The woman tried to smile, though anxiety was etched on her face. The closer Mike got, the louder the audio from the scanner. Something was on her, all right.
Mike started at the head and didn’t make it beyond the neck. The light pulsed and the audio signal grew to an annoying whine. The shirt?
“Nicole?”
Nicole smiled and touched Consuelo’s white shirt, fingering the collar. “May I?”
The woman nodded.
Nicole gently brushed the woman’s glossy chestnut hair to one side to check the collar and froze. She ran her finger up the woman’s slender neck. “Uh, guys? I think we have something here.”
Nicole lifted the hair up in a ponytail and pointed at a small red spot. “Consuelo, what’s that?”
Consuelo’s hand went up to touch her neck, her face blank. She blinked. “Oh, I completely forgot that. It’s a shot of some kind. some vaccine. All of us got one. Against STDs. And also birth control.”
Mike wanded her neck and the scanner practically jumped up and screamed There it is!
“I don’t think you got a vaccine jab, ma’am. I think you got tagged with a bug so they could know your whereabouts.”
The woman’s head whipped up so fast Nicole dropped her hair. It swirled around her shoulders. She was white-faced, shocked. “I have something inside me that tells them where I am? Oh my God, oh my God!” She twirled, frantic, trying to escape something that was in her body. “Get it out of me, get it out of me, get it out of me!” She was screaming and jumping up and down. “He’ll find me, he knows where I am right now, he’s going to come get me and take me back, oh my God, help me! He’s coming, he’s coming! Help me!”
A man of stone would be unable to withstand such levels of panic and none of them were made of stone.
“Quiet, ma’am, it’s okay. We’ll get you to a doctor—”
“No!” she screamed. “Get it out of me now! Oh God, please get it out of me!” She was hopping up and down in a panic.
Harry stood still for a moment looking perplexed, very un-Harry-like. He always knew what to do. Mike was at a loss, too. They had to get the bug out of her, but if she didn’t want to go to a doctor, what were they supposed to do?
Barney was entirely red-faced now. “Uh, ma’am? Would you trust me to get it out of you? I’ve trained as a medic.” He held his huge hands up. “I can be delicate, I promise.”
She didn’t even hesitate. “Oh God, yes! Get that thing out of me now!”
Barney looked at Mike. “I’ll need our medic kit.”
Mike knew exactly where it was. Inside a minute, he was handing Barney their kit specially made for them by a team of doctors, modeled after a field trauma kit. It contained almost everything necessary to deal with wounds that didn’t require major surgery.
Consuelo sat holding her hair to one side while Barney sprayed an anesthetic on the spot Nicole had found, swabbed it, took a scalpel and carefully made a small incision, pulling a tiny electronic device out with tweezers. The wound barely bled and only required two butterfly bandages.
He held up the tweezers.
Consuelo was white-faced, hands shaking. “Get rid of it, now! Nikitin knows I’m here, he’ll be coming for me!”
Mike pushed a button on Harry’s desk.
“Nikitin is in for a big surprise.” One of their men, Dan Ryan, poked his head in. “Come in, Dan. Barney, wrap that transmitter up in a piece of paper and give it to Dan.” The tiny blood-flecked piece of silicon went into an envelope and into Dan’s hands. “I want you and Lee to leave right now. Take one of our vehicles, cross the border into Tijuana, check into a room at a dive that offers surveillance possibilities front and back, pay for several days in advance, leave the envelope in a drawer and get right back out without being seen. Set up surveillance and wait for two Russians to find it. That’s a transmitter being followed by some bad guys, so execute security protocols. You know what to do.”
“On it, boss.” Dan executed an ironic salute and left.
Consuelo had stopped crying. She let out a huge exhale. “Thank you,” she said shakily.
Harry nodded. “Barney, go to the safe house with Consuelo. I’ll have someone bring you some new ID for her. Then take Consuelo north. Drive around for a couple of days until you feel you’ve found the right place. Text me on my throwaway cell when you’ve landed. Have Consuelo find a place and open a bank account. We’ll transfer some money there as soon as you do. Consuelo, don’t look for a job right away. Stay under the radar. When we take Nikitin down, we’ll let you know and you can go to Miami. You’ll be safe.”
“Safe,” she whispered. “Please.”
There was complete silence in the room. Nicole put her arm around her and kissed her cheek. “Good luck, my dear,” she said.
Harry waited until Consuelo and Barney were gone. “I wish we knew what these fuckers were up to, then we could go to Kelly. I wonder—”
His spare laptop gave a soft ping.
Nicole looked at the monitor and smiled. “Good old Rudy. He cracked the code. Let’s see what we have here. Oh, he’s on Skype.”
Mike, Harry and Sam gathered around the monitor, looking at a small square in the upper half of the screen. The man was impossibly young-looking with huge blue eyes and a spotty ginger beard. He looked serious and spoke a few words in Russian. Nicole answered back slowly, choosing her words carefully.
Mike really admired that. She was basically trilingual, her French and Spanish as good as her English. And knew enough Russian and Arabic to get by. Mike himself barely knew English. He was much better with guns.
“What did he say?”
“He said . . . he said it’s bad.” Nicole’s face was somber. “Let’s take a look.”
She sighed and shifted in the chair trying to find a comfortable position with about ten billion pounds strapped to her stomach. It had been that way with Merry, too. She’d been as big as a house and then Merry had come out, this tiny delicate little creature. What were the kids doing in there? Playing golf?
Nicole touched a key and the screen came to life. There were a series of photographs, full-face and full-figure, of young girls. All of them blond, and all of them very very pretty. The age range was from about six to ten. The photographs were very clear, professional quality, well-lit and well-staged. Next to each photograph was a series of words in Cyrillic script followed by numbers.
A male voice-over kept up a running commentary in Russian. Nicole leaned forward, concentrating, a frown between her eyebrows.
Suddenly she gasped, held out her hand. Sam’s hand was right there for her. She looked up at her husband, face deathly pale.
“Oh my God, Sam,” she whispered.
“What is it, honey? What’s wrong?” He crouched in front of her, holding her hand. “What’s the matter? Is it the baby?”
“Sam.” Nicole looked up at Mike and Harry, tears tracking down her white face. “Mike, Harry. Oh my God!”
Sam was a tough guy, tough in battle and tough in the boardroom. His only known weaknesses were Nicole and Merry. And the little girl on the way. If Nicole was hurting, Sam was frantic.
Mike’s skin prickled. What was on that monitor was also a threat to Chloe. He leaned forward. “What is it, Nicole? What’s he saying? What are those photographs?”
With a strangled sound, Nicole stood and took two shaky steps to the wastepaper basket near Harry’s desk and vomited. A worried-looking Sam held her as she straightened trembling, wiping her mouth.
Tears were streaming down her face as she turned to her husband, holding on to his arms. “Sam,” she said urgently, “we have to stop them! You’ve got to do something!”
Mike looked at Harry. Nicole was not a hysterical woman. There was something very nasty in those files.
A huge sob escaped her and she leaned over the wastepaper basket again, though only thin bile came up. She straightened, shaking.
“Those girls are on a boat, coming here. Those poor little girls. We have to do someth
ing! Stop it! It’s an auction. They’re going to sell those little girls to the highest bidder.”
Another shudder and her water broke.
Chapter 19
Chloe woke up with a gasp, heart pounding. Her head pulsed with sharp pain, as if she were wearing a crown of spikes. “Good. You’re awake.” The voice, deep and accented, came from somewhere in front of her. “You’re no good to me dead.”
The words made no sense, none. It was noise, together with other noise, a low humming sound.
Her world was pain—sunlight directly in her eyes that was like a bright lance piercing her head. She could keep her eyes open only for a few seconds at a time. Her right side hurt, as if something hard had fallen on it. There was a sharper pain in her right biceps, tight and focused and burning. Her arms were tied together at the wrists. Finally she was able to twist around enough to look at where it hurt, but only for a moment. She stared at the bright red spot blankly. In the middle of the spot was a hole, a tiny puncture wound. She closed her eyes.
Had she been bitten by a venomous insect? Could that explain her reaction to light, the pounding headache, the lassitude? Maybe, but it didn’t explain the low humming sound, like—like an engine.
A . . . car? Was she in a car?
Keeping her eyes open for more than a few seconds was impossible, it was like having a stage spotlight shine right in her eyes.
The tone of the humming noise changed and she rolled against something soft. The deep fog in her head lifted long enough for her to recognize that, yes, she was in a car that had just changed gears. She was lying on her side in the backseat and there was a plastic strip keeping her hands tied. She tried to pull her hands apart but it was hopeless. All she did was cut into the flesh of her wrists.
She couldn’t fathom anything of this. Was she in a nightmare? Her last memory was sitting happily in Mike’s kitchen, sipping tea. Had she gone back to bed and fallen asleep and now she was dreaming being held captive?
The metallic mechanical beeps of a cell phone. Not a number. Someone on speed dial.
“No, this is not Chloe, Mr. Bolt,” that deep Russian-accented voice said. “Chloe is alive and your sister will stay that way as long as you do exactly what I say . . .”
Harry, who was almost as good at computers as Nicole, was sitting at the computer, scrolling through the files on the thumb drive.
Nicole and Sam were on their way to the hospital, Sam keeping them up to date. He sounded frantic and was breaking land speed records to get Nicole to the doctors so he wouldn’t have to deliver their little girl.
Harry suddenly sat up. “Shit.”
“What?” Mike walked over, frowning. There was something worse than little girls being sold at an auction?
He’d scrolled through the photographs, wishing he could throw up like Nicole. Pretty, innocent little girls. Most too thin, but clearly beauties. He didn’t understand the Russian but he understood the numbers all right. The ages, which ran from six to ten and the bids, which all started at $50,000.
There was tons of other info, which was going straight to the FBI just as soon as Sam and Nicole’s little girl was born. The FBI was going to want to talk to Sam, too, and there was no way Sam would leave Nicole’s side. Not even a gun pointed to his head would do it. It was better all round if they just waited until Sam was free.
“Look at this.” Harry pointed to the screen.
“I don’t see—” And then Mike did. A list of names in Latin script, not Cyrillic. A list of names of potential customers, men who’d bid on those little girls.
It took a lot to shock Mike, but he was floored. There were people here he knew, people he recognized. Men he would never suspect could be filthy buyers of little girls.
The mayor’s top aide, four district attorneys, five CEOs of major corporations, a famous journalist, the head of surgery at a major hospital . . . the list went on and on. Little girls being obviously a popular commodity.
He wanted to vomit like Nicole had and he wanted to punch a hole in the wall. Harry just stared grimly at the screen. “Those scumbags are going down.”
It was a thought to warm the heart. “Oh yeah,” Mike promised. “The FBI will be all over this.” And he knew precisely whom to call. Special Agent Aaron Welles, who was a friend and whose mother had been beaten on a regular basis by his dad. He was a big help to RBK in helping battered women because he had an emotional stake in it.
And pedophilia—again, Mike had to suppress the gag reflex. All he had to do was think of his nieces and some fuckhead hurting them and he went a little crazy.
“Aaron’s going to be all over these guys. When are the girls arriving?”
Harry peered into the monitor intently, as if the harder he looked, the better he could understand Russian. He threw up his hands. “I can’t tell,” he growled, frustrated. “Goddammit. I hope it’s not now. Those girls will be disappeared fast if they get a chance to land.”
“Try cutting and pasting the info into Google Translate,” Mike suggested. “What?” he said when Harry glared at him.
Harry was pouding at the keyboard. “I hate it when you have good computer ideas. That’s my thing. You’re good with weapons, I’m good with computers. That’s the way it should be. Okay, here we go.” He read the translation and sat back, relieved. “Got it. Ship’s due in San Diego harbor two days from now. The Coast Guard can intercept them. Those guys won’t know what hit them. We have to make sure no one warns them, otherwise they’ll throw those poor girls overboard.”
Harry’s cell buzzed. He pulled it out, looked at Mike. “It’s Chloe.”
Mike frowned. Why was Chloe calling Harry and not him? He moved closer to Harry, shamelessly listening in. Did Chloe need something? If she did, by God Mike’d get it for her, not Harry.
“Yeah, honey,” Harry said, then stiffened. He shot a glance at Mike and switched to speakerphone.
“—not Chloe, Mr. Bolt,” a deep, strongly accented voice said. “Chloe is alive and your sister will stay that way as long as you do exactly what I say. You have something that belongs to me. I will give you your sister back in exchange for it.”
Every hair on Mike’s body was standing up in panic. A drop of sweat rolled down Harry’s temple.
“Who is this?” he asked, though Harry knew as well as Mike who it was.
Nikitin. The Russian. The man who hadn’t hesitated to waterboard a woman. The man who had Chloe.
Chloe in his hands.
Mike shuddered. His body had a reaction it had never had before. He felt an electric shock throughout his body as he pumped out sweat in one stinking rush. His muscles were weak, he had to stiffen his legs to keep upright. His insides roiled painfully and he barely made it in time to the fancy designer wastebasket Nicole had used and which had just been cleaned by Marisa.
It was absolutely uncontrollable. Mike had had a vision of Chloe being waterboarded and his entire body had rejected the thought so hard his guts turned inside out.
Harry scowled at him, covering the microphone so the fuckhead at the other end of the line wouldn’t hear him puking his guts out.
“—GPS coordinates,” the man was saying. “You will follow those coordinates on your own. I will see if anyone follows you, believe me. Come alone and come with the thumb drive and we will all walk away from this and forget about it.”
He disconnected.
“You almost gave yourself away,” Harry complained. He sounded normal but his face was ice white.
“Couldn’t help it,” Mike mumbled, wiping his mouth.
Harry’s scowl deepened. “Get it together, Mike,” he snapped. “You’re not going to help Chloe if you’re out of control. Trust me on this.”
“Does he have Chloe? How could he? My place is secure, goddammit. How could the fuckhead get in?”
Mike went to the program that controlled the video cams at their condo. The super knew nothing about it. He clicked onto the feed and got nothing but static. “Fuck,” he whispe
red, punching out a number. He listened as the phone at the ground-floor security unit rang and rang. “Security’s not picking up. José’s on duty this morning. The guy’s good. If he’s not picking up, he’s either knocked out or dead. Let me try one more thing.” He dialed his own landline and listened as it rang, each ring like a gong that echoed through his body. No way would Chloe not answer.
Mike and Harry looked at each other. “He’s got her,” he said flatly. Harry nodded.
Fuck.
Mike tried to stabilize, tried to get his head back in the game, tried to find his icy calm, that cool, still place inside him that allowed him to function under the most terrible of circumstances.
It wasn’t there.
It was gone.
He stood there, sweat pouring down his body, hands shaking, mind full of static, incapable of thinking, just seeing. Images of Chloe, broken and bleeding, in the hands of violent men.
He couldn’t do it. He simply couldn’t. He didn’t have any mechanism inside him that could cope with this. He moved to the wastebasket and bent over, then reeled back from Harry’s blow, nailing him right on the jaw.
“Fuck that!” Harry got right up into his face. “You’re not going to get all panicky on me now, Mike. My sister’s in the hands of a monster. I almost lost her to one once and I’m not going to lose her now. Come back, you son of a bitch, and help me here! If you don’t pull your head out of your ass, we’re going to lose her!”
He straightened, fingering his jaw, breath heaving in and out of his lungs. Harry still packed a punch.
Harry was terrified. But the thing was, if Chloe died, Harry would be devastated. He’d mourn forever. But his life would go on. He had a wife and a child and his family would remain.
If something happened to Chloe . . . Mike’s mind skittered away from the thought, but he hung on to it grimly. He needed to understand this. If something happened to Chloe, if she died, Mike had nothing. It was as if he’d lived his life in a dank, dark cave and Chloe had opened the cave door and shown him a beautiful world of light. With Chloe gone, that door would shut forever. He’d never have another shot at it because it was only Chloe who could open that door for him.
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