Chapter 8 - Trial by Media Fire
When Cairo and Zola raced into the penthouse twenty minutes later, they found the entryway shattered, the security detail wounded, and Miriam weeping on the floor with blood trickling down her temple.
"Zola... I tried..." Miriam sobbed, clutching her bruised ribs. "They took him. They had tactical gear... they took Tando!"
The world stopped spinning for Zola. A sound tore from her throat—a raw, guttural cry of pure agony that shook the very foundations of the room. The pain eclipsed every hardship she had ever endured.
"Cairo!" she screamed, gripping his coat with trembling hands, her eyes wide with unhinged desperation. "My baby! They took my baby!"
Cairo’s eyes were bloodshot, his face transformed into a mask of pure, lethal fury. He pulled Miriam up gently, handing her to the arriving medical team, then turned to Kato, his head of tactical security.
"Trace the transponder," Cairo ordered in a terrifyingly calm whisper.
Zola looked at him through her tears. "What transponder?"
"Tando’s gold medallion," Cairo said, pulling up a satellite tracking interface on his rugged tactical tablet. "The day we moved into this penthouse, I had an encrypted military-grade GPS beacon embedded inside the pendant I gave him. It updates every three seconds via private satellite."
On the screen, a red blinking dot was moving rapidly eastward, heading toward the private airstrips outside Lusaka.
"Vivienne Vance has a Gulfstream jet fueled on the runway," Kato reported, loading heavy ammunition into his tactical sidearm. "She’s planning to smuggle the child into an extradition-free territory."
"Cairo," Zola said, wiping the tears from her face with the back of her sleeve. The despair vanished from her eyes, replaced by a cold, deadly resolve. "Give me a vest."
"Zola, it’s going to be a firefight—"
"I gave birth to that boy in the mud while the world ignored me," Zola said, her voice trembling with absolute power. "No one takes him from me and lives. We go."
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Five high-speed tactical interceptors tore out of the underground garage, screaming down the highway toward the private airfield under a raging lightning storm.
***
