When Li was satisfied, he turned off the light and placed a cotton T-shirt and sweatpants on the bed.
“Put on,” he said.
He picked up a magazine from the coffee table in front of the couch and pretended to ignore her. Dietrich, however, stood up and walked toward her.
“Put it on, Sita,” he said. “You have no reason to be bashful.”
She was still for another long moment before she obeyed. Li skimmed the magazine, but Dietrich studied her every move. The shame she felt at undressing in front of him was overwhelming. She wanted to disappear, to leave the wretched world behind.
When she had finished, Dietrich reached out and cupped her chin.
“You will do well,” he said.
He traded a glance with Li and then left the room. Sita, however, was rooted in place. She felt as if he had raped her with his eyes.
Li threw the magazine back on the coffee table and gave a curt wave. She followed him to one of the rooms along the hallway. He opened the door and turned on the light. The room was windowless and utilitarian, its furnishings limited to a bed, a stack of magazines, and a TV/VCR combo on a stand.
“Bathroom down hall,” Li said. “Use when food come. Watch movies and Seinfeld.” For some reason he found this comment funny and laughed at himself.
When Li left her, Sita sat on the bed and stared at the wall, replaying the photo shoot in her mind. She remembered every picture he took of her, every angle her body assumed, every shadow cast upon the wall, the feel of the sheets, the plushness of the pillows, the blaze of the lights, the fur of the teddy bear, the taste of the lollipop. Neither Li nor Dietrich had asked her to perform any indecent act, but she knew there was a reason for the pictures. There was a reason Dietrich had paid thirty thousand dollars for her. Everything in this godforsaken place had a purpose.
She lay back against the bed and closed her eyes, thinking of Hanuman in the pocket of her coat, strewn on the floor of the studio down the hall. Like everything else in her life, he was gone, too. Her breathing deepened and she began to drift off. The restive night in the fat woman’s crypt and the long drive in the panel truck had left her exhausted.
Neither the anguish of memory nor fear of the future had the power to keep her awake.
Part Four
Chapter 29
The sword of justice has no scabbard.
—ANTOINE DE RIVAROL
Goa, India
Thomas packed his bags and left Agonda Beach in a hurry. He didn’t see Priya again, but he didn’t expect to—not after what she had said. The proprietor of the resort called him an airport taxi, and he gave the driver a hefty tip to make the transit in record time. The man saw the gratuity as a license to violate every traffic law in the Goan state, but Thomas didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything anymore.
He arrived at the airport a bare forty minutes before the scheduled departure time for the midday flight to Bombay. He bought a ticket and took a seat in the lounge. He read Tera’s e-mail again and fumed. What he would give to deliver her a few choice words. But it wouldn’t accomplish anything. The damage was done.
He scrolled through his inbox and found a message from his father. The Judge was a judicious user of electronic technology, and he only wrote personal e-mails when he had something very important to say. He wrote:
Son, I talked to Max Junger yesterday. It seems that the problem with Mark Blake has solved itself. I won’t get into details here, but Max has gone to bat for you with the partners. You’re welcome back at Clayton anytime. Max admires you, son. He says you’re one of the finest young litigators he’s seen. That’s rare praise from the man we used to call the Buzz Saw. I won’t keep you, but I wanted to let you know that you’re back in Clayton’s good graces. If you continue to make friends like Max Junger, you’ll find that the road to the bench is far easier than you imagined.
Thomas sat back in his chair. He knew he should be elated, but his father’s news only accentuated his confusion. So the partners had finally figured out that the man responsible for Wharton’s malpractice threat had been sitting in their midst all along. But the Judge had said nothing about an apology. Clayton had hung him out to dry and offered him no recompense. Nothing but an invitation back into the fold.
He looked out the window toward the distant runway. Did he really want to be a partner at Clayton|Swift? A judgeship was the goal, of course, but that was years away. Between here and there lay twelve-hour workdays and weekend toiling, cocktail parties and politicking, and ceaseless abuse from clients like Wharton Coal who threw millions of dollars around like petty cash and expected their attorneys to walk on water. He knew because he had watched his father endure it for most of his childhood. His father would say it was worth it. But he wasn’t sure his mother agreed, and he knew his younger brother didn’t. How many of the important things had his father missed in the quest?
He heard his flight being called and joined the line at the departure gate. He was about to turn off his BlackBerry when it chimed in his hands. He saw that he had a new message from Andrew Porter.
His friend had written:
Thomas, since when did you stop checking your e-mails? We found Sita. She’s in hell. We’re going to try to get her out. If you want in on it, you need to get on a plane to Atlanta. Now. He stared at the screen and felt a surge of adrenaline. After the miracle of Paris and the heartbreak of Brittany, could it be that Sita was within reach? Why Atlanta? What did Porter mean that she was in hell?
Fingers flying across the tiny keys, he sent two e-mails. To Porter, he wrote, “I’ll be there in the morning. Will e-mail flight info this evening.” To Jeff Greer, he wrote, “Had a break. Need another week. Will keep in touch.” After sending the second message, he boarded the Jet Airways 737 and wished the plane were supersonic.
That evening he took an Emirates flight to Dubai and boarded a midnight Delta connection to Atlanta. The giant aircraft touched down at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in the gray light of early dawn. He sailed through customs and collected his single piece of checked luggage from the carousel. Andrew Porter was waiting for him at the curb in a government car.
Thomas threw his suitcase in the trunk and hopped into the passenger seat. Gunning the engine, Porter pulled out into traffic.
“Everything I’m about to tell you is confidential,” Porter began. “I pulled every string in the book to get you included in this. The request had to go all the way up the chain of command to the assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division. As it happens, he and the deputy director of the FBI go way back. He also has great respect for your dad.”
“Did I ever mention that you’re my favorite human being?” Thomas said with a grin.
Porter rolled his eyes. “Have you ever heard of something called mIRC?”
“Vaguely.”
“It’s a program that allows a person to participate in Internet Relay Chat.”
“It sounds more intimidating as an acronym.”
“Are you going to keep joking, or do you want to hear this?”
“Sorry.”
“mIRC isn’t your garden-variety chat service. It’s organized into channels that are like chat rooms except they’re much harder to access. Some channels are exclusive. The host has control over who’s invited to the party. Ever since mIRC was invented, the guys at the FBI’s cyber division have been monitoring it for child porn. It’s the new Wild West—no rules, absolute privacy, and the Internet at your fingertips. It’s networked the underworld. Users of child porn are loners. Before the Web, they flew solo. Now they associate.”
“Sounds delightful,” Thomas said. “A worldwide convocation of creeps.”
“A fair assessment. Anyway, there’s a guy in the FBI’s Washington office named DeFoe. He’s wicked smart—served with the Green Berets and knows everything about computers. He’s been tracking child porn on the Web for years. Nobody knows how he stands it, but the psychologists keep passing him. He�
�s a mIRC guru. The guy never sleeps. For a long time he was working on breaking into this back channel called XanaduFuk.”
“No doubt its users are fine, upstanding citizens,” Thomas said.
“A regular bunch of Boy Scouts,” Porter replied. “So the guys DeFoe was chatting with mentioned it, but nobody told him how to access it. It’s like a secret society. You don’t ask to be invited. The host invites you first. Wonder of wonders, he got a message from the host about a month ago. The guy goes by the screen name Spartacus.”
“That’s original,” Thomas said.
“As you’ll see, the man’s creativity lies in other areas. DeFoe started chatting on XanaduFuk around the clock. He figured out pretty quickly that the users were sex tourists because they talked about places like Thailand, Cambodia, and Moldova. But they never talked about the kids. They talked about drinking expensive wine. Now DeFoe is a teetotaler, so he went out and bought a book on wine. He started talking about it in his chats, and it opened up a whole new world. It’s amazing what people will confess when they think they’re anonymous.”
“Aren’t they?”
“Yes and no,” Porter replied, changing lanes and passing a slowmoving big rig. “Be patient. I’m getting to the good part. After about a week, DeFoe heard somebody talk about drinking a certain Italian wine in the United States. Eventually he asked Spartacus where he could buy a bottle. This is when things got hairy. The guy invited DeFoe into a peer-to-peer conversation. No witnesses. Entirely private. The guy used the opportunity to ask DeFoe a question that was meant to separate the men from the boys. He asked DeFoe what it feels like to taste young cunt.”
“Dear God,” Thomas said.
“Exactly. DeFoe, however, is a pro, and he gave just the right response. Spartacus liked it so much he gave him a gift. He sent DeFoe a link to a website. When he followed the link, he found a porn site specializing in Eastern European girls. The site had a pay option and a password dialog.
He tried the password Spartacus gave him and went down the rabbit hole. The place he found is called Kandyland.”
“What is it?”
“A place where beautiful children are sold to perverts.”
Thomas closed his eyes and listened to the whistle of the wind outside the car windows. “You mean permanently?”
“No, I should be more precise. They are rented.”
Thomas opened his eyes again. “How does Sita figure in to this?”
“I’ll explain in a minute. But there’s another side to the story you have to hear first. The Justice Department has been looking for Kandyland for almost two years. We’ve broken up ring after ring, and every pimp has heard of it, but no one knows where it is. For the last twelve months, we’ve been building evidence against the largest trafficking network on the Eastern Seaboard. The places these guys source is astounding—truck stops, strip joints, escort services, and underground brothels from Maine to Miami Beach.”
Porter paused and weaved the car through a pack of delivery trucks.
“Six months ago, we got a tip from one of our sources that a man named Dietrich Klein was involved. Our techs did a bit of wizardry and we found him. East German native, probably a former Stasi officer, emigrated to the U.S. after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and married a prom-queen-turned-exotic-dancer. Go figure. They live in a ritzy suburb north of here. He’s been in investing and real estate and now trades as a ‘success consultant,’ whatever that means. He travels a lot. People speak highly of him. He pays his taxes. His reported income is lower than we would expect, but not too low.”
“You gotta love the new economy.”
Porter laughed. “Everybody’s a consultant these days. In any event, Klein checked out. We thought our source was making things up, but he was insistent. The Bureau decided to monitor Klein’s cell phone calls. It took a while because the guy is extremely sophisticated. But we put the puzzle together and hit pay dirt. He made regular calls to nondescript landlines in five major eastern cities—Newark, Harrisburg, Baltimore, Memphis, and Atlanta. We ran the traces and put assets on the owners. All of them turned out to be connected to the sex trade.”
“How does Kandyland fit in?”
“I was just getting to that. Agent DeFoe accessed the site for the first time about a month ago. The cheapskates who paid a hundred bucks a month got pictures only. Prepubescent girls doing things you don’t want to think about. The perverts willing to shell out more cash got access to another part of the site. They were invited to join the fun in person. For a thousand bucks an hour, they could have a photo shoot with a girl. For anywhere between twenty and forty thousand a night, they could have a child all to themselves. A number of the girls were advertised as virgins. They commanded the highest price.”
“This is wild stuff.”
“Tell me about it.”
“By the way, where are we going?” A minute before, they had taken an exit onto U.S. Route 19 North toward Roswell and Alpharetta.
“You’ll see soon enough. Let me finish my story.”
“Please. I gather you’re getting to the point.”
Porter went on, “DeFoe sent some of the images to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and got another agent to cross-check them with Interpol’s database. A number of kids were clear matches. Meanwhile, DeFoe did what only DeFoe can do. In less than twenty-four hours, he succeeded in tracing the Kandyland site back to a computer in the Czech Republic.”
“The East German connection.”
“Perhaps. It’s owned by a university in Prague and it’s infected with a virus called a Trojan Horse. The Trojan Horse allows a hacker to turn the infected computer into a ‘slave’ to transfer data and even to run programs from a distance. The slave computer protects the hacker from being discovered. It is the same thing as a digital identity shield.”
“Okay.”
“So DeFoe sent a request for assistance up the chain of command, and the FBI reached out to the Czech national police. The Czechs got permission from the university to access the computer, and the FBI sent a Cyber Action Team to Prague. The cyber guys passed their data along to DeFoe. DeFoe then traced the Web traffic to an Internet service provider in North Carolina. By this time, DeFoe was the man of the hour and everyone was marching to his orders. DeFoe flew down there, thinking he was going to find a link to Kandyland’s home server. But it turns out that this particular service provider offers its customers the ultimate privacy—anonymous access to the Internet. No digital footprint.”
“And this is legal?”
“It’s the Wild West, remember? The regulators are light-years behind the innovators. So the U.S. attorney applied some muscle, and the service provider gave DeFoe the keys to their mainframes. After two weeks, he was able to isolate a range of computers sending data to Prague. They were also able to confirm hundreds of computers receiving data from Prague.”
“You mean the sickos?” Thomas asked.
Porter nodded. “Exactly. The U.S. attorney had to get a search warrant, but when he did, he found the mother lode. The sending computers were registered to an account held by one of Dietrich Klein’s dummy corporations. DeFoe didn’t know this right away. He had to forward it through the chain of command. When we saw it, we knew that part of the mystery of Kandyland was solved.”
Thomas thought for a moment and saw a hole in Porter’s story. “But the fact that Klein is involved doesn’t tell you where the girls are being held.”
“True,” Porter agreed. “It only tells us that he’s running one of the most extensive trafficking rackets in U.S. history.” He paused. “Now for the end of the story. Sita is the key. DeFoe got back to Washington on Wednesday night. On Thursday morning, he logged into the Kandyland site. He noticed that a new gallery had been added on the premium side of the site. The girl looked to be Indian. He sent a couple of images along to NCMEC. They got back to him right away and told him about a notice my office sent out in response to your voicemail. I had to get pe
rmission to use it, but we have a mass distribution list—sort of like an electronic version of the old ‘all points bulletin.’ Just about everyone who works on the issue of child exploitation in the United States was instructed to watch for her.”
Thomas shook his head in wonderment. “I had no idea you would be able to do that.”
Porter waved off the compliment. “So NCMEC informed my office of DeFoe’s discovery. I contacted DeFoe directly and told him your story. Let’s just say he was touched. It turns out he’s an orphan too. He hatched a plot to get Sita out. We took it up to the assistant director in charge of the Washington field office, and he contacted the deputy director. The DD was hesitant at first. He didn’t want to move on the Kleins until we could take down the entire ring. It took us three days of preparation to coordinate the stings, but we made it happen. Everything is going down tonight. The Bureau is working with local cops in eight different cities. We have a SWAT team on hand for the Atlanta operation.”
“What’s the plan?” Thomas asked.
“It’s simple. DeFoe posed as a pervert and rented Sita for the evening. He wired earnest money to an offshore bank account and received an e-mail from the Kandyland webmaster directing him to a truck stop north of Atlanta. He’s supposed to come alone at eleven tonight. The e-mail said he would be escorted from that point.”
Thomas marveled at the serendipity of the events Porter had described. “After everything we’ve done to find her, it all came down to a picture and a phone call.”
Porter took the exit for the North Point Mall and pulled into a massive, mostly empty parking lot. He maneuvered the car to the rear of the lot and parked beside a gray beast of a vehicle bearing the designation FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION MOBILE COMMAND CENTER.
The door to the command center swung open as soon as they got out of the car. They were greeted by a tall black man wearing a no-nonsense smile.
A Walk Across the Sun Page 32