Human Traffic

by Patrick Logan

  “Purse,” he repeated.

  When Veronica didn’t immediately hand it over, the other man stepped forward. Although he wasn’t smiling either, his demeanor was less harsh than sausage fingers.

  “It’s just for safety. We can’t have you taking selfies with the client. He is very rich and powerful man. Once you’re done, you’ll get it back. I promise.”

  Veronica clutched the bag to her chest.

  She was playing a game, acting a role so as to not raise suspicion, but couldn’t imagine how anybody with any degree of common sense would enter the van with these two bozos.

  “Either you give me your purse or you go home. You can’t get in with your purse.”

  Veronica reluctantly handed it over.

  “Okay, but I know exactly what’s in there, and everything better be still there when I get it back,” she said.

  Her feigned naïveté was so saccharine that it was making her sick to her stomach.

  The man took the purse and nodded.

  “I promise,” he said again, reaching out and helping Veronica into the van. Sausage fingers did the same for Mandy.

  It reeked of stale cigarettes and sweat.

  “Where are we—” but before Veronica could finish her sentence, the van doors slammed closed. And then it took off, accelerating so quickly that she fell on her ass. “Hey, what the fuck! What are you—”

  But this time her sentence was cut off by a fabric hood that was pulled over her head.

  Veronica tried to struggle, but before she knew what was happening, her hands were bound behind her back.

  “It’s for your own protection,” one of the Russian’s said. “Don’t worry, it’ll all be over soon.”

  Veronica couldn’t be sure, but she thought she also heard him laugh.

  Chapter 42

  Drake watched anxiously as the van pulled up next to the two girls and a man started chatting with them. He was too far away to hear exactly what was being said, but judging by Veronica’s reactions, this was the encounter that they’d expected.

  The woman knew that things were likely to get a little rough, and she’d been willing to take that risk.

  But when both girls were hoisted up into the back of the van by two gruff-looking men, Drake couldn’t help but grind his teeth. Sitting in Veronica’s Tesla across the street with the lights off, he felt helpless. No, he felt more than helpless. He felt like a fucking invalid.

  The plan that he’d concocted was relatively simple, but the thing that worried him the most is the sheer number of people involved. Too many people had a role to play and even if one of them missed their mark, no matter how minor, bad things could happen. Like the bad thing that had happened to the young street worker that had been found in the dumpster. That kind of bad.

  Right now, Ken Smith and ANGUIS Holdings had all the leverage. They had photographs of him, of Beckett, and worst of all of Jasmine. All Drake had were some transient links between the Mayor and a clandestine holdings company. Drake was positive that it was all connected to the Church of Liberation and Ken Smith’s time in Colombia. He was also fairly certain that Ken wasn’t just using the church to use Ray Reynolds’s and his men to take out anyone who might oppose them, but to also wash money from illegal operations.

  But he had no real proof of any of this. Drake had spent enough time in front of lawyers to know that even public defenders would chew holes through his theories like pastrami on rye. It didn’t make it any less true, of course, but if a public defender could do that, he couldn’t imagine what the head of one of the largest and most prestigious law firms in all of New York City would be able to come up with. No, they needed real tangible, irrefutable proof.

  And the only way to get it, so far as Drake could see, was by putting themselves in dangerous situations. Drake only wished that it was him risking everything, and not Veronica and Mandy.

  The van pulled away, and Drake, eyes narrowed, put the Tesla into drive and followed.

  Chapter 43

  Beckett only got part of what he wanted accomplished. He managed to file his preliminary report on Bob Bumacher, but the traffic was so bad in Manhattan that the drive took twice as long as he’d anticipated. As a result, he wasn’t able to toss his bloody clothes in the incinerator. It made him nervous to keep them with him a second longer than he had to, but they were better off in the trunk of his car than taking the risk of getting caught with them half-baked in the oven.

  In the end, with some aggressive driving and a lucky streak of green lights, Beckett made it to the port with ten minutes to spare.

  He parked across from the main parking lot in a spot that offered him a clear view of the ostentatious yacht. Judging by the way the electronic devices on the roof whirred and spun, it was clear that it was preparing to depart.

  And yet, Beckett was in no hurry to get out of his car. The colossal fuck up at Bob Bumacher’s house was still fresh in his mind, as was the face of the poor kid who had walked in on them. He assumed that based on the fact the media wasn’t all over this already, that they found something incriminating on Bob’s computer to go with the heroin he’d planted. And if that were the case, he’d gone from a poor workingman slain in front of his son, to a criminal mastermind who had been taken out by his competition, and they were scrambling to change their scripts.

  He glanced over at the leather case on the passenger seat that had been loaded with not one but three syringes of Midazolam, two scalpels, and a pair of surgical shears.

  That’s your idea of being prepared? Not scoping out the place, planning and expertly carrying out a silent attack, but just bringing more weapons?

  Beckett sighed and rubbed his eyes. He was exhausted and his body was riddled with bruises and pain from his encounter with Bob. And yet he didn’t have time to sleep.

  He scooped up the case from the passenger seat and slid into the pocket of his shorts. Then he looked up at himself in the mirror.

  “What are you doing, Beckett?” he asked himself.

  It was a rhetorical question, of course, and yet he still felt the need to answer.

  You’re making those assholes pay. You’re making these assholes pay for murdering your student Dr. Eddie Larringer, for almost killing Suzan Cuthbert, for convincing a group of depressed ex-criminals to poison themselves, to being responsible for the overdose of more than two dozen girls in a shipping container. That’s what you’re doing.

  You're making them pay.

  You’re going to make them all pay.

  Chapter 44

  About halfway through their trip to wherever the Russians were taking them, Veronica started to think that this whole thing was a bad idea.

  A very bad idea.

  It wasn’t just the hoods over her face or her bound hands, although this was more than she expected, it was the silence. She could hear the men breathing and the occasional flick of a lighter as one of them lit a cigarette. But other than that, they didn’t speak. They didn’t speak to her or to Mandy or to each other. And this was disconcerting, to say the least.

  It was as if everyone in the van knew that the girls were being driven to their death.

  In her mind, Veronica tried to concentrate on the route that they were taking, using an old trick she’d come up with as a kid. She’d sit with her eyes closed in the backseat of her father’s Lexus and count the number of seconds that passed before each turn, note the direction, and divide that by the average driving speed. When they got home, her dad would get her to draw the route that she thought they’d taken on a map.

  More often than not, Veronica got it close to exact. In this case, however, the van kept accelerating and making so many sharp turns that she quickly lost track of any direction at all.

  Which was clearly the point.

  The passage of time was also hard to determine, given that her senses were occluded by the hood over her head. If she had to guess, she would’ve pegged the entire trip to have taken anywhere between thirty minutes to an ho
ur, although she wouldn’t have been at all surprised if Drake told him later that it was closer to two hours.

  If he could keep up with them, that is.

  Eventually, the van started to reverse and then came to an abrupt stop. A moment later, she was gruffly hoisted to her feet.

  “Can you loosen my hands?” Veronica asked. Her words were muffled by the hood, but she was certain that they could understand her; they just chose not to answer. She was lowered out of the back of the van, and heard Mandy struggling beside her. “Just relax, Mandy. They’re going to take care of us.”

  As if to reinforce this point, someone hooked an arm in hers, and Veronica was led slowly away from the van. She walked for about twenty paces before she was handed off to someone else. A door was opened, words were exchanged in Russian, and then Veronica felt the temperature and texture of the air change as she was forced inside.

  “Can you—”

  Veronica was going to ask to have her bindings loosened again when her hands were suddenly, and thankfully, cut free. At the same time, her hood was pulled from behind and removed.

  The next series of events were as confusing as they were frightening.

  The room that Veronica found herself in was nearly pitch, but she could see just enough to know that Mandy was beside her. There was someone else behind her as well, but she only knew this because they were in the process of cutting off her dress. Before she could even protest, her dress was gone, leaving her wearing only her thong. But a second later, that too was sliced and pulled away like an expert surgeon severing an artery.

  “Hey!” she shouted and whipped around. Veronica just caught sight of a man as he retreated out of a seamless door behind her. “You should’ve just asked me to take it off! That shit’s expensive! Now what am I going to wear home?”

  Veronica glanced over at Mandy, and she saw that the girl was also nude. She also looked frightened for the first time since they’d met.

  “Did you hear me?” Veronica shouted as she glanced around to try and catch her bearings.

  They were standing in a room about the size of a large shower stall, surrounded by what appeared to be glass walls. But they weren’t normal glass; they were blacked out, making it impossible for Veronica to see through them. The only illumination came from a dim red bulb maybe twelve feet overhead. Veronica found that if she concentrated on the area that she’d seen the man with the shears leave, she could make out a thin line forming the perimeter of a door, but there was no handle or lock to speak of.

  Veronica reached out and pounded on the glass with her palms, more to get a feel of its strength rather than an attempt to break through it.

  “Hey! Hey anyone out there!”

  The walls felt like Plexiglass; they had a slight give to them, which suggested that there was open air behind it.

  And most likely people watching me right now, she thought.

  “This is fucked up! I didn’t—”

  There was a loud buzz and then the red light above them blinked out. Once they were bathed in darkness, Veronica heard another click, and then Mandy shouted. Veronica reached for her friend, but only managed to graze her leg, which was kicking furiously, before she felt the air pressure changed again, followed by another click.

  When the red light came on a second later, Veronica found herself alone.

  “Hey! Let me out here!” she shouted. “Let me the fuck out of here!”

  This time when Veronica pounded on the Plexiglas walls, she was trying to smash her way through.

  Chapter 45

  Beckett walked briskly down the dock, keeping his head low and avoiding eye contact with several other patrons who were busy fiddling with their sailboats or tinkering with outboard motors.

  Because of the size of the yacht, it had to be moored on a separate extension that stretched out into water deep enough to contain it. This posed a problem for Beckett, as it was the only boat on the extension, which was also roped off; short of getting in the water himself, something he loathed to do, he didn’t see how he would be able to sneak up on its occupants.

  But as he walked closer, he saw a small leisure craft tied up just before the extension. It had a small 9.9 horsepower motor, the kind that looked like a modified lawn mower, and it appeared as if either the person had either forgotten to remove the gas tank, or he was planning to take off shortly.

  Without thinking, Beckett strode up to the boat and stepped inside. It rocked, but he somehow avoided tipping it.

  Fucking hell… people actually go out to sea in a thing like this?

  He sat on the metal seat and stared at the yacht, trying to figure out how many people were onboard. He knew little of boats, and less of yachts, but from his experience on B-Yacht’ch, he knew that it required a crew of at least a half-dozen people to drive the damn thing. And that didn’t take into account Bob’s smuggling buddies.

  Before he could see anybody onboard, however, he heard two people approaching. Beckett quickly turned and buried his head, pretending to be working on the antique motor.

  In his periphery, he caught sight of two men walking past.

  “No sign of Bob? No one’s even heard from him?”

  “Maybe he got cold feet. You saw how pissed he was when he found out what happened to the girls.”

  “We’ll wait five more minutes, but then we’re taking off, with or without him.”

  When they were by the pleasure craft, Beckett turned his head and caught a glimpse of the man closest to him.

  The man was wearing a pair of pale blue khakis and a white button-down shirt. He had slicked black hair and was cleanly shaven. With his straight nose and dark eyes, he was handsome and also unmistakably recognizable.

  It was the mayor’s son. Beckett had seen the man on TV several times, Wesley or Watney or Weasel, first when his brother Thomas had been killed and again when Ken Smith was campaigning for mayor.

  “No way,” he muttered under his breath. Drake was going to like this. Drake was going to like this a lot.

  The other man was bigger than the mayor’s son, with a square frame and muscular shoulders. But because he was on the other side of Wesley Smith, Beckett couldn’t get a good look at him.

  Beckett stopped tinkering with the motor and pulled the satchel out of his pocket.

  I don’t need to take out anybody on the boat. I can just hit them here, slide their bodies into the water, and get back to my car without anyone seeing.

  Both men were wearing shorts, and he knew that he could slice one, or both, of their femoral arteries before they knew what had happened.

  He didn’t like the idea of doing this out in the open, but it was better than on a boat with god only knows how many other witnesses. A quick glance around revealed that the dozen or so people on the dock were utterly transfixed in their own worlds.

  It’s now or never… if they leave, more girls are going to die.

  Beckett felt the familiar tingle in his fingertips that he’d experienced on the other four occasions he’d killed.

  It was now… it had to be now.

  Beckett somehow managed to get out of the boat without rocking it, while at the same time pulling a scalpel from his bag. It was as if time itself had slowed down, as if he was walking through a lucid dream.

  Like he was in control of everything.

  He closed the distance between them to ten feet, then five. Wesley unhooked the rope to the private dock extension and as he did, the second man turned his head ever so slightly.

  It took all of Beckett’s willpower not to moan the word no.

  Even though he’d only caught a glimpse of the man’s profile, there was no mistaking who he was, either.

  The first and only time that Beckett had seen this man, he’d been half out of his mind on sleeping pills and half dead from methadone poisoning.

  But even if he’d never seen the man before in his life, Beckett would’ve recognized him.

  He would’ve recognized him because he looked exac
tly like his friend Drake.

  But it wasn’t Drake; it was his brother.

  Breathing heavily, Beckett managed to spin around, even though he’d lost all feeling in his limbs. And then he stumbled all the way back to his car and collapsed behind the wheel.

  “Fuck!” he screamed once inside. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  Chapter 46

  Screech smiled as he cranked away at his keyboard. Because of the backdoor rootkit that he’d installed on Ken’s computer, it was a breeze hacking into it and completing his role in Drake’s plan.