“Pulling my—” She stopped as the meaning caught up to her. Flirting. Was Finn trying to say he’d been flirting with her, on some deeper level than his usual Finn, Michael Finn interactions with women? Before Talia could compose anything close to a suitable response, they came to the 267 feeder. “Take the U-turn under the next overpass,” she said. “We need to run a surveillance detection route.”
“I know how to run an SDR.”
“Then run one.”
“I am.”
“No, you’re heading straight for Wolf Manor. Take the U-turn.”
Finn flipped on the hazards and slammed on the brakes. Cars whizzed by on either side.
Talia checked behind them. “What are you doing?”
He put the Audi in park. “I came to this team with skills of my own, Talia. I bring value. I’m not the chosen one like you, but I’m not support staff to be called up by the ring of a bell either.”
A car swerved around them, horn blaring.
“You win, okay? You have value. Drive.”
“Whatever you say, your highness.” He punched the gas.
The chosen one. Your highness. She figured it out. “You’re not flirting with me. You’re mad because you’re not the center of attention.”
“Flirting?” He signaled left, heading for the same U-turn she’d indicated a few moments before. “Who said anything about flirting?”
“You did.”
He took the corner at high speed, tires squealing through the curve. “You’re unbelievable.”
For the rest of the drive, Talia let Finn make the decisions, even when she would have taken a different road. Best not to provoke the man at the wheel. And by the time he pulled into the circle drive, he seemed like himself again.
“For the record,” she said as they both got out, “I don’t see you as support staff.”
“Right. Then what am I?”
A crash and a tinkling saved her from having to answer. Darcy and Mac had been loading up a pair of cargo vans and dropped one of the crates. Silver discs like plug nickels lay strewn about the drive. Both had dropped to their knees to scoop them into piles.
Talia glanced at Finn across the roof of the Audi. “Should we ask?”
“Do you want to help pick those up?”
“No.” She had important business to discuss with Tyler.
“Then let’s go inside.”
Finn went upstairs, but Talia headed straight for the great room and Tyler. “I’m in.”
“You’re not in.” He lounged in a leather chair, playing with a novelty toy—a magnetic ball and a copper tube with a long slot cut out of the side.
“Why not? For the last week, you’ve practically begged me to join you.”
“Begged is an overstatement. I’ll admit, your involvement would greatly improve our odds of success”—he dropped the magnet into the tube and watched it slowly descend as if magically resisting gravity—“but you’re not in.”
“Who’s not in?” Eddie emerged from the kitchen with a miniature tart in each hand—one lemon, one strawberry.
Talia’s hands went to her hips. “We literally just ate at Bill and Wendy’s place.”
“But Conrad made them.” The geek popped the strawberry tart into his mouth, chewing and repeating his question at the same time. “Who’s not in?”
Tyler caught his magnet and dropped it into the tube again. “Talia.”
“Talia’s out?”
“She was never in.”
“Hey.” Talia glared at both men. They were doing this on purpose. She could tell by the smirk on Eddie’s strawberry-stained lips.
The magnet dropped from the bottom of Tyler’s pipe. He caught it and looked up. “Yesterday, you left no doubt you wanted nothing to do with this job. Now you want in. I need a good reason.”
Talia opened her box of adoption paperwork and removed the file she had slipped inside—Jenni’s file. She tossed it in his lap. The page with the picture of the little girl slid out a few inches.
Tyler drew the paper out and held it at arm’s length, finding a focal point for the small print. “Missing children. In . . . Ban Doi Henga . . . Thailand.” He lowered the page. “What’s this?”
“Thirty-four children went missing during a fire on the Thai/Myanmar border. You said Boyd’s crowdsourced crime syndicate has a hand in human trafficking through Rangoon. I think this is him.”
“Could be coincidence.”
Without looking, Talia pointed at the geek. “Eddie, what did we learn about coincidence at the Farm?”
Silence.
Tyler raised an eyebrow.
Talia dropped her shoulders and glanced back. “Anytime now, Eddie.”
He was licking his fingers, still chewing his second tart. “You told me it was rude to talk with my mouth full. You can’t have it both ways.” He swallowed hard and wiped his lips. “The textbook answer is ‘There are no coincidences in intelligence, only overlaps and intersections.’”
“See. Operational overlap.” Talia flicked the paper in Tyler’s hand. “Your favorite. Look at that report. On a per-deal basis, human trafficking is the most lucrative illicit trade in Asia.”
“So?”
“So, this kidnapping is too close to Boyd’s Frenzy—both in time and geography. It has to be one of his big players. The Hyena or the Liger or . . .” She signaled Eddie for a little help.
“The Hyena, the Snow Leopard, the Clouded Leopard, or the Maltese Tiger. But it could also be one of the three hungry panthers competing to supplant them, or the big boss himself—the White Lion.”
Talia gave Tyler a What he said look. “You hate coincidences as much as I do. This kidnapping is connected to Boyd’s Jungle. It has to be. So am I in?”
“Nothing that caused your earlier reservations has changed. You understand? I—” He glanced past her toward Eddie, as well as Finn, Mac, Darcy, and Val, who had all walked in from the kitchen. “We will follow this rabbit hole wherever it leads. Even if that effort digs up past skeletons you don’t want to see.”
Talia took the file and showed him the picture of the little girl. “For her? I’ll take the risk.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-
ONE
BAN DOI HENGA REFUGEE CAMP
THAI/BURMA BORDER
MAE HONG SON PROVINCE, THAILAND
EWAN FERGUSON ARRIVED on scene to find refugees tearing charred bamboo huts apart, salvaging what they could. A sea of cots lay outside an Order of Malta clinic tent. Doctors and nurses in masks and street clothes moved among them, treating burns and smoke injuries. Spellbound by the calm and care of the medical workers, Ewan bumped into one of four men dragging fresh bamboo out of the jungle. He reached out. “Sorry. So sorry.”
The men never looked back.
Controlled chaos. The Thai way.
The child of a Scottish missionary and a Thai schoolteacher, Ewan understood both the Eastern and Western philosophies of time and order, and where the two clashed. That merger of language and culture had given him the advantage when he applied to become Compassion International’s Director of Thailand Operations four years earlier. His mother had gone so far as to say God had purposed him for the position. While Ewan knew better than to argue with a Thai schoolteacher, let alone his own mother, inside he wondered whether the Lord created people for lifelong careers or for specific moments like this one.
“Excuse me.” He caught the attention of a woman hurrying past. “Where is the church?” In his memory, the church building and the school pavilion rested at the top of the highest hill in the camp. All he saw now were ash and charred trees.
The woman pointed to the same spot.
His heart sank. “And Pastor Nakor? Where is he?”
Sadness joined the misery in her eyes.
“Teacher Rocha?”
She bowed her head and walked on toward the medical tent.
Dear Lord, help me discover what happened here.
God was with him.
Ewan knew by the miracle which had brought him there so quickly—a perfect storm of circumstance. Travel and communications were difficult in Thailand, especially where the mountain borderlands were concerned. There were no phone lines, no cell towers. The dirt roads were muddy death traps from June to October.
By God’s grace, this fire had hit the camp in December, when the roads were passable and the Order of Malta was on site for the season. The Order had a sat phone, and their Thai coordinator was a member of Ewan’s Bangkok church. What should have taken a week or more between notification and safe travel had taken a day and a half.
“Pastor Nakor? Teacher Rocha?”
Each passerby continued on in post-disaster shock or sadly shook their heads. A few looked up to the charred hilltop. Ewan feared what he might find there. The Order of Malta always collected remains as quickly as possible, but the living took priority over the dead.
Remains. He didn’t want to think about it. Ewan clutched the satchel at his side, feeling the binder full of profiles within. If Pastor Nakor and Teacher Rocha were gone, what had happened to the children? He had expressed his concern on that score to Jenni Lewis, his State Department contact.
There were thirty-four profiles in that binder—thirty-four children in this camp center, out of the more than forty-eight thousand spread across Compassion’s Thailand facilities. Ewan’s heart broke to think of even one of them in pain.
The fineness, the utter softness, of the ashes where the church had stood struck him as peaceful. Blackened cinder blocks showed him the four corners of the vanished structure. Across the yard, one charred and stubborn rosewood pylon spoke of the pavilion. These sights hurt his heart, but the scent of the place gave him hope. The hilltop smelled of campfires, not death. Ewan had experienced the scent of deadly fires before. There were no bodies hidden in these soft ashes. The children were alive.
Someone touched his shoulder.
“Master Fer . . . Ferg-u-son.” The woman, about his own age, struggled with his name, which had never fit well with the Thai tongue. “You are here.”
They had been acquainted before. Obviously. For the woman had known him by the back of his head. But a name did not readily come to mind. “Forgive me, Mrs. . . .”
“I am Eh Taw. You were here when Pastor Nakor welcomed my daughter into the center program.”
“Yes.” Ewan took her hand. “I remember now. Your daughter is Hla Meh.”
The remembered fact earned him a fleeting smile.
He clung to one last hope. “Can you take me to Hla Meh now?”
The woman’s fingers tightened on his. She spoke with a voice broken and hard at the same time. “Come. The other parents have gathered in the yard at the center of the camp.”
The parents mobbed Ewan at the edge of the yard.
Again, controlled chaos. The Thai way.
He could not blame them. Ewan had a daughter of his own. Eleven going on twenty. How devastated and desperate he would feel if she disappeared in a fire.
Mothers cried. Fathers yelled. After a great deal of shouting for calm and listening to rapid accounts, Ewan gathered that the fire had taken place at the end of the school day. The flames had separated parents from children and spread into the huts. Eh Taw introduced him to Hsar, the woman who’d organized a bucket brigade from the river.
Hsar held her place at the front of the crowd with outstretched arms. “I was present at the last fire at Ban Doi Henga. My son, Thet Ye, was born that night.”
“Thet Ye. I remember. Smart boy.” He had been among the first from the camp to join the program. A sponsor family in the States had fallen in love with his profile, then him, and now sent him monthly letters to encourage his faith and studies. Hla Meh did not have sponsors yet, but there was still time. Perhaps.
Hsar told him how the refugees had worked the whole night to stop the fire, and Eh Taw made certain he understood Hsar herself had led the efforts. Hsar quieted her friend with a calming hand. “My husband only returned this morning from the rice fields in the next valley, hours after the fire went out. And still, the cinders burned his feet when he ran to the hill.”
“And the children?”
“Tell him.” Hsar placed her hands on Eh Taw’s shoulders.
Eh Taw’s face contorted with grief. “I should have listened. I should have trusted.”
She struggled to continue.
Ewan pressed her. “Trusted who?”
“My daughter. Hla Meh warned me of men near the camp. She claimed they were militiamen from across the border.” She began to sob. “I did not believe her. The militias are the reason we fled our homes—the reason my husband is dead. Fire is their favorite weapon.”
So Eh Taw’s husband was gone, but not Hsar’s, Thet Ye’s father. And according to Hsar, he had returned from the rice fields. Why wasn’t he here, with his wife? “Hsar, you said your husband burned his feet in the cinders. Is he at the medical tent?”
“No, Mr. Ferg-u-son. Po left an hour before you arrived.”
“To go where?”
“To track down the men who took our son.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-
TWO
MAE SURIN JUNGLE
MAE HONG SON PROVINCE, THAILAND
THET YE WORRIED ABOUT HIS MOTHER.
His parents had survived the fire. He had no doubt. They had survived the previous fire at Ban Doi Henga and brought him into the world at the same time. They were survivors. But his mother had once told him, after he had run off into the camp without permission, her heart would break if she ever lost him.
He believed her. He did not want to picture her crying.
The red light of the rising sun filtered through the jungle canopy, casting scattered rays on the marching column of children.
Thet Ye’s third full day with his captors had started much like the first, with a lot of yelling and shoving in the dark as the soldiers herded the children into formation. There had been less crying that morning, except for Aung Thu. Thet Ye did not know how the older boy managed it. Thirst alone left Thet Ye’s heart too dry for tears.
After the fire, the soldiers had marched the children through the night to a jungle camp, where they slept like sheep in a pen of barbed wire. By noon, the children were on the march again, and the first and second full day progressed much the same, with shoving, shouting, and tears. The column plodded along at a crawl. Children tripped and fell. Soldiers hauled them to their feet. And on they marched to another barbed-wire pen.
At each stop, two soldiers checked the children for burns and cuts, and treated them with balm and bandages. Teacher Rocha begged them to help the pastor too. The soldiers ignored her.
With no balm or bandages of her own, she had torn pieces of her sleeves and pant legs into strips. The soldiers passed a canteen around the group once every few hours. She used her ration to wet the strips and bind Pastor Nakor’s burns. Three days in, after wetting and wrapping and re-wetting and re-wrapping, the strips looked like pieces of torn flesh clinging to his body.
Thet Ye worried about Pastor Nakor as much as he worried about his mother.
He worried about Hla Meh too. He could not get her to look at him. He’d tried to reach her during the nights in the pens, but the soldiers always forced him back to his place—once with a slap to the cheek. “Shut up, boy. Sit down!”
Now, in the growing heat of a new day, Hla Meh marched far ahead. The soldiers had put the girls up front to set the pace. Thet Ye plodded along at the back with Aung Thu, beside Pastor Nakor and Teacher Rocha. She needed the boys’ help to get him over trees and up steep hills.
As they struggled up the worst hill yet, Teacher Rocha mumbled prayers. Thet Ye heard her sob a little too.
At the top, Pastor Nakor whispered comfort. “We’re going to make it. We stay with the children, and we see them through this. God will make a way.”
The pastor’s right leg crumpled on his very next step. The boys and the teacher lost their hold
s on his wounded body, and he fell into a depression hidden by the undergrowth.
“What is this?” The teenage soldier from the day Hla Meh had chased the butterfly stomped through underbrush. “Get up, old man. March or I will shoot you!”
Teacher Rocha could not get the pastor up fast enough. The young soldier dragged him to his feet, and Pastor Nakor cried out in pain from the strain on his wounds.
The soldier hit him with the stock of his gun. “Quit moaning and walk.”
Thet Ye clenched his fists in anger. He wanted to rush the teen—not much bigger than himself—hit him, anything to punish him for hurting Pastor Nakor. Teacher Rocha must have felt the same way. When the teen stomped off, she took a step to follow.
The pastor caught her arm with a weak hand. “No. Don’t you see? He is a child, enslaved by these men like all the rest, and just as frightened. He knows no other way.”
Could Thet Ye have heard him correctly? The boy who yelled and hurt the pastor. The boy who carried a machine gun. Could he be as frightened as Thet Ye and Aung Thu? Thet Ye could not imagine such a thing. But Pastor Nakor had never spoken anything but truth.
The light on the underbrush grew brighter. The trees were thinning. Not far beyond the girls, Thet Ye saw a dirt road. Soe Htun, their leader with the burn scars on his hands, barked orders, and the forward soldiers ran to the edge and kneeled, weapons ready. The rest quieted the children with shouted threats.
In the silence, Thet Ye heard a rumble. Soe Htun spoke into a radio. A voice answered back, and he signaled the men at the road to lower their guns. Two covered trucks drove into view, dust billowing around them.
“Go!” Soe Htun yelled. “Get them loaded!”
The soldiers bellowed in earnest. Some picked up the smaller girls, one under each arm. The trucks’ tailgates dropped. Thet Ye found himself separated from Teacher Rocha and Pastor Nakor, hurrying through the brush in a cluster of his friends. He scrambled onto one of the tailgates. Aung Thu pulled him deeper into the bed, and the two huddled together in the grit.
The tailgate slammed closed. The canvas flaps dropped, leaving them in darkness. The engines growled. The floor shook. The tires ground over the gravel. They were moving.
Chasing the White Lion Page 9