by Ryan Schow
He looked at her long and hard. “You realize I’ve been in both jail and prison for the better part of two years, right? I mean, that’s not lost on you, is it?”
“You’re not an animal,” she said dismissively.
“If you’re trying to torture me,” he replied, “it’s working. But not the way you think.”
“So you know how I think now?”
“I’m reading your mind this very instant.”
“Oh, and what am I thinking?”
“I’m embarrassed to say.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said as she took fresh clothes back to the bathroom.
“How come the food is taking so long?” he asked her through the door.
“Do I look like I’m in charge of their kitchen?” she said back.
He quietly opened her laptop, then listened to her blow-drying her hair. While perusing the internet, he couldn’t ignore the scents of her products. They were intoxicating on an olfactory level, but smelling them also filled him with incredible sadness. He missed Jade. He missed her skin, her hair, the easy life he’d once had with her.
When Cira finally came out of the bathroom, her hair was down and she was in cotton shorts and a fitted tank top. She seemed about five years younger right then, which actually put him at ease. She plopped down next to him. He closed her laptop, not trying that hard to hide the fact that he’d been using it.
“What are you looking at?”
“Random sites.”
She sat up on an elbow, turned the laptop her way, then opened up the search bar and looked at his history. Some of the searches were him looking at Leopold Wentworth, but by and large, he’d been looking at social media sites, specifically the ones on which Jade Hargrove had a profile.
“You being locked up for the last two years, I was hoping to see you looking at porn sites,” she joked. “But now I see you’re looking at dudes.”
“Just one dude,” he said, wondering why she wasn’t mentioning Jade. “Leopold.”
“What do you think you’ll find looking him up on public sources?” she asked as she picked up the phone and dialed room service to check on their food. “Leopold Wentworth is not your normal philanthropist.”
“I merely wanted to see the face that went with the name.”
She held up a finger as she spoke with someone downstairs. When she was finished, she said, “Our meals are on their way up.”
“That’s good,” he said, “because my stomach is digesting itself.”
“Where was I again?”
“I believe you were talking about Leopold.”
“Oh yeah. He’s pretty private now. Besides, what makes you think that’s even him? We have the best hacker in the world in our employ. If we wanted, we could put your face on a story we concocted and you would be the Leopold Wentworth you’re looking at.”
For whatever reason, Cira saying this completely changed the way he viewed this group. How much was Leopold Wentworth worth? What was his skill set? And in what capacity did he work? If the internet’s face of Leopold Wentworth could be fake, if the story behind him was fictional at best, then who was this man really? And was Leopold Wentworth even his name?
“Tell me about him,” Atlas said when she returned.
Cira plopped down and appraised him with a speculative look. He glanced at her tank top, marveled at how well it clung to her body, and then looked away before he saw anything to stir his temptations.
“Right now, he’s a man trying to save one child and find another.”
“So you know him personally?”
“Of course, I do.”
Lying on the hotel bed next to this mildly attractive woman, he engaged in easy conversation with her. This left him with a surprising sense of elation. As he lay there with her, he found himself falling under her spell. He was physically attracted to her, but he wasn’t exactly sure why. Beyond the obvious, he appreciated the competency she exuded, the certainty in her step, a sort of polished confidence he found insanely attractive.
When half an hour had passed and they still hadn’t gotten their food, he said, “Are they crawling up here with our meals? Because apparently, they aren’t on their way up with it.”
“You getting hangry?” she asked.
“Maybe a little bit.”
Pulling himself together, he refused to let her hold sway over him, physically, emotionally, or otherwise. No woman would ever have that kind of influence on him again, not after Jade. He had trusted his former wife. He’d believed her. And he still loved her, even after all she’d done to him and their marriage. But dammit, he didn’t want to go back to prison! Not the kind of prison failed love creates, and certainly not the kind of prison that comes with a shitty sock for a pillow and nothing but concrete, darkness, and isolation.
Looking at Cira, he thought, I don’t owe you or Leopold anything. Could he find Kaylee and then just disappear into the crowd, never to be found again? He could. Except then he wouldn’t find Alabama. He felt his face fall, his expression darkening. He was beginning to feel that the resources he needed to find Alabama lay not with Detective Truitt or local law enforcement but with Leopold Wentworth and his associates.
When their food arrived a few minutes later, Cira tipped the man, then thanked him and walked him out. On the bed, they sat across from each other. It had been years since he’d had a bedspread picnic. It was a welcome change from the normal.
“You seem different,” Cira said after swallowing a bite of her sandwich.
“If my situation wasn’t so dire, I swear I could get used to this. Especially the way the room smells.”
“How does it smell?”
“Like food, for sure. But really it’s what it doesn’t smell like that makes me happy.”
“Which is?”
“Concrete or body odor,” he said, remembering how bad solitary confinement had stunk. “Plus it also smells like you now, which isn’t the most offensive thing ever.”
She smiled easily. “Well, don’t get used to it. You won’t be staying here for the duration.”
Gulping down his food, he sat up straighter, stared at her. “What do you mean?”
“When we get you situated, you’ll be staying with Kofi. We put him up at this dank little studio apartment in Nevskiy Prospekt. I’m told it’s the best we can find for a few hundred euros a month in that part of town.”
“What are the beds like?” he asked, trying not to sound dejected.
She shrugged her shoulders, made a face. “Probably small and stiff, and most likely uncomfortable considering Kofi is a heavy sleeper, and at the same time a restless sleeper.”
“Meaning?”
“It’s a studio apartment, Atlas.” She held up a single finger. “There’s one bed. Perhaps you two can pose as lovers? How deep undercover are you willing to go?”
So much for feeling good with her.
“Don’t tease me about that crap. Gay people aren’t safe in Russia.” She scoffed at the comment, waved him off. “You realize that just twenty years ago, the Russians classified homosexuality as a mental disorder, right?”
“I’m not up to date on these things,” she replied. “But it should be interesting to explain. We’ll see how well you think on your feet.”
“You can go ahead and tell that story to my corpse if you put me in the wrong neighborhood.”
“I was making light of your bad situation,” she said, speaking with food in her mouth. “Plus there are no bad neighborhoods in Saint Petersburg.”
“Uh-huh, sure.”
“This may be my first time here, but I know Saint Petersburg. I’ve wanted to come here since I was a kid.”
“If there’s one bed in this room,” Atlas said, ignoring her, “and this Kofi guy is as bad as you say—”
“It’s a small bed, I think—”
“As I was saying, if this Kofi guy is as bad as you say—”
“I didn’t say he was bad, he’s just really good looking
, and you’re…well, you have that angry look on your face some might misread if you and Kofi are seen spending time together in a very small, very stuffy studio apartment.” She said this with a laugh, like she was amusing herself, which apparently she was.
“Why would you even arrange this if you felt there would be a problem?”
“That’s just how it worked out,” she said. “While I’m lying here in this big, comfortable bed, all alone, I will think of you, and long for the day when you can return to the civilized world.”
“What do you mean, that’s how it worked out?” He was having a hard time keeping his irritation in check.
“Relax, Atlas. You’re hiding in plain sight. We want to get in and out without making a lot of noise. And if something goes down in a five-star hotel, that would be bad. But if there were two gay guys that got beat up or killed in a less affluent part of the city, no one would report it, or even say anything. Especially if one of them was a dirty American criminal.”
After saying something so awful, she stood and went to the window. She then turned to him, beaming. “Before you go, you have to see this view. My God, it’s so beautiful out there.”
“So you’ll be staying here by yourself, then?” he asked, not moving off the bed.
“I said that already.”
“What is your relation to Leopold Wentworth?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I have time.”
A knock on the door interrupted them.
“Are you sure?” she challenged as she breezed past him to answer the door. He heard a man’s voice in the doorway, then he heard Cira say, “Thank you for your promptness,” and close the door. She walked back inside with a bag, which she set on the bed next to him. “A gift for the killer ex-cop.”
Frowning at her, he opened the paper bag and saw a suppressed weapon, two extra magazines, two boxes of hollow-points and a tactical blade, sheathed. He looked over the handgun, then pulled out the knife and smiled.
“The gun is okay,” Atlas said, “but this blade is perfect.”
They were interrupted again, this time by a ping on the computer. “That’s Codrin,” Cira said, excited.
She pushed him over and grabbed the laptop. Shoulder to shoulder with him, she opened the email and speed-read her way through it. When she was done, she turned the computer screen his way.
“Is this what you wanted?”
He skimmed through the email, locating names, addresses, and a set of somewhat confusing instructions for backdoor access to the website.
“Bingo freaking bango,” he said with a grin. “I’m going to follow the links inside if you’re okay with that.”
She nodded wordlessly. Codrin’s instructions were pulled up in one window; Atlas opened another window and accessed the darknet using the TOR browser. Instead of websites, TOR accessed “TOR hidden services,” as distinguished by the URL’s. Instead of using .com, . org, or .gov, all URLs ended in .onion. Atlas typed in the website address Codrin had given them, then waited breathlessly for TOR to do its job.
“So what’s all this you’re doing?” she asked.
“How familiar are you with the darknet?”
“I know of it, but it was never my thing.”
“TOR basically sends encrypted data through a virtual circuit comprising consecutive randomly selected TOR relays.”
She laughed like she didn’t understand. “Okay, you’re going to have to slow down on this or you’re going to lose me.”
“Think of this particular search engine as an onion with multiple layers. To get to the destination URL, or the middle of the onion in this case, you need to get through a series of encrypted layers. Each of those layers both decrypts the data, then encrypts it, almost like a relay race where one runner passes the baton to the next and so on. Except instead of a baton, you’re moving data, including incriminating data, such as our physical location, our URL destination, the sites we spend time at, etc.…”
“So, it’s like a VPN, then?”
“No, it’s different. We’re using a VPN to hide our location. But we’re also using it to hide the fact that we’re accessing TOR from our ISP. Anyone monitoring us, or trying to track us, will see we’re in an encrypted tunnel to a VPN server. Meaning whatever we look at in TOR can’t be indexed, looked at, or traced back to us.”
“How do you know all this?” She seemed impressed.
“The darknet is one of the best places to buy and sell trafficked children. I learned to use it on my search for Alabama. It’s also where they sell drugs, guns, illegal ordnance, hire hitmen and trade the kind of information you don’t want in the hands of the general public.”
“Such as?”
“Hacks, classified info, military strategy and tactics, leaked stories from inside sources to the press, and so on. But it’s also where they have the red rooms.”
“Red rooms?”
“Kill rooms for voyeurs. Places people watch live snuff films being made.”
“Good God,” she whispered. Then something dawned on her. “Leopold talked about that. The red rooms. I think that’s how he compromised the warden.”
A startled gasp left his open mouth. “Are you kidding me? I thought he said the warden was compromised with a shemale.” When she looked away, he shook his head and said, “What’s wrong with people these days?”
“Below the surface of our lives,” she said, watching the computer, “most of us are unruly animals, perverts, sociopaths…okay, here we go.”
The URL came up, as did the unindexed site. What they saw when they were inside had them both sitting back stunned.
“Dear Lord,” Cira muttered. She grabbed the laptop and pulled it her way. Her face went another shade of white. What she was seeing were dozens and dozens of kids’ pictures along with descriptions of them and a “Deliver Now!” button.
His face had officially lost all color. He had seen a lot of things on the darknet, but never something like this. He got stuck on the face of a four-year-old girl. His eyes teared up. He turned away, trying not to imagine the kind of hell this child had endured and would endure in the days, weeks, and years to come.
Cira glanced up at him, stricken, almost like she was looking for answers, or a similar response.
“We need to shut these motherfuckers down tomorrow. We need to shutter this entire operation.”
“That’s not the mission,” she said, closing the laptop.
“The hell it isn’t!”
“Atlas…”
Angry at this situation, and life in general, he hopped up off the bed, walked to the window, and looked out to the river below. He wanted to punch someone, something, anything.
“It is beautiful here,” he finally said after a long, painful bout of silence. “But there’s so much ugliness in the world as well. Sometimes it’s too much.”
“There was ugliness before us, and there’ll be plenty more after us.”
“Not if I can help it.”
Chapter Nineteen
ATLAS HARGROVE
“There are no bad neighborhoods in Saint Petersburg,” Kofi Danvers said after he’d picked Atlas up at the hotel. “Not like in Odessa, or Kiev. Drugs here are heavily monitored by police, but human trafficking happens under their noses all the time. It’s like they care about one, but not the other.”
“I don’t need a history lesson,” Atlas said. He was still pissed off about his sleeping arrangements. “I just need a guide.”
“I am a guide,” the handsome Ukrainian said with a disapproving frown. “I spent much of my youth here before I moved to Odessa. It is why I was brought here. To help you.”
“Fine, I get it,” Atlas grumbled. “Where’s this dump we’re staying at?”
“It is on Dybenko Street, near the subway. It is not nice to look at outside, and less attractive inside.”
“What do you mean?” Atlas was struck with a sense of dread.
“It looks like the old Soviet Bloc,” Kofi said
, his English better than the driver’s from the airport, but not by much.
The two of them headed in relative silence to the studio apartment, which consisted of a kitchenette, a small bathroom, and a queen-sized bed.
“Drop off your things, we won’t be staying,” Kofi said.
“Really?”
“You have address of traffickers, yes?”
“I just got it.”
“Well, now is time to speak to them,” Kofi said. “Prime hours for sex workers.”
He read off the address, then said, “Why don’t you speak to me in Russian? My wife is from Belarus, so I’m relatively fluent.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” Kofi asked in Russian, not amused.
“I wanted to see how good your English was. Now that I know it’s bad, I’m going to insist we speak Russian from now on.”
Kofi shook his head at Atlas’s fierce American sarcasm. Struggling to find some witty retort, he came up short. They arrived at their destination a short time later. Fifteen minutes later, they arrived at another unsightly building, a structure so utilitarian looking it might’ve been designed by three-year-olds who spent the better part of their lives playing with blocks.
“This is depressing,” Atlas said.
“What is?”
“Parts of this city are too beautiful to describe, and then you have this…,” he said, motioning to the building.
“You get used to it,” Kofi said. “Especially if you grew up here. I’m assuming you’re ready to take these guys down, right?”
“Of course,” he said.
Frowning, Atlas got out of the car, checked his surroundings with a few quick glances, then looked over and, in English, said, “Lead the way, Folgers.”