Deadly Ties (32 page)

“She won’t let him wallow long.”

Joe’s eyes lit with interest. “I think I like this woman.”

“Hadn’t considered it, but you two probably would hit it off.”

“I don’t know. She’s probably too smart for me.”

Mark grunted. “She’s brilliant. You’re not. But balance is a good thing between a man and woman.”

“Not cool, bro.” Joe headed toward his vehicle. “But I’ll let it slide because you’re wounded.”

“Wounded?”

Joe didn’t turn around or look back. “Lisa outwitted you. Bad. You’re wounded.”

She had and he was. “Tell Tim I’m sorry.”

Joe held up his arm and shot out a thumbs-up.

His pride pricked, Mark got in the truck and slammed the door.

Juan wisely kept his mouth shut, and Roxy gave Mark a radio respite; time to lick his wounds. Wise. Otherwise he might take off somebody’s head.

He continued south, and when they cleared town, he phoned Masson, who instructed him to go to Brownsville and cross the border into Mexico, then head toward Tampico, Tamaulipas, hanging close to the coastline—Juan’s home, as Mark had suspected would be the case. Travel time from the border, Masson informed him, was about four and half hours.

“Got it,” Mark said.

“The cargo shipment will be monitored the entire way, Bandit, so don’t get any stupid ideas about confiscating it. The world is too small a place for you to hide from NINA.”

Easy to answer that honestly
. “I never considered it.”

The line went dead and Mark drove on. “Roxy, Masson says we’re being monitored. Looks like our next big stop is in Mexico.”

“I heard.”

“What about these other women?”

“I don’t know what to think. Chessman swears on the number.”

“Unless someone meets us at a store, we’re not getting more of them to haul on this side of the border.”

“We’ve got to go with it,” Joe said. “My nose is saying there are more women. This run was too much trouble for just the four of them.”

Mark agreed. Grudgingly, he kept driving, stopping at Dutch’s stores on the expected schedule. Apparently Lisa’s guess about Dutch’s stores had been right on target. At each stop, they were expected and encountered no trouble. Why would employees do this?

Maybe they had been coerced like Juan. Or maybe they were paid well to be blind and silent. With people it was hard to tell.

Lisa was right about another thing too. On each of the store windows, Mark saw the two signs: one on human trafficking and one for a lost pet with instructions to call Nina but with no phone number.

In the wee hours, minutes before reaching the border, Masson called with specific border-crossing directions. NINA apparently had friends working for them in that realm too. Though bitter about that, Mark was relieved they had avoided any incident. Once the dust settled in Tampico, the FBI would move in and the corrupt border guards would be arrested.

At seven o’clock Juan took the wheel, and at seven thirty he pulled into the back entrance of a heavily guarded, lavish coastal estate.

The long road was surfaced though sand-slick and bordered by sparse trees, flowering shrubs, and hundreds of pink and white and yellow flowers. Every twenty yards, there was an adobe-type wall three feet wide and six feet high with small cutouts at eye level. The walls were etched with intricate drawings. And rifle barrels protruded through the cutouts.

“Joe, you seeing this?”

“Yeah, bro. Going radio silent for a while.”

Joe was infiltrating on foot.

Lisa and the other women stepped out of the back of the truck. All of them were shaking. So was Mark.

At seven forty-five a second truck pulled in beside them and stopped. The driver, a brawny man in his late thirties with short black hair and a spider-webbed hand, jumped out and opened the back door. “Welcome to your new home. Move it.”

Women poured out.

Roxy stepped close and whispered to Mark, “Looks like we found the other women.”

Mark stared at them. Arms and legs bruised and battered. Clothing half torn from their bodies. The scent of their fear burned his nose. Most hadn’t come easily and it showed. Oddly, the bruises largely were from the neck down.
Bring higher prices at auction
. They were all pretty, muscles well toned.
Good for fighting
.

Mark moved closer to Lisa, providing a shield for cover. Roxy relayed the message about the arrival of the other women to the team.

Lisa stood transfixed by the women. What she was thinking was easy enough to imagine. “You okay?”

“I will be now.” She glanced over at the six-story home and paled.

Attuned to her, he felt her strength falter, and fearing her knees would buckle, he clasped her arm. “What is it?”

She darted her eyes, swept the building. “I know this place.”

“You do?” How could she? The first abduction.
No. Oh no
. Susan’s note ricocheted through Mark’s mind. If Lisa remembered, she’d need professional intervention to get through it.

A whimper escaped through her clamped mouth. She jerked her gaze from the expansive home to Mark. Fear flooded her eyes, oozed from her every pore. “Mr. Phen lives here.”

Her fear pulsed through him, and while he had no idea what she remembered, he could see that some connections had been made and they terrified her. “Who is Mr. Phen?”

She whimpered again.

“Lisa, who is Mr. Phen?” Mark darted a worried look at Roxy, who’d picked up on the fear too.

A tear spilled onto Lisa’s cheek. “The man who bought me the first time I was sold.”

24

T
he phone at his ear, Karl looked into his rearview mirror. The border crossing was fading fast. That was the last huge operational hurdle.

“Yes, I substituted Bandit,” Chessman said. “I would have called, but the timing was inconvenient.”

“I understand.” Just as Karl had suspected. Incarceration had its limitations. “Did you notify Raven?”

“There’s no need to bog her down in minutiae. The substitution was mission essential. It’s done. End of story. The cargo should be on the premises now.”

That bothering-the-boss bit was a backhanded reprimand about Karl’s poor management. He let the insult slide. Chessman was still stinging at being demoted. “Excellent.” The auction was set for eight o’clock that night. “Do you have an update on the patient?”

“Still comatose.”

Alive
. Dutch would be glad to hear it. Maybe. Karl was glad to hear it. He kicked the air conditioner up a notch. It was even hotter here than in Seagrove Village. Apparently NINA had remedied its employee gap on the hospital site since Rose’s hasty departure. It hadn’t taken long. It never did. “I’ll notify the client.”

“That about wraps this one up.”

“Just about.”
Sweet. Nearly done and slick as glass
.

“Well done, Karl.”

No way was that sincere. Chessman wanted Karl to fall flat on his face so their roles would be reversed again, and only a fool wouldn’t know it. “Thank you.”

“About that other little matter.”

Kelly Walker
. Chessman wanted her dead too. She was the reason he was in jail, and the man did hold a decent grudge.

“Won’t be long now.” The air was still hot. Karl hit the AC again. When he got to the coast, at least it wouldn’t be as dusty. He hated dust. He hated heat too. Couldn’t wait to get back to Syracuse.

“Excellent.”

Essential
. Karl frowned. If he removed Walker, maybe NINA would get that artist’s rendering of his face off the U.S. post offices’ walls. Getting rid of those sketches was a worthy cause.

Chessman cleared his throat. “Still no signs of a memory return?”

Lisa Harper
. “None whatsoever. She’s been tested multiple times.”

“Her buyer will be disappointed.”

Phen was a sadistic jerk, and Chessman was right. Phen would be disappointed. He fed off fear, and Lisa’s forgetting him would stab his mammoth ego. He’d be determined to make her remember or learn to fear him all over again.

If she were going to remember, surely she would have by now. Either way, she would fear Phen. And Dutch’s wishes would be fulfilled.

Lisa would suffer.

Disjointed thoughts swirled through Lisa’s mind, memories of this grand estate: the light adobe brick and cold Saltillo tile. Six separate floors, but the first was a type of torture chamber created specifically to incite fear, to satisfy the lusts of deviates. Lisa shuddered.

“Are you all right?” Mark whispered from beside her. “What do you mean, the first time you were sold?”

She remembered it all so clearly now. Being dragged into an auditorium on the second floor. It was opulent and a lot like the one her parents had taken her to for a concert, with a wide stage and a tall, ornate dome ceiling and blue velvet curtains that stretched up so high they seemed suspended from heaven.

But in Phen’s auditorium, glimpses of hell came to life center stage.

She tried to find her voice. Gwen, Selene, and Amanda stood behind them. While quiet and watchful, their presence helped anchor Lisa and keep her emotions then and now separate, helped remind her she was no longer the child she’d been, but the woman she’d become.

“When I was seven, I was kidnapped and brought here. A man named Mr. Phen sold me, but I didn’t leave with him. I don’t know why. I tried to escape, and this little boy told Mr. Phen where I was. He caught me. It took days before I was healed enough to crawl out of bed. My buyer backed out—I was too headstrong for his tastes. He preferred his mates docile.”

Amazing, after all these years of remembering nothing, now the details returned, and they were so vivid! “Mr. Phen sold me to a new buyer in the States. A Spider was bringing me to him—I don’t know where the buyer was, I never got there. I played sick and escaped. The Spider went into a store, and I shot across the street into a dress shop. A lady there hid me.”

“So it was NINA who had you before when you were a kid?” Mark asked, pensive and tense.

“I don’t know about NINA, but Spiders were involved.” Armed men herded the women from the second truck up the road toward the house. Lisa stiffened. They’d killed her father—and she’d forgotten it. Shame washed through her. How was that possible?

Survival
.

“This is what Annie hoped you wouldn’t remember.” He filled her in on Annie’s muddled conversation in the ambulance.

Half-dead, and her mother worried about her. Tears built in Lisa’s heart and lumped in her throat. “Mark, what kind of woman am I? How could I forget this? They killed my father—”

“When this happened, you weren’t a woman, you were a child.”

He wasn’t judging her. Oh, if only she could not judge herself. “I started remembering in the truck—bits and pieces that made no sense. I wasn’t sure they were even real. But then the pieces started connecting, and when I saw this place, everything came rushing back.”

“Are you okay? Do you need to get out of here? I can take you to Harvey. He’ll know what to do to help you.”

“I’m upright.” She wouldn’t lie and say she wasn’t rattled. But Selene’s words came back to her as they often had when Lisa thought she’d fall apart.
“We don’t have that luxury.
”

It was amazing how much strength she’d found in Selene. So practical and purpose driven, she had insisted Lisa deal with whatever came and keep it in perspective. The past was past and couldn’t be changed. Did she want a future? If so, then she had to deal with the past and put it in its proper place. Otherwise, it would steal all it had and then steal her future too.

Thanks to Selene, Lisa had chosen. She would not become a victim to the past as she had become a victim to NINA, the Spiders, and Mr. Phen. “It’s a lot to process, but this is not defining my life, Mark. It’s mine, and I want it.”

Toward the center of the huddle of people, he shifted, clearly uneasy. “This kind of thing is outside my sphere of expertise, but Susan said—”

“Susan who?”

“Brandt. She left a note, and Peggy found it in your file.”

Surprise shot through Lisa. “She knew.”

He nodded. “Annie wouldn’t let anyone force you to remember. She said God would see to it in His own time.”

Lisa would have insisted on just the opposite. But the way things were working out … She’d have to think on that later. Now just wasn’t the time.

“Susan said you’d need extreme intervention to get through remembering constructively.” He paused to study her face. “You seem okay to handle this, but if you’re not, tell me and I’ll get you out.” He narrowed his eyes. “Listen to your instincts. That’s all I’m saying.”

One of the women in line stumbled. Gwen moved to help her, but Selene jerked her back. Another woman did, and a guard shoved her to the ground and planted his foot on her back.

“My gut is saying nail them.”

Pride flashed through his eyes.

“Think steel.” She hiked her chin. “Isn’t that what you, Joe, and the guys say?”

“Yes, but we’ve never been in this situation.”

But she had. “It’s good advice.” How could she reassure him? She hated that terrified-for-her look on his face. “I think I’ve already had extreme intervention. The hardships prepared me for this. So I could cope with what happened then and do what needs doing now.”

“But Susan’s note said—”

“Collect some fumes, Mark, and have faith. God’s in control.” Lisa touched his arm. “We just have to get what Roxy needs to shut these people down and lock them up. The Mexican authorities will handle the takedown. Isn’t that what Roxy said?”

“In theory, but it never works out that way. We’ll be right in the middle of it, and the takedown is always the most dangerous time.”

Lisa swept her gaze across the mansion. “The sooner it comes, the better, because I’m telling you, this place is as close to hell as exists on earth.”

“I don’t mean to beat this to death, but how can I be sure you won’t snap? Susan was explicit about the dangers—”

“I won’t snap.” Lisa leveled him with a look of fierce determination. “I told you, God has been preparing me all along. I’m not a fumes-of-faith Christian here just to serve others, and neither are you. We learn what we need so it’s there to protect us. When I was a kid, I was too little and weak to defend myself. Getting away took divine intervention. Now, I can protect myself and help protect the others. Look at me and you see extreme intervention in the form of a doctor trained in self-defense. But the Healer has given me extreme intervention my whole life.”

Mark dropped his lids, hooded his eyes. Lisa couldn’t blame him for being skeptical, but before she could say any more, men with guns formed two lines that stretched from where they were all huddled to a point toward the house beyond where she could see.

“Line up,” a man shouted. “Single file and move through the middle.”

Herded through the center between the armed men, they moved into a stone-floored courtyard. More armed men guarded its perimeter, perched on the roof. The overwhelming display of force made it clear that the women were prisoners and if they stepped out of line, they would be shot. It was a common psychological-warfare tactic, but it still had a debilitating impact.

A man walked out and stopped on the stone steps, towering above them, not seeming as large as he had the first time she’d seen him there, though he was a solid six feet and change. His hair was black, his eyes dark in the morning sun, not reflecting light. Trim and fit and tanned with broad shoulders and a thick chest, he stood clothed in a dark suit too heavy for the warm weather. He had to be sweltering, and yet he wore it for effect, down to the proverbial red tie to emanate a sense of power and authority. His message was clear.
I am the master of all in my domain. I am your master
.

Mark moved closer to her and whispered, “Who is that?”

Knowing the horrors the man was capable of, Lisa felt an icy hand slide from the base of her spine up over every vertebra to the base of her skull. All the nerves in her body throbbed simultaneously, pounding out warnings. “That’s Mr. Phen.”

A group of his armed minions circled the women standing clustered in the courtyard. One guard motioned Mark away, and he moved to the perimeter.

Mr. Phen motioned to the guard standing nearest him on the left. “It appears we are all here.”

“Yes sir. All present and accounted for, sir.”

Phen nodded. “Good morning. I am Mr. Phen.”

No one uttered a sound.