Taylor took her to his room and, once inside, let go of her arm, and started to pace, trying to make sense of how he’d managed to screw up so badly. On his second circuit across the small room he drew up short. The girl was standing directly in front of him, and her hands started working on one of the buttons of her shirt. Taylor’s hand shot out and grabbed onto hers, stopping the motion.
She looked into his eyes, a mixture of surprise and fear flashing across her face.
“No,” Taylor said and, still holding onto her hand, he pulled her toward the small bathroom. Pointing at the edge of the tub, he said, “Sit.”
She was looking at him in confusion as he shut the door. Walking over to the bed, Taylor stood on the bed, and opened the vent. Pulling out the sat phone, but leaving the gun, Taylor replaced the vent and hopped off the bed.
When Andre answered Taylor said, in English, “Andre, I think I found her. Or at least, I found the auction.”
Taylor thought it best to do everything in English for now, at least while the girl was around. He didn’t know anything about her, and the last thing he needed was her blabbing about what he was up to. They already knew he was American, so speaking in English wouldn’t give any new information. Not that he thought the precaution was entirely needed. Even though the door was essentially made of the thinnest plywood he’d ever seen, she probably wasn’t paying attention to him. In all likelihood, she was more concerned about what was going to happen to her, since he hadn’t done anything yet to reassure her she wasn’t in the hands of some asshole who was going to make her life hell.
“Is everything alright?” Andre asked.
“Not really, no. I’m not alone at the moment.”
“What do you mean?”
“I found the place Reznikov told us about, and they are holding an auction. I managed to get in, posing as a buyer for foreign clients, to try to get the lay of the land. They are gunned up in a serious way. Without some serious backup, the only way I’m going to get her out is to straight up purchase her and walk her out the door.”
“That might work, but what about the other girls?”
“I have no idea. I can’t buy them all. I don’t have enough money, and that would look suspicious as hell. My only hope is you can get here fast enough.”
“I will try, but, I will have to go slow. These people always seem to know when a raid is happening, and clear out before we can get there. I have people I trust, but we have to move slowly or we tip our hand. People already know I’m involved with something about missing girls. If I pull my team and move quickly, they will notice and most likely put the facts together. I don’t think there is any way I can be there before the auction starts, and probably not until morning, to be honest. If you can just keep an eye on them until then”
“I understand. I’ll try. I'll do the best I can until you can get here. Just do your best, also.”
“Stay safe my friend. You cannot help anyone if you’re dead.”
“I’ll try,” Taylor said, and disconnected and dialed another number.
“Agent Whitaker.”
“Hey.”
“Is everything OK?”
“Why is everyone asking that?” Taylor said with a laugh.
“Something in your voice. You sound frustrated.”
“I am. I’m pretty sure I found Mary Jane and the other girls that were shipped out with her.”
“Really?” Whitaker said, sounding excited.
“That’s the good news. The bad news is I’m a little screwed when it comes to getting them back.”
Taylor spent the next few minutes going over everything that had happened since he’d left her standing back at the apartment, pulling no punches as he told her about the container yard and what he’d done to Reznikov afterward. The explanation only got dicey when he caught up to current events.
“So, I managed to talk my way into the warehouse, posing as a buyer for foreign clients. I got a good look at their setup, and they have a lot of guys and a whole hell of a lot of guns. I called Andre and he’s going to get a team headed this way, but he said he has to go slow. He believes these guys have a source in the FSB, and he doesn’t want to tip them off.”
“And since the auction is tonight,” she said, “you are going to go back in and try to buy Mary Jane, right?”
“That was my plan.”
“Andre’s right. You should watch and wait until he and his people show up.”
“Lola, you know I’m not going to do that.”
“I know you’re not. You haven’t ever seen a damsel you don’t want to go swinging in to rescue.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Ha, bullshit. It’s exactly like that. Sometimes the damsel is a boy grabbed by his coked-up dad, but you have been unable to pass up being the knight in shining armor. Hell, that’s what you’ve spent the entire last year doing.”
“What can I do? I have to be who I am.”
“Yeah, I know. Like I said, I know you. I just wish sometimes you would temper that with a little patience.”
“Hey, I’m not even taking my gun. There is no way I can outshoot all those guys. I’m going to play it smooth, trust me.”
“Yeah, just like you played it smooth with me?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I know how these operations work. I’ve read plenty of files on them, including your friend Sergi. Some unknown guy walks off the streets, drops one name, and is invited to participate in the auction? No, you left a part out.”
“Ohh . . . that.”
“Yeah. What did you do?”
“I might have bought a girl already?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Hey, as soon as Andre gets here, I’ll turn her over and hopefully he can figure out what to do with her. But it’s all I could think of.”
“You are seriously not trained for this, you know that, right?”
“You don’t have to tell me. I’m flying by the seat of my pants out here.”
“Well, be careful. If things go sideways, drop it, and run. You can always work with Andre to track them again. You can’t do shit if you're dead.”
“I know that.”
They both fell silent for a moment, neither wanting to hang up.
“You know I love you, right?” he said.
“Yeah, I do. But now’s not the time to get all weepy. Get your head in the game and come home to me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“OK. And, John, I love you, too.” She hung up.
He clicked off the phone and leaned against the wall. “Shit,” he said under his breath, lifting his head then smacking it lightly against the wall. He had seriously screwed the pooch.
The bathroom door opened and the girl was standing in the doorway, her hands on her hips, the look of confusion gone.
“You are being a big liar,” she said in accented, but completely understandable, English.
Taylor felt the bottom go out of his stomach.
“Shit.”
CHAPTER 11
“You speak English,” Taylor said, still in English, his mind reeling.
That was the third time today he’d completely misjudged something. It was becoming an epidemic and showed how out of his depth he was. Not that Taylor allowed that excuse to stand, even when just giving it to himself.
“I speak some,” she said in English, before switching to Russian, “Your Russian is better than my English, however.”
She’d been silent from the moment she had been brought out to him until exiting the bathroom and calling out his ruse, and he found her voice both strange and yet oddly right for her. It was high pitched, although not squeaky, and he was sure if she tried at it, she could sound like the stereotypical valley girl. What it did do, was make her seem even younger than she looked, which he would have thought was impossible.
“I’m not sure what you heard, but it’s not . . .” Taylor said, trying to come up with another lie on the fly and reali
zing he was having trouble keeping them all straight by this point. He had always known he preferred the straightforward approach, and this entire day was doing an excellent job of reinforcing that feeling.
“I heard you talking about the auction and your plan of getting into it to find some girl. I heard you talk to someone I am guessing was from the police about coming to help you. And I heard you talking to a girlfriend or wife about buying a prostitute.”
For a girl who spoke ‘some’ English, she seemed to have followed every damned thing he’d been planning, and witnessed his single-handed torpedoing of all those plans. The calculating look she wore now made him feel like a mouse being looked over by a cat. He made a mental note to try not to underestimate her again. Setting the satellite phone on the small desk, Taylor stepped back to lean against the wall and rubbed his face in frustration.
“I wasn’t talking to her about ‘buying’ a prostitute. I did mention that I’d made an attempt to . . . umm . . . buy credibility so I could get into the auction. If you were listening to all that, you also heard that I planned to turn you over as soon as I could.”
“I’ve been turned over enough,” she said, sounding serious.
“To the authorities?”
She let out a laugh that somehow ended up sounding sarcastic all by itself.
“How very thoughtful of you,” she said, her voice as sharp as a knife. “However, I think I’ve found my own way out.”
“And how’s that?”
“You give me all the money I saw tucked in your pockets, and I use that to get as far from Timor as I can and hope he never finds me.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Taylor said, his voice now matching hers. “I need this money to buy the person I’m looking for.”
“Why do you want to buy this girl so much?”
“Because I was hired to find her and bring her home to her family.”
“I’m not going to let you turn me over to the police just so I can end back up in Timor’s hands and catch the blame when you fuck up whatever you’re doing.”
If the impasse hadn’t been so serious, Taylor would have found it amusing that he was here, locked in a battle of wills with a teenager, and not sure he was going to come out on top.
“We have a problem then,” Taylor said.
“Not really. As soon as you’re off to the auction I can start screaming you're a plant, Timor will skin you alive, and my life will be just as shitty as it was, but at least not any shittier. Or you can give me the money.”
“True. Of course, I could haul you out into all that forest and find a hole to drop your body in.”
She stared at him for a minute then let out a throaty chuckle, “No you won’t.”
“Are you so sure?”
“Yes,” she said confidently. “I’m good at reading people, and that is not who you are. If I was someone who was actually dangerous to you or someone else, like immediately dangerous and not just screwing up plans, I have no doubt you could do just that. But someone like me? No.”
‘Damn,’ Taylor thought, ‘she's got me pegged.’
“I’m not going to let you screw up my plans,” Taylor said, pausing as they each tried to stare the other down, “but . . .”
“But?”
“I am working for someone with a lot of money. If you help me, I’ll get you ten times what I paid that man in there, which is a lot more than I have on me. If you play a role in getting her daughter free, she’ll pay it.”
“Sure, and we finish this, then you just leave me cold,” she said, almost snarling.
“You told me you were good at reading people. Is that what you think I’d do?”
She stared at him for a long moment, the calculations almost visible behind her eyes, before she said softly, “No. One hundred thousand.”
“Deal,” Taylor said, already thinking about how the hell he was going to explain that to the senator. Pushing that thought off as a problem for the future, he extended his hand to her, “I’m John, what’s your name?”
“Kara,” she said, hesitating at first, then reaching out her own hand. Her grip was firmer than Taylor expected.
“What’s your plan?” she said, dropping his hand, and almost skipping over to the bed, sitting on it with a bounce.
Taylor pulled the chair away from the window across from her and sat in it backward, arms leaning on the back of the chair.
“I figured I’d go in, find her, bid on her, and we’d walk out the front door.”
“That simple?”
“Why not?”
She shrugged, “So who is this girl?”
“She would have been brought in recently. She looks kind of like you, although somewhat older, but red hair, freckles, blue eyes.”
Taylor was taken back when she burst out laughing. She almost doubled over, and he just stared at her, wondering what exactly had caused that kind of reaction.
“Let . . . let,” she stuttered, wiping a tear that had formed in one eye, “let me guess. You walked in and said you want a girl who looks like this and this and that, and they brought you me instead of her. You already tried to buy her back, and got the wrong girl.”
Taylor shrugged, “Something like that, although I’m not sure it’s as funny as all that.”
“Maybe not, but I don’t get a lot of things to laugh at. You’re not very good at this, are you?”
“I usually go with a more direct approach,” Taylor said, looking at her curiously. “How old are you, exactly?”
“Old enough,” she said, the mirth disappearing completely and her voice becoming almost emotionless.
“To look at you, I’d think twelve, but talking to you I’d guess closer to forty.”
“Ha,” she said, a somewhat sad smile breaking the mask that had fallen in when he’d asked, “I guess this has a way of toughening a girl up. I’m sixteen, I think.”
“You think you're sixteen?”
It was her turn to shrug, “It’s hard to keep track of. You only look at each day, wanting to make it to the next. It’s not like we get days off or weekends. Plus, what’s to celebrate?”
“I get that,” Taylor said.
His experience wasn’t exactly the same as hers, but those years in captivity, sometimes inside a cave for months at a time without ever seeing the sun, he had a similar sense of being adrift in time. He only knew it was three years because someone told him when he ended back up in civilization.
“I doubt it,” she said with a snort.
Taylor just shrugged. He wasn’t one to compare scars. Plus he wasn’t sure he wanted to see hers. They would be emotional instead of physical like his, but there was a good chance she’d win that contest. And there were some things he didn’t want to carry around.
“Did you see a bunch of new girls with the one I’m looking for. All Americans?”
“Yeah, there was a group of seven of them, including yours.”
“Will they all be on auction tonight?”
“Ohh, maybe I should have held out. You think you have enough to buy seven girls and not have Timor smell a sucker?”
“No, I don't have that much. But I can hopefully track them from there and have my friend get to them.”
“Maybe. I don’t think they’ll be up for auction. From what they were saying, they usually like to break the new girls before selling them, unless a customer has a specific request.”
Taylor didn’t know exactly what ‘breaking’ a girl was, but he had a guess, and he knew for a fact he didn’t want to know more.
“So you haven’t been through this before?” Taylor asked almost apologetically.
“No. My most recent ‘employer’ had a place in Sevastopol, but the owner was in debt to Timor, and he saw it as a good opportunity to pay off his debt and get rid of his problem child. I tended to talk back a lot and needed frequent retraining.”
A haunted look crossed her face, but it passed quickly.
“Where are the girls being kept?”
“There are a series of rooms through a door by the stage. There’s a large holding room, basically some benches and a commode for the more seasoned girls, and individual rooms for girls to be trained for selling. The girls you're asking about were sometimes in with us, and sometimes taken out on their own, I’d guess to the training rooms, but once they leave, I have no idea. Before you get any ideas, there are more guards back there, in addition to what you saw in the auction room. If you get yourself killed, I can’t get paid.”
The Wrong Girl (John Taylor Book 3) Page 16