Fifteen

 

 

Brett had been called into the office to deal with some sort of crisis, again. There had been a couple of them recently and I was beginning to worry that he was exhausting himself.

 

Coleman had gone with him, so I was in the house on my own with three of Coleman’s guys outside. They were ones that I knew, but one of them, Ray, always made me feel uncomfortable. He always seemed to be around and would get very close to me. I knew that he was there for my protection, but I’m not sure he needed to be that close to me.

 

I was now thirty-five weeks pregnant and I really was totally over this whole pregnancy thing. I couldn’t see my feet, I couldn’t sit down without making a big production, I couldn’t balance, stairs were now my enemy because I couldn’t see where I was standing…it was a pain in the backside, literally because that was an issue too!

 

Ebru had called me asking if I wanted to come over and chill with her and I’d been so relieved that I could have cried, yet another pregnancy issue. She’d told me that Cole was with Brett and that she’d made some adjustments to his phone, so we were going to have some fun.

 

Putting on my flip flops because I couldn’t even wear proper shoes, I waddled out of the house. Not that many months ago, I’d been laughing at Tom for walking like this. Frigging karma!

 

The men followed behind me, with one of Coleman’s right-hand men, Cooper, walking at my side. He had some scars from a blast that I thought made him look rather distinguished. I could tell that he was embarrassed by them though, which was probably why I just opened my mouth and let my belly rumble.

 

“You know,” I ventured, “those scars make you look rather dapper.” The use of the British word would normally have been lost on him, but instead Cooper just glanced out of the corner of his eye at me and grunted. “I’m serious,” I insisted. “Personally, I think they make you look like one of the heroes on the front of a Harlequin novel.”

 

Stopping I turned to face him and put my hands on my hips, Jesus they’d grown, and stared at him waiting for him to acknowledge that he looked like a freaking romance model. He must have gotten tired of looking directly ahead of us, because he eventually turned back to look at me.

 

“If I say okay, will you continue walking and get out of the open,” he beckoned to the fields and trees around us, trying to distract me with the implication that I was in danger.

 

“Only if you mean it.”

 

Sighing, he ran his fingers through his hair and muttered, “Thank you.”

 

That was as good as I was going to get. Now to get to Ebru and see what she’d done to her husband. She was still looking for revenge for the pain she went through giving birth to Louis and normally I’d feel bad for the guy, but I’d witnessed it and she deserved it.

 

 

So, you changed his ringtones?” I asked Ebru slowly, making sure that I’d heard her right.

 

“Yup!” She nodded excitedly. “And, it’s his turn to go into meetings for Townsend Oil today.”

 

Since Brett had been working from home, the family had been taking it in turns to go to important meetings for the company so that Brett didn’t have to be there all of the time. Today was Cole’s day, that poor sod.

 

“How are you going to know his reaction?”

 

“Okay, you know Brett’s secretary?” Rolling my eyes at her, I nodded. Obviously, I knew the lovely woman who was in her fifties and who made it so that there were rarely any issues within the actual company itself. Sadly, she couldn’t control the outside of it too. “Well, she’s sitting in on the meetings to take notes and she’s going to FaceTime me. Look,” she turned her iPad screen toward me and I saw a table full of people in suits all nodding and listening to something that one of the men was saying. I recognized them all as employees of the company and figured that it was just the weekly meeting that was going ahead instead of one involving external businesses. Any messing around during one of those meetings might have cost the company a lot of money in lost business, but Ebru wasn’t stupid, she’d have known what this was.

 

“Sorry I’m late,” Colette burst through the door. “Did you start without me?”

 

“You’re just in time,” Ebru gave an evil grin and then picked up her phone and hit the screen. The sound of Spongebob singing the F.U.N. song filled the room and I watched as Cole looked around the room shaking his head.

 

“He thinks it’s someone else?” I asked incredulously. The noise was coming from him, how did he think it was someone else? “Wait, can he hear us?”

 

Shaking her head, Ebru pressed the red button to hang up her phone and nodded at Colette. “No, Susan muted us,” she explained as Colette fiddled with her screen.

 

The sound of Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street singing the Rubber Ducky song filled the room making the man who was still talking pause. Again, Cole looked around the room and shook his head. People were starting to stare at him and chuckle, but he was still none the wiser.

 

Then, Susan got up and walked out of the room quietly. The iPad was set up to point from next to the door toward the conference table, so we saw her silent laughter as she walked out.

 

“Wait for it…” Ebru giggled, then the Spice Girls’ Wannabe song filled the room. Ebru was laughing so hard that she fell off her chair onto the floor while Colette and I watched the screen.

 

Cole did another judgmental look around the table, pausing when he saw that all eyes were on him. Sighing like it pained him to prove them wrong, he leaned down and pulled his phone out of the bag on the floor. Realizing that it was his phone playing the song, he started pressing the screen trying to make it stop. Susan must have hung up and called again though, because in the next second it started all over again.

 

“Why won’t you shut up?” He yelled at it, hitting the screen with his thumb.

 

“Why won’t it stop?” I asked Ebru. Surely by now he could have either answered the call or sent it to voicemail.

 

“I changed the thumb recognition and code on it,” she explained. “I also got one of Coleman’s guys to mess with the settings so that when those numbers call him, he can’t do anything.”

 

It was so evil that it was almost brilliant, until a thought hit me. “What if you have an emergency while he’s away?”

 

Looking over at Colette, she winced. “Uh oh!”

 

Little did we know, that it would be the one day when she needed to get in touch with him and that her genius payback would come back to bite her in the backside.

 

Three hours later…

 

I wasn’t sure if it was the bumping that had woken me up or the fact that I really needed to pee, but as I opened my eyes nothing looked familiar.

 

Trying to get up, I discovered that my hands were tied behind my back and that any tugging made my shoulders feel like they were being ripped out of the sockets.

 

“Ah, good,” a familiar voice said above me. “You’re awake.”

 

Rolling to my side so that I could see the owner of the voice a sudden fury hit me. How fucking dare he?

 

“You,” I hissed.

 

Fils de pute. Son of a bitch!

 

Brett

 

Cole’s phone started playing some fucking Spongebob song for the millionth time and it was really starting to piss me off.

 

“Will you answer your fucking phone!” I barked at him. I hated being away from Sabine and the drive to the landing strip was taking too long for my liking. I just wanted to get home. The closer we got to her being full term, the more anxious I became; and of course, she wouldn’t even consider moving into the hospital. I’d finally managed to get them to agree to me paying out of the ass for a private room for us, but nope she wasn’t having it.

 

“I can’t,” he cried, hitting the screen. “It’s not fucking working!”

 

After another ten minutes of the song, by which time I’d learned the words to it, we got to the strip. Boarding the plane, I pulled my phone out and growled when I saw the black screen. Of all of the days to forget to bring my charging case and for the damn battery to die on me.

 

Coleman’s phone started ringing at that moment, rubbing salt into the open wound that was my dead phone. Thankfully, we had sockets on the plane that I could plug it into and call her.

 

“Are you fucking serious?” Coleman yelled, and I turned around so fast I almost lost my balance. His eyes kept flicking to me as he spoke and with each word I pieced together what was wrong. Someone had taken my wife. “We’re on our way. Be ready to go!” He snapped before hanging up.

 

“What the fuck is going on?” The word fuck was being thrown around like confetti, but I didn’t give a shit.

 

“Someone took Sabine,” he grimly confirmed to me. “My team and your family are meeting us at the airport.”

 

Feeling a second of relief that there was a plan which meant that he must know where she was, I nodded until something occurred me.

 

“Why the airport?”

 

“Because the bastard who took her flew to London,” he explained. “The flight is logged to refuel at Gatwick and then travel onto a small airport in the south of France. At the moment, my men in London are creating a slight delay for the plane to allow us time to catch up with it.”

 

And this was why I had him as my head of security.

 

Buckling myself into the seat, I closed my eyes and thought of my happiest memories of Sabine to keep me calm. The three months that we’d been away from each other played out in my mind instead, and the overwhelming feeling of guilt at treating her that way hit me. There was also a feeling loss though, because I’d been cheated out of that time with her. I’d done my best to make that lost time up to her, but I was going to work even harder when we got her back. She might have been willing to move past it, but I hadn’t.

 

“Uh,” Cole interrupted my emotional battle. “Can anyone help me fix my phone?” He asked, just as the Spongebob song started playing again. Thankfully, the battery chose to die at that moment. “Oh, thank Christ,” he muttered, not plugging it in like I’d done with mine.

 

Almost as if I’d had the power to turn it on through thought - slightly melodramatic, but with what I was going through at that moment I felt I was entitled to it - my phone powered on and the binging of messages filled the plane.

 

Looking down at the screen, I saw one from Sabine sent four hours previously.

 

Wife of my life: Love you xxxxxxxx

 

It was so simple, but carried so much weight to it that I felt my throat closing up. Hitting the button to put the screen to sleep, I focused on what was ahead. Some might say I was too calm, but until you’re in that situation no one knows how they’d react if it happened to them. I knew one thing for sure though, I was getting my wife and son back.

 

Fifteen hours later (said in the Spongebob narrators voice) …

 

“Fuck,” Coleman growled as he walked back onto the plane. “He’s not here. His plane’s here, but there are no passengers in it.” He grabbed a handful of hair and stared out of the open door and across the tarmac of Gatwick Airport.

 

“How the hell did this happen?” I wanted to scream. We had made good time once we had boarded the bigger plane owned by the Company, but how had this happened? “She’s too far along in the pregnancy to fly. What about my son?”

 

“I don’t know, Brett, but we’re going to find them,” the look in Coleman’s eyes would have scared the shit out of a normal man, but I was no normal man. I was a Townsend whose wife and child were missing. “I spoke to one of the ground crew who said that the man who hired the plane had gotten off it about an hour ago, with a pregnant woman.” His face tightening as he added that.

 

“Someone tipped him off,” Maya muttered quietly. “Sorry,” she held a hand up and made a zipping motion over her mouth when we all looked in her direction.

 

“Hang on,” Coleman walked over to Maya and squatted. “What makes you say that?”

 

“Well, we know that he landed three hours before us because he didn’t have the same tail winds that we did, right?” We all nodded as she looked around us for confirmation. The tail winds had helped us catch up with him a bit faster. “And then, an hour before we landed he suddenly decides fuck this and gets off the plane when it was supposed to be continuing onto France? It makes sense that he was tipped off that we were coming and that we were landing faster than he expected.”

 

She was distracted from the issue by Crystal, who chose that moment to stretch and wake up. Picking her up and sitting her on her lap so that she was facing us, Crystal gave a slow yawn and then said what we were all thinking.

 

“Ffffffffff uck!”

 

At that moment, a member of Gatwick’s ground crew and a security agent walked through the open door of the plane. Their jaws dropped hearing the little cherubic looking baby girl saying the word ‘fuck’ in her cute little baby voice.

 

“Can we help you?” Coleman growled at them. As with most people who had never experienced him, they took a step back and looked at each other before proceeding.

 

“You now have clearance to disembark,” the security guy said, looking nervously at the door. What the hell? It’s not like there weren’t hundreds of back up for him if things went to shit. Giving us a quick glance, he got off the plane and stood at the bottom of the steps waiting for us to follow.

 

Clearly being the one with the balls, the ground crew member looked at Maya and said, “That’s bloody cool. How did you teach her to do that? I have a daughter who’s probably around the same age as yours and all she does is say normal words.”

 

Laughing, Maya stood up and turned to pick up the bag with Crystal’s diapers and shit in it. “Surround her with guys who don’t use any other words apart from that one and shit.”

 

“Shhhhhhhht,” Crystal repeated, suddenly finding the key to happiness in her tiny little feet and bringing them up around her ears. With what happened next, Ren will tell you she’s a genius, the rest of us figured it was a coincidence. Her face turned a dark red and she started straining while lifting her left foot into her mouth.

 

“Damn,” Ren mumbled in awe. “Mensa!”

 

Looking away from the baby, I picked up my bag and got my passport ready for the pussy outside.

 

“We thought that once about Tom,” Mom said as she walked past me toward the open door. “Turns out he was just like the rest of you. Special made, special born,” she patted Dad’s face to lessen the insult. He was still half asleep, so he nodded drowsily and just followed after her as she started down the stairs to the tarmac.

 

Anxious to get off the plane and after Sabine, I followed quickly. We’d had to leave our guns at home because the U.K. was a no gun country, so this was going to be an even bigger challenge.

 

“Jesus Christ,” Cole whined as he followed behind me. “Doesn’t the sun ever shine in this country?”

 

“Not at three in the morning, dilweed,” Maya drawled sarcastically behind him.

 

“Does it have to rain all the time then?” He pulled his hood up over his head and stood close behind me as the security agent did something with a handheld device and our passports. “Do you guys ever have water shortages?” He asked him. The guy looked quickly up at him and then back down at his screen as he nodded and made a grunting noise. “But how?” Cole persisted.

 

If I wasn’t in the shit storm that I was currently in, I might have found some humor in the look that the guy gave him, but instead I started to get irate. We still had the security inside the building to get through before we could follow after whomever had my wife and this was just holding us up even more.

 

“Because the water runs out,” the man replied in the driest tone of voice I’d ever heard, before waving us with his hand to move on.

 

“Rude,” Cole muttered as soon as we were out of earshot of the guy. “You holding up okay?”

 

“I’d be a lot better if y’all would stop fucking around so that I could find my wife!” I snapped.

 

As I walked into the terminal building, I heard the footsteps behind me pick up as my family started to run. I knew that they hadn’t forgotten about what was going on, they were just waiting for someone to tell them where they were going. Plus, when you were travelling as a group of roughly a thousand members, it took time for everyone to sing the same tune.

 

“Don’t panic,” Coleman advised as he appeared beside me. “I have the best on her trail. We already have information to go on.”

 

Nodding, I walked even faster up the stairs that we were now climbing. The sooner we got this over and done with, the sooner I could find Sabine.