On the Loose by Tara Janzen Page B

The woman who had written
The Sorority Girl’s Guide
to Self-Help Sex,
the woman who had made the covers of the tabloids with headlines about shameless sorority girl sex games, owned a pair of handcuffs—and he’d let her slip through his fingers in record time.
    Yeah, about twelve hours, that’s how long she’d been in his care, a real hit-and-run hookup, and wasn’t that the way of it sometimes.
Hell.
    Honey turned a page in the book she was reading and let out a sigh, one of many she’d given in to since they’d left the Blake. Something was all pent up inside her, that much was obvious, and it was probably something he needed to know, like maybe the truth of why she’d let herself be roped into this mission, or maybe exactly how much and what kind of trouble Sister Julia had gotten herself into, and what in the world Honey thought she could do to get Julia out of it.
    One thing Smith did know: The CIA didn’t give a damn about Julia Bakkert. The station chief at the U.S. Embassy here in Panama City, William Dobbs, had made that much clear when Smith had stopped by, per General Grant’s orders, and politely asked him what the fuck was going on. Covert mission gone bad, Dobbs had told him. A plane down. Time-sensitive, classified data floating around loose in the jungle. Guerrilla faction demanding money, weapons, and some woman named Honoria York-Lytton to deliver it all in forty-eight hours or less, or they were going to pack their toys and disappear, and the next time the Agency would see their documents would be on the international black market. Luckily, the Agency had enough dirt on Ms. York-Lytton to make her a malleable asset. Dirt, Dobbs had recalled, that included an unnamed covert operator under the command of General Richard Grant.
    Yeah. Dobbs’s opening salvo had pretty much summed up everything Honey had told him.
    Regardless, the chief of station had gone on, Rydell’s involvement had come from the other end of the chain, straight from someone high up at the State Department in Washington, D.C., very high up if they were overseeing the CIA’s involvement in the retrieval of their own data. Dobbs had been told to support the mission, and he had, arranging transportation and personnel from Panama City to Ilopango, and from Ilopango to Morazán, and negotiating political expediency in San Salvador, a lot of very expensive political expediency, considering where the weapons were going. In return, Dobbs had been promised that Grant’s operator could be counted on to deal with the rebels, retrieve the diplomatic pouch, and recover a 2GB flash drive concealed in the fuselage of the downed Cessna. The Catholic nun connection was purely peripheral and should in no way compromise Rydell’s or Ms. York-Lytton’s primary objective—as a matter of fact, if any part of the mission failed, Rydell’s involvement would be traced back to the State Department, not the CIA, so their meeting was strictly off the books. Brett Jenkins should have briefed him. As a matter of fact, as far as Dobbs was concerned, Jenkins
had
briefed him, and thank you very much for stopping by.
    To his credit, Dobbs had produced current intel on the CNL, and current imagery of northern El Salvador, specifically of Morazán Province, and most specifically of the probable plane crash sites. The analysts had pinpointed two, both within a few kilometers of the CNL’s camp on the Torola River.
    The pilot couldn’t have picked a worse place to bury his Cessna.
    Next to Smith in the limo, Honey let out another barely audible sigh, and it occurred to him she might be simply flat-out scared, and if she was, he needed to know it, and if she was, sitting next to him being closemouthed and stony-faced probably wasn’t helping. Conversation might ease some of her stress, and sure, he had just the thing for openers.
    â€œI came across the
Ocean
magazine you were talking