by Dale Mayer
“Then take a bathroom break here,” he said, “because we’re on the road again in five minutes.”
Back in the vehicle, Asher drove steadily, heading back to the house where they had picked up the woman. They had no idea if the other kidnappers had come back or not. The Mavericks team had assigned somebody local to watch the house, according to Asher’s instructions, but Asher never heard back as to whether anybody had showed up here. He parked outside, turned to Ryker, and said, “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Don’t you want Ryker with you?” Mickie asked, leaning forward.
“No. I’ll send a signal if I need backup.”
“Good enough.” Ryker shifted back in his seat and waved him off.
Asher walked up to the neighbor’s side fence and followed it behind the house and slipped inside the same window he’d been in before. Then he stopped, listening for the sounds around him. Older houses made lots of creaking noises but weren’t necessarily sounds of life. Asher and Ryker hadn’t been told that anybody had returned to the house, but, according to the satellite, somebody had. That didn’t mean that they had come inside though.
Would they have left the sister locked up? Or was that just a ruse? Asher wasn’t sure. He quickly did a full scan on the lower level and then moved upstairs, only to confirm what he had been afraid of. The house itself was completely empty. As he sat here, he stared out the window, studying the layout and the neighbors.
A vehicle pulled up into the driveway. The lights shut off, and two men got out.
Immediately his phone buzzed. He pulled it out and said, “I see it.”
He watched as the two men approached the front door. They weren’t talking. They looked fed up. Asher slipped into the closet in the hallway and waited with the door slightly ajar so he could hear. The conversation was rapid-fire, and it was loud enough that he quickly recorded it, wondering if they spoke English at all. He ran the tape through a translator on his phone to get the gist of the conversation. They had needed money, and they need more money now. They had to get the twins back for the original supplier, but now they were in more trouble with the hospital who wanted money to pay for their services already rendered. They’d been forced to steal the women out of there and now had to pay a friend to keep them. They would ask their boss for more money because they weren’t expecting the medical expenses.
Well, that meant the fifty thousand deposited in the one brother’s account was all they got. No cash payment had been given to them after all.
As he listened and read the translation, he realized that one brother probably didn’t know about the money in the account of the other brother. Asher couldn’t tell which brother was saying they needed more money, but one was more adamant than the other. Chances were the one who didn’t know about the bank account was more insistent because otherwise, although it would suck to tap into the money that they had counted as a profit for themselves, it was a necessary cost of doing this kind of business.
Just then they froze and called out, “Who’s there?” The men went silent.
Asher quickly sent Ryker a message, only to have Ryker send back his reply.
I’m still outside. It’s not me.
With that, everything changed. Asher quickly pocketed his phone, hoping like hell that Mickie had stayed in the car.
Only to hear a woman’s voice snap, “You fools.”
And he realized the sister had somehow been released and was back home again. He used the translation app on his phone to understand the conversation.
“Why?” one brother asked. “Why the hell are you not downstairs where you were supposed to be?”
“Because I was helped to escape,” she said sarcastically. “Government assassins are after you now.”
There was a shocked silence, and then both men yelled and screamed over each other’s words to be heard.
And Asher realized that the sister he had rescued, who didn’t know what her brothers were doing—maybe not in all the details, certainly knew enough.
“You must return the women now,” she snapped.
“We can’t,” he said. “You know that we’ll get in further trouble if we do that. We’re supposed to keep them until we’re told what to do.”
“And yet, you already took them to a private hospital,” she sneered. “And the assassins know about that. They know that you’ve got them on a boat up the coast.”
“They can’t know that,” one cried out.
“But they do,” she snapped. “They have satellite images. They followed you. They found you from the hotel, and they tracked your vehicle all the way.”
“No,” one said in a breathless voice.
“Yes,” she spat. “And they’ll be here any second. If they aren’t already.” She started to laugh. “Good God, did you guys screw up or what?”
“We didn’t screw up at all,” the other brother said, his tone much more measured and controlled. “Did you tell them?”
She caught her breath in her throat. “Tell them what?” She tried to lie.
“You did, didn’t you? Even though you knew it was our way of getting out of here, you lied to us. You gave us up, didn’t you?”
“No,” she roared. “I didn’t know anything. Remember?”
But there was a hard smack, followed by her cry of pain.
“Tell us the truth,” that brother said. “Did you tell them?”
“No,” she said, but her voice was cut off, and a strangled scream erupted and then went dead silent.
Asher winced. He didn’t know if she’d been silenced permanently, but she’d said all she would say for a long time. And, with that, he made his move.
Chapter 9
Mickie waited alone in the car on the back seat, under a blanket, so nobody would see that she was here. She hated to think that the men would be very long. But, at the same time, she’d asked to come when Asher had gone in alone, and she’d been shocked and surprised when Ryker had disappeared almost as quickly. Now her surprise had turned to worry. The last thing she wanted was to be left alone in the vehicle, but she also knew she wouldn’t hold her own in a fight. And what she’d understood from Ryker was that both brothers had just returned home. She waited and waited until finally her phone rang. She answered it quietly. “Hello?”
“It’s me. You can come inside the house.”
She immediately sat up and looked around, seeing the light cresting in the horizon. “Is it safe?”
“As safe as it’ll get,” he said grimly. “Both brothers and the sister came home at the same time. The police must have released her, but the brothers killed her.”
Mickie gasped in horror. “I’m coming in,” she said. “Are you sure she’s dead?” She crossed the road and swiftly raced up the front steps and pushed the door open. There, she was met by a macabre scene. She pocketed her phone, walked over, and bent to check the woman’s neck for a pulse. “They broke her neck,” she said in horror.
“Yes. They figured out that she had told us where the twins were.”
“But she didn’t really,” she said. “She just told us they went up the coastline.”
“But also gave up the hospital.”
“True,” she said. She turned to look at the two unconscious men. “These men could be the kidnappers, but I really don’t know.”
“But it’s possibly them?” Ryker asked.
“Yes, the same build and roughly the same height. But the original guys came in with weapons.”
“We haven’t found any weapons here,” they said. “Do you have any idea what the weapons were?”
She shook her head. “No, I really don’t. I’ve thought about it since, but it all happened so fast, and I was knocked out so damn fast that I didn’t really have much chance to determine if it was a handgun or a rifle or just a stick.”
“Exactly,” Ryker said. “It could have been anything.”
She sagged onto the closest piece of furniture and said, “Now what?” Then she motioned at t
he two men, still unconscious on the floor. “We can’t leave them here, can we?”
“No,” he said. “We need to get some answers from them before turning them over to the authorities.”
“How will you wake them up?” she asked with a broken laugh. “They look like they’re out for the count.”
“They are,” Asher said. But then he pulled something from his pocket and broke it in his fingers. He held the vial under the nose of the one. He came to with a half roar, lunging up from the ground, only to come in contact with Asher’s hard fist. He sat him in a chair, Ryker quickly tying him up. “Now,” he said, “you can talk.”
But the man stared up at him, bleary-eyed, with a fury that terrified her, even though he was secured. She understood a little bit of the language but not enough. Asher was running the conversation through a translator.
“You killed your sister,” Asher said in a conversational tone. “See? I already know that you’ll go to jail.”
“She’s a woman,” he said. “She betrayed us. We won’t get jail time.”
Asher’s eyebrows shot up. He looked over at Mickie, and she shrugged.
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” she said. “The law here is not exactly the same as American standards.”
“That’s too bad,” he said to the man, “because your sister didn’t betray you.”
The brother’s eyes widened, and Mickie could see a shadow in his gaze but didn’t understand what it meant.
“Of course, it might have been your other brother who did it though,” Asher taunted him.
Immediately his fury and rage spewed forth.
Asher waited until this brother calmed down and said, “So we know that you took the twins out onto a friend’s boat. But we want to know where the twins are right now.”
The man shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s supposed to take them up the coast for a while.”
“And how will you get a hold of him?”
“We weren’t. They would get a hold of us for the next step.”
“In which case, they would have contacted you already,” Ryker said.
At that, the brother just stared at him but stayed quiet.
“Fine,” Ryker said. “We’ll call the authorities and get rid of this bloody mess here. Two brothers will go down for their sister’s murder, and we’ll be on our way.”
“No, we should empty his bank account first,” Asher said. “It’s obvious that he’s been paid to kidnap these American women, so that’ll be an international incident, and we’ll make sure that the Swiss government knows all about it. Not to mention the American government.”
“You don’t know anything,” the brother said in English.
“Oh, I’m glad you speak English,” Asher said. “That makes life easier. So, where’s the money from?”
The brother went silent.
Asher shrugged. “I don’t give a shit. Jail is too good for him. Let’s bring him back dead.”
“No, we need to make an example out of him,” Ryker said. “They can’t go kidnapping citizens of the Western world and hold them for ransom or for whatever the hell they want.”
“Well, a couple elements are at work here. Who actually paid them to do the kidnapping and who is it that they’re supposed to be ransoming them for? Because I still have trouble with this whole wedding thing.”
At the word wedding, the brother’s expression switched to one of confusion.
“Oh, is your English not that good?” Ryker asked.
“My English is fine,” he said. “What’s this about a wedding?”
Mickie wanted to jump in and pound answers out of him now.
“Why are you holding the women?” Asher asked instead. “You tell us that much.”
“I was paid to,” he said.
“Of course,” Asher said, as if that made perfect sense. Which according to him, it probably did. “But for what purpose?”
“They wanted them out of the way,” he said.
“Permanently?”
“No, it was supposed to be for a few days to a week, depending on how much trouble there would be getting the ransom.”
At that, Asher and Ryker exchanged looks.
“Do you know why they wanted them out of the way?”
“Pawns in a chess board, they said.”
“Well, we get that. Are you releasing them when the ransom is paid?”
Again the brother shrugged.
“Will you hand them off to somebody else?”
At that, he shifted uncomfortably but stayed quiet.
“Were you to pick them up for somebody in particular?”
“Look. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was offered a lot of money to pick them up at the hotel and to hold them for a week at most. That’s all I know.”
“And what will you do with them in a week?”
“I’m just holding them,” he said. “When I get the word, I release them.”
“Where will you release them?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t been told.”
“Sounds like bullshit to me,” Mickie said.
Asher looked over at her, smiled, and said, “I would think so.”
The brother looked at her and then slowly realized who she was. “I should have killed you,” he snapped.
“You should have, yes,” she said. “Because I’m the twins’ nurse. And if you’ve hurt them …”
“Doesn’t matter if I have or not,” he said. “You’ll never see them again.”
And that stopped her and Asher cold.
“What do you mean by that?” Asher asked.
But the brother wouldn’t say another word. Asher grabbed Mickie’s hand and said, “Come on. I want to walk outside for a few minutes.”
“And why is that?” Still, she went with him willingly into the kitchen. Anything to get away from the death behind her. But when she heard a hard smack and a muffled groan, she froze, her breath caught in her chest.
But Asher wasn’t having anything to do with it. He moved her outside. “We need answers,” he said calmly. “That man is only holding out from giving them to us because he thinks that we won’t push the line.”
“What line?” she asked in a daze.
“That we won’t hurt him,” he said. “And he’s wrong. We’ll do whatever we need to in order to get the twins back.”
After all, the whole purpose of this mission, job, op was all about getting the twins home. Nothing else really mattered. Certainly not the scum who had kidnapped them, not even about the mastermind of this mess. She nodded, looked up at him, and whispered, “I know. And it’s okay. I understand. Do what you must do.”
Asher didn’t know if it was Mickie’s nursing training or her time spent with Doctors without Borders or if she had just come to a point in time in life where she understood, but he was glad that he and Ryker had her acceptance. It was much harder to fight off somebody who was supposed to be part of their team, and yet, disagreeing with their tactics. He waited until Ryker called out, and then Asher said, “Stay here at the kitchen. Don’t come into the living room, okay?”
She crossed her arms over her chest but said, “Fine.”
He quickly returned to where Ryker was.
“He said the pickup and delivery would be in different places,” Ryker said as Asher joined him.
Asher looked down at the man, whose eye was puffy and swollen and who now had a missing front tooth. “Which is only to be expected,” he said, “so I hope he had more to offer than that.”
“The pickup was ordered by a woman, but it’s to be delivered to a man.”
“Which still doesn’t help us much.”
“The voice was Western-speaking.”
“Well, that’s a little bit useful. Does he know who it was?”
“No,” Ryker said. “Said he never heard the voice again.”
“How did they know to contact him?”
“He’d done a job for somebody else a while back.”
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“And who was that?”
“He’s not talking. And, as it’s out of the scope of what we really care about, I wouldn’t suggest we move in that direction.”
“I’m fine with that,” Asher said, “but I need more information.”
At that, the prisoner moaned and said, “I don’t know where they were supposed to go afterward.”
“Well, you must know something,” Asher said in exasperation. “You don’t just take a phone call, go pick up and transport two people in the dark, and turn around and keep them for a week for no reason.”
“A lot of money,” he said.
“Sure, but are they part of the sex trade? We’ve got another case involving human trafficking,” he said. “Believe me. We’re trying to track down a lot of women.”
But his prisoner shook his head. “No, no, nothing like that.”
“So, who is picking up the girls?”
“An old friend. He’s coming in to save them.”
At that, they froze. “Are you sure?”
He nodded.
“And why the hell would he do that?”
He shrugged.
“Does this have anything to do with a wedding?”
“No clue,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
“The mother is a famous wedding planner.”
“I don’t think so,” he repeated.
“Was the mother involved in this?”
The man stared at him in confusion, the question not really entering his brain.
Asher tried again. “I’m asking you if the twins’ mother is involved in this.”
“I don’t think so.”
“And who is the man who’ll rescue them?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“When and where is this rescue supposed to happen?”
“Within a few days maybe. Out on the water.”
“Interesting,” Asher said. “Right now even? While they’re out there in your friend’s fishing boat?”
He shrugged. “When we get word.”
“And did you tell your friend holding the women on this fishing boat that this is happening?”
He slowly shook his head.
“Then this rescue will likely end up with him dead. Is that the idea?”