Chapter
14: Too Much Excitement to be Peaceful
by Melissa Taylor
It’s definitely not easy to tell a story from all of
these different points of view!
There were quite a few places where I would have liked
to have shared my two cents, but I didn’t want to interrupt.
Like when Dad first came to lobby the United Nations,
and how glad Henry and I were to see him. And how happy we were to see how he and Mom
were getting along. And
how disappointed we were when we were hanging out with him when
that Jesse-lady called -- on more than one occasion.
And then he had to fly off to Costa Rica, just when things
finally seemed to be getting close to heating up between Dad
and Mom, and how thrilled Henry and I were to see him and talk
to him on the Webcam as we reported on the progress of our Kindness
Kids Network and BetterWorld Clubs outreach every day, and how
thrilled we were when he was back on the east coast just a few
weeks later.
But I’m trying to keep the peace, and even though it seems like my turn
in the storytelling has been skipped, I haven’t said anything.
Except I can’t keep it in anymore. This
next part of the story was just too exciting and upsetting, and well... where
do I start?
Henry
and I were with Daddy in New York during that second visit, and we had the whole
beautiful spring day to spend together visiting the Statue of Liberty and Ellis
Island, and then in the evening Mom was going to meet us for dinner and we were
all going to see a Broadway show. Well, Dad had a little mini-meeting in the middle
of the day and he dropped us off at his friend Wei-Ling’s office downtown.
He asked Wei-Ling to bring us to the restaurant in an hour, because it
was a really short meeting.
An hour later we’re walking down Fifth Avenue towards the restaurant and
up ahead we saw Daddy walking with two men; he didn’t look very happy. Then a car door opened up and they pushed him
in and the car sped away, while we were yelling, “Daddy! Daddy!”
Wei-Ling rushed us back to her office, and she quickly called Jimmy Rogers
(the guy Daddy always says is the brains behind the peace operation) on the West
Coast. That evening they were all at our house -- Maya,
Uncle Merle, that lady Jesse, and Jimmy Rogers -- who it turns out is my age!
I
guess I left out a few parts of the story that would shed some
light on why everyone was especially upset.
A few weeks before, A
few weeks before, Maria Lopez, the Kindness Kids coordinator
in Argentina, discovered that someone had broken into their
database. Henry, who's the Kindness Kids Network webmaster,
checked the site and found a worm had been implanted on the
entire network of websites, which was monitoring all their visitors.
Turns out my BetterWorld Clubs website, the BetterWorld Movement
and ONE DAY IN PEACE websites all had the same thing happening,
too! They also discovered the phones were tapped!
To make things even worse, Daddy and Maya and Uncle Merle
began to suspect that they were being watched whenever they
made any appearances at conferences or meetings.
So, when Daddy was kidnapped, it was sort of a major red alert, because
they’d all been worrying that something like that would happen, although they
didn’t believe it ever could. We were all
pretty upset, as you can imagine, but didn’t know what to do about it. Who had kidnapped Daddy? Uncle Merle was sure it was the CIA or the FBI.
Jimmy thought it was a terrorist group, and Maya thought it was a corporate
cartel -- lots of people seemed to be getting upset about our growing peace campaign. For some reason lots of people seemed to think
that ‘peace’ was a dangerous idea. I don’t know what Jesse thought, but then I
really didn’t care. And I was really upset
that she seemed to be so upset. Mom didn’t
like it at all either. I could tell she
was jealous, and that made me feel a little better. We waited for hours, but no one called about
a ransom or anything like that. Then, just
as Mom had called the police and had been told that we had to wait 24 hours before
they would do anything, Dad walked in through the back door into the kitchen.
What a reception he got!
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Table
of Contents | Preface | Ch 1
| Ch 2 | Ch 3 | Ch
4 |
Ch 5 | Ch 6 | Ch
7 | Ch 8 | Ch 9 |Ch
10 | Ch 11 |
Ch 12 | Ch
13 | Ch 14 | Ch 15 | Ch
16 | Ch 17 |
Ch 18 | Ch
19 | Ch 20 | Ch 21 | Ch
22 | Ch 23 |
Ch 24 | Ch
25 | Ch 26 | Ch 27 | Ch
28 | Ch 29
UTOPIAN
DREAMER