Loose Ends - By Tara Janzen Page 0,1

to be brought down.

Geezus. The depth of the betrayal was numbing.

Randolph Lancaster had been a friend.

Enhancement and experimental use—he knew exactly what the words meant. On the computer screen, on an Atlas Exports invoice dated three years ago, he’d seen his own coded SOF ID number typed across the top of a page.

Sometimes, at night, the bite of the needle would come to him again, waking him with a scream lodged in his throat, his body drenched in sweat. More pain than what he’d been subjected to was literally beyond his imagination. Yet he knew J.T. had suffered much more, torture beyond bearing, transformation beyond reversal. J.T. had been changed into someone else, something else, a half-man/half-genetically altered beast going by the name Conroy Farrel, and that creature was on the loose, out there somewhere in the world and closing in on Denver. Dylan knew it down to his bones. He’d been the one to bait the trap, and “the bait” was showing all the signs of impending escape—heightened alertness, hours spent either pacing or standing stock-still, looking out toward the windows, refusing to speak. Somehow, somewhere, even with her locked deep inside Steele Street, incarcerated on the tenth floor, Conroy Farrel had communicated with Scout Leesom. The message would have been simple: “I’m coming to get you.”

“We need to bring J.T. in first, secure him,” he said to the blonde. “Then we’ll go after Lancaster.”

“No.” She was adamant, her arms crossing over her chest, her chin firming up, her gaze meeting his with mutinous intensity. Her name was Skeeter Bang-Hart, and out of all the bad girls in the world, she was his. “We go after Lancaster now, take this party to him, give him something to worry about besides trying to kill J.T., and you, and probably the rest of us while he’s at it. He needs to go down, Dylan. He needs to go down as hard and as fast as we can make it happen, and SDF can make it happen pretty damn hard and fast.”

She wanted blood. She’d wanted it since she’d found the invoices deep-sixed in the no-access files he’d hijacked off an ultra-secure computer in Washington, D.C., but Dylan wasn’t going to let her have it, not yet.

He shook his head. “This party started eight weeks ago in Paraguay, in Conroy Farrel’s compound on the Tambo River, and it’s going to end here, at Steele Street, when we have him back. Then we’ll take Lancaster out.”

She crossed her legs, tightened her arms, and looked at him long and hard. “You lost him in Paraguay, Dylan, you and Hawkins and Creed and Zach, all four of you, even after Creed hit him with a tranquilizer dart damn near big enough to drop an elephant. The girl was a secondary target at best, and if he doesn’t want her back, we’ve got nothing.”

Count on Skeeter to lay the failure of their last mission on the line, but she was wrong about the girl.

“He wants her.” Guaranteed. “You saw her. She’s not worried. She hasn’t been worried from the beginning. Angry, yes, but not scared. She knows he’s coming for her, and she doesn’t think we have a chance in hell of stopping him. That he might fail hasn’t crossed her mind, and four days ago, she started actively looking for him, actively preparing for her escape. He’s here now, Skeet, and I need you here, too, you and Gillian. This isn’t the time to be splitting the team up. We need everybody on board, everybody in place. How’s Cherie doing with the changes on the security system?” Cherie Hacker, a world-class computer nerd and electronic security expert for Steele Street, had been fine-tuning the building ever since they’d brought Scout Leesom to Denver.

J.T. was going to be thinking about how to get inside, and Dylan had decided to make damn sure he could, almost at will. When he hadn’t shown up in the first four weeks after the botched mission in Paraguay, Dylan had decided to loosen the security here and there and tighten it in other places, hoping to lure him into making his move. In effect, Dylan had left half the building unlocked. There was risk in the plan, but if he’d thought it would bring J.T. in, he’d have laid a trail of bread crumbs from Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, straight to Steele Street’s front door.

“She’s got all the outside doors wired into one set of controls, including most of the garage