Breaking Loose

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Outskirts of Ciudad del Este

“Yes,” Creed answered, sitting at a table in a dingy riverside bungalow on the southern edge of Ciudad del Este-mission central for this goatfuck.

Dylan Hart threw another question at him, and again he answered.

“Yes.”

Christian Hawkins’s voice this time, but again a question, in two parts and both parts like knives in his heart.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

A third voice joined the first two, Zach Prade’s, and as they all conferred, Creed kept his gaze locked on the photographs spread out across the kitchen table-Cesar Raoul Eduardo Rivera, Creed.

The man who’d shortened Creed’s name for him twenty years ago on the streets of Denver sat opposite him, on the other side of the table, looking rode hard, and that, more than anything else, had warned Creed that he was in for one of those bad, bad times that everybody had to get through sometimes. He’d never seen Dylan look so tapped out.

Still, when he and his partner on the mission, Zach Prade, had arrived at the bungalow an hour ago with the supplies Dylan had ordered, he hadn’t expected what he was looking at on the table.

No one would have expected it, not after six years, not ever.

He took a breath and settled deeper into the ladder-back chair he’d been offered, settled deep and heavy, more to keep himself steady and in one piece than to get comfortable.

There was no comfort to be had, not in this place, not with those photographs on the table.

Shit.

Dylan, the head honcho of 738 Steele Street, the brains behind Special Defense Force, was unshaven, his hair long and pulled back in a pony band, his clothes sweat-stained and dirty. On Creed’s right, Hawkins, the heart of SDF, didn’t look any better. The other SDF operators, men and women alike, called him Superman for a reason, for a lot of reasons, but Superman looked like he’d run the length of South America to get to this hellhole in Paraguay.

“One more time,” Dylan said, and Creed cowboyed up, swallowing the hard ball of rage sticking in his throat like a forty-pound weight, ignoring the edge of fear licking at his emotions.

Carefully, his movements slow and controlled, he stacked the photographs back in order and started at the top.

“First day in camp,” he said, sliding a photograph off the stack. It showed him and a dark-haired man, J. T. Chronopolous, bound, blindfolded, and gagged, bloody and beaten, lying on the ground in the Colombian jungle, with five huts in the background and a cooking fire and open-air kitchen in the foreground.

“Where was the camp?” Dylan asked.

“Northern Colombia. We were three days out from the town of Coveñas on the coast, when we were ambushed. From there, we were four days on the trail, gaining altitude, before we reached the NRF outpost.” Six years ago, he and his teammate, J.T., had been captured and held by a group of Colombian guerrillas, the National Revolutionary Forces. He’d lived through the ordeal. J.T. had not.

“Who was your connection in Coveñas?” Hawkins asked.

“It was a CIA setup, at least the guy in charge was CIA.” This was all old news. He’d been debriefed a hundred times a hundred different ways on the mission that had cost J.T. his life, but no one had ever mentioned photographs. Whoever in the hell had taken them, Creed hoped they were long dead.

“Who else was in Coveñas?” Dylan asked.

“A security guy from Occidental Petroleum,” he said, “and four shooters and looters who were running their own game out of there.”

“Had you ever seen any of them before you and J.T. got to Coveñas?”

He shook his head. “Not before or since.” And he’d been looking. He and J.T. had been set up for that ambush, but by whom and why remained a mystery. Creed had always wanted to have a chat with those other boys who’d been at Coveñas that summer, but that whole crew seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. The last Creed had known was the four of them heading up toward the Darien Gap in the northern Choco region of Colombia, on the border with Panama. An agent named Tony Royce had been high on Dylan’s list of suspects for the ambush, but like so many of Royce’s treacherous deeds, the confirming details had never surfaced, and Royce was dead now, killed by Hawkins.

“Do you remember the drugs you were given by the NRF guerrillas?”

Creed shook his head. “Only that there were a lot of them.”

“Hallucinogenic?” Dylan asked, and Creed gave him a hard look.

“I know what I saw, Dylan.” It was branded on his soul.

“Tell me…again.”

Creed reached for the second photograph and pushed it across the table. “I saw Pablo Castano torture and beat both of us.” A close-up photo showed a man with a flattened, broken nose and a pockmarked face grinning for the camera. “For the record, for the hundredth time, I personally slit Castano’s throat in Peru, sent him straight to hell. I heard there were photos taken of the body.”

Skeeter had told him.

“Did you ever see Ruperto Conseco?”

Creed looked down at the stack of photographs and spread them out again. “This guy,” he said, choosing one of the pictures and sliding it out of the stack. “I remember him coming twice, always treated like a VIP, looking things over, giving… orders.” A dull pain came to life in his gut.

Kid, J.T.’s brother, and Hawkins and Creed had killed all the bastards in that camp, their mission sanctioned by three sovereign nations. Tracked them down over the course of a continent and a year and killed them-the guerrillas, the drug cartel boys like the Consecos, and one rogue CIA agent, Tony Royce, who had gone down in Denver in an alley, in the rain, one shot to the back of the head delivered by a steady hand-Superman’s.

Guns and drugs and thugs-all over the world, those three things were twined together tighter than the knots on a dropped noose.

Creed took another breath, keeping it slow and easy.

This was going to get worse. He could tell, and a part of him wished Dylan would just get to his point-and a part of him prayed Dylan would never get to the point.

“What else did you see?” the boss asked.

With only the slightest hesitation, Creed reached for the pile of photographs and cut to the chase. The bottom picture was the one he needed, and he dragged it out from under all the others and pushed it squarely into the center of the table.

It was horrifying.

Unbearable.

But he bore it, the way he’d borne the deed while it had been happening, bearing witness.

“He’s dead, Dylan.” He shouldn’t have had to say it, and in no small way, he hated Dylan for making him voice the horror aloud. “He’s dead. He died on that cross, in the fucking jungle, crucified for reasons I’ll never understand.”

He lived with brutality. He was more than capable of his own brutality-but watching the NRF crucify J.T. and cut him open had damn near broken his brain.

Or maybe there was no “damn near” about it. He knew, no matter how he kept going, that he’d never been the same, that as J.T. had left his life and his blood and his screams on that cross in the jungle, Creed had left part of himself, the best part, in the blood and mud at J.T.’s feet. He knew his screams had echoed along with J.T.’s, and that they’d made no difference. None. He had not been able to save John Thomas Chronopolous.

Yes, he’d been drugged, and sick, and beaten, and tortured, but he knew J.T. was dead. He knew what he’d seen, what he’d witnessed.

“There are doubts,” Dylan said.

No, there weren’t.

He cut his gaze to Dylan’s and held it hard.

He could take the boss. He knew it. Dylan knew it, too, and Creed wasn’t shy about letting it show in his eyes.

“There’s a compound upriver, Costa del Rey” Dylan said, his voice strong and calm, his words clipped, delivering information in a steady stream-holding Creed to a line he couldn’t afford to cross, ever. “It’s isolated, at the end of a nearly impassable track, formidably protected. Seven months ago, the CIA got a team up there who sent back photographs. They haven’t been heard from since.”

Half a dozen heartbeats passed during Dylan’s news flash-but Creed hadn’t moved, not so much as a muscle.

He was looking at the boss, but he could see the folder lying under Dylan’s right hand. The seals on the folder had been broken, telling him the boss had seen the contents, probably Hawkins, too.

“I’m not going to tell you what’s in here,” Dylan said, sliding the folder across the table. “But I want you to tell me what you see.”

Easy enough.

He didn’t hesitate to reach for the folder, to take control of it, he didn’t dare. It looked like a viper coming toward him across the table, sliding, coiling, ready, and bottom line, he wasn’t going to be beaten by a goddamn folder full of photographs.

Dylan removed his hand, and Creed flipped to the first picture.

It was enough.

Just the one.

He knew what Dylan wanted, what the boss expected, what the job took, and he gave it to him-endurance. Second by second, moment by moment, he gave the photograph his undivided attention, scanning it from top to bottom, cataloguing the face, and with the utmost deliberation he kept his hands loose, his left palm resting lightly on the folder’s cover, his right resting equally lightly on his thigh.

There was no one in this room to blame for what he was seeing.

There was no one to fight.

There was no motherfucking explanation for the photograph on the table, a photograph taken seven months ago.

“Grant tagged us for an assassination six months ago,” Dylan said. “This man is our target, a rogue CIA agent they think is holed up at Costa del Rey Hawkins and I believe the same thing. We’ve been on this guy’s trail for six months, and he’s finally come home to roost. His name is Conroy Farrel.”

No, it wasn’t, and Dylan knew it as well as Creed did.

Nobody was named Conroy Farrel.

The name and the identity had been one of J.T.’s covers, and this man looked exactly like him-except J.T was dead.

Goddamn CIA. What the fuck had they done?