Liberation Song

by Raelee May Carpenter

On this one thing, he actually was right. Aggie would be extremely afraid if she woke to find strangers, especially armed strangers, inside their house. Alex led Beck to the little girl’s bedroom. She sat on the side of Aglaya’s bed and brushed a hand across her forehead. Aggie woke with a start and sat up. When she saw the strange man in her room, she gave Alex a startled look and asked her in a whisper, “Do we have to go now?”

  “Oh, no, honey. We have some friends visiting, and I wanted to introduce you. Aggie, this is Mr. Beck.”

  “Is Mr. Beck here to look for bad guys?”

  “He is. And you know what, he says there aren’t any here now, none at all. But he and his friends Mrs. White and Mr. Caplin will stay a little while just in case any bad guys do decide to come over, so they can catch them.”

  “Mrs. White and Mr. Caplin?”

  “Yes. They are in the yard right now.”

  “Is Mattie here?”

  Alex shook her head. “No, he’s at his house.”

  While Aglaya didn’t respond to that, she looked incredibly disappointed and nervous, and Alex realized suddenly how much the little girl trusted Matthew Gold. She probably even felt safer with him than with her mother. Alex understood, at least a little bit, how selfish she was to let her fear control everything in all three of their lives.

  “Actually, I am going to go see Mattie now to tell him about our visitors.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Benedict Beck hide a smirk behind his hand. “Do you think you could stay here with Mr. Beck for a little while so I can go do that?”

  “Of course, Mama.” All seriousness on her sweet little face, Aggie was just as brave a girl as Alex had always hoped she would raise her to be.

  “Okay. Then give me a kiss and go back to sleep.”

  Aggie gave her mama a big hug and a sloppy kiss and a minute later had even complied with the “going back to sleep” part of her mother’s request. Alexandra pushed past Beck on her way out of the room and jammed her feet into a pair of running shoes. She could feel Beck’s eyes on her. “Don’t say it,” she warned him.

  “I wasn’t going to say a thing.”

  * * *

  The porch light was on. Matt had left his front door open with only his screen door (not barred like Alex’s) locked. She stood on his brickwork stoop and forced herself to ring the bell. Immediately, she heard a thud, followed by a rustle, then the distinctive shamble of bare feet across his hardwood floors. He shuffled out of the shadows, wearing black track pants and a threadbare T-shirt. His hair went in every direction, and his eyes looked sleepy and confused. He squinted at her. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, and she was backlit by the porch light.

  “Who is it?” he muttered. His voice, low and heavy, sounded weighed down by the dreams he probably had left only a few seconds before.

  “It’s Aili MacIntire.”

  He unlocked the screen door and opened it. “AYE-LEE?” he asked as he gathered her into his arms. He stumbled a bit, sleepily, and leaned some of his weight down on her. She wrapped her arms around him and braced herself to hold him up.

  “A-I-L-I. It’s like a shortened Gaelic version of Alice.”

  “Spell it again when I wake up.”

  Aili giggled softly and patted his cheek. Matt kissed her briefly, then grabbed her by the hand and tugged her inside. He held her hand loosely as he led her down the hall into his living room. She knew where to go. Even if she hadn’t been here hundreds of times, his floor plan was almost exactly the same as hers; their simple ranch homes had probably been put up by the same builders however many years ago.

  In the living room, an afghan lay in a puddle beside his couch. Was he sleeping on the sofa so he could get to her faster if she decided to take him up on his invitation to come over and talk? Had he left the porch light on for her too, and the door open as a welcome?

  He grabbed his specs off the end table and clumsily slapped them onto his face. It took him a couple of tries, and Alex wanted to giggle. Then he picked up his phone from the coffee table. “What was it again?” he asked her, around a particularly dramatic yawn.

  “A-I-L-I.”

  He typed the name into his Notes app and put the phone back down. He sat on the edge of a couch cushion and rubbed his face with both hands. She sat down next to him, choking back another giggle. She really wanted kiss him. Like, really. Because they didn’t sleep together, she had never known before how slow he was at waking up, and it was almost the most adorable thing on the planet watching him try. She rubbed his shoulder tenderly. After a moment he swiveled his face around to look at her. He waited.

  “Do you know who Edward Tokan is?” she asked him.

  “Uh…yeah.” He was still foggy. “He was like some big guy in the U.N. a few years back, but there was some huge scandal about a human trafficking ring, and he was going to prison for a long, long time, then he disappeared. Did they ever find him, do you know?”

  She shook her head, and he peered at her drowsily. Then she watched the realization come over his face like a new dawn. Suddenly, he was completely and utterly awake. “That was you. You were in the FBI, working with Interpol. You were involved in that.”

  She nodded.

  “I thought all this was need-to-know.”

  “My boss from that mission, the Interpol guy, informed me tonight that, due to recent developments, that policy now applies to you.”

  “Edward Tokan,” he muttered, then shook his head. “Is he why you were kicked out of the FBI?”

  “I wasn’t actually kicked out. I know I implied that, but that’s not really what happened. I was demoted, but not terminated. I had been promoted to Agent just for that operation anyway. After I gave my testimony about the case to the Senate committees, the promotion was taken away, and I was an analyst again. But I didn’t lose the status because Tokan disappeared. I lost it because they couldn’t trust me with my own safety as an agent. I told you that I made a mistake and blew my own cover. Well, I jeopardized the entire operation, and a young girl, an enslaved prostitute in the Shangku brothel we were investigating, was killed.”

  “Katya. Aglaya’s mother.” He reached for her hand and held it.

  “Yes.” She played with his fingers, drawing comfort from the contact. “Katya was a fifteen-year-old girl who had been kidnapped from Russia at the age of twelve by a trafficker and pimp called Ivanovich. First, she was brought to the United States where she was forced to work in a brothel in Indiana. At that point, I, as an analyst, had been hunting Ivanovich for a year, and I had followed him from Michigan to Ohio. He had disappeared both times, and it took me about eight months to find him again in Indiana. The operatives with whom I was working had to fight through a lot of red tape to organize a raid, but they did so. Only when they got to the house, it was on fire, and everyone and everything in it was gone.”

  “He’d been tipped off.”

  “Ivanovich had access to so much money and resources. People would get bribed or intimidated, or they would just disappear, then he’d vanish, all his henchmen and his girls and sometimes boys too with him, just like ghosts. It had been obvious for over a decade at least, long before I was on the case, that Ivanovich wasn’t the head of his organization, that it was a lot bigger and a lot more powerful.”

  “The Russian mob?”

  Alex shook her head. “No, this group did things differently. They had a lot more power over law enforcement agencies around the world than any documented organized crime outfit. And the way it seemed to span cultural and political barriers was unique.”

  “How so?”

  “First because Ivanovich’s brothels tended to be almost all Russian people, but they could show up anywhere in the world.” Alex gripped his fingers; it wasn’t easy for her to remember all of it, and her voice rose with anxiety. “Second, because occasionally agencies would find themselves hunting other people similar to Ivanovich, but they could be of any nationality, and the brothels could be of any ethnic makeup, even ethnically diverse in th
emselves, but they would behave in so many of the same ways as his organization. Like culturally.”

  He scratched his head. “Corporate culture, you mean?”

  His MBA was at work even in the middle of the night. Alex nodded. “Exactly. A few years before I was onto the case, some extremely brilliant analyst for MI-6 wrote a report connecting all of these forced prostitution rings together and comparing them to retail or service franchises.”

  “Like the McDonald’s of sex trafficking?”

  Alex chuckled. “I know it sounds kind of silly, but the report laid it all out. There were certain cultural things within the organization that were just too eerily similar to be coincidence. This British analyst theorized that it was branding, and it was like light bulbs went on in law enforcement agencies around the world. But a forced prostitution company can’t exactly be traded on the New York Stock Exchange. And because of the strict hierarchal tableau of the organizational functions, it really seemed like the ‘parent company’ that ran all of these global franchises was controlled by one astonishingly powerful man.”

  “And that was the guy they really wanted to find.”

  “The Bureau gave Ivanovich’s boss the code name ‘Big Fish,’ and my first job on the case was to work with one of the FBI’s best behavioral psychologists. I collected information about the organization’s structure, culture, and the modus operandi of its crimes, so she could develop a profile of the unknown man for whom we were searching. When we were done with our research, about the time Ivanovich resurfaced in Indiana, we had a really detailed description of our faceless Fish.”

  “But then your trafficker disappeared.”

  “I found Ivanovich again in Shangku, the other side of the world, six months later, and looking back, I found him probably about the time Katya got pregnant.”

  “So you all made a deal with Interpol, and you went there.”

  She shook her head. “We couldn’t, not then. You’ve got to understand, there was no way. The government in that country was so weak and corrupt, an operation wouldn’t have been worth the plane ticket to get there. If Big Fish could corrupt and intimidate relatively wealthy and secure American cops, how much easier would it have been with Shangku officials who were so much poorer and more desperate?”

  He wobbled his head. “You have a point. It’s never been a stable place.”

  “Yeah, and at that point, child sex tourism was practically the country’s main industry. Western extradition treaties with them were shaky, and the government would never have authorized Interpol or anyone to work on their soil fighting what accounted for so much of their Gross Domestic Product. So Ivanovich got filed in the back of the Bureau’s cabinet. The profiler was reassigned, as were the ops people and most of the analysts. Eventually I was the only one left, and I had to divide my time between that and eleven other cases, all eleven of which the Bureau thought were much more workable and promising than Ivanovich and Big Fish. But then…”

  His jaw fell open. “Oh! The civil war.”

  “Yeah, the war. More than a year after I’d found Ivanovich in Shangku, the diseased government collapsed like a Jenga tower, almost overnight. Refugees fled the villages, tribal areas, and cities in the thousands and ten thousands, only to find themselves trapped in filthy, overcrowded, and dangerous camps on every border of the tiny country. In the midst of this chaos, the coup government had no structure or communications system. It was kind of like a school getting taken over by the Pre-K class; they don’t really want to deal with the teaching, the administration, or the infirmary, they just want to have endless recess and eat lots of ice cream.”

  Matt smiled.

  Alex shook her head to clear it and went on. “Anyway, the entire sovereign state of Shangku was one big state of emergency. The United Nations sent the peacekeepers, who aren’t supposed to interfere. But the government wasn’t doing anything and didn’t care, so the U.N. all but took over the country. They were monitoring the borders, organizing the aid NGOs in the refugee camps, overseeing the importation of all necessary goods, escorting the dignitaries and humanitarians throughout the country, hosting the journalists, and on and on. And from my cubicle in the Bureau’s headquarters, I watched Ivanovich. His business was flourishing more than ever before, and I asked my boss to contact Interpol.”

  “Weren’t there crazy travel advisories for Shangku when the U.N. was there?” Matt asked.

  “Of course. It was a civil war. Most of the foreign embassies and consulates had been evacuated; the rest were on guarded lockdown. No country would want their citizens flying into that for a vacation of all things.”

  “So how was that business surviving, let alone flourishing, without the tourists?”

  “Oh, that. The peacekeepers, of course.”

  His eyes widened. “The peacekeepers?”

  “Well, who else? The refugees didn’t have money for bread; they weren’t spending their pennies on the privilege to rape children, foreign or domestic.”

  “The peacekeepers?”

  “There is a real dark side to world politics, Matthew; trust me.”

  “That kind of makes me sick.”

  “Good. It makes me sick too. I think that’s the appropriate response.”

  He nodded and shrugged. “So Interpol agreed to work with the FBI, and you were given a promotion.”

  “I was made an operative because I was the only one left on the case. I knew more about Ivanovich, Big Fish, and their twisted empire than anyone else at the Bureau, because everyone who had ever worked on the case had been away from it for over a year at least. The Interpol guy Benedict Beck asked the Bureau to send an agent to help. The Bureau sent me because I was all they had; they made me an agent so they wouldn’t look like they couldn’t fulfill his request. More crappy politics.”

  He sighed. “Politics.” He spit out the word like a bitter taste.

  Alex gave a wry laugh. “I landed in Shangku with a lot to prove—to the Bureau, to Interpol, to Ivanovich, to Big Fish, and to the children whose innocence they sold for pocket change. I knew the FBI thought I was a mistake, a joke. But when Agent Beck met me, he took me seriously. I was a complete fraud, so I knew I had to get it right. And I had to do better than anyone expected of me. A lot better.”

  Matt leaned back into the couch and pulled Alex with him.

  “What happened?” he asked, once they were settled with her snuggled on his chest where she could hear his heartbeat.

  “Operation Free Bird. Kinda lame, I know. But that’s what Beck decided to call it.” She needed to change tones for a while. She fought a few tears, and she continued, barely above a whisper. “Aglaya’s mother was the sweetest girl ever born. She lived in hell, but she believed in heaven more strongly than anyone I’ve ever seen. Her name was Katya Nikolanovna Kostaskaya. She was fourteen years old when she gave birth to my daughter. Algaya’s father is Edward Tokan. He was Big Fish, Ivanovich’s boss, and Ivanovich kept my daughter alive so he’d have some leverage against him. I planned the op to get Katya and Anya out of Ivanovich’s brothel so that Interpol could use them to build a case against Tokan.”

  The next part was the hardest, and Alex struggled with her breath for a while. Matt rubbed her back gently and waited without a word. Finally, Alex said, “While I was running the op, I decided to try to save some of the other children in the brothel. And when I was trying to convince Ivanovich to believe I had this importer boss who wanted to rent his girls, I accidentally said his boss’s name.”

  “Oh, no…” Matt’s voice was soft because he was barely breathing.

  “Ivanovich made me in a heartbeat. He ordered that Katya, Anya, and I be executed. But Koli, his Shangku henchman, couldn’t kill a one-year-old baby, and he let us go. Ivanovich killed Koli, of course, and Katya was shot while we were escaping. She died in the jungle, and I mutilated her body so we would have evidence of who Tokan had raped and knocked up. I left her where she died, like she was road kill or something. I stole he
r baby, got on a helicopter, and flew to safety without her.”

  “Oh, honey. I’m sorry you had to go through all that. I’m so sorry. But it will be okay.”

  She sat up then. “The reason I’m telling you this now is because of the call I got earlier. It was Agent Beck.”

  He pushed himself upright. “Your boss in Shangku, yeah. You mentioned him earlier. What did he tell you?”

  “Ivanovich was arrested in St. Petersburg, Russia, about twelve hours ago. He’s being questioned by Interpol, and he’s already giving evidence against Edward Tokan. But some of the most damning evidence in existence against Tokan is—”

  “Aggie.” His posture was slack, and his eyes were blank.

  She nodded.

  He peered at her, suddenly intense. “Tokan is the one who wants you two to disappear?”

  She nodded again.

  “After that astonishing and astonishingly public fall from grace, Tokan still has enough friends to make something like that happen?”

  “Babe, with a man like Edward Tokan, the charm is too superficial to look shiny up close. It’s never about friendship with someone like that. It’s about control. His lackeys are just as twisted and self-seeking as he is.”

  “Oh, God.” And that was a prayer. “Alex—Aili, we gotta get back to her right now. Who is with her? You can’t have left her alone, can you? Let’s go.”

  Alex shook her head. “No. No, to all of the above. Beck is already at my house with two FBI agents. They will take care of her. I need you to stay here.”

  “Aili, no! To all of the above. Has it ever occurred to you that this Ivanovich probably hasn’t the foggiest idea where Tokan is right now? Has it occurred to you that someone who Tokan would send after Aglaya would be their best hope of tracing back to him?”

  “Matt, seriously.”

  “What if they’re using you and our daughter as bait?”

  “No,” Alex shouted, even while her brain asked her, Did he just say ‘our daughter?’ She was too upset to deal with that.

  “I should be there because you and Aggie are my priority! I don’t want to chase anyone out or get in their way, but someone needs to be there who cares more about you and that little girl than about some stupid case.”