Crazy Wild (28 page)

C
HAPTER

30

A
S SOON AS DYLAN
had called to tell him Skeeter was okay, Creed had grabbed Cody and they'd run. He was only going to get one shot at getting her out of town, and this was it.

The library. Son of a bitch. He'd practically been sitting on a map to the warhead the whole time he'd been watching her up in Reference. Except the map wasn't shelved in the new library. She'd hidden it in the old section, in storage—which was perfect, because at this time of night, it would have taken a court order or a very theatrical, highly gadgetized B&E, breaking and entering, to get into the new library.

Getting into the old library was going to be a breeze. The lock he'd broken on the side door to get them out? He could guarantee nobody had fixed it in the last few hours. It would probably be days before they even knew they had a security breach.

They parked Angelina in the garage across the street, right next to Cody's Saturn.

All the cops were gone from Broadway and 13th, so they simply crossed the street and walked straight into the building. It amazed him a little, that she'd left the book sitting in plain sight in a public place, and that virtually anyone could have walked in and walked out with it.

Flashlight in hand, she led the way through the stacks on the main floor, and in minutes, he was holding the fate of the free world in his hands.
Tajikistan Discontent
. It wasn't very big.

Their plan was simple. The books in storage were often old and outdated, but sometimes people needed old, outdated information, and a number of the volumes did circulate, so a librarian was always assigned to the collection.

They left the volume of poetry on that person's desk, marked for Inter-Library Loan, with Dylan's name, address, and phone number listed on the ILL sleeve.

It was almost dawn by the time they finished, and Creed just had one more stop to make before they could leave.

THEY'RE
not upstairs,” Skeeter said, striding out of the elevator into Steele Street's main office.

“Are you sure?” Dylan asked, not quite believing it. Creed couldn't have left, not and taken Dominika Starkova, or Cody Stark, or whatever the hell he wanted to call her.

He couldn't have. It was tantamount to throwing his life away.

“Dylan, I even looked under the bed, no shit, and they are gone.”

Skeeter was panicked. He could feel it rolling off of her in waves.

He was angry, and blown away.

Creed couldn't do this, not to himself, and not to the people who cared about him—and Dylan doubted very, very seriously if that included Cody Stark. She was using him, and Creed was in this bad place in his head and couldn't see it.

She must have fucked him blind.

Shit!

“Where would he go?” he asked, and by God, he expected an answer.

“He's got family in Mexico.”

“Mexico is a big place, Skeeter,” he said, tight-jawed. “Get on it.”

She slid into a chair in front of the bank of computers and had started to work, pulling up Creed's files, when the screen next to her came on, and a purple line snaked out of the lower left-hand corner across a black screen.

“Dylan, look.”

He went and stood by her side as she typed in 4167 and a map came up.

“Christ.”
He put his hand on her shoulder and felt a tremor go through her.

“I guess he had to say good-bye,” she said, her voice so soft he could hardly hear her, but he didn't need to hear her; the whole story was written on the map.

“Come on.” He gave her shoulder a squeeze and wished to hell he didn't suddenly feel so goddamned awful. “We better go get him.”

SHE
had a good memory. Not photographic, but good. Good enough to save him.

From where she was sitting inside Angelina, Cody let her hand slide away from the dashboard keyboard. She hadn't forgotten 4167, any more than he'd forgotten his friend.

He was still by the grave site.

J.T. Chronopolous. She'd read the headstone:
Semper Fidelis.
Always faithful. He'd been thirty-four years old.

God, she hadn't even known him, and she missed him. She missed him for Creed.

This was the right thing to do. She hated it, but it was the right thing to do. He'd saved her life, absolved her from her sins, and she couldn't repay him by taking away everything he loved, everything he believed in.

Before they'd left Steele Street, they had gotten the news that Reinhard and Bruno the Bull were in custody. Ernst Braun had actually been shot and killed. SDF, the team of operators he worked with out of the building on Steele Street, were amazing. They'd saved the world, and saved her.

Leavenworth was a risk, but one she was willing to take with Reinhard out of the picture. She didn't know why. Patrushev was no saint, but he also had less to prove. He'd have to go to a lot of trouble to kill her once she was in the hands of the U.S. government, utilizing time and resources that could be better spent making money, closing the next deal.

When she saw the Humvee pull to a stop up on the rise, she got out of the car and started walking back toward Creed. She wasn't going to think too much about what was happening, or about what was going to happen. She had a couple of minutes left with him, no more than that.

“Hey,” she said, sliding under his arm and going up on tiptoe to kiss his cheek.

“Hey, yourself.” He opened his coat and wrapped her inside. “Did you get warmed up?”

“Yeah.”

The cemetery was pillowed in snow, the headstones sticking up through the mounds of white, the trees stark against a sky that was quickly turning blue.

He'd pulled his hair back in a low ponytail and hadn't shaved. She ran her fingers over his jaw, feeling the stubble, and when he grinned, she touched his lips.

“I think I'm in love with you,” she said.

His grin broadened, and he tightened his hold on her, wrapping her more securely in his coat. “Good.”

OH,
cripes,” Skeeter said, looking up into the rearview mirror.

Dylan dragged his gaze away from Creed and Cody Stark where they were standing by J.T.'s grave, and glanced over his shoulder—and swore.

“They got a tracker on you, Dylan.”

“Me?”
Crap.
“How do you know they didn't get it on you?”

“Because nobody gets one on me.”

This was it, then. He looked back at Creed, who still didn't know the game was up. The woman did, though. He'd seen her walk away from Angelina. She was the one who had turned on the Chevelle's computer.

She'd given herself up, and he could only think of one reason for her to do that.

Hell
.

He and Skeeter waited for Royce to reach the Humvee, before they got out. The two “negotiators,” the man and the woman who'd been inside the warehouse, were with him.

“I see you brought your rats,” he said. It hadn't been too hard to figure out. The CIA had positioned their own people inside the whole Blond Bimbo with the Bomb operation. They'd had their own buyers in place, and probably given them an unlimited budget to make sure they were the ones who ended up with Patrushev's nuclear warhead. Assholes. That was the frickin' problem with the frickin' CIA. They never told anybody what they were doing.

“Yeah, yeah. Meet Hansel and Gretel. Hansel and Gretel, meet Dylan Hart.” There were no handshakes. “Is that her?” Royce gestured down the hill at Creed and Cody.

“Dominika Starkova,” he confirmed as another car pulled up behind Royce's, a late model sedan, pure FBI. Yet another car pulled up behind the sedan.

Yes, it was going to be a regular party here this morning, a lynching party.

A grim smile curved Royce's face. “It's been a long night, Hart, a damn long night.” He started down the hill.

Dylan grabbed him by the arm. “You better let me go with you, or you'll be dead before he realizes you're one of the good guys.”

Royce thought about it for all of five seconds. “Yeah,” he said. “Good idea.”

SHE
was crying. Creed could taste it on her lips. One minute they'd been kissing, and the next she'd started crying.

“Cody—” He lifted his mouth from hers and started to ask her why—but then he knew. He felt it, and then he heard it, the sound of a car door in the distance, the low hum of voices.

He had another fight in him, easy, but he wasn't going to do it. Not now. God damn it. It was over.

“You chose
this
?” he asked, furious and frustrated and trying not to freak out. He was holding her too tight. He could feel it, but geezus, he wished she'd done anything else. “Why? I don't know if—” He stopped, took a breath, tried to get ahold of himself. How could he explain to her that he needed her? That she wasn't optional? “We could have made it. I swear. I wouldn't have ever let them catch us.”

“I know.” She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand, and then she laughed, one short sound. “God, it was a crazy night, wasn't it?”

“Crazy.”
Fuck. It had been more than crazy, and he did
not
want it to end, not like this. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to hold her. He wanted to
escape.
“You've got to give me an hour, Cody, an hour to get the book out of the library. Don't tell them anything.”

She nodded.

He tightened his hands on her, thinking fast, thinking of what she needed to know. “They won't hurt you. Don't worry about that. Everything changed after the warehouse. They're not desperate now. They've pulled in a lot of the players. They've got you fair and square, and they'll stick to the rules.”

She nodded again.

God, she was so beautiful, and he could hear footsteps in the snow behind him, closing in. He pulled her against his chest and pressed his mouth to her cheek, and tried to think of all the thousands of things he wanted to say.

But it was too late.

“You saved me,” he whispered. “Thank you.”

And it was over.

“Creed.” It was Dylan.

He slowly turned around, letting her go.

There were half a dozen people besides Dylan and Skeeter. One man stepped forward and cuffed her. She didn't look at him, and that was for the best, but he didn't take his eyes off her, not until they put her in a car and drove off.

He waited a minute, and then he turned to Dylan. “Call Lieutenant Loretta. You've got a book at the library reserved in your name, and it needs to be picked up now.”

Both of Dylan's eyebrows rose.

“She hid the map in the library?”

“Right in the stacks.”

“Son of a bitch.”

C
HAPTER

31

L
EAVENWORTH WASN'T
such a bad place. As a matter of fact, it was about Creed's favorite place, especially the private visitor's room reserved for special prisoners and their special visitors.

It had taken him eight weeks to get his butt in here the first time, eight weeks of him and Dylan bribing every person they knew and threatening some of the people they wished they didn't know. General Grant had been a big help in the latter department. A general's threats had a way of getting people's attention, and Grant had been glad to throw his weight around. His team had saved the world from rogue nuclear destruction. His stock at the Pentagon was riding higher than a duck in the water. Nobody was saying anything about moving his office over there, but there was hope.

The secretary of defense was happy. General Grant was happy. Dylan was happy, and Creed was happy, or as happy as he could get until he could finagle his way into the extra-special visitor's room—the one with privacy and a bed.

“Conjugal,” he said. “I'm lobbying the President.”

She blushed, which he loved.

“You are not,” she said, but the way she said it sounded like she had just enough doubts to worry her.

“I know you think the job is all about domestic policy and world domination, but the President actually has quite an interest in the conjugal affairs of certain high-security detainees in federal prisons.”

He was so ridiculous, she laughed, and that had been the point. Prison wasn't easy. He didn't care how high up the ladder a person's crimes landed them.

She had shackles on her ankles.

He tried not to think about it.

“Dylan says one more month, on the outside.” He was holding her hand. That's about all he ever did, and kiss her when he thought he could handle just kissing her, but he was careful with the kisses. They weren't alone, and the way he felt about her wasn't anybody else's business. His life had been irrevocably changed on that cold January night, and it hadn't been a fluke, or some crazed adrenaline junkie sex fixation. Time had proven him out.

She didn't respond to his announcement. She never did. She was careful with her hope, but he always let her know, and he always let her know that he believed she would be released. She'd saved the world. She was one of the good guys. The laws she'd actually broken were minor in comparison to what everyone had thought she'd been doing. In time it was all going to get sorted out. Time just wasn't moving fast enough, no matter what Dylan did. But Creed believed in Dylan, too.

“I took your mom to lunch last Wednesday,” he said, saving the best for last, and then just basking in the transformation of her face. There was nothing like taking a woman's mother out to lunch to make her happy. Fortunately, for him, her mother was a really nice lady, and as an added bonus, if he held his head to one side and squeezed his eyes shut just so, she looked quite a bit like Cody. Consequently, her mother seemed to think he had vision problems. She'd asked him once if everything was okay, and he'd tried to be a little more discreet after that.

“Oh,” she said, excited. “Where did you go?”

He plunged into the story, trying to remember all the details, which was incredibly difficult. Guys ate lunch. Women expected a whole helluva lot more from the hours between noon and two, especially if they were with a friend.

Cody hadn't been with a friend in a long time, but he was learning to be her friend. She'd told him all about what had happened in Prague, how the visit to find the father she'd never known had turned into the visit to the father she'd wished she'd never known. Life was funny sometimes, difficult, and sometimes really good—like now. Two months without her, and three weeks of twice-weekly visits with a woman he was so hot for he'd had to drain the jungle pool to keep from hurting himself, and he spent their time together chatting.

It wasn't even talk, what women did. They chatted, and it was an art, and he was getting it down, this way of weaving a whole bunch of things together until it didn't even make sense anymore and neither one of them could even remember where they'd started—chatting.

She loved it, and he loved her, but he was keeping that to himself, too. She didn't need his painfully desperate declarations right now. She needed his friendship. She needed to be able to count on him showing up every Monday and Thursday at eleven o'clock without fail.

And she needed to know he and Dylan and General Grant were dealing her an unbeatable hand. She was going to be released. She had to be.

Hell, the job he and Dylan had pulled in Thailand last month should have already gotten her out. Nobody had wanted to touch that gig, with good reason. It had been wet work and politics, and nothing was more dangerous or more likely to backfire on the world stage.

When the guard cleared his throat, Creed knew his time was up. He wanted to throw himself on the floor, but he didn't.

“Hey,” he said, leaning down and giving her one brief kiss on her cheek. “I'll see you on Monday.”

“Monday,” she said, with way more hope in her eyes than he could handle.

So he got up and left, and he walked out without looking back, and he didn't swear when he heard the guard lock the door behind him.

No, he saved that for when he got in the car.