Breaking Loose

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Traffico jammo at the guardhouse with the main exit gate closed. Hell, Dax thought. This sucked.

Even worse, it was dangerous.

Things had been crawling along, up until about thirty seconds ago, when the gate had come down, and in less time than it took to say “sonuvabitch,” a traffic jam had been born, everyone jamming up, getting cattywampus on the road, ready to push through, practically parking on top of one another. Some people were getting out of their cars, walking, talking, starting to get in the guards’ way, slowing things down even more.

Geezus.

He and Suzi weren’t nearly far enough behind Esteban Ponce’s Range Rover, not for this kind of crap. It was eight or so cars ahead of them, bristling with antennas, unmistakable, and they had another dozen piled up behind them.

“This could get dicey.” And it wasn’t just Ponce. Something had happened to get that gate closed off, to change their protocols, and the biggest thing he could think of was the bloody corpse in room 205. Someone had found it and the cops had been called. “We need to change places-discreetly.”

She immediately undid her seat belt and started over the console, for once not arguing. He was appropriately grateful. If they needed to make an escape, he needed to be the one driving-that is, if he survived the seat exchange.

Good God. In a matter of seconds, she went from being the untouchably divine Ms. Suzanna Royale Toussi, to being Suzi, Girl on Top. And for the record, even sweaty and wrung out, she was so drop-dead gorgeous, it almost defied description. Nobody looked like her in real life, except Suzi Toussi, sleek and sophisticated, her makeup so bare it was barely there, her skin pure peaches and cream. The softness of her cheek, the sweet, elegant lines of her face, the winged arches of her eyebrows, every angle and curve on her conspiring to create beauty.

Fortunately, he was a very cool guy who was more than able to keep a level head in the proximity of female physical perfection.

Right.

“Excuse me,” she said, using his shoulder to steady herself.

“S’okay.” Geezus.

“Oh… sorry.” She kept moving over him, around him, next to him.

“Yeah, uh…” Fine, everything was fine, but her hair was brushing his cheek, and the inside of her arm was up against his neck, and…

“If you’ll-”

“Yeah, right.” She was right. He needed to slip out from under her.

He managed, somehow, to maneuver into the driver’s seat, he hoped without giving himself away-that he’d kinda stopped breathing there for a second or two to keep from inhaling her.

But he was okay now. All systems go.

Right.

And then his phone rang.

He took a look at the number, and hell, he didn’t dare not pick up.

“Yes,” he said into the receiver.

“I have a friend in Paraguay,” Erich Warner said. “A few miles from your location, and he is offering his services, to send armed men into Ciudad del Este to help secure the Sphinx, if you are having trouble meeting my expectations.”

Yeah, yeah, the guy was just full of fricking expectations, the biggest turning out to be almost impossible. One damn statue, Dax had thought four months ago when Warner had set out the bait-one damn statue in exchange for the kind of information agencies of the U.S. government spent months and years searching out.

“No, sir, that won’t be necessary.” That’s the last damn thing he needed, a private army spooking everybody into next week. “We should stick to the plan. The statue is here, in the city, and I have the deal set. When I have it in my hands, I’ll call for the transfer of funds. Do you want me to use this number?”

“When you have the Sphinx, yes.”

And that was the whole damn trick, now, wasn’t it?

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, hell,” Suzi said softly, leaning forward in her seat, her gaze fixed out the windshield.

Oh, crap.

“Who is that?” Warner asked, his voice sharp, and just the thought of the bastard knowing about Suzi made Dax’s blood run cold. “What’s her name?”

“Some girl. Hey, honey, what’s your name?” he asked, then briefly put his finger to his lips, warning her not to speak.

He waited a beat.

“She says for ten thousand guaranis I can call her Azúcar, Sugar.”

And he still wasn’t happy. Dammit. Not about her speaking, not about Warner hearing her, and for sure as hell not about what was happening up ahead. Ponce’s guys were piling out of the Range Rover, burly and armed.

“Don’t make any mistakes, Killian. I’m not in the mood.”

Finally, he and Erich Warner had something in common. Dax wasn’t in the mood for any mistakes either.

“Yes, sir.” And not for the first time, it crossed his mind that there were fifty good ways to kill the bastard-and maybe a hundred good ways to use him, if Dax could keep his hands in the cookie jar. Colonel Hanson had suggested very strongly that he should try. If Warner’s information turned out to be operable, if there was a sleeper cell in Texas with a viable plan for an act of terrorism, and if they were stopped because of what Dax was able to do in Ciudad del Este-then it was no contest. Erich Warner would live to fight another day. As a matter of fact, Colonel Hanson had strongly suggested that Dax make it so. Hanson wanted to mine the vein for as long as possible.

“I’ll expect your call soon, very soon.” It was a threat.

When the call disconnected, Dax slipped his phone back into his pocket, and all the while, he watched the action up ahead.

There was plenty-with drawn guns to add to the suspense.

“Oh, hell,” she said again, and oh, hell was right.

Ponce’s bought cop was striding up toward the guardhouse, undoubtedly to throw his weight around and get Ponce’s car through the gate, the rest of the idiots trapped at a standstill on the road be damned.

Two of the Brazilian’s goons were walking down the haphazard line of cars, gesturing and yelling, telling everyone to move, move, move. Vamos! Get out of the way. Back off. Make room for the most important and expensive Range Rover to turn around.

One way or the other, Esteban Ponce wanted out of this roadblock.

For Dax, it was a classic rock and a hard place-start doing the bumper car thing to get out of there, too, and draw a lot of unwanted attention. Or stay put and take the chance that these guys wouldn’t recognize Suzi from earlier at Beranger’s.

It took him about a tenth of a second to calculate the odds on a guy not remembering Suzi. He cranked the wheel hard and threw the Land Cruiser into reverse.

“Oh, hell,” she said again, and he didn’t doubt her for a moment.

He looked back up the line of cars, and Esteban Ponce himself was getting out with the Sphinx in his hand, looking extremely agitated and very unhappy. The driver who got out with him appeared to be trying to calm him down, but the spoiled youngest son of Arturo Ponce refused to be consoled. He was throwing a fit, a temper tantrum, and any second, he was going to break something. Dax could see it coming.

Holding the Sphinx by the top, Ponce shoved the bottom of the statue in the driver’s face, his other arm swinging wildly.

“Is there something wrong with the bottom of the statue?”

“That’s where the plaster shows through,” she said, both of them watching damn near breathlessly through the windshield. Sunlight was glinting on the fake creature’s eyes. The gold mane was catching the light. From a distance, the thing looked good.

“Then this is it,” he said.

“I think so.”

In the next moment, it was a done deal. With a final grand gesture of unprecedented, undeserved, monumental disappointment, Ponce smashed the statue to the ground.

They couldn’t see what happened to it, but the way Ponce was kicking around at the road, and still waving his arms about, and practically frothing at the mouth, Dax had a good idea that the thing had been smashed into smithereens.

“You’re sure that was a fake.”

“Absolutely positive. One hundred percent.”

“Then we’re out of here.” Whatever it took.

And it was going to take a lot.

He stepped on the gas and bumped into the car behind him, moving it about six inches. Then he cranked the wheel hard to the left and bumped into the car in front of him.

He noticed Ponce’s goons notice the Land Cruiser.

“The next time you’re coming up on a guardhouse, Sugar, or really, anytime, even just for a stoplight”-he cranked right and stepped on the gas again, bumped into the car behind him, heard all the cussing going on, and just kept gunning the motor, really moving the car behind him-”it’s a good idea to keep enough distance between you and the car in front of you that you can see their tires.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“Good girl.”

He cranked left one more time, stepped on the gas, took the Cruiser over the median, into the southbound lane, and headed back to the Gran Chaco.

“I think there’s another road out of here,” he said, remembering the maps of the city he’d downloaded and studied.

“One of the service roads on the golf course goes all the way down to the river. If you follow it long enough, it’ll empty out on Calle Palma.” Palm Street.

Okay, he was impressed.

“Ponce is going to head back to Beranger’s, same as us,” she said, turning in her seat and looking out the back windshield.

He heard it, too, the sound of sirens approaching from the north. Hell.

“We’ll never get ahead of him taking the river road,” she said. “Do you hear those sirens?”

“Yeah, and we don’t need to get ahead of him. We just need to get in place. He can have first shot at Beranger’s. If he walks out of there with anything, I’ll go after it.” He speeded up-quite a bit. “How far is this service road into the golf course?”

She looked out each side window. “About a quarter mile.”

He speeded up a helluva lot more. The best way for this to work would be to get off the road before the cops even knew they were on it.

He was hoping a hundred miles an hour for a quarter mile would do the trick.

“Do you have a visual?” he asked, somewhat surprised by the quick pickup and good handling of the Cruiser. He wasn’t an SUV kind of guy, but this thing was doing its job.

“No. We’re still clear.”

There was no median this far from the guardhouse, so when he saw the smudge of a dirt road peeking out of the heavy vegetation on the east side of the pavement, he slowed down just enough to take the turn without rolling the vehicle-which was quite a bit of slowing down.

Thirty yards in, he slowed down even more, and at the edge of the golf course, where the trees ended, he came to a stop. They would cross after the cops went by.

It didn’t take long, about half a minute, before the sirens crested and started to wane, the police passing them on their way to the Gran Chaco.

So, this was perfect. They’d escaped the cops. Ponce was very unlikely to turn around and virtually follow the police to the scene of where he and his men had committed murder. Even in Ciudad del Este, that was bound to go over very poorly. Of course, the cops would be looking for Suzi. Everyone was going to be looking for Suzi, and all of them for no good reason.

He needed to get her out of this country, and he needed to keep her with him until he could do it.

Yeah, that’s the way it was going to be from here on out, him and Suzi Q joined at the hip, until he put her on a plane, whether she liked it or not.

And yeah, he knew exactly where he was headed with the whole joined-at-the-hip plan-trouble.

Which didn’t stop him from making his play.

“We need to cut a deal, you and I, together.”

She buried her head in her arms on the dash and swore under her breath, way under, but he heard her, and he waited until he got what he wanted.

“Fifty-fifty,” the word finally came out.

“Sure. Great. I can work with that.” Not really. She was lying, but he didn’t care. He was lying, too. He didn’t need a deal with her to get what he wanted. He just somehow, in a very real macho caveman way, needed to be in charge of her for a while, until she really did leave the country.

It wasn’t about sex.

Not all of it. Really. Not even most of it.

It was more about… more about…

He let his gaze drift up the length of her to where she was draped over the dash like she didn’t have an ounce of energy or gumption left. No, it really wasn’t about sex. The sun was coming in through the windshield, dappled with the shadows of the palm fronds above them, dappling her. She had a line of sweat running down her side from under her arm, and one down the middle of her back, turning her black shirt even darker. The telltale print of her holster showed across her shoulders in another damp trail, and he could see the grip of a semiautomatic pistol where her shirt had been pushed back, a Beretta M9 to be exact, a 9mm, and yes, he recognized it just by the frame and magazine.

She actually looked kind of tough, wearing a pair of lace-up boots and tactical pants with cargo pockets, like maybe she could kick a little butt. Of course, she’d be kicking it in a silk camp shirt and butter-soft Italian leather boots, so soft the tops folded down. Her tactical pants weren’t heavy cotton twill like his, either. They looked like a linen and cotton blend, expensive, tailored to within an inch of their lives for some long-legged, curvy-hipped, small-waisted, all-girl female like Suzi Q… Sugar… Shu-gah.

Sweet.

Her hair was coming out of her Spa Monterey ball cap in kind of a tangle, but he could still see the nape of her neck-and when he did, he knew that was it. The whole caveman thing was about the nape of her neck, the sheer tenderness of that soft expanse of satiny skin, the silken strands of auburn hair curled damply across it, the delicacy of her nape, the vulnerability of it.

The way he wanted to get his mouth on it.

Yeah, that was the situation-the kiss-the-back-of-Suzi-Toussi’s-neck situation. Talk about tough.

Tough luck, because he sure as hell wasn’t going to be fulfilling that little fantasy anytime soon.

As if to prove his point, off in the distance, coming from the north, he heard the rise and fall of police sirens again.

Suzi lifted her head at the sound, her eyes meeting his across the console and the bucket seats.

“More cops?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Gang-style slaying at the Gran Chaco is going to trump a lot of street crime. It doesn’t even matter that the dead guy is Jimmy Ruiz. What matters is that he was killed in the gringa‘s room.”

Even behind her amber tinted glasses, he could see the sudden edge of panic in her gaze, and man, did he understand. In about ten minutes or less, she was going to own the top slot on the cops’ suspect list, and ending up in a Paraguayan prison was simply not on the menu-ever.

Then she went for the slam dunk. For the barest instant, as their gazes met, she did something so unexpected, so ingenuous, so purely female, that all he could think was Fuck it. She bit her lower lip, her teeth gently pressing into that plump curve of super soft, cinnamon-lipstick-slicked skin-and it was a done deal.

The whole thing was over.

Without another thought, he leaned across the Land Cruiser and took her mouth with his, his hand sliding around the back of her neck, over her soft, satiny nape, his fingers tunneling up into her hair, holding her, his tongue sliding into the warm, honeyed depths of her mouth.

And sliding again, exploring, taking her with a kiss, again and again, holding her tighter, kissing her harder, his heart starting to pound-because she let him. She more than let him. Geezus, for such a piece of work, she was so sweet, turning into him, her lips so soft, her tongue sliding over his teeth. She made a small sound deep in her throat, and he knew he was in trouble, hands down, no holds barred-and he loved it, the heated thrill of it, the chase, anticipating the hot, hot sex of discovering a woman for the first time, the excitement of taking her clothes off-the way he wanted to take Suzi’s clothes off and just get into her.

Yeah.

He slanted his mouth over hers more fully, taking more of her, taking everything he could get, all the sweet surrender and every soft sigh.

Oh, yeah.

She was so wonderfully dangerous, turning him on. Six months of nonstop fantasizing had brought him to this, their first kiss and wanting to just “do it” and keep on “doing it” in the front seat of a stolen Land Cruiser, with a dead body behind them, a dead body ahead of them, the cops getting closer, second after second, and him getting hard.

Perfect.

Oh, God, his kiss.

Suzi just gave herself up to it, to the taste and the heat of it. He was rock solid up against her, the muscles in his arms flexing around her, the gentle strength of his hand on the back of her neck, the sensual thrill of having his tongue pushing into her mouth again and again, the erotic rhythm of it melting her brain. He was insistent and tender at the same time, turning her on with every move of his lips over hers, with every thrust into her mouth, making her want to give him more.

Oh, God, she usually had more sense.

And she wasn’t fooling herself. This didn’t have anything to do with being scared half to death by Jimmy Ruiz getting massacred in her room or by the police descending on the hotel.

This was all about Killian the Konqueror, “Konk” to the guys with their boots on the ground, or sometimes K.C., to those who could spell, she guessed. Rumor had it that it was tattooed on his ass in Chinese-”Conqueror,” his nom de guerre, his war name.

God, she believed it. There was enough “boy” left in the Boy Scout to pull a stunt like that. And so help her, she wanted to find out, to get him out of his clothes and just get so damn close to him.

She slid her fingers up into his hair and kissed him like her life depended on it, slow and deep, teasing him with her tongue, breathing him in and tasting him-and it was all so impossibly good, so impossible.

“Konk”-geezus, who in the world let themselves be called Konk?

She sighed and moved against him, pressing herself against his chest. God, he was built like a slab of granite, and she loved it, and yes, she knew what kind of guy let himself be called Konk, the kind of guy who’d earned the name the hard way from the kind of guys who’d been up there on the ridge with him in Afghanistan seven years ago and innumerable times since.

She’d had to dig deep for that information, for the story of the ambush, of the overwhelming enemy forces, and of the deeds that had brought him and his guys home that long-ago night. Dax’s cousin Esmee Ramos didn’t have access to those facts, but her husband, Johnny, did, and so did the other SDF guys. They knew Dax was a legend in the wasteland, and Johnny hadn’t been shy about telling that story and all the others. Before joining SDF, Johnny had been a U.S. Army Ranger, one of the bad boys who hoped to end up with the big bad boys like Dax and the A teams.

But this kiss…this kiss was crazy and had no place to go.

No place, she told herself.

Off in the distance, but getting closer at an accelerating rate of speed, the wail of sirens cut through the air-trouble and nothing but, just like Daniel Axel Killian, and heading their way.

Somebody needed to show an ounce of sense, and considering the way his hand was sliding up her side and heading toward her breasts, she figured if there was going to be any sense in this front seat, it was going to have to come from her.

Damn.

With a monumental effort, because he tasted and felt so good, and because it had been so, so long since she’d been kissed, she broke away from him-and there they sat, still wrapped up so close, their noses touching, his breath soft on her skin, the temperature in the Land Cruiser heading for the deep freeze with the air conditioner going full blast, and her still absolutely melting inside.

“Hey,” he said, his voice rough.

Yeah, that was about all she had left, too.

“Hey.” She needed her head examined, and they were still so damn close, one of his hands still in her hair, rubbing the back of her neck, the other no more than an inch away from her breast, their foreheads still touching.

Behind them, the second flank of police cars screamed by, their sirens descending in the other direction.

“We need to…”

“Yeah.” The quicker the better, and still she didn’t move away from him.

Who the hell was he to affect her this way? Some guy who’d walked into the Toussi Gallery one night and looked too good to be true. Some guy who’d smiled at her and with one unabashed, come-on curve of his mouth had told her that he knew all about her, everything-and for a moment, she’d believed that he had.

But he didn’t. No one did, except for Buck, and probably Hawkins, maybe Dylan, her family, and the few people who had been involved. An accident, it had been termed, and rightly so, a violent accident covered up by the money and power of one of Australia’s most prominent families, the records sealed, the rumors squelched, the story barely heard. The Weymouth clan was synonymous with the Northern Territory, be it cattle stations, gold, or uranium, and by their choice, a life had been nearly wiped off the slate of the world, nearly forgotten.

Nearly, but not quite.

Suzi would never forget. She couldn’t, no matter how many years passed.

She pulled away from him and was so disappointed by the effort it took. She was usually smarter. He was an unnecessary complication, the competition, the guy to beat, not the guy to be kissing.

“That was a mistake,” she said. Unacceptable. Dangerous territory.

“Yeah.”

“We have a job to do.” She had unfinished business, and she couldn’t afford to fail, not in the work she did for Buck, and never again in the work she did in Eastern Europe. She wasn’t trying to save the world, or even every poor woman who fell into prostitution-but the younger girls, the ones who were trafficked from the U.S. to the Balkans, the Czech Republic, and the one she’d found in Ukraine, in Odessa on the Black Sea-with the SDF crew’s help, and Buck Grant’s documents, she’d returned six of those girls, almost seven.

It was the “almost” that kept her going. The “almost” she hadn’t forgiven herself for. The last thing she’d needed was another black mark on her soul, but there it was now, and like the first one, it had a sweet name-Lily Anne Thompson, but at least she could voice that name. The other one, the one she felt with every breath, that one she couldn’t speak.

Hell, sometimes she wondered if she was going to live long enough to make up for her failings and wash away her sins.

“Which one next, Warner?”

Inside the luxury cabin of his Learjet, flying high over the western edge of southern Brazil, Erich Warner closed his SAT phone and returned to watching his mistress roll half a dozen pretty pills around a small silver bowl-blue, red, green, orange, yellow, purple, all gelcaps, bright and shiny.

She was fascinated by her pills, as well she should be. He’d only let her go a minute too long without medication half a dozen times. Each time had been a punishment, a lesson taught. Each time had been a lesson learned.

Sometimes he wondered if he would ever let her go longer. Two minutes, possibly. The pain, he knew, was excruciating. He’d spent enough time in Dr. Souk’s lab to have seen human suffering on a truly epic scale-not in quantity, but epic in the quality and the depthless wonder of the suffering.

Pain had been Dr. Souk’s stock in trade. No mere torturer, he’d been a medical genius, a chemist, and Shoko was one of his finer creations. Erich knew why she cut people to ribbons, literally, with her knives. She was sick. Her mind twisted by the pain of her countless near deaths and rebirths in Souk’s laboratory.

Poor, bitter little thing. He’d been known to give her prizes as well as punishments, and today, he’d decided, would be a prize day. Maybe his generosity would bring him luck. His faith in Killian was being tested.

Tonight, the man had said. He’d have the Memphis Sphinx tonight.

If he didn’t, Dallas, Texas, was in for a very bloody Monday morning the first week in April. Heroin made for predictable bedfellows, drug lords and warlords, and nobody had more heroin to transport than a man who was both, Akram Jamal in southern Paktika, Afghanistan. For the favor of piggybacking one of the Afghan’s loads into Marseilles in one of Erich’s cargo ships, and for facilitating the land transportation of a shipment of surface-to-air missiles, SAMs, across Tajikistan, Jamal had given him the name of a restless Saudi deep in the heart of Texas.

Erich had more power and money than half the countries he did business in, and yet neither power nor money was enough to save him from Souk’s shadow beast. The creature had an uncanny ability to reach into Erich’s business and make his presence known. Two of Jamal’s lieutenants had been killed during the transport of the surface-to-air missiles, and the missiles had arrived in Jamal’s warehouse irreparably disabled. Erich hadn’t supplied the missiles. He’d only transported them-and yet it was clear to him that the shadow beast had been involved. He left things for Erich, marks. There had been a mark on one of the SAM crates-XT7, Dr. Souk’s code for a particularly effective drug he’d created. It was the only mark Erich had needed to know the beast had been involved. Always it was like this, the silent, evasive threat of him. The creature lurking around Erich’s deals, breathing on them, ruining them, then disappearing for months.

He was alive, he knew too much, and Erich had not been able to stop him in any way. The situation was untenable, and the solution was the Sphinx. With the shield of immortality upon him, he could track the beast down and kill him-or bring him to heel.

The thought was a recurring one and never failed to make his blood race, to control that much power, to chain the beast to him the way he’d chained Shoko.

“The woman, Warner,” Shoko said, looking up at him from where she sat at his feet, gently rolling her pills around and around in the silver bowl, the iguana resting along her hip and thigh. “I heard her on the phone, while you were talking with Killian.”

“What about her?” As if he didn’t know.

“I want her, Warner. I told you there was a woman, and I want her for my own. No interference.”

“So be it,” he said, granting the unknown “Sugar” a death unlike anything she ever could have imagined.

Shoko smiled, and that truly was a lovely sight.

“Purple, my dear,” he said, and she all but purred, taking the purple pill out of the bowl and putting it in her pocket for later, when she needed it.

For the next few hours, she was free of him, free to roam as she willed, and he had no doubt that when they landed, some poor sap in Ciudad del Este would pay for her freedom with his life.