The door on the other side of the room opened.
We saw Chen before he saw us. He was dressed in a baggy khaki shirt and pants that loosely resembled scrubs. His hands were shackled and chained to a restraint around his waist; his ankles were shackled, too. He shuffled awkwardly, one guard in front of him, two behind. I remembered him as a proud man with presence. His twelve years in prison had clearly changed him: he seemed smaller, somehow, his face shrunken and wrinkled, his jet-black hair now a shock of white. Dark blue circles sagged under his eyes, which darted restlessly side to side.
The guards opened the door to his side of the booth and shoved him in.
“Remember, we’re watching you, Chen,” one warned, slamming the door behind him.
He sat down, the shackles and restraints forcing him into an ungainly position.
He leaned forward, his attention focused on Michael, whom he took to be his lawyer. If I had any doubts about the sharpness of his mind after his time in prison, they were dispelled as soon as he opened his mouth.
“What are you doing to get me out of this hellhole, Wang?” he demanded, his dark eyes snapping with frustration. “It’s been months. I thought I made it clear the last time—my government, our government, will pay you handsomely if you are successful.”
Michael leaned forward toward the barrier, keeping his voice low. “I’ve been working on a plan, and I think I have one. But you’re going to have to cooperate with the Feds, do a little trading.”
Chen arched a brow, suspicious. “Is that why she’s here?” he asked, tilting his head toward me. “Who is she, anyway? My notice just said you were bringing another lawyer with you.”
“She’s working the Fed side of the bargain,” Michael said quickly. “Her name is Michaelson. Hannah Michaelson.”
Chen narrowed his eyes to inspect me.
“Michaelson, eh? That’s an interesting name. Familiar, though. Like that bastard who blew my operation in Vegas—what was his name? Carmichael. Yes, Carmichael. Maybe not a coincidence?” With effort, he nearly climbed up on the table to get a better look. “No,” he said, his mouth falling open in surprise as he looked me over.
I held my breath, beads of sweat trickling down the back of my neck as he inspected me. We’d chosen the alias deliberately, hoping it would jog his memory enough to get him to talk. That said, we knew the choice could backfire. Would he recognize me? I gripped the edge of the table, remembering that the last time I’d seen him, I’d been suffering from second-degree burns, forced to stand before him as he inspected my injuries—injuries he’d assumed Michael had inflicted on me to punish me for disobedience.
Nervous, my hand snaked to the back of my neck, touching my Mark as I waited him out.
Chen fell back into his chair, muttering to himself, looking around in confusion. “It is not possible. It must be a coincidence. She could never have recovered from those burns. Not without scars.” He darted a glance, this time more cautious, back at me and then, confused, turned his attention back to Michael. “But the resemblance is remarkable.”
“Are you done with your trip down memory lane?” Michael inquired with an edge to his voice. “I think you’ll want to hear what she has to say.”
Chen nodded, warily, and leaned closer to the glass. His hands were folded quietly in front of him. I looked closely: his once perfectly manicured nails were ragged and dirty. His hands shook with a slight tremor—whether nerves, drugs, or something else, I couldn’t tell.
“You’re going to have to cough up some good information for this to work,” I began, feeling him out.
“Well?” Chen answered, the cynicism in his voice notable. “Spit it out then. What is it that the all-powerful United States government needs from its humble servant?”
You can do this, I thought to myself. He’s just another client seeking legal advice.
“We have a situation,” I said delicately. “The daughter of a prominent Republican party contributor has disappeared under suspicious circumstances. She was clearly taken against her will. She disappeared at the same time as a friend of hers—the foster daughter of another prominent family in Atlanta.”
Chen’s eyes were sparkling with interest now. “Go on,” he urged.
“The evidence points to trafficking. There was some preliminary trafficking of at least one of the girls in Atlanta, we think. But now they’ve vanished. We need you to tell us where they might be.”
“You are accusing Triad?” he asked pointedly.
Michael shook his head. “No. There are no accusations. The government is just asking you to suggest, based on what you know about the trade, where these girls may have been taken.”
I offered what I hoped was the clincher. “We can get you out of the Range. Maybe even get you into the Step Down program so that you can get out of ADX for good.”
He sucked his breath in.
“My government approves of this?” He looked questioningly at Michael.
Michael shrugged, noncommittal. “They see no harm in your helping with a case that does not directly affect Chinese interests.”
Chen sat back in his chair. The opportunity being presented to him had recharged him. He was alert, eyes bright. I almost felt guilty to be lying to him in such a bald-faced way.
Almost. But not quite.
“I’d cough it up if I were you,” Michael counseled. “I’m not sure how many chances like this you’re going to get. And I don’t know how long they’re planning on keeping you in the Range.”
“It’s … how do you Americans call it? Trumped-up charges. I didn’t do anything wrong. They are just singling me out.” His face twisted into a bitter grimace.
Michael shook his head. “Don’t waste our time, Chen. It doesn’t matter whether you deserved it or not. The administration holds all the cards here. They can let you rot in that cell until the end of your sentence, and we won’t be able to do a damn thing. Tell us what you know, or we’re leaving.”
Michael pushed back his chair and made as if to leave. Chen arched a brow and then held up one delicate finger.
“One moment. I may have heard a few things.” He gestured toward the glass. “You’ll have to come closer, though. I don’t want to be heard.” He looked over his shoulder. I followed his gaze to another booth: another prisoner had joined us, huddled close to the glass and consulting with his own visitors.
We squeezed as close to the table as we could. Chen looked around, confirming that the other prisoner wasn’t listening.
“I have heard recently of some reverse migrations,” he finally said. “American girls trafficked to India—Kolkata, specifically. Kolkata, of course, has a long history of selling its children.”
He paused dramatically, checking to see if he had my attention.
“But then again, they could be in Brazil. The entire northeast coastal portion of the country is notorious for child sex tourism.” He tapped a finger thoughtfully on the cold countertop. “Or could it be China? Russians, Ukrainians, Americans, other Asians … you can find almost anything you want in China. How to choose where to search?”
I threw an alarmed look at Michael. We couldn’t possibly track them down if they could be in such far-flung places as these.
Chen leaned forward, enjoying my distress. “You seem concerned, young lady. Perhaps worried that you cannot find the girls you seek? You are right to be concerned. They will slip through your fingers, over and over—very difficult to find. Not important enough for foreign governments to care or come to your assistance.”
He sat back then, a self-satisfied, smug look on his face. But I saw how his manacled hands were shaking. He couldn’t hide them.
I leaned closer. “We can get you out of solitary confinement with one call. But this isn’t good enough.”
“I didn’t realize how eager you were to help the American government.” The corner of his mouth twitched a bit, twisting into a bitter smile. He would have enjoyed playing mind games with us, but we held all th
e cards, and he knew it.
“So,” he sighed, spreading his hands as wide as the chains would let him, “you are in luck. They are probably in none of those places. There would be no need for them to be taken that far away—not when there is demand right here, in your own country.”
I held my breath, forcing my face into a detached mask. He couldn’t see that I cared. I couldn’t let him exploit my emotions as a weakness.
He traced a pattern on the metal desk, dragging the chains of his restraint across the surface. “Where did you say these girls were taken from?”
“Atlanta,” Michael said tersely. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the vein throbbing in his forehead. He was losing patience. We needed to get whatever Chen knew, fast. I reached a cautionary hand under the table to rest on his knee. Startled, he shot me a confused look. I furrowed my brow and shook my head slightly, warning him not to erupt.
“Atlanta. I used to know that market well,” Chen reminisced with a faint smile. “A very ambitious District Attorney, if I remember correctly. Also the Attorney General. But I digress. My colleagues learned that in Atlanta, when things heated up, so to speak, it was easy to move just over the border to Alabama, to Tennessee, and to wait for them to settle down. But if these girls had connections, that would not be far enough away. Also not the most lucrative place to take them.”
Michael slammed his hand on the table. “Stop toying with us. Where are they?”
I placed my hand over his fist. His heat spiraled up my arm, familiar and strange at the same time. I realized that up until these moments, I hadn’t touched him since the night of my mother’s death.
Chen smiled. “Patience, my legal friend. I am getting to it. You know, I haven’t had a good conversation like this in some time. Did you know that the most human interaction I get is when I am let out for one hour to ‘exercise’, as they call it? If I am lucky, there will be someone else in the adjacent cage. Though frankly, I am not sure I can call some of these men human. And the conversation leaves much to be desired.”
He leaned back in his chair, enjoying Michael’s embarrassment. “You really should come to see me more often,” he chided Michael. “Then I wouldn’t be so tempted to drag things out like this.”
I squeezed Michael’s hand, silently wishing for him to hold his temper. He pressed his lips together in a hard line, gathering his patience, before answering Chen. “I’ll have to do that. I’m sure the loneliness is hard to bear.”
Chen pursed his lips, deflecting the small kindness.
“It doesn’t matter. Now, where was I? Oh, yes, the hot market for young girls. If I were you, I would be looking in North Dakota.”
“North Dakota?” I repeated, dumbfounded. But even as my mind registered skepticism, a fleeting jolt of recognition shot through me. “Why would they be there?”
Chen shot me a dazzling smile. “Because it is the hottest market for sex trafficking in the entire United States. The oil boom has drawn tens of thousands of men: desperate men, men willing to take backbreaking work because they have run out of options, men who believe it is their chance to strike it rich.
“But—and here is the catch—it is almost only men. Men with money to burn, stuffed into man camps to live alone in squalor and boredom.”
I looked at him skeptically. “‘Man camps?’ Really?”
“Do not sneer down your nose. For them, it is a solution to lack of housing. But it is a breeding ground for stress. For tension. For loneliness. There is nothing to do there but drink away your wages, so it also becomes a breeding ground for violence and vice. It is the perfect place to take a young girl, if your object is to make a lot of money fast. Of course, the recent collapse of oil prices has made the men testy. The threat of unemployment tends to do that. The girls can prove to be handy scapegoats, a ready punching bag for the customers to take out their frustrations. So a foolproof investment opportunity for the traffickers, regardless of the state of the oil markets.”
He paused, looking carefully at me through the glass. “The color seems to have drained from your face, Miss Michaelson. You worry about the young ladies, do you? Tell me,” he prompted. “How long have they been gone?”
I counted back. “A week.”
He shook his head, adopting a sorrowful pose. “They will already have been used, then, I am afraid. You will not find them as they once were. But if you are to find them at all, that is where I would look if I were in your shoes.”
He sat back in his chair with a self-satisfied smile. “I believe I have lived up to my end of the bargain. You will fulfill yours, now, won’t you?”
I nodded mutely, trying to erase the horrible images that were running through my mind—images of Rorie and Macey that were coming, unbidden, because of what Chen had just told us.
“You have something for me to sign?”
I pulled a thin bit of paper we’d brought in, just in case we needed some way to make our visit look official, from where I’d set it on the table. With my fingertips, I slid it through the narrow opening in the glass barrier.
I watched, fascinated, as he struggled with the shackles and tried, for just an instant, to see if he could touch my hand. The slot was too narrow, and shackles too confining, though; all he managed was to brush his shaking fingertips up against mine. He let his hand linger there for just a moment; through the glass.
He looked up to find me staring at him with pity. Flustered, he pulled the papers back and scanned them.
“I don’t have a pen,” he mumbled, his discomfiture not yet passed.
Michael pressed the call button. “We need a pen for Mr. Chen to sign some papers. And then we’ll be done,” he added.
Two guards entered the room and then buzzed open the door to Chen’s side of the booth. One hung back by the door while the other chained a pen into a specially made tether in the wall, in one swift move offering the ballpoint pen to Chen. Chen took it clumsily, testing the length of the short leash.
“Not like the old days,” he tried to joke. He scanned the papers carefully and then awkwardly, like a five-year-old just learning his letters, signed his name at the bottom.
The guard withdrew the pen immediately, handing it over his shoulder to the other waiting guard. “Get up,” he ordered, backing out of the cell, never taking his eyes off of Chen.
“Your escort will be here shortly,” he added as Chen pushed up from his chair. His body seemed heavy now, weighted down with the knowledge that it might be another six months before he would get more than a fleeting glimpse of a human being; another six months of sensory deprivation and boredom.
“You won’t forget?” he asked. It was plaintive. Needy. He locked eyes with me, ignoring Michael—his “real” attorney—and waited for me to answer.
I cleared my throat, looking away. “I won’t,” I answered.
When I lifted my eyes, he was gone.
“I say we split up. We can’t rule out any of the places Chen mentioned. Better to cover all the bases,” Raph argued, gesturing emphatically.
I glanced at my phone, the texts there from Tabby reinforcing what my intuition told me:
Chen right, but exaggerating.
Managed 2 get 2 Hale and charmed it out of him. He says American girls v unlikely 2 get trafficked overseas. 2 expensive & difficult.
My vote is Williston.
I squared my shoulders and prepared myself to counter Raph’s forceful argument when Enoch surprised me by jumping in. “But Chen himself said that it was most likely the girls were in North Dakota. Why would we waste valuable time, traveling all over the world, when they might be right here?” he reasoned, scratching his beard.
“Old man, you should stay out of this. Don’t you remember how you struggled to keep up the last time we went on a wild goose chase together? Oh, wait, I forgot,” Raph sneered sarcastically. “That wasn’t you, was it? That was your alter ego, Lucas, the one who got us into this mess, too.”
Enoch shrugged, not bothered in
the least by Raph’s disdainful attack.
I looked at Michael, now transformed back into his normal human guise. He had put some careful space between us, treating me almost as if I were toxic. I could tell from the expression on his face that he was not going to jump in to resolve this dispute. He was going to leave it to me, since I had, after all, demanded that I be in charge.
I sighed, feeling like I was corralling a bunch of preschoolers.
“Guys, stop it. We won’t get anywhere by arguing.”
Raph rolled his eyes. “If you do as I suggest, we won’t have to make a choice. India, China, Brazil, North Dakota. Michael, Enoch, me, you. It’s the most logical way.”
“Since when do we make decisions based on logic?” I shot back. I looked thoughtfully at Michael. “What are you sensing, Michael?”
He arched a brow. “To be honest, I’m not feeling a pull to any of the foreign countries. I’m feeling like they’re much closer to us.”
“Me too,” I said, nodding. “And when Chen first mentioned North Dakota, I had the same feeling I had about Skellig Michael and Puy-en-Velay, when we were searching for the Key.”
The corner of his mouth turned up slightly. “Then we know what to do.”
“But where?” I asked. “North Dakota is a big state.”
“A big, empty, boring state,” Raph sniped.
Enoch whipped out a phone that he’d stashed away in his fanny pack and typed something in. “I’d say this looks right,” he remarked, brandishing the screen so we could see. “Williston. Right near the Montana border.” He drew back his phone and typed some more. “It looks like it’s nearly a straight shot north from here. If we leave now, we can be there by tomorrow morning.”
“Pack up the car,” I said, not needing to hear anything further as my blood sang in response to his suggestion. “Let’s go.”
Raph fixed me with a dark stare. “Hope. Please don’t take this the wrong way. But are you prepared for what you might find?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, tired of his constant sniping.
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