Edge of the Heat 5

by Lisa Ladew

  Jerry looked around. The sun was rising now. He could see the terrain well. “Is there somewhere close by we can set up camp? Maybe we should break for the day. Let you rest.”

  Sara shook her head. “No, we have to get up there.” She pointed where she wanted to go. “The sun will bake us right here.”

  “OK, let’s just have some water and then we’ll move on.”

  Sara nodded, looking relaxed and sad.

  When they got moving again, Sara started talking again.

  “We didn’t know what to do with the body, so my dad called Thorpe. He was scared to death to do it, but he did. Thorpe flew down himself to take care of it. Afterwards he came to our house and said he wanted to talk to me alone. My dad thought he’d be hard on me and didn’t want me to, but I saw Thorpe’s eyes. He wasn’t upset. He was excited. I told my dad I’d be OK and went for a walk with him. I was right. Thorpe said he knew why I did it. Then he said that the country was full of brothels just like that, and many of them had little girls like Lupe in them. He said I could save them though. He said I could do it just like I had done this one, but I’d get more support from now on. He said he could imagine a place where human trafficking just didn’t exist anymore. Where people were too scared to steal babies and little kids because they knew it would be a death sentence. He said he would start a foundation for me that found the mothers and fathers of kids like Lupe, and if they couldn’t find the parents they would find them homes, and if they couldn’t find homes they could live at the foundation. He said he would provide therapy and care so that none of them felt like they just had to end it all. He sold me a vision and I bought it. I bought the whole package.”

  Sara took a deep breath and plunged forward in her story while they walked, their path steadily on the incline.

  “I started to get missions that didn’t involve my dad. He accepted this, but never seemed happy about it. Now, I was a real agent though. My support staff treated me like I was in charge, and I fell into the role willingly enough. But over time they became more of a liability than anything. I only did a few missions the way Thorpe set them up for me, and then I started doing them on my own. I would enter a place as a street prostitute looking for a pimp or a permanent bed. I would stay a few days and figure out what was going on inside. Sometimes I just left them alone, if there was nothing worse than adult women willingly selling themselves. Sometimes I would go in and come back out with 5 or 6 children. Frequently there were teenage girls who acted like they were OK with being there, but really they were terrified and terrorized. I became an expert at convincing them that I could help them - that they didn’t have to live like that. And Thorpe was true to his word. He set up an amazing foundation that is still funded today throughout Mexico and South America.

  Thorpe let me have free reign as long as I would do missions for him when he needed one. He would give me a name and instructions and I would be expected to drop what I was doing and carry the warning, or sometimes even to kill someone. By the time I was 21, I had freed over 54 children under the age of 12 and 138 under the age of 18. I had also killed 9 men. My father was a basket-case because of it. He hated the killing especially. He retired and refused to talk to me about the agency at all. I obliged him, and pretended that I was a kindergarten teacher when I went home to visit him. It was strange. I finally figured out that he was starting an early decline into old-age and illness. The stress of the changes at the agency had put strain on him. Eventually I had to take him to the U.S. where he moved in with his sister. She took care of him.

  Back in Mexico, if I ran into trouble of any type Thorpe had a clean up team on it in hours. But I began to get frustrated. It seemed that no matter what I did, things never slowed down. Every time I cleaned out an illegal brothel that dealt in trafficking and got rid of the person in charge, someone else just took his place. I watched the stories in the U.S. and the funnels from Mexico to the U.S. and the U.S. to Mexico never slowed either, like he swore they would. That was the reason we were doing this in the first place. Supposedly our over-arching mission was to reduce trafficking for the U.S.

  I began experimenting. My first experiment was a run down place near the border. I went in and found the worst conditions I’d seen so far. And there were 4 young children being held captive here. 3 young girls and a boy. Plus there were 8 girls between the ages of 12 and 16. I got them all out to the foundation, then I went back and slaughtered almost every man in the building. The only ones who were safe were the regular johns with adult women. Everyone else I killed. I did that twice more. And my reputation started growing. I began to get nicknames. You’ve heard a couple of them. I became this mythical creature. Some swore I was a monster or an apparition, like the chupacabra. And finally things did start to slow down. Finally I would go into brothels and there would be no children. And every place I went there would be stories about the butcher of Mexico, a lovely girl, who would kill you if you stole children.”

  Jerry interrupted her. “How is it that no one recognized you when you went in to a brothel as a prostitute?”

  She smiled. “You have to remember, this was before the days of cell phones and digital photos. No one took pictures of the prostitutes. They were non-people. And it’s not like I stood out. I looked like everyone else. Besides, I had a knack for disguise. I made myself look a little different every time. Some people would describe me as having short hair, some with long. Some said I had black hair, some said blondish. Some said my skin was fair, some said dark. They were all right.”

  She got back to her story.

  “I also started to see bands or groups of local women who would swarm local brothels and take in any teenage girls or children they found. This surprised me the most. It was like I started a movement or something. I didn’t create these groups, or encourage them, and sometimes the women in them would get hurt or even killed, but most times the men would stand back and let them come in, let them search the place and free the children. It was an incredibly gratifying thing to witness. They would sew cloth banners that had a picture of a large knife on them, and carry them to the brothels. They would say they were there in my name or with my blessing. And the men in the brothels would be terrified that if they stopped the women I would show up and they would all die. These women could just march in, take the children, and march out. Their pictures would be in the paper the next day. The children would all get new homes or reunited with their families if they could be found. It was even better than Thorpe’s foundation.

  Eventually I branched out of Mexico. I went to Guatemala, then Honduras, with Thorpe’s blessing. I noticed the pattern start all over again. I set in to work. I became computerized. I started keeping extensive records above and beyond what the agency wanted.

  Then one day something happened that made me question my purpose, the agency, my country, and my entire life. I was doing scouting in Honduras, and living in a hotel. When I came in one night I had a package at the front desk. It was a manila envelope and inside it were 7 pictures. The pictures were all of Thorpe and different men. Each one of the men was someone I had killed on his orders.”

  Jerry sucked in a breath. He could see where this was going. Sara looked at him with an odd expression on her face. They were both breathing heavy from the steady incline. Sara had led them to a way up the ridge line and they were going higher and higher in the now full daylight.

  “One thing you have to understand now, is that when I went into a place it was never just prostitution and trafficking going on there. There were always drugs, money and weapons too. Always. I didn’t ever care about the drugs, money, or weapons, but when it seemed like there was just too much, I would call in one of Thorpe’s clean up teams. And they would do whatever they did with the drugs, money, and weapons. I never thought about it much. That was someone else’s job.

  Back to the pictures. Each picture in the envelope was dated. Each picture was obviously surveillance and showed Thorpe in a heated discussion with the man. Alwa
ys he looked like he was trying to convince them of something. The pictures were in restaurants or homes. That confused me. Why would Thorpe be dining with criminals. And what would he be trying to convince them of? I took the pictures to my room, not even bothering to ask who had left them. It would be a dead end. I abandoned Honduras and flew home. I checked my old reports, and discovered each picture was taken approximately 1 week before I was given the order to kill the man.

  With the pictures was a note. It was handwritten and said ‘The wolf is not what he seems.’ Cryptic. Almost silly. Why not say ‘Thorpe is not what he seems.’? Thorpe was not known as The Wolf, as far as I knew.

  I thought a lot about who had sent the pictures. It had to be someone very high up in the agency. Someone who knew about me and knew much about Thorpe. Someone with their own agenda. But suddenly Thorpe’s agenda was called into question by the very fact that the pictures existed. I had to know. I told Thorpe I was taking a vacation. I’d never taken one. At this point I was 23 years old, and the agency, plus my obsession had become my whole life.”

  Sara broke off and dropped her pack and the cot she was dragging. The movement broke into Jerry’s reverie, where he was seeing the things Sara was describing. “Be right back!” she yelled and then bounded up the side of a huge boulder to stand on top of it. Jerry watched her go in amazement. She didn’t even look tired. He felt exhausted.

  Sara turned in a circle and examined the land around them. Jerry looked back the way they had came and saw the desert shine gorgeous in the morning light. It stretched on forever in every direction. Not a house or car or road to be seen. Just oranges and purples and muted chocolate browns spreading across the landscape.

  Sara slipped back down the side of the boulder and landed on her feet in front of him. “I know you’re tired. We’ll stop soon, but we have to get just a little closer to that area first, just in case. It looks like there’s a spring there.” She motioned with her finger and Jerry saw it. A line of trees on the other side of the ridge line, set close together. “I’m pretty certain that Thorpe won’t send dogs after us, at least not until it’s too late, but better safe than sorry is the spy’s motto.”

  Jerry smiled, despite the weariness that had slammed into him when they stopped moving. “I thought that was the boy scout motto?”

  “Oh no,” Sara said. “That’s always do what you’re told.”

  Jerry barked a laugh in spite of himself. He’d rarely seen this light, playful Sara. Maybe this was what she was always like when she was being chased by madmen across the desert? When she was in her element, in other words.

  As the orange light grew across the desert, they walked. And Sara talked.

  Chapter 25

  Sara snuck a glance at Jerry out of the corner of her eye. The morning light favored him. His strong face looked at peace out in the wild, and the young beard stubble made him look sexy as hell. She’d always wondered why more men didn’t just walk around with a day or two worth of growth on their face. Women loved it. Or at least she did. That was one thing about American guys. They shaved too much.

  She was surprised that he hadn’t asked more questions. He seemed to just accept her story, and her. And she was really surprised that he seemed so at peace with her past. She knew how idealistic he was - how much he valued life. And yet he hadn’t batted an eye when she said she had killed 9 men, then more.

  A pang of emotion ran through her again and this time she recognized it immediately for what it was. Deep, deep longing. Deep longing to never have been placed in the super-spy program. To not know that spies existed outside of the movies. To be a normal person who lived a normal life: school, work, falling in love, the big wedding, the two kids, the house, the mortgage, the vacations to the beach - all of it.

  Sara shut it down. She was one of the people who made all of that possible for everyone else, that was all. Not everyone could live like that.

  She took a drink of water and started talking again, not noticing how hard her voice had become.

  “My vacation created more questions than it answered. I didn’t have a lot of money. The Agency always provided everything for me, so I had never spent much of my salary, but I sent my father money every month, and I sent the foundation money every month, and I gave the girls at the foundation almost everything else I had. So suddenly I was trying to do spy work with no budget. And in America. America is very expensive compared to Mexico. I have always been an American citizen, so that part was easy, but nothing else was. But I made do. I didn’t have one contact outside of Mexico who wasn’t in the agency so I started calling the men and women I had gone to camp with. I wanted to be careful, and not tip off Thorpe that I was suspicious of him suddenly, so I couldn’t ask anything about him. But I got together with a few people. We gossiped. I found out what most everyone was doing. This seemed to be a dead end to me so I followed Thorpe. I watched him. But from a great distance. I discovered that a woman I had gone to camp with was his personal bodyguard. This surprised me. Why would he need a bodyguard in the U.S.? And she was very alert, like she was constantly dealing with trouble. Thorpe had his own jet. He flew off and left me in America, unable to follow him. I soon discovered that what I was doing wasn’t working.

  I flew back to Mexico and formulated a new plan. The pictures hadn’t made my work any less important to me, but they’d called Thorpe’s work into question. So for the time being I just kept on doing what I was already doing, with a few small changes. I didn’t have the lust for blood anymore. So I stopped killing people if I could help it. I woke the women and told them to run with the children to the foundation. For the first time I contacted a woman who was in charge of the local gang that was doing my work, and I asked her to wait for the fleeing women and children and take care of them. I took what money I could carry, and set the drugs and weapons caches on fire. I would make sure at least one man was able to raise the alarm, and then I left them to whatever fate decided. I did this twice before Thorpe flew down to see me.

  I knew he would come, but I didn’t know he would be so angry. It was a strange thing. It seemed to me that he cared deeply about the money and the weapons. Usually I left them to be cleaned by one of his teams, but now I was destroying them. I asked him what his teams did with the money and the weapons. I could tell immediately that what he told me was a rehearsed lie. He said the money (it was always mostly American dollars) was examined to be determined if it was from a crime of some sort and returned to the rightful owner if so, or returned to the U.S. Treasury if not. And the guns were destroyed. I asked why did it matter if I destroyed them, then. He spouted off about government accountability and responsibility and basically said nothing at all.

  I told him I didn’t care about any of that. My mission was human trafficking - child trafficking - and that was all I cared about. And I needed to do things how I saw fit. He argued with me and said if I cared about the children I would have to do things the way they’d always been done. He said without the backing of the U.S. Government I’d never be able to work in the same scope as I had been. And he was right. I knew that.

  So I backed down. I kept doing missions, but I always took as much money as I could carry at each one now. I needed a bankroll. And I kept investigating him. I found an asset who could hack into the U.S. government computers. I’d had some hacking training, but nothing on that scale. My asset taught me how to get in using back doors, how to hack into other people’s security codes, and how to sift through mountains of data. It wasn’t easy, but it was possible.

  I started reading Thorpe’s reports of my own missions. I hadn’t kept detailed logs about drugs, money, or weapons because that wasn’t important to me, but looking over my reports and dredging up my memory, I discovered that Thorpe’s reports were vastly under-reported. The amount of drugs reported destroyed seemed unremarkable, but the reports of weapons and money recovered were so low it was laughable.”

  Sara stopped and looked at Jerry. He had a sour, tired look on h
is face. He was a smart man and he knew where this was going. She also knew they were done for the day. This had to be good enough, because to push them any farther would be dangerous for them. She couldn’t take a chance of disabling one of them on their first day out.

  “We should stop,” she told him. “I’ll finish this tonight.”

  He blinked and looked around. “OK. Where should we stop?”

  They were on the top of a small ridge, with a view of the desert for miles and miles in every direction. There were no trees, just a few cacti and boulders, plus scrub brush lining the ground.

  Sara stretched backwards, feeling her spine crackle. She let her eyes wander, not looking at anything in particular. Her eyes would know it without her brain’s interference. She turned in a circle and let her eyes do their thing. Her vision zeroed in on a spot to the right. Two boulders stacked against each other, leaning against the ridge. “There,” she pointed.

  She knew it wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do. They walked to it and dropped their packs. Sara took out one tarp from the pack and fashioned a crude sun shade, just big enough for one person between the bottom of the two rocks where they opened up a bit. She lined this spot with their jackets, making a sort of bed.

  “You can sit down if you want. I need to do a few things. Go ahead and drink plenty of water too - we can only carry two days worth and I should be able to collect enough to replace what we drink.”

  Jerry grunted and sat. He took his boots off and his feet sighed in relief. If he’d known he was going to be hiking through the desert for a week he would have worn different shoes. He took out a bottle of water and drank it down swiftly. He took out another and drained half of it. He almost poured the rest over his face to wash the dust off and then caught himself. They were in the desert. Was that really a good idea?

  He watched Sara. She had walked a dozen yards away and was digging a hole in the ground with the small, foldable e-tool she had found in the shed back at the house. It looked like hard work to Jerry. All of a sudden he felt like a jerk for sitting here and drinking water - almost talking a bath in it - while she was working. He laced his boots back up with a small pang of regret as they confined his feet again, then ran over to her. “Can I help?”