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wondered if I could just buy CJ’s way out of this situation. Money always talked.
    I sighed. I didn’t want to do anything wrong. One false move, and CJ’s life could be in danger, even more than it already was.
    “Thank you, Arian,” I said to him. “I’ll wire the money to your account right now. Your intelligence was invaluable, and worth $500,000 to me.”
    “Thank you,” he said to me. “If there is anything more I can do for you, you know where to find me, of course.”
    “Of course.” Then I got off the phone and wired the money to him.
    White slavery. I knew where the Bardha clan was headquartered, and I would go down there as soon as Nikolai got into the airport.
    I called him. “How close are you?”
    “I’ll be landing in about three hours,” he said.
    “I’ll meet you then.”
    I couldn’t just sit there, though, and do nothing. I had to do something. Anything.
    Basically, I had to find out where they were keeping her. I knew of some of the locations where they worked, but, as Arian said, they moved from one place to the next all the time.
    It was time to go to at least one of the places that I knew about, though, and map it out. I made a list of the people I knew in this clan, and where I could find them. I got this ready while I waited for Nikolai to land.

    H e finally landed some three hours later. He was packing, of course. He had all the weapons which were needed for this mission – AK47, Smith and Wesson revolver and a Molotov Cocktail. Of course, he took my father’s private plane, so it wasn’t a problem packing these.
    “Okay,” I said when he first touched down on the tarmac. I put my arm around him in a hug. “We have to move quickly. I’ve made a list of all the places where I know that this clan might be hiding CJ, and I’ve hit on the most logical place.”
    “What do you know about this Bardha clan?” he asked me.
    “They’re Albanian, as you know, so they’re very tight-knit and secretive. Thank God I have somebody on the inside, as I do for all of the ethnic syndicates around New York City. He gave me some information, but not enough to really go on.”
    “What information did he give you?”
    “Just that she’s being held by the Bardha clan and that he suspects that they might be wanting to sell her.” I took a deep breath. “This is going to sound strange, but I hope that’s what they want with her. If they want her because she was investigating them for her magazine, then they probably will kill her.” I paused, trying to regain my composure. Just saying the words that they might kill her put my senses into a state of near-panic. Taking a deep breath, I continued. “But, the fact that they apparently haven’t yet killed her is a good sign that they might be holding her for a different reason.”
    Nikolai nodded. “Have you considered that they might be trying to get to you?”
    I knew what he was talking about. But I doubted that was the case. Nobody would be stupid enough to try to get to me, considering how powerful my father was. That would be courting an all-out war, one that they probably couldn’t win. Besides, they would have contacted me by now to demand a ransom, and Arian said that my name never came up.
    “I’ve considered that, of course, but I don’t know why they would be short-sighted enough to try something like that. As you know, the only reason why I’ve been protected all these years is because of my father. Nobody has ever wanted to touch me, because they know that, if they do, there will be serious consequences.” I sighed. “But, then again, who knows? They might be desperate enough to try something like that. If that’s the case, then that’s probably the best-case scenario, because they won’t hurt her at all.”
    We then went over all the possible Bardha hiding places that I knew about. There were abandoned warehouses, trailers in the middle of the woods, and three penthouse suites. I had ruled out the penthouse