“Over there,” Jez said, and I winced because now she was yelling so loud I feared for my eardrums. I hastily turned the volume down again and switched the video output to night vision. Hey, was that another door?
“At the rear. There’s a door set into the wall at the back.”
The barn butted up against a hillside, and the lower half of the rear wall was made from stone, which meant the door could have led to a storage room, a cave, or even another disused gold mine. And it was secured with another shiny padlock.
Jez pulled out her picks for the second time, and Ari whispered frantically at her to, “Hurry, hurry.”
“What do you think I’m doing?” she whispered back. “You reckon you can do it quicker?”
The padlock popped free. Jez pulled the door open with a loud creeeeeeeak and shined a thin flashlight beam into the pitch-black. A cave. It was a cave. A low-roofed, narrow cave that might have been used to store wine in the past, probably around the time of Prohibition.
Today, it held two terrified women.
They huddled at the back, shrinking away from the flashlight and the unknown visitors behind it. I took in the scene—the portable toilet, the food wrappers on the floor, the cots with blankets. Well, damn.
“Are we thinking slavery? Kidnapping? Trafficking?” I asked. “All of the above?”
Jez played the flashlight over each face in turn. “Yeah.”
The women looked to be in their early to mid twenties, both dressed in jeans and grubby T-shirts. Brown skin, dark hair, tear-streaked cheeks.
“The vehicle is two hundred yards out and closing,” Storm said. “You’ll have company in thirty seconds.”
“Can you run?” Jez asked the women, and when neither of them answered, she repeated the question in Spanish. “¿Podéis correr?”
The taller of the pair unfroze long enough to nod, terror in her eyes, but she didn’t move.
“Then vamos!” Jez pointed to Ari. “Síguela.” And to Ari, “Get them to the meeting point while we hold off these motherfuckers.”
Storm was a fighter pilot first and foremost, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t fire a gun. As Ari and the panicked women bolted from the barn, Storm took out the van’s rear tyres, a momentary distraction that gave Ari enough time to reach the safety of the trees. Roy and Margaret Leland finally got their act together and tumbled out of the cab, just in time for Jez to shoot out the headlights.
“What the fuck?” the driver yelled.
The trio had brought only one flashlight and one weapon between them, a handgun that belonged to the driver. Piss-poor planning when you were running a criminal enterprise. Jez sprinted back toward the winery, drawing fire away from Ari and the two women, and the van guy couldn’t shoot for shit either. In the forest, Ari was keeping her charges together, hurrying them through the trees as if their lives depended on it, which maybe they did.
The winery itself didn’t have much in the way of security, and the huge doors at the front weren’t fully closed. Jez ran inside as the van guy swapped his magazine for a fresh one, and like all good operators, she knew exactly where she was going because she’d scouted the building earlier.
“Don’t hit the winery!” Margaret shrieked. “Don’t hit the winery!”
Roy brought up the rear, huffing and puffing, and jogging clearly wasn’t his forte. It was also clear who wore the pants in this relationship. Margaret was the brains behind the operation as I’d suspected, but she wasn’t quite as smart as I’d feared. Jez ran all the way through the winery and out a smaller door on the other side while Margaret was still yelling at the van driver about bullet holes.
Unlike my drone, Storm’s came fully loaded, and she dropped an incendiary grenade onto the roof. Three seconds later, it had burned through the shingle and ignited whatever lay in the darkness below. The building went boom.
“What the fuck?” Nolan asked, pacing the room and tugging at his hair. “What the actual fuck?”
“Guess Roy doesn’t need to worry about those wine awards anymore.”
“You blew up his damn business.”
“Well, it seems his business involved trafficking women, and they’re climbing into the car with Marcel right now.”
“I don’t… I can’t…”
“Why don’t you go and have a nice glass of Xanax?” I suggested.
“We should call Priest,” Storm said through my earpiece.
“Great idea,” Jez agreed. “Why don’t you do it?”
