paying. The entire operation was controlled by criminal gangs. Local police, all bought and paid for, had become an irrelevance.
Jana had been working for Amnesty International then, as had her boyfriend, Dieter. He had hoped that his righteous indignation at the appalling exploitation of innocent young women by evil men would earn him a fuck out of political solidarity, if nothing else. But he had miscalculated Jana’s response.
Her outrage, unlike his, was not remotely synthetic. When they got back to their hotel, 20 kilometres away, she pulled out her laptop and went online. It took her just a couple of minutes to find sex-guides advising men how to get to the highway’s busiest stretches and what they could expect when they got there.
‘Listen to this!’ Jana had exclaimed as Dieter lay in bed, wondering when the hell she was going to climb in next to him.
Jana started reading from the screen: ‘ “Unfortunately, most girls do not show much enthusiasm in bed. At least the prettier ones usually lie passively in bed, but if you show them how you want them to handle you they seem quite obedient. They are also often grateful for tips, because they see little or nothing of your payment, after the bar and her pimp take their share. This may also explain their lack of enthusiasm.” Can you believe that? These guys know that the prostitutes are basically slaves, who don’t even get paid for letting men abuse their bodies, but they still complain because they aren’t enthusiastic. Pigs! Fucking pigs!’
‘Don’t worry about them,’ said Dieter. ‘Come to bed, huh?’
‘What? And have sex? With you? So you can tell your friends that I am not enthusiastic but, oh yes, I am very obedient when I am told what to do? Are you crazy?’
Jana had never again let Dieter anywhere near her. Instead she had devoted herself to the cause of all the women and children around the world who were trafficked and forced into sex-slavery. Subsisting on occasional donations and fees from speeches and journalism, Jana Kreutzmann had spoken to abused women, confronted the criminals who so cruelly mistreated them and lobbied politicians. She had displayed manic determination and unflinching courage and slowly, as the years went by, she had helped to make a difference. The media that had once regarded her as an obsessive, feminist nutcase now saw her as a twenty-first-century heroine. The criminals who had once dismissed her as an insignificant irritant now saw her as an increasingly dangerous threat to their business.
Official recognition was shown to her too. The European lawmakers in Brussels regularly called her, and paid for her consultancy. Now the Nobel Institute, the organization behind the Nobel Prizes based in Oslo, had invited her to a symposium bringing together academics, campaigners and media experts who specialized in the issue of people-trafficking. Together, they would compile a paper to be presented to the Anti-Slavery Conference. Over the past few days Jana had heard rumours that President Lincoln Roberts himself would be addressing the conference. His support, even if it were little more than a gesture, would be a huge boost to the anti-slavery movement.
As she collapsed into her seat and began her flight to Oslo, Jana Kreutzmann felt for the very first time as though she might just be on the winning side.
33
Presidential speechwriter Bobby DiLivio chewed on the end of a newly sharpened pencil. ‘OK,’ he said, taking it out of his mouth and tapping it on a legal pad in front of him, ‘how about this? “Human trafficking is a scourge in the world, a stain upon the conscience of civilized society.” What do you guys reckon – too much alliteration, maybe?’
‘How about too many friggin’ cliches?’ sniped his colleague Josh Grunveld, laughing as he dodged the ball of paper DiLivio flung in his direction.
Over at the far end of the White House writers’ room, Thornton Black, the third member of the team working on the President’s Bristol speech, paced up and down the carpet, squeezing a black and yellow Nerf ball in his hands.
‘Don’t worry about the cliches, man. That’s Roberts’s genius. He turns that trash into pure gold.’
‘You calling my work trash?’ DiLivio asked, beginning to bridle.
‘Man, this is politics, it’s all trash,’ Black replied. ‘So, did you guys see that story in the Huffington Post, the one about that sex-slave kid that got rescued in, I don’t know, Dubai? Abu Dhabi? Some place like that – Middle East, anyway. Story came out of the London Times…’
‘Nuh-huh,’ muttered DiLivio, chewing the pencil again.
Grunveld frowned. ‘Was that the one where the dude killed the Indian guy? Yeah, think I remember that…’
‘So, would it be a totally crazy idea to get that chick over to England for the speech?’ Black went on. ‘The way the guy wrote it, she sounded pretty cute. I’m thinking a black president with a white slave, that’s an image, right? God, that shot’s going to be on every front page in the whole damn world…’
‘Why stop there?’ Grunveld asked. ‘We could get a little slumdog and some old Chinese dude, make it a real rainbow nation.’
‘Aw, come on, man, I’m trying to be serious here,’ Black protested.
‘You know, it could even make some money,’ said DiLivio. ‘If we got enough kids, from enough different countries, we could auction ’em off to Hollywood celebrities after the speech. Get Madonna and Angelina bidding against each other, who knows how high it could go? Pay for the whole trip.’
‘Good to know you take the scourge of the century so seriously, DiLivio. Always helps a speech when it’s written from the heart.’
‘C’mon, Thorn, you know I was kidding.’
‘Yeah, well, I wasn’t. I honestly think this kid could make the whole thing real. Put a face on the problem, y’know? Give people something they can understand, not just a bunch of fine words and big numbers. The chick was eighteen when she got sold by her own aunt, for Christ’s sake. She was flown thousands of miles and forced into prostitution… People are going to look at her, think, “Gee, she could be our daughter.” That’s what I mean – she makes it real.’
‘You know, Thorn, that’s not a totally dumb-ass idea… considering it’s one of yours,’ Grunveld conceded. ‘You should think about it, Bob.’
‘OK, I’ll take it to Hal, see what he says,’ said DiLivio, as Thornton Black shouted, ‘Yes!’ and danced a touchdown celebration. ‘Now, the speech… How about I make it, “Human trafficking is a curse upon the world”?’
‘How about we start again from the top?’ suggested Grunveld.
‘Yeah,’ Black agreed. ‘’Cause, Bob, what you’ve got so far is total shit.’
34
The fifth-floor corridor of the King Haakon Hotel was reserved for the exclusive use of female guests. Men could hardly be forbidden from walking past the rooms, but they certainly were not encouraged to do so.
Damon Tyzack had no qualms at all about intruding. As he made his way along the carpet to the last door on the right he was dressed entirely in black, from his combat boots and his military fatigue pants to his shirt, fleece and ballistic vest – even the cap that hid most of his flame-red hair. He wore gold-framed glasses, a bushy moustache and there was a large and very vivid purple birthmark on his cheek: the kind of thing that people try very hard not to stare at, even though they are unable to see anything else.
Next to him trotted a yellow Labrador, a breed whose remarkable sense of smell and limitless appetite made it perfectly suited to work as a bomb dog. Yellow labs are also disarming. They are so appealing, so smile-inducing that they envelop their owner or handler in their golden glow. When Tyzack had appeared at the front desk claiming to be conducting a check for explosives in Ms Kreutzmann’s room, flashing a fake ID from a non-existent security firm, giving the clerk a confirmatory phone number that was routed through to one of his men, sitting in a van parked not fifty metres away, he was immediately believed.
