Juju didn’t care about the whys. Papa had ordered the two of them to tail her. She’d spent the least amount of time with the two of them, was less likely to spot them than any of the others.
Papa wanted two men who weren’t emotionally tied to her to do the tailing. Not that Papa didn’t trust Doc and Tango to call her out and bring her back if she tried anything, because they all knew the men would.
They also knew how badly it’d suck for those two if that turned out to be the case.
I wouldn’t want it to be me.
Delta let out a soft whistle. “Dude, you see that? Papa was right.”
“Yeah” He’d seen the car, parked three spaces ahead of them, pull out when Celia turned in at the hotel’s parking lot. The car whipped in behind her, slowly cruising past the spot where she parked.
The men were already out of their car and crossing the street when Celia got out of her car, still not paying a damn bit of attention as she messed with her surgical mask, trying to pull it into position over her nose and mouth.
But they were too late. They’d broken into a sprint, and yet still the damn car skidded to a stop in front of her, startling her. Two guys jumped out of the back, grabbing her and throwing her in and taking off again before Juju and Delta could even get their sidearms drawn.
“Dammit!”
They reversed course and ran back to their car, jumping in and trying to keep up with the abductors. Juju drove while Delta used a burner phone to call Papa to update him.
As Juju floored it, he mentally snapped the necks of whoever had grabbed her. It was obvious she hadn’t gone willingly. They’d been waiting for her.
Now he felt guilty he hadn’t cut her off in traffic earlier when they realized she’d gotten lost.
The trick now would be to get her back, safely, and figure out who the fuck those fucking fuckers were, and how the fuck they’d gotten their intel.
Especially important, to find out who the fuck they were working for.
They raced through the streets of Melbourne, Delta updating Papa with their location as they drove, several men already on their way to join the pursuit.
“Hope this isn’t a fucking diversion,” Juju growled as he whipped the wheel hard to the right in front of another car to take a hard corner without losing sight of the abductors.
“What?” Delta asked.
“Diversion. Make sure Papa keeps people on Q and his family.”
“Done. Just drive.”
* * * *
Tango and Doc were already on their feet and running for the door behind Papa as he spoke with Delta on the phone and then shouted orders at Zed, Uni, and Omega to stay there and guard Dr. Q. Uncle had grabbed the keys to another car they’d acquired. They all piled in, Delta behind the wheel and Papa guiding him as Tango and Doc jumped into the backseat.
Doc felt like he was dying inside, unable to interrupt Papa and ask him what the unholy fuck had gone wrong, that Juju and Delta could let Celia get abducted in broad daylight out of a Melbourne parking lot.
“Someone knows,” Tango grimly said before turning to look at him. “Someone fucking knows. Now we know for sure there’s a goddamned mole. That’s just too coincidental, we get intel concerning her, and then someone else abducts her as soon as she shows back up at her hotel? And why the fuck did she go to the hotel?”
“We’ll deal with that later.”
“We might have to deal with that now if we want to get her back safely,” Tango said.
“If?”
“You know what I mean.”
Not getting her back, safely or otherwise, wasn’t an option. They would get her back.
She was one of them.
And she was theirs.
It was times like this Doc felt glad he had no belief in any kind of a higher power or other deity. It meant he wouldn’t feel the slightest bit of guilt or remorse when he caught up with the assholes who’d taken their woman, and then ripped their nuts off their bodies and made them eat them raw before he slit their throats.
He hoped there was more than one guy so he and Tango wouldn’t have to play rock-paper-scissors for dibs on who got the honors.
* * * *
Celia wasn’t sure what the hell was going on at first. The crazy idea that the guys were putting her through some sort of test, or maybe a hazing, flitted through her mind until she realized these guys weren’t any of the Drunk Monkeys. Also, they weren’t speaking English. She thought maybe it was Russian, but she didn’t know.
They duct-taped her mouth shut and tied a pillowcase over her head, also binding her wrists and ankles with duct tape. She didn’t know which was worse, that she’d gone and fucked up and gotten herself kidnapped, or the worry that there was a chance her men might think she’d bailed on them.
Christ. I really am a stupid special farking snowflake.
She tried to stay calm, but unable to speak or move, she decided the best option was to cooperate unless or until she had a chance to get free. From the way the car was speeding and swerving, the driver taking sudden turns that would throw her back and forth between the men in the backseat, she suspected they were being chased by someone.
Maybe the police? Maybe someone saw them grab me?
She didn’t know. All she knew were the words the men uttered sounded like swear words, even when spoken in a foreign language.
She just hoped they didn’t feel her up.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
They lost the abductors when they ran a red light and caused an accident in the process, blocking Juju and Delta from following. After an hour of searching, Papa called them all back to the safe house.
Tango chafed, wanting to be out there doing something to find her. When Juju and Delta explained what happened, what they thought she’d been doing, he seethed.
“This is our fault,” Tango said. “We shouldn’t have let her go alone. She probably got turned around, realized where she was, and was backtracking from there.” He turned on Papa. “And now I wish to hell we had told her we thought someone might be watching the hotel. I bet she went thinking she was going to save us time.”
Papa called Alpha over from the other safe house to listen to what happened. After hearing everything, the Georgia native said, “I think this rules out any chance of Celia being the mole.”
Doc and Tango both glared at him. Doc found his voice first. “Ya think, asshole?”
“Hey, don’t get in my face about it,” Alpha said, not backing down. “You know how shit works. We don’t always know who the fuck we can trust. Now doubly so.”
“Pipe down, all of you,” Papa said. “She’s not the mole. Even I’m convinced of that, and I was already convinced before. The mole is someone in Arliss’ food chain. That’s not our problem. Right now, we need to figure out who has her and how to get her back. Then our next step is to figure out how they found out about her, and us, and exactly how far up the food chain this goes.”
“Y’all don’t think Arliss is involved, do you?” Alpha asked him.
“I don’t know. My gut tells me no, but that don’t mean shit anymore. If he was, I don’t think we would have gotten that coded message. He gave me those codes personally. If he was involved, he would have kept us in the dark until we brought Quong in.”
“So are we going to sit here pulling on our dicks,” Doc started, “or get out there and fucking find her?”
“We need a plan,” Tango said.
Everyone looked at Alpha.
“Oh, sure,” Alpha drawled. “Everyone picks on the redneck Cracker until the global pandemic hits.” He pushed himself away from the wall. “Let’s kick some tires and light some fires, boys. We have a damsel in distress to rescue.”
They started by sending in Yankee and Oscar, the twins, to talk to the desk clerks at the hotel. The men could charm the garter belt off the Statue of Liberty, if they tried hard enough.
Doc and Tango impatiently waited out in the car for them. Lima, their electronics and c
ommunications specialist, and Alpha were working to track back up the electronic food chain through Celia’s sat-phone, computer, and tablet, in case she sent any e-mails or messages, or made any calls, that they weren’t aware of.
Tango both hoped she had, so they had a chance of tracking her, and hoped she hadn’t, proving her loyalty.
He didn’t want to be a betting man right that minute.
Especially not with Celia’s life.
Alpha had quickly divvied up duties between the men who could be spared from guarding Quong and his family. Uni and Victor were running the license plate from the kidnappers’ car through their local contacts and seeing what they could dig up there. If the car was a rental and had any kind of trackable GPS built in, they might be able to locate it that way.
No one held out any hope that, if it was a rental, whoever rented the car used legitimate or traceable ID.
Of course they couldn’t track her burner phone because Papa had told her to turn it off, although Lima had a persistent search running for its signal just in case it popped up as active.
It was twenty minutes later when the twins returned, looking grim. They got in the front seat, Yankee driving. “We sweet-talked them into letting us see the security video. Told them our sister was supposed to meet us there, her car was there, but her room was empty. That she’d called us and said she’d arrived. That let us go back to the time. Couldn’t make out any of the guy’s faces clearly enough we could ID them, other than they struck me as pros.”
“Shit,” Doc said. “Mercs?”
“Couldn’t say. They were all in black, sunglasses, ski caps. Military or former, I’d guess.”
“No, that’s not stereotypical at all,” Tango snarked. “Who the hell do they belong to is what we need to know.”
Tango’s burner phone rang. It was Papa. “Good news, bad news,” their commander said without preamble.
Tango knew the routine. “Bad.”
“Rental car. Can’t trace the ID used for it. Tracker is deactivated.”
“Good?”
He heard the smile in his commander’s voice. “Car has an active backup tracker they didn’t know about.”
* * * *
Now, nearly three hours from when Celia was snatched, Doc and Tango rode in the minivan with six other DMs, two more in the car, all of them fully geared and armed. They wanted more than one vehicle in case the fuckers ran and they needed to give chase.
Doc had to fight the urge not to pound his fist into the vehicle’s roof. Anger and fear waged a desperate war inside him. He knew he had to follow his leader, because neither he nor Tango were thinking straight right now.
It was only his training allowing him to stay in control.
He knew Tango was as bad off as he was.
If anything happened to Celia, if she was harmed, he’d never forgive himself.
The car had been picked up in a rural area northwest of Melbourne, where lots of tall, thick trees and brush obscured homes and properties from the road.
Ideal for concealing their approach, but also ideal for the kidnappers to escape…or ambush them.
They parked a quarter mile away. Papa sent Zed and Uncle in on recon. Three minutes later, they saw a quick series of flashes of blue light.
Their signal that the car was there.
Together, they silently joined Zed and Uncle in the brush outside the house. Unfortunately, as Doc and Tango caught up, ordered to bring up the rear, they realized what everyone else already knew.
The house was empty. At least, it appeared empty. Which would explain the disturbing lack of sentries they’d encountered.
Papa gave them all silent signals, sending them around the house. Then they converged, kicking in the front and back doors at the same time, several men guarding the rear and watching for an ambush.
Nothing. The house had obviously been occupied recently, based on some food they found in the fridge. But there was little more than a couple of air mattresses and some cheap plastic chairs as furniture.
This had obviously been a temporary staging area.
“Comb it,” Papa ordered. “Anything you can find.”
It was Tango, going through the car with Doc, who found their first and only clue as to where to go next. A slip of paper under the driver’s seat, likely lost and forgotten there, with a series of numbers written on it.
“Phone number?” Tango asked as he handed it over to Papa.
Lima took it from Papa. “Nope. IP address.” He whipped out his netbook and used a secure sat-link connection to search.
Looking grim, he nodded and turned the screen so they could read it. More numbers, what looked like a log-in box, and some writing that Doc recognized as Russian, but couldn’t read it.
“This means nothing to me,” Doc said. “What are we looking at?”
“Probably how the mole is communicating with the people who took Celia. I need to get back to the safe house to go through this. I need Roscoe’s help with this one. It’ll be faster than me trying to run translations on Russian.”
“Then let’s move,” Papa said.
“What are we doing with the house?” Tango asked.
“Leave it. We don’t need to call more attention to ourselves by torching it or the car.”
* * * *
At one point, the men frisked Celia’s jeans, jacket pockets, and quickly ran their hands up her sides.
They didn’t, however, check her bra.
The phone they’d given her still lay uncomfortably pressed against one of her ribs, held firmly in place by her boob and sports bra. On the other side, a pointy part of the multitool knife was digging into her boob.
She refused to wince or shift position to adjust it. She didn’t want to do anything to draw attention to it.
They’d taken her passport, ID, and the money she’d tucked into her back pocket, so they must have thought that was all she had on her.
When she felt the car slow and stop, she breathed to control her fear, trying to remember all the lessons her men had given her in the past few days.
Think. You can do this.
The men didn’t speak. She heard car doors open. Two men grabbed her under the arms and she experienced a slight moment of panic until she realized their hands hadn’t brushed against the hidden objects in her bra.
She was half led, half dragged across what felt like grass and then unceremoniously dumped into another vehicle, what she suspected was a van from the sound of the side door sliding shut as the men climbed in behind her.
Then they were driving again.
They haven’t killed me yet.
Wait, I’m not acting scared enough. “Who are you?” she mumbled through the duct tape over her mouth, not needing to fake the fear in her voice. “Why are you doing this? What do you want? Please don’t hurt me!”
“Shut up,” a thickly accented voice said in English.
She didn’t know how long they were driving when they stopped and the side door opened again.
She was dragged out and taken inside somewhere, then thrown into a room, the door shut behind her. She listened, but didn’t hear anyone in the room with her. Taking the risk, she pulled the hood off her head and found herself in a darkened room, what felt like a tile floor. Shifting around, she realized it was a bathroom. She carefully peeled the tape off her mouth.
As fast as she dared, she retrieved the phone from her bra and powered it up.
I hope they can track it.
She panicked when it briefly vibrated in her hand, but then she realized that was just part of the start-up process. She listened for any sign of someone approaching the room. In fact, she heard what sounded like everyone leaving, an engine start, and then the vehicle left.
She crawled around to find the door and try it. The knob turned, but it wouldn’t open more than a fraction of an inch toward her when she pulled on it. From the sliver of light she saw, it looked like someone had put a padlock hasp on it.
“Hello
? Help me!”
A man appeared and startled her when he pounded his fist against the door. Another man yelled at him in that same coarse, foreign language from somewhere else in the house.
“Shut up!” the man at the door said, grabbing the knob and pulling on it, closing her in total darkness again. “Use toilet but shut up!”
Alrighty then.
She wasn’t as alone as she’d thought.
She didn’t dare try to talk on the phone, or take the risk it would ring, especially when she didn’t know how to silence it. She shut it off, then powered it up again, waiting for a moment before shutting it off again.
And again.
And again.
Please, let them be looking for it.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Lima only took a few minutes once Roscoe got there to find his way into the website. “Got it. They’re using a different location.”
They mobilized again and headed out with all vehicles. It was a warehouse unit in a mostly deserted industrial complex on the north side of Melbourne.
As the men started making their way in, someone emerged from the warehouse and spotted them.
“Dammit!” Papa swore. “Go, go, go!”
There were only three of them, it turned out. And they were unfortunately killed before the men could question them.
No sign of Celia anywhere.
Doc punched his fist through the wall of the unit. “Fuck!” Every minute that went by without word of where she was meant she might die.
He wouldn’t let himself think that she could be dead already.
He refused.
Things got worse when one of the men tested blue.
“Shit. Everyone outside,” Papa ordered. “Anyone splashed?”
Fortunately, no. The shots had hit the men from a distance, return fire.
No exposure.
“We need to get moving before law enforcement shows up.” Papa tossed keys to one of the trucks to Doc. “You two, get back to the safe house. Now.”
Doc caught the keys but protested. “We want to—”
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