“Which isn’t necessarily of any help.”
“Honestly it could also be the white slave trade,” Killian said. “Always a factor with two women together.”
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?”