Wiser Than Serpents (17 page)

“He’s here, too?”

Roman looked like he’d been up for about a week, with circles under his eyes, a two-day beard growth, and his hair matted on his head. David guessed he didn’t look much better, although his shower last night had at least made him feel human.

Roman confirmed his assumptions with a sorry look. “You need a haircut.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” He rubbed a hand down his face, sat down next to Roman. “Tell me everything you know about Elena and her disappearance.”

Roman filled him in on the details. “Truthfully, I think Yanna knows the most.”

“Which is painfully little,” David said. “For all she knows—really knows—Elena was kidnapped by someone else, or is even still in Korea. Or ran off with
Bob
to Maui.”

“No, she’s here. Elena passed through passport control over a week ago. And the fact that she used the same dating service, stayed at the same hotel and ended up in the same country, well, I’m thinking that Yanna’s at least warm.”

“Great. I was really holding out for Maui.” Although David could have guessed that Yanna wouldn’t be that far off the trail.

“I probably shouldn’t ask what you’re doing here, huh? Something about top secret, and special forces?” Roman scratched his beard, making a face.

“Something like that. But it’s all gone south, and my partner’s been shot—”

“Chet?”

David nodded.

“Who shot him?”

“See, that’s why you don’t want to ask.”

Roman raised an eyebrow and wisely said nothing. Finally. “How are we going to track down Elena?”

“We’re going to track down Kwan, that’s how.” Yanna stood on the landing on her way up the stairs. “If you think I can’t hear you then you must think I’m stupid. I’m going to track down the GPS I left on the boat, and see if I can find Kwan.”

Roman got up and gathered Yanna in his arms. “You really scared me.” He let her go and dug into his pocket, pulling out what looked like a necklace.

Yanna took it and held it to herself. “Where’d you find it?”

“At the hotel. A maid found it.”

David looked up at Yanna, saw that her eyes glistened. “What is it?”

“It’s my locket. I wasn’t sure where I lost it. It must have been ripped off when they snatched me from my hotel room. My sister has one just like it,” Yanna said, opening the locket. She handed the picture to David to look at. A girl who resembled a younger version of Yanna, without as much verve, stared back. He gave it back to her.

“She is very pretty.”

“Thanks for coming after me.” She backed away from him, looked at them. “I find it extremely eerie that here I am, in Taiwan, with two of my best friends—”

“Three. Vicktor’s in the bathroom.”

“Three—when I need you the most. Thanks.”

David saw emotion flicker into her beautiful eyes, and his throat tightened. He knew what it cost her to say that. He touched her hand. “We’re not the only ones on your side, you know. I think you might need to chalk this up to God’s providence. Maybe He’s trying to tell you something.” Please,
please,
Yanna, listen.

Her smile fell and she stared at him, her face unreadable. Roman glanced at David, then back to Yanna. “It smells great down there.”

“Pancakes. American-style.” She lifted the apron, swayed with it. “Like my new outfit?”

David took a breath and said nothing.

The door in the hallway above them opened. Vicktor came out, trailed by a gust of steam.

“Any hot water left?” Roman asked, rising.

“Hey, Yanna,” Vicktor said, but David wasn’t sure if it was relief or a question his tone held. “I’m glad to see you. How fast can you get me a visa to America?”

“First, stop hovering. Second, you’re acting like I haven’t the foggiest idea what I might be doing. Go back to your corners and let me work.” Yanna opened up the laptop computer Roman had brought with him and entered her password.

The breakfast dishes had been pushed away, and she hadn’t felt this full in—actually, she never let herself eat as she had today. And being here with Vicktor and Roman and David, watching them interact…it felt like college again.

It felt like maybe, yes, everything would be okay.

“So you work with computers?” Trish said, coming to sit beside her. Slim—except for her cute little belly, with short brown hair and hazel eyes that seemed to pick up more than Yanna expected, Trish hadn’t even asked last night—just instinctively known that Yanna needed privacy. Some time to sit in the bathtub and…cry.

And stupid her, she was crying just as much for herself as for Elena. While she knew she should have every thought focused on finding her sister, Yanna couldn’t help but wish, with everything inside her, that David loved her. That he’d hijacked a scooter and flagged down a bus and jumped in front of a thug with a knife because he couldn’t live without her.

But even last night, when she’d all but begged him with her eyes to kiss her, he’d simply done the
I’d hate to lose a friend
act.

So this morning, when Trish handed her an apron and wire whisk and asked her to stir, she’d decided it would be fine to let him see what he might be missing.

It was his loss. She made good pancakes.

“Yanna runs the IT department in Khabarovsk,” David answered for her.

She did more than run it. She had single-handedly brought the lot of them into the twenty-first century.
And
she made pancakes.

“Tell me your brilliant plan,” David said, apparently not listening to a word she said about hovering. Then again, when did he ever? Like his comment about God. Thanks, but she wasn’t going to take some good fortune and start proclaiming revival. Even if she did believe there was a God, she’d done just fine on her own.

She simply didn’t need someone else letting her down.

“Hopefully Kwan still has my cell phone. Even if it is off, the GPS is working. We can use it to track down Kwan, who will lead us to Elena.” She looked over at him. “So, you see, this isn’t over—not by a long shot.” She smiled, real big, at the men in the room. “Brilliant.”

“You do surprise me,” David said, smirking. He glanced at what was left of his pile of pancakes.

“Tracking down Kwan isn’t necessarily going to lead you to Elena,” Roman said.

“How do you even know this guy was a member of the Serpents?” Vicktor asked, turning away from the window. “Maybe he was just a human trafficker.”

“His ring,” David said. “We’ve discovered that all the major players in the Serpents are given a ring, usually with a snake emblem. Kwan had one on his middle finger.”

Yanna’s hand went to her cheek, where said ring had left a bruise. “That brings me to brilliant plan number two,” she said. “What if Kwan were to see
me,
the girl who got away. And I’ll be wearing another tracking device, but now that you are in the country, I let myself be captured again and—”

“No way. Not on your life.” David cut her off, shaking his head as if maybe she couldn’t understand him. “I’m not letting you near him. He’d kill you, and laugh while doing it. No way. Uh-uh. Nope.”

“Okay, okay, I got it. I just thought maybe you’d be hiding in the bushes, and do that thing you did last night.”

“What did he do last night?” Roman asked, shooting David a look.

“Someone jumped us. Tried to kill Yanna.”

“I don’t think he really cared who he stuck his knife into, as long as he started with one and ended with the other,” Yanna said with a shake of her head.

Silence filled the room.

“Okay, David’s right, there’s no way you’re getting near Kwan.” Roman wore a strange look as he glanced at David. “I’m really sorry, I should have never let her go alone.”

“Oh, that’s not the half of it, Roma,” David said in a dark tone. “I haven’t told you about the boat, or the ocean or her stealing my wallet. She’s lucky I haven’t wrung her neck and sent her home in handcuffs.”

“Which I’d just take off.”

“And throw in the ocean.”

The silence in the wake of their words made Yanna realize she’d been yelling. She glanced at Trish, who was staring at her coffee. Yeah, nice one, David. Now she sounded like some gangster in front of this sweet woman. She directed her attention back to her computer program, and her GPS system and what she did best.

There, lit up on the screen, was her signal. “I found Kwan, only he’s not in Kaohsiung.” She looked up at David. “The signal’s here, in Taichung.” She pointed to the screen, then zoomed in to the street name. “It’s not on his boat at the harbor, which means he has it with him. Why would Kwan hang on to my cell?”

“Maybe he’s using it.”

“Maybe it’s a trap.” This from Vicktor, who came back to life from where he stood at the picture window. “Maybe he knows you’d try and track it down. Maybe he wants you to find it. And him.”

“He’s right,” Yanna said, but Vicktor’s theory had David’s attention. She turned to him. “We’re going after that blip.”

“
I’m
going after that blip. You’re staying here. Aren’t you supposed to be getting Vicktor a visa?”

“It’ll be ready in a day or so,” Yanna said, trying not to be terse. They acted as if she was a glorified secretary. She did have combat training. And even knew how to use it. Sort of.

Trish and Cho had gotten up from their places to lean over Yanna. “Where is that?” Trish asked.

“It’s an address downtown.” She read off the address in Mandarin.

“I know that spot. It’s a teahouse. I’ve been there a few times.” Trish set her cup down. “What would this Kwan man be doing there?”

“Some traffickers use businesses to warehouse women en route because they’re high profile, an unlikely target,” Roman said. “Our team in Vladivostok raided a casino filled with Korean and Chinese women on their way to inland Russia.”

Trish put her coffee down. “Well, I think I need some tea.”

“Trish—” Cho said, his tone dark. “Don’t—”

She rounded on her husband. “No, you listen. While I’m there, Yanna can have a look around. She can pretend to go to the bathroom or something. I won’t get hurt.”

“You could get hurt,” Yanna said.

“I’ll be fine. Besides, I want to help. I’ve been in the country long enough to know about this problem, and to feel frustrated by my inability to help. I’m doing this.” She turned to Cho. “I’ll be fine, I promise.”

Yanna looked at David. His expression broadcast his feelings loud and clear.

Cho took his wife’s hand, his expression mirroring David’s.

In the corner, Vicktor sat down on the sofa, sighing so loudly that he sounded as if he might have had something terrible to eat for breakfast. And she’d made the pancakes, so—“What’s wrong?”

“It’s just driving me crazy. Now that I know Yanna’s okay, I can’t get her out of my mind. If I could just get a hold of her, know she’s okay…”

She didn’t have to ask who. “Going to America is a really bad id—”

“I need to be Dr. Vladimir Zaitsev. Today.”

“Vicktor—” Roman started. “That’s a forty-eight-hour medical pass. That’s barely enough time to hail a taxi. If you get caught with a fake visa, you’ll be deported, and then you’ll never get back to America, and you might as well kiss marrying Gracie in the States and living happily ever after goodbye, because they’ll take your visa application and use it for dart practice.”

“Who’s Vladimir Zai—” Trish started.

“You’re assuming that I’m the kind of guy who just twiddles his thumbs while the woman I love is in trouble.”

“No, we’re assuming that you didn’t dump your brains in the Pacific on the flight over and can see that a few missed phone calls doesn’t a national emergency make,” David said.

“Vladimir Zaitsev is a, let’s say, friend who lets Vicktor borrow his identity…occasionally, for sudden trips into the U.S.,” Yanna said quietly to Trish.

Vicktor got to his feet.

“In Vicktor’s defense,” Roman said, stepping between David and Vicktor. “Gracie’s been acting weird, and he can’t get a hold of her. She might be mixed up with the wrong fella.” He turned to Vicktor. “Still, you can’t go running off to America every time she doesn’t answer the phone.”

Yanna stood up. “Vladimir Zaitsev has a forty-eight-hour pass from Russia to America. I can make that happen for you, keep it under the radar and have you pick up your visa in Taipei. But you have to promise that you’ll leave the States in two days or you’re not the only one who will be chipping ice off the sidewalks if you screw up. An FSB agent going AWOL—”

“Not just AWOL,” Roman interrupted.

“In the United States,”
Yanna clarified, “is going to raise more than a few eyebrows in Moscow. And Washington.”

“What she’s saying is that we might all be writing to each other from various correctional facilities around the world,” David said.

“Gracie needs me,” Vicktor said, and the expression on his face, filled with so much agony, or perhaps fear, was enough for Yanna to sit back down at her computer and start digging around her records.

Because, deep inside, in the places she didn’t want to visit, she desperately wished that David might look and say that about her someday. And come running.

Instead of always running…away.

“I must have lost my mind. There seriously must be a fracture of some sort in my head where there is gray matter leaking out because, never in my wildest dreams, in any scenario did I ever see myself agreeing to letting Yanna and some untrained American citizen put their lives on the line while I sat in a battered van, watching from across the street.” David put down his camera and looked over at Roman. “Check. Do I have liquid running from my ears?”

“They’re going in,” Roman said from his place beside him. “We have about ten minutes before Yanna goes into play.”

The teahouse, located in the center of the city, flanked on one side by a courtyard and a professional office building, and on the other by a clothing store, looked like something David might see in an Asian tour magazine, all crisp lines and lotus flowers, with a typical pagoda-style roof and columns beside the doors. Scooters lined up on the sidewalk outside the building, and Cho had to circle the block for an hour before he could find a spot this close to the door. Even so, it would take them roughly twenty-three seconds to go from the white English-school van to the front door, and that was barring any traffic. Way, way too long.