Page 110 of Finding Elodie
Mustang shrugged. “Par for the course, I suppose. And Elodie and I weren’t doing anything other than hanging out at my place anyway. It’s not like we had a trip planned or anything.”
“Riiiight. Hanging out at your place,” Aleck joked.
“Shut up,” Mustang told him, throwing a pencil at him from across the table.
They were all waiting for their commander to arrive to tell them more about the mission they’d be leaving on the next day. Sometimes they had weeks to plan, other times, in the case of emergencies, they were sent out almost immediately.
Midas leaned back and listened to the team give Mustang crap. The truth of the matter was, they were all thrilled for their team leader. Elodie was amazing. Down-to-earth and funny. She didn’t seem to resent the time her new husband spent with them, and she was a hell of a chef to boot.
“Thanks for coming on such short notice,” the commander said the second he entered the room. He was passing out folders before he’d sat down. “This mission is very time sensitive. As you all know, there was an American and a Danish aid worker kidnapped from Somalia about three months ago. The kidnappers have been demanding ten million dollars to release them. The Danish man’s brother has raised half that, but says there’s no way he can get any more. The State Department has been trying to negotiate with the kidnappers, without luck. We’ve had several proof-of-life videos, but intel’s come in that the Danish man is very sick, and time is running out for them both.”
“We’re going in?” Pid asked, the excitement easy to hear in his voice.
“Yes. You’ll go in under the cover of darkness to retrieve the hostages and kill the kidnappers. The information we have on the hostages is in the folders I just handed out.”
Midas flipped open his folder and saw a still shot from one of the proof-of-life videos that had been sent. The woman had brown hair that looked as if it hadn’t been brushed or washed in ages. Her face was sunburnt and her hazel eyes were filled with fear. The man had blond hair and blue eyes, and he looked pissed and defiant, even in the photograph.
He’d heard their names were Dagmar and Elizabeth, but that was about all Midas knew. He perused the file—and froze when he read the information listed for the woman.
Elizabeth Lexie Greene. Age thirty-three. Graduated from Grant High School in Portland, Oregon.
Fuck. He knew her.
Lexie had been in his graduating class. She’d moved to Portland their senior year. They were in different circles—Midas had been on the swim team and was very popular, and being a newcomer, Lexie had mostly hung out on the fringes of their class. Midas had been in the top ten academically, and the information in front of him said that Lexie had been in the bottom twenty percent.
His mind went back to senior English class. They’d been assigned to work together, and while at first he’d been disappointed he hadn’t gotten to work with the girl he’d been crushing on at the time, he’d found that Lexie had great ideas about their project and was a pleasure to work with. Usually he put off group projects until right before they were due, but she did a lot of the legwork, and they’d finished well ahead of the deadline. He had no idea why her grades weren’t good, because he’d found her to be smart, funny, and engaging.
He hadn’t thought of her since graduation, but now he couldn’t help but compare the woman in the picture in front of him to the teenager he’d known in his youth.
Why was she in Somalia? How had she gotten kidnapped? Was she all right? Was she scared?
Of course she was scared.
Midas clenched his teeth together. This was one mission they wouldn’t fail. It was rare their missions became personal, but there was no way he was going to leave Africa without her. She might not remember him, but he remembered her. And Midas was going to do whatever it took to get her home safe and sound.
* * *
Elizabeth Lexie Greene lay on the pallet her captors had given her months ago and did her best to try to blank her mind. She stared up at the stars winking in the night sky overhead, trying to remember which one was the North Star. It was hopeless; she had no clue which star was which.
She’d never been a good student, much to her dad’s chagrin. She’d tried, she really had, but when she tried to read, the letters got all jumbled up. She knew now that she was dyslexic, but growing up, she’d just thought she was stupid. Even her dad had lost patience with her so many times and told her she was a “retard.” She hated that word to this day. It was so repulsive and discriminatory.
Her mind buried unpleasant thoughts of her past, and she gazed at her desolate surroundings. How had she even ended up here?
Oh, yeah, she’d been volunteering at a food bank back in Portland, Oregon. Years ago. Had overheard two of her coworkers talking about an aid organization Food For All, that did what it could to get help those less fortunate. So after researching the company, and liking the mission statement and all that they were doing to try to help others, she’d signed up.
Fast forward a decade, and she was still doing it. She’d been in Somalia when she and one of the head honchos of the organization, a Danish man named Dagmar, had been grabbed off the street right outside the organization’s building. They’d been driven into the desert…and had been here ever since. They’d been beaten and practically starved. And living in the desert wasn’t exactly fun, but at least she and Dagmar were mostly ignored now, as long as they didn’t step out of line.
The fact that the kidnappers were asking for ten million dollars was a joke. They’d at first asked for five million, and when Dagmar’s twin brother had come up with the money, they’d upped the ransom to ten million instead. Five for each of them.
Lexie wished they’d accepted the five million for Dagmar and let him go while trying to get more money for her. He wasn’t doing well. At all.
She suspected he might’ve had a mild stroke last month, and he hadn’t been the same since. His speech was slurred, and he kept forgetting where they were and what was going on. The captors were getting impatient with him, and she’d overheard them talking about handing them both over to another guy in the area, someone who hated foreigners.
If that happened, she was as good as dead.
She didn’t want to die. Life hadn’t exactly gone the way she’d hoped, but she still had visions of settling down, starting a family, and living the American dream.
Hopping from one country to another wasn’t conducive to finding someone to spend the rest of her life with. But she’d finally gotten to a place where she wasn’t ashamed of her disability, or herself. She wasn’t the smartest person in the world, but she was kind and loyal.
