Adriana looked up, still blinking and squinting her eyes against the intensity of the glare.
‘Listen to me very carefully,’ the woman said in flawless, machine-gun fast Russian. ‘You’re the only one in this group I can trust to help us. You need to understand that none of this is what it seems; there is an underground war being waged, and unfortunately you’ve been thrust into the middle of it. I know you’re no soldier, but right now you’re going to have to be. I’ve been observing you this whole journey, and from the conversation we had I know that you’re intelligent, savvy and that your heart is in the right place.’
‘I—’
‘Don’t interrupt me! There’s no time! This is all I can tell you: do whatever you’re told to do, and do not mention to anyone that I ever spoke to you. If anyone asks about me, and I mean anyone, for your own safety you must deny everything. Listen carefully for the names “William Gisborne” and “the Tiger”, and remember everything you hear about these names. A man will come to you in disguise; look for a red dragon in a stormy sky. He will tell you what to do next. Trust him alone and nobody else. I must emphasise that: trust nobody, not even these women with you. Goodbye Adriana.’
Adriana turned around just in time to see the Japanese woman spin around and then sprint down a side alley. She vaulted with acrobatic flair over a stack of parked scooters, then scrambled up a fire escape and then, just like that, she was gone.
‘What the…’ Adriana murmured to herself.
For a sudden, gut-wrenching moment she too had the impulse to flee, but she realised, with a sinking heart, as the truck driver walked around from the front of the vehicle to herd the women together, that that window of opportunity was now closed.
‘Are we at the restaurant now?’ a woman asked in a feeble, reed-thin voice.
The truck driver guffawed with raucous laughter, which morphed quickly into a fit of coughing. When he had recovered from this, he spat a wad of thick yellow phlegm onto the street.
‘Restaurant!?’ he chuckled, his broad face an ugly crumpling of incredulousness and sadistic glee. ‘That what they tell you?’ He roared with laughter again, and when his chuckles had subsided, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and glared at the women. ‘You go with he,’ he instructed, pointing at a well-dressed Thai man who had just emerged from a narrow alley to their right.
This new arrival was a tall, slender individual in his late thirties, who stood with a ramrod-straight back and carried himself with an air of self-assured dignity. He strode up to the truck driver and handed him a sealed envelope, did a head count of the women, and, strangely enough, did not seem to notice that the Japanese woman was missing, and then spoke a few words in Thai. The driver nodded, shuffled back to his truck and then drove off in a cloud of diesel fumes and metallic rattles and groans.
The thin man, attired in a grey business suit and reflective aviator sunglasses that dominated his narrow and intensely angular face, walked over to the girls and smiled warmly.
‘Welcome to your new place of employment,’ he said in flawless Russian, his almost effeminate voice soft and gentle. ‘I trust that you have had a comfortable journey?’
Adriana wanted to speak up and complain about just how horrific the trip had actually been, but a sixth sense warned her to hold her tongue and whispered to her that this man was not nearly as harmless a person as he made himself out to be.
‘I’m sure you are all weary, hungry and in need of a good shower and a soft bed. Am I correct?’ he asked.
The women nodded, and the man beamed a glowing smile at them yet again, baring a mouth filled with crooked, gold-capped teeth.
‘We like to take care of our employees here,’ he purred, his unflinching smile disarming. ‘If you will just follow me, I’ll show you to your quarters, where a hot meal and an even hotter shower awaits. Everything has been taken care of, as our agents in your home countries promised you.’
‘Excuse me sir,’ a woman said. ‘Do you have our passports? Are all our employment papers in order now?’
A strange look flashed briefly across the man’s face; suppressed rage, perhaps, Adriana guessed as she studied what she could see of his expression behind his aviators. In an instant, however, the look was gone, replaced by the sinister mask of his reassuring smile, rubbery in its artificiality.
‘You don’t need to concern yourself with such things right now,’ he answered coolly. ‘We will discuss the administrative details later. Please, follow me.’
They headed through the alley and down a flight of metal stairs that led to a basement entrance. The man rapped several times in a peculiar pattern on the reinforced steel door, flashing another comforting smile at the women when the door was opened from the inside. Two large, heavily built Thai men with earpieces and sunglasses stood guard just inside, and they stepped aside to allow the man and the women enter. Adriana noticed that they both wore pistols on their hips. After the last of the women entered, the guards locked the door behind them.
A sense of ominous foreboding was growing within Adriana like an engorged alien parasite, ready to burst free of her body. Something was very wrong here. She glanced across at Roxana, whose eyes were wide with fear, and she held the girl’s hand reassuringly and tried as best she could to conceal her own mounting dread. Suddenly she missed the Japanese woman, who had maintained such fiery defiance in the face of crushing hopelessness. Who now could she now look to for hope? She thought again of what the woman had told her before fleeing: ‘William Gisborne’, ‘the Tiger’,
