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Callum and Rachel stared at each other for a moment. There were times when he could almost feel the witch read his mind. This was one of those times.
“I’ll call Father and see if I can borrow his jet again.” Rachel stood, pulling her phone from her designer bag as she did so. She started to talk as she strode from the room.
“I’ll dig up everything I can on Esteban.” Elle grabbed her computer and followed Rachel.
“You taking the whole team?” Lake said.
“Megan’s still healing from the bullet to her leg,” Callum said. An injury from their last unplanned op. “She can stay here with Dimitri and man the store.” He didn’t mention that Dimitri’s traumatised sister would be there too. Both men knew that Katrina wasn’t anywhere near ready to leave the security of the building. And neither of them would take her into another dangerous situation. Not after everything she’d gone through at the hands of her kidnapper. “Rachel can handle the interviews we have set up.”
“So everybody else, then,” Lake said. “Keep me posted. Let me know if I need to call in emergency help.”
“Thanks.” Callum stood, ready to shut the call off.
“Be careful,” Lake said. “Elle only scraped the surface when she described Esteban. The guy is smart, ruthless and evil. Don’t underestimate him. He is completely relentless when it comes to getting what he wants.”
Callum felt a cold dread settle in his chest. “I’ll call you on the other side.”
With a click, he ended the call and went to pack—texting Joe as he did, to let him know help was on its way.
Chapter 9
There was no oxygen in Bolivia’s capital city. None. The air was so thin that they may as well have been on the moon. After a sleepless night worrying about Alice and listening to her gran snore, the last thing Julia wanted to do was catch an early morning flight to La Paz.
And now, she was going to die on the runway, in Bolivia. Somehow, it seemed a fitting end to her rather pathetic life. By the time Julia had made it down the stairs from the plane to the tarmac, her head was spinning and she was fighting the urge to vomit. Just as her legs gave way beneath her, she felt Joe’s arm around her waist.
“Altitude sickness.” He kissed her temple before calling to someone in Spanish.
A minute later, Julia was riding in a golf cart with a flashing light, with a mask over her face and a bottle of oxygen at her side. If she hadn’t felt so bad, she would have been humiliated. The whole thing was made even worse by the fact her grandmother was unaffected.
“Don’t feel bad.” Patricia reached over from the seat behind her to pat Julia’s shoulder. “I’ve been in South America for a while. I spent weeks in high altitude before going to Lima. You’ll get used to it. The key is to move really slowly until your lungs adjust to having less oxygen. Coca leaf tea helps too. We’ll get you some. It’s going to be fine.”
Julia groaned. She thought it had been quiet, but Joe must have heard. His arm wrapped around her and he pulled her tight to his side. She was feeling too ill to object. Joe was strong and warm and solid. And Julia was in no state to worry about the dangers of getting close to him, not when there were so many other worries vying for attention. The one uppermost in her mind was the fear of dying. She was pretty sure that if someone took the oxygen tank from her, she’d collapse and expire on the runway of the highest international airport in the world.
“It’s going to be okay.” Joe rubbed her arm.
Julia whined. It was pathetic, but she wished someone would knock her unconscious and wake her when they turned the oxygen back on.
Getting through the airport was a blur. All she remembered was handing Joe her passport and fighting nausea. The next thing she knew, she was in the back of a minibus, minus her oxygen tank which had to stay at the airport, racing through crowded streets into downtown La Paz.
“La Paz is the highest capital city in the world,” she told Joe, aware that she sounded a little drunk and a lot disorientated, but unable to do anything about either. “Twelve thousand feet above sea level.”
“Is that right?” There was a smile in his voice as he held her against his side.
Part of her thought she should probably fight his pr
oprietary hold on her. The rest of her was too comfortable to care.
Julia rested her cheek on his chest, mainly because she had no strength to hold her head up, but she found she liked it there. “Over a million people live in and around the city.” Yep, every fact she’d read on the plane was spilling out of her mouth—whether she wanted it to or not. She lifted a weak hand in an attempt to point at the snow-covered peaks surrounding the city. “That’s the Cordillera Real range. That peak there is twenty-one thousand feet. This city is more than halfway up that mountain. Can you believe it?”
“No, baby, I can’t believe it.” Joe’s chest shook beneath her, and if she’d had the energy she would have glanced up to see if he was laughing at her.
She continued her rambling, unstoppable guided tour. “We’re only forty-two miles from the highest navigable lake in the world. Lake Titicaca. That’s Lake Titty-Kaka.” She mustered enough energy to look up at him. “That name is all kinds of wrong, Joe. It brings to mind images that shouldn’t be in my head.”
“Baby.” He shook his head. His grin was wide and he was definitely trying not to laugh.
“La Paz sits in a canyon that gives it some protection from the elements,” Julia continued. “Although it’s expanded quickly over the past few years and now reaches the high plains area of the Altiplano. That’s where we just came from. That’s where the airport is.” She looked back up to Joe. “Does it mess with your head that we flew up twelve thousand feet to land? I mean, shouldn’t you go up then come back down? Isn’t it against nature to go up and then stay up?”
Laughter came from the front seats in the van, and Julia forced her head to turn to see who it was. Her gran and Ed were smiling back at her. Huh. Julia hadn’t even noticed they were there. Her head felt too heavy, so she rested her cheek back against Joe, her focus on the view zooming past their window.
