by Dale Mayer
“Diversion?” she said. “It’s simple.”
He frowned.
She shrugged. “The only way we could be rescued was if Lennox and his partner had a way to get the gunmen away from us,” she said. “So, they started the fire. Then, when our guards left us, that’s when I knew it was time to pick the lock.”
Lennox twisted to look at her. “Did I teach you that, or did you learn it on your own?”
“You showed me,” she said, “and then I learned it on my own.”
“Good,” he said, “at least you learned something.”
She frowned at him. “I’ve learned a lot.”
“Yeah, from me?” He waggled his eyebrows.
She glared at him. “Have you got a plan at this point?”
“Yep, to get the hell away.”
“Great,” she said. “In other words, no?”
He laughed. “We got this far.” Only then something hard pinged the side of the truck. “Everyone down!”
“Shit!” Gavin growled, and he drove faster.
“I presume we’re being followed,” she said. She tried to stare out the back of the truck, but bullets shattered the back window.
Lennox immediately ordered them to lie as flat as they could.
And, with all four of them taking up as little space as possible and flush low in the back, they bounced over the rough ground before suddenly hitting a smoother road. The truck picked up speed as it jumped forward.
Helena looked at Carolina. “Well, it’s a half-baked idea, but at least it’s a plan.”
More shots hit the truck but not anybody in the truck.
Carolina grinned. “Trust in Lennox. If anybody can get us out of here, it’s him.”
Helena didn’t need to be told. She already knew that. The only issue was the fact that, right now, they were between a rock and a hard place. Somebody was still firing at them, and she doubted this truck had the gas to keep going the distance. She also didn’t think this area was particularly friendly to foreigners.
Just then they hit another rough road and bounced and jostled as the truck tore across new ground. Helena wondered if it even was a road or if they were going across a farmer’s field. Crouched down as she was, she couldn’t see. She groaned as they hit a particularly rough spot.
“Sorry about the rough road,” Lennox said. “We’ll be changing vehicles in a few minutes, so get ready.”
Immediately she tensed, awaiting his instructions. She hoped they would stop—as in completely—before they were expected to switch vehicles. And suddenly they pulled up somewhere, hit the brakes with great force, and Gavin was out of the truck, opening up one of the rear doors.
Lennox had opened up the other rear door. “Let’s go now!” He moved them into an SUV parked at the side. It was older, had no license plates, but would seat six nicely inside. By the time they got into the back seats of the vehicle, it still hadn’t started. But Gavin waited while Lennox popped the hood, then did something, and got it fired up. He stepped up into the front passenger seat with his two duffel bags, and they took off across the road again before Lennox got settled.
Helena had no clue where they were and didn’t have any idea what direction they were traveling because it was pitch black outside, what with the cloud cover blocking what little moonlight was to be had. Sometimes in the night you saw enough of the shadows to see where you’re going—but not tonight. She leaned forward. “How can you guys see where you’re going?”
“Gavin is wearing night goggles,” Lennox explained. She looked over, and, sure enough, Gavin had some weird glasses over his eyes. “Okay,” she said, settling back. “Any idea how to get out of here?”
“We’re working on it,” he said. “We’re in Poland, by the way.”
That was a surprise to her. She glanced at the others, who stared back at her wordlessly.
“Anybody got connections in Poland?” Lennox asked.
Everybody shook their heads.
“Sorry, we’re no help back here.”
“Not an issue,” he said. “We’re trying to roust up some other means of travel.”
“Good,” she said. “A flight would be nice. It’s the fastest way out of here. But our IDs, wallets, phones, etc., these guys had it all. I’m not sure what happened to our luggage.”
Lennox laughed and picked up his phone to make a call. She wanted to listen in but couldn’t hear the conversation anyway. She looked at Carolina, who was huddled up in her seat, quiet, her eyes closed. “Carolina, are you okay?”
“I am,” she said. “We’re getting out of here. That’s all that I care about.”
“Well, yes,” Helena said, “and no. We’re not exactly free and clear yet.”
“No,” she said, “but my brother is doing what he can. And I have to admit that’s usually a whole lot more than anybody else can.”
“I get it,” John said. “He’s some sort of Secret Service spy guy. As long as he gets us out of there, I promise I’ll never say a bad word against him again.”
“We can’t make any guarantees here, not yet,” Helena said. “That’s not how life works. But he’s good, and, if anyone can get us out of this situation, Lennox will.”
“I know,” John said. “I’d just appreciate no longer being in this mess.”
“Exactly,” she said, “and hopefully that’ll be a distant memory soon.”
While they drove through the night, having finally lost their armed pursuers, they pulled into a small town, where they stopped to fuel up. She leaned forward to speak to Lennox, who stood outside her door. “We need food, and we need bathrooms.”
“I’ll take you,” Lennox said. “Nobody is to go on their own.”
He opened up the passenger door and let the three women hop out. After that, John hopped out and stood beside Gavin. Lennox led the women to the outdoor washroom with a locked door and that held one person at a time. Sasha went in first. When she came out, Lennox motioned at Helena. She just shook her head and said, “We’ll go in together.” She opened the door, and she and Carolina walked into the bathroom. They quickly used the facilities, washed, and stepped back out again.
“Coffee and food?” she asked hopefully.
Lennox looked at her in the half-light, studying her face, and then his sister’s. “Are you two okay?”
Carolina smiled, nodded, and said, “We’re fine. I took one hit. So did Helena.”
He swore when he realized that his sister had been smacked. He studied her face in the light of the bathroom and asked, “How bad?”
She reached up, cupped his face on either side, and said, “I’m fine, Lennox.”
“Good thing,” he growled, and he hauled her into his arms and gave her a big hug.
Helena stood off to the side, jealous in a way because she’d been looking for that human contact, which she had yet to get. Although she had known Lennox over many, many years, still he didn’t know a lot about her. Like her feelings for him. And the heat that flashed inside her every time she saw him. And yet he’d scared her back then, with that kiss, and she’d turned away from that confusion—that heat—and had promptly found someone the exact opposite of Lennox.
While she stood here, looking out at the SUV, an arm reached out and snagged her, as Lennox hauled her in for his hug with his sister. She burrowed her face tight against him, hating that trembling coming from inside her.
But, once again, Lennox had come through.
That’s the one thing—Carolina could always count on her brother. Hell, Helena didn’t remember anyone having her back. She’d been walking alone for all her life, whereas Carolina always had her brother there to help. He let her make the decisions and the choices in her life and let her fall when they were terrible choices, but he’d always been there to give her a hand when she needed it. Helena had Carolina, but she hadn’t had Lennox. Helena wondered just how different that would have made her world?
Right now it was huge. She was damn grateful for the warm arms
that held her close.
When he finally released them, he said, “Get back into the SUV. I’ll see if any food’s available to go with that coffee.”
She nodded. “That would be good.”
“Do you all drink coffee?”
Carolina flashed a smile at him. “Of course we do,” she said, “but I think two of them take sugar.”
“I’ll get it,” he said. They raced back to the SUV and hopped into the back seat. This vehicle had three rows of seats, and they were in the middle; John and Sasha sat in the back. John leaned forward and asked, “Is he getting something from inside?”
“Depends if there is anything to get,” Helena said. “I said we could all use some coffee and food, if that was an option.”
“Yes,” Sasha said, “both of those would be lovely.”
“Safety would be our priority though.” They sat quietly in the vehicle, but her heart pounded as she studied to see if they were still being followed. She leaned forward and said, “Hi, Gavin. My name is Helena. I’m a friend of Carolina’s.”
Gavin tossed her a quick grin. “I’ve heard about you,” he said. “Lennox doesn’t talk much, but he has mentioned you.”
“All good things I hope,” she quipped, but she was pretty damn sure it wasn’t.
He just shrugged and didn’t say anything.
As she watched the store, Lennox walked out of the small gas station, carrying a tray with four coffees. He walked to the passenger side. She rolled down her window and accepted all four. “Are you getting any for yourself and Gavin?”
He nodded. “I’ll be right back.” And he headed back inside.
Helena handed out the coffees. She smiled at Gavin. “He will get you one too, won’t he?”
“He will,” Gavin said, and she realized that they must know each other pretty well. “Our kidnappers said it was a revenge for Lennox. That they wanted Lennox to pay for a betrayal.”
Gavin spun in his seat and looked at her. “Can you explain what he said exactly?” And then he stopped her. “Hang on. Let’s wait until Lennox gets back.”
Just then the store’s door opened again, Lennox pushing it with his shoulder and then his foot, as he stepped out carrying another tray of coffee and a large bag. He handed the tray through the open window to Gavin and then walked around the front to his side and hopped inside. Gavin removed the two coffees from the tray, placing them in cup holders, and said, “Helena has something to say.”
She quickly explained what the scarred man had said about it being a betrayal.
Gavin just looked at Lennox, and Lennox looked back. He shook his head. “Can you describe him?”
“He’s got a bad scar on his cheek,” Carolina said. “And it’s deep. It would have involved some jaw surgery likely, and he’s got a burn mark on his neck.”
“The burn goes down the inside of his shirt,” Helena added. “And I would have called it third-degree burns. We saw a lot of scar tissue, and it looks like layers of it.”
“I agree with that too,” Carolina stated. “His muscle damage was quite extensive around the neck, where his longer hair covers part of it but does not go up as high as the jaw.”
“What about the rest of him?”
John supplied that info. “Six-foot, 205 pounds, light brown hair, short with a light wave. His eyes are dark, maybe brown. Fair skin as if maybe European descent.”
“Dress?”
“Fatigues,” Sasha added. “No hats among the kidnappers, no gloves among them, and I would have said military work boots.”
“Combat boots?”
“Yes,” Sasha said.
“Weapons?” Gavin started up the engine and put the SUV back on the road while they talked.
Nobody had any details on the weapons, outside of the fact that they were carrying rifles or machine guns, plus handguns. “Outside of the original kidnapping crew, once we landed in that cage in Poland, we saw three different men who stood guard on a rotating basis,” Helena added.
“We saw six,” Lennox added. “All six will be after us.”
“It was very personal,” John said from the back row. “We tried to explain that we had nothing to do with it, and he didn’t care.”
“Of course not,” Lennox said. “You were just part of the bait. Once they started shooting prisoners, it ups the ante as to when they’d get around to shooting my sister.”
John stared at him and then collapsed back. “I was afraid you were gonna say something like that.”
“Sorry,” Lennox said, “but you were caught at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“All four of us were in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Helena continued, “We all caught the same lift to the airport, so we were dropped off at the same time. Two of us were heading to Munich, and the other two were heading somewhere else, but all were international destinations. It’s almost as if the kidnappers were waiting for us. We were led to another vehicle and tossed into the back.”
“They approached you at the airport?”
“Yes, we were quickly surrounded by four men in military fatigues, who had handguns,” Helena supplied, as she dredged up the memory of when they were first picked up and moved into a vehicle. “They didn’t say much. But they didn’t need to. The weapons are a universal language.” Then she settled back with her coffee.
Lennox opened the bag he’d brought with him and handed out sandwiches and pepperoni sticks and string cheese and bags of chips. She gratefully accepted everything coming her way, making sure that it was an even breakdown, but Lennox had bought everything times six. She ate her sandwich first, then both the cheese and the pepperoni. As she looked at Carolina, she was not eating her lunch. “You’re not hungry?”
Carolina shook her head. “My stomach is still not so great.”
“You need to eat,” Lennox said.
“I know. I need to keep up my energy just in case we need to run again,” she said in a comical voice. “But since my head injury, my stomach has been on the queasy side.”
“Not a whole lot we can do about that here and now,” Helena said. “I’m pretty sure you had a slight concussion.”
“Most likely,” she said. “And it doesn’t matter now because I’m healing. That’s what counts.”
“True enough,” she said. “It’s all good.”
Lennox shot Helena a questioning look, one eyebrow raised. She nodded. “She’ll be fine.”
He settled back.
“So you listen to Helena now, huh?” Carolina asked, her tone sharp. “Without listening to me?”
“Yes,” Lennox said, “because you’ve been known to not tell me the whole truth every once in a while.”
“Seriously?” she said in outrage.
“Yes,” he said, “if it suits you.”
“That’s just being a sibling,” Carolina said with a laugh. “And having you as an older brother wasn’t easy either.”
“I’ve been there every time you needed me.”
“You’ve been there every time I’ve needed you and more,” Carolina said guiltily. “I did tell you how much I love you, right?”
He let out a bark of laughter. “Many times and often as you were ready to hit me.”
She grinned. “Again that’s siblings.”
The wrangling continued back and forth, and it helped to ease the atmosphere in the vehicle.
At a pause in the conversation, Sasha spoke suddenly from the back row of seats. “Do you think we’re out of danger?”
Lennox turned to look at her and shook his head. “No, we are not. Not until we can get you out of this country. Yet … considering you were tracked from Africa, kidnapped in Germany, then taken to Poland, I’m not sure that that’s even the correct answer here.”
Sasha stared at him. Her eyes were a vast well of fear. “But John and I should be safe once we’re back in the US, right?”
Lennox considered that, shrugged, and said, “Potentially, yes.”
“Potentially?” she
questioned him, her voice turning ominous. “What do you mean by that?”
He glanced at Gavin, and Gavin glanced back at him.
“What does that silent glance mean?” John interrupted.
“The problem is,” Lennox said, “we have to put a stop to this.”
“Sure, I get that,” Sasha said, “but why is it that we won’t be out of danger even if we’re back home again?”
“You will be safe once we capture the guy behind this,” he said, “but otherwise you are in danger of always being able to identify him.”
The other two sat back slowly and stared. “And that’ll be a problem?”
“Depends on how he feels about it,” Lennox said. “I don’t understand who this guy is, or why he feels he has a grudge against me, but, as long as he’s holding that grudge, then obviously my sister and her best friend will be in more danger than the two of you. However, if he’s considering his actions from a criminal level and the chances of being charged with a crime, then to not be identified will be important to him. Therefore, they’ll want to keep you from identifying him.”
“And that doesn’t sound very good either,” Sasha said faintly, “because that sounds like he’d planned on killing us.”
“I would suspect so,” Helena said quietly. “The fact that he didn’t hide his face right from the beginning is very indicative of his intentions.”
“And that seriously sucks.”
“Obviously but that doesn’t change the facts right now,” Lennox added.
“So, you’ll go after this guy?” Sasha asked.
“Right?” John repeated.
Everybody looked at Lennox.
Without hesitation he gave a crisp nod and said, “Yes. I’m going after this guy because he went after my sister.”
Lennox knew they needed to hear that, but they wouldn’t like knowing that it wouldn’t be so cut-and-dried in reality. The mastermind behind the kidnapping had skills, money, freedom to move as he needed to, and he had the know-how to hunt down people who were close to Lennox. He looked at his sister. “It might be time for an extended holiday.”
She wrinkled up her face. “Well, I was looking for a short one. I’m not sure about an extended one.”
“Extended,” Gavin said in a hard voice. “All of you should consider it.”
