little bit, and she looked back down the street. Every sense she had was telling her she’d just seen J. T. Chronopolous, not some man named Conroy Farrel. It had been in his eyes. “Forever eyes” she’d called them, back when she’d been ridiculously infatuated with him, like she’d seen all the way to forever whenever she’d looked into them, like they’d opened onto the cosmos, a window not into his soul but out to the far, depthless reaches of the universe. What a romantic sap she’d been back then, and yet, as a woman, she would still call them compelling, intensely so, and the eyes that had held hers for that brief second of contact had been exactly the same as those she remembered from so long ago—J.T.’s.
The light changed at 20th and Wazee, and after checking both ways first, she crossed and kept heading north. She had been heading home, but she needed to get to 738 Steele Street to see Christian Hawkins.
Superman had saved her half a dozen times over the years. She owed him her life.
She sure as hell owed him the wallet she’d just lifted off the man heading south on Wazee Street.
From where he was settled into his hide on the roof of the Bruso-Campbell Building, Jack Traeger checked his watch, then looked through his binoculars one last time. Four days of recon on 738 Steele Street had finally given him what he wanted—a lock on Scout’s location.
Tenth floor. West side.
He hadn’t seen her, but he knew Morse code, and he sure as hell knew what dit-dit-dit meant, and he’d seen it flashed from the tenth floor two hours ago; then an hour ago, he’d gotten dah-dah-dah. Three dots, the letter S, the first letter in the international distress signal, SOS. The three dashes were the letter O.
Close enough.
Four days of chatter, with him switching from floor to floor with the laser mike and a laptop, and they’d only been teased with the sound of her voice a few times, each time from a different floor. She sounded good, but he wouldn’t be happy until he saw her for himself, and now he had a lock on her location—so they were going in.
The gods of war were with them.
He keyed his radio.
“Alpha Two, my money is still on the tenth floor,” he said, talking while he stowed his binoculars with the rest of his gear. Every move he made was practiced, smooth, timed. “Did you catch Cherie at the Quick Mart?”
“Roger,” Con replied. “Alpha One heading in. Give me fifteen minutes.”
“Roger.” Fifteen minutes to create utter chaos. Fifteen minutes to get inside 738 Steele Street and turn the place inside out. Fifteen minutes for Jack to get to the tenth floor and rescue Scout.
That was his job, his only job. Con had all but beaten it into him: Get Scout, and get her out.
Nothing else. No sidebar heroics, no coming back into the building for any reason. Get her and get her out of Denver, out of Colorado, out of the country. That was the mission, and Jack was all for it. If he’d been in Paraguay doing his job, instead of in Eastern Europe picking up work on the side, she wouldn’t have been captured in the first place, and he’d felt the heavy weight of that mistake ever since Con had contacted him. By then she’d already been gone for over six weeks.
He didn’t blame Con for the delay. The guy had been fighting for his life. But they’d finally gotten here, and Jack had to save her, whatever it took. God forbid, if she’d been hurt in any way, these bastards would go down in fucking flames.
She wouldn’t be glad to see him, not after the last time she’d seen him, in Key Largo. He knew that much. He wasn’t an idiot. The Florida situation had been a disaster, but she was smart enough to put their personal situation aside to get the job done—he hoped.
Personal situation—cripes. It was never supposed to have gotten to a “personal situation” between them. God knew he’d done his best to keep their relationship strictly on the up-and-up, purely professional, no entanglements.
He should have known better. They were tangled, all right. They’d been tangled from the minute he’d first laid eyes on her four years ago in Rangoon, a gorgeous mulatto girl, with Con the protector at her side. She’d been eighteen, and he’d known better—then. Now he didn’t know anything when it came to