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“Yes. I could get fired, too. I could get killed, too.”
“Then why?”
He returned his gaze to the TV, knowing he had to offer an answer, but unwilling to get too personal.
Finally he found a way. “I’ve spent my entire career in the Bureau trying to nail white slavers. I spend my personal time on it. It’s an obsession.”
She fell silent in thought. “But you do other stuff?”
“Of course. It’s part of my job. But finding the missing is my specialty. It’s what I do best. And my life doesn’t matter a hill of beans if I can put one white slaver into prison or save the life of one kid.”
He turned to her again and found her eyes had darkened, as if someone had turned down the gas flame and replaced it with blue ink.
“I believe you,” she said. “It’s like that for me, too. I don’t have a personal score to settle or anything, but the idea of those little kids…” She trailed off, frowning. “I make my living with words, but I deal in facts, so it’s hard for me to explain what I’m feeling. I just knew, when my source tipped me off to this, that it wasn’t a story I was going to let go.”
“Then we’re on the same page.”
“Maybe.” She stared at him hard, as if trying to see into him. He stared right back. He wasn’t one to blink.
“Okay,” she said finally. “Where do I start?”
“How about telling me just how much about this you shared with your editors? Then I’ll have some idea what the bad guys know.”
“I didn’t tell them much.”
“Apparently it was enough.”
She sighed and touched the side of her head.
“Where are those pain pills?”
“In your upper left vest pocket.” He went to the kitchenette to retrieve a club soda out of the fridge and then poured it into a glass for her. Then he returned to the couch, crossed his legs loosely and waited while she swallowed the medicine.
“You don’t trust easily, do you?” he asked.
“Apparently this time I trusted too much.”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “That’s how we learn, Erin.”
“Yeah, right. By being whacked on the head.” But he saw her gaze drift to the badge clipped to his belt. “I usually have an adversarial relationship with cops.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, I jolly around with them and build relationships, but I’m always trying to learn things they don’t want me to know. Things they’ve done wrong. Things they haven’t done that they should have. They see my role as being their mouthpiece. I see my role as being the public’s eyes and ears. The two are not the same.”
“Of course not.”
She raised her gaze to meet his. “It’s going to be weird being on the same team.”
He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands. “Here’s how I see it. You’re not going to walk away from this story, no matter what they’ve done. Firing you. Taking your work. Breaking into your place. Putting you in the hospital. You’re not giving up, right?”
“No way!”
“If I can see that, having known you only a few hours, then they know it, too. So now you’re the best source I have on an international crime ring, and the bad guys know you’re not quitting. I wouldn’t walk away from the crime regardless. I’m also not walking away and leaving you in their crosshairs. Since we’re stuck with each other, we may as well work together.”
She seemed to consider it for a moment before replying. “You have access to resources that I can’t get to on my own. So sure, we can work together. Just don’t try to shut down my story once this is over. You can put these people in jail, but I can put them on the nightly news. Which do you think will cost them more?”
He nodded. “You can write it once we’ve got the case. I won’t gag you. But look at it this way, Erin. Right now, right this very instant, while you’re hesitating about what to share, they’re still trying to find you. Because you can lead them to their leak. Quit wasting time. They sure as hell aren’t.”
She lowered her head briefly. “It’s easier to walk into a forest fire,” she said quietly. “At least you can see where the danger is.”
“The problem is, you’re already in the fire. Now we have to walk through it.”
“Yeah. Okay. Nobody knows how much I know. Nobody knows who my source is, not even me. My editor knows only that I have one, and that he’s feeding me information to check on. And that so far I’ve been able to verify most of what he’s shared.”
“How much is that?”
She shrugged. “Not enough. This guy is scared to death. He’s handing out information as if it were nuggets of gold. A little here, a little there. Then he seems to panic and shut down. After a while, he comes back.”
“So you think he works for the company?”
“I don’t know how else he would get flight information.”
“Flight information?”
“Yeah. He’s told me that some shipments out of Colorado Springs are listed as going to one country but actually go to another. But the manifests don’t add up.”
“How so?”
“Equipment that’s supposedly being shipped isn’t leaving their factory. They list it as being shipped by cargo carriers, but they’re not cargo carriers. They’re private jets. Too small for the equipment that’s on the manifest, and not going to the country that’s supposedly getting the equipment.”
“So he got curious?”
“Yeah. And then one night he worked late and overheard a conversation about how the cargo had to be sedated.”
“And that made him think it was white slavery?”
“It made him curious. Curious enough to go out to the corporate airport and try to check on the cargo, thinking maybe he’d miscounted the inventory back at the warehouse, because his first count showed no product in transit. So he started looking around, and that’s when he saw two kids being carried aboard a jet, both of them asleep.”
“Some executives’ kids being flown back home, maybe?” Jerrod asked, almost wishing it could be that innocent.
“Home to Venezuela?” Erin replied. “Somehow I don’t think so.”
“He knows the flight went to Venezuela?”
She nodded. “Flight plan was for Brazil, but the aircraft never went there.”
“How would he know that?”
She shrugged. “That part I’m not sure about yet. But his e-mail sounded pretty sure, and everything he’s told me before has checked out.”
“Does he have any idea why Mercator would be doing this?”
Erin shook her head. “Not yet. I mean, would Mercator be trafficking in kids just to get contracts?”
He glanced her way. “Every foreign-arms sale has to be approved through the government. Which basically means armaments are going only where our policy wonks want them to go, never mind that we may live to regret it two or three years later. Which means there’s a certain amount of quid pro quo going on between government and contractors.”
Her eyes widened. “You mean, the government might…know about this?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But I’ve found it’s always dangerous to underestimate your enemy.”
6
Jerrod and Erin left the hotel before the eastern sky began to brighten. At a gas station, Jerrod bought them large coffees in metal travel mugs and breakfast tacos he’d heated in a microwave.
“Sorry it’s not a better meal,” he said as they pulled away. “We’ll get something farther down the road.”
“It’s amazing what we’ll accept as food,” Erin said with a sleepy laugh. “I wonder if there’s anything organic in these things?”
“Probably not,” he said, chuckling. “But at least they’re calories.”
She nodded as she chewed and swallowed. “And they aren’t the most horrible thing I’ve ever tasted.”
He laughed as he ate. “No. If I close my eyes and let myself imagine, I can almost believe they’re fit for human consumption.”
She laughed with him, trying to cling to the humor of the moment, knowing it couldn’t last. It didn’t.
“I’m going to keep to the back roads for a while,” Jerrod said. “I’ll make sure we don’t have a tail.”
Erin’s neck prickled. “What if we do?”
“I’ll drive off that bridge when we get to it.”
It was an odd kind of confidence, she thought. They had only the barest notion of a plan and no real idea what might happen, yet he seemed comfortable with that, as if the uncertainty itself were a security blanket. Then again, given what he’d told her—and what he hadn’t—he likely had a lot of skills that she didn’t necessarily want to think about.
Some of the prettiest countryside in Texas slid by, invisible in the predawn darkness. There were no headlights to be seen, and rarely a streetlight. They could have been driving through grass-scented ink, with only the thrum of the tires and the occasional chuckhole to pull them back to reality.
They rode silently, sipping coffee. Just as trees were beginning to emerge from the darkness, Jerrod spoke.
“I’ll have to stop by my office and do some things, but I’m going to leave you somewhere while I do.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s in the Houston police reports that I found you. And someone may also have reported that I took you away from the apartment. Point is, it’s no secret we met. So I don’t want anyone to know you’re still with me.”
“You think they’d be watching that closely?”
He glanced over at her before returning his attention to the road. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know what to think. I’m not used to being paranoid.”
“Like I said, you’re the only link they have to your source. They want to know who you’re talking to. Then they want you both dead.”
“Thanks for the message of cheer,” she said. “So they think I’m going to lead them to this guy?”
“That’s what they’re hoping. They’re hoping we’ll do exactly what we’re going to do. Find the source. So we have to do that without them knowing we’ve done it.”
“And if we can’t?”
He looked at her. “Then we’ll be taken out of the equation, and a whole lot more girls will go into it.”
“The equation?”
He nodded. “Ever ask yourself what it means when a corporation changes the name of its ‘personnel’ department to ‘human resources’? We’re not people to Mercator. We’re variables on a balance sheet. Until you tumbled onto this story, the paper had you in the assets column. But once you got onto this…”
“I became a liability.”
He sipped his coffee. “It’s as easy as that, when your personnel are just human resources. Move them from column A to column B. Eliminate as necessary.”
She shivered. “I don’t like the world you’ve lived in, Jerrod Westlake.”
“Neither do I.”
“Are you going to tell your office about this?”
“No.” Unequivocal and flat.
“I guess the FBI has human resources, too.” She settled back and sipped her coffee again. “So we can’t trust anyone. Hell, for all I know, you were sent here to gain my trust so I’d lead you right to my source. For all I know, you’re on cleanup detail.”
He laughed quietly. “Now you’re thinking like me.”
“I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.”
“Actually, it is. You’ll live longer.”
No clouds marred the sky of Austin when they arrived. The heavens shone a breathtaking blue, and the air invigorated her with just a touch of winter’s chill. Erin could have wallowed in the lack of humidity.
Jerrod surprised her. She’d half expected him to put her into another hotel, but instead he left her on the St. Edward’s University campus in South Austin.
“It’s busy, and it’s public. Nobody will bother you here. And their library will have Internet access.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll be back in two hours. Will you be okay?”
“Sure.”
When he glanced into his rearview mirror, he saw her disappear into the library. Then he sped north to the Federal Building, already planning his story.
Inside the library, Erin found quite a few students working busily. Near the elevators, she found a pair of public computers that required no log-in, linked into the library database and the world beyond. While she couldn’t connect to her anonymous account, she could look up “white slavery” on Google and see what was out in the public domain.
While some dismissed it as myth and others as women knowingly entering the sex trade for its economic opportunities, the statistics were staggering. Whether abducted, enticed, purchased from their parents or simply drawn by the lure of leaving home and gaining some measure of social and psychological independence, women and teens entered the international sex market on a horrific scale. Most knew they—or the daughters they were selling—would soon be working as “bar girls,” “comfort women,” “escorts” or “house girls.” What they too often did not know was the degrading, violent and often deadly conditions under which that work was done.
