by Lisa Unger
Within fifteen minutes, they had packed their bags, while Bentley and Negron sat on the couch like a couple of sour gargoyles. Within thirty, they were in their Jeep on the way to the airport, the FBI escort close behind. Exhausted and bruised, they had every intention of returning to New York. Because they could only get a flight to Tirana, Albania, from JFK. Tomorrow.
True to their word, Agents Negron and Bentley had graciously escorted them to the Miami Airport, were so kind as to wait while they dropped off their rental car, and then drove them to the terminal. There, Negron ate some Goobers and read the latest issue of Hot Rod, while Bentley seemed content to sit and glare at Lydia and Jeffrey until they walked up the gangway to their flight. As she smiled and waved to them obnoxiously through the portal window of the airplane, Negron gave her the finger from behind the tinted plate glass.
“I’m so glad I don’t work for the fucking Bureau anymore,” said Jeffrey, exhaling through his nose sharply.
“I think they’re glad, too.”
They sat staring straight ahead for a moment. Jeffrey hadn’t had time to work himself into a state before getting on the plane … and hadn’t had time to get a drink. So when Lydia felt him start to fidget as the plane began to taxi down the runway, she fished through her bag until she found her bottle of Tylenol PM, as well as a tiny bottle of Absolut Citron that she had taken from the minibar for just this purpose. She handed them to him.
“Thank you, Doctor,” he said. She held his hand, which had suddenly gone cold, and smiled at him. It constantly amazed her that he was so afraid to fly, when he was so fearless about everything else. She figured it was a control issue. He’d probably be less afraid if he was actually flying the jet.
“Can I have that stuff from the office?” she asked.
He lifted his shirt and handed her the file folder and date book, both all wrinkled and warm. She put the folder in her lap and smoothed it out with both hands, then opened the date book and flipped through the pages.
“What is this?” she asked, thinking aloud.
“It looks like some kind of schedule,” he answered, leaning in and putting a hand on her thigh. “Pickup and drop-off times.”
“Yeah, but picking up and dropping off what? And these dollar figures? Is that how much the cargo is worth?”
He shook his head slowly, frowning. “Well, I guess we’ll find out.”
“If we can find the spot. All we know is that it’s in a city called Vlorë.”
“We’ll find it.”
“You know,” she said, putting the date book down on her lap. “I guess I always thought of evil as being random in nature. I guess I never thought of it as so organized, backed by money and power. I never thought of it as making plans and keeping schedules.”
“What about the Nazis? They were organized. The entire government was evil.”
“If you believe Marianna, our entire government is evil.”
“I don’t know about that. Maybe there are evil men with evil agendas manipulating certain aspects of the government, but I don’t believe that it’s evil at the core. Americans are the good guys in the world order.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know what to believe.” She paused for a second, then said, “What happened there? I mean, was it a coincidence that we were there when someone torched the place? Is that why Sasa went there? To get rid of evidence? Or did someone follow us there with the intention of erasing the evidence and us along with it?”
“I don’t know,” he said, remembering the Ryder truck and wondering who had been behind the wheel of that vehicle.
The plane started to race down the runway, and Jeffrey visibly stiffened. She smiled sympathetically and placed a hand on his cheek.
“You just shot our way out of a burning building less than four hours ago. But you’re afraid to fly?” she teased, trying to distract him a little.
“I know,” he said, shutting his eyes, his breathing shallow.
She held his hand tightly as the wheels left the ground, and in a matter of seconds, the airport was a miniature village behind them. She imagined Dreads and Big Head the size of ants. What was their agenda? she wondered.
“And where does Jenna Quinn fit into this?” she said over the high-pitched whir of the landing gear retreating into the belly of the plane. “If she is the owner of American Equities, does that mean that she’s involved in this company American Beauty? Does that mean that she’s involved with the snuff films?”
She thought again of the DVD, the original sitting in the bottom of her bag, the copy on its way to New York. What kinds of people were responsible for something like that? Who did you have to be to make a film like that, or to get off on watching one? Someone like Nathan Quinn, so consumed with his own power that other people seemed so far beneath him as to be less than trash? People who consider themselves so far above the laws of society and morality that anything goes when it comes to their sexual pleasure? And was all of this somehow the key to what had happened to Tatiana? She remembered again what Detective Ignacio had said to her about the money. Well, they were going to follow it and Sasa all the way to Albania. She shuddered, remembering Sasa Fitore’s voice on the tape, how cold it was, how he lied to and manipulated that girl and watched as she died in horror and agony. She felt her face flush with anger. Nathan Quinn and Sasa Fitore were neck and neck for bad guy of the month.
When Jeffrey started to doze off, the Tylenol PM and shot of Absolut kicking in, Lydia pulled down her tray table and plugged her laptop into the modem jack, which would, of course, cost about a thousand dollars a second. When the machine booted up, she logged on to her search engine and entered the city name Vlorë. She waited while the slow connection loaded. It only took five minutes of scanning through the links before she came across a transcript of a news segment on the ABC Web site that answered a few of her questions; some articles from the BBC on-line filled in some more of the blanks.
Once an important fishing and trading port located on the Adriatic coast of southwestern Albania, Vlorë had in recent years been exporting something far more lucrative—young women and girls. Just seventy miles by boat from the coast of Italy, Vlorë, with its corrupt police and ineffectual government, had evolved into the epicenter of the country’s smuggling industry. Lured from their families with promises of rich husbands, modeling careers, or just abducted and subdued by torture and violence, the girls were smuggled in high-powered speedboats to the Italian coast, where they were sold to pimps or issued new passports and smuggled into other countries, including the United States. According to the ABC telecast, a young virgin could bring as much as ten thousand dollars. The beleaguered Italian border guards claimed to be able to stop only a fraction of the illegal immigrants. Loose estimates suggested that there were about thirty thousand Albanian prostitutes in Europe alone, nearly 1 percent of the entire population of Albania. The girls became, for all intents and purposes, sex slaves … trapped, hopeless. Unable to escape, but even if they managed to, they could never go home again. A woman who had been raped in Albania would be murdered by her father and brothers, blamed for the violence perpetrated against her. They were lost women, invisible to the world.
Lydia had written an article for Vanity Fair years back about a similar trade conducted by the Russian mob. She thought then that she had made a difference; she realized now that she hadn’t even scratched the surface. And for a moment, Lydia felt a wave of gratitude to have been born an American woman in the twentieth century. She closed her eyes and saw the faces of millions of women throughout the world without rights, living lives dictated by terror and oppression, beaten, tortured, sold into sexual slavery, and murdered. Afghanistan, Africa, Albania, and the former Yugoslavia, poverty stricken, war torn, morality and humanity running a distant second to survival at any cost.
Lydia thought of Marianna and the fear she’d seen in her beautiful young eyes. She’d said, “My country has been destroyed. And the people left there are like vultures feeding off th
e carrion of our dead culture. They would sell their daughters for the American dollar, not caring what their fate might be.”
Lydia had been blind not to recognize instantly that schedule for what it was. Or maybe she just hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it; in her heart, as the reality dawned on her, she wasn’t really surprised. After all, she had seen it years before under a different guise. Lydia had just left the Washington Post to strike out on her own, to work on more in-depth pieces and try her hand at writing the book that turned out to be With a Vengeance. She still had a voice mailbox at the Post, though, because so many leads came to her there. Working late one night on her book and reaching a creative lull, she checked her messages at the paper. There was a call from a young woman named Felice. Thinking of her now, she was reminded of Marianna. Though Felice had been plain and small, older by a few years than Marianna, her tiny arms bruised with track marks, she had shared Marianna’s distrust of the police and the FBI. Felice was from Russia, forced to be a prostitute, she claimed, an indentured servant to the pimp who had lured her from her neighborhood, promising her the life of a rich American model, a beautiful home in California for her family. She had been given heroin against her will, she said, and was now addicted and walking the streets. And she was not the only one. She had kept quiet because she was terrified of her pimp, of the American police, but also because she had the dimmest glimmer of hope that one day she would work off her “debt” and be free. It was a carrot her pimp had dangled when he was not beating her or forcing her to take drugs. But then, young women Felice knew began to disappear, turning up dead in rivers and alleys. She knew that she could be next at any time and that she had to do something before she died. Lydia had been compassionate but skeptical; she took the address where Felice claimed the girls were kept. After an investigation that led Lydia and Jeffrey from D.C. to New York to Minneapolis to Chicago, her article resulted in a sting that took down an international prostitution ring. Unfortunately, Felice died of an overdose just days after she had been freed from her captors and accepted into a rehab program at a clinic.
But if Marianna was right, this was even worse. And what they’d seen—the haunting, evil images on the DVD—indicated that she was. It had to be stopped by any means necessary. And Sasa Fitore had to be made to pay.
Lydia saw the faces of these women—Tatiana, Marianna, Felice, even Shawna, the pretty young victims of an ugly, indifferent world, like millions of others. But Tatiana was not lost—yet. Lydia could feel it, could almost touch her. And in finding and saving her, Lydia could strike a blow for all the cheated, murdered, lost women and little girls. The electric buzz made her restless, and desperate for a cigarette. She nudged Jeffrey awake to show him what she had found.
In the crowded, ugly airport Lydia and Jeffrey crushed their way through the usual mob of passengers, both of them getting jostled and pushed because they were too exhausted to be aggressive enough to make it out of JFK in under forty-five minutes. It entailed pushing your way off the plane while people struggled with the overhead compartments, then rushing down the gangway, making a half jog through the long hallways and escalators, volleying for the prime spot at the baggage claim, right near the mouth that puked tacky, dirty luggage. You had to have your ticket ready in case you were actually stopped by the people supposedly checking exiting luggage, then race for the taxi line. But tonight, they just allowed themselves to be scooted along by the crowd. Lydia was surprised and endlessly grateful to be approached by a limousine driver at the baggage claim.
He wore a driver’s uniform complete with a cap and jacket bearing an emblem and held a sign reading MARK/STRONG in black Magic Marker. His other hand rested on a luggage cart, and Lydia thought he was a mirage, seen through the blurred vision of her fatigue.
“Who sent you?” asked Jeffrey, suspiciously eyeing the frighteningly thin, acne-scarred man with thinning hair and a beak nose. He looked nervous and shifty as Jeffrey insisted that he call his dispatcher to find out who had sent him.
A small old woman with a cane bodychecked Lydia aside to reach for her embroidered suitcase, yelling, “Excuse me, excuse me” with a disproportionate amount of desperation and annoyance. When the luggage passed her by anyway, the woman let out a disappointed cry. Lydia rushed after the soft heavy bag with leather handles that the woman had reached for, grabbed it, and hauled it back to her. She snatched it from Lydia as if Lydia had been trying to steal it. She nodded in a gesture of grudging thanks, her eyes narrowed in a frown, as if trying to figure out Lydia’s angle, then she hobbled off. Lydia fantasized for a moment about having knocked the old lady over with her luggage, instead of handing it to her. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,” she would have cried miserably. “Bitch,” Lydia muttered, sincerely hoping that the limo had not been ordered by one of the various people who seemed to want her and Jeffrey out of the way, because she was exhausted and really wanted to avoid the taxi line at JFK.
“Jacob sent the limo,” said Jeffrey, taking the luggage from her and piling it on the cart the chauffeur was pushing.
“How uncharacteristically considerate of him.”
“And he’s waiting in it to ride with us.”
“Great,” she said with a sigh.
“My lady, your lecture mobile awaits,” he said with a flourish of his hand.
Out on the sidewalk, Lydia’s thin leather jacket, T-shirt, and lightweight rayon pants were no match for the slicing chill in the fall air or the pinprick drizzle that wasn’t quite snow but would be if the temperature dropped another degree. She pulled the jacket tightly around her, folding her arms and pushing in close to Jeffrey as they waited for the limousine driver to pull the car around.
“Did you have a nice vacation?” Jacob asked, looking at Jeffrey and ignoring Lydia entirely as they climbed into the car and sat opposite him.
“Not really,” replied Jeffrey sullenly, acting like a teenager in a black mood.
“That’s what I heard.”
The air was thick among the three of them, and Lydia thought Jacob seemed pale and drawn, wrapped in a heavy navy peacoat, a black turtleneck sticking out from beneath it. He was a handsome man sometimes when the light hit him right and he smiled. But not tonight. Tonight, he was angry, and anger didn’t become him. His cheekbones jutted out of his thin face, and his mouth was set, eyes narrow, nostrils flared.
“And what did you hear exactly, Jacob?” asked Jeffrey.
“I think we should drop Lydia off so that you and I can talk. Alone.”
Lydia bristled but said nothing.
“Whatever you have to say can be said in front of Lydia.”
“I’m afraid I don’t feel that way.”
“I don’t give a fuck how you feel, Jacob,” replied Jeffrey, exploding in anger and leaning forward. “She’s my partner.”
“Really. I was under the impression that I was your partner, Jeff. Remember Mark, Hanley and Striker, Inc.? She is not a partner in this firm, and we have firm business to discuss.”
“As far as I’m concerned, she’s more a partner than you are lately.”
Here we go, thought Lydia, looking out the window as the driver merged into the heavy traffic on the Van Wyck. A field of headlights glowed in the silvery drizzle; horns honked halfheartedly. She could tell by Jeffrey’s tone and expression that he had been holding ill feeling for Jacob inside, and she didn’t understand why he’d never discussed it with her.
“Just what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Jeffrey looked away from Jacob and shook his head. “On second thought, maybe you’re right. Maybe we do need to talk alone.”
“I hate to be a third wheel. Would you boys like me to get out and walk?”
Nobody laughed at her joke. “Jesus, what is going on between you two?”
Neither man answered, Jeffrey looking out the window, Jacob looking at Lydia with something that looked an awful lot like distrust and anger. She glared right back at him. He was out of shape; she could defini
tely take him.
“You pissed a lot of people off in Miami,” he said, pointing at Lydia.
She shrugged. He pulled a folded piece of paper out of the inside lapel of his jacket and handed her a faxed copy of the bill at the Delano, totaling almost five thousand dollars for the days they had stayed there. “And you cost this firm a lot of money.”
Jeffrey grabbed the bill from her hand. “This is not about Lydia and her spending habits. She brings more money into this firm in a year than you have in the last five. You don’t run things, Jacob. Don’t think I don’t realize that you are hiding the books from me. I may not have the same business sense that you do, but I’m not an idiot.”
“She’s been planting ideas like that in your head. She’s trying to manipulate you into making her a partner.”
“You’re some detective, Jacob. Always one step ahead of us all,” said Lydia with tired sarcasm. She was waiting for him to slip and call her Yoko. She mentally checked out of the conversation, too angry to keep her mouth shut and too tired to get involved. Besides, she didn’t have the faintest idea what either of them was talking about.
“Lydia doesn’t know anything about that, Jacob,” Jeffrey said quietly. “She’s never said a word against you.”
“Yeah, right,” he said. “So for all the money you spent, all the people you pissed off, and for all the people who are in body bags as a result of your Miami ‘vacation,’ is there even a client? Has anyone hired you, paid you anything? Have you forgotten that we’re running a business here?”
“There are more important things in this world than a paycheck, Jacob. The firm makes enough money that we can get involved in cases that don’t pay us anything.”
“Right, whenever Lydia gets the ‘buzz.’ ”
“That’s right, Jacob,” Jeffrey said calmly. “Because there’s usually a very good reason for it.”
“Like this?” asked Jacob, removing the black DVD jewel case from his pocket.