She let her gaze drift back to the fireplace-and in the space of a heartbeat, all those somnolent instincts went screaming into action. She froze in place, her pulse skyrocketing, her attention riveted by the shadowy figure sitting in the corner of the room, a man, his shoulders broad, his countenance very still-and she knew it was him, the man who had taken her from the Posada Plaza.
“You’re awake,” he said.
Very awake. Ultra awake. Her eyes wide open. Her heart pounding.
He leaned forward into the light of the fire, his hands clasped together, his elbows resting on his knees, and for one long, endless second after another, she barely breathed. She opened her mouth to say something, but no words came out.
Confusion warred with perception and kept winning, over and over again. What she was seeing was impossible. There wasn’t any way to comprehend him, the reality of him sitting in this room with her-John Thomas Chronopolous, J.T.
He rose from the chair, and if she’d had an ounce of strength, she would have leaped from the bed and run like hell-somewhere, anywhere. But she didn’t. Her limbs felt heavy.
“Don’t worry, cariño.” He walked with all the lazy grace of the superbly fit, no wasted movements, no “visual noise.” His strides were long, easy. “You’re tired, that’s all. Sleep tonight.” He stopped by the side of the bed and smoothed his hand around the side of her neck to the back of her head. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”
She felt herself falling again, but it was sweet, a release of tension allowing her to drift back down into sleep.
Yes, sir, for a moment there at Vargas’s estate, things had been going completely Dax’s way, and the minute he’d stepped out of the library with Erich Warner, it had all gone to hell. They’d been at this “get the hell up the river” trip for-freaking-ever-and Dax was afraid he was going to start foaming at the mouth.
He felt pretty damn rabid, and Warner was starting to look like a deer in the headlights. This was his gig going down the drain. Hell, Dax didn’t even want to live forever, especially if he couldn’t save Suzi from Conroy Farrel.
Dax had been on completely FUBAR missions that had gone more smoothly than this. For starters, getting twenty armed drug runners onto a boat for an unplanned, middle-of-the-night sortie had taken an ungodly amount of time. Dax truly could have gotten his butt back into the city and down to the docks and stolen half a dozen boats and rented six more in the same amount of time-but that wouldn’t have done him a damn bit of good. He needed frickin’ Erich Warner with him, and Warner seemed to think he needed a small army to protect him.
He was going to need more than Vargas’s twenty goons if anything happened to Suzi-that’s all Dax could guarantee him.
All the time spent at Vargas’s, screwing around getting ready to go, Dax had been painfully aware that Suzi was up on the river somewhere, kidnapped and alone, and in her underwear-which was why his nerves had been sliding along a fine edge by the time they’d launched the mission in an honest-to-God gunboat with two squads’ worth of hardened criminals, no intel, the man he was taking to his death, and one psycho bitch who he swore was eyeballing him like tomorrow’s lunch.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Creed low-crawled into place next to Hawkins and Dylan in their observation post on the ridge above the house at Costa del Rey. Zach was five yards behind him, watching their backs. They’d come in at dawn and were prepared for the long haul, breaking into two-man teams and flanking the compound, clearing their avenues of approach, gathering intel, and waiting for the cover of darkness, when they could use thermal imaging to locate their objectives and get in closer to the house.
They’d come across the two dead CIA agents a hundred yards down the ridgeline in a ravine, or what was left of them. Seven months in the jungle hadn’t left much, and even three months ago, the ravine would have been running with water. If somebody had been looking for those boys, Creed wasn’t surprised they hadn’t found them.
Two dead agents, Suzi Toussi a hostage in the house below, some damn statue causing nothing but trouble, and the astral shields moving into conjunction with the meridian lines of the pre-vernal equinox high tides-the mission had gotten damned complicated. General Grant had offered up the hocus-pocus edition of their intel, and Dylan had immediately passed all of it off to Hawkins to handle.
Despite the pressure bearing down on the general, Creed knew Dylan had one objective here in the jungle this morning-Conroy Farrel. Not magic statues.
“Did you get the girl?” Dylan asked. They were all flat on their stomachs in the dirt, buried into some leaves, Hawkins bagged in behind an M40 rifle and glassing the area through the scope, with Dylan on a pair of binoculars.
Creed got out his own binoculars. He had an M4 carbine slung across his back.
“Yeah. Zach and I tranked her and hauled her down to the boat. She’s secure. Now all we need is Suzi and Farrel.” And then the real work would begin, the finding out who Farrel really was. “You get any more movement down there yet?”
“Not since the girl,” Hawkins said.
It had been a perfect snatch. Creed and Zach had been up on the other side of the compound, their hide closer in than Hawkins and Dylan’s.
Farrel’s girl had exited the house and headed down a trail for one of her perimeter checks, and they’d slipped down the trail after her.
“Have you guys come up with any new ideas on why Conroy Farrel took Suzi?” he asked.
“We’re getting played,” Hawkins said without a second’s worth of hesitation.
“What about a flash of brilliance on why these two completely unrelated operations are both coming down to the same damn place?”
“Played,” Hawkins repeated.
“Played,” he agreed. None of them had a doubt in the world, and getting on the horn with Grant this morning had only bogged them down with all that useless information about the astral meridians.
“Fuck,” Dylan said, and he said it for all of them. “We’ll get answers, guaranteed, but first we have to get Farrel.”
“Played,” Hawkins muttered again under his breath.
Dylan looked over, and his gaze landed on Creed.
“You’re bleeding. What happened out there?”
By “out there,” the boss meant out there on the trail on the other side of the compound, where he and Zach had tracked down Conroy Farrel’s girl and snatched her.
“When I grabbed her, she fought. Hard and well.” And she’d done a fair job of kicking his ass around a little bit. He’d been impressed.
“Glad you came out on top,” Dylan said, giving him a look that plainly said the day Creed couldn’t come out on top up against a twenty-something girl was the day he needed to turn in his jungle boy badge. “When Farrel goes looking for her, we’ll go in, make sure Suzi is okay, and have a nice surprise waiting for him when he comes home.”
“If Suzi’s even there,” Hawkins muttered.
Superman did not like this mission. He hadn’t liked it since Farrel had gotten away with one of his girls-if Conroy Farrel really had gotten to Suzi. One old man’s word wasn’t much to go on, but other than one cryptic call from her in the middle of the night, a phone call during which she hadn’t said a word, they hadn’t heard from the divine Ms. Toussi-and she sure as hell hadn’t been answering any of their calls.
“Okay, we’ve got her,” Hawkins said, sounding relieved.
Creed checked through his binoculars and saw two people exiting a door onto the deck. A woman dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of khaki pants and a big man in BDU pants, a gray T-shirt, and a ball cap crossed the deck and entered another door. The man had been holding on to her arm, moving her along.