seen her in a dress—which was just one of those things that bugged him every now and then.
They’d been cruising the area, keeping a low profile in the nondescript gray Buick, on the lookout for Karola, Walls, and Lancaster—especially Lancaster, the bearcat—and trying to contact Con. He should have checked in as soon as he was clear and away.
But he hadn’t, and the game had changed. Jack couldn’t leave Con with Lancaster and his men this close.
“The people who took me, Special Defense Force, they aren’t out to kill him,” Scout said from her side of the car.
So what?
“They didn’t want to kill him last time, and he barely survived.” Killing him with kindness, darting him with damn ketamine, like he was an animal. Jack had been curious as hell about why these assholes had done what they’d done to Con. More often than not, in their business, when the going got tough, somebody usually got killed—and the going had been as tough as it could get in Paraguay. Con’s whole house had been destroyed. Everything had been shot, the walls, the deck, the windows, the furniture, and quite a few people—everything except Con.
No, they’d darted him, and just about killed the boss that way.
After seeing the guy in the Porsche, Kid Chaos, at least now Jack knew why they’d done it, and he knew why they’d kidnapped Scout, and he was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they weren’t working with Lancaster. But now the spymaster was here, the man who’d been hunting Con for six long years with only one goal: to kill him.
“They took you, Scout,” he said, a small warm-up to the questions that had kept him stone-cold focused every day for the last two weeks. “Did they hurt you? In any way?”
It would change everything if they had, no matter whose brother was whose.
“No.” She shook her head. “They only want one thing, that’s all. They want to help him. Geez, Jack, they’ve got pictures of him as a kid, pictures of his family, of when he was in the Marines, pictures of all of them together, and a thousand stories to go with the photos. They know things about him that we’ve only been able to guess at, and they want him back. They say he’s theirs, and he is; you saw Kid.”
Yeah. Kid. There was always something about coming up against an operator his age, a young guy still kicking thirty in the back, that brought out the worst of Jack’s knuckle-dragging tendencies, of which he had plenty—but not this time. Peter “Kid Chaos” Chronopolous simply blew him away. Drop a few years on him, and the guy could be Con’s twin, except for the scars.
When Jack had seen Con for the first time, in Bangkok, he’d been a mess. Brutalized. With hundreds of stitches in him.
Everything in Bangkok had been crazy, and Jack had been a too-smart-for-his-own-good kid with more balls than brains coming off a hitch with the U.S. Army Rangers. He’d gone looking for adventure in Southeast Asia and found nothing but trouble of the worst kind.
Transportation services, courier services, protection services—after Jack cashed out of the Army, he’d set himself up to provide all three to foreign investors and businessmen working from Myanmar to Vietnam, China, and Taiwan. Things had gone great for a year, until he’d had problems with a package and been sent by a securities trader in Taipei to Bangkok to pick up a replacement.
“Tuberculosis sanitarium” was what he’d been told. Dr. Souk ran a convalescent hospital in Bangkok for people suffering from TB.
Bullshit.
“Overzealous Colombians,” Souk murmured with obvious distaste, looking down at the injured, dark-haired man on the gurney with all those hundreds of stitches in him.
Jack didn’t know what the fuck was up. He’d come for a package, not to go on rounds with some creepy doctor.
Souk adjusted Con’s IV, then ordered a team of orderlies to take him below. The South Americans had all but ruined his patient, Souk complained, but he’d done his best to save the man.
“Every time I fix him, he gets better,” Souk added, which begged the question.
“How many times have you fixed him?”
“Dozens,” the thin, sallow-faced doctor said, looking up at Jack through a pair of thick, black-rimmed glasses. His lab coat was stained. His hair was chopped short and dirty. “It’s what I do with the good men. Fix them, then fix them better, though usually only from the inside out.”