Arthur shook his head. “You don’t have to dothat. Where does she live?”
“In the palace,” Max said, climbing into the helicopter. “She has a staff apartment in the palace.”
“Then we’ll try the palace first,” Casimir said. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Eight
DREE SPEAKS SPANISH
Dree
After Matryona Sokolov and her goons drove Dree back to the same damned warehouse, two of the thicker ones wrestled her out of the car, dragged her inside, and tied her to a chair with her hands behind her back.
Dree tried to fight them off. Oh, she tried. She threw elbows at their ribs. She kicked at their overly muscled thighs with her sharp high heels. She even managed a knee-shot at the left guy’s nuts, but he jumped back too quickly.
Getting kidnappedsucked.
While they were tying her to the chair with bungee cords and duct tape, Dree kept trying to roll away or go limp or keep her arms flexed to give herself more room in the bonds so she could get away later.
All her life, advice on how to escape from a kidnapper had been furtively whispered by other girls and loudly bragged about by guys. The subtext always was that if you didn’t get away, it was your fault for not being smart enough to know how.
Even though Dree had held her breath to blow herself up to try to force them to leave some slack in the bungee cords binding her midsection to the back of the chair, theelasticbungee cords were just as tight over her ribs as if she hadn’t done it. She’d flexed her feet up to try to do the same when they were fastening her ankles to the chair legs with duct tape, but it didn’t feel like there was any slack there, either.
Nothing wasworking.
Those know-it-alls who had never been kidnapped must have forgotten some strategy they’d been self-righteously mouthing off about.
Dree wanted to slap each and every one of them.
Matryona and Kir Sokolov conferred quietly with their goons about their operations schedule for the day while Dree sat in the chair, fuming and quietly jerking her hands and legs, trying everything she could think of to get loose.
After a heated conversation about whose responsibility it was that the computer was locked by malware, Matryona set her phone in the middle of a desk for a videoconference.
The person they called had a Central American accent, and Matryona and Kir switched to Spanish to talk to him.
Dree listened to them because she wasn’t sitting that far away from them and couldn’t escape their stupid voices. Their Spanish was oddly accented compared to the Arizona border Spanish Dree was used to, and the grammar sounded clunky. They kind of sounded like the nun who’d taught Spanish at Dree’s high school, who’d insisted her students slur their words like a Castilian from Spain, even the kids from Mexico who spoke Spanish at home.
No one did that. It sounded weird.
Matryona said to the guy on the video call, “We have fifty kilo of product to move to Paris, but we’re having problems getting it out of the Port of Marseille. Our usual trucking service is not available, something to do with having a cover job because someone is moving house. The authorities are being obstinate because we don’t have a direct relationship with anyone there. What are our other options?”
Kir told the guy, “The Port of Marseille is close enough that we could just go pick it up in a car, but we’d never get it past the inspectors.”
Matryona and Kir bickered over their options for a while, poking holes in each other’s plans instead of helping each other cobble together a better one, not that Dree was going to diagnose their interpersonal relationship problems for them. The Spanish guy didn’t say much, just stepped in with a sarcastic remark whenever it seemed necessary.
Seriously, screw those guys. Dree hated them with a steamy, killing burn like an autoclave.
Their discussion about encouraging addicts to reuse dirty needles drove her outrage to a new, professional level of loathing.
And the bungee cords and duct tape weren’t coming off her wrists and ankles or the chair.
Their sibling spat escalated, as Matryona insisted that they retrieve the shipment of narcotics from the Port of Marseille immediately and deliver it to Paris before the sun went down.
Kir argued that the shipment was not perishable, and they should just wait three days until the trucking service was available to do the job as usual. “Why should we worry about little problems in the supply line? The customers will be more eager for our product in a few days, and they’ll pay a premium price when the shakes set in.”
Matryona sighed. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. After this afternoon—I guess it is after midnight now—we’ll never have a problem with this kind of logistics again. Our shipments will glide through customs like they’re on ice, and we’ll have no competition in Monaco.”
Dree perked her ears up, though she kept struggling with the bungee cords cinched around her flesh.
