All Rights Reserved ยฉ 2018, Rick Haydn Horst
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
After breakfast, we returned to Maggie's flat to avoid wandering about in the pouring rain. We chatted with one another as we watched it blur the view through the living room window.
Maggie and Aiden, who appeared to get along well, tried their best to engage Pearce in conversation, and by his short answers, he had no interest. I knew they would have a discussion the previous evening. I hadn't known the topic, but with Maggie, one could only guess. In the past, she and I had discussed a variety of controversial subjects that one should avoid in mixed company.
I watched Maggie and Aiden interact with one another, and I thought their personalities meshed with ease. Maggie came from France, and the French love to flirt, but I knew Maggie well. She had a free spirit in a world of imposed unreasonable expectations with demands of conformity. The world shamed or shunned noncompliance, even in private matters that harmed no one. Maggie did what she must to survive in such a world, but she resented it. She told me it felt stifling, and she feared her acquiescence would destroy her true nature.
Aiden, the Englishman, had moments in the faltering of his stiff upper lip, but I wouldn't call his lip particularly rigid. In many ways, he had the remarkable luck to have such intellectual talents that it separated him from his peers. It placed a protective barrier around him, which, no doubt, caused difficulty at the time, but it had insulated him from becoming emotionally inhibited. I'm uncertain that he had ever met anyone like David, who projected himself capable, confident, relaxed, and masculine in a more genuine sense, rather than living a stereotype as many men do. I sensed Aiden admired David for that, and I witnessed Aiden, on occasion, study David. He watched his mannerisms, his bearing, and the things he found most interesting about him.
The rain would stop later in the afternoon, and we somehow ended up in a discussion about rain. Pearce commented that it was depressing, but that reflected his state of mind at the time. Maggie expressed a different view.
"I don't mind the rain," Maggie spoke in her French accent that I always found so charming. She stared out the window with a simple smile. Her skin, once tanned at the beach near her home in the South of France, had faded to a more natural peachy bisque, and her cheeks suddenly flushed a bit. "The rain reminds me of a romantic experience. When I was seventeen, a boyfriend and I decided to walk the Allรฉes Paul Riquet on a warm summer evening after dark. So, we parked his car beneath a streetlamp nearby, and he held my hand as we strolled. We had gone many blocks appreciating the ambiance and enjoying one another's company when it suddenly began to rain. We ran and laughed, desperate to reach the car." She smiled. "The rain soaked us before we got there. As it continued to pour, in the halo of the streetlight, he kissed me." --she turned toward Aiden, who sat near her-- "I love spontaneous romantic moments; they don't come along every day."
Her story enchanted us all, but none more than Aiden. I think Maggie fascinated him. She had such beauty and loveliness; he hung on every word she said.
We sat cozy and dry in a cafe at luncheon. We missed the rain on the way, but once again, it poured from the sky. We hadn't sat there long, drinking tea and having sandwiches, when the drone found the signal. We monitored the remote in expectation as it split into three before triangulating the precise location.
The map zoomed in as we watched. It located the ring in motion, moving west in a vehicle on City Road just past the basin. Once it turned onto Saint John Street, it stopped a bit over half a mile away, at which point, whoever had it entered a building along there. Maggie had no intention of joining us but suggested we meet back at her flat. We tore out of the cafe into the chilly rain.
Our hydrophobic clothing wouldn't get wet much, dashing past pedestrians and dodging vehicles, but the rain had soaked Pearce to the bone, and the run had him out of breath when we arrived.
Someone had the ring in a purple and lime green-colored sushi bar. We went in, and I did not expect to see the person whose hair I immediately recognized. Katheryn Elliott, wearing a plum-colored blouse, sat at a quaint little table with her back to us. The delightful little sushi bar had one worker and two other customers besides Katheryn. We avoided playing around with her in conversations or pleading to a better nature she likely didn't have. So, with limited possibilities, we took the choice that an honorable but desperate person might. We posted Pearce at the door, Aiden at the window, and stunned everyone there. David searched the contents of Katheryn's purse without luck. I searched her pockets, and then I found it. It dangled on a chain into the neckline of her dress.
With nervousness over what we had done, I fumble with the latch until it finally gave way. I put the ring on my middle finger. "What do we do now?" I asked David.
"Well, there's nothing for it," he said, "Katheryn knows where Cadmar is, so we bring her with us."
So, up she came, and when we got her out the door, I noticed an older car sitting in front of the restaurant. It blocked the traffic, much to the annoyance of the drivers in the vehicles trailing behind. Its door opened, and I could not believe it. The persistent fellow, Inspector Julien Le Gal, stood there.
"I told you I want to help you," he said, gesturing emphatically. "Please, let me." The people in the cars behind began honking their horns and yelling out their windows.
It only took a moment, and David led us to the inspector's car. "How did you find us?" I asked him.
"I put a GPS tracker into your jacket pocket in the cemetery," he said.
"What? What is this with people tracking me down?"
David and Aiden put Katheryn in the back-middle seat, we climbed in, and he drove on. Despite the car's size, it made a tight fit between the six of us.
"
Oh, mon Dieu
(Oh, my god)," Julien said in exasperation, "please, tell me I'm not an accomplice to an abduction."
"No inspector,
Il s'agit d'une mission de sauvetage
(this is a rescue mission)," I said.
"I see," said the inspector. "I apologize, Monsieur Heiden for the tracker. I hope you forgive me, as I had the best of intentions. I recognized something happening when the tracker showed you running on the sidewalk, so I came to you. Fortunately, I had parked nearby."
"Aiden, why didn't you find that tracker with your device?" David asked from the front seat.
"I only checked the flat, not us," he replied.
"M. Heiden, you speak French beautifully."
"Thank you, inspector," I said, "I'm out of practice."
"Please, call me Julien. Okay, tell me, who is this woman, and why did she need rescuing from a sushi bar?"
"She's not the victim, Julien," said David. "Are you sure the British have done the same as the Americans in giving the treatment, or whatever they're calling it, to people?"
"I know it for a fact," he said. "The British have done the same as the Americans, with success."
"If true," said David, "they must have a living source. They lied when they said Cadmar had died, and Katheryn Elliott here knows all about it."
"So, where would they get it, Cadmar's blood, I presume?" asked Julien.
"You don't want to know." Pearce, who sat soaking the seat in the middle front, spoke for the first time in over an hour, and no one said a word thinking of the significance of his statement.
Pearce, that poor man, I felt sorry for him. The sadistic torture to which they subjected him appalled me, but knowing the world as I did, it hadn't shocked me in the slightest. It sickened me to know that people would do horrifying things to someone, while others would dismiss, blame, and degrade them when they dared to come forward about it. The male-dominated culture we lived in would ridicule a man who spoke about experiencing rape. Its injustice nauseated me. Of course, David, Aiden, and I knew what they must have done, and that gave us more cause to stop them. If nothing else, one's bodily integrity should remain sacrosanct in this universe.
"I do not know where to go," said Julien. "I can drive until we run out of petrol, or you can give me a destination."
"David, I think he's still somewhere at Facility3," I said, and he turned around in his seat as best he could.
"We may just- oh look, Katheryn's coming around," David said, and she did. Aiden and I held her arms so that she couldn't hurt us.
"
Anata wa sushi o tanoshinde imasu ka?
(Did you enjoy the sushi?)" I asked her.
"What am I doing here? You!" She scowled at David when he showed his face.
