Operation Swift Mercy (21 page)

“Yeah, we did,” Del agreed. “But give us a break, babe—you were running around like
B
rid
e
zilla
. T
he last thing you needed to hear about was all this. We were waiting till things quietened down.”

“
Seriously
,
Del
?
That’s the reasoning you’re going with here?”

“It’s the truth.”

Mercy shut her eyes in dismay. Great—now look what she’d done! Because of her
, two
newlyweds were fighting on their honeymoon.

“Everyone calm down a second,” Chase cut in smoothly, stepping forward
. “How about instead of throwing around blame, we concentrate on the bigger picture here, namely that Mercy’s life is in real danger and we’re here to do everything we can to protect her.”

Willow’s gaze
turned
sidewards to fall on Mercy for a brief moment and her frown slipped a little. ”You’re right—sorry Mercy, you must have been going through some pretty tough stuff lately. How can we help? What are we doing about this then?” Willow
demanded
the investigative reporter in her coming to the surface
.

“We haven’t gotten that far, all we were worried ab
out was getting her out of town.”

“Well you’ve done what you guys do best—now  it’s time to let me do what I do, and get to the bottom of this.”

Mercy began to shake her head, but Chase stopped her, saying “I think she’s right.”
Del began to protest at that, but Chase over rode his objections. “Within reason,”
he added.

“Look,”
Willow jumped in quickly, “we can hide her and keep her out of sight for a while, but we can’t do it forever. Eventually she’d going to have to go back and how are you going to help her then? You can’t keep her a prisoner here forever. This thing needs to be taken care of or all you’re doing is putting off the
inevitable
,”
s
he shrugged.

Immediately Mercy felt her stomach drop and panic must have shown in her expression, because Chase
slid his arm across her shoulders and
glared
across
at Willow
. “You’ll get used to that—Willow’s the Queen of subtlety,” he snapped.

“Well, excuse me if I believe as a
grown
woman she should know exactly what she’s up against as opposed to wrapping her up in cotton wool and treating her like a child.”

Willow’s words stung a little, she couldn’
t deny it,
it had been nice to feel safe after those first few harrowing days feeling as though she were all alone in the world
but she’d been getting sick of the men making all the decisions and trying to keep her from worrying too much. She didn’t want to be a damsel in distress; she just wanted her life back.
“
She
’s right. I need to get this sorted. I need your help, Willow,” Mercy said turning to face the woman squarely.

From the corner of her eye she saw Del throw up his hands in defeat, and groan. “Well there goes the rest of the honeymoon.”

“Seriously?” Willow arched an eyebrow across at him. “You’re so hard done by in that department you think a honeymoon is the only place you’re going to get sex?”

“Fine. I give up. I’m going fishing,
”
he said, turning to stalk off in the direction he came from.

“Willow—” Mercy went to protest, but was cut off with a wave of her hand.

“He’s alright, he’ll get over it. We were snapping each other’s heads off before you lot even turned up. There really is only a so much togetherness a couple as independent as us can handle,” she said in a dry tone.

“Do you feel up to going over everything now?”

“How about tomorrow?” Chase stepped in once again.

“Chase, please. Willow’s right. You need to stop doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“Being over protective. The sooner we get this sorted out the better for everyone.”

“Fine. If that’s what you want,” he said a little stiffly for Mercy’s liking. She didn’t want to sound ungrateful, he’d probably saved her life—more than once since they’d met, but she was beginning to feel just as smothered as when she’d been living with Nikkos. She needed to start making her own decisions and standing up for herself. “It is.”

“Then I’ll see you later.”

“You don’t have to go, I mean you’re welcome to stay and –”

“I’ve got a few things I should take care of before it gets dark. Want me to come back and get you for dinner?”

“I can find my way back, you don’t have to go to any trouble,” she said quietly.

“That track’s pretty hard to judge once it gets dark—I’ll be back to get you later,”
he said, turning away before she could protest further.

Chapter
Seventeen

Willow made her nervous—she wasn’t sure if it were the fact that she was so confident and forthright, or that she was just so observant. Whenever she’d been in the same room with the woman before the wedding, it was like she was trying to work Mercy out, peeling back layers piece by piece and just not quite able to fit together all the bits she needed to complete the puzzle.

“Do you mind if I tape our conversation? It helps me to listen to it back later,”
Willow said, withdrawing her phone and swiping a few keys until she’d found the voice recorder function and placed it on the table.

“Go right ahead,” Mercy said with the slightest trace of sarcasm which apparently Willow was either too absorbed in anticipation of a juicy story to notice or she chose to ignore it
.

“So, let’s start,” she said, looking up and smiling across at her.

“I don’t really know where to start,” Mercy admitted as she searched for a way to explain just how she came to be mixed up in this whole mess.

“How about you start with the incident. Just tell me everything you remember,” she suggested, sitting back in her chair calmly as though she listened to people spill their guts on a daily basis—which she probably did, but
it
didn’t help Mercy any as this was her first time.

Taking a big breath, Mercy did as Willow asked, going back to that horrible day, she’d give anything to go back and change.

Mercy sat hunched down in the driver’s seat of her car, watching the car parked inside the gates of a large industrial estate site. Nikkos had gone inside the massive
shed, which
looked big enough to house a jumbo jet inside through a side door upon arrival and hadn’t come back out. She wasn’t sure what she was hoping to find—everything inside told her that nothing about this was innocent—but she wasn’t sure exactly what she was going to achieve by sitting here spying on the man. It wasn’t as though she could see anything now he’d gone inside the building
.
Channelling her inner James Bond, she’d followed Nikkos from his office this afternoon, after almost talking
herself out
of this harebrained
scheme a
hundred times
throughout
the day. Since late the night before,
overhearing that disturbing conversation in Nikkos
’s
office, she’d been unable to get it out of her head. She needed to find out one way or the other what Nikkos was involved in. Taking out her Nikon, she attached the biggest lens she had and focused in on the vehicles, waiting to see what on earth Nikkos could be doing out here
.

A few minutes later, a second vehicle drove through the gate, and pulled up beside Nikkos vehicle. Lowering the camera to get her bearings, she felt safe that from where she’d parked, there was no way she could be spotted and zoomed in to refocus on the vehicles once more, but the fact she was snooping made her jumpy.

Four men exited the second car, well dressed businessmen who looked completely out of place. She saw Nikkos and his body guard, Louie walk outside to greet them. Clicking off a few shots, Mercy saw the men shaking hands and after a few minutes of conversation, Nikkos led the men back inside.

With a frustrated sigh—Mercy bit the inside of her lip as she considered her next move. Either she packed up and went home—without any concrete evidence to confirm her worst fears, or she was going to have to get closer and find out what was going on inside that shed.

It took a while to make her way to the building. She hadn’t wanted to risk driving any closer in case someone heard the car, so she’d made her way over on foot, taking the most indirect way and trying to stay inconspicuous.

She circled the building quietly, wondering where the best place to try and see inside would be. Her options seemed limited. There was the small door the others went through off to one side of the front of the building. The two large hanger
-
like doors were the only other way in that way and were both locked up tight. Around the back was a staircase which led up the outside of the warehouse to another door. She didn’t particularly like that this way exposed her to anyone who may walk around the back of the building to check on anything. The only other place was a small window about half way down on the lower floor.

Picking her way through the tangle of scratchy weeds that had grown around the base of the building, she inched her face up to the window frame
and peered
inside. Naturally with her luck it was a room of sorts and she muttered to herself, about to pull away and search for another window, when she noticed something move on the floor inside the room.

With a surprised gasp, she realised there were people inside. Once she worked out they couldn’t see her, her heart dropped back down from her throat and she waited for her eyes to adjust to the dim room to make out huddled groups of young women.

Before she could digest what this implied, the door inside the room opened and Mercy ducked down, frozen in place as she waited to see what would happen.

The voices were muffled, but she could make out frightened whimpers and a man’s voice picking out women to follow him. The door shut again and the whimpers died down in the remaining girls, still huddled together.

A sickening feeling filled Mercy as she reached the only logical conclusion she could reach about why these girls were being kept here. Anger soon elbowed its way past the ill feeling and Mercy searched for a better view to get some photos. What she really wanted to do was march right in there and demand to know what the hell was going on—and find out if the girls in that room were ok…but she wasn’t stupid. She knew Nikkos could be dangerous…the man didn’t have a 24 hour body guard for no reason. She had always assumed it was because he was so wealthy, but clearly he didn’t trust a lot of people and probably had more than his fair share of enemies. No, she’d try and get some kind of evidence—take a photo with him and these other men together and maybe
the police
would take her seriously and do something.

Creeping around the corner of the shed, she spotted another door and window—these ones obviously n
ever used if the weeds growing at
the b
ase
of the door frame was anything to go by. A broken pane of glass allowed her an unobstructed view of inside the huge warehouse.

There were large curtained tent like rooms set up at the
furthest
end. It looked like something out of an old Arabian
night’s
movie. However in the centre of the room was a scattering of leather lounge chairs, where Nikkos and his guests were now seated, chatting casually. Three young women stood in a line before the men, their heads lowered. She saw one of the men point at a girl and stand up, walking toward one of the tent rooms, a body guard dragging the young woman who’d been chosen along behind him. Taking a quick photo through the window, she ducked back down and zoomed in on the photo. From a distance she couldn’t see who the other men were, but being able to zoom in on the photo, Mercy gaped as she recognised the man going to the tent as the minister for immigration. Mercy had met him a few times at functions and once at the house. The implications of what she was witnessing settled heavily in her stomach. This thing Nikkos was involved in obviously had connections within the Government.

The sound of raised
voices alerted
Mercy to a situation inside the warehouse, so she carefully eased back up to see what was happening.

The casual conversation of a few moments
before
had somehow turned very un-casual. One of the other men who’d come along with
the immigration
minister, was on his feet yelling at Nikkos, who
was calmly
seated and
looking unimpressed by the display. She couldn’t make out the words, but she could see that the man was not happy about something.

Nikkos called an order, and two men appeared from the rear of
the building
to come
to a
stop behind the guests. Something about the situation felt wrong
.
Mercy
needed
to capture some of these men on tape and
decided against using the camera, it was too bulky to try and manoeuvre, opting instead, for her phone to do the job.
Suddenly, Nikkos barked an order and the two body guards behind the angry man withdrew their weapons.