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 Tekilatı—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 room. “You’re trafficking in women,” I said. Piet scowled at me as I stated the obvious. I hoped Mila was still in range, that she was listening. Once we left the machinists’ shop, Mila could rescue these women. But that would put me in danger. Being the new guy, if this