TWENTY SIX

The missing report from the last shipment. My stomach fluttered. The report that Mrs. Patent and Veronica had been looking for when Jaisen and I were stuck in the closet. Presumably, the report that had gotten Franklin kidnapped in the first place, because he had found discrepancies in the shipment and something else that he tried to tell Mrs. Patent, but was instead mercilessly kidnapped.

“Jaisen, you aren’t going to believe this.” I sat down, tapping the sheet in front of me. He came and stood behind me, looking down at the paper in front of me.

Just as Mrs. Patent had expected, there were two discrepancies on the sheet. Each had been circled in red pen with question marks beside them. The first was the weight discrepancy. The ship had taken on tons of weight on its voyage. The second was the arrival of two separate trucking companies–each taking one section of the shipment. I took out my mini cam and photographed the report.

“I don’t get it.” I held up the paper. “I know why Franklin circled this–they probably only contracted out one trucking company and he thought that it was odd that there were two. But if Captain Staley had this paper, why are they trying to get more information out of Franklin? Isn’t this the information that they’re looking for?”

Jaisen shook his head.

“Maybe Captain Staley is holding on to it for insurance? To have something to blackmail Alex and Veronica with if they try to double-cross him?”

I stood up. A wave of nausea ran through me. I clutched the desk for support.

“Are you OK?” Jaisen’s voice beside me.

My eyes shut tight, I tried to focus, willing my stomach to settle.

“You’re looking a little green.” Jaisen’s voice came through waves of sickness rocking through me.

I couldn’t talk–I just stood holding the desk trying not to move.

Humor, I could swear there was humor in Jaisen’s voice when he said, “You weren’t joking about the seasickness were you?” He started rustling through the desk.

“Could you not move around so much?” I said slowly, looking at him sideways out of tiny eye slits. “Or breathe?”

Every movement in the room hit my stomach like a whirlwind.

“You aren’t going to…?” Through my eye slits I could see he was making the spewing gesture.

“That isn’t the plan.” I slowly lowered myself next to the trashcan just to be safe.

That’s when we heard running and screaming outside of the office. I froze, one hand still holding the report and one hand clutching the trashcan. My stomach continued to swirl.

The boat’s engines stopped abruptly. I handed the report to Jaisen careful and he returned it to the drawer.

Jaisen gently put something in my hand, tapped his mic on and walked towards the door.

I looked down. Mentos. I’m sitting here in agony, with god only knows what going on outside the door and he hands me breath mints?

I took a deep breath trying to hold my stomach together. Outside, it sounded like Alex was shouting in Cantonese. Then screaming like a girl, and I’m not talking about an ass-kicking girl like myself.

Jaisen turned to look at me—a wry smile on his face.

I glared back at him. It wasn’t my fault–Alex put on a very convincing façade.

Then I gestured to the Mentos, raising my eyebrows. I hope that he got the message “What the hell?” because that is exactly what I was trying to communicate.

He gestured eating them, then patting his tummy, and smiling. Great, he was going to cure me with breath mints.

Outside, Hank shouted the words “The Triad!” followed by an expletive. Having had my own personal encounters with the Chinese mafia recently, my ears perked up.

While I half listened to the scuffling sounds outside the door, I popped open the top of the Mentos container. Why did they smell so gross? Did anyone actually want their breath to smell that way? My stomach did a triple somersault and I realized that I had no choice. I popped three into my mouth.

Suddenly, the noise outside of the door ceased.

Where you supposed to chew on these things? I tried biting down. Chalk. They had the texture of chalk.

“Who are you?” Hank said.

I kept chewing, the sooner the mint was out of my mouth the better.

A new voice, one which I had heard before, from a man named Ja Wong who had given me his business card, said, “I am someone who has taken a great interest in you.”

I chomped away.

“And that would be?” Hank said.

“The Triad does not like foreign interference in the affairs of the Chinese people. Particularly foreign interference that is making the populace ill. We have discovered that you are giving our people harsh chemotherapy and then some sugar pills that do nothing to counter act the horrible side effects killing them in the process. So we have turned our attention to you.”

I swallowed.

This was an interesting turn of events. I looked over at Jaisen. He was listening intently.

“Whaddaya think yer gonna do?” Hank said. Veronica, Alex and the captain remained silent. Apparently, they realized that they were in big trouble, though crap for brains Hank wasn’t quite there yet. “You bring in a coupla guys dressed in black to scare us, whoopee. I can break these guys any time. I got a whole crew to back me up, you know.”

My stomach continued to turn over. Maybe if I tried sucking on one.

“You and your crew will be coming with us to be dealt with by my organization in China.”

I popped the top back open and tapped one out.

“You think you can subdue my whole crew? You and what army?”

Here goes nothing. I put it in my mouth and sucked.

“I’m afraid that you have gotten it correct for once, Hank Friar. It will be my army,” the cold voice said. “The rest of your crew as we speak is being subdued by the rest of my men and put onto our boat.”

How could a mint be so awful?

“Captain Staley,” Ja Wong said. “I would like to thank you for giving me the information that I needed to create this encounter today.”

Maybe I didn’t have enough spit.

A collective gasp came from outside.

I sucked harder while I tried to process what was going on, not the easiest thing with my stomach on a roller coaster. Stan Staley was a rat. This explained why the report we’d found hadn’t helped Veronica et al. They hadn’t even known Stan had it. Uh, he was the one in the building with me the first night. He was the one who almost caught me! I knew there was a reason I didn’t like him.

Silence followed. I tried mashing the mint up with my tongue. Big mistake.

My stomach spasmed hugely at the new gross sensation and I grabbed the trashcan and spit the mint out banging the can against the desk as I set it down. The loud sound of the trashcan echoed through the room.

Jaisen gave me a look. I shrugged. It was his fault. What was he thinking giving a seasick person the most disgusting breath mints on earth?

The door in front of us opened and Ja Wong stepped into the room, a figure in black on either side. He sucked all of the light out of the room.

“Send them with the others,” Ja Wong said to the people on either side of him.

Then he saw me. He shook his head. “I see you decided to procure employment with this terrorist corporation. You chose wrong.”

He turned on his heel and left. Out of the frying pan and into the fire–this mission had taken a turn for the worse.

The two Triad members went to help pull Franklin into a standing position.

“Follow us!” One of them shouted at us as they passed.

Jaisen helped me to stand.

I shot him a dirty look.

“What? I didn’t know it would make it worse. Mint is supposed to be soothing on your stomach.”

Standing up, I realized that the last spasm has subsided and the whirling sensation had calmed down.

We went out into the larger room on the other side of our door and found it emptied of people. As I followed the half stumbling figure of Franklin in front of me, the packets lining the wall caught my attention out of the corner of my eye. I grabbed one of the packets from the wall.

“Hurry! No dawdling,” one of the Triad members shouted from in front of us. All of this shouting really didn’t seem in character for ninjas. Maybe there are special rules of conduct for the vigilante ninjas that Ja Wong employed or maybe these guys really weren’t ninjas?

Outside the fresh sea air hit me. I breathed it in deeply, exorcising myself of the seasickness. A walkway had been set up connecting the two ships–Ja Wong’s ship only a few feet shorter than ONC Corp.’s–huge for his operation. Sort of like a ship usually used to hijack products not people, making me wonder just what the nature of the Triad’s business really was.

Our guards dropped Franklin’s arms and he stood wavering drunkenly. We were at the rear of the line of people stretching the length of the ship, waiting to pass across the walkway into Ja Wong’s ship. Jaisen and I stood quietly at the rear of the line, behind the half asleep Franklin. Seeing no signs of trouble from us, our guards went to subdue the thrashing Veronica.

The edge of the ship was to our right. I looked down to the water. Without the dock next to the ship, as I had last seen it, I realized that we were standing several stories up from the water. My stomach twinged, but I didn’t change my mind.

No one was looking at us. Jaisen came up alongside me.

“Grab Franklin,” I whispered. Jaisen didn’t even turn to question me. He grabbed Franklin by the shoulders. I took one last look at the back of Alex, a few people in front of us. He was whining in Cantonese, his dirty brown hair lank on the back of his head.

“Jump,” was the last thing I whispered before taking a deep breath and throwing myself over the side of the ship to the sea below.

I pulled the cord on the packet, praying that the lifeboat would inflate as I thought it would. I had more time to think about it not working than I would have liked as I hurtled down to the water. In fact, I had time to think several times over “This was stupid, this was stupid, this was stupid,” before smacking the ice-cold water and plunging down into it, the sky disappearing above me.

My fingers tightened around the cord connected to the boat and the buoyancy of the inflating boat pulled me up quickly. My head, still throbbing from getting hit by Veronica, broke the water and I gulped for air.

I heard a large splash next to me. Holding onto the yellow rubber life raft, rapidly filling under my hands, I turned to look for Jaisen and Franklin. Long seconds passed before their heads surfaced. Jaisen’s head smoothly bobbed up with Franklin sputtering and spitting water beside him.

Clumsily, I pulled myself into the life raft, lifting myself up over the inflated edge to land on the flat center.

I tried standing to lean over and help Franklin and Jaisen in, but no sooner was I up then a wave washed under the thin raft bottom and I was back down.

I heard a whoop.

“Are you OK?” I rushed on hands and knees to peer over the side. And found the smiling face of Jaisen Bax.

“Are you laughing at me?”

More smiling.

“I thought you’d been shot.” I looked up, but couldn’t see anyone looking down from the ship’s railing.

Grumbling the whole time, I reached down and helped Franklin in, leaving Jaisen to pull himself up and over.

“Nice work on the rescue.”

“Are you making fun of me?” I shot him a suspicious look.

“We’re safe aren’t we? I highly doubt anyone is going to bother with us. We are insignificant–plus where are we going to go? We’re miles from land.”

He had a point, especially about the last part, but I didn’t want to think about our distance from land just at the moment.

The shock of hitting the water seemed to pull Franklin out of his drunken stupor.

“Who are you?” His words all mushed together without his false teeth. “What’s wrong with your face?” Franklin was squinting at us like we were from another planet.

I looked to see that Jaisen’s supposedly waterproof makeup was streaking down his face. Mine probably was as well. I would have to have a word with Jacque about this.

If I ever saw Jacque again. I pulled out one of the tiny paddles tucked in the edge of the raft and pulled us closer to the ONC Corp. ship, hiding us under the curve of the ship, just to be on the safe side.

“Franklin, it’s OK. We’re rescuing you,” I said and hoped that it turned out to be true. Franklin looked doubtful, but then his eyes closed again and in seconds a sharp snore rattled out.

“How are you feeling?” Jaisen pulled the other paddle out from the edge of the raft.

“I’m feeling fine, no thanks to you.” I touched my stomach tentatively and realized that it was true. Yes, I had beat seasickness! Ha! “That was the most disgusting mint I’ve ever had in my entire life.”

“You need to get out more,” was all Jaisen said as he helped me maneuver around to the other side of the ship.