Crazy Love Read Online Free Page B

stair and swear.
    Christ.
He released a weary sigh and let his head drop down on the desk.
    The boss had it bad, but no worse than Baby Bang.
    A year ago, he would have murdered Dylan in his sleep if he’d messed around with Skeeter. But a lot had changed in the last twelve months—most of all Skeeter. She wasn’t the same girl she’d been. She was stronger, inside and out. Sometimes he looked at her and wasn’t sure what he’d created, or if he’d had a damn thing to do with her transformation.
    Oh, he took full credit for her four-inch groups with a .45 at twenty-five yards. And her deadly roundhouse kick—that was all his. She could break a guy’s balls without breaking a sweat, because he’d taught her how. But there was no way on earth to teach someone how to beat Kid Chaos on the draw. That was pure mad instinct. He’d never seen anybody beat Kid on the draw, not and double-tap a guy who was shooting back.
    Skeeter had done it with split-second timing, two shots to the chest on her first mission. She’d been just as effective in Afghanistan.
    He hadn’t been lying when he’d said she was too good not to be utilized. She was an instant advantage on the playing field, an instant leveler when the odds were against them, and she needed to be at Dylan’s back when he went up against Whitfield’s security. If Grant wanted the Godwin file bad enough to sic SDF on a U.S. senator, it had to be something worth protecting. The mission wouldn’t be a walk in the park. They never were, no matter how simple they looked at the outset, and he’d be damned if he let the boss go in alone when Skeeter was ready, willing, and able. Dylan had been walking the razor’s edge these last few months, taking the kind of chances Hawkins thought they’d talked each other out of a long time ago, like the job he’d just pulled off in Jakarta. The boss had been a little short on details, but Hawkins knew Jemaah Islamiah, an Indonesian terrorist group, wasn’t to be fucked with, and he knew that over the course of his last mission, Dylan had single-handedly gang-banged every cell of Jemaah tangos from the Bay of Bengal to the Banda Sea, diverting seventeen million dollars of their high-grade heroin slush fund into a numbered Swiss bank account owned by the Indonesian government, for which favor the Indonesians had vowed eternal gratitude to the United States.
    A useful thing, seventeen million dollars’ worth of eternal gratitude—so was teamwork, damned useful, but Dylan seemed to have forgotten all about teamwork. He’d always been SDF’s lone wolf, but the boss had been working without a net all year, and it was taking a toll. He looked like hell, pure, unadulterated, rehashed, warmed-over, rode-hard-and-put-away-wet hell. Dylan was falling apart, whether he knew it or not, and Hawkins wasn’t going to let it get him hurt, not on Hawkins’s watch—and at Steele Street, every watch was his watch.
    With a couple of keystrokes, he closed the inventory program and opened a coded e-mail account. Sure enough, General Grant had sent a few files. Hawkins opened the first one and started downloading the attachments. As always, he was impressed with the general’s intel. If SDF had a secret weapon, it was their commanding officer. From what he was seeing, it looked like Grant had raided the Secret Service’s files. Detailed diagrams of the Whitfield mansion flashed on the screen, along with diagrams of the security system and Grant’s notes on the safe he’d seen in Whitfield’s office.
    Last, but not least, was a memo detailing an invitation that would be waiting for Dylan at his hotel. Senator and Mrs. Arthur Whitfield were hosting a reception for the British ambassador tomorrow night. Dylan would be going as Michael Deakins, a State Department aide assigned to the ambassador.
    White Rook.
No one else could have arranged such a perfect cover at a moment’s notice, and Hawkins didn’t have a doubt in the world that given a