Side Effects

Chapter 39

Five Months later

I won't bore you with the minutiae of the investigation and trial. I wouldn't want you to fall asleep reading about the testimony, or even Anna's outbursts in her initial statements. None of it really mattered anyway. Ken and several of the lab workers had been captured in Mali, and the lab had been shut down as a crime scene, so they were all in The Hague as well as Anna, Tim, and Melony. I think Anna had held out hope that she was going to be rescued from the yacht, especially after she found out that we'd gone through with our idea to let all the American agencies know about the plot. We'd sent that information out while we were in the car, just wondering who might bite on it.

We'd ended up getting five different calls and a pair of texts all warning her. We kept all the information to be turned over later, but it made us realize that we'd made the right plan. She would have been gone if we tried it the other way. But it didn't help Anna's current predicament.

Unfortunately for her, on the fifth day out in the Atlantic, we got an escort from a pair of frigates, one from each of the French and British navies operating in conjunction with the United Nations. When she saw that, her hopes sank, and she refused to speak any more. That was fine with us, as both Tim and Melony had been speaking nonstop, giving videotaped confessions that were done a second time with lawyers from The Hague that had come out with the frigates.

It wasn't long before the world knew that the rumored plot wasn't a rumor, and we had more worries about people wanting to blow up the yacht just to kill Anna, than we were worried about people coming to rescue her. Plus, with the lawyers there to advise us, the messages, and calls that we'd received to warn Anna were given to the US Attorney General, since several of the calls were from his top deputies, and they were soon arrested as well, along with the other corrupt people that we could find. So, we made enemies from those people too. We were pretty popular!

The laptop that Alaya had grabbed turned out to have dirt on so many political figures that there were a rash of sudden retirements throughout the US senate and the house of representatives. Those that didn't retire ended up losing their election bids, and they were easy prey for people that campaigned on their dishonesty. It was nice to see. That was another reason that we were worried about the yacht being sunk, there were too many people that wanted Anna dead for all she knew.

The laptop also had more than enough evidence to corroborate everything that we had alleged, and the raid of the lab found both of the original files that we had copied, plus several others that were smoking guns to illegal activity. The case wasn't going to be hard to prove, it was just going to be a spectacle.

It was a tough time for me because I really needed Anna to talk to me. Ever since I'd been found to be alive, along with Alaya and Esme, I'd been trying to get a hold of my parents to make sure that they knew I was safe. Alaya and Esme had both been able to get in touch with their families, which made for tearful phone calls, but I had no such luck. I'd also want to talk to my parents about Anna and what she'd done, but that wasn't going to be as good of a conversation. The problem was, neither of their phones seemed to be in order. They were, as far as I knew, still living on their yacht, which was a damned big one. Not as big as Viola's but it still had satellite communications and internet that should make it so that I could contact them. I tried calling, texting, and emailing, and wasn't getting any sort of response. I thought that maybe they had damaged their satellite equipment, but as the weeks passed with no reply to any of the messages I'd sent, that hope was beginning to dim.

"You can do this," Alaya said while squeezing my hand. I was standing outside an interview room where I'd finally be allowed to speak to Anna, which I hadn't been able to since we'd brought her here. Once we'd turned over all our information and evidence, we weren't needed as anything other than witnesses, but we had to stay in the local area for protection. Until the trial was over, there were too many people that might want to rescue or kill Anna to keep themselves safe. The UN was worried that we could be held ransom for her, which was a silly thought. Why would anyone turn her over for that?