“Listen to me!” Seth shook his head, coming out of his daze.
“Oh thank God, you’re staying. You have to listen to me sweetheart. I’m safe. But the team knows you need help, and they’re there to help you. Brice is found like you.”
“What do you mean, you’re safe? Safe from what? Who is we?”
“Nell, you’re grandmother and me.”
“Who’s Nell?”
“Our daughter. We’re all safe. Seth, I know you’re dream walking and you’re going to leave at any moment. You have to listen to me. Brice, Nate and Sierra are at your hotel.”
“Our daughter? We have a daughter?” He saw his answer in the deep forest green of her eyes, the melting color of compassion and love, everything went green, the whole world.
He blinked and saw the black of the night sky, the shimmer of the moon on the water. The moon was much higher in the sky. Dream Walking or Spirit Walking, he remembered his Grandmother Shilah talking about such things when he lived in New Mexico. He had researched it when he was in high school and even in college. He believed most things in the People’s tradition were based on fact. His personal experience with his own gifts told him there was more to the world than taught in textbooks as fact.
If he had been dream walking since he had started this assignment it meant what Annie told him was true. He had a daughter named Nell. Despite the warm tropical air, Seth began to shiver, and tremble. How was it possible for him to have a daughter and not to have known, not have felt her presence?
He closed his eyes, centered himself within his body, and then started the slow process of reaching ever outward further, and further. He thought he heard something, was that Nell reaching out? He concentrated as he continued to reach out. It was a consistent noise, and seemed to get louder the more he reached out.
“Open the Goddamn door.” The pounding started again. Seth looked through the peephole and saw the three people from the bar. The one pounding on the door was the redhead who spoke with a Scots accent. Once again Seth felt a strong pull to him. Fucking A, he was found. That’s what was going on. This was the team Annie told him about. He opened the door.
The Scotsman opened his mouth, starting to say something when the woman elbowed him out of the way. She put her finger to her mouth indicating silence to both Seth and the other two men, and stepped into Seth’s room while motioning for everyone to move in and shut the door. Everyone understood the room could be bugged.
She mouthed to Seth to get dressed, and he put on his shirt and his shoes, then he followed them all out the door. They went to the elevator.
“What is…?”
The woman shook her head, indicating the need for silence. They went up two floors and into a different room.
“So, which do you preferred to be called these days, Seth Natani, or Carson Runyon?” She asked with a great deal of venom. For someone who Annie said was supposed to be on his side, she sure sounded like she hated him.
“Dammit Sierra, cut the man some slack,” the giant said. Seth looked up and up at the man who towered over him. He had to be six foot six, if not six foot seven.
“How in the hell are you sent into the field for undercover work, you will never blend in.”
“Nice to meet you too, Seth. Since I’m here to help you, you’d think you wouldn’t be such an asshole. My name is Nate Goodman by the way.” He held out his hand and Seth shook it.
“I’m sorry, it’s been a long couple of days, and you guys took me by surprise.”
“I take it Annie finally convinced you the so-called dreams of yours are actually real?” the Scotsman asked. Seth felt a flush creeping up his face, and he wasn’t happy about it. It meant Annie must have told people he had been visiting her in her dreams. Had she told them what had been happening in those dreams? Then he remembered, it was Annie, she wouldn’t have done that. He looked at the three people facing him. The men had bland expressions on their faces. Too fucking bland. They fucking knew. Meanwhile the woman just looked furious. What in the hell was going on with her?
“So Annie convinced you, and you know why we’re here?” the Scotsman prompted.
“Yeah.” Seth shook his head to clear it. “Yeah, and please call me Seth, it’s good to be called by my real name for a change. What are yours?”
“My name is Brice McElyn, SAS.” He held out his hand, and Seth shook it. Then turned to Sierra and lifted an eyebrow. She reluctantly held out her hand to Seth.
“Sierra Mathers, Petty Officer, 1st Class.”
Seth figured it was best to clear the air. “So why do you hate me, Officer?”
“Sierra will do. We’re going to be working together undercover. So why don’t I call you Carson?”
“You’re right, calling me Carson is probably for the best. Can you tell me about my daughter? About Annie? Why did she say she was safe?”
“Why do you care? Don’t you have a wife you need to focus on?” There was the venom again, and Seth finally understood. He would never be able to dig himself out of this hole with this woman so he didn’t even try.
“Can one of you just explain what Annie meant about being safe?”
“Did you read or hear about Kelly Wachowski’s kidnapping?” Nate asked.
Seth remembered all right. She was one of the five publicized found children from twenty-one years ago, and was kidnapped after he went undercover to work for Labado. He followed her case closely. She was rescued by a naval rescue team. He looked at Nate. “Are you Navy too?”
“Yep, Chief Petty Officer at your service,” the man smiled.
“You two were in on the rescue mission to recover Kelly?”
“Yep.” Nate answered.
“So how does that relate to Annie?”
“So far we have uncovered three different groups after the found. We’ve stopped two of them.”
“Why? What for?”
“One was just a hate group, a splinter group of a white supremacist group out of Idaho. They wanted all found dead. They’re either dead or in prison for life.” Seth closed his eyes trying to assimilate the new information. He shouldn’t have been surprised. When he opened them, he saw the compassion on the face of the big man. “Yeah, I know it’s a lot to take in.”
“Okay, that’s one group. What about the other two?”
“Then there were two brothers behind Kelly’s kidnapping. One was an evil motherfucker who wanted to dissect her so he could find out what made her different and use the knowledge to create some kind of drug. The other brother wanted to know where she came from, so he could go there. He was just batshit crazy. One’s in prison, the other is dead.”
“So it’s the third group after Annie? I don’t understand, she’s not found.”
“Yeah, but her daughter is half found, now isn’t she? And, you just left them both.” Seth felt Sierra’s words to the depths of his soul.
“Tell me about the third group.”
“It really doesn’t make sense why they are after Annie and Nell,” Brice spoke. “It’s our understanding from the one man we’ve actually managed to question, that this is a breeding program. However, according to Dave Rydell it is more. What they were doing with Mai Zhang with the brainwashing was horrific and he’s finally getting to the bottom of it.”
“A breeding program?” Seth sat on the corner of the hotel bed, and stared out the large window, noting the sky was beginning to lighten. Soon the sun would peak over the horizon. How had his life managed to change so drastically in just four hours?
Brice sat in the chair next to the window so they could look at one another. “Yeah, a breeding program. Look, we’ve been tracking this group for nine months. It’s a corporation called Rixitron. The more strings we pull, the more crap falls out. This company has offices all over the world, and its grubby little hands are into all kinds of things. We know it’s in bed with all kinds of nasty characters.” Brice rubbed the back of his neck and looked at Seth before continuing.
“Besides the
breeding, we figure their pharmaceuticals arm has got to be interested in how we acquire languages. What we know for sure is they first came to New Mexico looking for you, when they couldn’t find you, they discovered you had a daughter and she became a target. Your grandmother hid both Annie and Nell.”
“How did all of you get involved?”
“The naval team following the Rixitron thug realized Annie and Nell were in danger. They did everything they could to get to them first. The leader of the team is Lieutenant Commander Noah Kukailimoku, and he’s found as well. He’s able to find.” Brice chuckled. “Get it. A found who can find things.”
“Yeah, I get it. Just get on with it,” Seth growled.
“Jesus Nate, our boy doesn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor.”
“Cut him some slack Brice, he just discovered he had a daughter an hour ago, he has a right to want answers.” Nate turned to Seth. “Noah and Riley brought Annie, your grandmother and daughter to safety. They’ve been in a safe house in California for the past seven months. Nobody is going to get to them, I promise.”
Seth took his first full breath since his dream on the balcony. He gave Nate a grateful smile.
“Why haven’t you called in your team? Why are you working all on your own?” Nate asked Seth.
“I’m not working on my own. There is one person at the DEA I trust, it is my boss’s boss. Somebody on my team is dirty, maybe a couple of someones. On my previous assignment, it went bad, two of my team died, it had to be someone on the inside gave us up. When I went to Greg on this, he wouldn’t believe it of his team. My gut tells me Greg isn’t in on it, but he’s blind. So I went over his head. The commander is watching the team, hopefully he’ll flush out the rotten eggs while I’m gone, but in the meantime he’s the only one who knows my cover, and he’s the only one I’m feeding information.”
“Who’s Greg?” Sierra asked.
“Greg’s the leader of my task force. I went to his boss, Lee Isaacson, he’s the Deputy Director of the DEA.”
“You took a pretty big chance your team wouldn’t find you with the magazine spread on your wedding. It’s how we discovered you.”
“Portia allowed it be published in only two magazines, and she ran it by me. One was a bridal, the other some kind of society magazine in the Miami Sunday paper. We were safe, like my team was going to be reading either one of those.” What’s more Seth still looked at those pictures and didn’t even recognize himself. How had they made him look like some kind of model?
“Wait, are you telling me Annie saw those?” Seth felt his blood run cold. In the entire year he had been with Annie he had never known her to pick up any kind of magazine like that. All of the pictures had been taken at the reception, Portia’s perfect outdoor garden reception. There were six damning pictures in the photo spread, culminating in the final picture of them kissing in the gazebo.
The only way he had been able to act so happy about marrying Portia was to think about the baby he would be able to keep safe. It’s what carried him through the entire day, and then it turned out to be nothing but a lie. Annie wouldn’t have known that, all she would have seen is he was happy that day. It must have burned inside her like acid. Yet still she welcomed him again and again into her dreams.
“Are you asking if she knows you’re married? Yeah, she knows. She’s known since the beginning.” Nate looked at him with compassion. Seth shoved off the bed and yanked open the balcony door, desperately needing the fresh air.
If Annie knew, then his family knew. He had a daughter. His world was spinning out of control.
Stop! Get it together. He breathed in. His life wasn’t spinning out of control, it was actually coming into focus for the first time since this goddamn assignment started. Somehow through the grace of God his woman still had feelings for him despite his betrayal. He was humbled.
He had a daughter with this woman. He didn’t have to worry he had a child with a criminal psychopath who would endanger or abuse his child. Instead he had a child with someone who would be the best mother he could ever hope for. He really wanted to try to contact Annie this very second but three people were waiting on him, and it was obvious they had a plan in mind. Again, he needed to focus.
Seth turned and found them huddled around a laptop. They broke apart when he came back in. “Do you have some sort of plan?”
“Our plan was to offer our services to you. All of us have worked in the field, but I’m the only one who has done undercover work,” Brice said.
Seth realized he was about to take these people on face value. But then again, he was really relying on Annie’s word, and he trusted her absolutely. The other factor was he knew without a shadow of a doubt Brice was found as well. He didn’t know how he knew since he had never met another found before, but he knew.
“Aye, you feel it too? It’s the damnedest thing.”
Seth looked into the Scot’s pale gray eyes. “Does this always happen?”
“You’re the fifth found I’ve met. Each time there has been a sense of recognition. Kali, Noah and Joe actually remembered one another.”
“What do you mean, remembered one another?”
“They remembered one another from before they came here. You’ll have to let them explain it to you.”
“Who’s Kali? Who’s Joe?”
“Look, we don’t have time for this. We really need to focus on the job,” Sierra interrupted. Seth and Brice looked at the woman and nodded. She was focused on the computer screen in front of her. “Okay, come over here then.”
Seth looked over Sierra’s shoulder and saw a perfect organizational chart of Thiago Labado’s and Luther Vargas’ operations and how they intersected with Benitez Shipping. She had everything figured out, it was amazing. “How do you know all of this?”
“It was easy. Once I made the leap Benitez was doing the shipping for Labado’s drugs and guns, which he had to be, otherwise why would you have married Portia? We knew you were involved with Labado, so it was easy to trace. The only tough part to figure was Vargas.”
Seth watched Sierra’s fingers flew over the keyboard and slide after slide whizzed by showing the players in both organizations. We’ve had you, Portia and Tomas under surveillance for the last two weeks. By the way, Portia is out of her ever loving mind. I couldn’t believe it when she slammed her boat into Ricardo Vargas’ boat. She was lucky his body guards didn’t kill her and her giggly girlfriends’ right on the spot. I guess all those breast implants were worth the money.”
Suddenly pictures and organizational charts of Ricardo Vargas’ family and business were on the monitor. Sierra hadn’t missed any of the players. “We saw Labado’s men planting charges yesterday and today, we knew you wouldn’t be on the premises. But we thought you’d be at the penthouse with Portia and Tomas. How did you manage to get away from your loving family?”
“They’re hoping I’ll think I have privacy and autonomy, when in actuality I’m watched even more closely. It’s one of our fun family games.” Seth’s tone was resigned. “I’m impressed you figured out everything about Vargas.”
“Brice sees patterns. Show him one or two pieces of a puzzle, and he can see the whole picture,” Sierra said with a combination of frustration and admiration.
“Watch it wench, or I’ll start trying to figure out the puzzle of Sierra Mathers,” he said as he pulled at a lock of her auburn hair.
“Is this a stronger skill than normal? Do you think it has something to do with being found?” Seth asked the Scot.
“Aye.” Seth waited. Brice just looked at him with calm gray eyes.
“Okay, so you saw the pattern, and concluded Vargas was horning in on the action with Benitez, what else did your ‘spidey senses’ tell you?”
“That Vargas is going to grind Labado into so much dust, but not before killing a lot of innocents, and you’re trying to figure out how to stop it.”
“And?”
“Labado is trying to come up with an alterna
tive source of income to make up for the shipments you have shut down,” Brice said, as his finger traced over one of the lines on the organizational charts on Sierra’s computer screen.
“Since he’s been cut off from shipping and selling arms into the US, I’m betting he’s started doing business with Africa,” Nate guessed.
“I would have preferred that.” The night was getting worse. He had stuffed down the thought of the auction, but he the bile was rising. “Labado’s has started a human trafficking ring.”
The three people in the room looked both sick and resigned, which told Seth all he needed to know. They obviously had worked on many different situations in the past.
“How deep is Labado into this?” Nate asked.
“Oh it’s deep, he’s got quite a pipeline.”
“Let me guess, it’s the bitch Leslie Gordon,” Sierra said with disgust. Seth raised an eyebrow in question.
“Something is severely bent about that creepy wench, I could just tell.”
“She’s a full-blown psychopath. This isn’t about a revenue stream, she is enjoying this.” Seth explained what he had seen.
“Let me see if I can track down the modeling agency she is using as a front,” Sierra said and yawned.
“Come on Mathers, we need to call it a night,” Nate said, as pushed down the top of her laptop. “You need to sneak back into your room,” he said turning to Seth.
“I figured out a way to short out the surveillance they have on you, so we can meet again,” Sierra assured him.
“It seems to me this new trafficking angle is perfect. We can use this to work our way in as buyers,” Brice said as Seth walked to the door.
“It looks like I might actually have a team I can trust.” He looked at the three in the room and smiled as he left. He wanted to ask if they were going to be speaking to Annie. To convey some sort of message, but what would he have them say? As he carefully let himself back into his room he realized he felt better and worse. He had to cling to the fact that through everything Annie had not turned away from him, and he had a daughter.
Forsaken (The Found Book 2) Page 5
