Spy Hard

Jase wasn’t sure who made the last small move that brought them together.

Melanie’s soft lips tasted like sweet papaya. An odd, exhilarating feeling hit him like a lightning bolt out of nowhere and sent his head spinning. He wanted to sink into her sweetness, to take her up—here and now—on everything she was reluctantly offering.

Jase pressed closer and licked the corner of her lips. Melanie gave a soft, startled sigh, but didn’t move back. If anything, she leaned toward him. Hot need plowed through him like a freight train.

In the back of his mind he was aware of the open door. He knew if someone walked by, it would mean instant execution. They’d drag him outside and shoot him like a dog. He was a dog, for taking advantage of her like this.

Yet with Melanie’s lips on his, the guilt and the risk didn’t seem so grave, and certainly seemed worth it…

DANA MARTON is the author of more than a dozen fast-paced, action-adventure Intrigue novels and a winner of a Daphne du Maurier Award of Excellence. She loves writing books of international intrigue, filled with dangerous plots that try her tough-as-nails heroes and the special women they fall in love with. Her books have been published in seven languages in eleven countries around the world. When not writing or reading, she loves to browse antiques shops and enjoys working in her sizable flower garden, where she searches for “bad” bugs with the skills of a superspy and vanquishes them with the agility of a commando soldier. Every day in her garden is a thriller. To find more information on her books, please visit www.danamarton.com. She loves to hear from her readers and can be reached via e-mail at DanaMarton@DanaMarton.com.

Spy Hard

Dana Marton

www.millsandboon.co.uk

This book is dedicated to Cindy Whitesel

and Amy Ignatz, friends I’ve been lucky enough

to reconnect with lately.

With my sincere thanks to Allison Lyons.

Chapter One

Lazy drops drummed a unique rhythm on the emerald leaves. Not rain—not yet, just the humid air weeping in the South American rain forest. Ripened fruit dropped from the mango trees, one nearly hitting a capuchin monkey. The animal jumped aside with a shriek, which sent a flock of parrots flying from the canopy, red-blue wings flapping. The soft and harsh noises blended into perfect harmony, pulsing with life—the morning song of the jungle.

A few hundred yards to the east, boots splashed in the shallow water of the ravine. Guns clinked against the water canteens on the men’s hips. The intruders must not have heard the jungle’s music, because they didn’t even try to fit in, creating disharmony.

Mochi perched halfway up the kapok tree, his feet dangling a hundred feet above the jungle floor. He’d sneaked out of the village at dawn to spy on the new batch of baby monkeys, hoping to spot one without a mother, an orphan he could take home. Since a jaguar had stolen his pet dog in the spring, the mud hut where he lived with his three mothers seemed empty.

But the monkeys dashed off the moment those boots came too close for comfort. Slow minutes passed before the six men came into view, then stopped to rest right below Mochi. He stayed to see what they were about, even if his mothers would be awake by now and looking for him. When he got home, nothing would save him from a good beating. He bristled at that. Nobody seemed to appreciate that he was now the man of the family.

An accident at the diamond mine up north had killed his father three months ago, the same week that his oldest brother had been shot by the drug lord who controlled their village. His three middle brothers had been taken more recently by a curse from an angry jungle spirit one of them had stepped on accidentally. A potion from the witch doctor could have helped, but the witch doctor had been on his annual pilgrimage. So the spirit-curse disease spread through the family, nearly taking Mochi, too. The witch doctor had come back in time to save him, but he’d been too late for the others.

He was still weak and now hungry. A line of lemon ants marched up the trunk not far from him. Not much, but enough to take the taste of hunger out of his mouth. He stood on the wet branch to reach them, balancing on bare feet.

He would never have slipped if a small part of the jungle spirit’s curse wasn’t still wedged somewhere inside him, making his legs unsteady. He grabbed the branch, his feet scrambling in the air for only a second before they found purchase. He barely made any noise at all. But one of the intruders below looked up, right at him.

A dark smile spread on the man’s face.

He weighed the mango in his hand, then threw it hard. The missile hit Mochi square in the middle of his chest, and the boy lost his perilous perch in the tree.

A KID WAS the dead-last thing Jase Campbell needed in the middle of this particular undercover op. He swore under his breath as he watched the boy drop. The soft leaf carpet and the kid’s age, meaning flexibility, saved him from any broken bones, as proven by his quick recovery and dash into the trees.

Most of the men were too tired or too lazy to do anything about it. Mercenaries of the biggest crime lord in the area, they were returning to camp after a weeklong trek through the jungle, tired and sweaty. They just wanted to sit for a second and grab a bite to eat.

“¡Alto!” But Alejandro, having gotten the kid out of the tree, took off after him.

Which left Jase no choice but to follow. Not that he knew what he could do without blowing his cover.

He watched where he stepped as he ran. Even a small scratch from a broken shaft of bamboo could cause a fatal infection out here; the bite of a poisonous snake would mean near-instant death. He didn’t have to look up to know which way Alejandro went. The idiot made enough noise for a deaf man to follow—first with his feet, then with his wheezing. He’d had way too much palm wine the night before.

“I got it.” Jase passed him when the man slowed to catch his breath.

There had to be a village around somewhere, one that wasn’t on their itinerary. The kid couldn’t have been more than six years old, wouldn’t wander into the woods on his own farther than a couple of miles. The boy ran a lot quieter than Alejandro, his tan skin and drab loincloth blending into his surroundings. Only the screeching birds above betrayed the direction he took.

“Hey,” he yelled. Not to make the boy stop, but to scare him into running faster.

Trees became sparser, the undergrowth thicker as Jase followed. Soon he came out onto a well-worn trail. Probably led to the boy’s village. The kid would reach home safely following it. Jase looked after the boy for a second, then turned back. Time to return to the others and let them mercilessly make fun of both him and Alejandro for being so old and feeble that a child could outrun them.

But he barely walked ten yards before a high-pitched shriek of terror stopped him. He spun on his heels and darted down the trail after the boy.

He expected some sort of an animal attack, but soon he could smell smoke. Then the village came into view—about two dozen primitive dwellings, the huts burned, bodies littering the ground.

He slipped his rifle off his shoulder and waited a few seconds. Nothing moved. He stepped into the clearing and followed the shrieking to a partially burned hut. Inside, the boy kneeled next to a dead woman, tears streaming, leaving shiny tracks on his dirty face. Another woman lay facedown in the back of the hut. The smell of death and smoke hung in the air.

“Take it easy, I’m not going to hurt you.”

Every cell of him protested the senseless destruction as Jase reached for the wrist of the woman nearer to him, then the other’s. Neither had a pulse. Anger burned in his gut. The wanton murder of innocent villagers was a good reminder of why he did the work he did—to stop tragedies like this from happening. The crime lords of the area considered the locals disposable pawns in their games, and gave even less thought to the countless victims of the drugs and guns they sent north on a regular basis.

“Come on.” He grabbed the boy by the arm and pulled him outside before the smoldering roof could collapse on them.

A third woman’s lifeless body sprawled behind the hut, the sight sending the kid into a renewed fit of crying.

“Para,” he told the boy. Stop. Then pushed the kid behind him. Someone was coming.

Alejandro burst from the jungle. “What the hell happened here?” he asked in rapid Spanish.

“Cristobal is pushing his boundaries forward,” Jase responded in the same language.

Alejandro’s facial muscles tightened as he raised his gun to the sky to squeeze off a jungle telegram.

Jase lifted his hand to hold him off. “Those bastards can’t be too far. The huts are still burning.”

Alejandro nodded and lowered his weapon. “Better take the news back to Don Pedro as fast as we can. I’ll go tell Lucas.”

If Cristobal’s men were pillaging through this corner of the jungle—a group that likely outnumbered Jase’s small team judging by the damage they’d wrought here—their best bet was not to engage them but to take information to Don Pedro instead. The big boss could then decide how he wanted to respond to Cristobal, an ex-captain of his who’d recently turned against him.

Alejandro ran off with a scowl on his pockmarked face.

Jase waited until the man disappeared from sight before turning to the kid.

“Go to the other village.” He pointed east.

The small collection of huts they’d left the previous morning was a day’s trek for the adults, would be only slightly more for the kid. The boy should be safe there. Cristobal’s men weren’t heading that way. Jase and the others would have met them if they had been.

He stepped back into the smoldering hut and grabbed some fruit that had been spilled to the ground, took a piece of cloth to wrap the food, then added his canteen to the bundle. “Here.”

The boy wouldn’t move an inch.

He shoved the kid gently in the right direction.

The boy stepped two feet away, then stopped and stared at him expectantly.

“¡Vamos!”

Might as well have been talking to a wild fig tree.

He turned his back on the boy and moved toward the jungle, hoping the kid would understand that the both of them needed to get going.

But instead of heading for relative safety, the kid followed him.

“You can’t come with me,” he said in Spanish, having no idea if the kid spoke that language or some isolated native tongue. A day’s trek in the jungle to the nearest village would be perilous for the boy, but a day’s trek in the jungle with a team of seasoned killers would be even worse.

The kid knew the jungle. With some luck, he had a chance to reach the village. But if he went to Don Pedro’s place on the river, his life wouldn’t be worth a damn thereafter.

“Run for it.” Jase put on a scary face and stomped his foot.

But instead of taking off, the boy began crying again, which made him feel like a heartless bastard. Which he was, by the way, so he didn’t fully understand why his conscience would choose this moment to have a fit.

“Go,” he said again, his tone suspiciously close to pleading.

But Alejandro reappeared from the jungle, followed by the other four, and the boy’s options disappeared.

The team spread through the village, looking for evidence of Cristobal’s men and picking out whatever they wanted to take. No sense in waste.

Alejandro came for the kid.

Jase stepped between them in a stance that would allow him action no matter which way he needed to move.

“I saw him first.” The man put his hands on his hip.

His protest drew the others’ attention. Lucas strolled closer. As team leader, he was responsible for settling trouble.

Jase being the latest addition to the group, he ranked lowest, firmly on the bottom of the pecking order. He didn’t have enough influence to take what he wanted, and to show weakness by admitting that he wanted to save the boy would make the others suspicious. It would conflict too much with the killer image he’d been taking care to cultivate.

“I looked into his dead mother’s eyes. Her spirit said it’ll curse me if I don’t take care of the kid.” He nodded toward the charred hut with a grave face.

Lucas moved on. Jungle superstition was its own thing. Nobody went against it.

Alejandro kept the scowl on his face. “Don Pedro would pay me a hundred dollars for him.”

Unlikely. Maybe twenty, if Don Pedro needed someone to help out around the dog-fighting rings he ran in the larger towns downriver, or another runner, or a jungle spy—all jobs with a very low life expectancy.

Jase pulled his second-best knife, the one with the serrated double edge that Alejandro had coveted from the beginning, and held it out on his palm.

The man accepted it with a shrug as if being generous, as if the knife wasn’t worth ten times more than what he could have gotten for the boy.

“Hey, Jase found himself a little brother,” he called out to the rest, and joined in their laughter as he loped off, not wanting to miss any of the scavenging.

The men thought of the forest-dwelling natives as little more than animals, so calling one Jase’s brother was an insult. Like calling him stupid, which he was. He risked a multimillion-dollar mission almost a year in the making for a scrawny kid.

He shook his head, then squatted in front of the boy and pointed at himself. “Jase.” Then lifted his eyebrows and pointed at the latest complication in his life. Now he would have the responsibility to protect the kid at the compound, and find a way to get him out of this godforsaken corner of the jungle to safety, the sooner the better.

“Mochi.” The boy wiped his tears with the back of his dirty little hand.

Jase rubbed the bridge of his nose then looked at the men picking through the village. Rough and tough killers, every one of them. On some level, he wasn’t much better. He’d certainly seen and caused plenty of violence over the years. What on earth was he going to do with a kid? It’d be a miracle if his cover wasn’t blown and they both survived the day.

THE LAST LEG of the trek back to camp had exhausted the men. They sat around the beaten-up table in the kitchen at the back of the barracks half asleep, taking their last puffs of smoke, their last swigs of the homemade tequila that was being passed around. Night had settled on the jungle around them, thick and dark, exhaustion pulling them toward their bunks in the barracks.

“I need to talk to Alejandro,” Lucas said, and nodded toward Jase. “See if he’s up at the house.”

That got his attention and woke him up. A seal of approval. He’d never been sent up to the house before, not once since he’d joined Don Pedro’s empire of crime two months ago. But now it seemed he’d proven himself with the weeklong trek through the jungle and his assistance with the collection of debts.

Plus, he’d discovered the burned village—important intelligence. He’d fully gained Lucas’s trust at last, which brought him one step closer to Don Pedro himself, one step closer to crucial information on his operations and business associates.

He glanced at Mochi, who slept on a rug by the woodstove. The women who were responsible for feeding the men had taken care of him. He’d made it through the day, but how long his good luck would continue remained a question. The sooner Jase found a way to get him to another village the better.

He finished his yerba maté and stood to lumber off into the darkness, up to the house where Don Pedro kept his most nefarious secrets.

Sharp voices, men arguing in the barracks, wafted through the night air. A dog barked in the distance. The compound that housed Don Pedro’s army of criminals teemed with life, yet Jase felt alone in the middle of it all.

Trust no one. Don’t let your guard down for a single second. Those were the top two keys to his survival at the moment. Don’t get involved on a personal level would have been a good third, but he’d shot that to hell when he’d taken on Mochi this morning.

The downstairs windows of Don Pedro’s jungle hacienda were dark. The only light came from upstairs, from Don Pedro’s private living quarters—strictly off-limits to all but his closest confidants. Even Lucas wasn’t allowed up there. Since Cristobal’s attack on his life at his old jungle headquarters, the Don had become paranoid.

Jase slowed as he passed the building he’d observed so many times from afar. He knew every door, every window, every man who was allowed in. He had a plan. And now that he could freely move around the compound, he would be able to implement his plans, slowly, carefully, over the upcoming days.

He glanced up at the balcony and caught a dark shape that didn’t quite blend into the rest of the shadows. His hand inched toward his weapon as he moved closer.

A single shot.

One shot could take out the Don right now. The man was responsible for over 10 percent of the drugs and illegal weapons that reached the U.S. Credible intelligence indicated that he was also providing weapons for terrorist cells and was possibly involved in a plan to smuggle terrorists across the U.S. border.

Except, even if he died right now, tonight, someone else would take his place by next week. Someone like Cristobal.

So Jase’s orders didn’t include assassination. He was to come away with a chart of Don Pedro’s organization. They needed to know how he was linked to the other major crime lords in the area, what local cops and higher-up politicians were on his payroll, and who his connections were to those terrorist cells he was rumored to be negotiating with.

Jase’s team—the Special Designation Defense Unit—had gained important documents last year. The notebook they’d acquired held crucial information, but not enough. Colonel Wilson wanted more before he launched a serious offensive. As big as Don Pedro was, he was just the first loose thread. Jase had to tug gently, and if he did it right he might just unravel the whole tapestry of corruption and violence.

He had a bug hidden in the lining of his left boot, meant for the Don’s office.

As he moved forward through the shadows, the moon peeked from behind the clouds at last and illuminated the figure on the balcony. Long hair framed an oval face, spilling down slim shoulders. Not Don Pedro, after all.

A woman.

Her light hair framed Western features, definitely not Hispanic or a mixture of Hispanic and native, like most of the people on the compound. The hauntingly beautiful face caught Jase off guard. Of course, Don Pedro never settled for anything but the absolute best. He could afford it.

Looking at something pretty felt good after the gruesome massacre he’d seen today. Jase slowed. Then he caught himself and moved along. The last thing he needed was a shot in the head for ogling the boss’s girlfriend.

Since the downstairs windows were dark, Alejandro clearly wasn’t in the house. Jase strode toward the packaging facility behind the hacienda and scanned the men who stood around up front, but didn’t see Alejandro among them, either. He did spot Don Pedro, however. Since he couldn’t afford to miss any opportunities to get closer to the boss, he walked forward.

The men were standing in a circle, surrounding Paulo, a burly guy of about forty who usually worked with the runners.

“Where is the missing kilo?” Don Pedro asked in Spanish, his eyes filled with pure menace.

“I swear I didn’t touch it. I don’t touch what’s yours. I never have.” The man’s voice shook.

The Don nodded to the thug who held Paulo’s arm, and the guy planted his fist into Paulo’s stomach hard enough to make him double over.

“All I want is that kilo back,” the Don said in a deceptively mild tone.

But the accused knew the boss wanted a lot more—his blood and life, in fact. Everyone knew Don Pedro didn’t forgive. He didn’t believe in setting a bad precedent.

So Paulo went for it, coming up swinging. Since they were all standing together and Don Pedro among them, nobody dared to squeeze off a shot. The men froze for a moment, unsure of what to do, which Jase used to his advantage.

He lunged forward and tackled Paulo to the ground, ignoring the forty or so pounds the man had on him.

Others moved to get in on the action, but a word from Don Pedro called them back, even as he nodded to Jase to go ahead.

Raw violence went from zero to a hundred in the first second. Paulo fought for his life, while Jase fought for a promotion. He needed to move up in the ranks to get closer to the Don.

The knee to his stomach almost made him lose his dinner. He responded with an elbow to the chin. They rolled in the dust like savages, looking for an opening, a handhold, anything. Paulo had probably been sitting around camp all day, while Jase’s body felt every mile of their long trek, his muscles achy, his energy exhausted. He didn’t let that stop him.

His eyebrow split from a headbutt as they fought on, then his lips split from a punch the guy had somehow gotten in. He tasted blood and saw stars.

Flipped the man.

The good thing with big ones was that they usually tired faster, since they had to move all that weight. Paulo had never heard of that rule, it seemed. He rolled right over Jase, making his ribs crack and pop under the pressure. But Jase rose and got the upper hand at last, got the man in a headlock and immobilized him. They were both bleeding and breathing hard, nearly choking on the dust-filled air they desperately tried to suck in.

Jase looked over his shoulder at the Don just as the boss nodded to one of his lieutenants, who was holding a gun on Paulo.

The bullet grazed Jase’s cheek on its way to slamming into his opponent’s head.

He dropped the suddenly limp body to the ground, then pushed to his feet, trying to avoid the growing pool of blood. He looked back at the Don, hoping the man would at least ask his name. But the boss was already walking away.

He didn’t give his men orders to clean up the mess; he simply expected it to be done. Two of them were already grabbing Paulo by the feet to drag him away.

A third man, Roberto, clapped Jase on the shoulder. “Want to come over to the fire for some whiskey?”

He was one of the Don’s inner circle, not a bad friend to make. But not tonight. Jase couldn’t afford to anger his immediate boss by making him wait too long.

“Lucas sent me up for Alejandro. I better find him and get him back to the kitchen,” he told the man, and limped back the way he came.

If Alejandro was up this way, he would have come out for the fight. And if he wasn’t at the packaging building, he was most likely either with the dogs or the mules.

Jase passed by the main house again, giving it another careful look as he walked. He would come up in the morning and ask for Paulo’s job. He’d be turned down with a scoff, but all he needed was an excuse to get inside, see exactly where the office was located.

The woman stood on the balcony in the same spot as before. Something glinted on her face. Sure looked like tears. As the wind changed, he could hear her soft whisper.

“Dear God, please help me away from this place before he kills me. I beg you, please, please send someone to save me.” She had a slight Texas accent.