Brett Battles - Little Girl Gone

“Just call me Debbie. Come in, come in.”

As soon as he was inside, she shut the door.

“I want to thank you for meeting with me this late,” he said. “I know it’s a huge inconvenience.”

She shook her head dismissively. “Not at all. You’d be surprised at how many late nights we put in here.”

As she led him from the reception area into the back room, he heard something moving around. “Is someone else here?”

She smiled. “Just Roger. Roger, come here.” A few seconds later, a golden retriever ran up and nuzzled Debbie’s hand.

When he saw Logan, he ambled over. “Hey, Roger. How you doing?”

The dog sniffed his fingers, then gave them an experimental lick. After that, they were fast friends.

Debbie pointed at the door to the airfield. “The plane’s in a hanger nearby. We just need to—”

“I was thinking we could discuss business first,” Logan said. “If you don’t mind.”

She turned back. “Of course. Whatever you’d like.”

She motioned to a desk in the middle of the room. After they were both seated, Logan let her give him what he assumed was her normal sales pitch.

Finishing up, she said, “As you can imagine, we deal with a lot of people looking for discretion. For that reason, we never discuss our client list with anyone. In our case, less publicity means better business.”

“I certainly can appreciate that. Tell me, do you fly just domestically? Or…?”

She looked momentarily confused. “Didn’t you say you wanted to go to New York?”

“Yes. On this trip. I was thinking more long term.”

“Oh, sure.” She smiled. “We’ll fly anywhere our clients need to go, except war zones and that kind of thing, of course.” She let out a little laugh. “We’re all about customer service, but we’re not fighter pilots.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to be.” He paused for a second. “My client might need to fly to Japan later in the month. Is that doable for you?”

“As a matter of fact we have a aircraft making that very trip as we speak.”

“Oh, that’s good to know,” he said, surprised, then chuckled. “So you have a client going to Japan, huh?”

“Well, through Japan, anyway.”

He let the subject drop, and asked if she could run up an estimate of what the New York trip would cost his client.

“No problem,” she said, then pulled a keyboard out from under her computer terminal.

When people typed passwords into their computers, they generally checked to make sure whoever was with them wasn’t looking. But when they did the actually typing, they would focus either on the keyboard or the screen. Logan was petting the dog’s head when Debbie did her check, but as soon as she looked away, he moved his gaze just enough so he could see which keys she tapped to unlock her computer: roger1207. He figured the numbers must be the dog’s birthday.

Once the estimate was printed out and in Logan’s possession, she said, “Shall we see the plane now?”

“Absolutely.”

The dog led the way, running ahead, stopping until they caught up, then running ahead again. They were almost to the hanger, when Logan shot his hand into his pants pocket, and pulled out his phone.

“Sorry,” he said to Debbie. “This should only take a second.” He pretended to hit a button, then moved the phone to his ear. As he spoke, Roger loped over, and nuzzled his hand. “Hello?...Yeah, I’m here now…What? But I thought…Are you sure that’s what Tom wants?...Okay. Okay. No problem.” He hung up his fake call, grimacing.

Debbie took a step toward him. “Everything okay?”

Logan ran his hand over Roger’s head, then said, “Well, no, actually. I’m so embarrassed. My client’s changed his mind, and decided not to go. I feel horrible for having made you come out at this time of night, but it looks like we won’t need a plane in the morning after all.” He closed his eyes for a second. “It’s not the first time he’s done this, so I guess I should have expected it. I’m really sorry.”

“No, no. Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It happens more often than you’d guess. At least you know about us now. I could still show you the plane, if you’d like.”

“I’ve taken up too much of your time already. But I guarantee you when the Japan trip comes up you’ll be at the top of my call list. I owe you that much.”

“We’d definitely appreciate the business.”

He let her show him out, gave the dog a final pat, then apologized again as she locked the front door behind them. Not surprisingly, she and Roger were parked in the same lot Logan was.

Logan got into his El Camino, started it up, then pulled out his phone, and pretended to be talking again. He didn’t know if he was getting good at it or not, but he did seem to be doing a lot of talking to dead air that night. As Debbie and Roger drove by, he gave them a waved, then slipped the phone back in his pocket once they was out of sight.

Three minutes later, he was sitting at Debbie’s desk, typing in roger1207. In no time, he found the file for the charter flight Elyse was on. Interestingly enough, the client—Mr. Robert Andrews—had stated that he and his associates were escorting the sick daughter of a businessman home. Only home wasn’t Tokyo. That was merely a fuel stop.

Home was Bangkok, Thailand.

The country right next door to Burma.

24

The first flight Logan could get out on was at 12:55 p.m. on Cathay Pacific. There’d be a plane change in Hong Kong, and by the time he reached Bangkok, it would be nearly midnight the following day. In the best of cases, he would be at least fourteen hours behind the people who had Elyse, but thought it prudent to assume the difference would be closer to sixteen.

Would that be too late? As much as he tried not to think that way, the thought did keep creeping in.

His father was true to his word. He and his friends brought Logan an envelope containing five thousand dollars in cash to the motel before he left.

“If you need more,” his dad told him, “just let me know. I expect you to check in everyday, too.”

“Don’t,” Logan said. “I’m not going to stop whatever I might be doing just to let you know what’s going on.”

“I didn’t mean that, but—”

“Dad, please. If I can, I’ll call. If I can’t, I won’t.”

Harp was going to say something else, but Barney put a hand on his shoulder. “Do what you need to do, Logan.”

Logan nodded his thanks.

“And just in case,” Barney said, then handed him a small bottle. “Sleeping pills for your flight.”

On the way out, Logan stopped by Tooney’s room. Elyse’s grandfather was sitting on the bed, his packed bag on the floor near the door. As soon as Logan left for the airport, he and the others were all heading back to Cambria.

“Are you doing okay?” Logan asked, sitting down beside him.

“I’m happy she’s still alive, but…am still worried.”

“I’ll…I’ll bring her back.”

He looked at Logan, and tried to smile. “I know you will.”

Logan patted him on the arm, then stood up. “I gotta go.”

“Thank you, Logan,” he whispered. “Thank you.”

Logan didn’t know what to say, so he simply nodded, and left.

Outside, Dev was waiting next to the El Camino, ready to drive Logan to the airport, then take his car back up the coast.

“Thanks for all the help,” Logan said once they were on the road.

Dev shrugged like it was no big deal. “I assume you just want us to hold onto everyone?”

Logan hesitated. “Eventually we’re going to want to turn them over to the police, but I don’t want to do that yet. Let’s see if I can learn anything that can help us out first.”

“Okay.”

“That is, unless your people do mind.”

“They don’t mind.”

They fell silent for several blocks.

“Dev, I need to ask you for a little more help,” Logan said. “I’m hoping someone you know might have contacts in Bangkok that can assist me. Probably someone who—”

He stopped as Dev pulled a piece of paper out of his shirt pocket, and handed it to him.

“What’s this?”

“What you just asked for,” Dev said. “A phone number. When you get there, call it.”

“A friend of yours?”

“A friend of a friend.”

Logan hoped he’d say more, but in typical Dev fashion, that was it.

“So you were expecting me to ask for help,” he said.

“If you didn’t, I would have given it to you anyway. Tooney’s a good guy. Find his granddaughter, Logan. And if you can, make the ones who took her pay.”

• • •

Logan wasn’t sure how long after his plane had taken off that he fell asleep, but he knew they hadn’t reached cruising altitude yet. Barney’s pills really worked. By the time Logan woke, he’d been out for seven hours. Which was nice until he realized he still had about another seven to go before the plane was due to land in Hong Kong.

He filled some of the time by working on his laptop. In the morning before he’d left the motel, he’d received an email from Ruth containing Forbus’ latest information on Burma. Not having time to look at it then, he’d saved it to his hard drive. He’d also found some stuff online about Elyse’s mother, Sein, and saved those to the computer, too. Now that he had nothing else to do, he was able to go through most everything.

Ruth’s Burma info didn’t really add much to what he already knew. Decades of repression, peppered with occasional bouts of protest that were always put down. The latest had been in the fall of 2007 after the government had raised fuel prices, putting further strain on a population that had very little money in the first place. This time the Buddhist monks in the city of Rangoon had gotten involved, leading the protest, until government thugs had put a stop to that. Logan could understand why Sein had such a passion for trying to free the people of her birth country.

When he’d looked her up online there had been hundreds of links. Human Rights websites, Burma-centric websites, news articles, interviews. There were also several dozen videos of talks she had given, and a couple of television interviews. He hadn’t downloaded everything, but those he did, he watched.

He was surprised that she didn’t look much different than the girl he remembered from twenty years before, and was impressed by her intelligent, matter-of-fact delivery. He’d expected more emotion, more rhetoric, but her calm, confident demeanor was so much more effective than any ranting would have been.

She talked about the crimes the Myanmar generals had committed, the deaths they had been responsible for, and the stranglehold they had on Burmese lives. Then she talked about her mother, how Thiri had gone to support Aung San Suu Kyi in hopes of making Burma a place her children could come back to without fear.

“Though they took her life, they did not take what her life was about. Her dream is still alive in me, like it should be in you. When tyranny and oppression are imposed on one person, they are imposed on us all. We must not stop until our brothers and sisters enjoy the same freedoms as we do.”

It was all pretty heavy stuff. Logan was almost glad when his battery ran out of power.

After a few hours layover in Hong Kong and a second flight, this one only two and a half hours long, he finally landed in Bangkok.

It didn’t take long to clear immigration and customs, and soon he was in a taxi on the way to a hotel his dad had booked for him online.

Logan had been to the country once before, in the summer between the Army and college. It was long enough ago, though, that he didn’t recognize most of what he saw on the drive.