by Steve Lee
Shaven Head lunged to strike again.
Sprawled over the sofa, Tess slung a pizza box into his face to give her chance to twist around. He cowered, turning away. She slammed a kick into his gut.
He staggered back, face contorted in pain, while Tess rolled off the sofa and to her feet.
She shot a glance to the door behind Reception – still firmly shut. Had no one sounded the alarm?
Shaven Head stormed at her, heaving his bat back with both hands.
Tess let him – this time she had the chance to maneuver.
As he let fly with his hunk of wood to cave in her skull, she sprang closer. So close, she was inside the swing so the bat could do nothing but harmlessly swing by behind her.
She grabbed Shaven Head’s arms, pinning them.
Twisted around and bent forward.
Threw him over her shoulder.
He crashed down onto the table of beer cans and pizza boxes. The table collapsed and he hit the floor.
She stomped on his knee. He shrieked.
Tess kicked his bat away and spun around.
Wavering, Fatty clambered to his feet, still groggy from her metal punches. But he came at her again. Blood caked his face.
Tess feigned a hook to his head. When he threw his hands up to protect himself, she whipped a kick into his knee.
Fatty hobbled to one side. Trying to catch his balance, he grabbed the balcony rail to steady himself.
Tess rarely used kicks above the waist. They had proven too risky in the past – on uneven or slippery surfaces, the higher she kicked, the more likely she was to lose her balance and fall. However, on level ground with good friction, she’d sometimes risk them if the payoff was big enough.
Arcing her leg high into the air, she blasted her foot into Fatty’s head. The kick pushed him backwards with such force, he toppled over the balcony rail and plummeted to the ground floor.
Meanwhile, Shaven Head was struggling up.
Tess risked a sneak peek over the balcony – Elena would stand no chance against Fatty.
The big man lay on the last few steps, his neck bent at an unnatural angle, eyes open.
She spun back to Shaven Head.
On his feet, he’d lost his main weapon so he grabbed an alternative – two broken table legs.
He winced when he put weight on the leg on which she’d stomped. But it didn’t stop him coming at her. Obviously more wary this time, he didn’t try to rush her like before.
He flung one piece of table leg at her.
She threw her hands up and twisted away so it missed her.
Sneakily, he took advantage of the distraction and lunged, using the splintered piece of wood as a slashing blade.
Too slow.
Tess blocked his swing. While one of her forearm guards hit his arm with such force it must have caused tissue damage, her other hand caught the piece of jagged wood, his grip on it loosened by the force of her strike.
She ripped the wood away and whipped it around in an arc. Smashed it into his temple.
For a moment, he stood frozen, the piece of wood sticking out of his head.
A drop of blood trickled down the side of his face and his eyes rolled backward in their sockets.
Then he dropped to the floor as if he was a nail that had been hit by a giant hammer.
Tess looked at the door to the private room behind Reception. Why had no one rushed out? In fact, why had no one rushed out from anywhere?
She glanced at the corridor. Why hadn’t the johns and women run out screaming the moment they heard the fighting?
She crept over to the door behind Reception. Eased the handle down. Peered in.
Empty.
At one side, a dirty microwave and a battered fridge suggested it was where they prepared meals when pizza and beer became too tiresome. At the other side was a bed with all the covers heaped in a pile in the middle.
She ducked out.
Froze.
Listened.
No talking. No movement. Nothing. So strange.
She leaned over the stairwell. “Elena?”
“Yes?”
“Everything okay?”
“Yes. Shall I come up?”
“No,” Tess said. “Stay where you are while I check it’s safe. I’ll call you when it’s clear. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Tess prowled across the room towards the corridor which led to the hotel’s rooms. It was eerily quiet. Way too quiet. Something was wrong.
There were far fewer people here than she’d imagined there would be. Where were they all? And more to the point, where was Cat?
Chapter 15
Tess stalked toward the corridor from which ten doors led off, five on either side. All ten doors were wide open. Immediately upon entering the corridor, her mind flew back to the bus station in Bangkok and her first ever experience of the squat toilet – the stench of sweat, urine and feces hung so thick in the air she could almost shovel it out.
Fists clenched and raised before her, Tess strained to hear the tiniest of sounds, wary of a three-hundred-pound gun-toting thug leaping out at any second.
But no one leapt out.
At the first door, she hugged the wall and shot a glance inside.
Nothing.
She peered in. Then entered. The smell clawing at her.
Inside, a bed covered in a stained off-white sheet sat to one side, a grimy sink hung off the wall near the bed’s foot, and a bucket sat below a window that was bricked up. Tess didn’t need to look in the bucket to guess from where the stench was coming.
As the clues slotted into place, horrific images formed in Tess’s mind of what might have been going on here. She turned and crept across the corridor and entered the room opposite, praying she was wrong.
She wasn’t.
“Oh, Christ, no.” The same basic setup confirmed her suspicions. This was worse than she’d thought. A million times worse. This was no brothel and Cat’s abduction was no kidnapping.
Tess shook her head. “Not this. Please not this.”
An aching void raked at her gut from the inside, as if Shaven Head were carving out her innards with the splintered piece of wood.
Oh, God, how would she tell Elena?
This… This was human trafficking. At least in a kidnapping situation, there was a chance you could pay a ransom to get your loved one back. Even in enforced prostitution, there was a chance you could break in and rescue them. But this…
There was no ransom to pay. No rescue to be launched. Your loved one might as well be dead. And probably wished they were.
To be certain, Tess worked her way up the corridor and looked in all the rooms. In the room at the end on the left, she caught a glimpse of something from the corner of her eye. She strode in, reached down, and picked something up off the floor. In a little transparent plastic envelope was a four-leaf clover.
“Oh, God.” Cat had been here. But Tess had been too late to save her. In the day and a half since Cat had disappeared, these monsters could have taken her anywhere. Right this second, she could be being raped almost anywhere in the world – China, the Middle East, Brazil. Even the USA.
Tess slumped, rubbing her brow. How the devil was she going to break it to Elena?
In the back of her mind, Tess heard coughing coming from way back in the hotel. She was so deep in thought about how Cat would be suffering and how Elena would take the news, that the sound didn’t register at first.
The coughing got worse, really starting to hack.
Something clicked. Tess gasped. “Elena.”
She made for the door.
A woman’s scream slammed into Tess like a heavyweight boxer’s right hook.
Tess flew down the corridor and across the room. Instead of dashing around the balcony rail and to the top to the stairs, she leapt over the rail. Using her hands and feet to absorb her momentum, she hit the wall opposite and sprang away and down onto the halfway landing.
Elena was curled up on the fl
oor, spluttering.
Fatty was sprawled out on the floor, dead.
Michal – their only lead to finding Cat – was gone.
Tess jumped over Fatty’s unmoving body and darted to Elena, where she crouched and cradled the fragile lady.
“Are you okay?” Tess asked. “Has he hurt you?”
Elena looked up in Tess’s face with bloodshot eyes. Her voice croaked as she spluttered out just one word. “Ca-Catalina?”
Tess took a deep breath. “She’s… she’s not here.”
Elena’s face screwed up like the palm of an aged boxing glove.
Tess dabbed blood from her mouth where she’d obviously been hit.
Elena’s chin trembling and her voice wavering, she said, “He hit me whi-while I was coughing.” She gripped Tess’s arm. “G-go. F-find him.”
“You’re okay?”
She squeezed Tess’s arm harder. “Go.”
Tess pulled away, but Elena didn’t let go. “What is it?” Tess asked.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. It’s not your fault.”
“You don’t“ – she gasped for air – “you don’t understand.”
Tess frowned. “What? What is it?”
The lady’s face screwed up again. “He ha-has the gun.”
Tess glanced over at Fatty. She’d lobbed the gun down here believing it was the safest place for it. And it would have been if Elena hadn’t had another of her coughing fits. Now, the one person who could lead them to Cat was armed and on the run.
Tess leapt to her feet, ripped open the door and shot out. She scanned up the street. Nothing. Down the street?
There!
Because his hands were still tied in front of him, Michal was running down the sidewalk with his shoulders swinging wildly.
Tess jumped into the car. The engine roared and she took off after him.
But Michal must have recognized the sound of his car’s engine.
Turning while still running, he raised his gun. He blasted a shot in her direction.
She ducked down in the car, only for the wild shot to fly wide.
Tess tore down the road.
Michal made a break for the other side of the street. Tess could see a shadowy alleyway. If he made it in there, she’d have to chase him on foot. She didn’t want that. Not when he had a gun.
She hit the gas.
Obviously realizing he wasn’t going to make it across the wide road before she plowed into him, Michal stopped. He raised his gun. Took his time to aim.
Every fiber of Tess’s being screamed at her to yank on the wheel and turn away from danger, away from almost certain death.
But calm logic overruling her primitive instincts, she steered straight for him.
He blasted with the gun. Shots tore into the side mirror, into the hood, into the windshield.
Tess leaned over to the right to hide as much as she could behind the dash. She only needed a second more.
Almost on him, she hammered on the brakes, yanked the steering wheel right, and rammed her door open partway.
As the big black Mercedes screeched past Michal, the acutely angled door caught him. Instead of splattering him like a brick hitting an overripe tomato, the angled door spun him away. He reeled across the road like a drunken ballerina and crashed into the gutter.
Even before the car stopped, Tess twisted around in the driver’s seat.
A body lay in the gutter.
Oh God, please don’t say she’d killed him.
Dotted along the sidewalk, a number of cowering bystanders dared to stand up and look to see if it was once more safe to get on with their lives.
It wouldn’t be long before some Good Samaritan phoned the police. She had to act fast.
Tess slammed the car into reverse, shot back up the street, and stopped beside the body.
She prayed he was still breathing. If he wasn’t, she’d just killed any chance of finding Cat.
Chapter 16
Tess drove into a makeshift parking lot created on the site of a demolished building, the car bouncing over potholes and rubble embedded in the ground. Parked as close to a nearby construction site as possible, she got out. A bulldozer rumbled by at the other side of a chain-link fence and two workmen used pneumatic drills in the distance.
She opened the trunk. Squashed inside lay Michal, battered and bloodied. A jagged piece of tibia protruded through a blood-soaked tear in his beautifully tailored trousers.
She’d tried to get the information she needed once. And failed. Now, she had a more secluded spot, so she could offer a little more persuasion.
Tess grabbed his ankle and twisted.
The tip of broken bone moved.
Michal screamed, though Tess barely heard it over the construction machinery.
“Give me those names,” Tess shouted. “Or I’ll tear this leg clean off.”
Seven minutes later, Tess squashed up next to Elena in a grubby cubicle in the Internet café around the corner. She scrutinized the list of six names she’d pried out of Michal and then booted up the laptop she’d taken which Shaven Head had been using in the hotel. Unfortunately, before she’d been able to get her hands on it, the laptop had gone into hibernation mode and now required a password to access it.
This was their last hope. She had to crack it.
Michal was only the face of the gang, only the person who lured women to their lair, so he only had sketchy information on where the women went once they left the hotel. None of it anything they could follow up. He didn’t even have a password for the computer – Tess had twisted his leg hard enough to know he was telling the truth there.
In the Username field, Tess input ‘Artur’, the first name on her list, and then in the Password field, she typed the word ‘haslo’ – the word for ‘password’ in Polish, which Elena had provided. The laptop rejected the login.
She replaced ‘haslo’ with ‘password’.
Again, it was rejected.
Finally, she tried a third password option: 123456.
Rejected.
Tess sighed. Around the globe, countless hackers hacked countless computers with ease. Unfortunately, this beginner’s technique was the only one she knew. Statistics said of one hundred people’s logins, this strategy would crack at least one of them because so many people thought it was a brilliant idea to use such passwords.
But Tess didn’t have one hundred people, only six. The odds were not on her side. But then they never were.
She’d often dreamed of finding someone with true hacking skills because they would be incredibly useful when she started her search back in Manhattan, but how could she find someone like that? If she approached the wrong person, she could easily find the very skills she dreamed of working for her being used to rip apart her bank account, her ID, hell, her entire life.
Okay, that was only one name down. She still had five other chances to crack the laptop. It was not the time to be despondent. Yet.
She tried the next name – Kuba – with the same three passwords.
Rejected.
She drummed her fingers on the desk, scouring the far recesses of her mind for something she might have forgotten about cracking logins. This had to work. If it didn’t, they were completely screwed.
With forced cheerfulness, Elena said, “The third time’s a charm.”
“Let’s hope so.” Elena’s English was amazing. Tess would have to ask her about it if ever they had a relaxed moment.
Tess input the details.
Elena gripped Tess’s arm as she hit Enter.
All three password variations were rejected. And Elena’s grip on Tess’s arm tightened.
The fourth one was rejected too.
When ‘Mateusz’, the fifth name, and ‘haslo’ were rejected, Elena turned away. “I can’t look.”
Tess changed ‘haslo’ for ‘123456’ and hit Enter. She gasped.
Elena snapped back around to look. She gasped too as a desktop opened up be
fore them. Everything on it was in Polish.
“Can you use a computer?” Tess asked.
Elena laughed and playfully punched Tess on the arm. “I’m sick, not old.”
She angled the laptop so she could use the keyboard. A moment later, she had a list of the most recently opened documents and was combing through them.
This time the third one really was a charm – Elena translated it as she read it, describing details of a consignment and the ship on which it sailed at midnight from Gdansk.
Elena stared at the screen, hands cupped over her mouth, eyes wide.
“Oh, God. Is Gdansk far?” Tess asked. Every time they thought they’d made headway and might have found a way to reach Cat, things got ten times worse.
Her voice wavering, Elena said, “It’s a port right up in the north, at the other end of the country.”
“Oh, Jesus.” So there was no way they could drive. “Can we fly?”
Elena hit keys. Searched. Scanned the page. Elena sat bolt upright and leaned closer to the screen. “Yes.”
“Fantastic. What time is the next flight?”
“Four twenty. What time is it now?”
Tess looked at her watch. She heaved out a breath. “Four forty-five. What time’s the next one?”
Elena slumped over the desk and wept.
Tess pulled the laptop back around in front of her. The next flight was tomorrow. She heaved another breath and put her arm around Elena’s shoulders.
“I’m so sorry, Elena.”
“I-I… I just” – she struggled to get the words out – “w-wanted t-to hold her one las-last time.”
They’d been so close to rescuing Cat. How could they have got so close only to fail? How was that fair? Well, it was as fair as a beautiful person like Elena getting a terminal disease decades before her time.
“Just a minute.” Tess typed info into the search box and scanned the results. “It’s around an eight-hour drive from here.”
“Eight hours? It’s nearly five o’clock already. We’ll never make it before midnight.”
“We’ve got satnav. If we drive like hell, we might. It’s not like we have any other choice.”
Elena held an open hand up to Tess. “Wait.”
She grabbed the laptop.
Typed furiously.