Fatal (15 page)

Alexandra Hidalgo wiped her sister’s mottled brow with a grimy strip of cloth that she had torn from her dress. Lucia’s hair was dirty and caked with sweat. Alexandra’s eyes had become accustomed to the gloomy metal container that the men had made their hellish prison. The heat was unbearable.
 

She glanced over her shoulder at the other girls. They were sitting or lying down in the middle of the container, where it was coolest. Some were hugging each other, trying to find comfort in the closeness of a sympathetic presence. Others were sitting up, staring straight ahead.

Alexandra looked down at her sister. She was only twelve. Lucia had not opened her eyes for a long time. Alexandra bent down to listen to her breathing. It was soft and shallow.

They hadn’t come here for the allure of a better life. Or for work, as the other girls had done. Their life had been good enough. Some men grabbed them while they were walking back home from school. Threw them in the back of a car and sedated them. They woke up in this living hell.
 

There was an air vent with a circular fan at the top of the container. They had tried to form a human pyramid and push one of the smaller girls through the opening. It was useless; the gap was too narrow. They banged on the walls and shouted. No one answered.
 

The doors did open occasionally. Some drunk men hauled a couple of girls from the container, dragged them away kicking and screaming. Since then, whenever the girls heard laughter or voices close by, they crawled to the back of the space, where all the urine and shit was. Four girls had been taken away alive, none had returned. Sometimes the men came to remove the bodies. There had been two so far.

Alexandra woke from her daydream as a girl crawled closer to them. Her name was Elsa Ehlers, and she was seventeen years old. Elsa had caked blonde hair and blue eyes. “How is she doing?” she asked Alexandra, touching Lucia’s forehead.
 

“She has a fever. She needs water.”

Elsa nodded. “I’ll give her mine when they bring some. I’m still OK.”
 

Alexandra touched her knee, smiling appreciatively. Elsa’s mom was a doctor. Elsa wanted to become one as well. Alexandra thought that she would be a good one.

Lucia moaned. Alexandra hushed her, speaking comforting words, like their mom used to do when they had nightmares. They hadn’t had a meal for the past three days. They received their last ration of water more than twenty-four hours ago. It was gulped down in a matter of minutes.

A collective cry went up as someone fiddled with the doors. The levers went down and the doors swung wide open. A man with day-old stubble entered the container and looked around. “C’mon, you baby bitches. Time to get off,” he shouted and walked out.
 

“Was he expecting us to follow him?” Alexandra thought, shielding her eyes from the sun.

Alexandra dragged Lucia to the back of the container. Two men came in and grabbed her by the arm, roughly pulling her out of the container.

“Come on, honey, we’re going to give you something to eat. Is that one dead?”

The other man bent over her sister. “Dunno, it looks like she’s still breathing.”

“Bring her anyway, she might make it,” he said and dragged Elsa and Alexandra outside by their arms.

The girls were shoved and pushed out towards the deck of the ship, led down some stairs into the bowels of the vessel, then escorted into a dining room filled with chairs and tables. Delicious aromas of food hung in the air. They were lined up in a row, handed trays and plates and glasses, and fed properly for the first time in weeks. The girls were ravenous. Some overate and threw up, leading to smacks and abuse from their guards.

After the meal, they were bundled into a tiled shower area, forced to strip and clean themselves. The men jeered and ogled them, ripped their clothes off their bodies if they undressed too slowly. Some took photos with their cellp hones. But nobody touched them.
 

They were given white hospital gowns and tampons. Even Lucia looked a bit better, smiling again.
 

“Do you think they’ll take us to our new jobs now?” a girl asked, her voice hopeful.
 

Alexandra shook her head. “I don’t know. I hope so.”
 

Voelkner sat back against a bilge block in the empty dry dock. Pieces of scrap metal and netting had been dumped into the now-defunct work area. The dock walls were low enough so that, if Voelkner stood up, he could see over them. The harbor was busy with cranes hoisting cargo off ships and men giving loud instructions and pulling the containers into position with bulky straps. Some containers were being loaded onto waiting train trucks.
 

Voelkner studied the Handymax bulk carrier from SAT Marine that contained the cargo that he was interested in. The containers were stacked neatly on either side of the vessel.
 

He punched a number into his phone.
 

Latorre answered. “I’m here. But here are tons of containers.”

Voelkner looked at his tablet screen. He glanced back at the containers. The blip on the map hovered somewhere in the center of them.

“Just follow the signal,” Latorre said.

Voelkner shook his head, frustrated. “The signal is accurate to two hundred meters. But as I said, the ship is filled with hundreds of containers. It will take me days to search them all.”

“OK, be patient. They have to unload them sooner or later,” Latorre said.

Voelkner nodded. “OK, I’ll stay here for a while. You relieve me in four hours. And don’t bring me that crap gas station coffee. I want Starbucks.”
 

Latorre chuckled and disconnected the call.

Voelkner made himself comfortable. Two hours later, a panel van drove up and parked in front of the gangway on the harbor wall. People disembarked from the ship. Men wearing overalls walked off the bridge.

The men were followed by a group of frightened-looking teenage girls dressed in white dresses. They were led to the panel van and climbed inside. Voelkner phoned Alexa. Her number rang and went to voicemail. He phoned Latorre again.

“I think I found our cargo. Young girls,” he said excitedly. “And guess what? They were loaded into the exact same panel van that we always see enter Metcalfe's gates.”

“Bingo,” Latorre said. “This cannot be a coincidence. Follow them.”

Voelkner ducked behind the wall and jogged towards his car in the parking area. The brown van drove out of the boom gate and merged onto the highway. Voelkner followed it.

Latorre’s phone rang. It was Neil Allen. Latorre explained about the cargo that Voelkner found, but Neil interrupted him.

“Latorre, shut up and listen. They kidnapped Alexa. They loaded her into a van. The one that we always see at the mansion.”

Latorre’s jaw dropped. “It picked up a bunch of girls at the harbor about five minutes ago. Voelkner is following it as we speak. Where are you? What happened?”

“At a gas station, I’ll explain everything later,” Neil said.

“Hang on a sec,” Latorre said and looked through his binoculars.

“What?” Neil asked.

“Our guests have just arrived. They’re at the gate.”

Voelkner came charging into the room.

“You see them?” he asked.
 

Latorre nodded. “Sergeant, I think you better get here, fast.”
 

“I’m on my way,” Neil said and disconnected the call.

Voelkner targeted a telescope at the occupants of the tinted panel van. An olive-skinned thug with a gold necklace and a slick ponytail was making small talk with the guards at the gate. He pointed to the back of the van and the guard peered inside. The guard slapped the driver on the arm and they both burst out laughing.

“You think the captain is in there?” he asked Latorre.

“The sergeant seems to think so.”

“What do we do?” Voelkner asked. “Go get her?”

“No, we wait for the sergeant,” Latorre said. “I think we need every bit of help available to get her out of this one.”

Voelkner bit his lip. “Shit, the general’s going to have a hernia.”

Senator Robert Metcalfe watched as Hector Rigo gave a thumbs-up to the gate guard.
 

“OK, be ready now,” Rigo said, popping the cigarette from behind his ear into his mouth.

Rigo looked at Metcalfe through the rearview mirror. “You ready, boss?”

Senator Robert Metcalfe was an impatient man at the best of times. Today he was simply downright jittery. “Do you always take this long to get in? What am I paying you for, to flap your trap the entire day?”

Rigo glanced over his shoulder at Metcalfe. “I had to make it look authentic, boss. They’re watching us.”

Robert Metcalfe waved his excuse away. “Yes, yes, yes, OK, let’s go.”

Rigo nodded to the armed guard at the gate. The gate swung open, and he drove along the neat graveled pathway towards the loading zone at the side of the mansion. Another guard opened the metal door, and Rigo drove into the loading area.
 

They unloaded the girls and herded them up a flight of stairs. Their hands were bound and they had duct tape over their mouths. Alexa was the last one out. The policeman climbed out of the van and marched towards Metcalfe.

Metcalfe clicked his fingers. “Monroe, let’s make this snappy. How many men do we have in the building?” Metcalfe asked the cop.

“Twenty in the house, six down here. Another eight in the yard. They don’t stand a chance,” Monroe said with a smug smile.
 

“OK. Get the men into position. Remember, the peripheral units need to stay with the schedule, as they always do. Don’t arouse any suspicion.”
 

Monroe nodded. He slipped an earpiece into his ear and brought his wrist to his mouth.

“Everyone get into position. Unit A, carry on as usual with perimeter checks. Unit B, follow them from behind as soon as they enter the building. Remember, be patient. We want to herd them into the house and give them no place to escape.”

Metcalfe jogged up the flight of stairs to the second floor and strode to a built-in closet. He pushed some costumes aside and punched a code into a keypad. A door slid open and he walked through.

He skipped down a wide passageway and punched another code into a keypad next to a fireproof door, then he entered a brightly-lit room and seated himself in front of a console consisting of a keyboard, mouse, a microphone, and three flat screen LCDs. He pushed a button on the microphone and said, “OK, men, get ready.”

Alexa sat with her back to the wall in a cramped room, hardly any larger than the panel van that had brought them here. The cell contained a toilet and a sink.
 

All the girls were gone by now. A guy who had introduced himself as Danny came to fetch the girls one by one. He brought them sandwiches and sodas. Told them not to worry, they weren’t going to hurt them. He appeared every half an hour or so, fetching a girl and bringing a snack. He said he didn’t want the girls looking hungry to his audience.

She had been waiting in the cramped space for hours. She wondered if Neil was OK. At least Voelkner knew where she was; she had seen glimpses of his car as he followed them to the mansion.

She wondered when her men would make their move. Classic procedure would make it under the cover of night. The Legion preferred early in the morning, when opponents were tired and slow to react. She counted the hours in her head. They had arrived at dusk. The clock in her head said it was quarter past ten at night. Still a long time to wait.
 

She was certain that Metcalfe was running a sex ring, trafficking humans and selling the girls to the highest bidder. Probably shipping them off to some country in the East to join the harem of a rich sheikh. She wondered what he had planned for her. She wasn’t going to make a good concubine.
 

She needed to get out of there, hopefully in time to save the girls before they were shipped off. She understood the fear that they must have felt.

A key turned in the lock and Danny walked in. “You’re next,” he said and pulled her up by her arm.

He walked behind her and pushed her out of the room, holding her by her neck. They walked down a passageway with plush carpets towards a door at the end of the hallway. Danny typed a code into the keypad next to the door. It looked like a bunch of ones. Metcalfe probably couldn’t trust his thugs to remember anything more complex.

The door clicked open and he pushed her inside the room. They passed through a closet filled with costumes: German officers’ uniforms, ballerina costumes, and an Indian feather headdress.
 

They had been hurried through here when they were unloaded from the van. The room looked plain enough, with a plastic garden table, a kitchenette, and grey carpets. Now it had been transformed completely.

It was filled with all kinds of photographic paraphernalia. A video camera stood on a tripod facing a mattress on top of a base unit. The mattress was covered in a transparent plastic sheet. On the wall behind the bed was a red flag with a Nazi swastika. A bucket and mop stood next to the bed.