“Well, yes, but just once. It’s easy enough to nudge one of these babies up to a leaf spring, and the laws of physics take care of the rest.”
“If you say so.”
The experiment the young hunter had run on the Kurga happened so flawlessly, he’d forgotten to repeat it and learn from mistakes. But he needed the trick to work, possibly several times. The time for second guessing had passed. “Yes, I do say so, buddy.”
“We’re supposed to turn right up here.”
Liam followed the GPS tracking software’s recommendation through congestion. Though he slogged the Kurga through nasty traffic, the same lethargic vehicular flow restricted Dianne’s progress away from him.
“Do I get body armor?”
“Was it that obvious that I’m wearing mine?”
“Yes.”
The young hunter had hoped to be less conspicuous, but he admitted the light jacket he wore over his armor in June’s heat was a beacon for onlookers. He’d considered leaving the armor off, but he’d been one loud noise away from gunplay when inserting Dianne into the truck. “Yeah. There’s a suit back there. You want to try it on?”
“You’ll need to help me.”
At least the kid knew his limits. “Sure, do your best now and I’ll help you when I can. This traffic will be stop and go for a while. There should be a vest for you on the floorboards behind your seat. We’ll deal with helmets and other good stuff later.”
“We’re only two miles from Dianne.”
Growing accustomed to his partner’s rapid segues, Liam agreed the offhand comment made sense. “Right. That’s comforting. I uh… don’t suppose you’ve heard from her yet, telepathically?”
“No.”
“Do you think you should reach out to her, just to make sure she’s okay?”
“I can’t reach out to her.”
Liam frowned. But if you were highly emotional, she’d seek you, wouldn’t she?”
“Yes.”
The hunter flagged a data point in his brain to stimulate emotions in Josh to summon Dianne.
“She’s okay.”
Liam shrugged. “Not my area of expertise. I’ll trust you.”
“She’d contact me if she needed me.”
“Cool.” He abandoned the subject as the next turn brought the Kurga to slower traffic, and Liam sensed the onset of rush hour. “I have to admit these human traffickers are patient.”
“Don’t let that stop you from pulling the trigger.”
Liam guffawed. “Bloody hell! Now, that’s an attitude I can get behind.” From the corner of his eye, he saw Josh pulling his vest into his lap.
“Where do I start?”
In his mind, the young hunter reverse engineered the procedure he could perform in seconds. “Uh… if you can get your head and arms through it the right way, that would be a great start.”
The empath’s brother fumbled with the armor. “How’s this?”
Shooting a glance, Liam surmised the effort. “Well, it’s backwards. So, just try it again the other way around.”
Tufting his matted hair, Josh lifted the vest and tossed it to his feet. “I don’t want to. This is stupid.”
Dianne’s wisdom spoke to Liam, and he let her brother’s frustration wear itself out. He’d put him in the vest before he’d put him in the line of fire. To change the subject, he hailed his father on this phone.
“Yes, lad. How are you?”
“We’re fine up here. I don’t see you on GPS. Can you call it up on all your phones, please?”
“Right. Sorry. I was wary of my battery constraints. I shall address it now.”
Liam stole a glance at his passenger’s tablet and saw his father’s phone’s location appear half a mile behind him in traffic. “How’s the new young lady holding up?”
“I’d say amazingly, given the circumstances. She’s calm and coherent.”
“Did you let her know she has no obligation to help us?”
“Of course, but she wants to stay at least until we get her sister back. I defy you to win an argument against two incensed Iraqi women. She’s formed a quick bond with Nana, and I’m not committing political or literal suicide with a challenge.”
“Oh, bloody hell, Father. You didn’t give her a gun already, too, did you?”
“Nonsense, lad. She’d have to prove herself to me first, as Nana did.”
“With all due respect, Father, please remember that… well, shit. I don’t envy you two against one, but do your best to resist if they tell you to arm Nadine.”
“I didn’t say I was arming Nadine, but her temperament tells me she’d welcome it.”
Liam drove in silence for miles, coaching his calmed companion into his vest and trailing Dianne’s truck. When the GPS showed the targeted vehicle turning into a bar and restaurant’s parking lot, he asked for his passenger’s help. “Can you send that destination to Father?”
“Okay.” Josh tapped his screen. “I sent it.”
The young hunter elevated his chin toward the cabin microphone. “Do you see it yet? They’re in a parking lot.”
“I’ve got it. Careful with your drive by. I’ll assess the nearby lots for parking.”
Dianne’s truck passed through a motorized chain link fence and into a lot that oozed the desire for privacy. “Josh, can you take a video from down low in your window? I’m going to drive by the back and through this neighboring lot.”
“Yeah. That’s easy.”
Liam stopped at the last intersection before the establishment of interest. “Easy, huh? You got it rolling yet?”
“Yes.”
He wanted Josh to video everything, but he respected the limits of his understanding. “You’re doing great, Josh. Okay. Get a shot of all the trucks you can. Once that’s done, let me know.”
The light changed, Liam rolled the Kurga forward, and the lot came into view. From the corner of his eye, he counted the two men from Dianne’s vehicle greeting a lone guard at the door.”
“Go ahead, Josh. Get the trucks.”
“I got the trucks.”
Aiming his nose towards traffic, Liam minimized the suspicion to witnesses, but he knew if anyone saw Josh with his phone, the mission would blow up. “Wait! Never mind.”
“Never mind?”
“Too many people are looking around now.” He suspected they’d become paranoid as they moved the girls from the truck to the building.
“There they are!”
Behind the private parking area, Liam turned into a convenience store’s lot. Adjoining its retail neighbor, the small store shared a tall chain fence with a wall of ivy. The young hunter slowed the vehicle in hopes of giving Josh a view. “Anything?”
“No, it’s too thick.”
“Did you see Dianne?”
“No.”
“But they’re unloading the girls from her truck into the building, right?”
“Yes.”
The autism became frustrating during rapid communications. “Okay, then this is the place. I’m going to circle back to the other side of the road at what looks like a bridal shop. It’ll have lower security protection than a convenience store.”
The elder hunter’s voice filled the cabin. “Can you see the lot from the bridal shop?”
“Yes, but not all. They have ivy over a lot of the view. Josh was able to video the trucks through the gaps, but it’ll be tough.”
“You don’t see a better option?”
“I don’t. We could back out of traditional surveillance and leave this to the empath and GPS trackers.” The suggestion sounded distasteful as he uttered it.
From his phone connection to the Fiat, he heard Nana’s protest. “Bridal shop? What’s wrong with you? I owned one for forty years. You send me in. I take care of everything”
CHAPTER 29
With both cars parked behind the bridal shop. Liam followed his new five-person team into the store’s foyer. Though gaps in the ivy across the street allowed modest spyin
g, the vantage point was insufficient.
Unless he could see better, Dianne would be carted away on a random outbound truck, and he’d need her telepathy to give him a hope of identifying the vehicle carrying her.
With five trucks having appeared on her brother’s video, Liam judged himself lacking in tracking abilities. He wanted to rectify that first.
But Nana was leading the charge.
The grandmother frowned as she caressed frilly, laced dresses of off-white colors that hung upon racks. Standing a with a short but spunky posture, a woman in her mid-sixties approached Nana and greeted her in Turkish. “May I help you?”
The Chaldean grandmother shifted gears, responding in Arabic. “Do you speak Arabic or English?”
The patron cocked her head. “I prefer English. Many of my clients come from America or the UK.”
Liam translated the comment to mean the owner knew her inventory’s value, and negotiations would be futile.
He noticed a peculiar habit about the Chaldean matriarch. Somehow, she equated sheer number of family members with strength. It was bizarre to a man who’d trained his entire life to join a two-man hunting team.
“I have my granddaughter, her fiancé, her fiancé’s father, and my grandson, the best man. We’re going to need a wedding dress, tuxedoes, and at least six bridesmaid dresses.”
“That’s wonderful. Can I help you look? Do you have a theme for the wedding party?”
Nonplused, the Chaldean grandmother struck hard. “That dress over there in your display, the Giovani. You say it’s this year’s, but it’s two-years old.”
Everyone but Nana and her jousting partner meandered towards safe corners to hide. The patron showed her poise under pressure. “Giovani’s style has been constant for several years. Perhaps you’re mistaken.”
“I doubt it, but what about that McDougal? You price it at four thousand liras. That’s five times the wholesale price.”
“We offer free alterations. That helps quite a bit, if you’re on a tight budget.” The woman’s glare was a barb precluding any pity about pricing.
As Nana scowled while formulating her counterattack, the owner switched subjects. “Are you here to buy products or to do something about those god-forsaken human traffickers across the street?”
Unable to contain himself within the charade, Liam marched to her. “What makes you ask that?”
The patron pointed to his chest. “You’re wearing body armor under your jacket.”
Liam had hoped she’d figure it out and accepted the opening. “Well, silly me. Looks like I’ve blown our cover. Now that we can talk seriously, we have someone on the inside pretending to be a victim, and we’d like to set up surveillance from here. Since the police won’t help you, we find our way to helping those who are otherwise helpless.”
The woman squinted. “Who pays you? Parents of the victims? Village elders at the source cities? I’d be surprised since half of them profit from this.”
Before Liam could ruin the conversation with an irrelevant version of a detailed truth, Connor spared him the mistake with a concise answer. “We work for a European agency. Fortunately, the costs are minimal to attack small groups like the one across the street, but we hope to stop this horrific practice with enough small successes.”
The patron seemed to accept the elder hunter’s argument. “I’ve been wanting to retire for years, but these evil men, they set up shop about three years ago and cut my profits in half. What can I do to help?”
Liam pounced on the tactical layout. “Can you get me roof access?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Great. Father, can you help me bring the drones up there?”
“Indeed. I think I see where you’re going with this, but what else is on your mind?”
“Another distraction. I see an entry point into the parking lot at the corner of the chain link fence. It’s out of site of the loading dock, but I need a backup plan in case someone walks too far on their smoke break.”
“I’ve already been the distraction. So, I can’t help you. Neither can Josh.”
“Oh, I’m not convinced of that.”
On the bridal shop’s roof, Liam doublechecked the coordinates of the parked vans he intended to track. He sent the three drones with the GPS trackers mounted atop their cargo bays over the lip of the dress shop’s roof, down to the sidewalk, and to a resting position beside the chain link fence. He spoke into his wireless headset. “I’m ready to go. I don’t see anyone looking.”
Below him and nearer to the intersection, Josh wore bright red lipstick, a fuchsia dress, and a gay rights sign written in English and Turkish.
Connor owned the final decision. “Josh, do you see anyone looking towards Liam’s drones.”
“No.”
“Send the drones, lad.”
Liam tapped an icon on each of the three controllers lying on the tarred roof. The day’s heat wafted upward, causing him to sweat. He watched the trio of aircraft rise above the nearest fence and then float back down to ground level, behind the vehicles. Within the forbidden parking lot, the drones did his bidding.
The first settled under the center of a van. He used its camera to bring it under the left rear leaf spring, farthest from the lone sentry. With gentle alignment, he aligned the craft with the curved and layered pieces of metal and then slow, upward movement brought the GPS tracker to its magnetic mount.
He backed the drone away and took a parting glance at the GPS device. Success. He tapped a command to order the drone to its landing site behind the bridal shop.
After moving to the second hovercraft’s controller, he played the same game and yielded the same results.
But with the third tracker, he couldn’t get it to stick. He wondered if excess dirt on the truck’s undercarriage precluded the connection. Instead of forcing the bad situation, he ordered the final drone back.
“I got two of three loaded. That’s all I’m doing. Bring in Josh.” He shot a glance across the roof to Connor, who laid five meters away, looking through the scope of his Heckler and Koch 416 rifle with a suppressor. “Can you see anything, Father?”
“Nothing yet. This could go on all night and into the next. The next full moon isn’t for two days, and there’s no guarantee the wraith is even here. We’re trusting our empath.”
Liam pondered the permutations. “Five trucks are expected to depart, and we’ll have to assume the women from Nadine’s village will be split across at least two of them.”
“I doubt that divine providence would consider making it any easier on us. We could be stretched thin.”
The young hunter continued his assessment. “Until we can get more intelligence from Dianne, we’re forced to watch and guess. The original truck with Nadine’s colleagues still has a GPS tracker. Dianne’s truck will obviously have Dianne, and that’s going to have to be good enough whether it has GPS or not. I’ve got one GPS tracker each onto two other trucks, but I missed one.”
Connor’s confidence was reassuring. “Let Dianne handle her own end, lad. Unless she’s facing the wraith, I pity whomever leaves this lot with her. And if we need to follow the truck without GPS tracking, I can do it the good old-fashioned way.”
“You’ll trail it? Visually?”
“Of course. With Nana and Nadine. That seems a good separation of duties.”
“Should we bring them up here? A few extra pairs of eyes couldn’t hurt.”
“No, it could hurt, unfortunately. An extra reflection from an untrained surveyor’s phone, weapon, or clothing would ruin the mission. Sorry, lad. It’s just father and son up here tonight.”
“Do you have eyes on the target?”
“At the moment? Yes.”
Liam rolled to his back and stared at the stars. “Tell me a bedtime story."
“Hah! To put us both to sleep?”
“No, Father. To celebrate that we’re both here after defeating a wraith in Michigan, and to get our minds around the concept of de
feating the next one.”
Ten minutes later, Josh appeared on the roof. His dress was gone, but a tenacious wiping effort remained ahead of him to remove the remaining lipstick.
“I thought you didn’t want anyone else up here.”
Connor answered over this shoulder. “I didn’t. Josh, get down please.”
“Never mind, Josh. Just head back down and I’ll follow you.” Liam crawled to the roof access door and descended rickety wooden steps to a back room. “What’s going on?”
“Dianne contacted me.”
“Telepathically?”
“Yes.”
“What’d she say?”
“She said she’s okay, but the place is seedy and disgusting.”
“Did she show you any images of her truck’s drivers?”
“Yeah, just to be sure we were in the right place.”
“And we are?”
“yes.”
“Did she add anything else, like how they’re going to separate the women?”
“It looks like an auction.”
Complete randomness and unpredictability. “Well, we’ll deal with that when the time comes.”
CHAPTER 30
Edric paced the floor in front of the auction stage.
Something bothered him.
Unsure why he’d shown up, he questioned if his Master had urged him to buy one or more girls. After killing for sport three days ago, he expected to survive without scratching the itch again until the full moon tributes of his three Syrian captives.
But he was here, intending to purchase Iraqi toys from the latest inventory.
Given his limited jail cells, he found the concept illogical. Three of the four pens held Syrians, and he saw the acquisition of new women distracting. Sensing the buzz and energy of the other of bidders, he realized his competitive nature was playing a factor in his presence, placing him at danger of buying women for whom he had no place.
Then he rationalized that killing, cutting, and incinerating his purchases required no storage. He could buy all he needed, and he trusted he’d find a way to dispose of them.
But the hunger was missing. Every appetite, even killing, followed a natural rhythm of feeding, digesting, resting, and hungering again. Nothing within him suggested a growing hunger for committing casual homicide.
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