16. Phae
Phae
O kay, Kopassus did have some good qualities. They were proficient at sourcing vehicles. For the second time in a week, I found myself in freefall, this time with Emmy Black at my side instead of Jez. Jez was far, far below, waiting by a pair of jeeps that were growing rapidly larger by the second.
I glanced across at Emmy. Was this a contest? Were we seeing who would pull their ripcord last? Because my record was two hundred and eighty-nine feet, and I’d gotten chewed out royally for that by Priest.
But no, we were being sensible today. Emmy rolled her eyes behind her goggles and deployed her parachute at a sensible fifteen hundred feet, and I followed suit, drifting the remainder of the distance at a leisurely pace before I touched down next to Jez.
Heath fought his way out from under my deflated canopy.
“I gotta start disembarking more conventionally,” I muttered. Like Priest, I preferred to be in an airplane rather than out of it. “What’s the plan? Any breakthroughs?”
When we tossed ourselves out the door at nine thousand feet, the team still had eighty-seven Couch2Castle properties left to check.
Eighteen sub-teams were moving carefully between them, ascertaining whether the guests might be engaged in any extracurricular activities.
And by that, we meant terrorism, not filming a porn movie, as was apparently happening in one rustic bungalow in Raja Ampat.
I wasn’t sure whose faces would’ve been redder, the actors’ or Kopassus’s.
Probably the latter. Sin’s dog walker worked in the adult entertainment industry, and nothing fazed her, not even an unruly Malinois.
Sin said hiring a professional dominatrix to exercise Saint when we were busy with work was the best move she’d ever made—Saint wasn’t even allowed to cross the threshold without sitting first, and she walked beautifully to heel now.
All props to Madam Olana and her endless ability to deal with brats.
The woman had the patience of a Buddhist monk and also a high pain threshold, judging by the corsets and high-heeled pumps she wore.
Jez pulled a face. “Not a breakthrough exactly, but a development.”
“Well?”
“Caroline Fortier showed up in Raja Ampat.”
“What? Tell me she wasn’t sipping cocktails at a beach bar.”
“Two Dutch tourists found her stumbling along the beach, crying.”
“And? Was she injured? What was her story?”
“She had a bunch of bruises and a split lip, and she said the people who took her kept her tied up and blindfolded before they dumped her out of a boat an hour and a half ago. Rix is on his way to speak with her.” Jez checked her watch. “He’s in a helo, so he should get there soon.”
“Did she identify any of the abductors?”
“She didn’t see them, apparently.”
“How about voices?”
“All totally unfamiliar.”
“And do we believe that?”
“The cops are treating her as a victim rather than a perpetrator.” Jez wrinkled her nose. “But she conveniently lost her iPad too, so…”
“So we carry on as we are and hope Rix comes up with something?”
“Yup. We haven’t stumbled across the den of snakes so far, but Sinaga nearly got bit by a pit viper. How are the legalities going? Did McDonald try to renege on the deal yet?”
“Of course.”
Emmy shrugged out of her harness. “His lawyer tried to quibble about the price. I told him I’d double my offer to two bucks, and if he didn’t sign the papers by three p.m., Indonesian time, we’d make sure his home movie had sound.”
I checked my watch. “Which gives him seventeen minutes.”
And damn, I hoped he kept his end of the deal because nobody needed to hear all that grunting. But in case he didn’t, we also had work to do while Emmy’s legal team beavered away.
There were two properties in this direction, both built on wooden stilts in traditional style, both surrounded by dense forest, both with signs of activity in the past few days.
The latest images, taken eight hours ago by a satellite in medium Earth orbit, showed three vehicles parked outside one, and smoke drifting around the other.
Not the-house-is-on-fire smoke, more like evidence of outdoor cooking.
We’d split into pairs, and each pair would visit one location to check who was there, and then we’d regroup to move on to the next area on the list. All along the coast, other teams were doing the same.
Priest was an hour away with Mimi, exploring a villa on the edge of an abandoned hotel complex—the place was a ten-minute car ride from the coast, but the empty building would make a great place to hide hostages.
Emmy glanced at her phone. “Nothing from the suits yet. Who’s going to which property? I’d suggest flipping for it, but I don’t have a coin.”
That was true—she’d liberated several from the American douches, but then she’d dropped them in a panhandler’s basket on the way to the airport.
“I have my lucky dollar,” Jez said.
“Does it work?”
“I’m still alive, aren’t I?”
Sunlight glinted off the coin as she flipped it into the air, and five minutes later, we had a plan—Jez and I would learn about outdoor cooking while Emmy snooped around the other rental property with Heath.
This wasn’t the kind of place where you could do a drive-by.
No, we’d have to leave our vehicle a safe distance away and go in on foot, plus we had the option of drone surveillance.
No easy-to-spot commercial units for us—our toys were modelled on the living world.
On nature. For snooping, we had the hummingbird, but it would pass as a sunbird in this part of the world as long as we remembered it had to perch and not hover.
With the spare battery, we’d get two hours of flight time, less if Storm piloted the bird remotely—and we tended to avoid that, not only because it hammered the battery life but also due to the slight lag as the signal bounced off a satellite and back again.
Even a millisecond could mean the difference between life and death in a fast-moving combat situation.
Or the difference between discovery and slipping away unnoticed.
And if the mess got hot? Well, I still had the extra box of goodies Storm had slipped into one of my load-out bags before we left the US.
Emmy’s phone buzzed. “Signed, sealed, and delivered.” It buzzed again, and she took a moment to read the message. “That stupid twat.”
I suspected that could reference a lot of people in her life. “Are you talking about Lonnie?”
“He jumped the gun with his own press release.”
I began cursing under my breath, as did Heath, who’d seemed reasonably polite until now.
“‘Twat’ is a very mild word for that, don’t you think?” Jez asked.
“Does ‘shit-slurping cuntwaffle’ do it for you?”
“That’s better,” she admitted.
“Good. Let’s move out.”
* * *
“What the fuck?”
I said it in a barely audible whisper because I was lying in a bush a hundred yards from the target property, being eaten alive by something that had crawled up my pant leg.
Yes, I’d tucked my pants into my socks and sprayed myself liberally with DEET, but the little bastards were more persistent than a proselytiser with a pamphlet.
There were no picture-postcard beaches along this part of the coastline.
Mangrove swamps stood guard between land and water, hosting a variety of creatures that hated humans in general and me in particular.
Fifty yards away, three buildings clustered around a small clearing—two on stilts, one large and one small, plus a long, low shed that looked as if it might have housed animals in the distant past. The woven walls had holes in places, and a grill was still smoking under an overhang at the front.
In the ten minutes we’d been sitting in this damn bush, we’d seen three people, but the first two were nothing to write home about.
A pretty blonde a few years younger than me walked out of the smallest of the three structures carrying a bucket, and an older man with longer hair than the blonde ambled around behind her, his face stuck in a smartphone.
Tourists. Looked like backpackers. Father and daughter?
Retired music executive and groupie? This rental was one of the cheapest on Couch2Castle—the supporting pillars appeared sturdy enough, but one good gust of wind, and those walls would be nothing but a pile of sticks. So far, nothing out of the ordinary.
Then a shirtless man backed out of the shed, dragging the Indonesian equivalent of a lawn chair, and damn, I’d recognise that ass anywhere.
Jez blew out a breath. “That’s Marc?”
“Yeah. It is.”
We watched in silence as he returned to the shed for a cushion, slathered his chest with sunscreen, and settled himself onto the seat. Well, fuck. Had he been kidnapped, or was he on vacation?
“And he’s…sunbathing?”
“Look, I don’t know what’s going on any more than you do.”
“He doesn’t exactly look distressed.”
“Yes, I can see that,” I snapped in a whisper.
Snapped because I’d flown my ass all the way to Indonesia to save a man I hadn’t spoken with in a decade, and he was sitting in the sunshine reading a paperback. Relief warred with irritation.
“So, should we rescue him, or what?”
If it hadn’t been for the chain attached to Marc’s ankle that snaked away into the darkness, my answer would have been “Or what.” Was this a setup? And where was Serena?
Nothing about this made sense.
“Guess we’d better call it in.”
And prepare for the inevitable “I told you so” from Emmy.