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14
Cole
After the SUVs disappeared with Annie, I'd tried the running, the session with the punching bag. I tried working, the day spa project that was promising, though John Fleet and I were both busy enough with running our individual businesses we might actually come together to work long after the last of the Brazilian rainforest had burned to the ground.
None of it worked. Being in the control room watching the drone operators search for a trace made it worse. The anxiety ate me alive. I wondered briefly about Annie's ex-fiancé. Had he been that passive or that controlling to be able to wait for so many years of their relationship without knowing where she was. Without knowing if she was all right.
This was agony. Whatever she was going through, it was worse than anything I was even contemplating, but this was still hell.
Regular updates on the hour from my team were interspersed with my showing up in the control room to pace and act like a caged tiger. Scott was with me half the time I was there, offering suggestions, he and his security team doing their own searches. I didn't ask who their contacts were. They'd all been cleared for what was probably higher security levels than people who worked in the White House. I trusted them to know and do their jobs.
The did. And they didn't find anything. Fact was it had nothing to do with high tech. It probably didn't have anything to do with advanced planning and subterfuge at this point. The simple fact was they'd driven off with Annie and no one knew where.
It was that simple. Maybe the simplicity was what made it work. And what made it so much harder to take.
By the end of the day I'd made my decisions. My first step was to call in a small team of mercenaries. I'd worked with them before, on more occasions than the normal citizen has to contact trained mercs. What I wanted them to do was find the most logical places she could have gone and go there. Eyes on the ground. The cars had gone off in three different directions. My security team and my IT people could all plot where those directions led. So could I. The mercs had the magic and muscle to make anyone in those destinations talk.
I wanted to know where she was. The tracker had shown up for half the day and stopped working when she ended up in the SUV. Might be something shielding the SUV. The things were big enough for all I knew they were lead-lined. Or maybe both devices had just stopped working. There were two and they shouldn't both fail but things happen.
She wouldn't even know they'd failed yet. I wasn't supposed to be coming after her. She'd still think she was safe.
Relatively, but I was arrogant enough to at least hope it was something she'd depend on, and human enough to be horrified to know it wasn't. It wasn't, and she didn't know.
The mercs were on standby. I'd give it 24 hours for her to surface again, a good strong signal beeping her location and then I'd send them. That felt like too much time. It made my heart pound and sweat break out on my face. But there was no point putting her through any of it only to pull the plug before anything could have happened. Before she could have found out anything and achieved anything to take down the people doing this.
Annie was beautiful. Warm skin tones, pixy face, big dark eyes, that headful of dark curls that had grown so long. Big tits, small waist, long runners legs. We were dealing with a trafficking ring. They'd value all of that no matter how mad she made them. Rape was a possibility and it made me want to find the nameless, faceless fucks doing this and putting this whole plan into action, but permanently hurting her? It would be stupid from the bottom line standpoint.
That wasn't reassuring. But Annie had been in these situations before, undercover for PD. I hadn't. She was a masochist, which they wouldn't know, and while there was no way in hell I thought she'd enjoy a single thing they did to her, because all of it would be meant to break her, not to help her grow, I did think she could compartmentalize it and withstand it.
Otherwise she wouldn't be wherever it was she was right now.
And as for me, I was just arrogant enough to now wonder if my role wasn't after all the harder to endure.
