Looked at her hard.
“You’ve been holding out on me.”
“A little,” she admitted.
Sonuva-gee-fricking-bitch. There was only one thing in Beranger’s damn gallery worth tagging with a radio frequency identification chip, the Memphis Sphinx, and sure as hell that was the only damn thing she was searching for in this dump-and the lucky girl just happened to have a scanner for it in her pocket?
Oh, baby, that was a huge can of worms.
“So where’s the chip?” As if he didn’t know.
“On the Sphinx.”
Yeah, she said it with a straight face.
“Excellent. Great.” He pushed on the rebar again, giving it his all, and the rusted-out lock on the gate gave in and busted apart. “So we’ll be able to find this thing in record time and get the hell back out of here, right?”
Her answer to that was an elongated pause.
“Theoretically,” she finally said.
Theoretically.
Absofuckinglutely amazing, and geezus, what a cool piece of action she really was-all this time, in possession of a freaking scanner to pick up the signal off a chip someone had adhered to or embedded in the statue.
And wasn’t that suddenly the biggest mystery in the whole damn day-who?
No art dealer, no antiquities smuggler, that was for damn sure, and he was betting no senator from Illinois either. He’d known she was lying about a few things, but the sheer scope of her subterfuge had just hit cosmic proportions.
And she’d been good at it, damn good. She made him look like an amateur. A smart guy would pay attention to a fact like that, but somehow, he knew he’d been smarter earlier in the day, before she’d shown up-and wasn’t that just the damn way of it.
He pulled a pair of lockpicks out of his shirt pocket and went to work on the main delivery door.
“Theoretically?” he repeated. “What’s the matter? Doesn’t it work?”
“I’m not sure. I got a hit when I was in here with Remy,” she said, and he heard her unzip something-and hell, yes, that was enough to get him to turn around and look.
“Do you want some light on that?” She was pulling a flashlight out of her fanny pack.
Fanny pack, not her pants. Right. He needed his head examined-and he was starting to get real impressed with her kit, what she’d brought, and what she’d not. Everything she’d pulled out had been damn useful.
“Yes.” Geezus. “A hit?” And he was filing that under the day’s nearly empty category called “Good News,” about a hundred steps down from where he’d filed “First Kiss.”
She turned the flashlight on and held the beam on the door’s lock while he slid the picks into the mechanism.
“More like half a hit,” she said. “We were in his Chapel Room, at the bottom of the stairs where you were on the second floor. I thought the scanner was malfunctioning, that it didn’t work, and then just as the cops were coming in, it signaled a GPS location.”
“GPS,” he repeated, and felt the locking mechanism release.
She nodded.
And he swore.
RFID scanners, chips, and GPS, hell, she was light-years ahead of him on this deal.
He opened the door and then just stopped for a second, waiting for the first wave of heat and stench to wash over him. It was bad, old Remy cooking in the heat for a few hours, and if Suzi didn’t lose her lunch in the place, he was going to get her a gold star or something.
“An RFID tag on a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian statue,” he said, pulling his own flashlight out. “I didn’t realize the ancient Egyptians had that kind of technology.” It wasn’t a question, but he sure as hell expected an answer.
“They were very advanced.”
No shit.
“Not that advanced, Sugar.” He slid the beam of his flashlight down the inside wall, found a light switch, and gave it a flip. Nothing happened, which racked up another el perfecto in his day. This wasn’t going to work. “Why don’t you give me the scanner and just wait outside.” Sometimes he didn’t know much about women, and sometimes he knew even less, but he knew she’d be happier if she didn’t go inside the gallery. It was dark, dangerously haphazard with broken everything all over the floor, and it reeked.
The only answer he got was a short laugh, very short.
Okay, she could have it her way-almost.
He looked over his shoulder and met her gaze.
“Remy’s dead, Suzi. The cops killed him when they busted in the gallery this afternoon, and from the smell, I’m pretty sure he’s still in here. Are you sure you’re up for this?”
“Ah, hell,” she said, closing her eyes and suddenly looking very weary.
Yeah, it had been a long day, and poor dead Remy was just one more hurdle-but it wasn’t enough to send her packing, and she should have been running the other way the minute the cops had first busted into Galeria Viejo.
“Who are you really working for, Suzi?”
He needed to know, not just for his sake, but for hers. He hadn’t seen anybody in this damn city trying to save her butt except him, but there was somebody out there somewhere who was responsible for her being in this mess, the same somebody who had tagged the Memphis Sphinx and lost it, and of all the damn things, they’d sent Suzi Toussi to Ciudad del Este to get it.
Well, that somebody needed to know that the job had gone south.
“One name,” he tried again. “Just give me a name.”
That was a question, straight out, and the girl straight-out ignored it, opening her eyes and looking at him, but not moving her lips-geezus, as cool and collected as a cube of dry ice, even in the ninety-plus heat.
So he put it another way.
“That name isn’t Skip Leonard, is it? You’re working for somebody else, aren’t you?” he asked, and sweet thing, she ignored him again.
Actually, she did more than ignore him. She shook her head, like he should know better than to ask.
“All right, sugar. Have it your way, but the deal we have is fifty-fifty.” No matter who was holding her leash.
And he was going to find out, guaranteed.
“Fifty-fifty,” she said, not sounding any more convincing than he probably did. Fifty-fifty on the finding was one thing. Fifty-fifty on the keeping was where their deal was going to get sticky.
But fine. He was going to let her have it her way for now. He just hoped to hell she was ready.
“Stay close” was all he said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Outskirts of Ciudad del Este
From where he was working out of the back of the Jeep he and Zach had rented, checking his gear, Creed heard footsteps and looked up. The boss was heading his way.
Yeah, they needed to talk.
They’d loaded the Jeep and the vehicle Dylan and Hawkins had been using for the last six months, getting ready for their morning recon on Costa del Rey, or maybe it would turn out to be a raid, or a snatch and grab.
It wasn’t going to be an assassination. He knew that damn much.
The photograph in the folder had shown a man who looked like J.T., with J.T.’s face, but just a little skewed, not quite right. The basic body build had been J.T.’s, but J.T.’s on steroids. The guy in the photo was big, over six feet and two hundred pounds of ripped muscle and raw power.
The CIA wanted an assassination, and Dylan and Hawkins had decided to go another way, and that was the kind of independent thinking that got them in trouble and, more often than not, got the job done.
Creed would have made the same decision. No way in hell could he pull a trigger on that face-not without knowing one of two things: that it wasn’t J.T., or that J.T. had turned, and the only way to figure either of those out was to talk to the guy. No one at SDF was going to take the CIA’s word for who the man was, not on a bet, especially not Creed, who would have sworn on his grandmother’s grave that J.T. had died in the Colombian jungle.
But that face…that face was almost enough to make him doubt what he’d seen-almost, but not quite.