Crazy Love

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Authors: Tara Janzen
Virginia, twenty miles outside Washington, D.C., Tony Royce looked out over a small lake and the green expanse of the heavily wooded grounds beyond. Not so much as a finger twitch betrayed his impatience. He was calm, steady, his anger curbed on a tight leash. He was a pro, a seasoned veteran of twenty years of CIA operations, and hell would have to freeze over twice before he’d let Hamzah Negara rattle his cage.
    Especially when their whole goddamn problem was Negara’s fault. Royce had fulfilled his part of their bargain. He’d delivered Dylan Hart’s head on a platter, and Negara had lost him, allowed him to escape from a damn-near inescapable island. Royce had been at Negara’s compound on Sumba a week ago, and the place was a fortress, complete with a garrison and around-the-clock guards. Given the condition Hart had been in at the time, Royce found it doubly unimaginable that the man had escaped. The kind of drugs Negara had been pumping into him should have left him comatose.
    So what had happened between the interrogation Royce had witnessed Sunday night and Monday morning when Hart had vanished from the island? Two guards had been found dead, one with his throat slit, the razor still in it, a deed well within Hart’s capabilities under normal circumstances, but the circumstances shouldn’t have been normal. The man should have been down for the count, not overcoming his guards and escaping.
    And Negara had the balls to keep him cooling his heels, after a fuckup like that?
    Royce discreetly checked his watch again. Forty minutes, that’s how long he’d been waiting for Negara to get out of his bath, or off the phone, or finish his lunch, or whatever it was he was doing behind the set of closed doors at the end of the living room.
    “Mr. Royce.”
    Tony turned at the sound of the voice. A slight man in a dark shirt and slacks, one of Negara’s “enforcers,” gestured toward the now-open door. There were two more men of a similar demeanor in the room, both of them armed, both of them lethal, even without the pistols he knew they each carried concealed in shoulder holsters beneath their black suit coats.
    Royce didn’t trust either one of them, any more than he trusted Negara. The only thing keeping his ass in one piece in this den of murderers and thieves was his ability to deliver Dylan Hart—again.
    “Mr. Negara,” he said, entering the office. Two more guards were inside. All of the men he’d seen in the house had tattoos on the backs of their hands, a circle with three long lines running through it—Jai Traon pirates.
    “To-nee,” a small, white-haired man said with a big smile, pushing out of the chair from where he’d been sitting behind a mahogany desk. Hamzah Negara, Butcher of the Sabu Sea, weighed in at one-thirty on a good day, one hundred and thirty pounds of seventy-year-old sinew and bone wrapped around the heart of a despot.
    “It’s good to see you,” Royce said. It wasn’t, but the lie came easily enough. They always did.
    “And you, To-nee.”
    “I trust your flight went well?”
    “Yes, yes, very well.” Negara gestured at a chair in front of the desk, part of a group of three, and Royce moved to sit down.
    “I see you brought your house guards.”
    “Yes, most of them,” the old man said, taking the closest chair and signaling one of his men. “There are more arriving this afternoon, to help with security a little, here and there.” He gave a slight shrug. “As you know, I am an international businessman. Besides my property holdings, I have many current investments and commitments in your country.”
    Bullshit.
    Negara had seventeen million dollars’ worth of current commitments in the United States and not a penny more, not this week. That’s how much of the warlord’s China White cash Hart had gotten away with, under orders. Somewhere, some Foreign Affairs experts in the upper echelons of Washington’s more hallowed halls had decided the Indonesian

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