AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“It’ll be done. You know what we need. What we’re asking for.”
“I know. We’re on the same page. Fucking do-gooders ruin fucking everything. You know how wealthy I’d be right now if it wasn’t for that damn law? We’ll get it through.” The wind shifted and she didn’t catch the next few words. Maybe “chair”? “Affair? That didn’t make sense.
Then a noise caught their attention and they swung around to greet a pretty young woman in a bikini. “Come swim with me!” she called. “There’s a pool on this boat, isn’t that crazy?”
The men exchanged one more glance, nodded at each other, as if sealing the deal, and left the railing.
Only once they were gone did Bliss allow herself to relax. What had she just overheard? Some kind of crime being plotted right in front of her? Or not—there could be an innocent explanation. She ran over the conversation in her head, but couldn’t get a clear picture of what was going on. What did it matter, anyway? So what if she’d overheard a fishy conversation at a party? She didn’t know what it meant, couldn’t prove anything, and who would take her seriously anyway?
All that changed when she pulled out her phone and realized that she’d never pressed the red button and it had been recording audio ever since that first shot of the Andaman Sea.
She stopped the recording. Then held it up to her ear and played it, her heart racing. Part of her wanted the audio to be muffled, or distorted, or nonexistent. That would make her next decision so much easier.
No such luck. Her phone had a great camera and it had captured every word, even the ones she herself had missed. Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee.
“So then what did you do?” Granger asked.
His interviewing technique was impressive. Once she’d started telling her story, she’d lost herself in the reliving of it. She snapped back to the present moment and found Granger watching her from the other end of the couch with a kind of neutral compassion.
“I tried to act normal through the rest of the party. I kept looking for those two men, thinking if I could at least identify one of them, that might help me decide what to do. But I never saw them again after that. They probably went into the pool and then to a bedroom, and then who knows what. I got talking to a nice older man who had to jet off to Japan the next day. A helicopter was coming to pick him up and he offered me a ride.”
She caught his expression. “Right, you don’t need all the details of my glamorous yacht party. What I did next was that I didn’t sleep all night. I listened to the recording a few times. The next day I was knitting during a break when I finally remembered where I’d seen the American man before. I told you that knitting is magic. He’s a United States congressman. That’s when I put it together. He was talking about extorting someone to help repeal sex trafficking legislation. That was when I decided to contact the consulate.”
“So you met with someone and played them the recording?”
“I did. He was a low-level guy, I think. Pretty young. But he took lots of notes and thanked me for reporting it. I figured my part was done. I went back to the hotel and finally had a nap.”
“Did you leave the recording with him?”
“Well, I airdropped it to him. I still have it in my phone. It’s probably in the Cloud as well.”
Granger nodded. “So then someone broke into your hotel room?”
“I came in after the next day’s shoot and it was a mess.”
He shot an impassive glance around the hotel room they were currently sitting in. She smiled wryly. “Much more of a mess, if you can believe it. Everything was tossed around, all my clothes were on the floor, that sort of thing. Nothing was stolen. Then I wondered if they were looking for my phone, for the recording, but obviously I had my phone with me. Who would leave their phone in their hotel room?”
“Maybe someone was trying to scare you,” he suggested.
“Well, it worked. I did get scared. I changed my ticket to leave early and hired atuk-tukto take me around the markets for some Christmas shopping. The driver was the one who noticed that someone was following us. Once he pointed it out, I saw he was right.”
“So you put the pieces together and came to the conclusion that the State Department guy you met with had ratted you out.”
“It was certainly possible.” Would he think she was paranoid? Over-dramatic? Flaky?
“I agree. It’s the most likely explanation. With a U.S. congressman involved, you never know what you might have stumbled into.”
The reality of that sank in. She’d hoped that leaving Thailand would put the whole thing behind her. It all felt so far away from tiny Lake Bittersweet.
But it wasn’t as if the little community was walled off from the world. In fact, the congressman in question…well, he was from Minnesota. From a little town much like this one, but in a different part of the state. Representative Linde came from a district up north, one not dissimilar to this one. Lake Bittersweet might be a small town, but it was still part of the world, and everything was connected.
“I didn’t really stumble into anything,” she protested. “I overheard a conversation.”
“And recorded it. You could have deleted the recording, but you didn’t. Now you’re in it.”
His words were not only blunt but completely correct.
“Crap. I was hoping it would all just go away. Maybe I should never have reported it. Why do I always get into these messes?” In sheer frustration, she swung her legs off the couch, nearly stepping on Moses. He skittered away with a little yelp. “Moses! I’m so sorry.” She scooped him up and cuddled him. “I bet you wish someone more stable had rescued you in the forest.”
