Mason looked at the book Baylor pulled out of his shirt and asked, “What’s that all about?”
Baylor opened it up, so Mason saw the Help message, and then Baylor turned to the next page. Immediately the men around them whistled.
“Jesus,” Mason said.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Baylor said, “we need to go after this guy—and now.”
“Is there any other logical reason why that would be noted there?” Hudson asked.
Baylor gave a one-arm shrug and replied, “I don’t know where the daughter would have seen that face unless she’d actually seen him in person.”
“Good point,” Hudson said, studying it.
Baylor looked over at Mason. “I want to go with the rescue team.”
“Well, nobody is going alone anywhere,” he said, “but I have to get clearance for this.”
“Well, we’ve got a young woman’s clues here, indicating a kidnapping. Actually I have no clue how old the daughter is,” he said, then looked over at Mason. “Did we get any intel on that?”
“Yeah, she’s twenty-five. She was here on holiday with her parents. Apparently the mother had just come through several rounds of chemotherapy for breast cancer, and this was to be a recuperative voyage for them.”
“Wow, that’s tough,” he murmured. “So we have a young woman with an uncanny ability to sketch faces, and she left us one hell of a message.”
“She did, indeed. Okay,” Mason said. “I’ll see if I can get clearance for a team of four. We still need a destination.”
“Well, maybe this helps,” Hudson said. “Look here in the drawing, written in very small letters. It says Bern.”
“She only would have noted that if the kidnappers were talking,” he said. “But why Bern?”
“Unless the kidnappers are after what, Swiss banks?” Hudson offered. “Maybe these gunmen have a Swiss connection.”
“Or rather,” Baylor said, “maybe the governor does?”
At that, Mason gave him a sharp look and nodded. “We’ll go with that.”
*
Gizella stared at the gunman in anger. “You didn’t have to hit her.”
“You’ll be next, if you keep it up,” the man said in perfect English.
“She’s just recovering from breast cancer treatment, so she’s hardly a threat to you.”
“Anybody who keeps running their mouth is a threat to me,” he said, turning to glare at her. “So, if you don’t want a dose of the same, shut the hell up.”
She pinched her lips together and glared at him. Gizella had seen some assholes in her life, but this guy took the cake. She gently patted her mom, who had crashed on the bench beside her.
They were in another boat, and Gizella had no clue where or why because they had been knocked out in the interim. When she woke up, she was in this boat, just floating along a river. The river part made her think Europe because towns were all up and down on either side. She couldn’t identify any particular landmark to help her figure out where she was. But she had overheard one of their kidnappers say something about Bern, before they were knocked out with some kind of drug.
As it was, she doubted that anybody knew where they were going or where they’d come from. Even if some witness did see their transfer, Gizella and her parents were confined to this small space in maybe a cargo room aboard the ship. Out of sight of any more witnesses. This area had been blocked off with plywood only waist-high. So she could vault it, if she needed to, but wouldn’t push that opportunity right now.
The only thing she could really do was stay alert and try not to open her mouth and piss these guys off any further. But it was impossible for her to sit by while they beat up on her mother, who had been through far too much already. Not only had her father crossed the line and had an affair several years ago but her mother had ended up with a diagnosis of breast cancer just after the two had reconciled. The years since had been fraught with worry, pain, and stress, and now this happened—just when her mother had completed her treatments and they were taking a little vacation to enjoy some family time and to get some distance from the treatments and the fear that seemed to permeate every day of their lives.
Gizella groaned, as she collapsed against the side of the boat. She didn’t know where they were and had only one window, which didn’t give her a decent view of the landscape outside. What little she had seen looked like small communities. Even as she studied the area, nothing seemed familiar, but then she’d never done any European tours. She didn’t even know if she was on a little barge, a converted luxury yacht, or a miniature cruise ship; she had no clue. For that matter it could be a monstrosity of a cruise ship, although it didn’t feel that way. It felt like a smaller craft, which took on every wave, every damn little movement of the water.
She loved the rock-and-roll movements when she was out on the ocean. She loved to feel the water gently roll under her feet, with the sense of being alone in the vast midst of Mother Nature out in the world. Gizella usually loved to be the only one out there, not seeing another boat or anything else around her. She felt such a tremendous sense of freedom when she was by herself on the water.
And that’s where they’d been, until they’d been boarded by these assholes, and then their yacht was rammed into a cargo liner. She didn’t even understand what part the cargo ship had in the whole thing. She did hear
