Mercy Killing (Affairs of State Book 1) (6 page)

“Give you an example,” he said, his eyes following a two-man rowing scull on the gray river water. “The tsunami of December, 2005. It hit the coasts of Sumatra and Indonesia. Soon as the water started to recede, gangs scooped up orphaned and lost kids. Same thing happened after a similar disaster in Japan.”

She shuddered. “I remember hearing something about the Indonesian situation.” She’d been just a teenager herself in 2005. “The government there asked our State Department for help tracking down their missing children.”

Clay nodded. “Before relief workers could even take a headcount of survivors, the traders had moved their catch out of their home country. The kids just disappeared.”

Mercy felt sick. “It’s outrageous,” she agreed.

He continued as if she hadn’t interrupted. “A joint task force was formed: FBI, State Department, CIA and foreign law enforcement. But it’s nearly impossible to catch these people. The traffickers split up their victims and move them whenever we get close. If they get too nervous and think they won’t have time or the opportunity to transport their merchandise, they butcher their captives, dump the bodies into a mass grave, burn them. . . whatever.”

She shuddered. “No one left behind to tell tales?”

“Yup.” He nodded, still focusing on the river. Just another sightseer in the nation’s capital, to anyone who might be watching. “We believe as many as ten thousand victims of human trafficking are warehoused in Central America right now, waiting for buyers in the U.S., Canada, and South America. When it’s time, the gangs involved will transport those headed north, through Mexico and across the U.S. border. How and when this will happen, we never know ahead of time. So far, the best chance we have of stopping modern slave trade in our part of the world is to intercept shipments en route. Break up their supply lines. Pull the victims out of the system after they’ve left the warehouses and before they’re placed with buyers. It’s much harder to track them after delivery. They become invisible to the rest of the world.”

Every nerve in her body twitched with revulsion at the thought of the suffering of these poor people. Many of them heartbreakingly young, no doubt. The young were not only strong, they would be less likely to know how to escape or object to their treatment once they were sold and put to work. And coming from an entirely different culture, they’d have no way of knowing how to reach out to authorities in a new country and ask for help.

“How do I know you’re telling the truth about your involvement in this team?” she asked.

“You don’t. No one in the joint project will acknowledge me. If they did, I would no longer be useful to them.”

He turned the popcorn bag upside down, dumping the leftover kernels on the sidewalk. The pigeons scrambled greedily, their complacent coos suddenly combative and urgent as they fought for leftovers.

Mercy watched him, still suspicious. “I’ll of course do anything I can to help these poor souls. But—” she hesitated, “—I’m not a trained spy.”

“That’s just the point.” He flashed a lopsided grin at her. “You aren’t a spy, Mrs. Davis. You are a respected artist and former curator of the O’Brien Art Collection. With no ties to government agencies of any country, other than being married to an American diplomat, you are beneath the radar, so to speak.”

Mercy forced her clenched fingers to open out of fists. Her palms had pooled with sweat. When she looked down at her hands, she saw that her fingernails had left little crescent marks in her flesh where the nails had dug in. If she agreed to help this man, she would be saving innocent lives. And he’d be more motivated to help her find her mother. Or so he’d implied.

But
there was a serious hitch.

“If I agree to supply you with information about Mexican citizens, I might jeopardize my husband’s position with the State Department.”
Not to mention risk my life if said citizens turned out to be criminals,
she thought, but didn’t say out loud. Anyone actively involved in the dirty business of human trafficking wouldn’t want to be found out. If they valued life so little they willingly slaughtered victims who became a liability, they wouldn’t hesitate to murder an informant.

Clay tilted his head and looked away toward the river, as if giving her objections solemn consideration. At last he lifted both hands off his knees and stood up, arms wide in a gesture of resignation. “I was afraid you’d say that. I must admit my deep disappointment. I had hoped your devotion to your mother would encourage you to aid our cause.”

Mercy shot to her feet. She reached out and seized him by the jacket sleeve as he started to turn away. “Wait! You’re saying you won’t even tell me what you already know about my mother because I refuse to spy for you?”

“That’s right.” He looked down at her hand on his arm. “And I’d let go of me if I were you, Mrs. Davis.”

“That’s blackmail!” she hissed, refusing to be intimidated but releasing her grip.

“Slavery was supposed to have been abolished in the 19
th
century. But here it is alive and well in the 21
st
. Ta-dah!” He performed an elaborate motion with his hands: magician producing rabbit from hat. “Do you
know
what they use the children for?”

She winced, able to guess well enough. Damn him for planting such images in her brain!

She’d read about those special “holidays” arranged for men in exotic locales? Thailand came to mind. Adventures complete with “attractive young companions,” as young as ten years old, boys or girls. The idea of children of any nationality being sexually exploited disgusted her.

Mercy spun around and marched down the wharf, wanting nothing more than to get away from him, fighting off tears that burned in her throat. Just listening to him made her feel violated. A breeze picked up, bringing with it the stink of garbage from dumpsters behind the nearby restaurants. She tasted sour bile.

Walk away. Just walk away and let someone else deal with it!
That’s what law enforcement agencies were for, damn it.

But she hadn’t gone far before her conscience caught up with her.

Mercy staggered to a stop, turned around and slowly retraced her steps. She halted yards short of the man. “What, exactly, would I be doing?”

He glanced along the dock, down one way, up the other. As if to make sure they were still alone. “We suspect those involved in slaving are also active in the transport of other goods—drugs, weapons, whatever they can put their hands on that has value. They know the best routes across the U.S. border so it makes sense to multi-task.”

Good God.
She shook her head but said nothing.

“The cartel bosses have acquired considerable wealth. As long as it’s in bank accounts, it can be traced and frozen. So they’re in a hurry to either spend or invest as fast as the money comes in. They like to buy things that make them feel important, that give them status: Real estate, jewelry, women, yachts, private jets, weapons—”

Money laundering
, she thought,
that’s what it’s called
. “And I come in where?”

“Criminal kingpins, just like old-money families like the Davises and O’Briens, invest heavily in art. Most of it they keep in their homes. But what use is having a magnificent private collection if you can’t show it off? To a special guest, perhaps even to artist?”

“Me,” she murmured. Now she saw where this was going. To a certain extent, it made sense. She started walking along the waterfront, feeling the need to move.

He followed along. “Yes. And once accepted into their circle of friends. You’ll be invited into their homes, witness personal and maybe even business relationships and transactions. You may get access to information that’s protected from people like me.”

“And the information you have on my mother? When do I get that?”

He pursed fleshy lips and tipped his head to one side in thought. “Sadly, I have very little just yet. What with all of my time being tied up in this anti-trafficking mission. And getting reliable information out of a former Soviet bloc country is extremely difficult and time consuming. People there remember the days of the KGB. Silence meant survival. Now former KGB agents hire themselves out as goons to the Russian mafia.” He shrugged. “This is the way of the world. Criminals, like rats, jump ship before it goes down.”

“But it is
possible
,” she insisted, “to get news out of Ukraine.”

“Of course. If you are willing to help me with my mission while you’re in Mexico City, freeing up some of my time, I can turn my attentions to the east. Tit for tat, as they say?” He smiled, showing pointy white teeth.

She despised the man’s tactics. But it was more than that. She suspected he might be truly dangerous. He actually seemed to take pleasure in having manipulated her.
But can he be all bad if he’s trying to stop the abuse of women and children?

“You must give me something,” she said. “I need proof that you are capable of helping me locate my mother.”

“Naturally.”  He pulled a 5X7 envelope from inside his jacket. “This came to me through a friend of a friend. I can’t give you names or tell you how he got it. I’ll let what’s inside speak for itself.”

He held it out toward her, just far enough so she’d still have to step closer or reach for it. He waited. Mercy glared at him. She felt like a dog being trained.
Take the reward. Good girl! Now, do what I tell you and there will be more rewards.

She snatched the thing from him. Mercy stared at it, heart tap dancing in her chest, unable to breathe much less lift the paper flap and peer inside.

“Open it now or later, I don’t care. But if it's later and you have questions, I may be more difficult to reach,” Clay warned, his voice going cold. “I need to get back to work.”

Mercy slipped her hand inside. Pulled out the contents—two flat sheets.

The top one appeared to be a photocopy of a document from the
Dnipro Hotel
, Kiev, in Ukraine. Under the letterhead was writing in Cyrillic script. Despite her two semesters of Russian language in college, she couldn’t read it. Only one word stood out as recognizable to her. Translated, she thought it meant “reservation.” Below this was her mother’s name, the cost of a room for three nights and a total in the far right margin.

“So, it’s a standard hotel bill. It proves my mother checked in. So what?” If this was all he was prepared to give her, she would have nothing to do with him.

“At the bottom is a note in Ukrainian. It says that the guest abandoned her room on the day she checked in.” Clay paused, studying her expression. “This invoice was sent for payment to
Geo-World
. The hotel also asks what the magazine wants done with the guest’s personal items.”

Mercy swallowed and blinked, swallowed and blinked.
No tears. Not now—please, God!
Not when there was so much she must do. And not in front of this horrible man.

From behind the top sheet she pulled a second page, the only other item in the envelope. A photograph. It was a beautiful example of her mother’s distinctive style: black-and-white, the shadows and light dramatically playing with the eye. Objects in the foreground appeared starkly realistic, so crisply focused they seemed almost three-dimensional. Touchable. Other parts of the image, toward the edges of the photo and in the background, floated as if in a mist.

“Where did you get this?” she demanded.

“Another of my contacts. This one in Belarus.”

At first Mercy assumed her mother’s intended subject was the old woman in the center of the picture. Wrapped in a shawl, a rustic vine basket balanced on her head, she plodded down a dirt road nearly overgrown with trees, waist-high weeds, coarse brush.

Then Mercy let her eyes relax and refocus. A trick her mother had taught her when she was very little. A way to see a second, less obvious image in an optical illusion. Not the central chalice, but the two faces in profile that form the outline of the cup. And there, above the tree line, four immense shadows rose like threatening giants above the land and the woman.

It had been more than twenty years. But she knew these shapes from the famous UPI photos and would never forget her mother’s anguish at the news of the tragedy.

These were the remains of the nuclear reactors of Chernobyl. Their explosion, and the cloud of radioactive material that had mushroomed from them, had reduced the land for miles around to a nuclear wasteland.

But this photograph wasn’t old. It had been taken recently, she’d bet her life on that much. Talia had been there. Taking photographs.

And then she’d disappeared.

6

Sebastian Hidalgo rode out through the hacienda’s gates and across the land his forefathers had bequeathed to him. He had just returned to Mexico after spending ten days in Washington, D.C., a city he disliked for its emotional frigidity and colorless government architecture.

He had missed his morning ritual—traversing on horseback the wide valley of his ancestors on Hermanito. The immense white Andalusian, nearly 18 hands tall, needed no more than the flick of the reins now and then. The animal knew his way around their kingdom. Sitting easy in the saddle, Sebastian fell in love with the land all over again as they rode. For a time he felt at peace.