by Andy McNab
I started down the metal steps towards a row of heavy steel doors at basement level. There wasn’t a window in sight – either these bolt-holes were bomb shelters for when the B52s flew over to give the Soviets the good news, or the brickies hadn’t been arsed to put them in.
I went up to the faded blue entrance I recognized. My task last time around had been to track down the missing teenage daughter of a Moldovan missile-defence-system supremo – and Lena was a bit of an expert at locating the victims of the people-traffickers. Lily had run away with the love of her life – or so it seemed. Nobody could find her; nobody knew where she was. My job had been to get her back so the Firm could become best mates with Daddy – and implant their own technology into the kit he was building for the Russians to supply to the Iranians. Keeping Armoured-dinner-jacket and his mates on the back foot had always been high on their list of priorities.
I pressed the buzzer and it sounded like I’d sparked up a garbage-disposal grinder somewhere inside.
I got no reply so I buzzed again.
The speaker crackled. Even if the greeting had been in English, it was so loud and distorted I wouldn’t have been able to understand a word of it.
‘It’s Nick. Nick – for Lena …’
All I got back was more psychotic yelling punctuated by the odd ‘Lena’.
‘Nick – to see Lena. Lena!’
The speaker went quiet. I stood and waited, but nothing happened. Maybe she thought I was selling dusters.
Finally, about a hundred bolts were thrown on the other side of the door and Miranda Hart’s twin towered in front of me in flared jeans and a baggy blue jumper. She must have been north of six feet tall. Unlike her sister, she’d shaved her dark brown hair on the left of her head. The rest hung down to her right shoulder. Maybe it was on trend around here; to me it looked like the world’s biggest comb-over.
She started shouting at me again. ‘Lena!’
‘Yes. Lena!’
I poked myself in the chest with a forefinger. ‘Nick!’
She ushered me in and I stepped past her into the corridor. The steel door slammed behind me and all hundred bolts were hammered back into position. She led me past a battered red-leather sofa and a coffee-table. Nothing had changed. The walls of Lena’s windowless office were still lined with archive boxes; a small desk was still strewn with files. Even the smell was the same, most of it coming from the overflowing ashtray next to the phone.
I sat on a knackered old wooden kitchen chair and waited as Miranda moved around behind me.
‘Café?’ she bellowed.
I nearly jumped out of my seat.
‘Café?’
I turned. She had a can of instant in one hand and a spoon in the other. I nodded like a happy chimp. ‘Yes … thanks …’
She disappeared down the corridor towards the front door and then the buzzer went and the whole performance kicked off once more.
I heard Lena join in. The entry-phone volume was at full blast. Miranda screamed in one direction and Lena in the other. Then the speaker cut out and the bolts were thrown again.
The shouting resumed as Lena entered the corridor. Fuck me, I’d soon be trembling with shell-shock and stinking like Lena’s ashtray.
4
I stood up to greet her, but she didn’t appear. I leaned into the corridor to see her – in matching black trousers and cardigan – standing just behind Miranda. The big girl threw the last bolt, turned, leaned down and they kissed. Not a polite peck or two, but full on the lips.
I waited. And I waited some more. Come on, you two, haven’t you had your lunch?
They eventually managed to prise themselves apart and made their way towards me, shouting at each other as they walked. Miranda threw some shapes with her arms, in case she hadn’t been heard.
Lena was all smiles. ‘Nick!’ She threw her arms round me and treated me to a big continental three-timer on the cheeks. I was glad I hadn’t got the Miranda treatment: this girl’s breath stank of cigarettes.
Miranda disappeared again as Lena moved to the other side of the desk. ‘Please, Nick. Sit.’
She plonked herself on a cheap foam-padded office chair and stole a quick glance over the paperwork on her desk. ‘You still searching for trafficked girls? We’ve got enough of them.’ It was good dealing with people like Frank and Lena. They worked on the basis that I would tell them if they needed to know. For them it was all about the moment.
Her hands shot into the air and whirled around above her head, indicating the array of box files containing the details of thousands of girls who’d been kidnapped by or sold to the trafficking gangs – or who’d signed up voluntarily, thinking they were going to Turkey as cleaners or waitresses, only to have their passports removed and be forced into prostitution.
Her hands came back to land, and slammed onto the piles of paperwork on her desk, giving me the chance to admire her latest nail and hair-colour combo. Last time I’d been there, the nails had been silver and the hair short, spiky and blue. Now the nails were black and the hair was red and even shorter.
I smiled. ‘Still busy, then?’
There was a mocking tone in her voice as she scanned the row upon row of files lining the office walls: ‘Formerly one of the wealthiest parts of our great – but now defunct – Soviet Union, we are now officially the poorest country in Europe. We have a government with no teeth and no balls. Our judicial system is a joke. Our police are so corrupt they are worse than the gangs. The only thing we have to be proud of as a nation is that we’re number one in the world for human trafficking. We’re an international business success story! Young girls are still the country’s biggest export. But … I will keep trying to get them home, wherever they are.’
Lena lit a cigarette she’d pulled from the drawer; they seemed to be loose in there. The smoke soon filled my eyes and nostrils.
‘Nick, do you know that forty per cent of Moldova’s sex slaves are now kids?’ The mockery was gone: she was back in serious Lena mode. ‘Anna should talk to the networks about it. The big demand in the sex trade these days is for children.’
Anna obviously hadn’t said anything about the baby and I wanted to leave it at that. I didn’t like talking about my personal life any more than I liked having my picture taken – and look where that had got me.
She hoovered up another lungful and let the smoke roll out of her mouth. ‘Soon we’ll be number one at that as well. All that will be left are the old men.’
‘If everybody’s leaving, why all the bolts? You having problems with the gangs?’
Miranda came back into the room and the pungent smell of black instant joined the cloud of nicotine up my nose. Lena invited her to share the joke at maximum decibel level, even though she was only a couple of feet away. She pointed at me and repeated my question with a stream of Us and Ns. They both cackled. The noise nearly burst my eardrums. I bet the neighbours were glad there were no windows.
Miranda turned and shouted down at me, smiling like a lunatic and throwing a whole lot more shapes. She gave me a pat, which nearly dislocated my shoulder, and disappeared down the corridor, laughing loudly to herself. I guessed the voices in her head must have told her a follow-up joke.
Lena picked up her brew, tested it, and decided it was too hot. I didn’t bother testing mine. She nodded in the direction of the corridor. ‘Linda says if only that were true – because we would be more than able to handle that lot.’
It was my turn to smile to myself. I’d nearly got her name right. Well, the ‘da’ bit, anyway.
‘We have to worry about her family. They are so pissed with her, and now with me. They blame me for her “deviancy” and have been here two or three times, trying to break in and trash the place before taking her home for …’ her fingers curled to give me the quote marks ‘… safety.’
She waved her hands in my direction and ash cascaded off the tip of her cigarette. ‘It’ll pass. Anyway, Nick. What do you want? Anna didn’t tell you I neede
d cigarettes, and said nothing to me about why you are here.’
I couldn’t help laughing. She didn’t need my help to smoke herself to death. ‘Have you heard of a woman called Dr Katarina – or Katya – Fuentes?’
She shook her head. ‘But we can start combing the files.’
‘No need. She’s Cuban-Russian. What about Vasil Diminetz?’
Lena’s face dropped faster than it would have if Linda’s family had just kicked down the door.
I picked up my brew as she stubbed out what was left of her cigarette into the overflowing ashtray.
5
‘Linda!’
The whole room shook. Even Linda must have felt the shock waves because she rushed in seconds later. Lena screamed some more stuff at her, though the only bit I understood before Linda disappeared again was ‘Diminetz’. I heard box files being ransacked as I took another sip of my brew.
Lena rested her smoking elbow on the arm of her chair. ‘Diminetz is not a nice man. He used to traffic drugs, girls, guns – the normal stuff. But then he branched out.’
Linda reappeared with a box file that was so well worn it was coming apart at the spine. She started to hand it over to Lena, but the black fingernails redirected it to me. I lifted the lid to see not much at all, just some printouts in Moldovan. It meant nothing to me. There were pictures, mostly of girls, then one of a male. I held it up. ‘This him?’
She nodded. ‘Maybe five years ago.’
He looked like a lot of arseholes in their mid-twenties, with a dark-brown crew-cut and uneven stubble. His first distinguishing feature was that he looked in need of some serious bulking up. His second was a tat of a dragon on the left side of his neck. It was quite a good one, not the normal prison botch-up.
She leaned over the desk and pointed at the picture. ‘That was before he started his new venture. He advertised quite freely in the papers here. People lined the streets outside a store he rented. A few months later we started seeing the results. The scars …’
The piece Anna had written about a Moldovan village where every single male had sold a kidney flashed through my head. ‘He’s in the harvesting business?’
She settled back in her chair. ‘He attracts them with the promise of thousands of dollars. He then makes a deal with the brokers. The middlemen could be anywhere, according to what we’re piecing together from those who make it back – the US, Rio de Janeiro, Berlin. A lot of them are sent to Israel.’
The Jewish faith, she said, prohibits the donation of organs. The bodies had to be intact when they were buried.
‘So they buy them instead? No hypocrisy there, then.’
‘It’s a marketplace, with no national boundaries. Anywhere there is money, and people who need an organ, there is an … opportunity and someone has to supply the goods. Diminetz will send the donor to South America, the Middle East, Europe, anywhere a broker can arrange for an operation to take place.’
‘Any hospital, you mean?’
‘That’s the hard bit for them. Hospitals need the cash, but it’s still illegal. The brokers have to do a bit of work to co-ordinate it all. With most transplant operations, there’s a window of a few hours between taking it out of one body and putting it into another. They have to get the donor and recipient in the same location. The rich one goes home with a new kidney or whatever, and the poor one comes back with bits missing and maybe just a couple of thousand dollars because the accommodation, food and flight – you name it – are deducted. Even so, still life-changing amounts of money.’
‘Isn’t it illegal here too? How does he get away with advertising?’
She dived back into her cigarette drawer. ‘The only country where it isn’t illegal, I think, is Iran. But so what? Like I said, there’s no law or government here. The vice squad in this city consists of seven officers, Nick. Seven! They don’t even have a vehicle. They have to catch a bus to crime scenes. That’s why there are people like me.’
‘So what sort of money are we talking about? How much could I get for a kidney?’
The disposable clicked but there was no flame. She gave it a couple of shakes and sparked it up this time, then wafted it across the tip of her smoke.
‘He promises ten thousand US, and you’d be lucky to see half that. But if you’re desperate, Nick, if you’re trying to escape from poverty or debt – or this country …’ She raised the filter to her lips. ‘Diminetz will send them to wherever they need to be – to whichever broker, in whatever country. Sometimes they come back in good condition – it all depends where the operation takes place. But sometimes they don’t. That’s when Linda and I pick up the pieces. And sometimes they just disappear completely.’
Another toxic cloud filled the room. My eyes were watering, but Lena wasn’t deterred. ‘China is also a growing market. The new middle class doesn’t want organs from executed prisoners any more. They want designer organs to match their designer handbags and watches. Prisoners have been on bad diets, and are probably riddled with hepatitis or HIV. They want healthy organs from healthy, strong young men and women.
‘Diminetz sells the dream: clean, fit, healthy East Europeans, who have been working out in the fields, not drinking or smoking …’ She took another long drag, then balanced the cigarette on the dog-end mountain that was toppling off the ashtray. ‘They are paraded in front of the clients, like girls in a brothel. He makes sure they turn up without make-up, with short nails and no polish. If their hair is dyed he will keep them under wraps until it grows out. He wants them to look as wholesome and healthy as possible. It costs more, but the buyers don’t complain.’
She swirled the remains of her coffee around a couple of times in the bottom of her mug. Her jaw clenched and I could see the anger in her face. She flicked through the pile of papers in front of her and scribbled the odd note. The end of her Bic ballpoint looked like it had been chewed by a Dobermann.
‘It’s all about supply and demand, of course. Their mark-up is as much as you’d expect on any designer bag – and if you want the real thing you don’t buy Louis Vuitton from a Somali at a street corner. Diminetz sells them to the broker for fifty to sixty thousand dollars. The broker sells them for a hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand, sometimes even more, depending on where the operation is taking place. Sometimes, if the girl is beautiful and her scar does not weep, she finds herself sold on as a prostitute.’ She tilted back her chair, closed her eyes and massaged her temples with her fingers. For a moment I thought she was going to cry. ‘So why is your friend caught up in this? You think that scum has put her up for auction?’
‘I haven’t got a clue. I’m just trying to cover every base.’ She didn’t need to know the full story, just enough to help. ‘Do you know if Diminetz speaks English?’
Her eyes rolled and she burst out laughing.
6
Club Royal Park Hotel
20.32 hrs
The beaten-up Merc pulled in beside the third hotel on my circuit and I handed the cabbie a five-dollar bill. It had been a ten-minute ride so he was very happy indeed. He took off as fast as my last driver had done, before I realized my mistake.
We’d passed a whole stream of posters along the way showing a girl gripped in a huge clenched fist being exchanged for a handful of dollars. I didn’t know precisely what the caption said, but it was pretty fucking obvious. I wondered if there were any other countries in the world that had to publicize the perils of people-trafficking alongside the attractions of Diet Coke and Nescafé.
Lena didn’t have much solid intelligence on Diminetz, but was able to tell me he didn’t have a home: he hung out in the kind of five-star hotels that had sprung up in Chisinau to suck money out of people like him. Off his tits on drink and drugs most of the time, he shagged his life away between deals. Frank was right. This lad might have a big wallet, but it hadn’t lifted him out of the gutter.
Lena had listed my most likely targets and I’d already tried the Maxim Pasha and the Prezident in the centre o
f town. Number three was just outside, in a park called Valley of the Roses. Not that I could see any.
It was a large, two-storey, rectangular shrine to the God of White Walls and Glass. A veranda fringed the first floor like a crinoline, possibly in an attempt to give the place some kind of colonial vibe. Lights glowed; expensive cars gleamed on the gravel forecourt. An island of cash floating in a sea of corruption.
I went up a short flight of black brick steps and in through a pair of gold-sprayed, aluminium-framed doors. The riot of brass and multicoloured fabric that hit me as soon as I’d crossed the threshold was like an artist’s impression of a migraine. Saddam Hussein would have felt completely at home there. Maybe he’d lent them his interior decorator; the only bit of Baghdad chic missing was a gold bust of the great man at the reception desk.
The signs were all in Moldovan with English translations, and the woman sitting behind them had scraped-back jet-black hair and drawings for eyebrows. I nodded at her as I passed, scanning the mauve chairs, swirling Oriental carpets and futuristic red lightshades. Moldovans kept their heads well below the parapet and never asked questions; it was a prerequisite of survival in this neck of the acid-rain-drenched woods. Even the shopkeepers never asked you how your day was or if they could help. They just left you to do whatever you needed to do. Old habits die hard.
It was dinnertime. Maybe Diminetz was sitting quietly with a nice bowl of boiled cabbage, but I doubted that was his style. In any event, the restaurant was the last place I’d check. I’d have to have a reason to go there – to eat or to meet – and I’d draw unwelcome attention to myself if I then walked away.
The bar and terrace were another matter. I could wander through them to my heart’s content. If they were empty, I would try the gym and the swimming-pool, but something told me that Diminetz wasn’t the sort to pump iron or clock up lengths. He had money to burn before it all ended in tears, and Lena had given me the impression he kept the furnace roaring.
