A look passed between the men.
“We left him a business card,” Hawkins said. “He’ll know where to find us.”
Yes, he would, Suzi thought. There was only one business card in this group, and it said: DYLAN HART, UPTOWN AUTOS, WE ONLY SELL THE BEST, 738 STEELE STREET, DENVER, COLORADO.
CHAPTER FORTY
Marsh Annex, Washington, D.C.
Buck Grant was impressed as hell.
He sat back in his chair, his phone to his ear, looking at Suzi and seeing his pension grow by leaps and bounds. The girl had done him good. But somebody somewhere had a whole helluva lot of answering to do, and Buck was going to damn well find out who. The Conroy Farrel mission and the Memphis Sphinx mission should never have intersected, let alone meshed like two halves of a whole-but they had, and that meant there was a connection higher up the ladder. In Buck’s experience, the higher up the ladder things went, the more dangerous they became, which in this instance wasn’t going to slow SDF down for a second. He and Dylan were already tearing this thing apart, event by event, line by line, and they were going to find the bastards who had turned J. T. Chronopolous into Conroy Farrel, and Buck didn’t have a doubt in his mind that the search would also reveal who had stolen a top secret artifact from one of the most secure laboratories in the world.
Buck also didn’t have a doubt in his mind that it was going to cost him everything-least of all the pension Suzi had just helped become a little more secure. This thing was big, and dark, and dirty, and everybody was on Buck’s list of possible perpetrators, including the guy he was calling.
“Bill,” he said when the phone was answered, and he meant William Davies, who’d been the assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict when SDF had first been created and put under Grant’s command, William Davies who since then had been kicked so high up into the stratosphere of government that his missives and his orders came from places he most certainly wasn’t at-like the Department of Labor or the Department of Education.
“Buck,” Davies answered.
“I’ve got that item the DIA lost a few months ago, the one their buddies over at Langley asked SDF to go get back for them.”
“That statue they were screaming about?”
“That’s the one.”
There was a slight pause on the other end of the line.
“Good job, Buck. A couple more like that, and you might actually work your way back into the Pentagon.”
Buck doubted it, but it was nice to hear.
“Do you want to send somebody over to get it, or do you want my team to take it back over to DIA?”
There was no pause this time.
“I’ll take care of it. No need for you and your guys to bother. I’ll have some people there in half an hour.”
Like Buck hadn’t seen that coming.
“Good enough, Bill. The package is ready to go.” He grinned. Business as usual. Don’t rock the boat, not yet. Let the big boys have the glory-that was his motto. All Buck wanted was the truth.
He hung up the phone and looked over at the woman sitting on the other side of his desk.
“Rough go?” he asked. She was still beautiful, still wearing an outfit that dared him to look, but she’d been hurt. Her face was bruised and scratched, and he could see a couple of Band-Aids on her arms here and there.
“Not too bad,” she said. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”
Right. That’s what he had Dylan Hart for-to tell him the whole truth, and his girl had been pushed to the wall on this one. They’d all been pushed to the wall, his whole team.
“Glad to hear it.”
She was damn proud of herself. He could tell, no matter how cool she was playing it. She always held herself well, but her shoulders were just a little bit straighter, and he noticed.
“More than likely, given your success here, and that you pulled this thing off in record time, they’re going to want to use you again,” he said.
“You mean the next time they lose something?” She gave him a very skeptical look. “I would think the DIA wouldn’t go around losing things very often.”
“No,” he agreed. “They don’t. But they do spend a fair share of their time accumulating items of interest. Are you up for it, or should I tell them to go take a flying leap?”
He meant it. If she wasn’t on board, the DIA and the CIA could take their business elsewhere. It was all Grant could do to keep Bill Davies happy. SDF needed another team. He was running his operators ragged most of the time. They needed some downtime, and he was doing his damnedest to figure out how to build his unit in order to give it to them, if there was a unit by the time they finished with Conroy Farrel.
Suzi met his gaze, and he could tell she was thinking.
He liked that. She’d just come off a helluva mission, unlike anything he’d ever given her, though honest to God, he’d had no idea at the time. She needed to think, weigh the possibilities-weigh her commitment.
“Yes, sir, I’d like another go,” she said, and the conviction in her voice didn’t leave a doubt in his mind. His girl was ready for another go.
Well, he could pretty much damn well guarantee that she was going to get one.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Nepal-eight weeks later
“Hey, sugar. How do you want your tea? Hot or cold?”
“You’re hilarious,” Suzi said through chattering teeth.
They were a two days’ trek out of Pokhara, Nepal, staying in a flat-roofed stone house euphemistically described as a “hotel.” Their room had a stone floor with a fire pit in the middle and came inclusive of a set of cooking pots. Miracle of miracles, there was a bed with plenty of blankets. The view in the mornings of the sunlight hitting the Himalayas was breathtaking-literally. By dawn, the room temperature would be hovering in the hypothermia zone, until Dax got up and stoked the fire back into a blaze.
Suzi’s job at that time of day was to keep the bed warm.
She was good at her job, but this morning, the job took more than she had to give in the way of body heat.
Shivering, she watched Dax pour steaming water into two metal mugs.
“I’ll take that as a ‘hot’ request,” he said. “I think you’re getting in a rut.”
“I think I’m going to give Noble Faith two more days to get here with the Paitza of Abd Hasan, and then I’m heading back to Kathmandu and hot running water.”
The Moonrise team of the Defense Intelligence Agency had gotten a line on an ancient artifact of the Golden Horde of the Eurasian Steppes-the Paitza of Abd Hasan, a gold plate from the thirteenth century-not nearly as old as the Maned Sphinx of Sesostris III, but in certain circles considered even more powerful. The Paitza purportedly granted life everlasting and untold riches. Suzi’s job, if she had chosen to take it-which she had-was to meet with a man named Tam-cho, Noble Faith, in this godforsaken middle of nowhere, and cut a deal. Rumor had it that the Paitza had been discovered in the ruins of Shekar Dzong, the Shining Crystal Monastery in Tibet, somehow transported there over the centuries from Mongolia.
Dax carefully set her tea on a bedside table, then crawled under the covers with her with his own mug.
Grant had asked her who she wanted on backup for the mission, and she hadn’t thought twice.
“Should we go down to the dining room later and have brown bread and cheese for breakfast?” he asked.
“How about quiche and croissants with a cappuccino?”
“And for lunch, I guess we’ll go back to that little café-”
“Hovel,” she interrupted.
“Café,” he repeated, “and have-”
“Pea soup and rice.”
“Daal bhaat,” he translated.
She took a sip of her tea. With the hot liquid going inside and her hands wrapped around the mug, she was warming up, and for each degree of warmth, her mood improved two degrees.