The Stolen Ones

by Owen Laukkanen

  “Tell Interpol to work on that witness,” she told the Newark agent, yelling over the thunder of the rotors. “We need to know which of these twenty boxes is legitimate, and which aren’t. If there’s women on this boat, I want to find them.”

  They’d left LePlavy to coordinate the investigation from land. Commandeered a CBP Black Hawk and flown out to meet the Atlantic Prince as she steamed into the Upper Bay. Stevens watched the big ship as she passed beneath the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge between Staten Island and Brooklyn: a thousand feet long, she was the same length and general dimensions as the Ocean Constellation, though her hull was sleek and black and somehow more foreboding.

  There was no guarantee that any of the boxes stacked on the Atlantic Prince held women, Stevens knew. But if they did, it would break the case open.

  LePlavy had a CBP tactical team en route to the Atlantic Prince on a borrowed Customs SAFE boat. “It’s fast,” he said. “Sixty miles an hour. They might beat you out there.”

  “Good,” Windermere said. “I hope they do. Keep me and Stevens from getting shot.”

  “Those traffickers aren’t going to want to give up their cargo,” Stevens said, watching the Atlantic Prince grow larger outside his window. “So let’s try and get the women out of the box before this ship docks.”

  Windermere glanced across the helicopter at him. “Yeah,” she said. “Let’s try and do that.”

  104

  LEPLAVY CALLED BACK just as Stevens and Windermere reached the Atlantic Prince.

  “Got a box for you,” he told Windermere, reading a number off of a manifest. “Just like the Ocean Constellation, nineteen legit boxes, one bogey. Headed to a nonexistent company in Jersey City.”

  “Get the ship’s crew that information,” Windermere said. “Tell them to find the box for us. I want those women out of there immediately.”

  “Ship’s crew has been informed of your arrival,” LePlavy told her. “That CBP tactical squad’s nearly on-scene, as well. You probably want to wait for them, in case things get hairy.”

  “Fine,” Windermere said. “But tell them to hurry.”

  The CBP Black Hawk swooped over the bow of the Atlantic Prince, descended into a controlled hover ten feet above the deck. Windermere could see five or six members of the ship’s crew clustered below, ready to help bring her and Stevens aboard. The customs airman slid open the helicopter’s rear door. Gestured to Windermere, Now or never. Windermere looked at Stevens, who gave her a weak smile.

  “We do too much of this cowboy shit,” she told him, yelling over the wind and the howl of the engines. “See you on deck.”

  > > >

  STEVENS FELT HIS STOMACH drop out as he descended from the Black Hawk onto the Atlantic Prince’s bow. Wondered how a Minnesota state cop found himself in this kind of predicament all the time. Before he could come up with an answer, he was touching down on hard steel, and the crew of the Atlantic Prince was surrounding him, unclipping his safety harness, bringing him and Windermere on board the ship.

  As on the Ocean Constellation, most of the crew didn’t speak any English. The first officer did, though, and he met Stevens and Windermere inside the ship’s accommodations tower.

  “Your colleague onshore relayed your request,” he told Stevens and Windermere. “In general, it’s not possible to access the cargo during a voyage. But this box, luckily, is at the top of a stack. If you’re careful, you should be able to get up there.”

  “Perfect,” Windermere said. “So let’s do it.”

  They hurried out of the tower and back out to the cargo deck. Met the customs tactical team, four hard-looking men with assault rifles and combat-zone body armor. Windermere explained the situation.

  “We have a box we suspect is full of women at the top of that stack,” she said, pointing skyward. “We need to get up there and get inside.”

  The leader followed her gaze. The box was five containers up, fifty feet above deck, a hundred-odd feet above sea level. Stevens felt his stomach churn, felt suddenly aware of the motion of the waves against the ship’s hull. The swell was a light one, but there were no handrails up there. Any slip could be fatal.

  “Maybe we should wait,” he told Windermere. “It’s a hell of a risk letting forty disoriented women loose up there.”

  Windermere shook her head. “The longer we wait, the better the chances that the Dragon figures out what we’re up to,” she said. “We want to catch this guy, Stevens. We’ll just have to be really freaking careful.”

  Stevens considered the stacks again. Weighed the odds. Figured he’d rather try and corral all those women than see the Dragon get away clean.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

  105

  THE TACTICAL TEAM scaled the containers one at a time, beginning with the lowest stack at the bow of the ship. They climbed atop the first ten-foot box with rope and brute strength, dropped a rope ladder behind so that Stevens and Windermere could follow. The ship swayed as they climbed. The breeze picked up. In the distance, Stevens could see thunderheads. There was a storm coming.

  The ship steamed beneath the Bayonne Bridge as the team worked their way to the box. She made her way slowly into Newark Bay, met a flotilla of tugboats as she approached the massive gantry cranes on the New Jersey shore.

  Windermere picked up her radio, called LePlavy. “Don’t let them dock this ship before we find those women,” she said. “Stall until I give the go-ahead, okay?”

  LePlavy said something that Stevens couldn’t make out, and then Windermere stowed her radio again. Ahead of them, the tactical team clustered around a nondescript brown container, similar to every other box on board.

  “This is the one,” the tactical leader told them. “You want we should just cut it open?”

  “Yeah, but be careful,” Windermere told him. “I wouldn’t put it past these bastards to leave a booby trap.”

  The leader flashed her a thumbs-up, and Stevens and Windermere hung back as one of the tactical guys produced a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters from his belt. Stevens watched the man approach the box, watched him cut the lock. Watched the man’s colleagues cover him with their weapons.

  Stevens drew his pistol, too. Windermere did the same.

  Slowly, the tactical team slid the container door open. The men drew back instantly, one of them gagging. A moment later, Stevens caught the smell, a noxious, too-sweet blend of human waste and vomit. He held his breath and inched closer, his pistol still drawn.

  Inside the box was a false compartment, as Irina had described. Stacks of cardboard boxes holding cheap DVD players. The tactical team moved the boxes away, slowly, methodically, revealing the hidden compartment behind.

  Sounds now. A pounding from within, weak but audible.

  The tactical leader shined a light at the door. His man fiddled with his bolt cutters. Stevens felt his heart pounding. Come on, he thought. Come on, get them out.

  The tactical man cut the lock. Pulled the ruined shards clear and pulled open the door. The smell was even worse now. Inside was darkness. Stevens searched the dark for survivors, praying it was survivors and not bodies they’d find.

  Then the first girl appeared. Cautious, her eyes wide, her pale skin stretched drum-tight over her cheekbones. Another emerged from the gloom, leaning against the dirty walls of the box for support, then another, none of them older than sixteen or seventeen. Windermere rushed forward to help, glanced back at Stevens, paused when she saw the look in his eyes, his clenched fists, his whole body paralyzed.

  “Shit,” she said. “You okay, partner?”

  “We have to get these bastards, Carla,” Stevens said, and knew when he said it that he meant to kill them, every piece-of-shit trafficker with a hand in this mess, evidence or no evidence, justifiable or not.

  Windermere met his gaze. “We do,” she told him, “and we will.” />
  106

  “I NEED MEDICAL STAFF for these girls,” Windermere told LePlavy. “I need someplace to house them, and enough agents to guard them. And I need to keep this a secret until we follow that box to the Dragon, or whoever’s in charge of this mess.”

  LePlavy had met them on the pier, after the Atlantic Prince docked. They’d left the trafficked girls in the crew’s mess on board the ship, found them food and fresh water and supplies from the infirmary, left them with the tactical squad and more customs agents from the port. Now they watched the Atlantic Prince from inside the Charger, waiting as the ship was unloaded.

  “Someone’s going to come for that box,” Windermere said. “Wherever they take it, we’re going to follow them. With any luck, they’ll take us right to headquarters.”

  “Irina said she wound up in a container yard,” Stevens said. “The thugs hosed her down and put her and Catalina back inside the box and drove away. Probably these guys will do the same thing. What if all we’re getting are a couple more thugs?”

  “We arrest them for being ugly and lean on them,” Windermere replied. “Hope they’re smart and selfish enough to turn on their bosses.”

  “Smart doesn’t seem to be their MO. And if their employer is the Dragon, these guys might be too scared to talk.”

  “They’ll talk,” Windermere said. “I’ll make sure of it.”

  “Anyway, we got the girls out, right?” LePlavy said. “Forty lives saved. That’s a pretty damn good day, I’d say.”

  “Sure,” Stevens said. “But Catalina Milosovici is still out there.”

  “And so are the guys who did this,” Windermere said. “We’re going to put a stop to them.” She glanced at her watch. “Just as soon as that damn box appears.”

  Stevens opened his mouth to reply, but LePlavy beat him to it. “Guess you called it,” he said, pointing out the windshield. “That’s our bogey, right?”

  Alongside the Atlantic Prince, a tractor and an empty flatbed waited for cargo, while above it a crane lifted a box from the ship. The box was dull brown, and just looking at it, Windermere could smell the sickening stench from inside. As she watched, the crane carried the box across the ship to the shore and lowered it carefully to the back of the flatbed.

  “Get on your radio, LePlavy,” Windermere said, shifting the Charger into gear. “I want eyes on this truck from as many angles as possible. No way we let the bastards get away.”

  107

  VOLOVOI STOOD in the container yard and watched the sunny summer day turn gloomy. In the distance, a thunderstorm was brewing; already, the wind was whipping up a brisk breeze through the stacks of containers, and purple thunderheads loomed to the south. The air was humid, muggy, stiflingly hot, tense with implied violence.

  A helicopter droned by in the distance. Volovoi checked his watch. The ship would have arrived by now. With any luck, the longshoremen on the pier would off-load the box quickly. Volovoi’s nerves were on edge; he was reluctant to be here. Every minute spent waiting was another minute the FBI could catch up to him.

  He’d napped for an hour or two, maximum, before the Dragon arrived. Woke up groggy, his shoulder aching, had handed little Catalina Milosovici over to his partner and supervised as his soldiers loaded the rest of the girls into the truck to Manhattan.

  He’d kept a couple of his soldiers behind, a giant lug wrench named Marek, who’d driven off to the pier with a truck and a flatbed chassis to await the new box, and a skinhead named Sladjan Dodrescu, who presently lounged in the shade in his purple Dodge Durango, smoking marijuana and enjoying the air-conditioning, waiting for Marek to return. They would unload the new girls here, hose them down, feed them, weed out any who were sick or dead or undesirable to the buyers. Then they would pack them into a new box and take them to Manhattan.

  It would be the last shipment they would process in this lot, Volovoi knew. He would have to retool his entire operation for the New York expansion, wipe clean any trace of his New Jersey operation. Even soldiers like Marek and Sladjan Dodrescu would have to be disposed of.

  Volovoi walked away from the Durango and the little store building and wandered out through the stacks to the service road. Smoked a cigarette at the gate and studied his surroundings. He’d chosen a good location for his yard, an unremarkable and anonymous flat of industrial land close enough to the container harbor and the New Jersey Turnpike, and isolated enough to prevent any neighbors from getting nosy. What neighbors there were were mostly trucking firms, warehouses, and interchange points; a railroad yard lay about a half mile inland, and the service road was bisected with sidings and access tracks.

  The helicopter flew by again overhead, and Volovoi shielded his eyes and searched for it in the sky. Tried to gauge how far away it could be. He couldn’t find it, gave up, snuffed out his cigarette. Was about to turn back to the Durango and its blessed air-conditioning when he saw movement down the head end of the service road. A container rig turned the corner, drove up toward the yard. It was Marek’s rig. The shipment was here.

  Volovoi walked to the chain-link gate, slid it all the way open. Then he made his way across the gravel lot to where Sladjan Dodrescu waited in the Durango, surrounded by containers. Overhead, the helicopter circled again. Volovoi thought of the FBI investigators and felt his senses tingling. Motioned to Dodrescu to roll down his window.

  “Keep the engine running,” Volovoi told him, scanning the sky. “And make sure your gun is loaded.”

  108

  WINDERMERE DROVE the Charger inland, hanging far enough back from the container truck so that the driver wouldn’t recognize the tail. The land around the harbor was low-lying and industrial; in the distance, more spindly cranes reached toward the sky, unloading more shipping containers from more leviathan ships. The truck driver picked his way past refineries and across railroad crossings, dodging tanker trucks and flatbeds and chunky oversized lifters painted the gaudy colors of a child’s sandbox toys. In the distance, a jet plane descended from the sky, on final approach to nearby Newark Liberty International.

  LePlavy talked on his radio in the backseat, coordinating the support units he’d corralled to meet the container truck and its cargo wherever it stopped.

  “We have air support, too,” he told Stevens and Windermere. “That customs helicopter is trailing us overhead. Make sure we keep a good eye on these guys.”

  “Tell them not to get too close,” Windermere said. “We don’t want to spook them.”

  LePlavy gestured through the windshield as the truck turned a corner. “Even if we did spook them, where the hell would they go?” he said. “As long as that chopper has eyes on them, they won’t get away.”

  Just being careful, Windermere thought. We don’t want to mess this up again.

  She slowed the Charger and followed the truck through the intersection and down a long, ruler-straight road. On either side were more empty lots, a few warehouses. LePlavy leaned forward and pointed at a white cube van approaching from the opposite direction.

  “Our guys,” he said. “Got a whole tactical team loaded in the back of that rig.”

  “What else do we have for support?” Stevens asked.

  “As many field agents as I could muster,” LePlavy said. “Plus backup from Elizabeth and Newark PDs. They’re in position behind us, and they move at my signal.”

  Windermere thought about the shootout in the Blue Room. About how a man earned himself a nickname like “The Dragon.” “Your backup,” she said. “How are they armed?”

  “Heavily,” LePlavy said. He pointed out the window as the container truck turned off the road and into a gravel yard full of boxes. “This must be the spot,” he said, reaching for his radio. “Let’s go get them.”

  > > >

  VOLOVOI HEARD THE RUMBLE as the container truck turned in from the service road and onto the gravel lot. Heard the throb of the helicopter,
high overhead, and the ominous, low growl of thunder in the distance.

  Sladjan Dodrescu waited in the Durango, his pistol on the dash. Volovoi paced, nervous, listening to the crunch of heavy tires on loose stone as the truck idled through the stacks of containers to the clearing.

  The helicopter buzzed overhead like a bee in his ear. Marek slowed the big truck to a halt. Cut the engine. Volovoi waited.

  The air was still. Sticky. He was sweating through his shirt. Today’s box was shit brown, bruised and dented. It sat on the back of the flatbed like a bomb.

  Marek climbed from the cab. Circled around toward Volovoi. “You want me to open the box?”

  Volovoi didn’t answer. Was that a car’s engine he could hear, somewhere beyond the containers? A truck? A plane?

  He looked at the box, and at Marek again. Nodded.

  Soon enough, he thought. Soon enough, we’ll know.

  Marek took a pair of bolt cutters from the truck and walked to the rear of the box. Paused at the doors a moment. Volovoi watched him. “What’s the problem?”

  “The lock,” Marek said.

  “You can’t cut it?”

  “No,” Marek said. “It’s not there to cut.”

  Volovoi started toward the box. Then he stopped. He saw the helicopter now, high in the sky. It was closer than he expected, an angry black insect. Volovoi was sure he could hear engines, too, out on the service road, through the stacks of containers. And the lock was gone.

  Too much coincidence.

  Volovoi started running for the Durango just as the first police cruiser appeared through the stacks, lights up, tires skidding on the gravel. There were more cars behind it, unmarked sedans and a white cube van, all of them screaming in like an invading army.

  “Police,” Volovoi screamed to Marek. He pulled out his pistol, took aim at the first police car. Fired two shots at the windshield and then hurried around the Durango, pulling himself into the passenger side.