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“I wish things were different for us as well,” I confess, and I’m speaking with nothing but honesty.
Emily blows on her tea and takes a sip of it. I’ve never had chamomile tea before, but I know from Eset that it’s good for calming nerves and anxiety. I hope it’s doing just that for Emily.
“I think I’m going to take a hot shower. Then can we just go to bed after?” Emily asks me as she raises her brows. I can see she’s exhausted, and I don’t blame her one bit. Today has been very emotionally tiring for her. In fact, the last twenty-four hours have been.
“Okay, I’ll meet you in there after you’re done.”
Emily finishes her tea over the course of the next few minutes, and then she rises from the couch and heads for the bathroom.
Ludvik’s in the kitchen fixing something to eat for himself, so I get off the couch and head into the kitchen. I need to know if he’s found anything else out, especially after I gave him more information on Emily’s daughter last night.
He’s flipping something over in the frying pan and turns to glance at me before returning his attention back to his cooking. “You need something, boss?”
“Yeah, I wanted to see if you had any updates for me.”
“I do, actually. I wanted to wait until Emily was out of earshot, given the nature of what you’re having me look into.”
“Emily knows everything. I spoke to her last night about it all, but please go on.”
“Okay. I managed to trace all the girls between the age of nine and ten. I have thirty-four hits on those two age groups combined.”
“Her birthday is August 19th, so she’d have to be ten now since we’ve just passed that. How many are ten?” I go over to the fridge and take out a bottle of water. As I twist the cap off, Ludvik answers me.
“Fourteen.”
“Okay, so what do you and your contacts know about Julio and his operation?”
“We know that Julio has a facility where he houses them in Del Rio, Texas. It’s on the other side of the Mexican border, and we believe he has some sort of way to get them in and out. My best guess is they have underground tunnels. It would be a way to stay underneath ICE’s radar. A child confirmed they go down and then come up, but we’re not sure how reliable she is.”
Children hardly ever lie, especially under these sorts of circumstances. “The child’s reliable. What else do you have for me?”
“If that’s the case, then we’re going to believe all of what she’s said? My worry is that we can’t trust her, given the things we don’t know about. We’re unsure if she’s been coerced to say these things to us or if she’s being honest.”
“Without her, we have nothing to go off of, so we need to believe what she says.”
“Okay, then she’s told us she’s gone up and down, followed her bosses wherever they told her to go.”
“How old is this girl that you have?”
“She’s fourteen, and she’s giving us a lot of information,” Ludvik murmurs as he takes his grilled cheese off the frying pan and places it on the plate sitting on the counter.
“Then we should believe her. You said there are fourteen girls in that age bracket, and while I wasn’t prepared to take that many away from Julio’s ring, we have no choice but to do it.”
“We don’t have the facilities to do it, boss.”
“It doesn’t matter. I won’t leave helpless children in that monster’s hands. We get them all out. Any of them could be Emily’s daughter. We’re going to have to orchestrate something to get them, as well as transportation.”
“Do you have anyone who can get the girls out? Transportation wise?” Ludvik questions as he turns the stove off and takes a bite of his grilled cheese.
“I do. I have a contact who owns a shipping company. They work by stating they’re delivering rabbit food to different distributors, but the reality is they aren’t. They have hidden areas in the tractor trailers all the way in the back, which makes up for the weight distribution.” Each bag of rabbit food weighs about forty pounds. If there are one hundred bags on one trailer, that’s four thousand pounds of cargo. They’ll get the girls loaded onto the trailer, and then they’ll put the rabbit food in front of them once they get to a secure location. It’ll be easy as pie.
“Okay, then we’re developing a plan to get these girls out. It’ll be one hell of an operation, boss.”
“It will be, but at the end of the day, I know we’re going to be successful with it. We’ll get the girls on that trailer and bring them here to Atlanta. There’s a warehouse outside the city that we used to torture my stepfather. It’s out of sight and off the radar. We can have the semi-truck deliver the girls there, and it’ll give them a safe place to stay in the meantime until I can come up with a more permanent solution for the other thirteen girls.”
“Okay, I’ll do whatever needs to be done.” Ludvik has always been a loyal soldier, and after Kirill’s betrayal, I’m hoping Ludvik won’t let me down as Kirill did.
“Thank you. We’ll discuss how we’re going to execute the plan flawlessly later, but good job,” I tell Ludvik, and he nods, taking his plate over to the dining area where he chooses to eat.
