The Darkness Gathers (24 page)

They had pulled into a parking garage in the city during this conversation and come to rest next to a black Land Rover. “This vehicle,” said Harriman, pointing to the Rover, “belongs to you now, Mr. McIntyre. You’ll find all the necessary paperwork, including a Pennsylvania driver’s license in the glove box. There is also a Social Security card. Both documents are in the name of Martin Monroe. Martin Monroe’s record is clean and his résumé, which is fully verifiable and which closely resembles your own, will allow you to find work at some point in the future. Do you have any questions, Mr. McIntyre?”

Jed was impressed, really impressed. “Why?” he asked, his engineer’s brain really wanting to know. “Why would anybody do this?”

“Let’s just say my client has some macabre whims. And the resources to indulge them.”

chapter twenty-four

T
he desk clerk at the Delano looked at Lydia and Jeffrey with disdain as the two of them, dirty and trailing about as much dust as Afghan refugees, walked through the elegant lobby. Feeling shaken and angry, she sneered at the concierge, who raised a curious and condescending eyebrow at their disheveled appearance. Waiting for the elevators to arrive, Lydia smoothed out her hair pointlessly in the mirrored doors, then turned to the side to inspect the cut on her arm.

“That’ll leave a nice scar if we don’t get it stitched,” said Jeffrey, leaning in to take a look.

“It’s not that deep,” she said, but it stung when he touched it, and she flinched.

“We’ll stop by the emergency room on the way to the airport.”

“We don’t have time.”

“You’re right,” said Agent Bentley to her reflection as he came up behind them, accompanied by his trusty sidekick, Agent Negron. When the elevator opened, the two FBI agents pushed Lydia and Jeffrey in before them.

“Ms. Strong, Mr. Mark, you have two choices,” said Agent Bentley, apparently having trouble keeping his temper. He was clenching his big white teeth and speaking through them. “Either you will cooperate and accept our escort back to the airport, where you will catch the first flight to New York, or we will arrest you for knowingly interfering with a federal investigation, which has led to the destruction of evidence.”

Lydia looked at him with an expression of mock sheepishness. Jeffrey said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You know full well what I am talking about,” said Agent Bentley, reaching behind him and pressing the stop button on the elevator. It groaned to a halt, and Lydia felt a hollow of fear open in her belly. In the distance, an alarm bell began to clang, adding an aura of panic to the moment. Lydia looked Agent Bentley in the eyes and didn’t like what she saw there—or, rather, what she didn’t see there. He was a man on the edge, someone who had been pushed to the limits of what he could endure. His eyes were red-rimmed, and a muscle in his jaw twitched. Lydia moved in close to Jeffrey and grabbed his wrist.

“We’re leaving,” said Lydia. “Just let us get our bags and we’re out of here. Nothing and no one is worth this much hassle. We were trying to help. Maybe we were a little pushy about it. But we’re done here. Someone else can worry about Tatiana Quinn.”

Agent Bentley looked at her with some combination of skepticism and relief. “No fucking around,” he said, half-questioning, half-threatening.

“No fucking around,” she answered. “We’re on a two o’clock flight to New York. You can call the airline and check it out for yourself.”

Bentley reached behind him and the elevator started its assent with a jolt. A voice came crackling loudly over the speaker, “Everyone all right up there?”

“It’s moving now,” said Bentley, sounding carefree as he spoke into the intercom. “You better check it out when it lets us off, though.”

“Will do. Sorry about that, sir.”

“No problem.”

The doors opened on Lydia and Jeffrey’s floor, and the four of them filed out.

“I’m sure you won’t object to our sticking around and making sure you get to the airport safely, what with all the misadventure you two seem to get yourselves involved in,” said Bentley with mock courtesy.

“Suit yourself,” replied Jeffrey as he pushed open the door to their room.

Within fifteen minutes, they had packed their bags, while Bentley and Negron sat on the couch like a couple of sour gargoyles. Within thirty, they were in their Jeep on the way to the airport, the FBI escort close behind. Exhausted and bruised, they had every intention of returning to New York. Because they could only get a flight to Tirana, Albania, from JFK. Tomorrow.

T
rue to their word, Agents Negron and Bentley had graciously escorted them to the Miami Airport, were so kind as to wait while they dropped off their rental car, and then drove them to the terminal. There, Negron ate some Goobers and read the latest issue of
Hot Rod
, while Bentley seemed content to sit and glare at Lydia and Jeffrey until they walked up the gangway to their flight. As she smiled and waved to them obnoxiously through the portal window of the airplane, Negron gave her the finger from behind the tinted plate glass.

“I’m so glad I don’t work for the fucking Bureau anymore,” said Jeffrey, exhaling through his nose sharply.

“I think they’re glad, too.”

They sat staring straight ahead for a moment. Jeffrey hadn’t had time to work himself into a state before getting on the plane … and hadn’t had time to get a drink. So when Lydia felt him start to fidget as the plane began to taxi down the runway, she fished through her bag until she found her bottle of Tylenol PM, as well as a tiny bottle of Absolut Citron that she had taken from the minibar for just this purpose. She handed them to him.

“Thank you, Doctor,” he said. She held his hand, which had suddenly gone cold, and smiled at him. It constantly amazed her that he was so afraid to fly, when he was so fearless about everything else. She figured it was a control issue. He’d probably be less afraid if he was actually
flying
the jet.

“Can I have that stuff from the office?” she asked.

He lifted his shirt and handed her the file folder and date book, both all wrinkled and warm. She put the folder in her lap and smoothed it out with both hands, then opened the date book and flipped through the pages.

“What is this?” she asked, thinking aloud.

“It looks like some kind of schedule,” he answered, leaning in and putting a hand on her thigh. “Pickup and drop-off times.”

“Yeah, but picking up and dropping off what? And these dollar figures? Is that how much the cargo is worth?”

He shook his head slowly, frowning. “Well, I guess we’ll find out.”

“If we can find the spot. All we know is that it’s in a city called Vlorë.”

“We’ll find it.”

“You know,” she said, putting the date book down on her lap. “I guess I always thought of evil as being random in nature. I guess I never thought of it as so organized, backed by money and power. I never thought of it as making plans and keeping schedules.”

“What about the Nazis? They were organized. The entire government was evil.”

“If you believe Marianna,
our
entire government is evil.”

“I don’t know about that. Maybe there are evil men with evil agendas manipulating certain aspects of the government, but I don’t believe that it’s evil at the core. Americans are the good guys in the world order.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know what to believe.” She paused for a second, then said, “What happened there? I mean, was it a coincidence that we were there when someone torched the place? Is that why Sasa went there? To get rid of evidence? Or did someone follow us there with the intention of erasing the evidence and us along with it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, remembering the Ryder truck and wondering who had been behind the wheel of that vehicle.

The plane started to race down the runway, and Jeffrey visibly stiffened. She smiled sympathetically and placed a hand on his cheek.

“You just shot our way out of a burning building less than four hours ago. But you’re afraid to fly?” she teased, trying to distract him a little.

“I know,” he said, shutting his eyes, his breathing shallow.

She held his hand tightly as the wheels left the ground, and in a matter of seconds, the airport was a miniature village behind them. She imagined Dreads and Big Head the size of ants. What was their agenda? she wondered.

“And where does Jenna Quinn fit into this?” she said over the high-pitched whir of the landing gear retreating into the belly of the plane. “If she is the owner of American Equities, does that mean that she’s involved in this company American Beauty? Does that mean that she’s involved with the snuff films?”

She thought again of the DVD, the original sitting in the bottom of her bag, the copy on its way to New York. What kinds of people were responsible for something like that? Who did you have to be to make a film like that, or to get off on watching one? Someone like Nathan Quinn, so consumed with his own power that other people seemed so far beneath him as to be less than trash? People who consider themselves so far above the laws of society and morality that anything goes when it comes to their sexual pleasure? And was all of this somehow the key to what had happened to Tatiana? She remembered again what Detective Ignacio had said to her about the money. Well, they were going to follow it and Sasa all the way to Albania. She shuddered, remembering Sasa Fitore’s voice on the tape, how cold it was, how he lied to and manipulated that girl and watched as she died in horror and agony. She felt her face flush with anger. Nathan Quinn and Sasa Fitore were neck and neck for bad guy of the month.

When Jeffrey started to doze off, the Tylenol PM and shot of Absolut kicking in, Lydia pulled down her tray table and plugged her laptop into the modem jack, which would, of course, cost about a thousand dollars a second. When the machine booted up, she logged on to her search engine and entered the city name Vlorë. She waited while the slow connection loaded. It only took five minutes of scanning through the links before she came across a transcript of a news segment on the ABC Web site that answered a few of her questions; some articles from the BBC on-line filled in some more of the blanks.

Once an important fishing and trading port located on the Adriatic coast of southwestern Albania, Vlorë had in recent years been exporting something far more lucrative—young women and girls. Just seventy miles by boat from the coast of Italy, Vlorë, with its corrupt police and ineffectual government, had evolved into the epicenter of the country’s smuggling industry. Lured from their families with promises of rich husbands, modeling careers, or just abducted and subdued by torture and violence, the girls were smuggled in high-powered speedboats to the Italian coast, where they were sold to pimps or issued new passports and smuggled into other countries, including the United States. According to the ABC telecast, a young virgin could bring as much as ten thousand dollars. The beleaguered Italian border guards claimed to be able to stop only a fraction of the illegal immigrants. Loose estimates suggested that there were about thirty thousand Albanian prostitutes in Europe alone, nearly 1 percent of the entire population of Albania. The girls became, for all intents and purposes, sex slaves … trapped, hopeless. Unable to escape, but even if they managed to, they could never go home again. A woman who had been raped in Albania would be murdered by her father and brothers, blamed for the violence perpetrated against her. They were lost women, invisible to the world.

Lydia had written an article for
Vanity Fair
years back about a similar trade conducted by the Russian mob. She thought then that she had made a difference; she realized now that she hadn’t even scratched the surface. And for a moment, Lydia felt a wave of gratitude to have been born an American woman in the twentieth century. She closed her eyes and saw the faces of millions of women throughout the world without rights, living lives dictated by terror and oppression, beaten, tortured, sold into sexual slavery, and murdered. Afghanistan, Africa, Albania, and the former Yugoslavia, poverty stricken, war torn, morality and humanity running a distant second to survival at any cost.

Lydia thought of Marianna and the fear she’d seen in her beautiful young eyes. She’d said, “My country has been destroyed. And the people left there are like vultures feeding off the carrion of our dead culture. They would sell their daughters for the American dollar, not caring what their fate might be.”

Lydia had been blind not to recognize instantly that schedule for what it was. Or maybe she just hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it; in her heart, as the reality dawned on her, she wasn’t really surprised. After all, she had seen it years before under a different guise. Lydia had just left the
Washington Post
to strike out on her own, to work on more in-depth pieces and try her hand at writing the book that turned out to be
With a Vengeance
. She still had a voice mailbox at the
Post
, though, because so many leads came to her there. Working late one night on her book and reaching a creative lull, she checked her messages at the paper. There was a call from a young woman named Felice. Thinking of her now, she was reminded of Marianna. Though Felice had been plain and small, older by a few years than Marianna, her tiny arms bruised with track marks, she had shared Marianna’s distrust of the police and the FBI. Felice was from Russia, forced to be a prostitute, she claimed, an indentured servant to the pimp who had lured her from her neighborhood, promising her the life of a rich American model, a beautiful home in California for her family. She had been given heroin against her will, she said, and was now addicted and walking the streets. And she was not the only one. She had kept quiet because she was terrified of her pimp, of the American police, but also because she had the dimmest glimmer of hope that one day she would work off her “debt” and be free. It was a carrot her pimp had dangled when he was not beating her or forcing her to take drugs. But then, young women Felice knew began to disappear, turning up dead in rivers and alleys. She knew that she could be next at any time and that she had to do something before she died. Lydia had been compassionate but skeptical; she took the address where Felice claimed the girls were kept. After an investigation that led Lydia and Jeffrey from D.C. to New York to Minneapolis to Chicago, her article resulted in a sting that took down an international prostitution ring. Unfortunately, Felice died of an overdose just days after she had been freed from her captors and accepted into a rehab program at a clinic.