Lost Girls

by George D. Shuman

  Right now her cheek was pressed against the wooden door, her voice barely above a whisper. “Anmwe! Anmwe!” she called out to the man.

  There was a long moment of hesitation before he looked her way, his eyes darting up and down the corridor before he turned to study the door.

  “Souple anmwe,” she’d begged.

  The man in the green pants was walking toward her, squinting as he put his eye to the small window of her cell.

  It had never occurred to her that she might go numb if he actually did walk up to her, but now he had and for one long moment she found herself speechless.

  “Ki yès sa?” the operator whispered hesitantly.

  She tried to collect herself, not to stammer as he put his eyes to the slit and looked in on her. Along with a flood of relief she felt, in some small way, embarrassed. This was not how she’d wanted to be seen by anyone, not ever. But here he was and there was no time for that now. She’d have to use the moment wisely.

  “Souple, van mwen kreyon paye.” Paper and pencil, she’d begged. She knew few words of his language so she wanted to write it down. She needed to get it right. She needed him to take her message to someone on the outside.

  “Souple, ban mwen”—please give me—“paye kreyon. Prese, prese!”—pencil and paper. Please hurry!

  There had been no way to gauge understanding by the look on the man’s face. He had the look of a witness of a terrible accident when he stumbled away from her cell door. His expression was of pity and revulsion all wrapped up in one. She couldn’t blame him. She could only imagine what she must look like by now, half naked and living on a bare dirt floor, face disfigured by a grinning skull tattoo. Not to mention the little blond girl balled up in a corner behind her. Jill had begun sucking her thumb. They must look worse than pathetic, the two of them.

  And had she said it right? Had it made sense to him? She only knew what little Creole she had learned from listening to the guards speak, in combination with French she’d learned in the university in Warsaw.

  But perhaps the bigger question was, Would he dare to do what she asked? Would he come back again or would he tell Bedard what she’d said?

  Which was why she had been terrified when the man walked away without responding; it was like watching hope itself walk away, every step making it harder to hold on to. With every step she worried she might never see him again.

  The man in the green pants had first come to the castle a week ago. He was with Bedard at the time. They were in the room opposite her cell, a map spread out on the wooden platform that was used to display and discipline them in front of each other. The man in green pants tapped on the ancient walls with his hammer. Then they left. Two days later he returned and the drilling started. The man in green pants began making fist-sized holes high in the walls at regular intervals.

  She pressed her eye to the slit in the door and watched him as long as she could. The guards were off drunk as usual, probably on their second or third bottle of rum for the day. She had heard them laughing earlier; they rolled dice and smoked ganja when Bedard was not around and Bedard had not been around for more than a week, not since the day he brought in the man with green pants.

  He was not supposed to be here now without an escort, she was sure. She could tell by the expression on his face he had not known what this place was used for, had not known until he heard her calling out to him that there were actually people behind these wooden doors.

  Something had definitely been different about these last days in the cellar. First the trucks that used to regularly bring girls to the compound had stopped coming. Then Bedard began spending more and more time away from the castle. And the man in green pants was the first civilian she’d seen since arriving here. She knew the moment she saw him that she had to take the risk.

  She scraped the grime of sweat and dirt from her face with the heels of both hands. She closed her eyes to a wave of vertigo that accompanied the beginning of an ear infection and sat down, hugging her knees to her chest. The temperature in the cells soared by midmorning. She opened her eyes and looked up through a dusty shaft of light from the air vent; it was like a laser slicing the cell in two.

  She’d marveled of late how simple this whole human trafficking business was, so simple and yet beyond the grasp of most educated people. It was a paradox if ever there was one.

  Where criminals had advanced—or declined, as many would see it—to trade in human beings, one would expect a sophisticated, rather than trite, display of resources. But there was nothing sophisticated about it. In fact, there was something primitive, base about the whole thing, something that brought cattle to Aleksandra’s mind. Cattle didn’t end up as your Sunday roast at the hands of sterile men in starched white smocks. Cattle stood in their own shit waiting to be rendered unconscious by a metal rod fired into their head so they could be hung by their legs and bled to death. It was a lot more about gore and men in rubber suits than green pastures and sterile deli counters. It was a lot more like that in harvesting humans too. There were no big thinkers here.

  It began with lies and rusty freighters, stripped-out airplanes and filthy cargo trucks. You spent your days in dark holds and cages. Then you were beaten and raped and addicted to heroin. When you were finally—and thoroughly—broken, you were ready for market. Then you spent the rest of your life servicing strange men.

  Any idiot could have done it, any idiot with no conscience.

  She heard the roar of a jet through the vent, a military jet. It was the third such jet she had heard this week. This was something different, she knew, different altitude, different time of day. It was a different sound from the commercial jets beginning their approach to whatever airport lay nearby. Something was going on out there, someone was finally taking a look at this godforsaken country.

  10

  PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

  Brigham sat at the head of the table in Sherry’s dining room. Sherry sat in the middle, facing the man Brigham introduced only as Graham. She didn’t know where Graham worked and no one was going to tell her, Sherry understood. It was a conversation of courtesy and one that never took place.

  Brigham had been reluctant about opening dialogue over Sherry’s vision from the moment he’d learned who the dead climber hanging off the side of Denali was.

  He reminded Sherry that she wasn’t bound by any legal or moral edict to “act on every damned thing she happened to see in a dying man’s head.” It was like she was looking for trouble when there was already more than enough trouble waiting out there in the world. Not to mention the phone calls and letters she received each day beseeching her to become involved in this or that.

  “Can’t you just stick to serial killers and sociopaths?” he’d said jokingly, but he really wasn’t joking. “You don’t need this,” he’d told her. “You really don’t need this, Sherry.”

  “I have to know,” she’d said stubbornly. And at last Brigham had conceded.

  And told her that she had tapped into the last memories of Sergio Mendoza, son of Thiago Mendoza, head of the most powerful cocaine cartel in the world.

  And now this man Graham was sitting across the table from her.

  It was surreal in a way. It wasn’t the kind of conversation one might have about things found in the newspaper today.

  “So Sergio was not part of his father’s cartel, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Never even visited Colombia until last year,” Graham said. His mother wouldn’t permit it after the divorce. She’d lost two of Sergio’s older brothers to drugs before she left her husband, one killed by a bullet that was meant for his father in the city of Medellín.”

  “What did Sergio do as a child? Until he turned thirty?”

  Graham seemed amused by the question. “His father was the twenty-second richest man in the world. He grew up in Monte Carlo and played polo around the Mediterranean. What else would he do? Yachts, women, casinos, he was a kid in life’s candy store.”

&
nbsp; “And he was an adventurer. He climbed mountains,” Sherry said. “Two in Tibet, I’m told. Two before Denali.”

  “So what brought him out? After all those years of avoiding his father’s lifestyle?”

  “His mother died of myelogenous leukemia two years ago. Sergio was living in Monaco when Thiago was diagnosed a year later with cancer of the pancreas. Sergio decided to come home. I guess he was looking for roots and his father was all he had left. We knew that Sergio stayed with his father in Colombia the whole time he was undergoing chemotherapy. They were flying him in and out of Dallas that year.”

  “Wasn’t Thiago wanted by the FBI?”

  “He was dying, Miss Moore, we knew it because we saw the medical reports. There were more interesting things to learn by watching him in his final months than placing him under arrest. Actually, that was how we first identified Sergio. As you know, the press hasn’t even picked up on him. The paparazzi had lost interest in the boy years earlier when his mother remarried. By the time he came to South America he was an unknown.”

  “Thiago died two months ago?”

  Graham nodded. “Funeral was in Barranquilla.”

  “And the boy from Monte Carlo suddenly becomes heir to the biggest drug cartel in Colombia.”

  “A gift I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy,” Graham said.

  “Because he wasn’t prepared for the lifestyle?”

  “Exactly. He had no history, no support system. He had just become an assassination target for his competitors, men long intimidated by his father’s political connections in Bogotá. Sergio did not have his father’s power or respect. He only had the land and money and that would not have kept him alive for very long in Colombia.”

  “Was he close to his father in the end?”

  “I can’t say he was close, but he was certainly getting involved in the business. The old man’s inner circle closed around him. They had to be worried for their own safety and were probably trying to get him in control as fast as they could.”

  “Sergio thought he could continue his father’s legacy?”

  “We had no doubt. At least at first.”

  “And this building, this castle I told you about, the things that I saw, what could it possibly have to do with the Mendozas and cocaine?”

  “Ah, yes,” Graham said, “a very good question, Miss Moore. I guess the simple answer is that the cartel, like any corporate model, was paying attention to markets and trends. The black market conduits were already in place. It only made sense to evolve into human trafficking. It would have been foolish to send empty ships home to South America. As for opportunity, they knew they were well ahead of law enforcement. Until 2002, we were still trying to figure out what traffickers were guilty of when customs caught them smuggling a shipload of people.”

  Brigham got up from the table and she heard him open the French doors to the living room, bottles tinkling in the liquor cabinet.

  “The castle or whatever. Do you have any idea where it might have been?”

  “As the admiral pointed out earlier, it may have nothing at all to do with the cartel, it could have been from any place or time in Sergio’s life. The boy had seen a lot growing up. He was worldly. What you saw is exactly the kind of thing he might have encountered in Thailand or Indonesia. We can’t know for sure, but this memory, as you call it, could have been many years old.”

  Sherry smiled inwardly. How uncomfortable this man must be talking about a “memory” seen by a blind woman. Retired admiral aside, Brigham must carry quite some political weight to bring conversation to the table from intelligence analysts or CIA agents or whatever Graham was.

  “But it was more likely a recent memory,” she said. “He thought about it as he was dying. Perhaps it was the memory itself that drove him to the mountaintop.”

  “I understand your theory, Miss Moore, and yes, it’s possible.”

  “So?” Sherry asked. “Do you know where in recent weeks he could have been?”

  “Sergio was photographed with members of the cartel in Venezuela right before he went to Alaska. We also know he traveled from Colombia to the Caribbean with his father’s accountants and bodyguards. It was impossible to account for his every move, but it seems he remained exclusively in the Western Hemisphere after his father’s funeral. Actually, up until the day he died.”

  “How did Sergio end up in Alaska?”

  Brigham reentered the room, took a seat at the table, the sound of his glass on the table.

  “Two weeks ago on a Monday, all hell broke loose at the Mendoza compound in Colombia. Cell phone calls, cars, in and out, helicopters, even military vehicles.”

  “They lost him. He slipped away.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “His head must have been reeling from what he learned about his father’s cartel. About where all that money came from that had supported his lifestyle as a boy,” Sherry said.

  Graham remained silent a long moment.

  “I think it is obvious, Miss Moore, that your theory is correct and the boy was running away from his legacy. I also think it is possible you are describing a location in the Caribbean, an indoctrination camp where they ready women for the market. That is common in the business. I really can’t tell you more.”

  “Will you call me if you learn anything new?” Sherry asked. She appreciated all that Brigham’s friend Graham had told her, but she was still left with the visions from that mountainside. She didn’t want it any longer.

  “I know I have only given you the abstract of the cartel, Miss Moore, but yes, there are people in DEA and Interpol who have a more intimate knowledge of the Mendozas and who certainly know more about human trafficking than I. I’ll do this for you. I’ll place a call to a friend at Interpol. I’ll tell him exactly what we spoke of today and I’ll let him make his own decision about calling you. If he rings one day, fine. If not, I have told you what I could.”

  11

  CONTESTUS

  HAITI

  Aleksandra turned away from the slot in the door, hearing light snoring behind her, and reached down to pet the head of Jill Bishop. The girl’s hair was soaked with sweat, as hot as the walls that radiated around them. She had been sleeping a great deal lately, if you called whimpering and shivering sleeping.

  Aleksandra had entered law enforcement after serving in the Polish army, where she attended Land Forces Military Academy. She was educated in the effects of prolonged stress in battle and knew about the body’s common biological responses. The terror of battle raised blood sugars at the same time it debilitated the body’s ability to digest. When the spleen began to expedite red blood cells to produce more oxygen, high levels of cortisone and adrenaline were pumped into the circulatory system. If the encounter ended quickly, the body’s countermeasures stood down. If the encounter was protracted, the body’s biological responses, some fourteen hundred altogether, would mutate to meet the undue stress. Over time those transformations would begin to take a physiological toll; the person would begin to experience involuntary muscle contractions, nervous tremors, fatigue, intestinal maladies. Eventually he or she would forget things, lose problem-solving abilities, confuse what was vital with the trivial.

  The sleeping girl was almost there, she thought. The sleeping girl was shutting down.

  Aleksandra wiped her hands on her T-shirt and stood again, put her eye to the hole in the door, and looked around the cellar. Then she heard footsteps in the corridor, one person, coming toward her.

  The girl behind her rolled over, moaned, then gasped loudly for air. A second later her breathing returned to normal, and the slow smooth snoring resumed.

  The footsteps were getting closer. Aleksandra’s heart began to pound.

  She tried to control her emotions, head pressed tightly against the wooden door.

  Aleksandra thought once more about destiny. If there really was such a thing, then what was to be her destiny today?

  She sometimes envied the sleeping girl behind her, wo
uld not have minded curling into a ball and sucking her thumb for a day. But then she thought of a young redheaded girl on a ship all those months ago, buried now not far away in the recesses of the castle’s foundation. She didn’t want to end up like her. She didn’t want these despicable men to decide her fate.

  She heard boots scratching dirt—they were only a dozen meters away, would be visible in a moment’s time—and then suddenly the man with green pants was at the door and she felt her heart pounding in her chest.

  Destiny once again flickered through her thoughts. To believe in destiny was to admit that all that had happened was preordained, that every victim in life was born to suffer their fate, born to come to ruin on a particular day and time. It was such an unfair scenario, and yet could it be that destiny worked in opposing directions? For both good and bad? If destiny had brought her here, could it also have brought the man in green pants to her rescue?

  His hand went to the slit in the door and through it he pushed a small cylinder. Then he turned and walked away.

  Oh my God, oh my God. Her lips formed the words without sound.

  She kept her eye on him until he was gone, then she slid back to the door, until she was sitting in the dirt and facing her spent cellmate. Aleksandra reached for the cylinder and unrolled it, heart pounding, tears welling in her eyes.

  It was a single cigarette paper wound around the stub of a lead pencil.

  It was almost too hard to believe. They had a real chance now. They might yet come out of this alive, she thought.

  She knew she had no control over what the man did with the paper once he left here. Who he saw and what he did with it was completely up to him. She could only pray that he was as wise as he was compassionate. That he would know who to give the note to. That they would call the phone number in Warsaw that she would write.