16 Carve That on My Gravestone
“How was your night?” I asked Taylor.
She spoke without looking over. “About what you’d expect. No sleep. A lot of crying. What about yours?”
“I went to bed but couldn’t sleep. My mother came in to say goodbye. She said that she wanted to tell me not to go, but remembered when she was the one kidnapped and how grateful she was that I came after her.”
Taylor was quiet a moment, then said, “That puts things into perspective, doesn’t it?” She looked up at me. “When the Elgen took me, you barely knew me, but you came after me. We were practically children. The odds against us were absurd.”
“Sometimes it’s a good thing that we don’t know what we don’t know,” I said. “I had no idea what we were facing.”
“We still don’t.” She took a deep breath, then said, “I need sleep. I’m going to take a sleeping pill.” She took an amber pill bottle from her purse. “Do you want one?”
“No. I don’t do well with those.”
“Okay.” She popped the pill into her mouth, chased it down with a drink from her water bottle, then kissed me. “Good night.”
I pulled a blanket up over her. “It’s morning,” I said to myself. Within just a few minutes she fell asleep. I sat there looking out the window. I wondered where Abigail was and what she was doing. Or what they were doing to her. Somewhere in that I fell asleep.
I woke about an hour before we landed. I went to the back of the plane and sat down next to Jack, who was sitting alone next to a window. He seemed as withdrawn as I’d ever seen him, even after Wade had been killed.
“What’s up?” he asked.
I turned to him. “Do you ever hear from Mitchell?”
I think my question surprised him. He grinned lightly. “I hear from him now and then.”
“What’s he up to?”
“Well, a couple of months after we hid out at his place, his parents moved to Florence, Italy. Mitch said it was for his dad’s work. The truth was, his father had embezzled millions of dollars from his company and was hiding out.
“Europol caught up to him and extradited him to the US. He was given a twenty-year prison sentence.
“After all that embarrassment, Mitchell and his mother didn’t want to come back to the US, so they stayed in Italy. The last time I heard from him, he’d fallen in love with some hot Italian chick from Milan and they were buying an orchard in Chianti to start their own winery.”
“I didn’t see that coming.”
“I didn’t either. I expected his parents would send him off to some fancy college back East that they could bribe his way into, then set him up at a cushy management position at their company. But since when did life ever turn out the way we thought it would?”
“Not for us.”
“Definitely not for us,” he said, shaking his head.
“Are you ready for this?” I asked.
“Born ready,” he said. Then a moment later he said, “Maybe not completely.” He sighed. “Something feels off this time.”
I said nothing. I’d been hoping I was the only one.
He waved it off. “What am I saying? It’s just opening-night jitters, right? We’ve faced tougher.”
“Yeah, we have. Hades was… Hades.” Then I said, “Do you remember that day I knocked on your door and told you that you were driving me to California?”
He grinned. “That’s not something I’d forget.”
“Are you glad that I did?”
“Are you being serious?”
“I am. I mean, you’ve almost been killed twice; you’ve been tortured and beaten, gone for days without food or water; you saw your best friend die in front of you….”
“And I had my girlfriend kidnapped,” he added. He looked down for a moment, then said, “I’ve been through things I wish I never had. But, if we’re being honest with ourselves, no one gets off this stage alive. No one. Everyone dies. And the thing is, not everyone really lives.” He looked into my eyes. “You can’t judge your life on how much pleasure you got or how much pain was avoided. You judge your life on the experiences you’ve had and the impact you’ve had around you. That’s living. And we’ve lived, hombre. We’ve lived.
“Some people spend their lives staring at screens and living vicariously. Not us. We don’t watch the news; we are the news. Our lives have mattered. And more than that, if you hadn’t come that day, I would never have met Abi. And you and me, we never would have been friends. And you’ve been a good friend.”
“Thank you.”
“So back to your question: Am I glad you knocked on my door? If I had to make that choice again, I’d be waiting for you on my front porch with my suitcase packed and the gas tank full. Because, man, what a ride.”
I smiled. “That would make a great line on a headstone. ‘What a ride.’ ”
“Dead right,” he said. “Pun intended. Seriously, I want that carved on my headstone. ‘Jack Vranes. Member of the Electroclan. Man, what a ride.’ You make sure that happens.”
“What makes you think you’re dying before me?”
“Not saying I am, not saying I’m not. I’m just saying, just in case.”
“Why are we talking about death?”
“You brought up the headstone thing, not me.”
Just then Boyd the pilot came over the speaker. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have started our descent into Huancayo. Prepare yourself for landing, or don’t. Whatever you want to do.”
“This is why I love flying private,” Jack said. “It’s the only way to fly.”
“Amen to that.” I leaned back in my seat. “So, one more time. You meet up with Alpha Team at the airport, spend the night, then leave in the morning. We plan on you making the staging point around twenty-one-thirty hours. That’s when you signal us to move in.
“If Grace’s info is right, they’ll detect us about four kilometers out and we become the distraction. One kilometer from the site, we’ll signal you back, and you start your move in. If all goes according to plan, you sneak in undetected, retrieve Abi, and you’re gone before we even engage.”
“Hopefully all goes according to plan,” Jack said softly.
“Everything will work out. It always does.” I took a deep breath, then said, “It’s still not your fault they took her.”
He was quiet for a moment, then said, “I know. Mentally I know, but sometimes the heart has its own story.
“It’s like this. Let’s say that a mother asked her son if he needed anything from the store. He asks for something, maybe an energy drink, and it turns out they don’t have it at the store she went to. So, without him knowing it, she goes to another store. An hour later a police officer is at his doorstep. He tells the son that the store his mother went to was held up and his mother was killed.” Jack breathed out. “You get it?”
“I get that that’s a horrific story. What does that have to do with you?”
“It’s just how it is. It’s not the son’s fault that his mother was shot. He didn’t shoot her. He didn’t even tell her where to go. But it doesn’t change the fact that if he hadn’t asked for what he did, she’d still be alive.”
I looked at him for a moment, then said, “We can dissect that later, but for now you’re thinking too much about this. We’re going to save her. You can spend the rest of your life apologizing to her. Happily ever after, and all that.”
“I’m going to marry her,” Jack said. “I won’t ever let that girl go again.”
“I’m going to hold you to that,” I said. “Speaking of girls, I’d getter get back to Taylor.” I stood.
“Hey, I love you, brother.”
“You too.”
He smiled. “What a ride.”