CHAPTER 491: RAID THE ABODE (6)

Around her, everything was chaos. Some girls sobbed. Some collapsed in disbelief or relief, depending on who the observer was.

Others just stood still, as if too afraid to believe any of it was real. Brainna was somewhere in between. This was especially true when the police personnel had left her be and whipped around her for the guards.

And then it hit her.

Him. The man who had been helping her.... the same one who could be considered her friend in this place: Marvin!

Brianna looked toward the dense foliage near the back of the fields, where she’d seen her friend creep away just hours ago. Her stomach twisted. For once in her life, she cared enough for someone to think of what may have happened to him.

Had they caught him?

Or worse... had he made it out only to be punished just before salvation arrived? These were two instances that Brianna, of all people, could not stomach.

Tears gathered in her tired eyes. Every emotion she could think and even those alien ones, came crashing down on her.

But even through that, she crouched down by the tree, following the advice given. As she wished for his safety, she had a bit of nostalgia with her for the wind carried a new sound—freedom.

Somewhere in the chaos, someone shouted, "Leon! Over here!"

Leon, clad in plain clothes unlike the rest of the squad, jogged up to Evans and tapped him on his shoulder. Leon’s face was grim, but his eyes betrayed his happiness as he took in the island, once echoing with the cracks of whips and muffled sobs, now reverberating with the crunch of heavy boots and the stern bark of commands... Thankfully these commands were from the relevant authorities.

The guards and thugs ... the same ones who had strutted like kings ... were now lined up on their knees in the dirt, wrists cuffed behind their backs. Their faces bore a cocktail of fury, disbelief, and fear. Some spat insults. Others stared blankly; their power undone in mere moments. They still could not understand how all this had happened.

As the lead officer, Leon, tall and broad-shouldered, paced before them, barking orders to his team, it did not look odd that he was the only plain-clothed officer. He had been the scout and still could not believe they had found this lair.

"Make sure every person is logged and tagged. Get facial scans and vocal matches. We want no one falling through the cracks!"

Above, the low hum of a military-grade aircraft signalled more than just transport. Soon, crates of seized documents, laptops, ledgers, hard drives .... evidence of the thugs years of operations ... were airlifted, hoisted into the sky by long cables.

If the thugs thought that was all, they were deeply mistaken. Nearby, a controlled fire roared to life. Fields upon fields of cannabis .... the very heart of their illicit empire .... were set ablaze, thick grey smoke curling toward the heavens. The smell was pungent, overwhelming, but cleansing in its own bitter way.

Among the captives being readied for water transport, Brianna and the others looked on with complex emotions. Some were wrapped in emergency blankets, while others greedily drank water from bottles, but they all watched it with hollow eyes. That signalled the suffering they had endured for only they knew how long. Some wept openly. Others just watched in disbelief as the unthinkable unfolded.

Brianna stood among them, clutching the thin blanket around her bony shoulders. The heat from the fire touched her face, giving her a warmth that she had craved for months. She could see the outlines of the huts ... her hut, if she could call it that, was already smouldering.

By then, it was already evening, and the police had been meticulous. All files had been transported away, including crates of money. It was overwhelming even to watch. They also took lots of pictures for evidence’s sake before they burned all the unharvested plants to the ground. The ones that had already been processed were also airlifted. The two choppers had to go back and forth several times before everything that could be airlifted was.

The air was still heavy for these freed workers, but for once, it wasn’t from despair. It was relief... and confusion.

Every now and then, Brianna would look through the crowd toward the jungle path where her friend had vanished. No one had spoken his name, no one had asked. She didn’t know whether to hope or mourn. She was the only one without a bottle of water, and she was too worried to care.

A medical officer came by and gently pressed a bottle of water into her hand. She blinked at it, unsure what to do with something so freely given.

"Drink," the officer said softly. "You’re safe now."

The word clanged inside her head like a bell.

Safe.

How strange. How unreal. She took a small sip. It tasted like nothing she’d almost forgotten on ... Freedom.

"This way! Follow me!" A voice shouted and they all obediently followed in a single file. As they were ushered into a waiting boat in batches, Brianna caught a glance of Marvin in one of the waiting boats and a sigh of relief left her... he was safe as well.

***

A couple of days earlier....

Evans had never expected this out of everything it was just one tiny image that had jogged Leon’s mind and helped piece this information. He had nothing to say, except that Leon was a genius at what he did. It was just unbelievable!

"Hand me James Wendover’s file ...."

That single statement was what had set the ball rolling. Another thing was that, though they had no recourses, it had taken exactly a day for them to make a breakthrough. No one could question Leon’s competence and luck again. The man might have a midas touch, for all they knew.

Though oblivious to this at that time, it had been normal for Evans to question the why, as he had been bone-tired, just combing through all that irrelevant data.

"Why do you need that?"

Evans had asked, but it was the excited glint in Leon’s eyes that both puzzled and hyped him for Evans had worked with Leon long enough to understand, especially when Leon added,

"If this is what I think it is, then we might just have stumbled upon a missing piece in the most unlikely of places!"

Evans immediately dropped everything he was doing and went to their current file and case room. This time, he ignored all the jests from his colleagues, but he was covert in his actions. In fact, no one had seen him take anything out; he just logged the necessary permissions and copied all that needed to be copied on a flash drive, then returned to their office. The two pored over the information for a long while, until dawn.

"Are you sure of this?"

"I think it’s worth checking out. We never found who James Wendover’s supplier was, but that picture just reminded me that James Wendover had only ever left this island, T-Vino, once, and that was when he met his current wife, Clara. Before then, he was a legitimate businessman.

Delving into his records, the only strangeness started after he got married. That was when everything truly changed. I mean, that’s when the strange trails in his finances began.

At first glance, nothing seemed out of place. But a closer look revealed discrepancies too neat to be accidental. That is what I noticed when we worked on his case previously, but. I could never connect the dots till now.

I seriously doubted then that his wife, Clara, had anything to do with this. The woman was just a bimbo and nothing else. She came into the marriage with nothing but her beauty—a beauty so striking, it was almost distracting .... But that was all there was to it.

It led me to suspect he made some sort of deal during one of those visits. A pact, perhaps or even a trade. Something he buried so deep that no one had ever thought to look in that place.

He was convicted of drugs, but where was it grown? Processed? No one knew, but tell me, where can one grow that much drugs so that he would not be discovered?"

Leon tapped on the picture of the island in question....

"Exactly, a place like this. I know it’s all a hunch, but I also know that the drug trade never collapsed after James. Remember that there were two masters of the trade? I think it’s time to find the second head of that snake. Now that we have stumbled upon this, do you think we have something strong enough to overturn the chief’s treatment?" Leon smiled.

Evans lifted the corner of his mouth in amazement. He knew that it was a long shot, but knowing Leon, Evans was willing to bank on it. From that time, he did not utter a word of complaint and followed every single instruction from Leon to the letter. They had an issue, though.

If their Chief wanted to block them, they could not go through him with this piece of information till they were absolutely sure. That was a big stumbling block in their way, but Leon did not give a hoot about that, but Evans did and as he pondered over that possibility, little did he know that they were about to literally hit the jackpot sooner than they had ever anticipated.

So, how did they manage that?

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