“And on that basis, you fight for the honor of my name?” He laughed.
“No. I thought you might not want him screwing up your deal. I need a job. I didn’t realize until later that what I heard might be valuable to me.” I shrugged. “You can’t use his route to America now. But you could use mine. I’m guessing, if you’re using the Turk, it’s because you don’t have a regular route into America.”
“But we don’t know you.”
“You want my creds? Ask Petrova in Kiev about me. Ask Djuki in Athens about me.” I threw out the name of two traffickers.
“Petrova is dead,” Piet said.
“I hadn’t heard.”
“Last month. She was shot by a rival.”
“Oh. Too late to send flowers, I guess.”
Now Piet flicked a smile, like he was tossing a card to me, sure my hand would crash. “Djuki went missing a few months ago.”
“He’s probably hiding.” The fact I knew their names was not cred enough. I didn’t expect it to be. “Or he’s in China, running Gucci and Ralph Lauren counterfeiting action.”
“And if I could reach him, I’d hire him over you. Him at least I know. You could just be cleaning up the mess left behind,” Piet said. “You could work for the same people as the Turk.”
“That’s a theory.”
“What did you work on with Djuki?”
“Girls from Moldova and Ukraine, shipped to Israel and to Edinburgh and Toronto. I moved guns from Albania and Uzbekistan to Mexico. I shipped in fake cigs and fake Windows software from China to Canada and the U.S., mostly Houston and New York.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You moved girls with Djuki?”
“Yeah. Twice. You find him in China, you can ask him about me.” I shrugged. Djuki wasn’t hiding; he was dead. He was a Greek trafficker who’d been turned by the Company, spilled information on his routes and methodologies for a hefty sum and immunity, and then been killed when he tried to vanish after the Company put him back out in the field to serve as an informant. Djuki was scum. I’d met him once or twice, and the Company had entrusted me to put out the word he’d gone to China to work deals on that side.
“Where’s his scar?” Piet asked.
And my mind went blank.
47
I didn’t blink. “There are so many to choose from.”
“The most embarrassing one.”
I swallowed, trying to picture the photos in the smuggler’s thick file. Not on the face. Not on his chest. Then I smiled as I remembered Brandon, my boss back in London, cracking a joke.
“Across his ass,” I said. “His girlfriend gave it to him with a kitchen knife. She should have had your wakizashi.”
He smiled at my using the Japanese term. “And why did he get it?”
“He was screwing around with girls he was shipping to Israel and Dubai,” I said. “Breaking them in for the customers.” I couldn’t let the disgust show on my face. Most of the girls trafficked were from the former Soviet republics, desperate for work; they’d been promised waitressing or secretarial jobs; they were going to be broken with rape and heroin before they met their new pimps. “Girlfriend didn’t approve. He was lucky she cut his backside and not his front.”
“And how did you see the scar?”
I’d seen it in his file, of course. I hoped Djuki’s explanation as to the scar’s origin was accurate. If it wasn’t, I was dead; Piet would kill me on the spot if I couldn’t kill him first. “He kept up his practice of breaking in the girls when needed. I saw it then.”
Piet gave me the slightest of nods. I was inside the circle, at least for now. My creds proven by knowledge of a rapist’s ass scar.
“Make your calls,” he said to me. “The goods will be here in two days. You will arrange a pickup of them when they arrive, repackage them for shipment to America, and then get them past customs and onto the ship in Rotterdam. You’ll be paid fifty thousand in euros. If you need help forging documents, my boss Edward is an expert forger.”
Repackaging the shipment. Oh, yes. That would be it, the key. I would need help. I would need the whole gang together to help me.
And that’s when I could take them down, rescue Yasmin, and find out the truth from the scarred man. The opportunity dangled before me, bright as a diamond.
I hid my sudden relief by holding up hands. “Wait a minute. You’ve cut the Turk loose, right? I’m not coming aboard if he’s about to bring the law down on you.”
“He’s not a worry for anyone anymore.” This was one of the twins speaking, the bald one.
“Oh,” I said.
Piet said, “The Turk is a former MIT agent.” MIT was Milli stihbarat Te kilat?-Turkey’s CIA. “He got run out of the agency for malfeasance. He bribed a group of Turks here to let him work with them to get close to me; I won’t ever work with those guys again. He tried to screw me over; he failed.” He leveled a stare. “The twins are very good about finding out what we need to know about people.”
The Turk was like me, then; Bahjat Zaid had found a fellow reject to try and save his daughter. “Well, I don’t fail when I take on a job.”
Piet glanced at the twins and then at me and said, “You want to break in a girl, Samson?”
“What?”
He jerked his head toward a door. “I got eight girls heading to Nigeria and Israel. Two still giving me a bit of lip, even with the horse in their veins to settle them down. But nothing settles them like getting broke in.” A second test; if I was experienced as a human trafficker, I shouldn’t blink much at raping the merchandise.
“Go choose one you like, give her a ride,” Piet said.
“You said we could have a turn,” the bald twin protested. “Why does he get first pick?”
I thought how pleasant it would be to kill Piet. I had not killed but once before, and it was not an experience that I had liked. No human being would. But with Piet, I wouldn’t blink at it at all. It would be a service to humanity. Part of my heart, the part that thought I might be a husband and father again as soon as I found Lucy and the baby, said don’t be so ready to kill. But this guy… if Edward had taken Lucy, had this monster been near her?
Had Piet touched my wife?
It took a total gripping down inside my heart to say, “Do you move a lot of women?”
“My best revenue stream. From Moldova, mostly. Doing more from Russia and the Baltics as the economy worsens. About thirty a month. Usually special requests. Can’t keep up the demand for the young ones. Come see.”
I glanced at Nic, who trafficked in pictures of kids. Filling specific demands. Welcome to the personalized world of human suffering.
I followed Piet down a short hallway to a side office. The twins and Nic followed me. I smelled rotten fruit, burned steak, and a chemical stench, with sweat an uneasy undercurrent.
He opened the door into a dimly lit room, a side parlor to hell. In the flickering gloom I could see eight women along the wall. Manacles cupped their ankles and their wrists. The chains threaded back to the concrete on the floor. The women sat huddled. They wore their tops still-stained, torn. But their skirts and jeans and underwear were gone, robbing them of dignity. I saw bruises and tears and emptiness in faces that had endured too much horror. I felt a hot red rage glow in my brain.
But if I killed Piet and Nic now to free these women, I ruined any chance of getting close to Edward, to finding Lucy and the baby.
But I could not permit this. Rewrite the scenario, I told myself. Let Mila know what horror lay inside this
