“What happened back there?” he finally asked.
“I took precautions.”
“What the hell are you talking about? We were almost killed!”
“Not even close,” I said. I reached into the pocket of my white doctor’s coat and fished out a handful of metal spindle-like objects. I held open my palm for him to see. Each one was about three or four inches long and looked like a very thick knitting needle but with the flanged head of a pushpin. I jingled them for a few seconds. “These little jackrabbits won’t be spooking any dogs today.”
Slowly he began chuckling, his laugh growing steadily louder. “You bastard,” he said. “You removed the firing pins. When you said you were going to get the ‘defibrillator.’ But wasn’t the weapons cabinet locked?”
“Of course,” I said, and I produced the battery-powered lock pick from my medical bag.
Breaking down a rifle, removing the firing pin, and reassembling it takes a few seconds if you’ve done it before. And I have. Better, I figured, to leave the rifles there but hobbled than to hide them someplace and force the guards to resort to their fully functioning semiautomatic pistols. That way, their hands were occupied holding eight pounds of useless metal.
“You could have told me, you know. When I saw those rifles I almost wet my pants.”
“I would have enjoyed that.”
He squinted his eyes, unamused.
“Actually, I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.” Until it was too late, of course, I saw no reason to tell him. Then I didn’t have the opportunity. “I like to plan for the worst.”
“This is plan B?”
“No,” I said. “Plan A. Turns out we didn’t need plan B.”
“Remind me never to make an enemy out of you.”
“Never a good idea,” I said.
“You didn’t kill no one.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“No. It’s better.”
“But if we’d had to…?”
He was silent for a long time. He looked back at the unconscious or maybe semiconscious girl on the stretcher in the back. “She’s fifteen?”
I nodded.
“It is good thing Soler was not in the house.”
“How so?”
“Any man who can take away the innocence of a fifteen-year-old girl…” I was surprised by the quiet ferocity in his voice. “This is a man who needs killing.”
* * *
Benito had hired a private medical evacuation flight, an air ambulance run by a jet charter company in Barcelona. They made all the arrangements, preclearing passports with the Guardia Civil at El Prat Airport, in order to expedite matters. When there’s a medical emergency, the Guardia Civil can be extremely cooperative.
Benito helped us board the converted Learjet 35, which was equipped with a flight stretcher and IV equipment and was staffed by a small medical team, a paramedic and a nurse, even though I didn’t need them. The nurse, a young man, and the paramedic, a young woman, were both Spanish. Benito explained to them that I had the patient stabilized and would supervise her care. They seemed a little put off that their services weren’t required, but they obediently took seats in the aft section of the plane and watched sullenly, with nothing to do, clearly wishing they’d brought something to read or a Sudoku book or a deck of cards or something.
Benito gave me a quick embrace and a backslap. “You have my mobile number,” he said. “If you ever need my help again…”
I nodded and thanked him.
We were airborne twenty-five minutes later, en route to London. I sat next to the stretcher, where Svetlana was strapped in, face up. Her A-shirt had come up, exposing her belly, and I couldn’t help glancing.
What I saw sickened me.
Her abdomen was crisscrossed with raised red welts that looked like they’d been made by a rawhide whip or maybe an electrical cord. I could see that the long welts extended to her lower back, and probably to her buttocks as well.
She’d been beaten, savagely and repeatedly.
But the beatings weren’t recent. Some of the welts were deep red and had begun to fade. Some of them had turned into angry new scars. There were also bruises that had gone yellow and blue and purple, indicating that they were several days old, probably more than a week.
She’d barely been a prisoner at Soler’s house for forty-eight hours. These beatings had been administered long before that.
After a while Svetlana began to stir and make little noises. Her eyes came open briefly, then closed. Her face went through a series of expressions. She wrinkled her nose, frowned. Then she made a heaving, retching sound. I was there just in time with a kidney-shaped vomit bowl and a cool washcloth.
“Hey,” I said softly a few minutes later as I released her from the gurney’s restraining straps. “Feel any better?”
She sat up and glared at me. Her eyes looked a little out of focus.
“That’s probably just a reaction to the sedative,” I said. “I’m sorry we had to do that, but you weren’t exactly cooperating. You were scared. I can’t blame you.”
“Where…where am I?” she asked in English with a strong Ukrainian accent.
I told her my name again. “Your father hired me to get you out of Soler’s house.”
“You say you work for my…father?”
“I don’t work for him. I was hired by him to do this one job. In about two hours we’ll be landing at Gatwick Airport. You’ll be home. Not a prisoner anymore.”
“A prisoner?” she said. “I wasn’t a prisoner. I was finally safe!”
I spoke very softly. “I’m sure that’s what Soler wanted you to think.”
“Goddamn you!” Then she uttered a profanity that I hadn’t heard since the Special Forces. Not something I expected out of the mouth of a fifteen-year-old girl. “Was his name Vadim Kuzma?”
I looked at her.
“This man isn’t my father! Vadim Kuzma hired you to kidnap me!”
* * *
She must have suddenly gotten self-conscious about her thin cotton A-shirt and her welts and bruises, because she folded her arms across her chest. I handed her my ancient, well-worn commando sweater. Army issue. You couldn’t buy those anymore. Now they were made of acrylic and way too scratchy. She looked at the coarse ribbed wool, the shoulder and elbow patches, with distaste, as if it were some filthy rag I’d picked up off the street, but she pulled it over her head anyway. It pooled around her, made her look like a little girl playing dress-up on the floor of her daddy’s closet.
Except for her face. There was, I now saw, a cynicism, a jadedness in her eyes that she was far too young to have.
It took a good half an hour before I was able to convince her that it was safe to talk. She clearly lived in fear of Kuzma. I assured her that I had friends in the U.S. embassy in London who could arrange for her to return to Ukraine immediately.
“I ran away from home almost two years ago,” she said. “We lived in a village in Ukraine called Povvysoke, my mother and me, but I had to leave. I was…drowning. Suffocating. I found a job in Odessa as a waitress, dancing on tables at a bar, and then a man came one day and said I was beautiful and asked if I wanted to be a model. I could make thousands of pounds a day. What should I say?”
“It was a prostitution ring,” I said. Odessa, Ukraine’s port city, had become one of the world’s hot spots for the international sex trade. The police there were underfunded and overbribed. Organized crime rings dispatched scouts there to recruit vulnerable young girls with bogus offers of glamorous jobs in foreign cities, as dancers or models or actresses, with promises that they could make a fortune. Russian and Ukrainian girls were particularly in demand.
She nodded. “They sell you to rich men in Turkey and Italy and the Emirates. But I was sold to this Ukrainian bastard who lives in London. Because he likes girls from his home country.”
“How much money did you make from the deal?”
She looked down and didn’t answer. Afte
r a long moment, she said, “I was his sex slave. Sometimes there are as many as six of us living in his house. But I think I must be his prize possession, because he takes me with him when he traveled to show me off.”
“He trusted you not to run?”
“He kept my passport. So where can I run?”
“He beat you.” A statement, not a question.
Her nostrils flared. Her face flushed. At last she nodded. “Only where others could not see. My back and my stomach and my thighs. I have to wear one-piece swimming suit.”
“Why?”
“Why he beats me?” She fell silent again. Then, in a whisper that was barely audible: “Because he can. Because it excites him.”
I felt something cold and hard in my stomach.
“How did you get to José María Soler?
“Kuzma took me with him to Barcelona. At this party I meet Soler. Later, when Kuzma is talking his business in another room, I give Soler a note. I say I am prisoner and I need to escape and I do anything he wants if he will save me from this monster. Later that night a man comes up to me and takes me out a side door without anyone notice and put me in car and drives me to Soler’s house.”
“And what did you have to do for Soler?”
“Nothing.”
I looked skeptical.
“Nothing at all. For what I should lie about this? Soler was negotiating with the Ukrainian government to get me back home to my mother. He said it would take a week or two.”
“And you think he was telling you the truth?”
“I talked to people from the Ukrainian embassy in Madrid. Soler was not lying to me. And now, you take me back to this monster!”
She looked like she was about to cry. I could see that the vulnerable little girl had just broken through the hard shell. She said in a small voice, “Help me.”
I nodded. Put a hand on her forehead and said, “I will.”
* * *
About three hours later I was driving a rented, up-armored Range Rover along Kensington Palace Gardens, talking to Benito on my cell phone. Hands-free, because it’s safer.
“Yes,” Benito said, “I spoke with the consulate in Madrid. It all checks out, what the girl said.”
“Excellent.” I’d come to a traffic light. I glanced down at the Heckler & Koch MP5K on the passenger seat and picked up the long curved magazine. It was full. Thirty rounds.
“So what you gonna do now, my friend?” Benito asked.
I inserted the magazine into its well and slapped the cocking lever forward. Something final about that well-oiled click.
“Plan B,” I said as the light turned green.
READ ON FOR A PREVIEW OF
BURIED SECRETS
JOSEPH FINDER
Available June 2011 From St. Martin’s Press
For info about special offers & Joe’s other novels,
Visit www.JosephFinder.com
Or become a fan on Facebook.
Part One
There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors, and looking them piteously in the eyes, die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burden so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged.
—EDGAR ALLAN POE,
“THE MAN OF THE CROWD” (1840)
1.
If this was what a prison was like, Alexa Marcus thought, I could totally live here. Like, forever.
She and Taylor Armstrong, her best friend, were standing in a long line to get into the hottest bar in Boston. The bar was called Slammer, and it was in a luxury hotel that used to be a jail. They’d even kept the bars in the windows and the huge central rotunda ringed with catwalks, that whole cell-block effect.
She was checking out this bunch of guys behind her who looked like MIT frat boys trying too hard to be cool: the untucked shirts, the cheap blazers, all that product in their hair, the toxic fumes of their Axe body spray. They’d stumble home at two in the morning, puking on the bridge to Cambridge, bitching about how all the girls at Slammer were skanks.
“I’m loving the smoky eye,” Taylor said, studying Alexa’s eye makeup. “See? It looks amazing on you!”
“It took me like an hour,” Alexa said. The fake eyelashes, the black gel eyeliner and charcoal eye shadow: She looked like a hooker who’d been beat up by her pimp.
“Takes me like thirty seconds,” Taylor said. “Now look at you—you’re this totally hot babe instead of a suburban prepster.”
“I’m so not suburban,” Alexa protested. She glanced over at a couple of skinny Euro-looking guys smoking and talking on their mobile phones. Cute but maybe gay? “Dad lives in Manchester.” She’d almost said, “I live in Manchester,” but she no longer thought of the great rambling house she grew up in as her home, not since Dad had married that gold-digger flight attendant, Belinda. She hadn’t lived at home in almost four years, since going away to Exeter.
“Yeah, okay,” Taylor said. Alexa caught her tone. Taylor always had to let you know she was a city kid. She’d grown up in a townhouse on Beacon Hill, in Louisburg Square—her dad was a United States senator—and considered herself urban and therefore cooler and more street-smart than anyone else. Plus, the last three years she’d been in rehab, attending the Marston-Lee Academy, the tough-love “therapeutic boarding school” in Colorado where the senator had sent her to get cleaned up.
Good luck with that.
Every time Taylor came back to Boston on break, she was rocking some different Girls Gone Wild look. Last year she’d dyed her hair jet black and had bangs. Tonight it was the skintight black liquid leggings, the oversized gray sheer tee over the black lace bra, the studded booties. Whereas Alexa, less adventurous, was wearing her ink skinny jeans and her tan Tory Burch leather jacket over a tank top. Okay, not as fashion-forward as Taylor, but no way was it suburban.
“Oh God,” Alexa murmured as the line drew closer to the bouncer.
“Just relax, okay, Lucia?” Taylor said.
“Lucia—?” Alexa began, and then she remembered that “Lucia” was the name on her fake ID. Actually, it was a real ID, just not hers—she was seventeen, and Taylor had just turned eighteen, and the drinking age was twenty-one, which was way stupid. Taylor had bought Alexa’s fake ID off an older girl.
“Just look the bouncer in the eye and be casual,” Taylor said. “You’re totally fine.”
Taylor was right, of course.
The bouncer didn’t even ask to see their IDs. When they entered the hotel lobby, Alexa followed Taylor to the old-fashioned elevator, the kind that had an arrow that pointed to the floor it was on. The elevator door opened, and an iron accordion gate slid aside. Taylor got in along with a bunch of others. Alexa hesitated, slipped in, shuddered—God, she hated elevators!—and just as the accordion gate was knifing closed, she blurted out, “I’ll take the stairs.”
They met up on the fourth floor and managed to snag a couple of big cushy chairs. A waitress in a halter top so skimpy you could see the flower tattoo below her armpit took their order: a couple of Ketel One vodka sodas.
“Check out the girls on the bar,” Taylor shouted. Models in black leather butt-baring shorts and black leather vests were parading around on top of the bar like it was a catwalk.
One of the MIT frat boys tried to mack on them, but Taylor blew the guy off: “Yeah, I’ll give you a call—next time I need tutoring in like differential calculus.”
Alexa felt Taylor’s eyes on her.
“Hey, what’s wrong, kid? You’ve been acting all depressed since you got here.”
“I’m fine.”
“You think maybe you need to change meds or something?”
Alexa shook her head. “Dad’s just, I don’t know, being all weird.”
�
��Nothing new about that.”
“But like he’s all paranoid all of a sudden? He just had these surveillance cameras put in, all around the house?”
“Well, he is like the richest guy in Boston. Or one of the richest—”
“I know, I know,” Alexa interrupted, not wanting to hear it. She’d spent her entire life dealing with being a rich kid: having to play down the money so her friends didn’t feel jealous. “But it’s not his normal control-freak mode, you know? It’s more like he’s scared something’s going to happen.”
“Try living with a father who’s a friggin’ United States senator.”
Taylor had started to look uncomfortable. She rolled her eyes, shook her head dismissively, looked around the now-crowded bar. “I need another drink,” she said. She called the waitress over and asked for a dirty martini. “How about you?” she asked Alexa.
“I’m good.” The truth was, she hated hard liquor, especially vodka. And gin was the worst. How could anyone voluntarily drink that stuff? It was like chugging turpentine.
Alexa’s iPhone vibrated, so she took it out and read the text. A friend at some rager in Allston, telling her it was epic and she should come over. Alexa texted back sorry. Then, abruptly, she said, “Oh my God, oh my God, did I ever show you this?” She flicked through her iPhone applications until she came to one she’d just downloaded, launched it, held the iPhone to her mouth. When she talked into it, her words came out high pitched and weird, like one of the Chipmunks: “Hey, babe, wanna come back to my dorm and take off our clothes and do some algebra?”
Taylor squealed. “What is that?” She tried to grab the phone, but Alexa yanked it away, swiped the screen and started speaking in the creepy voice of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings: “Must have preciousssss!”
Taylor shrieked, and they both laughed so hard that tears came to their eyes. “See—you’re feeling better already, right?” said Taylor.
Plan B Page 3
