Use the same technique as with the final e-mail I sent you; it is up to you, my dear, to decipher the location of your gift. I know you can do it. Think, process, calculate. All the clues are within your grasp.
I hope you have a wonderful, memorable birthday, Madalina, and to tide you over until you receive your physical gift, I’ve given you a few photos of a time you may or may not remember.
All my love,
Walcot
Reading the note aloud hurt Madalina’s soul. To expose her grandfather’s whimsy to the bastards in the room felt like a violation. It felt wrong. All these men cared about were the dragons and the money or power they might bring them. They cared nothing for the sentimentality of Walcot’s words or the clear affection passed from grandfather to granddaughter.
She was partly choked up at the contents of the letter, and at the same time, her mind raced forward to decipher the message. Across the room, she heard her mother make a soft sound of distress and wished she could provide comfort.
“What technique is he talking about?” Lance demanded. “I know there’s information in here about the dragons.”
“It’s convoluted. I have to think for a minute,” Madalina said. She recalled that she needed to pluck whatever numbers had been provided from the note—one and eight—and then seek a word or phrase that would contain the rest of the location. Maybe a street name. The numbers came easy; the letters did not.
“I need to see the photos, too. There might be a clue in them. Or on the back.” That was a blatant lie. Madalina knew all the clues were in the letter itself. But it bought her more time to think.
Beau stepped closer and held out the photos. He rifled through each grainy picture while Madalina battled her emotions. They were snapshots of her and Walcot over the years, pictures she’d never seen before. In this one they were swimming; in that one he was crouched next to her, smiling.
“Turn the photos over,” Madalina instructed. The backs were devoid of names and dates.
Lance stepped over and positioned himself threateningly next to Juniper’s chair. He faced Madalina so that Juniper could not see his face or expression. “I don’t have to tell you that stalling or misleading us will result in . . . unpleasant consequences.”
Madalina read the danger loud and clear. “Look. That’s not helping. I can’t think if I’m panicked. Just let me work it out for a minute.”
The room fell into silence. Madalina, feeling as if she’d pushed her luck a little too far, glanced at the floor to concentrate. Gnawing the inside of her cheek, she puzzled over the letters in the note that seemed to be different from the others, with emphasis on the slant or pen pressure or some small tell.
She already knew that she would find the dragons in Pokhara, Nepal. Eighteen, or one-eight, was the address. Now she just needed the street. In truth, she knew the sooner she found it, the sooner the men would either kill her and her parents or rush them all off to Nepal. Making Lance believe she had value was more important than ever to their survival.
“It can’t be that hard if you know what you’re supposed to do,” Beau said, putting the photos back in the box.
“How’s this? You’ve got five minutes—” The ring of a phone interrupted Lance’s threat. Pulling a phone from his pocket, he said, “Yes?”
Madalina made eye contact with her parents while Lance took the call, trying to reassure them that everything would be all right. Juniper looked paler than usual, but Wesley’s face was red, his eyes glittery with indignation.
“When?” Lance said. “We’re on the way.”
Madalina snapped her gaze back to Lance, hope surging bright in her chest. Maybe the men had been pulled off this mission for another. If Lance’s group departed for even a few hours, Madalina was sure she could get free and escape with her parents.
“Get them up; we’re leaving.” Lance barked orders to his men, pointing to Madalina, Juniper, and Wesley. “Total extraction protocol.”
“Wait, what? What does that mean?” Madalina demanded. Someone untied her and her parents from the chairs with precise, no-nonsense movements. Her wrists remained bound behind her as they were guided from the room into a hallway.
Lance did not answer.
“What about her translating the letter and the destination?” Beau asked.
“We’ll have to do it on the fly,” Lance replied, guiding them into a larger, more spacious room.
Taken aback by the large maps on the walls, the laptops with screens aglow, and desks situated in the middle loaded with office-type paraphernalia, all Madalina could do was stare in confusion.
It reminded her of a war room. Where someone might orchestrate an attack.
Lance went to one map in particular and used two fingers to pinpoint a small dot, indicating a particular point to his men. Taking a device out of his pocket, he input something with his other hand, glancing up at the red marked numbers as he typed. Moments later, Julian began taking the maps down and carefully rolled each one.
Madalina noted a red circle around a cluster of islands in the South China Sea, along with numbers that meant nothing to her. The prominent countries outlined were Vietnam, Malaysia, and China. That wasn’t a coincidence—was it? China had sent agents after the dragon Walcot had left her in his will, and now here she was, staring at a map of that exact region. The spot Lance had pointed to looked to be an island within the circle of red, but she was too far away to see the name or other details.
What these maps and Lance’s men had to do with the dragons was a mystery to Madalina. She couldn’t figure out what was happening or why the group of men was acting with such a sense of urgency. As if they’d been called to duty.
“Where are we going?” she asked. Again she received no reply. Madalina watched the men gesture toward certain spots on the map. She overheard snippets of conversation that cemented the cold hard truth: the men were transporting them overseas.
Glancing down at the edge of a table near her hip, Madalina saw a printout of one of the maps on the wall. It, too, had the red markings. While the men were distracted, she tilted her body enough to grasp one of the papers in her fingertips. It didn’t help that she had her hands tied behind her back, but she managed. Righting her posture, she finessed the page between her fingers, folding it in half, then in quarters. The mad dash of Lance’s men covered the sound of crinkling paper. Once the map was small enough to fit in her palm, no larger than a walnut in its shell, she scraped the edge along her wounded hand to transfer a bit of blood onto the paper. Then she fisted the square to hide it from view. Cole or the local authorities would run the DNA and match it to her, giving them solid evidence that she’d been here.
She knew Cole was coming. He had to know she was missing by now and would have started the hunt. There were clues in the parking lot, perhaps on their security video at the shop, and he would be relentless until he found her. Madalina took comfort in the knowledge that he wouldn’t give up or give in. It was worth the risk of discovery to give Cole every lead she could.
In less than ten minutes, the maps and office paraphernalia had been condensed to a total of three backpacks and five long tubes. Lance, on the phone several times during the process, seemed to forget that they existed. Madalina knew better. She knew the second she tried anything, Lance would notice. He and his group had that kind of awareness about them, like they’d been trained not only in warfare but in dealing with hostages.
Ushered toward the front door, Madalina made sure to position herself behind her parents and waited until the last second to flick the paper square. She flicked at an angle, attempting to bounce the wad off the baseboard. With any luck it wouldn’t hit Julian’s leg or catch his attention.
When he made no mention of it, she breathed a sigh of relief.
If anyone came looking, they might glean a clue from the map itself, and Madalina knew she and her parents could use all the help they could get.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Cole approached the house in Santa Barb
ara with more tactical precision than he’d used at Harold’s. Damon and Brandon moved in the same way, sticking to the shadows where possible, weapons drawn. They crept past obviously expensive homes in a tract nestled into the foothills, using sago palm trees for cover when they paused to survey the street. Everything looked as it should for the middle of the night: quiet, still, serene.
From a strip of grass near the curb thirty yards from their target, Cole assessed the situation. The windows of the one-story house were dark, and he detected no movement either inside or out. If he hadn’t known that the rental Ford had been here several times, he would have thought the home belonged to some random citizen who had nothing to do with the abduction.
So far, there was no sign of the van.
Senses on high alert, Cole broke cover and traversed the distance between the grass and the porch at a cautious run. He paused long enough to allow Damon time to find a rear entrance, then used a boot to kick the door in. With Brandon at his back, Cole swept the gun left and right, jaw clenched, ready for anything.
A muffled bang indicated Damon had entered the same way.
The arrangement of desks in the middle of the living area struck Cole as odd. There wasn’t any other furniture—no pictures, no decorations, not even curtains on the windows—as if the house wasn’t used as a residence but rather an office. The desks weren’t desks, exactly, he noticed, but folding tables with fake wood-grain surfaces.
“Clear,” Damon called from down a hall.
Brandon swept through rooms to their left while Cole cleared the kitchen area.
The men weren’t here. Neither were Madalina or her parents.
“Dammit.” Despite his frustration and annoyance, Cole immediately began absorbing clues in the kitchen. He saw the spare remnants of life: coffee cups in the sink, spent tea bags, a trash can half full of fast-food bags.
Someone had used the house as a temporary residence as well as an office. A place to hole up while they made plans.
In the living room, where Brandon and Damon had gathered, Cole ran his palm across the wall near a desk, feeling the tiny holes made by tacks. Although the tacks were gone, he had no trouble discerning a pattern in the drywall. Not just one rectangle, but several. Like big posters had once been hung.
“Well, someone was spending time here. There are a few beds in the spare rooms with rumpled covers,” Brandon said.
“I found fresh-crushed cigarette butts out back,” Damon added. “And another couple of rooms where someone was being held. There were chairs and cut rope and broken glass.”
“Blood?” Cole asked.
“No blood,” Damon replied.
“It looks like someone used this as a staging area,” Cole said of the living space. “There are tack holes in all the walls, as if posters or something had been hung there. And these desks—not your usual Santa Barbara décor.”
“Probably drew up their time line for Juniper and Wesley’s abduction, then Madalina’s,” Damon agreed. “We should call in the locals and have them test for fingerprints and all that.”
Something white near the front door caught Cole’s attention during his search. Picking up a tiny, folded piece of paper, he straightened and unraveled it. “Found something.”
Brandon and Damon crowded his side as he scanned the map and markings. “What the hell is this?”
“Those are the Spratly Islands,” Brandon said, gesturing to the cluster of islands circled in red. “I don’t get why someone would have a map of this here. What does that have to do with Madalina?”
“Maybe it isn’t about Madalina,” Damon said.
“It’s a target or something,” Cole said. “I wonder if it’s where they’re going? If they plan to escape there?”
“The Spratlys aren’t like Hawaii or anything. I mean they’re islands, yes, but that whole area has had a lot of political and military strife for a long time. These countries here—China, Vietnam, Malaysia, to name a few—all have claim to different islands, and some are hotly disputed,” Brandon said. “There are skirmishes and standoffs all the time that go unreported by the media. Some of the altercations are big enough that they get covered by world news.”
“So as far as escape routes, it’s not a prime location,” Cole said.
“Not exactly,” Brandon replied.
“All right, so these guys snatched Madalina and her parents and are . . . taking them to a political hot spot? That makes no sense to me.” Cole felt as if they were wasting time standing there staring at a map that had nothing to do with Madalina. But he also knew that it paid to follow every clue. Someone had dropped this on purpose, unless he’d missed his guess, which meant it was a lead they needed to follow up on whether or not it turned out to be a wasted effort.
“I agree. I don’t understand the correlation,” Brandon said.
“Unless these people somehow found a clue, and this is where they think the remaining two dragons might be. Maybe they needed Madalina to help them figure it out,” Cole said.
“That could very well be. I think we can say for sure that these people are the ones that took Madalina. This house is a halfway point, and the fact that China is indicated on these maps can’t be a coincidence,” Damon said. “Although I have to admit—Walcot hiding the dragons in politically hot territory doesn’t jibe with what I know of the man so far. Would he risk his own life to go there, or his granddaughter’s, if he knew he would eventually lead her to the artifacts?”
“A great point,” Brandon said, tonguing the edge of his teeth. “Which leads us back to the question—what the hell do the Spratly Islands have to do with this, and is that where they’re going?”
“I have to agree with you about both, Damon. It just doesn’t seem like a Walcot type of place.” Cole paused his examination of the paper, then said, “Look. There’s a scrape of what appears to be blood on the side and back here. It looks fresh.” Cole turned the paper to show his brothers the faint smear. “Think that’s a coincidence, too?”
“Hard to say. I still think we need to get this and the rest of the house tested immediately, though. If it’s blood from one of the abductors, then it might give us a lead. If it’s Madalina’s or her parents’, then it definitively places them here. Either way, it’s information we need,” Brandon said.
Cole studied the Islands again, trying to make sense of the numbers written off to the side. A sense of urgency to do something, to act, to move was almost overwhelming.
“I know one thing,” Damon said. “It looks to me like whoever was here left in a hurry. If that blood is fresh, then we’re not that far behind them. And there’s only one way to get to the Spratlys, if that’s their destination.”
“It makes sense that they would leave if they knew we were coming, hole up somewhere else in Santa Barbara—but we’re totally under the radar,” Cole said. “I didn’t see a tail on our way here, so unless they planted a tracker on one of us, there’s no way they could have known we were this close. I don’t think they’re fleeing us, but heading to one of the places on the map. Which means we need to search—”
“Airports. Probably a private one,” Brandon interjected. “They won’t risk taking hostages through a busy terminal. Damon, see what the nearest—”
“I’m already on it.” Damon had his cell phone out.
“Brandon, call Thaddeus. See if he can get someone here to collect samples from the house. Those men left DNA behind somewhere. We’ll arrange to have someone more trustworthy test the blood on the map.”
“Let me take a picture of the map to send Thad,” Brandon said, taking out his phone. He snapped a photo, then dialed Thaddeus to pass on Cole’s requests.
DNA samples, fingerprints, Cole wanted it all.
While his brothers were busy making arrangements, Cole folded the map and tucked it into his back pocket. Searching the house, he came upon the room Damon had mentioned. The one with lengths of rope coiled on the floor and chairs clearly used to detain hostages. His body
tightened at the thought of Madalina and her parents being held here, unable to escape. A sprinkle of glass from the broken pane in a french door baffled him. Maybe the men had broken in this way.
What the hell is happening to you, Madalina?
Prowling into the main area with a renewed sense of urgency, Cole accompanied his brothers out of the house and jogged back to the Jaguar.
“Closest private airstrip is fifteen minutes out,” Damon said.
“If this was their home base all along, then it’s a good chance that’s where they’ll fly out from.” Cole hopped into the Jag and started the car. Doors thumped as Damon and Brandon got in. “Call Thaddeus. See if he can find a flight plan out of here for that part of the world.”
“Good idea.” Damon took his phone out again.
Cole sped away after punching in the address to the private airstrip. It was a long shot that they would find the men there with Madalina and her parents, but it was also the best lead they had. He felt as if he and his brothers were right on the men’s tails, missing them by minutes. A strange sense of inertia gripped him; he felt if he pushed harder, went faster, he might actually catch up.
Hold on, Madalina. I’m coming.
Madalina agonized about their destination as the van careened through the streets. Sitting on the hard floor with her back to the wall, she tried in vain to get glimpses out the front windshield. Streetlamps blurred by in the darkness, along with the occasional shape of a building. Nothing that she could recognize.
Her parents appeared to be holding up as well as could be expected; Wesley’s stone-cold expression gave little away, while Juniper’s eyes darted nervously from Beau to Julian and then to her. Madalina encouraged her mother to keep the faith, to believe in a good outcome, all with a glance. She couldn’t tell them that she’d left what she hoped would turn out to be a decent clue at the house—the men would hear.
A Dangerous Tryst (The Inheritance Book 3) Page 6
