Alien Tongues

by M. L. Janes

  "Better than a big city?"

  "At least initially – friendlier police relations," McMahon told him. "And you'd be surprised the high-rollers who fly in and want a top-dollar girl who can give them a good time at the casinos. Many of these East Europeans never had a classy Asian woman who can speak their language intelligently." He paused. "Will you be looking for work yourself?"

  "Put it this way," Séamus replied, "I've got enough cash for about a month, and I don't intend to be anyone's pimp."

  "Excellent. No problem in getting you some security position. Pay can be pretty good. Mind you, it is likely to require, shall we say, some of your rougher skills."

  Séamus shrugged. "Beggars can't be choosers."

  "Sounds like a deal." Grant rose. "Ryan and I will head out now. You're very well protected here. When you've made your decision, call me on this phone, which is fully secure and you can keep." He handed it to Séamus. "If you accept my terms, I suggest my men take you to Felixstowe soon. We'll get you on a container-ship to The Hague in the morning." He stepped closer to Séamus. "There are few men I would trust with such an arrangement, Mr FitzGerald. I'm doing it partly because of Ryan's knowledge of your family, partly because I like what I see about you, and partly because there's a high chance of a good payoff and some chance of an outstanding payoff. But you know I would also not be doing this unless I was sure in my mind that you understand the consequences of breaking my rules."

  Séamus looked him in the eye. "It's either you or some government-paid psychopaths. But above all, I'm my own worst enemy."

  Grant smiled. "Well, you have one less enemy tonight. Ed Allsop will be accompanying you to the port." At Séamus's surprised look he added, "No need to worry. When Ed learned what you did tonight, he felt he got off lightly. I assure you there are no hard feelings on his side and – given his somewhat anti-government sentiments – quite a lot of respect."

  "I'll take your word for it."

  Grant shook his hand, patted his arm, wished him luck and left the room. McMahon followed him, waving a hand at Séamus, grinning and advising him to stay alive.

  Séamus fetched the girls from upstairs. They sat in the large armchairs, looking somewhat overwhelmed. He explained the deal he had made with Grant. He felt he had to make reference to the Consortium, saying it was a private business that shared their results with the government, and who might have an interest in hiring the girls which could be worth exploring, if he could ensure their safety. He avoided any details of how the government or Consortium would use their number language.

  After some ten minutes he fell silent. Alice was the first to respond, sounding distressed.

  "Séamus, that sounds terrible! How can we possible trade these girls into such a business? Didn't we already rescued them from crime?"

  There was a silence. Both Séamus and Alice looked at the girls, but none of them seemed to connect their gaze. Finally, after the pause was painfully long, Chrissy spoke up.

  "Alice, we know you mean well, and you have a good heart. But if you spent a while thinking about it, you might realize how thoughtless your remark was."

  There was a very faint murmur from the other girls, as if providing moral support to Chrissy. She continued, "All of us knew what we were doing back in our home countries. We did it because it was the fastest way to earn money to help our families. Instead, we could have chosen to work in factories for five dollars a day, in which case we would have been able to buy our families aspirin to ease their pain. If there's an evil in this world, it's not the opportunity we had to make good money. It's the fact that all so-called honest jobs back home don't make enough to buy medicine when our families get sick. So as far as we were concerned, we were not traded. We just chose to so something tough because we felt a duty."

  "Chrissy," Alice said in what she obviously meant to be a kind voice, "I was not criticizing you. You are the victims."

  "We're not victims!" Phyllis said loudly. "Yes, I was the victim of my uncle's rape, but after that I knew how to take care of myself."

  "Alice," Jenny said, her voice pleading. "You have to give us some dignity here. We're actually all quite proud of what we did. We were the breadwinners in our families. Of course there is unpleasantness sometimes. But in my book it's much better than going down a mineshaft every day. And whenever you turn on a hot shower in much of Asia, you're sending someone down a mineshaft to supply your energy. So the world is full of people who get abused and people who create the abuse. In our case, we all believe we made the right decision before, and we're the ones who are free to make it now."

  "Anyway, the job you got for us would have had us burnt to death if Séamus hadn't saved us," Tina added. "Who are you to say that Séamus got us a bad deal? Actually, I certainly don't know yet if I want to risk going to this Consortium, which could have the same fate planned for us. For the time being I'm just comfortable with a well-organized gang."

  Séamus wondered if the girls were somehow protecting him, but he didn't have a way to measure that. They had seemed hard on Alice, but it was impossible not to side with them – it was they who had suffered that kind of life before, after all. They sounded very supportive of his deal with Grant, so he felt he could side-step Alice's objection. Should the girls' viewpoint seem so alien to her? The conflict was, as far as he could see it, that the girls seemed to feel they were in full control of their own lives, and Alice could not accept that they were. Is any sense of control an illusion? Even if we think we are willingly accepting the seduction? Now he knew enough at least to ask that question.

  "Girls," Séamus said. "Would you mind if I spent a few moments with Alice alone?" When they had returned to their bedrooms he said to Alice, "I'm afraid I just don't see any alternative. None of us have the money to otherwise survive in hiding, let alone pay for our escape from here. And we need to give Grant an incentive to keep us alive."

  She nodded. "I know you're right. And I know Tina's right – it must now look like a better option than what we offered them. I don't think I can ever lose my sense of guilt about that. But it's so hard to be a woman telling them that this is their best option. I can't tell you how much of a total failure as a human being that makes me feel. And these girls are so talented! Séamus, how did everything fall apart so quickly?" Alice buried her face in her hands. He realized that, among the six of them, she was the one wholly unprepared for events to turn so suddenly and violently downwards. Or was there something else, too?

  "One practical question," he said slowly. "Do you believe that Grant will stick to his word? In other words, protect them from violence as much as he can, and keep them free to choose?"

  Alice lifted her face from her hands. She had been silently crying, but now her face was calm. "Yes, Grant will stick to his words. He loves his code of honor. It makes him the Genghis Khan of Northern England."

  "You said before that you didn't know him," Séamus said softly. "What's the story?"

  "Can you hug me a little?" she asked. Séamus moved to her sofa and she leaned against him. "Mum accidently killed Dad. They were fighting and something went terribly wrong. I told her not to worry about any murder or manslaughter charge; that the evidence was very much in her favor. But she was too scared. She went to Grant to clean it all up, and he did. Mum was never charged with anything. But now my family owes Grant for a long time. Both she and I have to help him with alibis and, in my case, some blocking of police surveillance. It was I who told him about the girls, so that created the Allsop problem. Grant just wasn't prepared to fully accept my version of things. Maybe he trusted me to be truthful, but he couldn't be sure that you were not using me and the girls for other purposes. He's really paranoid, which is what scares me."

  Séamus waited a while, letting this revelation sink in. His hug did not change, but he said, "So anyway you're one of the many in this community that supports his business. Has that been your source of guilt? Now adding our girls is the final straw?"

  There was no r
eply to this question, but she said, "Séamus, why is the world still like this? I and millions of other naive geeks spend our lives developing sophisticated technology which we tell ourselves is making the Earth a better place to live. Yet there is still some elite club of ruthless and power-hungry, self-appointed leaders who make fools of us all. Why do we always tolerate it? Worse, why do most of us actively sign up to follow these leaders?"

  "That's an easy one," Séamus told her. "Laziness and fear." And in his quest to be the good agent Barbara wanted him to be, he was as guilty as anyone else of mental laziness. It was only when events forced him to choose between the Agency bosses and the girls almost instinctively, pressing a single button and setting off an unstoppable sequence under which Phyllis would execute two of his colleagues, he had leapt forever from the minion carriage of the Establishment train of life. And no sooner was he free than he had jumped on the Anti-Establishment train and gone cap-in-hand to its gilded leadership carriage. He was being assigned a new seat in this new train, maybe if he was lucky in the senior minion carriage.

  Did any of it make sense? Was it all worth it for that one moment between the trains, when he had been his own man and tasted true freedom? Would he look back on that moment in the lobby as his one crowning moment of humanity, or his dumbest decision imaginable? And in the end did it actually matter? Was it all nothing more than the timing of their inevitable deaths, those time differences being utterly irrelevant in the course of the Universe? Dying now or dying in bed fifty years later – one millionth of the evolutionary gap between Earth and its first penpal.

  12. Flight

  They all travelled south in a van which was windowless but comfortably furnished. Séamus and the girls were headed for the main port on the coast of East Anglia, a route that took them via Cambridge. Alice decided she would use that opportunity to see Professor Wilkie in person.

  Edward Allsop sat with them, having been courteous and helpful to everyone from the start. The girls slept on long bench-seats, while Séamus, Alice and Allsop sat on a separate row. Séamus, unable to sleep, decided it might be useful to start a conversation with his new colleague.

  "How long have you worked for Mr Grant, Ed?" he asked.

  Allsop frowned. "Since leaving school. That'd be some twenty-five years."

  "You have always found him a man of his word?"

  Allsop nodded strongly. "Séamus, you can depend upon it. I've never know a man so principled as Mr Grant, and I'm sure I never will."

  "Why does such a principled man run a prostitution ring, then?" Alice said with some bitterness. Though he would not have bothered with the same remark himself, Séamus also felt interested in the answer. He noted that Allsop's face lost none of its composure.

  "Well, that's the point, really," he answered thoughtfully. "He does it because he's one of the few men who's making a serious effort to get rid of the real evil in this world."

  "Oh?" Alice replied. "So what do you consider the real evil?"

  Allsop turned to her, his expression unchanged. "Child prostitution. Slavery, especially sex slavery. Stuff like that."

  Alice shook her head. "Aren't you guys encouraging that sort of stuff by running this business?"

  Allsop dropped his head a little. It struck Séamus he was deliberately pausing before he started his answer. "Dr Turner, you are a very clever woman, and I am just a simple, rather impetuous man. So maybe you'll be able to correct any muddled thinking I have inside my head. Here's how I see it. Mr Grant, and the Syndicate to which we belong, have some very strong principles. So strong, that most people who have broken them end up regretting that they ever did. Our top principle is that none of our girls are legally underage, and our second principle is that all of our girls are free to quit working with us whenever they choose, even if they owe us money. Everyone who leaves us is given three years to repay whatever they owe. No girl ever owes us more than three years' worth of honest wages."

  "I don't believe that," Alice remarked.

  Allsop shrugged. "You asked me how a principled man can run a prostitution ring, and I just explained it. You didn't ask me to prove it, and of course I can't. But I can tell you that, if I ever thought the Syndicate allowed these principles to be violated, I myself would go to the police, much as I hate those bastards to death."

  "Why do you hate the police so much. Ed?" Séamus asked.

  "'Cos most of them are the worst crooks. Not all, I grant you. But most. They use the law to break the law, and there's nothing more degraded than that."

  "How do you know that?" Alice challenged him.

  "Oh well, let me see. You pointed out the existence of child prostitution and sex slavery, though you incorrectly assigned some of the blame to the Syndicate. Now I am going to agree that these evils are sorely widespread in this wicked world. But I would ask you, how can that be when we have so many policemen on the taxpayer's payroll? Maybe it's because the real offenders are not arrested. Maybe when crimes do occur – let's say where the criminal is not caught red-handed – the police don't go looking for the truly dangerous types who do the very bad stuff. They just find some poor fool on whom they can pin some evidence. A lot easier, isn't it? Someone stupid, or suspicious-looking, or with some history, etcetera. Juries believe police evidence, don't they? Maybe the offenders pay off police and witnesses because they can afford to. In the public's eye, someone is punished for a crime. Trouble is, the real criminal is free to commit another crime."

  "You don't know that!" Alice snapped.

  Allsop shrugged. "I know it for a depressing number of cases. Many, many, many. Of course I don't know about every case, but there's a very troubling pattern." He leaned towards Alice. "Now I would guess, Dr Turner, that you personally don't know any cases where you actually are sure the police did not take the easy road and just find anyone they thought they could easily get convicted? You just believe they do a good job because… Because it's really too disturbing to imagine that they don't, isn't it?"

  "I work with the police a lot on breaking gang codes and I can tell you they are not like that."

  Allsop shook his head and smiled. "Dr Turner, you give us information to protect your mother from a murder charge. Are you telling me Old Bill is less corruptible than yourself?" Alice swore at him but the man just chuckled. He looked at Séamus and said, "You've got to ask yourself, what makes a bloke become a rozzer? 'Cos he wants to help folk? Ever seen that delight in his eyes when he's handing you a speeding ticket? Those bastards are interested in power, nowt else."

  Alice was pointedly looking away from Allsop. Séamus broke the silence by asking, "But how does your Syndicate get rid of evil, then?"

  The other man opened one of several thermoses of coffee and poured three plastic cupfuls. "Well, Mr Grant would tell you that there are two types of evil. Evil that cannot be avoided, and that which can be avoided. Take underage prostitution. We can't stop pedophiles being born, so that's an evil we will always face. But most underage girls are teenagers made up to look like adults. There's a demand for them because there's a poor supply of adults. Increase the willing supply of real adults and you eliminate the demand for fake ones and coerced ones."

  "Sounds rubbish," Alice said, still looking away. "Isn't it, Séamus?"

  "I never thought about it," he commented. How could he imagine what made sense in this context, when he was obsessed by a woman who had a daughter a few years younger than him? He said to Allsop, "So other men in your Syndicate share these beliefs? I mean, it's a kind of Credo for you?"

  The Syndicate man shrugged again. "We don't see them as beliefs, we see them as science. Our people severely punish pimping of under-aged and coerced girls, and everyone doing voluntary adult business is invited to join us. Throughout Western Europe there's not much left than ourselves, and we're growing everywhere else. Just one more rule – if you leave us then, for the safety of yourself and your family, you say nothing. If you see something wrong, you tell us and not the coppers."

>   "So you're basically like the Mafia?" Alice said. "You're the gods who decide what justice is."

  "No, Ma'am. Mafia is families. We have no preferential treatment of family members. And we have our own legal system. If someone's up for punishment, we have our own jury review the evidence."

  "I pray someday you'll all be up before a real jury," Alice remarked.

  Séamus sighed. "Not any day soon, I suspect." He looked at Allsop. "I've recently been reading the government files on the Syndicate. Seems our people concluded the same as you. Coercion and underage is way down these days and they suspect it's because of the spread of your organization. So they're not going after you, since you're doing the worst part of their job for them. What I had no idea about – and I'm sure they don't either – is that this is actually part of your mission."

  After pausing, he gave an ironic laugh. "You know, I now appreciate more what McMahon said to me about unlawful armies. But instead of the IRA, it's more like Sinn Fein was in the old days – illegal, but in constant talks with the government. Local police may hound you from time to time, but our Agency and others stop it going anywhere because they know any alternative's going to be worse. If we don't have enough resources to stop bombs in public places, we're not going to waste them on consenting adults in private."

  "Especially when your top people enjoy our discounted prices," Allsop said with a wink, "And can be assured of no breaches of confidentiality."

  Alice made a noise of disgust. "Then all you're saying is that everything's just as corrupt as you are. Seems we still don't have enough women in government yet."

  Allsop nodded his appreciation of the point. "When we do, I suspect our bill for luxury goods will go a lot higher – especially those involving the skin and parts of endangered species." He picked up a cushion and placed it behind his head. "They said with women in government there'd be more peace in the world, but I don't remember them campaigning too hard against the last war." He looked at Séamus. "But I'd vote for Petra any day, wouldn't you? Says she'll stand for election when she goes back to her home country – she's a big fan of our cause, you might say. Now if you wouldn't mind, I'll take forty winks."