Side Effects

Chapter 36

Thankfully, almost right across the street from the inn was a Walmart, and we were there in just a couple of minutes. It was an extra large parking lot, like you'll find at most Walmart stores, and we parked off in a distant corner near no other cars. Tim and Melony were sitting in the back seat, and neither looked happy about the situation. We didn't care.

We opened the back doors, with Esme and Viola on Melony's side, and Alaya and I on Tim's, with the two bodyguards turned around with their tasers from the front seat. "They have anything on them?" I asked the guards, since they'd frisked them both when they got them to the car.

"Just the empty holster," answered one. "They're clean otherwise."

"I guess we should look in the purse then," I said to Esme, who was currently holding it.

She opened it, as though there could be a bomb inside, and gently started picking things out one at a time. Tim and Melony didn't even bother to look, as though they knew it wouldn't do any good to complain. We all heard her suck her breath in through her teeth as she pulled out a pair of simple Glade Plug In air fresheners, which looked to be hermetically sealed. If they contained the virus then they would have just plugged those in and walked away, nobody would even look twice at them. Unbelievable. We put both of their phones in the purse along with everything else, and Esme kept a tight hold of it.

"Well, I'm sure we know what we'll find in these once we get it to a lab."

Tim just scoffed. "It won't matter. None of this is legal. This is kidnapping and planting evidence and will be tossed out of court with no problem." He shot us a smirk as though he was untouchable.

"You're right. None of this is likely to hold up in a US court, even with the files we copied from the lab back in Mali. Not to mention, Anna probably has so many people in her pocket here that you'd probably get no jail time at all." Melony just smiled sweetly at us, as though she knew it to be true as well, and Tim had a shit eating grin that I couldn't wait to see disappear. "Luckily, Alaya had a better idea."

Alaya smiled right back at them. "Within a few hours, you'll be on Viola's mega yacht heading towards international waters for a nice long journey. It might take a while, but we'll be delivering you to where you started your last plague. China. We'll be fetching Anna next, and we have people on their way to get Ken too." Both of their smiles fell at once, though the Ken part was a partial bluff, as that part would only happen once we had Anna secured. But thanks to Viola's father we did have people on the way. "You may have everyone here bribed, but I'm betting the Chinese government will find more than enough evidence to make you disappear for however long you have left to live."

"You can't do that!" Tim screamed. "They won't have proof!"

"Yeah, I think their courts would allow the evidence we have here a lot quicker than ours would," Esme pointed out.

"My yacht will take about a month to get there, so you should use that time to make peace with whatever God you like." Viola had no expression on her face when she stated this. "My country lost many people to the disease you spread, and it will be a pleasure to ensure that you pay for your atrocities."

"Please!" Melony finally spoke. "Please don't do that! We'll do anything!"

"What could you possibly offer?" I asked her. "We know where my sister is, and we know where the lab is. We can easily find out who else at the lab had a part in this, and you can all stay together in prison in China. We can't put you on trial here, we already know the system would be rigged in your favor."

"Yep!" Alaya happily agreed. "Speaking for my late grandmother, I will be happy to hand you over when we get to China."

"Get them to the ship!" Viola ordered the guards, who quickly sped off towards the highway to Newport.

"Do you think that will work?" Esme asked. "It would be nice to get them to confess. I really don't want to sail all the way to China."

"It will probably work on Melony, she looked ready to crack already, but I'm not sure about Tim," I reasoned. "It doesn't matter too much though, if we're not turning them over here. I'm glad that we're turning them over to the United Nations instead. They deserve to be tried for crimes against all of humanity."

That was the other part of Alaya's idea from dinner. Ignore the US justice system that was probably riddled with people on Anna's payroll, and go right to the UN, and let the whole world judge her. While we'd thought to have Viola's father call Interpol, it made more sense for him to contact people in the UN Peacekeeping. They had troops relatively close to the lab already, and they were already enroute to Mali to help secure the lab, though they were under orders not to start until we had Anna, so she couldn't warn them.

Yeah, when we were done with all this, I was going to reward Alaya in every way imaginable for her great ideas.

"Are you sure that your sister will be in her house?" Alaya asked me while rubbing the small of my back.

I put my arm around her, pulling her into my body. "She should be, unless she's at the office on the weekend. If I had my old phone, I could tell, we used to track each other's locations." Everyone just looked at me, with their eyebrows raised. Oh. Yeah, I could still do that. "She assumes I'm dead, so if I went and got a new phone, and had them restore my number, then I should be able to still do that. She would have no reason to look for mine though. Why didn't I think of that?"

Ayala snickered, standing on her toes, and kissing me. "It isn't like we had the fate of millions in our hands or anything. Come on, let's get you a new phone!"

It wasn't hard to find a Verizon store, and I ended up getting three phones so that Alaya and Esme could get theirs back too. I might have also put Alaya on my plan, because I had a feeling that she would be sticking around for a long time, and it was a good way to take baby steps towards a more permanent future. Once my phone was restored from the cloud, I turned on the phone location, and saw that Anna was indeed right where she was supposed to be.

"Okay, Greenwich, Connecticut, here we come!" I called out as we got back onto the highway. It was a straight shot on Interstate 95 South towards New York City, and we made good time. This stretch of highway was always busy, but with no rush hour traffic on a weekend, it was manageable.

"You mentioned something about being able to get us in?" Alaya asked. "But what about getting out?"

I smiled over at her. "Well, we can try to go out the way we came in. But if not, I think Esme is getting us out if we run into trouble. My sister never drives into the city, she has a helicopter pad on the roof of the house to commute instead. If we can get Anna, then we'll take her chopper and fly her right out to the ship if we have to, or just land it and take the car."

"What about everything in the car?" she asked me.

Damn, that was a good point. I didn't really want to bring the virus with us, I wanted to keep it safe along with the luggage we had in case something went wrong. What we really needed was a large field, and Viola could watch the car, so it might work. She could be our backup in case of emergency. "Okay, new plan. We'll have Viola meet us at the high school football field if we can't get out the way we go in. She'll keep everything here in the car, and then we can drive with her."

Alaya nodded quickly. "That's safe, we can't afford to lose her. She has all the connections."

"I can't afford to lose any of you, so don't think you're not important cariño. I need the woman I love to stick around for a long time." I reached my hand over the console and gently gripped her thigh. She covered my hand in hers as we continued to drive. At our current rate, we'd be there before dinner, and then hopefully we could have a nice meal on the yacht.

"You're important to me too, Kian. I don't want to lose you now that I found you. I love you."

I looked over with a smile before getting my eyes back on the road. "I like the sound of that."

"Shut up!" Else snickered. "You too are so damned sweet!"

Alaya turned to look in the back seat at the other two women. "And you're not? I've heard your pet names, and I'm pretty sure I heard the word 'love' tossed about as well. We can all be sweet, so let me love my papi and you can kiss your mami!"

There was a lot of laughter from the back seat, and I couldn't help but chuckle alongside them. Hopefully we'd all still be laughing still in a few hours!