The Love Language of an Assassin

4

Saturday morning Jesse was sitting at a desk at Bellona headquarters and was working through the translation of online conversations. All languages had nuances and sayings which didn’t translate correctly if you just plugged them into a translation app. Euphemisms and jargon didn’t always translate from English to another language and back again. It was sometimes in these finer details of slang conversations between people where the ugly truth was spilled. Usually, Jesse was able to pick these nuances quicker than the Bellona computer programs, even though she herself updated a lot of the programs to adjust to the slang meanings.

Bellona, named for the Roman goddess of war, was a powerful collective of women with the unified goal of taking down s*x offenders and abusive men all over the globe. Jesse had been recruited at seventeen and she’d been a staple for nearly thirteen years, both in the office and in the field. In the field she was Beta to Naomi’s Alpha. In the office she was Juno to Artemis. Artemis relied heavily on her and she loved the challenge to her brain.

She had cut her teeth working in the offices, doing occasional field work as a spare on a team before getting a permanent assignment on a team with a leader who got results but had little people skills. The leader instructed to train, and function as a drill sergeant, necessary for teaching an assassin to take orders. Even though this outfit wasn’t about mollycoddling, she hadn’t enjoyed the assignment. Then eight years ago, she’d been put on a team with Naomi, Cat, and Bliss. When Bliss had elected to leave Bellona to be a stay-at-home mom to her and Naomi’s child, Arwen had joined their team. For the last nearly eight years they had become a fine-tuned well-oiled machine. They regularly joined forces with another team and as Jesse saw the long legs of one of its members approaching the desk, she couldn’t help but smile. This woman had over the last several years become one of her closest friends. The life of an assassin could be lonely, and you made friends where you could and for her, she’d made a great friend on and off the field in Isabella Ruiz-Torres.

A chair opposite her desk was spun on one leg before her colleague Isabella flipped it backwards and straddled it. “Hey b***h, clean any toilets lately?”

“Yup and it sucks. I have to go back, Monday.”

“She’s making you go back on Monday?” Isabella wrinkled her nose like she could smell something bad in the office. “Why? Thought you got fired?”

“Because he pays her three times the amount of a full weeks’ housekeeping rate for three days a week and he went to her at the hospital and said it was my fault for not following her routine.”

Isabella grunted folding her arms over the back of the chair, “your fault?”

“Yup. Turns out before she starts working upstairs, she always lets him know she’s done downstairs. I didn’t know. I just went upstairs and got to work. He thought mom was in the bathroom working downstairs because I stupidly closed the door behind me. He heard a person walking around the house upstairs, came upstairs to find me smelling his soap,” she lifted a finger still not looking up from the document in front of her, “do not ask, and then threw me out of his house. He thought I was a stalker who preys on rich billionaire types. When I argued with my mother, he bruised my arm throwing me out of his house and didn’t let me speak, she flung in my face I never shut up and I have a black belt and thus was letting him fire me to get out of doing the job.”

“Damn she’s really onto you.” Isabella laughed outright at Fabiana’s assessment.

“Right? Now I have to go back and work for The Jolly Green Giant.”

“Who is he? I asked Cam and he said his name is Doctor Torben Haugen and he is some kind of pharmaceutical guy. He occasionally uses Cam for security services. Supposedly a genius recluse who runs his company with an iron fist, tons of privacy and secrecy and it was all Cam would tell me. Did you ask Artemis to find out more?”

“Nope because I’m going to clean his toilet exactly six more times before Paloma is back from Puerto Rico and then I never have to see his ginormous frame again.”

“He’s as big as the guy from True Blood, bigger maybe.”

“I was thinking more the guy who played Pennywise.”

“Aren’t they brothers?”

“Yeah, but one is infinitely creepier. Vampires are sexy, clowns with balloons aren’t and I’d rather keep him in clown category, thank you very much.” She looked up as she circled a line in the pages upon pages of dialogue she was reviewing. “What do you make of this? Three times in this conversation they mention ‘the boss who likes candies,’ and while I get icky vibes off it, I’m struggling with this one. Caramelo. It’s means candies in Spanish but then in another conversation,” she flipped through the paper, “these two idiots who are probably going to get shot by their boss for all their texting back and forth about his activities, talks about how much his boss hates his father’s wife because she was the first candy to shoot him down.”

Isabella reached for the papers and perused the papers, “could her name be Candy or Carmel or Caramel?”

“So, he has a thing where he wants all the women named Candy or Caramel?” Jess shook her head and tapped her forehead with a pencil. “Hunting s*x offenders shouldn’t be this hard. Why are they getting smarter even when their minions are this stupid, they text back and forth like high school girls?” Jesse paused, “wait, wait,” she dug through the papers frantically, “here he mentions the boss leaving milk untouched. What if we’re talking color and not food? What if this guy is looking for women with a specific skin tone?”

Isabella furrowed her brow as she looked at the photos of the individuals they were tracking. “Okay, we know the guy we suspect as the ringleader is white. He’s got neo-Nazi ties which in itself should allow us to go shoot him in the balls but what if this is about him controlling, dominating women of color.”

“Of a specific color. He likes skin tones which are not, per his standards, too dark or too light. He left a milky or white woman untouched but then devoured his caramel-skinned woman until there was nothing left.” Jesse felt her stomach lurch as she managed to sort out the languages. “Someone should tell them using food to describe skin is nasty.”

“What language is this?” Isabella motioned to the conversations of the alleged ringleader. “I thought he was German, but this doesn’t look German.”

“It’s not, it’s Dutch, he had a Dutch grandmother. He likes to communicate in both. It’s why Artemis has me reviewing all of this. I can speak the Spanish, Dutch, and German.” She rubbed her forehead, “and for kicks, this guy also learned Arabic to deal with other oil tycoons for business. I’ve been reviewing his business emails too.”

“Well now we know he’s looking for brown skinned women to own,” Isabella said, “tell me what the words are for transport, move, ship in all four languages and maybe between us we can figure out a source or a mode of transportation of what we expect he’s up to.”

“It’s unnerving, isn’t it? A man like this guy who has never been photographed with any woman, not ever and just by a strange twist of fate, the couple taking a photo of a fancy car parked outside their hotel, happens to catch an image on his phone resembling a high-profile kidnapping victim in London. A naked photo.” Jesse passed her a paper with a bunch of handwritten words which could be interchanged for modes of transport.

“I just hope she’s not the girl he devoured like caramel candy,” Isabella whispered as she scoured the documents.

“What are you two focused on?”

Jesse looked up to see her Alpha, Naomi, standing over her. Naomi was barely five foot four and yet her presence was bigger than the two seated women combined. Jesse quickly caught her up to speed.

“Use the algorithm,” Naomi leaned past her to the computer, “plug the keywords into the system and find them.”

“It’ll find the keywords, but it won’t put them in context. I need the full sentences in order to relate it back to the conversation and how it applies or doesn’t apply to our missing woman. It’s one thing to think this guy just likes b**m porn and photos of naked bruised women on his phone. We can’t confirm her identity no matter how hard the techs are working. I need the link.” She looked to her leader, “why are you here? I thought you and Bliss were taking the kid to the zoo with Clara and her twins.”

“Nope.” Naomi shook her head. “I love my wife and I love my kid, but they got into this morning and Bliss grounded her. No zoo for her.”

“Jesus, what did she do?” Isabella chuckled as she flipped through more papers, her eyes scanning almost as fast as the computer was. She circled a paragraph and flung the paper at Jesse who read it shook her head and handed it back.

“I believe my wife is sincerely regretting being open about how the brat was conceived. This morning the seven-year-old had the audacity to tell Bliss,” She took a breath as if even repeating it would get her in trouble with her wife, “technically, they weren’t really related because they didn’t share blood since she was made with my egg and not hers.”

“Oh snap,” Jesse pulled her lips back taut. Bliss had once been the Delta on Naomi’s team before she had decided to step back from Bellona activity and be a mom. Jesse knew her quite well from the number of times they had all hung out in Naomi’s home and knew the woman wouldn’t have tolerated such talk.

“Yeah,” Naomi chuckled as she continued typing things in the computer beside Jesse, hooking her foot around a nearby chair and dragging it closer so she could sit. “My wife’s a sniper but quite certain she wanted a bit of up close and personal interaction with the little s**t. I love my kid but f**k me she has my mouth and she’s going to get herself killed shooting it off. I had to leave in order to plead ignorance when one of them gets arrested. She is not going to make it to her eighth birthday next month if she doesn’t reign it in.”

“My mother would have beat me with a wooden spoon,” Jesse grinned at the women, “and then went back to making dinner with the same spoon using my blood and tears as ingredients for the meal I would have been forced to eat while thinking about what I’d done.”

“Not me,” Isabella looked up grinning, “the other five would have been beaten with the spoon but I’m the baby. I could kill in front of them, and my mother would simply get her rosary out and pray for me.”

Naomi chuckled, “speaking of your mother. I saw her at the pizza shop last weekend. She’s still bemoaning your refusal to have kids.”

“She can bemoan all she wants. My husband shoots blanks. I’m good with that.”

“I don’t even want to know what you are talking about,” Arwen pulled a chair closer, “but Artemis told me to come help find a missing girl who might be part of some rich German guy’s alleged harem?”

“We’ve sorted out he has three houses and two apartments in various European cities, he has never been photographed with any woman, but he had the photo of the suspected missing woman on his phone as he exited the hotel in London. He has two security guards who are as stupid as they come but he also has a team of a lot of very smart men. These two are going to be his downfall.” Isabella shrugged out her shoulders as she easily read the Spanish texts, “they spend an exorbitant amount of time talking about his weird fetishes. It’s as if they hate him, but they have no choice but to work for him.”

“They don’t,” Jesse pointed to a stack of papers, “he bought the company they worked for and fired everyone except the two of them. They are big guys so he said they could be used as human shields if someone tried to kill him. He specifically only keeps them around as protection for their size. If they try to leave, he’s threatened to kill their families.”

“f**k, I hate rich white men,” Arwen grumbled.

Isabella kicked Jesse under the table, “Jesse has one now. Big guy. Looks like the guy from True Blood.”

“I don’t have one,” Jesse kicked her back hard, “my mother cleans his toilets and since she’s in the hospital, I have to take her place for a couple of weeks and before any of you get on my case, need I remind you who my mother is and ask if any of you would dare defy her?”

There was quiet around the small desk as the women all nodded. Fabiana was notorious at the women’s shelter where they all did volunteer work as being a force to be reckoned with. Once a disgruntled husband had shown up at the shelter to get to his wife who was there and she had gone toe-to-toe with him, using the skills she’d learned at the center when she’d been a guest there decades before. It had taken both Jesse and Cat to pull her off him.

Jesse focused on the document and then pushed her chair back excitedly, “I got him.”

“What?” Naomi leaned over her shoulder, “where?”

“Here, in this email, he’s speaking German and at first, I read it as he was driving his car as fast as it will go down the Autobahn, but it’s code. He doesn’t own a Mercedes. He says ‘taking the Benz on the BAB for a hard ride until she can’t go any more, but I’ll let you know when I come up for air and need more fuel’ but he hasn’t been back to Germany in about six months. He’s not getting on the BAB. The missing girl’s name is Mercedes, isn’t it? Fuel could be anything from drugs to food.”

“f**k!” Naomi screamed and kissed her cheek excitedly and tugged her out of her chair. “We got him!”

Artemis magically appeared at the desk as if she knew the woman had done it. Jesse went through what she’d found and then Isabella interrupted.

“Hey, in the text messages between dumbass one and dumbass two, they mention the candy factory producing all the candy got shut down for bad candy. One of them mentions the boss won’t be able to walk the block to get his candy fix any time soon and he better make his current stash last.”

“Find a nightclub, coffee shop, whatever it is young Black women would be frequenting in London and has been shut down around the date of the text. Do a walking distance radius around it and find any properties this asshole owns in the radius. If he can walk there or his goons can walk it, they are sneaking the women in and out,” Artemis called out to the entire office. “I want you all to stop everything you’re doing. Let’s find Mercedes and bring her home, ladies. I want this guy’s head and his balls on my desk for a souvenir.”

Jesse and Arwen high fived as Naomi and Isabella moved to help the rest of the team.

“The only thing which would make this better,” Arwen started to speak

“Would be if we were in Europe and part of the team?” Jesse finished for her with a shake of her head. “Don’t worry Arwen, there’s as many psychos in our neck of the woods as there are over there. We’ll get a turn soon enough.”