Breaking Loose

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Costa del fucking Rey.

Goddamn Levi Asher, there was no Costa del Rey on any map Dax could find, and he was a pretty damn good map finder, one of the world’s best. But he’d found the Rio Tambo, and Dax was betting everything he had that Levi had told him the truth, and that Suzi was smack-dab where the Tambo flowed into the Paraná.

Because she sure as hell wasn’t here.

Geezus.

He rubbed his hand across his chest, trying to ease the tightness that had taken hold of him the instant he’d realized she was gone.

Two men, Levi Asher had said, and one of them had gotten to her in a heartbeat, five floors up. The security chain on the inside of the door had still been in place when Dax had come out of the bathroom. Nobody had gone out the front door. She’d been grabbed so fast, she’d dropped her fork and the rice on it on the balcony-and not another thing had been out of place in the whole room.

That was crazy. Who could do a snatch and grab that clean, that quick, without Dax knowing it?

A few folks, maybe, he guessed, but as soon as he’d seen the chain on the door, he’d run to the balcony, and there had been no one on the street below, not with a leggy redhead in tow.

The guy had taken her fanny pack, too, so the sonuvabitch was thorough. Hell.

He hit a key on his computer, locking it up and shutting it down. He had a couple of calls out, to guys he still knew in the trade, but so far, no one had Costa del Rey on their radar. It wasn’t a town, or a village, or even a spot in the road as far as he could tell. It was a place, a private place on the river with at least one badass knuckle dragger and one multimillion-dollar piece of stolen goods.

Geezus, he hated going in cold, but he didn’t have a choice.

He glanced up at the door. The chain was hanging broken now. The frame was busted where the Posada’s cheap dead bolt had gone through it, assisted, Dax had been told, by someone’s heavy, booted foot, un rubio, according to Marcella, a blond-haired man, un gato, according to Marceline, a cat, a very big cat who had gotten Marceline’s motor running.

The first guy in here tonight had grabbed Suzi without a trace. The second guy had been sure to leave his mark, and both those guys were on their way to Costa del Rey.

Dax hoped to hell he wasn’t too far behind.

He’d changed back into his cargo pants, T-shirt, and shoulder holster, with an open shirt over the top. The 9mm he’d carried in a holster inside the back of his slacks had been transferred along with two folding knives to the cargo pants, and he had extra magazines in the pockets.

He rechecked the loads on his sidearms and the submachine gun he’d picked up the day he’d landed in Paraguay. That was one of the perks of working for a world-class criminal-easy access to plenty of armament.

He packed five extra magazines for the subgun in a duffel with a couple of bottles of water and basic survival gear. Then he loaded his tac vest with more ammo, a flashlight, and a sheath knife.

The way this had been going down all day had proved one thing to him-this was not and never had been an art auction. This damn thing had been down and dirty from the get-go, and he had a lot of bad feelings about not knowing what in the hell was really going on here.

Suzi had been kidnapped, with him not ten feet away from her. Somebody was pulling a helluva lot of strings, and when Dax found that guy, he was going down.

He put his vest in his duffel, made sure he had plenty of cash in his pocket, a big, fat roll of it, and turned to head out the door.

And stopped dead in his tracks, staring at a woman who made his blood run cold.

Ice cold.

He’d met some bad men in his life. Killed quite a few of them. But he’d never met anyone like her.

Shoko.

“Warner wants to see you,” she said, her voice a lilting combination of accents and sibilant seduction, the complete opposite of the flat deadness of her eyes.

She was a machine. He believed it down to his own soul that she had none. She’d been made, pieced together somehow, like a Frankenstein, but the seams didn’t show.

She was standing there in front of him in a pair of lace-up boots, all golden-skinned with her long, silky black hair draped over her shoulder, her body encased in a pair of black pants and an olive green T-shirt, and it made his cold blood curdle.

She looked tactical, like she had a plan, like she was going somewhere. She had three knives he could see, and probably half a dozen he couldn’t.

“I’ll call him,” he said.

“No. He’s waiting out front. Let’s go.”

It was a voice of unmitigated command in five feet three inches of pure sadism. He hated her, and she knew it. No big deal. As far as he’d been able to tell, she hated him, too, just like she did everybody else on the planet, including Warner. Dax didn’t know what the German had on her, but it kept her in line. For all the murderous energy she expended on everyone else, she was never anything other than obsequious to Warner.

Which didn’t solve his current problem.

Paraguayan standoff in a dive-that’s what he had here, and the damnedest thing was, he knew he couldn’t take her, not unless he killed her, and that would be screwing the pooch. Old Warner wouldn’t be giving him anything if he killed the guy’s woman-and Dax was using the term “woman” lightly, very lightly.

So he was going to talk to Warner, give him a minute flat, before he headed up the Paraná to where it met the Tambo.

Zipping the duffel closed, he gave Shoko a short nod.

He closed and secured the door to his room as best he could and then followed the Blade Queen of Bangkok down the stairs and out onto the street to an armored Humvee.

Con keyed a code into the boat’s onboard computer, and the steel gate in the cliff wall swung slowly outward. The engine was in idle, and he could hear the waves lapping at the hull. The woman, Suzanna Toussi, was still out cold, stretched across a bench seat down the port side and wrapped in a light blanket to keep the wind off her.

He’d been careful not to hurt her, but he didn’t think she’d be waking up before early afternoon. He was exceedingly skilled in the pressure points of the body, and Ms. Toussi was down for the count.

Scout would take care of her once he got her inside.

When the gates finally came fully open, Con throttled up the engine and drove the boat into the cave that sat beneath the house. It didn’t take long to carry Suzanna Toussi up to a guest room, and once he was assured of her well-being, he clipped her fanny pack off from around her waist and took it with him into the living room.

Her pistol was locked and loaded, a serviceable 9mm. Her driver’s license and passport both had all the requisite authentications, but it was her phone that intrigued him.

She had only two names in her contact file, and five numbers dialed in her call log, which included both her contacts-which all said one thing to him: It wasn’t really her phone. It was a mission-specific phone, and it didn’t take him long to figure out who she was working for. He started at the bottom of her call log, and the man who answered only said one word-”Go.”

Con pressed the end key and went on to the second number on her call log. The phone was answered, but nothing was said, and then he heard a series of clicks. Sonuvabitch, the receiving phone was waiting for him to key in a code.

Sonuvabitch.

He couldn’t believe it.

She was the DIA agent. Her phone setup was pure covert ops.

And that meant Daniel Killian was his connection to Warner. The world was definitely going to hell in a handbasket when former Special Forces operators started running contraband for the likes of a scumbag like Erich Warner-but that was the world’s problem, not Con’s.

He only had one problem, and fortunately, he had a phone number for the man who could solve it-Daniel Killian.