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“You mean, the part where we were walking back and the fire jumped across the road?”
“No!”
She nodded. “Yeah. For a few seconds all I could see was fire. Everywhere. But it was arching through the branches overhead. Not down to ground level yet. We ran like hell, and the next thing you know it was behind us. It was way cool.”
“Cool? You are an adrenaline junkie.”
She rose from the chair and began pacing, unable to hold still despite the jackhammer in her head.
“Y’know where the real adrenaline rush is?”
“Tell me.”
“Writing the piece up under deadline. Racing the clock to get the front page done when the people down in production are screaming for the layout and everyone around you is yelling at someone because they need some little tidbit to finish what they’re working on. TV blaring so if the world comes unglued we’ll know it, plus so we know what the Barbie-and-Ken world are saying about the story. It’s barely controlled chaos, a dozen blindfolded foxes chasing chickens around the same yard, knowing Farmer Time is just around the corner with a shotgun and that’s why they call it a deadline. That’s the real rush.”
She realized she’d been talking a blue streak, and sat down and went silent for a moment. He was eating his salmon, yet she knew he’d taken in every word. Finally he looked up. “I knew guys like you in special ops. The crazier it got, the more they felt at home.”
“But not you?” she asked.
His eyes took on a faraway, haunted look. “Nah. I couldn’t feel at home when I was holding an artery closed, trying to keep a buddy alive until the evac team got there. All that training and discipline and focus, and y’know what I was thinking at that moment?”
“No,” she said, and forced herself to down a spoonful of soup.
“That he and I wouldn’t be shooting hoops anymore. That’s what we’d done, last thing at night, every night. There was a basketball net in the hangar back at base, and every night, we’d wind down from the shit by playing three-on-three or H-O-R-S-E or just whacking the damn ball off of the backboard until the world no longer seemed so…loud. No way we were ever going to do that again, not with his leg hanging by a tendon and me pinching the femoral artery so he wouldn’t bleed out. That’s when I knew I wasn’t like you, that I couldn’t shut everything out and learn to love the chaos. That’s when I knew I had to get out.”
Her soup had lost its appeal. She pushed the bowl aside and looked at him. “I know. Kind of. Some stories still give me nightmares. Ever since a plane crash I covered, I still can’t eat spaghetti. A county commission meeting may be boring, but at least I know that after the deadline rush passes, I’ll sleep.”
He nodded, but offered nothing else in return. She fell silent, then got up and began once again pacing the room, hating this caged feeling, hating the notion that her movements were limited because someone was after her. They really wouldn’t go far enough to kill her—would they? It was like a bad movie. Reporters didn’t get killed for doing their jobs.
But this story…Something inside her seemed to freeze. Maybe some stories were worth killing over. Maybe this was one of them. It was certainly worth dying for.
“What are they after, Erin?” Jerrod asked quietly behind her.
She paused, then wrapped her arms around herself. She realized that someone else had to know. In case…This was too important. If something happened to her, someone else had to be able to pursue this, and who better than an FBI agent? She decided to take the leap of faith.
“I think Mercator’s in the white slave trade.”
Seconds ticked by in silence. Then he said, “You think, or you know?”
“I knew most of it. I needed confirmation.”
“Jesus.” He was quiet for a little longer. “And they took everything you had.”
She faced him. “I’m not a bimbo. When I work on a story this big, I keep backups.”
“So they didn’t get it all?”
She almost forgot and shook her head, but caught herself just in time. “I send everything I get to an anonymous e-mail account.”
“Could they trace it from your computer?”
“Not unless they’ve been following me. I used cybercafés all over town. I guess at some level I was already paranoid.”
“Not paranoid,” he said. “Careful. There’s a big difference. So…what do you know?”
“I had a source. Inside Mercator, I think, but I’m not positive.”
“Then he’s in their crosshairs, too,” Jerrod said.
She shook her head. “Maybe not. I hope not. After our first contact, I never dealt with him on my work or home machines.”
“Why did he contact you to begin with?”
“He saw the story in Fortune. He said I’d caught the jaywalkers and missed the killers.”
“He said that?”
“Word for word,” she said. “He said it was one of the perks Mercator offered for some customers. Buy Mercator’s stuff and they’ll get you a girl.”
His face seemed to freeze. “Shit.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Can you prove it?”
“That’s what I was working on.”
He nodded. “And your boss knew about it?”
She faced him. “Yeah.”
He sighed and rubbed his face, as if he were tired. “You really do need protection.”
“They don’t know I have anything. With luck they think they took it all.”
His cheeks were taut, the muscles in front of his ears flexing as he drew a slow breath through his nose, as if trying to hold back some part of him that she found almost…frightening.
“They want the whistle-blower. They think you know who he is. Or she. That means they need you, Erin. And you don’t want to even think about what they have in mind once they have you. You don’t know these people.”
“And you do?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I do. I was one of them.”
5
“Okay, who are you really?” Erin asked.
It was a good question, Jerrod thought. He wasn’t sure it had a good answer. “I’m not who I was.”
“So who were you? You said special ops before. But that’s not what you meant just now.”
He nodded. “Once I got out, I did what a lot of special ops guys do. I went to work for a PMC.”
“Private Military Corporation,” Erin said. “So you were a mercenary.”
He’d always hated that word, but he couldn’t deny it. “Yeah. I was a mercenary. Private executive security at first. Then K-R-and-R work. Kidnap, Rescue and Recovery. There are a whole lot of fringe groups whose main source of income comes from kidnapping foreign executives or their families. The execs usually have insurance for it, if the companies they’re working for want to spring for it. Some of them buy it for themselves. The company I worked for had a K-R-and-R team that contracted out to the insurance companies. We’d handle the ransom negotiations, cover the exchange, and generally keep stressed-out people from making stupid mistakes.”
“And rescues?” she asked. “You’d try to find the victims and get them out without having to pay?”
He stifled a bitter laugh. “I wish I could say yes. That’s what I’d hoped I’d be doing.”
“But you didn’t?”
“Almost never. It was a straight business deal. Negotiate the ransom down to a reasonable amount. The insurance companies had actuaries who actually had tables of this stuff. A site manager for a Fortune 500 company is worth X. Chief engineer is worth Y. Everything according to the ransoms that were customarily paid. The kidnappers knew it, and we knew they knew it. So they’d give their demands, we’d go through the motions, and they’d eventually come down to the standard asking price. We’d show up at one side of a bridge with a big bag of cash. They’d be at the other with our client. Sometimes the guys even shook hands at the exchange, like they’d bought a house or a car.”
“Sounds…cold,” Erin said.
“It was.” He chewed his lip for a moment. “It was like a big play. GloboCorp wants to build a pipeline in some dust- or mud-covered corner of the world. The locals have two legal choices—go to work for GloboCorp and help tear up their ancestral homeland or be out of work. So they pick door number three. They get together and give themselves some fancy name…the People’s Liberation Army of Revolution or some such. They write a big manifesto against GloboCorp. GloboCorp buys K-R-and-R insurance and sends in a supply of easy-to-abduct workers, guys who want the hazard pay or whatever.
“The People’s Liberation Army abducts a few of them a month, not enough to really upset GloboCorp’s pipeline project, because then the gringos would come down in force and stomp the ‘movement’ into so much jungle jelly. So long as the kidnappers don’t get too greedy, the insurance geeks dutifully pay up. GloboCorp builds its pipeline. The locals make some money in the process, plus they feel as if they stood up to big, bad GloboCorp, fought the good fight, even if they lost.”
He shook his head. “Truth is, they were all just going through the motions. The K-R-and-R insurance and our fees and the rest of it was budgeted from the start, assessed within two or three percent by some math whiz wearing Coke-bottle glasses sitting in a Manhattan office and crunching numbers. It was all just the cost of doing business.”
“Pretty pragmatic,” Erin said.
“Hell, yes,” Jerrod agreed. “A few years later, the locals find a way to live with the pipeline and the guys who were running around the jungle kidnapping people are running for office, talking about how they fought for the people, and how they’re going to reform the government and end corruption. But by then, they’ve made so much money from the Globo-Corps of the world that they’re as corrupt as the rest.”
He paused. “And if they weren’t, if they were really serious about protecting their native land and culture…well, then they’ve gotta go. We send in one of my former colleagues to plant a car bomb or, even better, to set it up so the local cops or army can do it. Some lieutenant in the godforsaken army gets a medal, and good ol’GloboCorp keeps racking up the profits. The Dow Jones Index goes up, and all is right with the world.”
In the silence that followed, Jerrod realized he’d said way too much. He tried not to let himself think about those days. And this was why.
“And I thought I was a cynic,” Erin said. Her eyes were neither approving nor judgmental. There was something else there, something he couldn’t quite read. “So what really happened, Special Agent Westlake?”
He shook his head. “Another time. Or…not.”
He expected her to fire back another question. But this time she did seem to take “No” for an answer. He turned on the TV to a low volume, some program about global warming. He stared at the scenes of disappearing glaciers, while Erin dozed off. Meltwater running down through moulins, cutting loose the Ross Ice Shelf. The world coming apart.
But the scenes of dying glaciers merely provided a backdrop to his thoughts. White slavery. It existed. Law enforcement knew that without a doubt. But it was rare to find anyone involved who wasn’t beyond reach. Or to be able to prove the case once they were caught. The Dutch, a few years ago, had managed to crush some powerful white slavers who were bringing women out of Russia, promising them good jobs and then throwing them into brothels, where threats of violence against their families held them silent.
But there was another, even dirtier, side to that kind of operation. A much more clandestine one. The kind where individual children were snatched off the streets, young girls and boys, and sold to the twisted wealthy and powerful in other countries.
Those were the ones almost impossible to trace. The scumbags law enforcement found too slippery to grab. Somehow when Erin said that Mercator, a huge defense contractor, was involved in white slavery, he didn’t think she meant the kind of rings the Dutch had broken. There would be no advantage to Mercator in such a thing.
He closed his eyes against the doom portended by rapidly calving and melting glaciers, and turned inward to dark places he had to visit too often in his job. Places where innocent children were nothing but things to be used by someone with sick desires. Places where Elena lurked even yet.
If those were the kinds of things Erin was uncovering, then he wasn’t going to tell another soul. Not if Mercator was involved. That company had too much power and too much influence, and all too often he had seen where that could lead. They might take a hit on a penny-ante corruption case, but on something like this, they would be covered nine ways to Sunday.
The Mercators of the world didn’t get caught for things like white slavery.
Emotions he didn’t allow himself to have any longer tried to wedge their way up to his heart and mind like those moulins melting their way through the glaciers. They would have their day, but their day would be destructive. He forced them down again, and instead focused on the cool anger and determination that had proved his best friends for many years.
No heat. No passion to interfere with reason. He might be propelled by passion, but he steered by cold reason. Passion must be kept in the background, simmering and providing energy, but never dined on. Never indulged.
He opened his eyes again to discover that the very place he was sitting would probably be underwater in a hundred years. He supposed the global scale of the impending climate crisis might cast his obsession with the missing into obscurity, at least to some, but he felt differently.
That was why he climbed out of bed every morning.
Erin stirred, murmuring something in her sleep, and he took that as a good sign. She hadn’t sunk into a sleep so deep it meant the concussion was creating a problem.
He needed more information from her. Much more. Then he could decide a course of action. Although if she was right about what she claimed, then only one course lay ahead of him.
On the television, the narrator’s focus had shifted from glacial flooding to mega hurricanes. Erin spoke without opening her eyes. “Rita was a rush.”
“What?”
“Hurricane Rita. I covered it. Can’t say it was a happy rush.” Her eyes opened, as blue as gas flames.
“It hit us hard. It kind of got lost in the wake of Katrina. It wasn’t as bad because there were no levees left to break.” She stretched and yawned, then winced a little. “My neck is getting stiff.”
“Not surprising. You took a pretty hard blow.”
She stretched again, more cautiously, and curled up in the other direction. The TV commentator was now talking about desertification. Erin indicated the TV with a slight wave of her hand. “You listen to too much of that, you might get depressed.”
“It’s background noise. I already know about it.”
“Yeah? Do you do anything about it?”
He tilted his head a little to one side. “Do you?”
“Parry,” she said, with a smile that barely creased the corners of her eyes. “You’re as good as I am at dodging questions. Ever consider becoming a politician?”
“I’d have to sell my soul. And you didn’t answer my question.”
“That’s a two-way street. But yes, I try to do my part. I walk or take public transportation. I’ve replaced all my incandescent bulbs with those compact fluorescent ones. I don’t turn on my heat unless my fingers turn blue, and I do without air-conditioning unless it’s night and I can’t sleep. I also try not to buy anything that had to come from far away. You can’t always tell, but ‘grown in Chile’ or ‘made in China’ are good indicators.”
“You’re doing better than I am, then.”
“Aha.”
But the reaction lacked spirit. They were walking around the edges of a peril that could destroy them both, trying to reach for some level of normalcy and banter.
He knew all about that, and he suspected she did, too, from the way she was behaving. Sometimes you just had to ignore the elephant in the room, especially when you couldn’t deal with it right that instant. The other elephant, the one unfolding before them on TV, seemed more like a parable than a science program.
Finally Erin spoke. “I guess I’m going to have to trust you.”
He looked at her. “That’s another two-way street.”
“Is it?” She appeared dubious.
