonder everything looked so damn familiar.

“Not at all.” Dylan let out a short laugh. “Two miles north, on the road you're on. We'll put the map up on your Bazo. You can't miss it, and Zach?”

“Yeah?”

“Stay out of trouble.”

“Sure,
jefe.
” He could stay out of trouble at Alazne's. It's what they'd all done.

         

Half an hour later, Lily was no longer anywhere close to being tired. She was enchanted, delighted, and wide awake. Rose-colored adobe walls, robin's egg blue shutters and doors, a stone courtyard with a bubbling fountain and flowers everywhere—she'd never seen a prettier place than where the people in Denver had directed them.

“You know the woman who lives here?” she asked, even though he'd already said as much. It was just that the little house and the perfect gardens were so…so female, everything so lush and delicate. Even the barn where he'd hidden the car had been sweet-smelling, full of drying flowers and herbs. It was hard to imagine a man being here, being invited in…except in one way.

“Yes.” He opened a wooden gate, and they entered the courtyard.