Deadly Promises (Tracers #2.5)(37)
“Let me make some calls. See what I can find out. I’ll be back in touch.”
“Thanks, man.”
“Don’t insult me.” They’d been too much to each other to ever have to say those words.
“Right. Love you, too.”
A quick smile curved Cav’s lips as a glimpse of the Savage he knew finally surfaced. He disconnected, then started looking up old contacts who might have connections in Myanmar.
TWO HOURS AND several calls later, Cav still had nothing. In a city peopled with Asians, a slim, pretty, blue-eyed blonde, five foot seven or eight, should stick out like a square peg in a round hole. But he’d butted up against dozens of brick walls. No one had seen or heard anything about an American woman. This wasn’t good.
Myanmar was a country where human rights—especially women’s rights—were basically nonexistent, and this was starting to stink like a government cover-up. Which meant two things. One: Carrie Granger of Nowhere, Georgia, was in big, bad trouble. Two: Cav couldn’t hang up his spy shoes just yet.
It was a full forty-eight long hours later before he finally managed to rattle the right chains and come up with some answers. He flipped open his phone and called Wyatt’s number.
“I found her,” he said without preamble when Wyatt picked up. “As far as I know, she’s still alive.”
“And the bad news?” Wyatt asked, too savvy to feel relief.
Cav glanced toward the window.
“You don’t want hear the bad news.”
Two
SOMEWHERE NORTH OF MNDALAY,
IN THE MOUNTAINOUS JUNGLES OF
THE SHAN PLATEAU NEAR MOGOK
Until last week, the closest Carrie Granger had come to a monsoon had been in the comfort of her living room, watching news footage on CNN. Detention camps where people were held with no shelter, their food tossed in through the bars of a crude wooden cage, were the stuff of documentaries exposing the horrors of third world injustice.
Until last week, she hadn’t truly understood the term “living nightmare.”
This week, after being herded into the back of a truck like cattle with several other prisoners, then traveling for hours over mountainous roads to this hellhole, it was far too clear.
She huddled into the corner of the make-shift outdoor cage that was her jail cell and new living quarters. She and a dozen captives—all of whom appeared to be Burmese and none of whom spoke English—had been forced to build the cage themselves at gunpoint when they’d arrived at the labor camp.
Their cage was identical to ten others, also filled with slave laborers, crowded along the mountainside. The bars were made of roughly cut wood that her jailers had hastily chopped from a stand of small trees. Her hands were still raw from the wood and hemp rope slivers she’d gotten lashing the poles together. The reward for their labor? Each night after they’d worked in the mud and the rock and the ruby mine for twelve or sometimes fourteen hours, they were shoved inside the seven by seven–foot cell like animals.
No roof. No shelter from the elements or the creepy crawlies that slithered out of the jungle edging the mining site.
Wet to the bone, Carrie dragged the sodden hem of her coarse work pants out of the mud and shivered against the unrelenting downpour. Even the vicious dogs that patrolled the site had better quarters.
She stared at the guard who took particular pleasure in shoving and hitting and prodding with the nose of his rifle. The one who had been watching her in a way that made her nauseous in anticipation of the day he decided he wanted more from her than endless days of hard labor.
Watch your back, you slimeball, she thought, before cutting her gaze away from where he stood under the shelter of a tree in the fading daylight, his back to her, his rifle slung over his bony shoulder. If he and his buddies force-marched them up the steep mountainside path into the mine tomorrow and he came within shoving distance, the little sadist was going to find himself on a fast ride to the bottom of the deep, rocky ravine.
Once, she would have felt guilty for having such horrible thoughts about another human being. That was before she’d experienced the depth of man’s inhumanity to man.
Her belly growled with hunger. She tried not to think about it, or about the cuts and bruises on her body and her feet and the utter, consuming hopelessness that clogged her throat like a rock. Instead she thought of ruby slippers, a magic lantern, a get-out-of-jail-free card. Anything to keep her from dwelling on the dull, lifeless eyes of the others who shared this prison with her.
She’d settle for a rabbit hole in Wonderland. A frickin’ time continuum. Please, God, anything to take her back in time to before she’d flown halfway across the world, wide-eyed and ready to embrace the first big adventure of her life—a humanitarian mission to help set up a dialysis unit in a rural Myanmar hospital.
Something to take her back to a time before she’d stepped out of a taxi onto a bustling, vital, wildly exotic city street, only to gasp in horror when she’d seen a young girl being beaten with the butt of a gun. She’d run to the girl’s defense and been promptly arrested for “interference” in a police matter.
“You have been charged as an enemy of the state of Myanmar.”
Verdict: guilty.
Sentence: ten years of hard labor.
She closed her eyes and dug deep to keep from giving in to burning tears as rain streaked down her face. Panic knotted in her chest, tight as a clenched fist.