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.
“Positive identification. That’s Suzi,” Dylan said.
“And Farrel?” Hawkins asked.
“Who looks a lot like our boy,” Dylan said. “A helluva lot.”
Sonuvabitch, Creed thought, and he knew he was thinking it for all of them. No way should Suzi have ended up in the company of a man who’d killed four CIA agents, two of whom were still rotting in the jungle.
“We shouldn’t let this play out all day,” Hawkins said, looking up from his scope at Dylan. “I say we offer this guy a deal, our girl for his girl, and hit him with the tranquilizer gun while we’re talking. We get Suzi, we get this guy, and we go home.”
“Aye, aye,” Creed whispered, flat on his belly, watching everything in the compound and the house below. They were all keeping their voices down. “I’m with Superman.”
“And you’re both with me,” Dylan reminded them, unnecessarily and sounding a little snappish in the heat. “We’ll hold our-” The boss stopped talking and turned his head, listening. They all fell silent.
Dylan signaled for Creed to move out. They could all hear it, a boat coming up the river.
Suzi’s Big Day-God, if she’d kept a diary, she would have written those words at the top of the page.
Costa del Rey, that’s what he’d told her, the name of his home, King’s Coast. He’d also told her his name was Conroy Farrel, but that she should call him Con.
Conroy Farrel, for the love of God.
He pulled a chair out for her, and Suzi sat down to a beautiful meal laid out on an exquisitely crafted teakwood table. Warm croissants, sliced bananas, fresh pineapple, rich coffee with cream, petite filets mignons grilled to perfection, sliced cheeses, scrambled eggs-it briefly crossed her mind that maybe she should get kidnapped more often.
It also, more than briefly, occurred to her that the gray backpack lying on the table might hold the answer to all her problems. It was so out of place on the elegant table, and without a doubt, it was there for a reason.
She took a sip of coffee and helped herself to a wafer-thin biscuit with a tiny dollop of crème fraîche topped with some kind of tropical fruit preserves on it, all while safely ensconced in a beautifully cushioned rattan armchair, under a gently wafting, slowly whap-whap-whapping ceiling fan.
Heaven would be like this-quiet, subdued, wood floors, stone walls, teak paneling, slatted ceilings, white furniture, and big windows framing a tropical forest and a slow-moving river.
She’d woken up to the sound of birds singing, her room flooded with sunlight, and her window open onto a large wooden deck. There had been clothes laid out for her on the edge of the bed, a white T-shirt, khaki pants with a leather belt, and on the rug, a pair of flip-flops and a pair of canvas boots and cotton socks, none of it new, but all of it spotlessly clean, with the clothes pressed.
She’d awakened twice more in the night, and every time he had been sitting quietly in the corner of her room, next to the fire, an oddly comforting presence, and every time, she’d drifted back off to sleep, the day’s exhausting cares and woes lifting off of her, becoming burdens of the past, not of the present.
He had the most soothing voice, deep and calm and certain. The voice had not changed, not since she’d first met him.
There had been a girl in the night, too. A young woman, no more than mid-twenties, by Suzi’s estimation, she’d been tall and lanky with a wild mop of curling dark hair, and Conroy had called her Scout, but Suzi hadn’t seen her this morning.