Breaking Loose

CHAPTER TWENTY

Costa del Rey

Con loved this time of night.

Crickets chirping, tree frogs singing, and Scout’s pretty patio lights illuminating the Costa del Rey compound. The river was running dark and deep, heading toward Argentina and the Iguazú Falls. A soft wind soughed through the trees.

Leaning back against the cool stone wall of the house, looking out over the deck to the water and the jungle beyond, he took a heavy draw off his cigar. For a long time, he held the smoke deep in his lungs, longer and longer, until slowly, he began to let it out.

Softly, he opened his mouth in an O and blew smoke rings, one after the other, each more perfect than the last, and he watched as, ring by ring, the smoke settled like the loops of a necklace around the statue he held in his hand. A small fortune in gold was draped in a headdress from the Sphinx’s brow to its leonine shoulders, slivers of regal lapis lazuli decorated the frontispiece of the crown, and rock-crystal eyes caught the light of the waxing moon and reflected a glittering shimmer deep into the beast’s granite skull.

Tomorrow night the deed would be done.

He took another draw off the cigar and felt a subsiding flicker of pain in his arm.

He was running out of time. He felt it with each passing day, and he wanted Erich Warner dead. The fact would bring him a small measure of peace, and if he should triumph over the spymaster as well, he could die a happier man. It was the only doubt he had, that he could get to the man in Washington, D.C.

He held his last inhalation of smoke in his lungs-longer, and longer, and longer, seconds passing one after another. At a minute, the smoke started drifting out of his nostrils.

He certainly didn’t doubt that he would die-probably badly, considering what he’d seen in Bangkok, considering how Scout’s father, Garrett, had died.

Hopeless.

Hopeless.

Helpless.

If Con could have reached him, he’d have slid a knife up into the back of Garrett’s skull and severed his brain stem, would have given him instant death, anything rather than watch the slow, twisting devastation that had allowed Garrett Leesom to linger and suffer.

But they’d been more than a cage apart, and the man in the cage between them had been dead for days by the time Garrett’s meds had started to fail.

Fuck.

It could just as easily have been him.

Since then, Con had learned how to control his situation, but not without some failures of his own-and the failures weren’t worth the living it took to get to them. So he kept his meds close, and he kept his supplier very close, and he kept his.45 closest of all. The fools who touted “no pain, no gain” didn’t have a fucking clue what pain was all about, or how long it could last.

Long enough to make a man fear that even death wouldn’t stop it-and, baby, that was taking fear right down to the soul. What if… what if even death won’t stop it?

What then, kemo sabe? What then.

Religion, of course.

Con loved religion. It was so damned fearless, not only answering his biggest, scariest question about life but throwing it right back at him, utterly fearless. Pain, pendejo? it said. Live right, or we’ll show you pain, guaranteed everlasting pain, Promethean pain.

No matter what he sometimes thought, pain had not been invented in Bangkok by Dr. Souk.

But it could be alleviated by the pills and by the brujo in Danlí, Honduras, who hand-rolled the cigars for him. A brujo, a shaman, a witch doctor-God only knew what the man put in the things. Con didn’t, but neither did he care. The long filler was dark, almost oily, and the wrappers were faintly green, and whatever blessings Mario Sauza Orlando chanted over the cigars, they worked.

He let the rest of the smoke drift out of his mouth and took another long draw, feeling the sounds of the night wash over him.

Tobacco was a drug-his favorite.

“Con?”

He’d heard her coming, the soft tread of slippered feet on the cool tile floor.

“Scout.”

“I’ve got those names for you from Jo-Jo, the gringos staying at the Posada Plaza, and the intel you wanted on Levi Asher and Suzanna Toussi.” She was standing in the light of the doorway onto the deck, and there wasn’t a thing about her that didn’t fill him with pride. He wasn’t sure how it had happened, this love he had for her, that her welfare was so important to him, sometimes even more important than the justice he sought-and that was saying a lot.

She’d been such a lost little wild thing when he’d finally found her, living on the streets of Bangkok, seventeen years old and looking about twelve, but most definitely Garrett’s daughter, with her father’s warrior spirit running true. It was the only thing that had saved her.

Jack Traeger wasn’t good enough for her, but Con had a feeling Scout was of a different mind.

What she saw in the hellion was beyond him, except Jack was a lot like he used to be-before Bangkok.

He needed to talk to the boy, set him straight about a few things, let him know that once Scout was his, there’d be no more riding the edges of the rails. And as for all those wild oats Jack had been sowing-well, that was going to come to a screeching halt.

Or maybe not.

Con had a feeling that was the only reason Scout hadn’t given in to the boy yet, and he was all for Scout not giving in to the boy.

“Start with Levi Asher,” he said.

“A well-known dealer in the art world,” she began. “Famous, or infamous, depending on a person’s perspective, for brokering substantially profitable sales. Buyers love him because he knows where all the good stuff is and who’s willing or being forced to sell, and the collectors love him because he always has access to people with money to spend. He works mostly out of Europe and has run some major pieces through Sotheby’s, London.”

“Not our guy. Too high-profile for Warner.”

“More than that,” she said. “Asher has given three pieces of sculpture to Yad Vashem, for their grounds.”

He understood, and she was right. Even if Warner had contacted Asher about the Memphis Sphinx, anyone who donated works of art to the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, would not work for a man like Erich Warner, a man whose political views were decidedly anti-Semitic along with being anti-everything else.

So Levi Asher was off the hook.

“What about the woman?”

“Suzanna Toussi, a very wealthy American art dealer, also known for brokering major deals and for finding the rarest of antiquities for her clients, but she likes to keep her deals private and doesn’t work through the auction houses. She’s been to Eastern Europe a number of times over the last few years, most notably in and out of Bulgaria.”

A damning résumé in this game, and why in the hell that would demoralize him was beyond Con. Beautiful women could be as bad as anybody else on the planet, sometimes worse.

She was definitely still on the hook.

“And the gringos at the Posada?” One of the out-of-towners was Warner’s proxy on the deal. The German had somebody here.

“There are three,” Scout began. “George Teller, a tire salesman from Detroit. The description Jo-Jo got from the concierge-

“Wait a minute.” Concierge? There was no concierge at the Posada Plaza. “Do you mean that pimp behind the front desk?”

“He prefers the term ‘concierge.’” She gave him a look. “And he says Mr. Teller weighs in at two-fifty and about five foot eight inches.”

“Not our guy.” The asshole probably was a tire salesman, down here for the whores.

“Victor Bradley from Savannah,” she continued with the list. “He bills himself as an investment broker, and he’s connected in Ciudad del Este, doing business with Lorenzo Mamoré, trying to score a container of high-end electronics.”

“No.” Mamoré’s customers weren’t in the same league as Erich Warner. The German wouldn’t have trusted some low-end hustler to represent him at an auction for the Memphis Sphinx.

“Last, we’ve got Daniel Killian. Jo-Jo says he’s just another gringo looking for a deal and a whore, but Miller says otherwise.”

Con’s money was on Miller.

“What’s the wizard got to say?” he asked.

Scout was still backlit in the doorway, reading from her notes.

“Miller says he’s definitely the guy in the photos you took at Beranger’s. When he slapped the name Jo-Jo got from the Posada onto that picture, he came up with a former U.S. Army soldier, Special Forces, highly decorated. His last couple of tours were in Afghanistan. And Miller wants ten times the normal price for that bit of information. As you can well imagine, he says, tagging an SF guy took a Herculean effort on his part and every favor he ever had coming to him.”

“Ten times?”

“Ten,” she confirmed.

And the wizard was still a bargain.

Con nodded, glad to have the information and highly doubting that Daniel Killian was Warner’s mule. Nobody who’d bled for the flag would roll over and hustle contraband for the likes of Erich Warner, not for something as New Age hocuspocus as a magic statue. Those SF boys were grounded in the real world with a vengeance.

No, Con’s money said somebody else had sent the former Special Forces operator.

“So the DIA wants their statue back,” he said, giving in to a slight grin. They definitely would have sent somebody when they’d picked up the chatter on Beranger’s auction, and they would have definitely picked up the chatter. Hell, everybody else had, and Killian was just the kind of guy they liked-skilled and connected to the community. Nobody would have suspected someone of the spy-master’s standing and privilege of having stolen the thing. Certainly no one had yet figured out that the spymaster had been underhandedly dealing them all a stacked and marked deck for years, and in the process lining his pockets with boatloads of money and the kind of power that shook Third World countries like a paint mixer.

“Sure looks that way.” Scout knew as much about the Memphis Sphinx as he did. He’d made sure of it. She knew where it had come from, and she’d know what kind of guy the Defense Intelligence Agency would send to get it back.

Former Special Forces was perfect for the job, less easily held accountable than an active-duty soldier. The deal would be a private contract, and Con doubted if the other two gringos at the Posada were on his team. They didn’t fit the profile.

“Killian’s got good intel,” he added. “The kind of information the DIA would have. He certainly showed up at Beranger’s right on cue. If he becomes a problem, let’s do our best not to kill him.” Garrett had been SF, and there were other ways to get people out of the picture, at least for a while. “He gets a pass on this job.”

“Roger that,” Scout said.

DIA, CIA, Con didn’t give a damn who wanted what. He’d killed every assassin the spymaster had thrown at him, no matter what agency he’d culled for his hit men, and he wasn’t planning on changing his standard operating procedure anytime soon. But Killian appeared to be a different story. He was a soldier, and for his own sake, he needed to fail in his mission.

Whereas Ms. Suzanna Toussi, he’d concluded, needed to succeed, brilliantly. She needed to find the Sphinx, get her hands on it, and report back to Erich Warner, telling him exactly where it was being kept, and extend an open invitation for him to come and get it.

Con, for one, was only too glad to help her, though he doubted if she would much like his methods.

“Did Jo-Jo get a line on the woman yet?” he asked.

“No.” Scout shook her head. “But she hasn’t been listed on any flights out of here, so she’s lying low somewhere.”

“Unless she headed out on the roads.”

“Maybe,” Scout said. “But that’s the long shot, Con. Traffic on the bridge is backed up halfway to Asunción, and heading into the interior isn’t her best bet for escaping the Paraguayans. And most of all, if she’s working for Warner, she’s still got twenty hours to pull this thing off, and if she’s working for Warner, she knows better than to fail.”

Con agreed. He’d be doing the woman a favor by bringing her to Costa del Rey and putting her under house arrest, whether she appreciated the fact or not-but he needed to get her first.

He stuck the cigar between his teeth and stretched his arm all the way out, then stretched his fingers. There was no pain. Good.

He pushed off the stone wall and handed the statue to Scout.

“I’m going to go get Ms. Toussi.” If she hadn’t flown the coop, then his money said she was going to end up at the Posada Plaza sometime tonight. If not, Daniel Killian was a good place to start looking for her. She sure as hell wasn’t going to go back to the Gran Chaco.

Scout nodded, holding the gold and granite sphinx close to her chest. She was worried, he could tell, but there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to save him-tonight or any other night.

“I should go with you,” she said.

“No. I might need to cover a lot of ground. Relay any information Jo-Jo comes up with. I’m heading back to the Posada Plaza.”

“What you need is somebody to watch your back.” She stood her ground. “You’re not alone out there, and you know it.”

Yeah, they both knew it. Two guys had been on his ass for months, staying out of sight, just on the edge of his radar, moving through the shadows, moving like he moved, following him, but keeping their distance. He didn’t know who in the hell they were, but he knew they were here, in Ciudad del Este. He could almost smell them.

They hadn’t been at Beranger’s, though. They didn’t give a damn about the Memphis Sphinx. They were in Paraguay for one reason-to kill him, like the others before-and like the others, they didn’t have a clue what they were up against.

And like the others, he’d bury them in this damn country.