Hunting Zero

by Jack Mars

  “Yes!” he cried. “Think about it, think of any hotel in the world.” He spoke quickly, as if pleading for his life. “A man walks in with a few girls. Well dressed. Well behaved. They are quiet. Compliant. Would you think twice? They, they do things to them. Give them drugs. Threaten. Sometimes… sometimes beat them. To keep them in line.”

  With every horrific description, an image flashed through Reid’s mind of some atrocity happening to his own daughters. He grabbed Varga’s face with one hand, holding him by the chin, and pressed the shard of glass to his cheek.

  “Filip,” he said dangerously, “to me it sounds like you know more than the average client should know about these men and what they do.”

  “P-please…”

  Reid pressed on the glass, drawing a bead of blood. He had to steady his own hand from tearing a thick gash down Varga’s face. “A man like you, in a position you’re in, would be of great help to these traffickers. Wouldn’t you?”

  “I-I-I…” Varga’s chest heaved as he hyperventilated.

  “Are they Slovak?” Reid demanded. He pressed harder on the shard.

  “Yes! Yes. M-mostly. Some are, are Bulgarian. Croatian…”

  “And you help them? With what—faking flight manifests? Crossing borders? And in return, you get what you want when you want it?”

  Varga cried out as the sharp glass punctured a hole through his cheek. “Yes,” he whimpered. “I help them. Sometimes…”

  “Give me something I can use or I will cut the flesh from your face.” Despite the pain and exasperation, Reid’s hand stopped trembling. He was fully prepared to make good on his threat. “Where do they operate?”

  “Everywhere.” Varga grimaced. “All over…”

  “Where are they based?!” Reid shouted. “They must be headquartered somewhere. They must keep the girls somewhere. Where, Varga?”

  “Please, please…” Varga pleaded as a rivulet of blood ran down his face. “I don’t know. I don’t know. They operate all over, in several countries. No single place.”

  “That doesn’t help me,” Reid growled. The traffickers had to have a base of operations. They just had to, or else his girls still could be anywhere. “Give me something, or…”

  He heard nothing over the sound of Varga’s whimpers, and barely caught the glimpse of movement in his periphery before the other SIS agent leapt toward the bed, reaching for the pistol Reid had left there.

  Reid’s hand shot out and swept the pistol off the bed and onto the floor a half-second before the agent’s hands slapped down on nothing but Egyptian cotton. He leapt again, this time to the floor to retrieve the PPK. Reid leapt as well, springing up from his crouched position over Varga and falling atop the SIS agent.

  As the man’s hand reached the gun, Reid drove the shard of glass down into the back of it. The agent screamed and rolled, throwing Reid to the side and off of him. He grabbed up the pistol with his other hand and turned to fire…

  Reid had the second gun loose, the one tucked into the back of his jeans. He fired only once, a thwip of a silenced shot into the SIS agent’s forehead. The man’s head jerked back, a nine-millimeter-sized hole frothing blood between his eyes. His body fell forward onto the carpet.

  “Help, I am being attacked!” he heard Varga say frantically. The fat man had reached the hotel phone on the nightstand. “Penthouse… please, come quickly…”

  Reid had no choice. He raised the gun again and fired two shots.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  Both bullets found home, but not in Filip Varga. Reid fired both shots into the phone on the nightstand.

  He had already killed two SIS agents—agents that would have killed me, he reasoned; agents that knew damn well what was going on in here and allowed it—but he was not about to kill a global official, even if he was a monster. Varga would face a court for what he had done.

  But he had made the call, and Reid needed to get out of there. He pulled himself painfully up off the floor and stowed the gun in his jeans again.

  “I know your name and your face,” he warned the politician. “This is far from over.” Then he fled from the bedroom, leaving Varga mutilated and bleeding on the floor.

  He paused in the parlor. He had given the girls his keycard for the freight elevator, and he couldn’t very well take the penthouse elevator back down. Someone would be on their way up, or waiting for him at the bottom.

  I could make a stand here. Fight my way out. No, he told himself. That would be suicide…

  “This way!” a feminine voice called out in Ukrainian.

  Reid spun around. In the doorway to the kitchen was a young girl with auburn hair—one of the three he had freed from Varga. The seemingly youngest of them.

  The one that had reminded him of Maya.

  “What are you doing?” he hissed. “I told you to leave…”

  She flashed the keycard and motioned for him to follow. He dashed into the kitchen after her as she opened the freight elevator doors.

  As they descended to the main level, Reid leaned heavily against a wall with one arm.

  “Are you all right?” the girl asked.

  “I’ll be fine. Why did you stay?”

  “I sent the others away,” she told him. “But I heard what you said. You are a father of two girls that were kidnapped?”

  “Yes,” he admitted quietly.

  Then, curiously, the girl put both arms around his waist and hugged him. It was brief, but it was so powerfully reminiscent of holding one of his own girls that Reid held his breath and bit his lip to shove back the emotional wave that crashed down on him.

  “Thank you,” she said quietly.

  “You are Ukrainian?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Moldovan. But I have been here since age thirteen. Then I was sold to the Slavs.”

  Sold? My god. She had been—still was—just a child. “Is there anything at all you can—”

  The elevator doors opened and Reid found himself face to face with a very surprised, and very burly, man on the other side. He wore a red blazer and had the shoulders of a college linebacker. Hotel security, Reid realized grimly.

  “Stop…” The man put up a hand in warning.

  Reid half-surged and half-stumbled forward, driving an elbow into the guard’s solar plexus. As the man grunted and doubled over, Reid sprang up, slamming one knee into his forehead with such force that the guard crashed to the tiled floor and slid, unconscious.

  Reid staggered and fell to his hands and knees with the exertion. The girl grabbed his shoulder and helped him back up. Together they hurried to the loading bay, exiting the hotel through the same door that he had first entered.

  Outside, the coast was clear, but he could hear sirens wailing and getting very close. He put his arm around the girl’s shoulders as they stepped out onto the boulevard and strode quickly up the sidewalk.

  “Laugh like I just told you a joke,” Reid said quietly in Ukrainian. The girl threw her head back and laughed right on cue as two police cars approached, blue lights flashing.

  He forced himself to grin. It felt odd and foreign on his face. He couldn’t remember the last time he had genuinely smiled.

  The police cars screamed past them and screeched to a halt outside the hotel as the two of them kept walking.

  “Thank you,” Reid said. “What’s your name?”

  “Maya.”

  “I’m sorry?” Reid blinked.

  “I said Aiya.”

  “Oh.” He shook his head. He knew the name; it was Hebrew for “bird,” but for a moment he really thought she had said… “Aiya, I want you to go straight to the police. Find the other two girls. Ask for Interpol. They’re working on finding the men that took you. But first, I need to know if there’s anything you can tell me about these traffickers.”

  “There is not much,” Aiya admitted regretfully. “They do not use their real names in front of us. They speak only in Slovak. When they take us places like this, it is in darkness o
r blindfolded, so we cannot know where we are or where we are going.” She shuddered; likely not from the cold, Reid realized. “They are… careful.”

  He sighed. The ordeal with Varga had yielded little fruit, and now it seemed he had reached yet another dead end.

  “There may be one thing,” Aiya said. “A small city, northeast of here, called Staremesto. Do you know it?”

  “No, but I could find it. What about Staremesto?”

  “That is where I was before I was sold. Find a club called Macicka. Ask for Matej.”

  Macicka. Reid knew the term in Slovak; it meant “kitten” or, depending on whom he might ask, a far more vulgar word. “Who is Matej?”

  “The one who sold me,” Aiya told him. “He was my handler.”

  “Handler?” That was the word in Ukrainian that Aiya used, or at least the translation that he knew… Oh. He realized what she meant. He was her pimp. Jesus… a prostitute at thirteen. Reid could hardly fathom it.

  “Pretend to be a wealthy American,” she continued. “Tell him Veronika sent you. He will meet you.”

  “And Veronika is…?”

  “No one,” she said with a shrug. “It is a code word for the type of thing that will get you alone with him. Matej will know how to meet with them. Only… you may have to make sure that he cannot warn them.”

  He understood the implication, and he would damn well make sure that Matej could not warn the traffickers. Anyone who pimped teenage girls deserved what was coming to them.

  He took his arm from around her shoulders. “Thank you, Aiya. Now go, and don’t stop for anyone.”

  “May I know your name first?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I’m afraid not. It might make things harder for you.”

  “I understand. Goodbye… and I wish you luck finding your daughters.” Aiya turned and hurried down the sidewalk.

  He watched her go until she vanished around the corner. Then he asked a passing couple how he might get to Staremesto. They gave him directions and he thanked them as pleasantly as he could muster. Then he traveled three blocks further, just to put some distance between him and the District, and found a parking garage adjacent to another hotel.

  He was certain that Filip Varga would report the American man who broke into his hotel room and assaulted him, but he doubted the politician would mention that he was looking for his daughters from human traffickers. The trio of girls would link him to enough problems as it was. Even so, Reid promised himself that he would put in a call to his friend in Interpol, Agent Vicente Baraf, and make sure that he was aware of Varga’s transgressions.

  But that would have to wait.

  The young couple had told him it was a forty-five-minute drive to Staremesto. Reid bet himself he could make it there in half that.

  I just need a vehicle. Something fast.

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  “No!” Maya screamed from the back of the white windowless cargo van as the Slavic men reached for her sister. She pushed herself in front of Sara, her arms out, feet planted, trying anything to keep them from taking her away, from separating them.

  Powerful arms grabbed onto hers and yanked her from the van. She tried to resist, but they were strong, much stronger than she was. They pulled her easily through the open rear doors and flung her to the ground. She landed hard on her hands and knees in gravel.

  When Maya turned again, she saw another of the Slavic men grabbing Sara, wrapping her in a bear hug and pulling her out of the van. Sara did not scream or cry out, but there was some sign of life in her as she struggled against his grip, legs kicking, her face bright red and teeth gritted. But the man held her with her arms pinned to her sides, and her attempts to wriggle free were fruitless.

  This is it, Maya told herself. This is the only opportunity you’ll get. She leapt up from her hands and feet and rushed at the closest Slav, the one that had thrown her to the ground. She barreled into him hard with both hands and knocked him off balance, into the van. Then she turned and kicked out her foot, striking another trafficker in the crotch.

  He grimaced, and then responded with a swinging backhand to her face.

  Maya was again forced to the ground, her cheek stinging and stars in her vision. Get up. Her legs felt weak. You can’t fail now. Or you’ll never see her again.

  She heard a primal scream behind her—not one of pain or anguish, but of anger. When she turned again, Jersey had leapt upon the Slav’s back. The Latina girl had both arms around his neck, pulling with all her might as wet chokes escaped his lips.

  Maya wanted to rise, to help her, to fight back, but something pressed against the back of her skull. Hard, unforgiving, unmistakable.

  The Slav reached up behind him and grabbed Jersey by the shoulders. He twisted his body and threw the girl down to the gravel. She landed hard on her back beside Maya.

  “Stupid girl,” hissed the man behind her. Maya closed her eyes. She had failed. She waited for a bullet to end her life.

  But then the pressure of the barrel subsided. She dared to glance over her shoulder. The Slav towered over her, seeming to be impossibly tall, with deep-set eyes and a chin bristled in coarse hair. He had a submachine gun in his hand, but it was not pointed at Maya.

  “No!” she shrieked again, but her cry was drowned out by a short blast from the gun.

  Jersey’s body jerked once in the gravel and fell still.

  Maya froze, breathing hard as her vision instantly blurred. This girl had spent her last moments alive trying to help her sister, a complete stranger to her. I didn’t even know her real name.

  Tears ran freely down both cheeks as she looked up at her sister, hanging limp in the grip of the Slav, her legs swinging uselessly. She had stopped struggling, merely staring down in shock at the body on the ground.

  Then the man behind Maya grabbed her roughly by a handful of hair. She cried out in surprise and pain as he dragged her to her feet, barking at his comrades in their foreign language. The Slav holding Sara stalked off with her still in his arms.

  The horrifying reality seemed to have finally set in with her then. Sara writhed anew, legs kicking at the man’s thighs and shins, shrieking for her sister. “Maya!” she screamed. “Maya!”

  Maya squirmed, trying desperately to pull free, but she was held tight.

  What can I do? she thought in an agonizing panic. What can I do? What would Dad do?

  No answers came to her as the man carried Sara toward the open compartment of a waiting boxcar.

  It was only then that Maya noticed their surroundings. There was a train, but this was not a station. There was no platform; only gravel beneath her feet. A freight train terminal, she realized.

  Get the details, her mind told her. It’s all you can do.

  Her gaze flitted left and right as the Slav held her head still. There were no signs, at least none that she could see. There were boxcars, several of them, most a solid color and a few with logos and words on them, but in a foreign language.

  Wait. She spotted one word that she recognized. Warszawa. Polish for Warsaw. Did the boxcar come from Warsaw, or is going there? Are we in Poland? It didn’t matter. It was something.

  She could only watch as the Slav shoved her sister into the open compartment, followed by the two other girls who had been in the van with them. Red boxcar. Two down from the Warszawa one. There—a number, twenty-three, stenciled on the side in yellow.

  Then the Slav slid the door to the boxcar closed, affording Maya one last glimpse of her sister’s frantic, frightened face.

  As she stood there in place, trembling, she felt a sharp pinch against her upper arm. She flinched and tried to pull away, but the Slav pushed the plunger at the back of the syringe.

  She was being drugged.

  He yanked the needle from her skin and tugged on her hair, pulling her backward. She took awkward steps to keep up, gasping as he half-dragged her across a set of tracks to another waiting train. A second trafficker followed, and together they li
fted her up and forced her into the open door of a boxcar.

  Then they slid the door shut after her.

  Maya trembled from head to toe, nearly hyperventilating. She didn’t know how much time she had before the drug took effect and rendered her as useless as the girls she had seen on the plane and in the van, but it couldn’t be more than a couple of minutes.

  And she needed to get a message written.

  She pulled off one of her black flip-flops. The nylon straps met in the middle and were secured by a small metal clip. She could hardly see a thing inside the boxcar, but she felt for the clip and pulled as hard as she could. It yanked free of the shoe and slid off the nylon straps. She pried the small curled piece of metal with her fingers, feeling it sink into the flesh of her thumb as she did. It was sharp; sharp enough for what she needed.

  A wave of dizziness washed over her, but Maya shook her head, forcing herself to stay alert for just a minute longer. She sat on the floor of the boxcar, pulled up one pant leg of her pajamas, and pressed the metal clip to the skin of her calf.

  Carefully, and without being able to see what she was doing, she traced the letter “R” with the sharp corner of the metal clip. Teeth gritted against the pain and fighting off the drowsiness threatening to consume her, she carved an “E.”

  Slowly she wrote out her message: R-E-D. 2-3. P-O-L-A… The metal clip fell from her fingers as her muscles relaxed against her will and she slipped into unconsciousness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  Reid slowed the motorcycle as he approached the Macicka Club, but he did not stop. He cruised on for another block and turned down an alley, stowing the red and black sports bike among a collection of metal trash cans. He separated the ignition wires and replaced the plastic plate, and then hiked quickly back toward the club.

  After he hotwired the motorcycle he had found in the parking garage in Bratislava, it had taken him only twenty minutes to reach Staremesto. He stopped just long enough to ask for directions at a twenty-four-hour convenience store from a cashier behind a plate of thick glass, and then another five minutes to find the club.