The Stolen Ones (12 page)

“WELL, OKAY,”
Stevens told Windermere. “Let’s forget about Irina for a second.”

Windermere shook her head. “We can’t just—”

“Mathers and Harris can stall her until we get back,” he said. “We go home to Minnesota with a break in this case and that girl won’t be so eager to walk, I promise.”

Windermere opened her mouth to reply. Thought better of it apparently, and sank down in her seat and said nothing.

They were in LePlavy’s car, driving away from the empty pier where the
Ocean Constellation
had docked. Stevens watched Windermere from the backseat, figured he understood his partner’s frustration.

Mathers was right about Irina, of course; it was against the law to keep the poor girl from contacting her family. And of course she was scared. But she wouldn’t get anywhere by running.

In the front seat, Windermere opened her eyes. “I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “That girl isn’t getting out of FBI custody.”

“Of course not,” Stevens said. “She’s a witness in a major investigation. She’s not going anywhere.”

“Legally, you can’t just keep her in a cell, though,” LePlavy said. “If she doesn’t want protective custody, you can’t force it on her.”

“So what the hell is she supposed to do?” Windermere said. “Get her own apartment somewhere? What if she wants to go home? Just pack up and head back to Romania with Mommy and Daddy?”

“I guess we petition a judge,” Stevens said.

Windermere made a face. “Fucking Mathers,” she said.

Stevens sat up. “Yeah,” he said, “but we’re not completely screwed here, Carla. We still have a case.”

“That ship’s the one that delivered these women,” LePlavy said. “You’re pretty sure of that, right?”

“We’re sure,” Stevens told him. “Based on the timeline and that Newark phone number—”

“Which has given us absolutely nothing,” Windermere said. “Derek says there’s nothing in that number’s records but a bunch of anonymous calls. Started two months back and ended with this delivery. These guys were too goddamn careful.”

“They gave us Newark.” Stevens sat forward. “And we have the
Ocean Constellation
and Irina’s description of the container. This harbor is lousy with checkpoints and security cameras. If we do some digging, we’ll find that box.”

LePlavy met his eyes in the rearview mirror. “Well, okay,” he said. “Let’s dig.”

STEVENS AND WINDERMERE
waited while LePlavy called in a warrant. Then they all drove to the Port Authority office, where the supervisor was waiting with his hands on his hips and an
I don’t have time for this shit
expression on his face.

“We’re on the hunt for a forty-foot red container that came off the
Ocean Constellation
,” Windermere explained in the supervisor’s office. “The owner is shipping women into the country through your facility, so let’s just assume you’re going to bust your ass to help us, okay?”

The supervisor looked at her. Looked at Stevens and LePlavy. “You know that ship dropped off a thousand boxes,” he said. “You—”

“We know,” Windermere told him. “Just hook us up with the tape.”

>   >   >

THE SUPERVISOR LED THEM
to the Port Authority’s security office, a large, windowless room filled with computer screens and banks of monitors. The place was
cold
, the air-conditioning on full blast, but Windermere forgot about the chill as soon as the supervisor brought up the footage from the
Ocean Constellation
’s arrival.

The Port Authority had cameras everywhere. On the pier and in the parking lots, in the vast marshaling yards amid stacks of containers, at the customs checkpoints and the entry and exit gates to the facility. They had manifests, too, and electronic scanners to track each container as the cranes lifted them from the ships, placed them on the backs of trucks or on train cars that shunted them away from the pier.

“Amazing,” Windermere told Stevens and LePlavy. “If we can pin down which box is ours, we can trace the manifest to the shipper, easy.”

“Sounds good to me,” Stevens said. “Let’s get to work.”

>   >   >

THEY STUDIED THE MONITORS
for hours, an endless procession of containers of all sizes and colors.

How many of these boxes hold women?
Windermere thought.

Most of the boxes had logos on their sides, the names of shipping companies or railroads, or big-box discount stores. Windermere watched them move from ship to shore and out through the exit gates, felt her senses dull with the monotony, the chill in the room the only thing keeping her awake.

She realized she was shivering, was about to ask for a sweater or a blanket—hell, a parka—when she caught the flash of red. “There,” she told Stevens and LePlavy, pointing at the screen. “Check it out.”

The two men squinted at the screen. Watched as a giant gantry crane lifted a plain red container from the
Ocean Constellation
’s hold and deposited it on the back of a flatbed truck.

“That’s a red tractor,” Stevens said, and she could tell from his voice that he was starting to feel it. “Just like the one Irina described.”

LePlavy copied something into a notebook. “I’ll run the owner data,” he said, standing. “You guys keep watching, make sure this is the one.”

“It’s the one,” Windermere said. She could feel it, plain and clear as she felt the sailor on the
Ocean Constellation
was hiding something. “Hurry up and tell us who owns this thing.”

LePlavy hurried off. Stevens hit play on the monitor again, and they watched as the driver of the truck slowly pulled out from under the crane, the container secured on the back of his flatbed. Windermere imagined the women inside, their fear, their disorientation. She closed her eyes and tried to chase the thought from her mind.

We’ll find who owns this box,
she thought.
We’ll track them down. We’ll find Catalina Milosovici and the rest of the women.

We’ll make these bastards pay
.

THE TRUCK IDLED AWAY
from the pier, the giant cranes, the
Ocean Constellation
. Navigated the massive stacks of waiting boxes and lined up at the customs checkpoint that guarded the facility. Stevens and Windermere watched as the truck waited. The line was long. Windermere wrapped her arms around herself and exhaled, half expected to see her breath in the air.

Beside her, Stevens tapped his fingers on his knee. “I keep waiting for a camera angle that’s going to show us this guy’s face,” Stevens said.

“We already know the guy, Stevens,” Windermere said. “Hell, we have sketches of both of them.”

The truck inched forward. Windermere watched the screen. Ached to reach through the camera and just stop the truck, open her up, and free the damn women right there. Hated that she couldn’t. Hated that she knew what happened next.

Finally, the truck made the customs checkpoint. From what Windermere could tell, some trucks were pulled aside for secondary screenings. A small fraction were directed through an X-ray scanner. The
Ocean Constellation
had arrived on a busy day at the port, though. Most of the trucks drove away unchecked.

The red truck and its red box were among them. Windermere watched the truck idle through the checkpoint and out onto the surface road beyond the facility. There were no more cameras here. The truck drove offscreen and was gone.

“And off they go,” Stevens said, pausing the footage. “Let’s see if LePlavy could dig up any dirt.”

>   >   >

BUT L
E
PLAVY
didn’t come back with much.

“The good news is it’s probably your truck,” he said. “The tractor’s a rental, leased from a national heavy-equipment distributor. The flatbed chassis’s the same, but from a different distributor. Both leased to a company called ATZ Transport, out of Elizabeth, New Jersey.”

“That’s just down the road,” Stevens said. “Right? Let’s go get them.”

LePlavy shook his head. “It’s a front,” he said. “It’s a P.O. box. ATZ Transport is owned by a numbered company based on the Isle of Man. There’s no cracking who owns
that
company, not without some serious help from Interpol.”

“And the box?” Windermere asked.

LePlavy sighed. “The box is the same story, only it’s owned by a
different
shell company, which is owned by a different numbered company in a different overseas tax haven.” He looked at them both. “Basically, what I’m saying is, these guys are pros. They know to hide their assets. And it’s going to take a hell of a lot of sifting through ownership statements to find them.”

Windermere felt the electricity in the air evaporate. Felt, honestly, like she’d been punched in the stomach. “But you have the box coming into Trieste, right?” she asked. “So we just trace it back from there. Don’t they have a record of where it came from?”

“You’d think so,” LePlavy said, “but the EU customs officers only have what’s on the manifest: one forty-foot container, owned by the aforementioned shell company, carrying . . .” He checked his notebook. “DVD players from the Czech Republic. Which we know is a lie, since your victim entered the box in Bucharest. Basically, this whole operation is a ghost before the box shows up in Trieste.”

He gestured to the monitors. “What about the security footage?” he asked. “You guys find anything useful?”

“Nothing,” Windermere said. “The box landed on a flatbed and drove off the lot. Disappeared into oblivion.”

“We were hoping you’d get us our lead,” Stevens said.

“I can get in touch with Interpol,” LePlavy said. “Try and convince them to help me track down this chain of ownership. FinCEN, too, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, down in Virginia. Maybe they can open up some doors.”

“These guys are human traffickers,” Windermere said, her frustration mounting. “Scum of the earth. Let’s just go Patriot Act on their asses.”

“We’ll try,” LePlavy told her. “Two numbered companies in two different offshore havens, though; it’s going to take time.”

Stevens met her eyes, and Windermere could tell he was thinking the same thing she was.
We have a whole box of women in danger, and probably more. Time is the last thing we can spare.

BOGDAN URZICA
felt the truck slowing. He sat up, blinking, rubbing his eyes. “Where are we?” he asked Nikolai, peering out at the gloom.

Beside him, Nikolai steered the truck to a stop at the side of the road. They were off the highway, Bogdan realized. There was no light anywhere except for the headlights of the truck, piercing the darkness for thirty feet, illuminating a teeming swarm of bugs and nothing but a flat, single-lane blacktop beyond.

Nikolai shifted the truck out of gear, turned off the engine. “Quick stop,” he told Bogdan. “I’m going to feed the bitch. You go back to sleep.”

He opened the door and climbed down from the cab, and Bogdan closed his eyes again, basking in the warm air from Nikolai’s open door. The night smelled like a farm, and Bogdan imagined he was back in the home country, a child, visiting his grandparents outside of the city. He’d imagined, once, that he’d like to work on a farm; it was a simple, honest life, anyway, and his grandparents seemed happy enough. Maybe he would purchase a farm someday, when he was finished running girls for Andrei Volovoi. After this trip, he could use a taste of something simpler.

>   >   >

WHEN HE OPENED HIS EYES AGAIN,
fifteen minutes had passed. Nikolai was not in the truck; his door hung half open, and there were flies swarming into the cab. Bogdan sat up. “Shit.”

He reached across the cab for Nikolai’s door, couldn’t reach it. He was about to slide across and slam the thing closed when an ugly thought crossed his mind.

What if the girl had escaped?

Her sister had done it. The girl had been right behind her. She could have felt the truck slowing and waited for Nikolai to open the door. Struck him on the head and run off into the night.

Shit, but the Dragon would kill them both.

Quickly, Bogdan opened his own door and climbed out of the truck and down to the road. Walked back along the shoulder to the end of the box. The door hung open. There was nobody there.

Drawing his weapon, he climbed into the back of the box. Stepped around the cardboard boxes to the little door to the false compartment. “Nikolai?”

Silence. Then, a girl’s sobs.

Bogdan drew a flashlight from his belt and shined it into the dark compartment. The beam was weak and he couldn’t see anything. He ducked through the little doorway and swung the flashlight again.

There, in the corner, a jumble of limbs and shadows. Nikolai on top of the girl, his tongue at her ear, his hand fumbling with the zipper of his jeans. He was laughing, muttering something, and the girl was crying and struggling beneath him. He’d torn her shirt, Bogdan saw. Forced her pants to her ankles. He intended to rape her.

Bogdan felt his anger rise. Nikolai, the fucking animal.

Bogdan slid his pistol back into his waistband. Then, his heart pounding in his temples, he crossed the compartment toward Nikolai and the girl.

NIKOLAI STRUGGLED
with the girl. He hadn’t noticed Bogdan yet, was fighting to keep the girl pinned while he fumbled with his jeans. Bogdan grabbed him by the shoulder. “Nikolai.”

Nikolai snarled at him, shoved him aside. “Fuck off, Bogdan,” he said. “I’m getting a taste of this little bitch.”

“You’re an idiot.” Bogdan grabbed Nikolai again, harder this time, as the girl scuttled away into the corner. “The Dragon will kill us if he finds out.”

“So he won’t find out,” Nikolai said. “Now fuck off and leave me to her.”

Bogdan stood in his way. “
You
fuck off,” he said. “Forget the girl.”

Nikolai’s eyes were wild, his mouth open, a rabid dog. “Get out of my way, Bogdan,” he said. “Or I’ll move you.”

Bogdan stood fast. Stared him down.

Then Nikolai threw the punch. A roundhouse haymaker. It caught Bogdan off guard, though he knew he should have anticipated it. Knocked him staggering backward, across the compartment, knocked the flashlight away. With a snarl, Nikolai leapt for the little girl again.

Bogdan landed on his back, his head in a daze. Stood just as Nikolai reached the girl. Just as he pulled open his jeans. The girl screamed and crawled backward, but there was nowhere to go.

Bogdan drew his pistol. Crossed the compartment and pressed the weapon to the back of Nikolai’s neck. “Enough,” he said. “Now.”

Nikolai stopped moving. Bogdan could feel the girl’s eyes on him as the compartment went silent. “I hope you don’t draw your weapon without intending to use it, Bogdan,” Nikolai said slowly.

Bogdan held the gun steady. “Would you like to find out?”

Nikolai didn’t respond for a moment. Then he pushed himself from the girl. “You wouldn’t shoot me,” he told Bogdan. “The Dragon would kill you.”

“The Dragon would understand,” Bogdan replied.

Nikolai studied him, panting heavily. The girl watched them both. Bogdan felt his jaw throbbing, ached to touch it. Knew as soon as he blinked, Nikolai would be on him.

An eternity passed. Finally, Nikolai shrugged. “Your turn to drive,” he said, brushing past Bogdan and out of the compartment.

Bogdan waited until he heard his partner drop out of the back of the box. Then he retrieved his flashlight and hid the gun back in his waistband. The girl half sat, half lay on the floor in front of him, her clothing torn and askew. She watched him, her eyes serious.

Bogdan looked at her. “What?” he said.

She didn’t say anything.

He waited, but she didn’t speak. “Goddamn it,” he said finally. “Fix yourself.” Then he turned and walked out of the compartment.