The Black Shepherd

by Steven Savile

  There could be breadcrumbs, of course, the most obvious being if she’d use her own passport to enter the Eurozone. That at least ought to offer a point of entry. But there was nothing to say the traffickers hadn’t found another way to get her across the border, including the use of facilitators.

  There was a whole lexicon for this stuff, she’d discovered. Facilitators came in all shapes and sizes; they were the legitimate businesses that ran alongside the trafficking and provided the support structure that made it possible for the people trade to function. Stuff like hotels and motels, property landlords, taxi drivers and haulage drivers, advertisers like Craigslist, banks that brokered the transactions. And then there were the Lot Lizards, Loose Bitches, and Gorillas. Most of it was self-explanatory. Some of it made her sick to the stomach, like references to Kiddie Strolls, Seasoning, and Branding which were dehumanizing even if they sounded relatively innocent; psychological manipulation, intimidation, sodomy, gang rape, food and sleep deprivation, isolation. and physical beatings. Stuff designed to break the girl’s will and turn her into a malleable sex-worker who wouldn’t put up a fight. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the girls would never find the money to pay their exit fees, making it a form of slavery, which was reinforced by the use of tattoos to brand the girls as the property of a certain pimp, though the phrase ‘modern day slavery’ was loaded with a lot of problems, not least the fact that in an attempt to protect the victims many countries had turned to the aggressive punishment of anti-prostitution laws, which seemed to mean that salvation came in the form of arrest.

  It was a fucked-up world they were living in.

  But then, she’d never thought anything different.

  Laura set to work.

  It was going to take time to put all the searches in place, but all she could do was be systematic about it. Back in London she’d been working on a crawler bot that could trawl through every database she had access to – and a few she shouldn’t have been able to touch. It was still fairly crude, and guaranteed to dredge up a lot of irrelevant hits, but this seemed the perfect time to test it.

  The risk was that somewhere down the chain there was another Kask keeping an eye out for people taking an interest in Maria Bartok.

  Any sort of search that pinged back with her name was fine, but actually initiating one with it and risking tripping any alerts Kask might have put on her name to monitor outside interest was dumb. So, avoiding the obvious risk, she worked with Maria’s presumed nationality, took a broad age range of fifteen to thirty, and used the digital reconstruction to map out noticeable features. It was a gamble, but by not deliberately searching out Bartok’s name she should still turn up the woman without triggering any alerts. Theoretically. It depended on how good or paranoid Kask was, and how invasive her dive into their system went. Limiting the key features would help with the initial response, but there was always the risk doing so would exclude the right girl.

  It would have been so much easier if she could just put Maria Bartok’s name into the crawler, but for now she didn’t want anyone watching to know they knew the girl’s name.

  She hit search.

  It didn’t take long for the search engine to warn her she was looking at a six-to-eight-hour search time for full access to all of the member states. Any number of precise details would slash that time dramatically, not just the name, even so it seemed like a ridiculous amount of time to compile the data given a Google search was essentially instantaneous.

  The difference was this was far from a simple search, but if it worked, by the end of it she’d know if Maria Bartok had used her own passport anywhere in the world, registered to work and pay tax, or received medical attention within the countries of the European Union. She’d know what kind of medical attention she’d received, including things that breached doctor–patient confidentiality. She’d have her hands-on personal information, including voter registration and credit-card usage, if Maria Bartok had made it as far as using a credit card or finding a job that paid tax. And that was a big if, given she was almost certainly lying in an Estonian morgue with her skin burned off.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  This time breakfast was more relaxed affair.

  They had each other’s rhythm, and when they were joined again by the two girls who’d been there yesterday things dropped into a comfortable routine.

  While the girls set up, Tasha made the call to let John know that Frankie was interested in the camp. She gave Frankie the thumbs-up a moment later, like it had ever been in doubt. Frankie offered her a smile in return and carried on with brewing the coffee for the first breakfast guests.

  Tasha finished her call. ‘All good,’ she said, coming over to the serving hatch. ‘John will swing by and pick you up at ten thirty.’

  ‘That means I’m bailing on you right when the dirty work starts,’ Frankie protested.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, we can manage. We’ve done it often enough.’

  ‘Are you here again tonight?’

  Tasha shook her head. ‘I’m done for the day. Got a couple of days off now.’

  ‘Nice. Any plans?’ Which was a very subtle way of asking just how much One World controlled her existence.

  ‘Sleep,’ she laughed, not giving anything away.

  ‘No partying then?’

  ‘Ha, the chance would be a fine thing. I’m too old for discos. Hell, do they even still call them discos? Yeah, I’m that old. Besides, I don’t know many people here. The only real friends I’ve got in Tallinn are either working here tonight or they’ll be on the shift with me when I take over from the crew here.’

  Which sounded like an empty existence. ‘No family?’

  Tasha shook her head. There was a moment. A flicker of something in her face. If Frankie hadn’t known better she’d have thought it was distaste. ‘No family,’ she said. ‘They turned their back on me when I needed them, so I’ve done the same to them. I have a new family now, and our bonds are stronger than blood. They are from love. Sometimes we need to cut our losses, move away from relationships that don’t work, that impact on your state of mind and well-being. It isn’t about being passive or accepting. It’s about realizing where the fight actually is. One World helped me understand that. For all the strength and energy I wasted trying to force my mother to love me enough to stop my stepfather from loving me and just be on my side for once, I realized I could channel that pain and grief into good. I could make a difference for kids who were like me, but not as strong, or didn’t have people like The Shepherd to help them.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Frankie said. ‘My mother kicked me out,’ which was so far from the truth it would have needed satnav to find it, but was just the kind of thing that would forge an added bond between her and Tasha.

  Tasha reached out and touched her arm in response, a small but significant gesture.

  ‘Go to the camp, listen to what people have to teach you. Go in with an open mind. Use what helps you. You don’t have to become a devout follower of The Shepherd. We’re not like that. But if you find something there that helps you, then maybe One World will make your life better. That can’t be a bad thing, can it?’

  ‘No,’ Frankie agreed.

  ‘And if you come back to us, well, maybe we can be the family you deserve?’

  She leaned in and gave her a hug, holding Frankie tighter than anyone had in a long time.

  ‘Will you still be here when I get back?’

  ‘Of course,’ Tasha said. ‘But there’s always the chance you will decide your future isn’t here, serving soup and cleaning tables. Maybe your journey will lead you elsewhere. It’s a wide world.’

  Frankie tried to look surprised, as if the possibility of being moved on elsewhere had never crossed her mind. Her brief conversation with Peter had pretty much convinced her this camp was some sort of test, the good girls go to heaven the bad go to hell, kind of thing. She needed to make sure her face fitted. But was hell always the same place? And if it was, was th
at where she’d find Irma?

  The next couple of hours passed through a filter of treacle, moving slower than any since she’d set foot in Tallinn. Frankie recognized a few of the returning faces, and met them with genuine pleasure, happy to make even this small difference to them. And in their faces she saw something else, too. Hope. Not theirs, but hers. And it was a hope she’d never expected to find down here. It was the hope that when she got to the end of this road she wouldn’t find anything wrong with One World, and that all her time away in the woodland compound would do was prove to her these were good people doing everything they could for the homeless of this city and who knew how many others. Because if she was the reason they stopped helping, how many of these people smiling back at her now would survive the coming winter?

  IN THE DARKNESS …

  Time passed slowly, if it passed at all.

  The only light she saw was when they lowered food down to her.

  Her life up until that point had been measured in the rising and the setting of the sun, in the anchor points of minutes, hours, and seconds. Lacking this was another level of disorientation.

  She hated the bucket.

  The sound it made when she peed into it. The way the dehumanizing stench of her shit was enhanced by it.

  It was worse than the rats brushing up against her.

  She slept.

  Not well.

  Sometimes sitting up, sometimes curled into a foetal ball. She never felt refreshed. There was never any change in the darkness.

  She couldn’t hear them any more, moving about above her. They had forsaken her.

  But that was the test, wasn’t it?

  A test of faith.

  She would not fail him.

  She would not surrender to the darkness.

  Her world was silence.

  She pressed her hand against her heart to feel something. To mark the passage of life in those desperate panicked beats.

  All she could do was think. Let her mind race. Run.

  John posed a computer-related puzzle on the journey from the compound to the hole. It was the last thing she’d expected from him, truth be told. It was very specific in application, almost mundane really, like the kind of challenge her professors would pose on a Friday to keep them busy over the weekend, which felt peculiar as One World seemed so distant from mundane demands. But it had seemed so important to him. She wanted to please him. That was all she ever wanted. She focused on those words now, ignoring the cold and the damp.

  But how could she solve his puzzle without a computer?

  She needed to see the code. To visualize it. She tried to create the lines in the darkness, imagining them as brilliant bright flashes in the black, scrolling in front of her.

  And in her mind they were bright enough to light her face, banishing the darkness.

  She sought refuge in the code, looking for answers, for a way to do what John had asked of her.

  She would not fail him.

  Not now. Not when she was so close.

  He loved her.

  More lines of code, looking for the break, the weakness. It had to be there. And in that relentless search she hoped to find her sanity, because even as the instructions filled the darkness she felt her sense of self slipping.

  Food was lowered down.

  Empty plates taken away.

  Water in a slop bucket.

  Moments of disorientating light.

  She didn’t call out.

  She didn’t beg.

  She knew better.

  She needed to be strong.

  She needed to solve the problem he had set her, then and only then could she call out.

  She felt the rats brush up against her, used to her intrusion in their home now.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Another lunchtime in another cafe.

  Peter Ash was beginning to think he’d make a killing if he saved those loyalty card stamps all the coffee chains offered.

  That half-thought kick-started a chain of possibilities versus probabilities in a filling-time kind of way: for some of those reward schemes surely you’d be able to track someone? It wasn’t that he expected it to be of any use in this particular case, but it could be an angle. But knowing Laura, they were already in her database crawler. She was always half a dozen steps ahead of him when it came to technology.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ Mirjam Rebane said, slipping into the seat opposite him. The radio was playing a version of ‘Every Time You Go Away’ he’d never heard before. She was barely ten minutes late, which in his world was as good as being early.

  ‘Busy morning?’

  ‘You know the job, same, same, but different. A naked corpse might not be an everyday kind of occurrence, but it’s not a one-off, sadly. I take it that’s what you want to talk about? Annja Rosen?’ He nodded. ‘It’s all anyone’s been talking about since they brought Tamm in,’ she said.

  ‘Tamm?’

  ‘Local sex-offender. Nasty piece of work.’

  He nodded again, letting the silences live.

  ‘As soon as I heard the name I knew it was tied up with your case. Question is, is the universe fucking with you, or is it more twisted than that?’

  ‘Half the time I’m convinced the universe hates me.’

  ‘But not this time? Even though they’ve brought in the killer.’

  He looked at her. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Mirjam, but I need to ask you something – just because I need to hear you say it.’

  ‘OK, I’ll do my best not to get offended.’

  ‘Are you one of the good guys?’

  ‘Well, that’s a dumb question.’

  ‘It’s not. I don’t know who I can trust here.’

  ‘Are you serious? Shit, you’re serious.’

  He nodded. ‘I told you, I need to hear you say it. I need to know you’re not part of One World. I need to know you’re not on the take.’

  ‘I should just get up and walk out,’ she said, but she didn’t move.

  ‘Don’t do that.’

  ‘I’m not mixed up in any cult. I don’t believe in God. I don’t fuck on a first date and I’m not into drugs. I don’t gamble. My biggest vice is I’m a bit of a daddy’s girl. If you don’t trust me that’s your call, Peter, I won’t lose any sleep over it. But I was beginning to think—’

  ‘That’s all I needed to hear,’ he promised. ‘And when I tell you why, I hope you’ll understand. The first officer on the scene was Maksim Kask.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘The same Maksim Kask who took Annja’s statement about Irma Lutz’s disappearance.’

  ‘I’d say “So?” again, but I’m assuming you’ve got something else to tell me?’

  ‘Annja’s statement was omitted from the files sent over to my Division.’

  ‘Clerical error?’

  ‘It was the only statement in which Irma’s connection to One World was mentioned.’

  ‘OK, I can see why you might wonder, but Kask? You really think one of our most decorated officers could be involved in this?’

  ‘I was due to meet her this morning, just a few hours after she died. Why can’t I shake the feeling she was being silenced?’

  ‘Wait, you think Kask killed her …? Seriously? Even though they’ve got a perp bang to rights?’

  Peter held up a hand. ‘I know what you’re thinking. I know all of your objections, because they’re the same ones I’d have. Cops don’t become cops to get away with murder. They just don’t. But what if One World had something on him? Something enough to make him cross the line? It’s not out of the question. He doesn’t even have to be the one to pull the trigger. He could just be the one who offered up the sacrificial sex-offender so it’s all wrapped up nice and conveniently. I mean, two girls from the same apartment, months apart, are the subject of major investigations, both with Kask slap bang in the middle of them? I’m not saying you’re not great detectives here, but this is way too convenient. The girl’s panties hidden in the guy�
��s apartment because some random passer-by saw a yellow car?’

  ‘You know a lot about this,’ she said. It wasn’t a question. ‘Laura. Does she have access to all our systems?’

  ‘Major cases, certainly.’

  ‘But not missing persons?’ Mirjam asked.

  ‘Not everything is going to end up in the system. Summary details. The written report. But when it’s deemed no crime has taken place? The temptation is to let things slide. That makes it an imperfect system. So talking to the people on the business end is just good police work. Our job is always more difficult simply because we’re dealing with stuff across national borders. Everyone gets quite territorial. Computers don’t. At least that’s what Laura says. It’s all about patterns. Sometimes it’s more about the things that aren’t there than those that are there. Like Annja’s statement.’

  Mirjam nodded. ‘Makes perfect sense to me.’

  ‘Which is why I like you.’

  ‘Why, Peter Ash, are you hitting on me?’

  He changed the subject without missing a beat. ‘So you know Kask. What’s your hot take on him? Could he do something like this?’

  ‘Don’t really know him. I’ve heard stories, though. He’s got a bit of a reputation.’

  ‘The kind of stories worth sharing?’

  ‘OK, well, one black mark, given what we’re talking about here: he’s the religious type. Claims to have some kind of divine moral compass that guides his work.’ She didn’t look happy to be telling tales out of school. He said nothing, letting her work her way through her own moral quagmire. ‘I’ve heard him say he gets a thrill out of nailing the dealers, and getting the prostitutes and perverts off the streets.’

  ‘Plenty of cops get a buzz out of putting the bad guys away.’

  ‘You weren’t listening to me, were you? I said the dealers, prostitutes, and perverts. The girls are victims not villains. They need help. But Kask is on some kind of crusade where they all need to be burned.’