Taken 19

Sidney was lost in the crowd, but she never felt more exposed than ever.

Less than two weeks ago, Marco had laid down the plan to kidnap a very young girl for Personas. She was working for the Black Lotus, and none of their respective gangs knew of their relationship, which would have meant death.

She convinced him to sell it to the Black Lotus for a higher price, not revealing to those in the echelon that her dealer was a rival syndicate member. This was all in a bid to help her rise among those ranks, even as she was occupying an important position as their ‘eyes and ears’ in the Police.

 She’d been put in charge of that mission as only she could handle the tough job of monitoring any investigation, as well as ensuring the consignment reached the Black Lotus safely. The plan of making the exchange at the Bloody Arachnids’ concert was foolproof – no one would expect that location to be a venue for that sort of exchange.

Neither would anyone see anything in a young mother bringing her young daughter to the concert, all dressed as punks. The psychotics, mental patients, and all sorts of whackos of the underworld assembled at places like this, while the Police simply looked away.

It was all going according to plan.

Until Marco died.

Marco’s unprecedented killing forced the girl into her custody before schedule, and it was going to be hard to just meet her bosses with the girl because the entire police force was too involved in the case. With missing posters everywhere, there was no way to escape the heat.

And when things could not get any worse, Derek became more and more involved in the case, no thanks to her clumsy efforts to assassinate him and those of Bruno Schneider.

The fool was dead anyway, but what was scary was that Schneider had been discovered, which meant that Derek had caught up with her.

“I want to see my mommy!” the little girl she was dragging by the hand sobbed silently.

“If you don’t shut up, I’ll kill you and your mommy!”

A frightened Aimee kept shut instantly, sobbing as her tears mixed with the mascara to form dark paint rolling down her cheek.

She looked the part effortlessly.

Zoe had been pushed into a very tight corner, and it would be a miracle if the exchange occurred without any events.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she knew that it was time to make the rendezvous.

*****************************************

Derek knew that the idea of hiding in plain sight within the crowd was futile - Zoe knew exactly what was happening, and would not be so stupid as to try to make a move there.

Unfortunately for her, he knew exactly how her mind functioned.

Sure enough, he heard a pair of hurried steps, followed by her voice shouting “Bloom!”

“That’s a crazy word for a signal,” Derek said, stepping into view with his gun leveled at her chest.

She froze like a deer in headlights.

“You!” She exclaimed.

“Good evening to you too, Zoe. Or is it Mariana?” He asked, cautiously stepping towards her. “Oh, sorry. It must be Sidney,” he said triumphantly, flashing her a glare. He had the menacing look of a lion that had caught its prey.

“H-how’d you…”

“I have to give you credit for planning, Zoe. I never expected you to be a double-agent, nor did I expect you to be the mastermind of all this. You bet I never expected you to be running three different personalities so effortlessly,” he said coolly, snatching her handbag from her shoulders and crossing it far away.

He took a few steps back, noticing he’d been crazy to come so close to her.

She just stood there, clenching and unclenching her fists. Her face was ghostly pale, and she held tightly to the girl’s arm.

“How long have you known?”

“I had a few suspicions on the day I was attacked at my home, but I left all that aside. The day you entered the precinct as Mariana, the crazy widow, your shoes gave you away.”

She recalled when he asked her about her shoes. Oh sh!t, she thought, realizing how she’d underestimated him.

“When I found out how to read that code – a feat borne of sheer luck – I deciphered all your texts and found out who Sidney was.” He said, smiling.

She was too slow to act. If she had killed Lucio earlier, this would not have happened. If she had destroyed those text messages or killed the detective earlier, she’d have been free.

“But how to lure you out was the big problem. And by a stroke of luck, I coincidentally exposed Schneider the day before the exchange was to be made. It was by another stroke of pure luck that I found out what the Scorpion and Park in Marco’s dying words referred to,” he said, fixing his eyes on her shivering figure.

“And I knew that once Schneider’s capture and suicide hit the news, you’d be very desperate and scared, which would lead to you making a mistake borne out of paranoia, like purchasing a new SIM card for making contact with the Black Lotus operatives,”

”But,” she started, confused.

“But you played yourself by registering those details in the name of Sidney, whom you thought we weren’t aware of. You’d been so smart as to set Tony against me, knowing that one way or the order, you’d get to finish off who survived out fated encounter. But you weren’t banking on the fact that I would figure out your association with Tony.”

She stood there, shocked. He’d put the puzzle pieces together.

“I had the best hackers in the state bypass the Black Lotus’ contact with mine, and that’s why I brought you here. Backstage. The exact place you’d want to make such an exchange. Because I know the way you think and act. You always want to stay in the shadows, Sidney,” he finished.

She took some time to regain her composure.

“Well, well, well. I did underestimate you, and I did make a lot of careless moves. But is one girl going to be worth anything? You’ll still be in the dark about the Black Lotus, as well as dirty cops in the Police and other juicy info. I have information on both, and I’m willing to…”

“You fail to see the big picture, don’t you? I know exactly how you reason. You didn’t get rid of those texts with Marco, and that was how Lucio found them. Instead of discarding some unnecessary and incriminating stuff, like Tony, you decided to keep him around to use him to try and eliminate me,”

The reality of his statements hit her.

“I already knew you had carefully documented all the information on the Black Lotus somewhere, so all I needed to do was search for a house owned by one Sidney Silva,” he said, taking a moment to commend himself for his quick deductions.

“Fool! It’s not there! It’s in a safe deposit elsewhere…”

“You’re the bigger fool if you think that’ll deceive me. You’d never keep something that important so far away from you, would you? No, you’d keep it in your laptop at home which was secured by a ‘strong’ password. That password wouldn’t by any chance be Y3N(IY5, would it?”

“That’s impossible, even you can’t…”

“Of course, it’s just your name in that code you created. Except in the ‘D’, you used the c-shaped parenthesis and capital letter I. And you didn’t use the symbol for the Greek letter ‘Gamma’ as your letter ‘Y’, because there isn’t a key for that on your laptop. But I already knew all this, thanks to the texts Lucio gave me.” He concluded.

“So…”

“Yeah, a team is there, retrieving all the info you were so nice to catalog for us. Unlike all the others I’d met in the course of this investigation, you have nothing to bargain with. As we speak, a false text has been sent to your contacts that are present here, and they’ll be arrested as with you,” he said.

“Well, I’m one to admit when I’m beaten,” she said, pushing the girl towards him, “But that time is not now!”

He was so occupied looking at the girl who was stumbling towards him, he barely caught Sidney’s quick movement.

In the blink of an eye, she pulled out a small pistol from her jacket’s inner pocket, but before she could aim, Derek pulled the trigger twice.

The barrel clicked, but there was no boom.

Oh my…

“I guess luck’s got to run out sometime, you dipshit!” she shouted.

“See you in hell,” she shrieked, aiming for his head.

Two shots rang out.

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This is an extra-long special because the next part will be the last for this series.

Thanks for being with me every step along the journey, and now we've reached the finale, what are your thoughts on this story?

If you're looking for any of the Taken stories, please head to this post to read them