At that, Zack’s laugh became uncontrollable. Damn! He hadn’t laughed like this in a long time. “I don’t know how that’ll work out for us here,” he said, finally catching his breath. “But damn, it’s good to see you.”
“It’s always good to see you,” Bonaparte said with a rolling laugh.
“Any further intel on this case?”
“Levi texted me a few minutes ago, telling me that he’d uploaded the updated case file for us.”
Immediately Zack pulled out his phone and brought up the email and downloaded the file. “I still don’t understand why he thinks this is the point of origin from where she’d gone missing.”
“Her passport cleared customs ten days ago, entering Turkey. They think she came back to see her folks.”
“Aren’t they both in exile under guard?”
“Yes.”
“So she made it to their side and then what?”
“According to what the parents told Levi, Zadie went out for a walk in the garden. She was talking on her phone, last they saw her, only she didn’t return.”
“And they, of course, called out a warning and asked for help?”
“No, not initially,” Bonaparte continued. “They thought she’d found a way to sneak out.”
“Why would she have to sneak?”
“Because it was made clear that, once she arrived, she was under house arrest as well.”
Zack stopped, froze, looked at him, and said, “Seriously?”
Bonaparte nodded grimly. “According to the parents—and this is just the little bit of information that they’ve managed to get out—Zadie had no intention of staying as a prisoner with them. So, when she disappeared, they initially congratulated themselves, thinking that she had found a way to get out from under house arrest. But, when they hadn’t heard from her in the last four days, they got worried.”
“How did Levi get involved?”
“I believe it came through Bullard,” Bonaparte said. He twisted to look at Zack. “I know the name, but I’ve never met the man.”
“I see.”
“But I know that Bullard and Levi work together a lot,” Bonaparte added grimly. “Is it just the two of us?”
“Yes,” Zack said.
“I thought this was supposed to be a four-man team?”
Zack shook his head. “Not unless two more guys shake free from their ops and can help us out here. Plus there is the travel delay to consider. So consider us on our own for this one.”
The vehicle jerked to the side quickly, sending Zack lurching against him. “I see your driving hasn’t improved,” he said with a laugh. Bonaparte’s driving was akin to a race car let loose on the autobahn. And that included zigzagging through the traffic to get where he was going, completely ignoring any road signs, of which there were very few anyway.
“If people would just get out of my way,” Bonaparte said, unfazed, “life would be a lot easier.”
“I don’t think that’s how the traffic works,” Zack retorted.
“Well, it should,” he said. “It would all work much easier that way.”
Zack chuckled. “Says you. The rest of the people probably think you are a crazy idiot they should shoot.”
Bonaparte shrugged and moved between two other vehicles across two lanes, simultaneously hitting an exit at top speed. The thing was, he was such a skilled driver that at no time did Zack feel like his life was in danger. But he could imagine how everybody else on the road felt.
Zack pulled up the file on Zadie, but it had just a few more details, not a whole lot. “She’s never been married and has no children,” he commented.
“No, her political activist aspirations kept her single apparently.”
“Or she just didn’t like the political aspirations of the men around her.”
“Same thing.” Bonaparte looked at him. “What about you? You never married?”
“Nope,” Zack said with delight. “Still single.”
“What about kids?”
His heart twitched at that; then he shook his head. “No, no children either.”
“I’ve got the two, as you know,” Bonaparte said, “but the wife has them, and she already remarried.”
“What about you?” Zack asked, looking at the big man in surprise. “Visiting rights?”
“I get them on holidays,” he said, giving his partner a fat grin, “and, boy, do we like to holiday.”
“I can imagine. So something like Levi’s place might be good for you now.”
“Yes, and I’ll take off all my holidays so I can be with the kids.”
“That sounds pretty cool,” he said. “How old are they now?”
“Eight and six,” Bonaparte said with a nod of satisfaction. “The perfect age to start doing things together. They want to learn how to surf next summer.”
“It’s a good age for them to learn too.” Zack felt momentary twinges, as he realized that he had nobody to teach or to spend holidays with doing things like that. Nobody to even share the world. He shook his head. “You are very lucky.”
“In many ways, yes,” Bonaparte said. “The wife and I are at least amicable.”
“Yet you don’t call her your ex?”
“Mostly for the kids’ sake,” he said. “We tried the first-name thing. The kids didn’t like that either.”
“Dictated by the children, huh?”
Bonaparte gave a big shrug and said, “You do what you got to do to keep the peace.” He took another hard right and sent the car careening in the opposite direction.
“We are not being followed or anything, are we?”
“Nope,” Bonaparte said. “But I had enough time to beat that light, so I took it.”
“Right,” Zack said, settling back into his seat. “I see little new in this updated file. Basically nobody knows anything.”
“Well, there is an interesting part to that though. Her passport wasn’t cleared leaving through any customs checkpoint. So she didn’t leave the country by air or train or bus.”
“Doesn’t mean she didn’t drive or walk across the border,” he said. “She could have taken a boat, and wasn’t she used to traveling that way anyway?”
“The boat is in England,” he said.
“Right, but we have to figure this out. Was she kidnapped, and, if so, by whom and why?”
“The biggest one being the why,” he said. “We are almost there.”
Zack peered into the night, the darkness slowly taking over. “The perfect time for an ambush.”
“Or a perfect time for surveillance,” Bonaparte said in his suspicious tone of voice. “And that’s exactly what we are up to,” he said.
*
Zadie rolled over once again and huddled tighter. Her arms, her knees, her hands curled up in the tightest ball as possible. Zadie stared at the tiny room she was in and wondered how the hell her life had come to this. But then, every person who found themselves in prison unexpectedly must feel the same way.
Day four of captivity and still on the property where her parents were being held—or at least she assumed she was, but she didn’t know for sure—blew her away. She’d been out for a walk, trying to set up her plans to escape the sudden house arrest she found herself under. Only to be grabbed when she hit the trees. She’d deliberately gone along that route, checking the guards’ timing. Just when she had seen a chance to escape the guards, someone else had nabbed her.