Tara Janzen

Breaking Loose

The fourth book in the Steele Street – Loose series, 2009

PROLOGUE

Marsh Annex, Washington, D.C. -Friday afternoon

Elegant.

The woman sitting across from General Richard “Buck” Grant in his office absolutely, positively owned the word-lock, stock, and barrel.

It was impossible for a guy to keep his eyes off her, so Buck didn’t even try. What he did do, what he always did, was try not to let his gaze drop below her chin. If she was fascinatingly beautiful from the neck up-and she was-then she was nothing but trouble with a capital “T” from the neck down.

Dangerous, dangerous territory-he let the thought cross his mind with just the slightest downward glance.

Hot damn.

She did it on purpose-a hint of cleavage, the curves of her magnificent breasts always draped in some kind of soft material, her clothing perfectly fitted to a waist he knew he could nearly span with his hands. Any further than that, he never went, not unless she was walking away from him. The last thing he could afford, under any circumstances, was to get mired in the fantasyland of Suzi Toussi’s hips. She was just too damned important, his secret weapon.

“Stargate?” she said, repeating the word he’d dropped between them like a small atom bomb. “Sure, Buck. I remember Stargate, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s experiments in remote viewing, the psychic spies, the ones trying to gather intelligence using ESP.”

She, at least, could say it with a straight face. That was the great thing about Suzi, her smooth coolness. She was always gracious, always unfazed, always somewhat imperious.

Okay-he paused and backed up to his last thought-she was always damned imperious. She knew the effect she had on men-which was the point, one of the reasons Christian Hawkins had recruited her five years ago to do a piece of contract work in Eastern Europe for Special Defense Force, SDF, Buck’s unit of black-ops shadow warriors based in Denver. She’d done good, damn good, so he’d used her again and again, until one day she’d turned the tables on him and started using him.

Smart girl like her, he should have seen it coming. No complaints, though. She was a topflight paid asset, his sleeper, and the tasking that had landed on his desk last night had been tailor-made for her. Personally, he thought the whole Stargate thing was a holy crock of crap and a criminal waste of the American people’s tax dollars and the military’s budget, but nobody had asked him.

Nobody ever asked him anything-except when it came to doing the deed. Then they asked plenty of him, and especially of his team. They asked for guts and gave no glory-and his operators wouldn’t have had it any other way.

“The DIA initiated and performed another set of experiments associated with the Stargate program,” he said. “Moonrise, as they called it, is still classified.” And in his opinion, if Stargate had been a holy crock of crap, Moonrise had been an unholy crock.

He picked a folder up off his desk and leaned forward, handing it over to her.

“Moonrise dealt with the use of… special objects to achieve the same goals,” he said, knowing that wasn’t quite as descriptive as it might have been, but finding himself stumbling over the more accurate word. To his way of thinking, the words “military” and “magic” were diametrically opposed, nonexistent on the same plane, nonsensical to the point of absurdity. “To that end, the program had an inventory of these…uh, special objects, and one of them, in particular, has gone missing.”

“Missing?”

“Disappeared,” he clarified… sort of.

“Stolen?”

“Teleported.” He cleared his throat. “Officially.”

Even the cool Ms. Toussi lifted an eyebrow at that-thank God. He’d known he could count on her.

“Are you sure you don’t want Skeeter on this?” she asked. They all knew SDF’s blond bombshell, Skeeter Bang-Hart, had more…psychological empathy, Buck liked to call it, than the other operators.

“No,” he said. “We have a line on it. Regardless of how it might have gotten there, telepathically or airfreight, two days ago the DIA intercepted some chatter that leads them to believe the object has surfaced in Paraguay.”

Both of the lovely Ms. Toussi’s perfectly arched eyebrows rose this time. “It seems a lot of things are surfacing in Paraguay lately.”

She shouldn’t know that.

“Do I have a security breach at Steele Street you need to tell me about?” Steele Street, an alley in Denver’s lower downtown, was where the SDF team was housed in a state-of-the-art, steel-reinforced old brick building, along with every techno gadget and classic American muscle car known to man.

“No.” She shook her head, sending a fall of richly auburn hair sliding over her shoulders. He shouldn’t have noticed, but he did. “Dylan had me do some legwork for him the last time I was in San Francisco. Contact some people, strictly off the books. Paraguay came up over lunch, very casual, that’s all. It’s in my report.”

Strictly off the books.

Right.

Everything Suzi did for the team was strictly off the books. It was the reason he used her. No one on either side of the Potomac knew the drop-dead-gorgeous art dealer reported to him, or in the case of her lunch dates, apparently, to his second-in-command, Dylan Hart.

Hell, he only knew the simplest, most basic, least damaging parameters of how Dylan was conducting SDF’s current top-priority mission, and that’s the way he needed to keep it. If Suzi had written a report to Dylan about some “casual” lunch in San Francisco where the word “ Paraguay ” had come up, it was the last damn thing he wanted to read. To the very best of his ability, he didn’t want to know Dylan had been going in and out of South America, and in and out of Paraguay in particular. Hawkins had been doing the same damn thing, and Buck didn’t want to know that either, and all he could hope was that one of them knew where in the hell Zach Prade was going in and out of-Buck sure as hell didn’t. And if anyone knew where Creed was, well, hell, Buck actually did want to know that. The jungle boy hadn’t shown up on SDF radar for three weeks, which was just about two weeks and six days too long in Buck’s book. Crap. What a way to be running a command. All he knew for sure was that everybody knew where in the hell he was, where in the hell he always was, next to the damn boiler room in the hell-and-gone Marsh Annex, and if anyone needed him, the codes were in place and the gloves would come off.

The CIA had certainly known where to find him, and they’d known he had guys already in place in Paraguay, which told him plenty about whose hands were in this Moonrise-and-magic cow pie. He didn’t know why they’d sicced the DIA on his ass, when his team was cleaning up one of their messes, a rogue agent the CIA had not been able to bring to heel, but he was sure they’d gotten something for the trade-and that would probably bite him in the ass, too. Both agencies would have been better off sending this mess somewhere else. Dylan and Hawkins were in too deep to break cover over a damn crystal ball or whatever the DIA thought their “teleported” knickknack was-but if Suzi could find it, his boys could snatch it, done deal, everybody happy. Of course, the whole damn request begged the question of why the Moonrise geeks didn’t just have their own psi guys “teleport” the damn thing back to their lab. Which, of course, was no question at all, not in Buck’s mind. Teleport, his ass. Somebody had plain old stolen Moonrise’s hocus-pocus doodad.

“All I want you to do is go down there and verify the rumors,” he said, getting the conversation back on track. “If it pans out, and if you can locate the item, I’ll send in a team to retrieve it.”