Mercenary's Woman (15 page)

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MERCENARY'S WOMAN

DIANA PALMER

113

He's not much on adventure, you see.
He's sort of sarcastic
when I mention where I went on my vacation, out in the
field in Central
America with a group of mercenaries. It
was great!"

"Cy wasn't enthusiastic, I gather?" Eb probed.

"Naw,"
Harley said heavily. "He's just a rancher. Even
if he knows Mr.
Laremos, he sure doesn't know what it's
like to really be a soldier of fortune. But we
do, don't we?" he asked the other two with a grin.

Eb and Dallas glanced at each other and
managed not
to laugh. Quite obviously, Harley
believed that Cy's in
formation about
Rodrigo was secondhand and had no idea
what Cy did before he became a
rancher.

Cy joined them,
presenting a slip of paper with a num
ber on it to Eb. "That's the last number
I have, but they'll
relay it, I'm sure."

"You still hear from Laremos?" Eb asked his friend.

"Every year, at
Christmas," Cy told him. "They've got
three kids now and the eldest is in
high school." He shook
his head. "I'm getting old."

"Not you," Eb chuckled.

"We'd better go," Dallas said, checking his watch.

"So we had."

"What about me?" Harley asked excitedly.

"We'll be in
touch, when the time comes," Eb prom
ised him, and, oddly, it sounded more like a threat.

Cy saw them off and came back to take
one last look
at the bull. "Good job, Harley," he said, approving the
treatment.
"You'll make a rancher yet."

Harley closed the bull in his stall
and latched the gate.
"How do you know Mr. Laremos, sir?" he asked
curi
ously.

"Oh, we had a
mutual acquaintance," he said without
meeting the other man's eyes. "Diego still keeps in touch

with the old group, so he knows
what's going on in the intelligence field," he added deliberately.

"I see. I
thought it was probably something like that," H
arley said absently
and went to work on the calf with s
cours in the next stall, reaching for the
pills mat were c
ommonly called "eggs" to dose it with.

Cy looked after the smug younger man
with amusement

Harley had his boss pegged as a retiring, staid rancher with

no
       
backbone
and only an outsider's familiarity with the
w
orld of covert operations. He'd think that Cy had gotten

a11
 
that information from Laremos, and, for the
present, it
s
uited Cy very well to let him think so. But if Harley had
i
n mind an adventure with Eb and the others,
he was in
f
or a real shock. In the company of
those men, he was
g
oing to be more uncomfortable than
he dreamed right
now
.
Some lessons, he told
himself, were better learned
through experience.

When they got back
to the ranch, Eb phoned the number C
y had given him. There was a long pause and
then a q
uick,
deep voice giving instructions. Eb was to leave his name and number and hang up
immediately. He did. Sec-onds later, his phone rang.

"You run that
strategy and tactics school in Texas," the deep voice said evenly.

"Yes."

"I read about it in one of the
intelligence sitreps," he r
eturned, shortening the name for situation
reports. "I th
ought you were one of those vacation mercs who sat at a
desk all week and
liked to play at war a couple of weeks a
year, until I spoke
to Laremos. He remembers you, along w
ith another Jacobsville resident named
Parks."

"Cy and I used
to work together, with Dallas Kirk and M
icah Steele," Eb replied quietly.

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115

"I don't know
them, but I know Parks. If you're looking
for someone to do black ops, I'm not available," he said
curtly, with only a trace of an accent. "I
don't do overseas
work anymore,
either. There's a fairly large price on my
head in certain Latin
American circles."

"It isn't a
foreign job. I want someone to go undercover
here in Texas and relay intelligence from a drug
cartel,"
Eb said flatly.

There was a long
pause. "I'd find someone with a terminal illness for that sort of
work," Rodrigo replied. "It's
usually fatal."

"Cy Parks told
me you'd probably jump at the chance
to do this job."

"Oh, that's rich. And what job would that be?"

"The drug lord
I want intelligence on is Manuel Lopez.
I'm trying to put him back in prison
permanently."

The intake of breath
on the other end was audible, fol
lowed by a description of Lopez that
questioned his an
cestry, his
paternity, his morals, and various other facets of his life in both Spanish and
English.

"That's the
very Lopez I'm talking about," Eb replied
dryly. "Interested?"

"In killing
him, yes. Putting him back in prison...well,
he can still run the cartel from
there."

"While he's in
there, his organization could be suc
cessfully infiltrated and destroyed from
within," Eb suggested, dangling the idea like a carrot on a string,
"In fact, the reason we're under the gun in Jacobsville right now is
because a friend of
our group is protecting the identity of
an intimate of Lopez who sold him out to the
DEA."

"Keep talking," Rodrigo said at once.

"Lopez is trying
to kill a former government agent who
coaxed one of his intimate friends to help
her get the hard
evidence to put him in prison. He's only out on a legal

technicality and he's apparently
using his temporary free
dom to dispose of her and her informant."

"What about the
so-called hard evidence?" Rodrigo
asked.

"My guess is
that it'll disappear before the retrial. If he manages to get rid of the
witnesses and destroy the evi
dence, he'll never go back to prison. In fact, he's
already
skipped bond."

"Don't tell me.
They set bail at a million dollars and
he paid it out of petty cash," came the
sarcastic reply.

"Exactly,"

There was a brief hesitation and a sigh.
"Well, in that
case, I suppose I'm
working for you."

Eb smiled. "I'll put you on the payroll."

"Fine, but you
can forget about retirement benefits if I
go undercover."

Eb chuckled softly.
"There's just one thing. We've
heard that you and Lopez had a common
interest at one
time,"
he said, putting it as delicately as he could. "Does
he know what you look like?"

There was another
pause and when the voice came back,
it was strained. "No, you can be sure of
that."

"This won't be
easy," Eb told him. "Be sure you're
willing to take the risk before you
agree."

"I'm quite sure. I'll see you
tomorrow." The line went
dead.

Eb took Sally out to
dinner that night, driving the sleek new black Jaguar S that he liked to use
when he went to
town.

"We'll go to Houston, if that suits you?" She agreed. He
looked devastating in a dinner jacket,
and she was shy and uneasy with him, after
what she'd
learned about his fiancee. In fact, she'd told herself she

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117

wasn't going to be alone with him ever again.
Yet here
she
sat. Resolve was hard when emotions were involved.
His feelings for the
woman he'd planned to marry were
unmistakable in his voice when he talked
about her, and
now that she was free, he might have a second chance. Knowing that part
of him had never gotten over his fian-
cee's defection, Sally was reluctant to risk
her heart on
him again. She kept a smiling, pleasant, but determined
distance between
them.

Eb noticed the
reticence, but didn't understand its pur
pose. He could hardly take his eyes off her
tonight. His green eyes kept returning to linger on her pretty black
cocktail dress under the long red-lined
black velvet coat
she wore with it. Her hair
was in a neat chignon at her
nape,
and she looked lovely.

"Are you sure
this is a good idea?" Sally asked him.
"I know Dallas will take care of Jess and Stevie, but it
seems risky to go out at night with Lopez and his
men
around."

"He's a vicious
devil," he replied, "but he is absolutely predictable. He'll give
Jessica until exactly midnight Saturday. He won't do one thing until the
deadline. At one
minute past midnight," he added curtly, "there will be an
assault."

Sally wrapped her arms
closer around her body. "How
do we end up with people like that in the
world?"

"We forget that
all lives are interconnected in some way, and that selfishness and greed are
not desirable traits."

"What good will
it do Lopez to kill Jessica and us?"
she asked curiously. "I know he's angry
at her, but if she's
dead, she can't tell him anything!"

"He's going to be setting an example," he said. "Of

course, he probably thinks she'll
give up the name to save
her child." He glanced at Sally. "Would
you?"

"I wouldn't have
a hard time choosing between my
child and someone who's already turned
against his own
people,"
she admitted.

"Jessica says
there are extenuating circumstances," he
told her.

She stared at her fingers. "I know.
She won't even tell
me who the person
was." She glanced at him. "She's
probably covering all her bases. If I knew who it was..."

He made a sound deep in his throat.
"You'd turn the
person over to
Lopez?"

She shifted restlessly. "I might."

"Cows might fly."

He knew her too
well. She laughed softly. "I wish there
was another way out of this, that's
all. I don't want Stevie
hurt."

"He won't
be." He reached across to clasp her cool
hand gently in hers and press it
"I'm putting together a
network. Lopez isn't going to be able to move without
being in someone's
line of sight from now on."

"I wish..." she began.

"Don't wish your life away. You have
to take the bad
with the good—that's what
life is. Good times don't make
us
strong."

She grimaced. "No. I guess they
don't." She leaned her
head
back against the headrest and drank in the smell of
the leather. "I love the way new cars smell," she said
conversationally. "And this one is just
super."

"It has a few minor modifications," he said absently.

She turned her head
toward him with a wicked grin.
"Don't
tell me—the headlights retract and become ma
chine
gun ports, the tailpipe leaves oil slicks, and the pas
senger seat is really an ejectable
projectile!"

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WOMAN

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119

He laughed. "Not quite."

"Spoilsport."

"You need to stop watching old
James Bond movies,"
he pointed out. "The world has changed since the
sixties." Her eyes studied his profile quietly. He was still hand
some well into his
thirties, and he glorified evening
clothes. She knew that she couldn't look
forward to any
thing permanent with him, but sometimes just looking at
him was almost
enough. He was devastating.

He caught that
scrutiny and glanced at her, enjoying the
shy admiration in her gray eyes. "Can
you dance?" he
asked.

"I'm not in the
class with Matt Caldwell on a dance
floor," she teased, "but I can hold
my own, I suppose.
Are we going dancing?"

"We're going to a supper club where
they have an or
chestra and a dance
floor," he said. "A sophisticated place
with a few carefully placed friends of mine."

"I should have known."

"You'll like
it," he promised. "You'll never spot them.
They blend in."

"You don't blend," she murmured dryly.

He chuckled. "If that's a compliment,
thank you," he
said.

"It was."

"You won't blend, either," he said in a low, soft tone.

She clutched her
small bag tightly in her lap, feeling the
softness right through her body. It made her
giddy to think
of being held in his arms on a dance floor. It was some
thing she'd dreamed
about in her senior year of high
school, but it had never happened. As if it
would have. She couldn't really picture Eb at a high school prom.

"You're
sure Jess and Stevie will be okay?" she asked

as he pulled off the main highway and onto a
Houston city
street.

"I'm sure.
Dallas is inside and I have a few people
outside. But I meant what I said," he added solemnly.
"Lopez won't do a thing until midnight
tomorrow."

She supposed that was
a sort of knowledge of the enemy that came from long experience in a dangerous
profession.
But she couldn't
help worrying about her family. If any
thing
happened while she was away, she'd never forgive
herself.

The club was just off
a main thoroughfare, and so discreet that it wouldn't have drawn attention to
itself. The
luxury cars in the parking lot were an intimation of what
was inside.

Inside, the sounds of music came from a
room off the
main hallway. There was a bar
and a small coffee shop,
apart from
the restaurant. Inside, an employee in a dinner jacket led them into the
restaurant, which ringed a central
dance
floor, where a small jazz ensemble played lazy blues
tunes for several couples who were dancing.

''This is really
spectacular," she told Eb when they
were seated near a small indoor waterfall with tropical
plants blooming around it.

"It is, isn't
it?" he asked, leaning back to study her
with a warm smile. "I have to
admit, it's one of my favorite haunts when I'm in Houston."

"I can see
why." She searched his eyes in a long, tense
silence.

He didn't smile. His
eyes narrowed as they locked into
hers. She could almost hear her own heart
beating, beating,
beating...!

"Why, Eb!" came a soft voice from behind Sally.