Jerricho Read online

Jerricho looked at him. “Two women? I thought Jessie was male.”

  “No. Female. No picture was in the file, but I looked it up.”

  “And the file says he,” Jerricho said. “Let’s double-check.” Jerricho quickly sent off messages, and, when the report came back later, Jessie was determined to be a she. Dammit, he typed, you need to fix that dossier. That changes things.

  “Funny how just making sure that they’re both female completely changes some of the motivations for the kidnappers,” Killian noted.

  “And not in a good way,” Jerricho said, “not in a good way at all.”

  Brenna lifted her head and looked around at their heavy canvas covering that barely classified as a tent. They had no water to drink and had been moving on the boat for hours, until they were stopped and tossed in here. Now the sun baked them, and they were dying of thirst. She looked at Jessie. “How are you holding up?”

  Jessie shook her head, smiled, and said, “I’ll be fine.”

  “You’ll be fine because we are fine or because we have no choice but to be fine?” she corrected.

  “World we live in,” Jessie said, shifting her position on the floor.

  “Which is why we were supposed to be reporting all this for the world at large, so they would know what goes on.”

  “So what happened?” Jessie asked. “We’re supposed to be pros. How did this happen?”

  “We got separated from the crowd.”

  “I think that was deliberate,” Jessie said, her face contemplative.

  “I think so too. I think two of our guides, our protective detail, separated from us.”

  “But why?”

  “No reason that I can think of,” she said. “We’re both media but not exactly one of the largest of the news corporations. Yet we’re Americans and maybe the only Americans there. Maybe we were singled out for that.”

  “Or because we’re both females,” Jessie said quietly.

  “I’m trying not to think about that,” Brenna said. “We have enough on our plate right now.”

  “I know,” she said, “but this isn’t exactly politically motivated, from what I can see.”

  “We can’t count on that either,” she said. “The fact is, we’ve been traveling steadily by boat, with no understanding of where or why. Now we’ve stopped for the heat, got out of the water, where all that thermal activity is just amplified, not to mention the sunlight reflected off the ocean either. Everybody’ll just relax for a while, and then we’ll pick up and move again.”

  “But move where?”

  “I don’t know. I thought we would be on that ship for a long time.” A terrifying incarceration in itself.

  Just then, the covering was thrown back, and water was tossed at them in one of those weird cloth bags, but Brenna quickly opened it and took a big long drink. She passed it to Jessie and warned her. “I know we’re thirsty, but we have to consider that we might need to conserve this.”

  From the light shining through the opening, even as the guard stood there, Brenna saw the ocean ahead. “We hardly even got away from the dock.”

  “Maybe we’re going back on another boat,” Jessie murmured.

  And no truer words were said. It wasn’t very long that they were stood up again. Whatever covering that they had had was completely deflated, and they were moved onto a four-wheel-drive vehicle, which took them to the docks and a new ship.

  “That’s why we were on land,” Jessie said. “They were waiting for this boat to come.”

  This one looked like junk, something put together with baling wire and twine. Brenna’s heart sank when she saw it. “Jesus,” Brenna said, “we won’t even get a life vest with this sucker, will we?”

  “How well do you swim?” Jessie asked.

  “I was on the swim team,” she said, “but swimming in a pool in a controlled environment versus out here in a panic, where Mother Nature is known for bringing up storms that will crash the biggest of ships,” she said, “not so good.”

  “Right, completely different circumstances.”

  They were shoved forward, as Brenna turned to look at one of the men and asked, “Why?” He pointed at the ship down there and barked out orders in English. She nodded and kept walking. Then she turned back to him, and she asked, “Where are we going?” She was struck immediately across the face. Crying out, she buckled under the blow. But she wasn’t given a chance to say anything more. Instead she was grabbed by both shoulders, brought to her feet again, and forced forward.

  Jessie immediately told her, “Don’t talk.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” Brenna muttered, as they were forced down the long ramp toward their newest transport. There she took a look at the men’s faces, the men helping these guys, and realized, with a sinking heart, that no future was here for her. Not a good future anyway. Smirks abounded, not one ounce of sympathy. When she hesitated, a heavy rifle butt slammed against her shoulder. And she fell onto the ramp.

  The men around her burst out laughing.

  Chapter 2

  Brenna slowly got up, made her way on board with Jessie, who was much smaller than Brenna was. They were pushed and prodded along, led to a partitioned-off section of a cargo hold. She sat down in the far corner and whispered, “Dear God, what have we gotten ourselves into?”

  “I don’t know,” Jessie said. “But did it ever occur to you that there’s room enough in here for hundreds of people?”

  “Like an old slave-trading boat, yes,” she murmured. “Or ones moving immigrants.”

  “All those boats that were charging people for safe passage.”

  “I know,” she said. “That’s probably what this was used for. Although it’s not happening quite so much anymore,” she added. “Or we don’t hear as much about it now.”

  “I wonder about that,” Jessie said. “What exactly is going on here? Do you think anybody’s looking for us?”

  “Absolutely they are,” she murmured. “I just don’t know how quickly our bosses realized we were missing.”

  Jessie dropped her head to her knees. “I really don’t want to die this way.”

  “Neither do I,” Brenna said quietly. But, in her mind, she knew that there were a whole lot worse things than dying. At the moment it looked like they were heading to one of those ends. She wiped the hair off her forehead, then whispered, “Please, somebody come rescue us.”

  “I don’t even know what we could have done differently,” Jessie said. “I do feel we were targeted. The whole thing was so smooth that they must have done it a hundred times.”

  “I tried to do everything I could,” she said. “I turned my face to the satellites. If anybody’s looking, I tried to leave clues, but what else am I supposed to do?”

  “What clues?” Jessie asked.

  “Pieces of paper with somebody’s name on it,” she said quietly.

  “Whose name?”

  “The only man I can really trust to find us,” she said. “I sure hope that the US sends a SEAL team to rescue us, but I can’t guarantee that they will. It’s too politically charged over here for them to really want to get involved.”

  “So who else would come?”

  Brenna gave a bitter laugh. “Somebody who probably wouldn’t come, even if he knew it was me.”

  “Wow, a lot of history there,” she said. “Sounds like you need to tell me about it.”

  “Nothing to tell,” she said, with a shrug. “Sometimes life is just what it is.”

  “No,” she said, “sometimes it’s way worse. Maybe you need to give me a little bit more information.”

  “We were very close,” Brenna said. “Married briefly. We split up in a very ugly fight. I ended up hooking up with another friend, and I never saw my ex-husband for a long time. Last I heard from him, he had contacted me just before I was due to marry Princeton,” she said. “I didn’t respond to his voicemail at all. I think it was supposed to be a congratulation, but all I heard was some bitterness in it.” She shrugged, st
ared out at the long history in her mind, and said, “Some things are just not very easy to sort out. Anyway the wedding didn’t go ahead, and I never had any contact from Princeton or Jerricho again.”

  “So why would you think Jerricho would be somebody who could do this?”

  “I read a couple articles about him. Then I asked a few friends of his, people in the navy back then. He had signed up with a bunch of friends, and I kept in touch with them. He made it on a SEAL team,” she said. “And then was selected to do a bunch of private missions. And this would classify as a private mission.”

  “You mean, like from the public sector?”

  “Meaning that he and maybe one other would go with the team to back them up. He was really good at infiltrating the enemy apparently.” She laughed. “He sure infiltrated my heart and then destroyed it.”

  “Sounds like you were young and stupid back then,” Jessie suggested.

  Brenna looked at her friend and burst out laughing. “I was a stuck-up bitch,” she said, “until my fiancé left me and showed me exactly what I had been,” she said. “I wasn’t very proud of myself at that moment. Princeton walked away, left me at the altar to face everybody. But not before he announced that he couldn’t possibly live with somebody who was as judgmental and as difficult to get along with as me. I was devastated, and I was mocked by all my friends for his actions.

  “It took me a long time and a lot of counseling to figure out that, although his methodology had been really rough, and his delivery had been brutal, Princeton was also right. I had a lot of good qualities, but I had let my privileged upbringing in a wealthy family destroy my inner core of who I really wanted to be. After that, I changed my entire focus and my career, went into finding the truth, and here we are,” she said in a contemplative voice.

  “Wow,” Jessie said, “most people aren’t quite so harshly truthful about their own personality.”

  “No, but I needed to face it,” she said, “and I did send Princeton an email, a long time afterward, saying that—although he had been an absolute ass and had really broken my heart and had devastated me at the time—I’m sure he would like to know that I had grown up through the process and that I was a very different person from who I was then. He emailed me back and said that he was in counseling himself because of what he’d done, knowing that he’d hurt me and had caused me such pain, and that he was still a big mess. But he was happy if I’d managed to move on because maybe that would allow him to as well.” At that, she gave a lopsided grin to Jessie. “So we never really understand what goes on inside one another.”

  “What set him off?”

  “I guess just one more of my demanding emails about the perfect wedding. You know? Bridezilla. Yeah, I was a bridezilla, and he couldn’t handle it, and he was right. He shouldn’t have to handle it,” she said. “If I ever get a chance to marry again, I think it’ll be on a beach at sunset, with just the witnesses and the minister. Anything would be a lot easier than what I went through back then. Now, every time I hear about weddings, I just get the chills.”

  “No wonder,” she murmured. “That’s hardly an easy way to go.”

  “I was also twenty-one, and maybe I was still reeling from all the headaches of my lovely relationship with Jerricho,” she said. “Really loved that man but I didn’t really know what love was. I was so in love with myself, and I had this really good ability to project, to be the person that they wanted me to be. Yet, when they found out what I was like inside, it was just bad news. I was such a bitch back then. I was raised by a bitch, an upper-class snob. My sister was a first-class bitch. I fell in line behind her. But inside, I was at odds with it all. When it all blew up, that part of me actually had a chance to step forward and to say, ‘Stop. you need to be you. You don’t need to be a clone of them.’”

  “I’m sure your parents didn’t love the wedding scenario very much.”

  “No, they absolutely trashed Princeton and basically took his business and burned it to the ground, so he could never be in the same town anymore,” she said. “I’m not happy or proud of what they did either, but the fault lies with me. I can’t blame them for everything.”

  “I’ve never heard you talk like this before,” Jessie said, quietly studying her.

  “We’ve never been in a scenario where we’re facing death quite the same either.”

  “Are they planning to kill us, do you think?”

  “I’m split,” she said. “Half of the time I think, yes, and I’m grateful. The other half the time I think, no, and I’m grateful.”

  “I guess a lot of things are worse than death, aren’t they?”

  “Especially for women, who are now captives,” Brenna said quietly.

  Jessie sucked her breath tight against her throat and said, “I was really trying not to go that direction.”

  “Try all you like,” she said. “I know that Jerricho would be perfectly capable of getting us out, but I’m not at all sure he’d care.”

  “If it’s his job, he would,” she said. “The SEALs are well-known for doing what they’re supposed to do and doing it well.”

  “But I don’t think anyone in the US will consider us important enough.”

  “But still it’s a statement to kidnap two American journalists out of a crowd like that.”

  “I just wonder if anything else is behind it or if it’s just that simple—take two women journalists. Maybe our kidnappers didn’t even know we were the media. Maybe they thought we were just assistants,” she said, with that twist of her lips. “You know how little value we women journalists have over here.”

  “Yeah, that’s another thing, isn’t it?” Jessie said. “It’s not easy being female in our industry.”

  “It’s not bad. We’ve had a chance to really grow and to really develop our skills. So, in a way, it’s been really nice, but we’re in a completely different world right now.”

  “Let’s hope,” Jessie said, “we have a better outcome than a lot of the women.”

  “I hope so,” she said, “but it’ll take someone special to save us, to rescue us. No,” Brenna corrected herself. “It takes somebody with a little bit of heart.”

  “Why do I think that you feel like you don’t deserve that?” Jessie asked.

  Brenna looked at her in surprise. “I didn’t say that.”

  “No, but everything I’m hearing is you castigating yourself for being a self-involved teenager and young adult,” she said. “Maybe you should cut yourself some slack and realize that you had to grow up. Now that you made some earlier decisions, you’ve made choices that are completely different, and you’ve developed to be who you are now. So you shouldn’t have to keep paying for that teenager or for that twenty-one-year-old.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “It doesn’t change what’s going on in our world right now though.”

  “No, it doesn’t, but it still feels better, if you didn’t feel like the world was against you.”

  “How can I not?” she asked. “Look at where we are, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I know. Anyway this conversation is too depressing. I can’t handle it. I’ll close my eyes and have a nap and hope for the best.” And, with that, Jessie rolled over, curled into a ball, and did exactly as she promised.

  Jerricho and Killian trolled up and down the coast, looking for the boat provided in the information that they’d been given. They’d found one ship on satellite and then had located it, docked at the coast, with only two people on it. Neither were willing to talk or to seemingly give a damn about anything Jerricho and Killian had to say. The vessel also seemed to have been parked there for a long time and didn’t appear to be doing anything suspicious. But that in itself was suspicious.

  Jerricho would love to do a full search on the vessel, but it wouldn’t be now. It would have to be clandestinely done. And, if the women weren’t there, it wouldn’t help him. So Jerricho and Killian set off in the boat again, stopped at one of the small villages, picked
up a few more supplies, and returned to the area with the suspect boat. As they sat here in their boat, looking at their options, Jerricho said, “It’s frustrating because we just don’t have any intel.”

  “The only way not to have intel is if the kidnappers have kept them under the radar.”

  “Sure, but for how long?”

  “Until they get to their destination. Out here unfortunately it’s just too easy to disappear. Whether they want to or not.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “When you think about it, these women are important but not so important that, outside of a good search, nobody’ll care.”

  “I care,” Killian said.

  “Would you care if you didn’t know them or me?”

  “Yes, absolutely I would,” Killian said, looking at Jerricho in surprise.

  He grinned. “Just checking,” he said. “Wondering if you had changed at all.”

  “Nope, I haven’t. It’s why I went into this type of work. And what about the fact that you do know who this person is?”

  “That just adds to the frustration,” Jerricho said. “She’s beautiful. It’s one of the arguments that we had.”

  “Arguments over a beautiful woman?”

  “Yeah, she knew it, and she used it,” he said, with a hard twist of his lips.

  “Ah, one of those.”

  “Yeah, one of those.”

  “Sorry about that,” Killian said.

  “Me too, but it is what it is, and she is who she is.”

  “Still doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.”

  “Nope, it doesn’t. But, like a lot of things in life, you move on.”

  “And you don’t know why the other marriage broke up or did not go on as planned?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ve asked for more information on it.”

  “Good, but it doesn’t really pertain to this.”

  “No, it doesn’t seem to,” Jerricho said, “but we need to check everything just to make sure.”

  Hearing a shout, they turned to watch the same two men, now arguing.

  “Wonder what that’s all about,” Jerricho said.