trade. Once she’d decided on what to do with Milo Weaver, she made sure to cease her in-office investigation of him, because every site and document she looked at was logged in the central database. However, instead of returning to what she was supposed to be working on-namely, the backgrounds of two Iranian nationals applying for asylum-she found herself drawn to the industry that had set Adriana Stanescu’s life moving along its particularly atrocious path.
It was bleak. Part of the reason sexual slavery continues unabated is that imagining it is so abhorrent to most people that they choose instead to ignore it. Imagining the travails of someone like Adriana led to upset stomachs. Law-abiding citizens preferred the knowable crimes of murder and robbery to the unknowable of slavery. This silence on the issue only encouraged the industry to thrive.
So it was almost a relief when Tomas Haas interrupted her. The young analyst from the basement-level surveillance center had been at Pullach nearly a year and was one of the few with whom she chose to exchange words. “Good afternoon, Tomas.”
He wasn’t smiling. “Fraulein Schwartz, we’ve spotted a van at your house.”
“A van?” She let herself appear concerned. “Markings?”
“Toledo Electrik GmbH.”
“Oh!” She smiled and touched her breast. “You had me scared. No, that’s nothing. There’s a problem with the circuit breaker-it keeps switching off in the middle of my shows. I gave Toledo a set of keys.”
“Would you like someone to check on it? To be sure.”
“No, I’ll call the electrician,” she said, picking up her office phone. “Thanks.”
Once he was gone, she called the number of a throwaway cell phone she’d bought the previous night and left inside her house. Oskar answered on the third ring. “Toledo Electrik.”
“Yes, this is Erika Schwartz. Do you have someone at my house right now?”
“Schwartz… here it is,” he said and rattled off her address.
“That’s it.”
“Should take an hour or so. We’re mailing the bill, right?”
“Exactly. It looks like it won’t be a problem?”
“No problems yet, ma’am. We’ll let you know if anything comes up.”
“Thank you.”
Image
The rear doors opened to reveal a woody bilevel, and when he was brought out he saw that they were surrounded by gangly birches and broad elms, stripped of leaves, creating a black web through which he could just make out other houses that made him think of American planned communities. Large homes set far back behind tended lawns, clean automobiles in the driveways. He could only see these things when he looked hard, though, which meant that anyone looking in would simply see four men getting out of a van with-he now saw-the markings of an electrical repair company. From their perspective, the man in the center of the group would be walking with his hands clasped behind his back; the new set of PlastiCuffs would not be visible at all.
There were no guns involved, just a light, almost comforting, hand on his back, while the little man with the mustache hummed some song. He was clearly the boss, and it was he who unlocked the front door, typed the security code into the alarm, and pocketed a cell phone sitting on a fragile-looking end table beside the door. “Come in,” he said. “We’ll soon have you out of those restraints.”
It was all so polite that Milo began to sweat profusely.
They went downstairs, where the man turned on some lights and found, beside a spare bathroom, a heavy security door with a keypad. He typed the code with a flat hand, fingers covering the pad so it was impossible to tell the combination, then pulled open the door to reveal stairs heading deeper into the earth.
A couple of decades ago, he would have called it a fallout shelter. Times had changed, though, and these were now referred to as panic rooms, but the function was the same. A secure place where one could survive for days or weeks with no need of the outside world. Along the walls were shelves of provisions-canned food, soap, bottles of water. A refrigerator beside an electrical generator. A propane stove. There was a television/VCR combination, a radio, and a shelf of books. Two small monitors, now black, were assumedly connected to CCTV cameras observing the grounds. Two lounge chairs, one sofa, and a dining table. Against the stone wall in the back of the room, a single cot with fresh bedding. On the concrete floor beside it were two rolls of duct tape.
The mustached man gazed at cans of soup while the other two removed Milo’s cuffs and took his coat. “You needed to urinate?” he asked.
“Desperately.”
The man nodded in the direction of a small door, and the other two led Milo to it. Inside was a spotless toilet, but no sink. It was a small space, but both his guards squeezed in behind him, peering over his shoulder, hands on his back as he relieved himself. He pulled the chain to flush, then raised his hands. “Can I wash?”
Neither answered. They pulled him out and led him to one of the chairs. The mustached man, still reading the cans, said, “Are you hungry perhaps?”
“Could use some coffee.”
“Yes. So could I. Heinrich? Nehmen Sie auch einem?”
The block of muscle looked up from Milo. “Ja, danke.”
The mustached man turned to the wiry one. “Dann also fur alle?”
The wiry one nodded and trotted upstairs.
Their exchange, figuring out how many coffees were needed, struck Milo as amusing. Nothing else did. He was in a secure basement from which he would never escape unless they let him leave. He was here for as long as they wanted, and in here they could do anything they desired. No one would hear a thing.
Heinrich took the chair across from Milo as a phone began to ring. The mustached man took out the cell phone he’d taken from the foyer and said, “Toledo Elektrik.”
A conversation followed. He got the name Schwartz, that something would take about an hour, and that a bill would be mailed. And Frau-ma’am-he was talking to a woman.
He pocketed the phone again and said to Heinrich, “In Ordnung.”
Heinrich looked relieved, though the mustached one didn’t seem concerned either way. He held Milo’s coat folded over his arm and paced the room slowly, peering at everything as if he’d never been here before. Perhaps he hadn’t. His free hand searched Milo’s coat pockets, coming up with receipts and lint. He stuck the receipts in his pants pocket and tossed the coat on the bed. “You should make yourself comfortable,” he said. “It’ll be some hours before things get started.”
“What, exactly, is going to get started?”
“Conversations.”
“When your boss gets home from work?”
The man stared at him.
“This is his house, isn’t it? Or her house. Your boss’s.”
“All that matters to you is that this is the easy part. Have some coffee, something to eat. Get over that headache… does it still hurt?”
“A little.”
“Heinrich.”
Heinrich half-rose from his chair and, with a large flat hand, struck Milo across the temple. It felt like a wooden board and rekindled the pain that had, until then, been subsiding. He cradled his head in his hands and stopped himself from shouting an obscenity. “What was that for?”
“For nothing,” the man said as he passed behind Milo. “I’m not a big believer in the carrot and stick. It’s fine for mules, but for people? No. Much too predictable, and anything that predictable can be manipulated. The unpredictable stick-that’s much more useful because there is no clear answer to it.”
Milo raised his head, half of it pulsing sorely, and could feel his damaged nose dripping blood onto his lips. “I think I understand,” he said.
“Good.” The mustached man sat on the sofa, just beyond Heinrich. He used a remote control to turn on the television against the wall. “My boss, as you say, isn’t entirely comfortable with modern digital technology. So we have this.” He pressed play, and the embedded VCR began to whir, flickering grainy images on the screen, the buzz of static, then voices. News items. A German newscaster. The image of a girl, Adriana Stanescu. A camera ranging over mountains, then a mountain road, the scene of a wreck, a path into the forest. Then again. Another
