Breaking Loose

CHAPTER SIX

São Paulo, Brazil

Erich Warner read the text message on his phone, then settled back into his chair and shifted his attention to the young iguana tethered next to him. With an absentminded grace, he slowly ran his finger down the reptile’s comblike spine. They were on the wide front porch of an exquisitely restored plantation house, overlooking a cerulean ocean. A jeweled leather collar encircled the beast’s thick neck, with a linked chain running from the collar to the railing where the animal basked in the sun. It wasn’t much of a chain, not quite a meter in length, not quite enough to keep the youngster from hanging himself if he fell off the rail.

Erich liked keeping his possessions on a short leash-like the golden-skinned woman sleeping naked on a low bed at the far end of the porch. Her name was Shoko, and she, too, wore a jeweled collar. Like the iguana’s, her collar had come from Tiffany’s. Unlike the iguana’s, hers was made of platinum and encrusted with diamonds, an inch-wide band of icy clarity resting on sun-warmed skin.

She’d chosen it herself, the same way she’d chosen the tattoo gracing her left hip, a swastika radiating out of a kanji, a Japanese character for “hero.” Nazi Hero-a personal calling card his beautiful slave girl tended to leave in the most surprising places, usually cut into somebody’s flesh.

In recent memory, the tattoo and the necklace had been the only choices he’d allowed her, the Blade Queen of Bangkok, for slave she’d been born, and slave she was, forever and always his, a gift… of sorts, a twisted beauty from a twisted place, received in payment for an overdue debt from a very, very twisted little man.

He ran his finger down the length of the iguana’s spine again.

Dr. Souk had been so brilliant, except in his choice of associates, but the man hadn’t been the first or the last overindulged, slightly deranged scientist to fall prey to Hamzah Negara, an Indonesian warlord whose base of operations had been on the island of Sumba in the Sabu Sea. Souk had simply been the first and last of Erich’s overindulged, slightly deranged scientists to defect to Negara. They were both dead now, unfortunately not by Erich’s own hand.

Negara had been such a fool, allowing himself to be used by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, and for his foolishness, he’d ended up splattered across the living room of his house on Sumba, his brains blown out by a sniper’s bullet. Before all the foolishness, though, before Negara had seduced Souk away, there had been years of research and a burgeoning business in psychopharmaceuticals. There had been the lab Erich had built for the demented Dr. Souk in Bangkok. There had been deals in the millions of dollars. And there had been freaks of nature like Shoko, lab experiments gone awry-like so many of Souk’s experiments had gone awry Some days, the lab had resembled a charnel house of destroyed human and barely human beings. But the drugs had been beautiful, cutting-edge pharmaceuticals with names like XT7, XXG2, NG4, and the notorious BBE5, all of them razor sharp at the molecular level, capable of reshaping the landscape of the human brain with remarkable results-like Shoko, a woman so sleek and strong, so capable, so ruthless, so unfathomably unique. She had no heart, not in the metaphorical sense, no compassion, no empathy. No sense of mercy or justice.

She was perfect, and perfectly self-sufficient, except in one small area, and therein lay Erich’s short leash. She needed him as much as she needed air, water, and food. Without him, she would simply cease to exist, her potential demise so gruesome, she dared not cross him-ever, not in this world.

He reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew a small silver canister, then rocked it back and forth, listening to the gentle slide of the multicolored gel-caps inside. Pills for life, pills for death, pills for pain, pills for peace-he knew what she needed, and he knew when to give it to her, and always, he made her wait until she felt the need. It kept her always on edge.

Holding the canister up to the sun, he let the reflection off the shiny metal flash on the sleeping woman’s body, elusive moments of bright light touching her here and there, warming her skin an undetectable degree, undetectable to anyone except her-and slowly, she began to rouse, stretching with languid grace, her legs sliding over rose-colored sheets, the long silky fall of her raven black hair slipping across her breasts and pooling on the bed.

She never left his side, not ever.

“Have you heard from Killian?” she asked, her voice liquid and warm from sleep. It was a deception, the warmth. Pure ice ran through her veins.

And the added shade of darkness in her eyes told him she was quickly approaching the edge of her need.

“Yes,” he told her. “He’s at the gallery now, and says the news is good. We should hear something more tonight, after his meeting with Beranger.”

This new guy he’d taken on, this Dax Killian, was proving to be a real bargain compared to the other men Erich had targeted for special mission recruitment over the years. “Exceptionally skilled,” “reliable,” and “cheap” weren’t words that normally went together in Erich’s world. But Killian had been his for the small price of a woman’s life, a savvy piece of work named Esmee Alden, and for an additional bit of information Erich had been able to dangle-both of which he’d had no problem putting on the bargaining table.

Not so for Shoko. His silken-haired beauty had been forced to relinquish the American girl almost before she’d even begun to torture the brave little thing. A couple of cuts, that’s all the Blade Queen had managed before Erich had taken her toy away.

He’d made it up to his lover, much to the horror of those he’d eventually sacrificed to Shoko’s knives, but it wasn’t as though he’d precisely had another option. He’d had a use for Killian. In his business, he always had a use for men like Dax Killian, highly adaptable, superbly trained, elite former warriors from the sovereign nations of the world, and Killian had demanded the release of his partner in return for his cooperation, for being put on retainer, so to speak.

A bargain indeed, for when the day had come, when the rumors had begun to run and Erich had deployed his team of mercenaries, Killian had been the one to track down the Memphis Sphinx. Or so Erich hoped, and so he prayed. Time was running out, and failure was unacceptable. He needed the Sphinx, felt the need of it deep in his gut where fear lay in an ever-tightening knot, sapping what little joy he’d ever felt in life. He needed the Sphinx’s protection of immortality; nothing else could save him from the shadow he felt breathing death upon him at every turn.

Shadow-there was no better name for what haunted his steps, another failed experiment Dr. Souk had left behind in Bangkok when he’d defected to Negara, not a gift, but a curse, a man who had been sent to them through avenues so black, they hadn’t even known his nationality. There had been a CIA connection to that beast, too, an agent named Tony Royce. But by that point in his career, Royce had been working both sides of the fence for half a dozen governments, and least of all for his own.

Royce, too, was dead now, and again unfortunately not by Erich’s hand.

But the beast was alive, long since escaped from the Bangkok lab instead of dying as had been expected, desired, and decreed by Souk himself. The beast should have died from the last injection the good doctor had given him.

Should have died and had not. He was loose in the world and deadly, gathering strength all these years, readying for a killing strike. Fiercely predatory and on the hunt for the instrument of his destruction, which of course was Dr. Souk, first and always Dr. Souk-but the beast didn’t seem to understand that, and in every way, in every day, Erich felt the creature on his trail, sniffing close to the edges of his life, lying in wait, killing deals and allies in equal measure, reaching out and touching Erich’s existence and most assuredly determined to destroy him.

Erich wasn’t going to allow it-so he kept Shoko close. If the beast should rise up in front of him some night, or make his lunge from behind, Shoko would be there to deflect the blow, or to take it herself. It mattered not which-not to Erich. She was a tool he used to sate his needs and grant him what little sleep he dared, and when she was gone, he’d make another.

Of course, the Sphinx could change the game…perhaps.

Cocking his wrist, he sent the gel-caps sliding to the other end of the canister again.

“Come here, baby,” he said softly. “Come get your medicine.”

With all the power and ease of a superbly fit and barely tamed animal, the Asian beauty crossed the porch and knelt before him. Eyes closed, mouth open, she tilted her head back and waited.

He never failed her.

Opening the canister, he chose a red pill out of the jeweled array, each saturated hue denoting a different Souk Special.

“Wider,” he said.

When she complied, opening her mouth wider, he dropped the gel-cap onto the back of her tongue and reached down to stroke her throat until she swallowed. She never knew what he gave her, and he kept things that way, purposely, definitively.

Without moving another muscle, she slowly opened her eyes. He knew what she saw-her lord and master, matching her in elegance in every way, a long, narrow nose over a firm mouth, a shock of thick blond hair bluntly cut and casually swept to one side, blue eyes the color of a summer sky. She’d once told him that she thought he was beautiful, which he’d found so very odd. Not the opinion, but that she’d had one. She usually didn’t. What she did have, and she had it in abundance, was obedience and chemically induced youth.

She was older than him, fifty-six to his forty-two, but she looked no more than thirty, her skin smooth and flawless, her body a sleek expanse of hard muscle overlaid with soft feminine curves. She didn’t look like she could break a man’s neck, but she could-in a heartbeat.

“We should go, Warner, today. Now,” she said, still on her knees in front of him. “To Ciudad del Este. We should be there when this Killian makes his deal with the Frenchman. I don’t trust him.”

That last bit was superfluous, almost laughably so. She didn’t trust anyone, ever. Neither did he, but there was always an extra component of risk to be weighed when venturing out into the unguarded world, a component of exposure he’d become less and less inclined to entertain over the last four years, which was why he hadn’t already taken over from Killian.

“He won’t cheat me.” Not for any reason. Erich knew that much about the man. “If the Sphinx is in Paraguay, as he’s told me, then he’ll get it and bring it to me.”

Killian, unlike some of the other men he’d hired, was motivated down to his core, and not by the substantial reward Erich had posted for the finding of the statue. Far more than the money, Killian wanted the information Erich had used to coerce him into finding the Memphis Sphinx, an utterly priceless piece of intelligence Shoko had tortured out of a Pakistani general who had betrayed him.

Sleeper cells of terrorists in the heartland of America-the fears were justified, and Erich had the name of a man who nurtured and presided over such a cell. He also had the name of a town in the state of Texas where this deadly cell slept, biding its time for the call to martyrdom.

Killian was a patriot.

“He won’t cheat me,” Erich repeated, utterly convinced.

Shoko continued to hold his gaze, her eyes growing flatter and deader with each passing moment, as if he wasn’t worthy of even her lowest contempt.

He knew that look-the bitch-and it never boded well.

“What?” he asked, his voice sharp. He didn’t like her in this mood. She was quite capable of killing him, and the day she decided she could face her own death, he had no doubt that she would break him into a dozen pieces and then rip him apart into a dozen more-bare-handed and with her teeth, if it came to that.

“There’s a woman, Warner. I can smell her.”

A woman.

Erich’s own mood grew suddenly grimmer.

He didn’t claim to know how Shoko sometimes knew things, though he doubted if it was actually by scent, but he’d learned not to doubt her-and if she said there was a woman involved in the Ciudad del Este deal, then he didn’t doubt that there were all manner of unforeseen catastrophes on the horizon. Women, in and of themselves, had often been catalysts of catastrophe in his life, starting with his mother-who also, unfortunately, had not died at Erich’s hands. A woman’s mere presence, he’d learned at a young age, was often enough to skew a paradigm, which was why he didn’t keep one around-present company excluded, except Shoko was not like any other woman on the face of the earth.

“A woman?” he repeated.

“Yes, Warner. It’s not good.”

No, it wasn’t. Realistically, the odds of one woman ruining his chances at immortality were on the slim side, a possible, but not wholly probable, catastrophe.

And yet if there was a woman suddenly involved with the Sphinx, she was a new player.

Erich didn’t like new players-not at this late a date, not when the Gates of Time were destined to open Sunday night and bestow life everlasting upon the person who held the Sphinx in their hands, the refracted moonlight from its crystalline eyes washing the supplicant in immortality.

That person would be him. He was the supplicant, and after Sunday night, he would be immortal.

Let the beast strike at him then and be broken.

He looked down at Shoko where she still knelt at his feet, at the warm color of her skin, the erotic perfection of her every curve, the soft pink of her mouth-and the black, dead flatness of her eyes.

No, there was not another like her, not anywhere.

“Can you be ready to leave in an hour?” he asked. The flight from the coast of Brazil to Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, was no more than three hours.

She nodded, and he smiled. They would be in the City of the East before nightfall.