by Dale Mayer
“And your mother had nothing to do with your father’s activities?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head vehemently. “She never did. I know people blamed her because she was always in the background, but it’s not as if she could have stopped him at any time.”
“Possibly not,” Zack said, “but many people would have blamed her anyway.”
“Exactly.” She worried, just having heard her mom’s voice. She quickly redialed, but there was no answer. “Oh, my God,” she said, her voice barely audible. “What if it’s already too late?”
“Then we’ll find out soon,” Bonaparte said.
“How soon?”
“I’ll see if I can beat my record,” he said.
She was sorry she had asked because, all of a sudden, it was as if the entire vehicle was flying through the air. She gasped as she looked at his speedometer, but it was off the dial. “How can you possibly drive this fast?” she asked, staring in amazement.
Zack twisted, looked at her, and said, “You might as well lie down and rest. Think about anything you can that might help us.”
“Okay,” she said.
“If they were to take your parents somewhere, where would they take them? And, if they weren’t moving them, would they kill them right now? Is there any reason to keep them alive?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
Zack looked at her gently. “You know more than you think,” he said. “So spend the next few minutes lying there, thinking about it.”
She collapsed back down and stared at the roof of the car. “Dear God,” she said. “If I had known she was in immediate danger, I would never have left without her. You know that, right?”
“I know,” he said, “but we came in to rescue you, and that was our mission.”
“Oh, my God,” she said, “I didn’t even think about her.”
“Stop it,” he said. “You couldn’t have changed it. We are the ones who left without her.”
“I know. I know. I know,” she said, crying out. Sinking back, she crossed her arms over her chest and laid down. The vehicle shot through the air faster than any she’d ever been in before. “Dear God,” she whispered, “let me please be in time.”
*
Zack settled into his seat and looked at Bonaparte. “This isn’t exactly part of the plan,” he said softly.
“Plans change,” Bonaparte said.
“I get it,” he said. “I better update Levi.” He brought out his phone, and, instead of explaining it all in a text, he called him. As soon as Levi answered, he quickly explained the sudden turn of events.
“Did you consider that it might be a trap?”
“I’m not sure that it would matter,” he said. “The fact of the matter is that Zadie is concerned that her mother is an innocent party and wants us to save her.”
“And what about getting Zadie away safely?”
“Well, we did that,” he said, a note of humor in his voice. “But the trouble is, she insists on going back.”
“Of course she does,” Levi said. “I’ll call you back after we check out some satellite feeds.”
Zack ended the call and turned to check on her. Her eyes were closed, and he didn’t want to disturb her. In a low tone, he updated Bonaparte. “With satellite, they might see if anybody has been removed from the place.”
“Is that good or bad if they have though?” he asked. “Not sure it makes any difference anyway,” Bonaparte said, his eyes on the roadway.
“I know,” Zack said, frowning. “And maybe they are blaming the parents for the daughter escaping. That would make more sense to me.”
“Yes, that could be it,” Bonaparte said with a nod. “Maybe they were punishing them.”
“It’s possible,” he said. “Interesting that the mother managed to call to let out a warning.”
“She probably still had the phone in her hand from calling her daughter a few minutes earlier. There wasn’t any reason to be too worried about her after the first call, but she’s definitely in more trouble now after the second call.”
“Yeah, I heard her scream,” Zack said grimly. “Nothing nice about that sound.” As a matter of fact, it brought back all kinds of horrible notions. And, if there was ever any soft spot in the world, it was the fate of everyone’s mothers. He shifted the seat backward and said, “I’ll catch five.”
“Sure,” Bonaparte said. “I’ll just sail back the way we came.” He started whistling. “Hopefully by the time we get close, they’ll have satellite feed again. We need to know if any vehicles left, and we need to get back into that house.”
“Great,” he said. “I went through a hell of a lot to get her out of there. I’m not looking forward to going back in.”
“Well, think of it this way,” Bonaparte said with a laugh. “This time, we are likely to go through the front door, instead of creeping in through a window, like a robber in the night.”
“The trouble with the front door,” he said, “is someone with a weapon will likely be waiting for us.”
“Bring them on,” Bonaparte said. “I’m ready for a good dustup. How about you?”
Chapter 5
Zadie heard the guys’ conversation in the front seat and realized that it was typical of others. It wasn’t their mother in trouble right now. Zadie knew her mother was a hard sell to leave her father, so Zadie figured she’d had to free herself, then come back with reinforcements to free her mother. If only her mother had been cooperative from the first. But that had never been part of Zadie’s original plan. When she had been setting up her ultimate escape plan, it had hopefully been for the two of them. She had planned to take her mother back to America and to live quietly.
As for her father, she knew no hope remained there. He was doomed to die in Istanbul. And, while her mother would never leave him willingly, Zadie had hoped she could convince her mother that it was the right thing to do with all the added unrest in Turkey. Now all Zadie could do was hope they made it there in time.
Somewhere along the drive, she must have dozed off. When she woke up, they were still traveling at an astronomical speed. Zadie realized she should be grateful she was even alive, considering how fast they were traveling. Although the driver appeared completely confident, she wasn’t. Zadie had traveled the world in various forms, but this was the closest to flying without actually getting off the ground that she’d ever experienced. Still, the movement helped her drift back asleep. When she woke again, she heard Zack’s voice.
“We’ve got satellite feeds! According to Levi, no vehicle has left the premises.”
“Good,” he said. “Then they are still in the house.”
“If that’s a good thing,” Zack said. “That means they might have fortressed in.”
“Only if they are expecting an attack. For all we know, they’ve already snuck out some other way with no vehicles, like we did.”
“I wondered about that, but then they had to be expecting satellite feeds to capture those movements.”
“Who all has satellite?” she asked, smothering a yawn.
“Way too many people,” Zack said, twisting to look at her. “How do you feel?”
“I’m starving,” she said bluntly. “I know we are in a rush, and we need to get back to my mother. Is there any way to run through someplace and pick up food and carry on?”
“I’m not sure there is,” he said.
Bonaparte said, “There is a protein bar in my bag, under your head, if you want to get that.”
Immediately she struggled upright, dug through the bag, found the protein bar, and tore into it. The two men listened to her eat in silence. When she took the last bite, she remarked, “This tastes like sawdust, but I was running on empty.”
“We will all be running on empty soon enough,” Zack said. “We also haven’t had much rest.”
She winced at that. “I know, and I’m sorry,” she said. “I was really looking forward to a room in Komotini, until I realized what was going
on.”
“I hear you. Your mother sounded completely different in those two calls. Her first phone call raised no alarms or immediate red flags.”
“I can only blame the pain, the drugs, and the circumstances for that. None of it connected until she screamed for help into my ear. Believe me. I feel terrible.”
“No point in feeling terrible,” he said. “Let’s sort this out as much as possible. Why would somebody hurt her?”
“Getting rid of the evidence,” she said bluntly. “My father, well, he will be on trial for his crimes. His conviction is almost guaranteed.”
“So somebody will save the country the cost of a trial and just kill them both?”
“Maybe,” she said. “So many political factions are going on in Turkey right now. It’s just unbelievable how the country runs or survives.”
“Is your father guilty?”
“Hell, yes,” she said. “I’ve no sympathy for his fate. I just didn’t want my mother mixed up in it.”
“I know. Are you absolutely sure she’s innocent?”
“You’ve asked that before,” she said, noting his doubt, yet knowing everyone wondered the same thing.
“I know. You have to seriously answer that yourself,” Zack said. “I don’t know anything about the situation, but, like the rest of the public, when somebody stands by her man all those years, you have to wonder if she wasn’t in the know about it.”
“She was in the know for some of it,” Zadie said. “Does that make her guilty?”
“Many people would say so, yes,” he said.
“Even though he beat her?”
“Your father?” he asked in shock. He twisted to look at her, and she nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “My mother was very much a battered woman. She was terrified to leave and terrified to stay. She’s no more guilty of any of those crimes than I am.”
“Good enough,” he said. “The trouble is, not everybody will believe you.”
“Nobody would believe me,” she said, “but it is what it is, and I can’t help that.”
“Do you know how to get to where they were in that house?”
“Their bedrooms were up the stairs, on the back right,” she said. “Second bedroom after you turned a quarter at the top of the stairs.”
“Locks in the door?”
“No,” she said. “Bars on the window.”
“Bars in the downstairs windows?” Zack asked, frowning.
“I saw them in the basement and on the upper floor where the bedroom windows are, but not on the main floor,” she said, “but definitely steel bars are involved.”
“So it’s a prison for sure.”
“They also have guards.”
“How many guards, and how heavily armed?”
“Four guards, with handguns,” she said. “No rifles but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have them somewhere.”
“Any other men come and go?”
“Not while I was there,” she said. “Not that I saw.”
“And the two men who imprisoned you?”
“They worked at the house. The woman was one of the cooks.” She brought up the images she had on her phone. “I took these in case that helps. It’s hard to describe people afterward, whereas a picture is worth one thousand words.”
“One of the cooks?” He turned to look at the photo she held up.
“The house came with its own staff. So the main cook and an assistant cook, a housekeeper, and somebody who cleaned up around the place,” she said with a shrug, as she thought about it. “For all I know, they were all hired gunmen too.”
“The woman you spoke with while you were jailed, she was the assistant cook in the kitchen?”
“Yes,” she said. “I did see her up and around some of the bedrooms too.”
“It was a great disguise too,” Zack said. “Very few people actually recognize ‘the help.’ It’s a sad fact.”
“Anything else you can tell us?” Bonaparte asked.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t even realize I was seriously in danger. They told me that I wasn’t allowed to leave, but it was a flat-out ‘don’t even expect to be leaving’ kind of a comment. I did talk to my parents, and my father wanted me to leave too, but he couldn’t arrange for it because the guards there refused.”
“But you made arrangements yourself?”
“Well, I was putting final touches into place, yes,” she said. “I was literally setting up my last steps when I heard them talking outside about killing my parents.”
“Are other people expecting you anywhere right now?”
“I told a few people I was visiting my parents and would try to get away—friends, colleagues, that kind of a thing. But nobody had dates yet because I didn’t know how fast I could leave the country. But I was supposed to let them know when I was free and clear.”
“And, since you woke up, have you contacted anyone?”
“No,” she said shortly. “Apparently I’m not thinking too clearly yet.”
“That leg injury is nothing to trifle with,” Zack said in a soothing voice. “The drugs that you were under while in the prison didn’t help, and now you’ve got painkillers and antibiotics in your system. If we are lucky, you won’t have an allergic reaction between the drugs.”
“I don’t know what they gave me, “she said, “but it’s possible that they would drug my parents if they’re moving them.”
“That would make sense,” he said, “but why move them?”
“To get rid of them?” she asked.
“Then drugs aren’t needed. Just a bullet would do.”
*
Zack knew he shouldn’t have said that, but it slipped out. At her startled gasp, he turned and whispered, “Sorry.”
She shook her head and stared at him, her eyes big globes of pain. “I feel so shitty,” she said. “I should have insisted we get her right from the beginning. I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time you found me and rescued me.”
“Don’t let it bother you. Remember. You didn’t have a choice in the matter. We were focused on getting you out of there. We didn’t realize your mother was in so much danger at that time.”
“How much longer?”
He checked his watch and said, “About forty-five minutes.”
“I’d like to lay down and sleep again,” she said, “but my mind is churning.”
“Your leg can’t heal without sleep, and you can’t do any running around while we are out there either,” he said. “You need to prepare yourself for staying in the vehicle the entire time.”
She glared at him.
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “If I go in there looking for your mother, I can’t be watching and helping you get in and out too. Trust me that I can get her out—if she is there, if she is alive, if she is mobile. The same as I got you out.”
“She can’t crawl out a window and go through broken glass,” she warned.
“Well, I was hoping to miss that part this time,” he said with a smile. “But we’d have to improvise because we don’t have a plan in place. We also may have to take out four, if not six or seven people,” he reminded her. “And that won’t be an easy walk in the park either.”
“The guards have taken over two rooms on the main floor. When you go in the front door, they’re on the right side. There’s a hallway, and several rooms along there the guards took over for their quarters. They have offices, computers, monitors, camera equipment in there. And then a couple rooms with bunks.”
“So all the guards are on the main floor?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Any idea approximately how many rooms are in the house?”
“Possibly sixteen or seventeen,” she said, “but I don’t know what’s in the basement. It was completely black.”
“Prison cells probably,” he said. “Don’t know if there was anything else because I didn’t get a chance to check it out myself. More rooms, similar in size, and not all the windows had bars
,” he said.
“No?” she said. “That’s surprising. Mine did.”
“No,” he said, “not the bigger ones. Maybe they were used for something else. So maybe the small rooms had those little windows with bars, like you were talking about in your cell.”
“I have no clue,” she said, as she sagged against the back seat again. “I just wish this was over with, and I wish my mother was in this vehicle with us, safe.”
Zack twisted back around, slid a look at Bonaparte. The two men exchanged hard glances because, when it came to a change of plans like this, things tended to go very wrong. They were safe and clear, but now, going back for her mother—an emotional decision—was not a smart business decision, and Zack somehow didn’t think it would go anywhere near as smoothly as Zadie was hoping for. As a matter of fact, he didn’t think it would go smoothly at all.
Chapter 6
Huddled in the back seat, her leg as elevated as she could get it, Zadie waited in the darkness. They’d arrived twenty minutes ago, and every minute seemed interminable for her. She thought the wait to get here had been bad on the drive, but, with Bonaparte driving like a crazy man, she’d been half wondering if she’d even arrive alive. Now all she could think about was her poor mother.
The men had given her a strict order, staying where she was, and, given the state of her leg, it wasn’t too hard to follow. But it was painfully difficult to wait and to worry. Despite the time of day—afternoon—the dark cloud cover blocked out the sun and allowed the men to proceed. Otherwise they would have waited for nightfall.
She kept looking at her phone constantly, checking for any messages, but there was nothing. Both men had her number, and of course so did her mother. Zadie had to trust that the men would get her mother out of there, the same as they had gotten Zadie out. Preferably in a much better way. So much was counting on what happened next, following her mother’s frantic phone call. And Zadie didn’t even want to think about the fact that maybe her mother was no longer alive. It would just cripple Zadie.