It seemed to occur to me and him at the samemoment what that meant. Mikado had to go inside with me or it wouldtrigger the alarm. I’d hoped to take the opener and have him takeoff and get into witness protection before I retrieved the car.
“It’s no big deal,” he shook his head androlled his eyes. “I’ll go in with you, and we’ll drive the car out.Then I’ll be gone, and you’ll be gone, and we can forget about thebratva once and for all.”
My chest squeezed, and it felt like aballoon was inflating in my throat. “I don’t expect it to, Mikado,but it could go very wrong.”
“My life is already really wrong. At leastthis will give me and my family the chance to get out of this.Let’s go.” He slid into the driver’s seat, and I ran around the carand hopped into the passenger seat and then slid down so that nocamera would pick me up. He drove the couple blocks to the yard andpushed the button on the opener.
“It’s opening. That’s a good sign. Theydidn’t only restrict me to a particular number of opens today.Sometimes they do that.” After a thirty-second pause, the car movedforward through the gate. Since I was out of sight, I checked myphone and quickly scanned through the messages I’d received fromHalluis and Jeremy. Halluis had retrieved the drive, and Ace hadstarted decrypting files, looking for information about the kids.Jeremy said they would be ready for us when we got out. The carstopped, and Mikado said, “All right. You can sit up.”
I pocketed the phone and sat up. He’d parkednext to the office building. “I’ll go in and search for thecontainer with the kids. You wait here.” People were rushing about,loading cars into containers and working on the VINs anddocumentation of others, some workers just ran from place to place,and I had no idea what they were doing.
“Wait here, act like you belong, and we’llbe out of here in no time,” I said, climbing out of the car.
No one seemed to be paying me any attention,and I opened the door to the office. I knew from my study of cargoships only a few days ago that one guy organized exactly where eachand every container would go on the ship before they were loadedaccording to weight and contents. Each container was tracked usinga specific code. That information was fed to the crane operatorsand truck drivers to get the right containers located in the rightspot at the right time. It was a very complex process. All I had todo was get my eyes on the list of containers and look for the onewith the kids in it.
Since loading was in process, I’d have todisable the man behind the computer, and if the container with thewould-be slaves had already been loaded, I’d have to disable acrane operator, too. I could do this. I peeked quickly through thewindow in the door—the reception room of the office was empty. Iopened the door and walked into the office, acting like I knewexactly what I was doing.
Just as I entered, I got a text fromHalluis. Slaves not listed as cargo. They are using code. Trythese three words for the description of contents: livestock,auction, new merchandise. Cars are listed in code also, but thecode varies with the different cars. I checked out the emptyroom. Nothing of consequence caught my eye, but there was a doorbehind the counter. I headed toward it.
It was obvious that I’d found the rightroom. A thin man with wire-rimmed glasses and super pale skinlooked up at me. He must be the man who pulled the strings and toldthe crane operators where each container was to be put. I pulledout my knife and in two steps, I had it on his neck and his handsbehind his back before he could react to my presence.
“I need you to pull up the cargomanifest.”
“Never.” He spoke through clenched teeth. Ididn’t wait; I didn’t have time to negotiate. I slid the knife intomy boot and with one pressured movement at his neck, I knocked himout. I slid him off the seat and called Ace.
“I’m sitting in front of the computer.” Ithen explained to him what I was seeing on the screen.
“Okay, you’ll need to access the ship’scargo manifest,” he said. I felt a twinge in my heart as hepatiently walked me through the process, utter calm emanating fromhis voice. I hadn’t stopped to think about the consequences ofgoing off mission—for all of us. If we didn’t retrieve the cartonight, Director Skriloff would probably find a way to have us allfired.
“Ace—Jeremy told you and Halluis what’sgoing on?”
There was a pause on the line. “You got thatlast step, right?”
“Yeah, I got it. But listen, I just want—Imean, I need to make sure you guys understand—”
“Christy.” Ace cut me off. “What did we tellyou? You’re our girl, and we’re with you one hundred percent.”
“Ace—”
“Don’t worry about us. If we lose our jobs,big deal. Those kids are more important than any job, and we allagree on that.”
Suddenly, Halluis’s voice was coming overthe line, muffled as if he were trying to pull the phone away fromAce.
“Of course, if you could pull off a miracleand rescue the director’s car at the same time, we would not beungrateful.”
There was a brief scuffle, then Ace was backon the line. “Don’t listen to him. You do what you have to do tosave those kids and get yourself out of there safe.”
“You’ve got it, Ace,” I said, barelycontaining a grin.
“All right, last step,”
