The Girl Who Made Them Pay

by Tikiri Herath

  Without a warning, a gunshot rang out, shaking the whole house.

  Zero’s hands softened. I could breathe again.

  Silence.

  Someone pushed Zero’s body off me and pulled me up. I stood for a moment, trying to catch my breath. The robe felt claustrophobic like it was choking me too. I tugged at it and pulled it off with someone’s help. I threw it on the ground and looked around.

  Win was standing close to me, looking frightened to death, but alive. She must have helped me with my robe.

  Tetyana and Luc pulled a lifeless Zero to the side. She gave him a swift kick before picking up his gun and tucking it in her boot. She still had hers in her hand. Luc wiped his knife on Zero’s shirt. I noticed blood on it. Where did that come from?

  Vlad was still gagged and bound in a corner, with bloody gashes on his face. He was looking at the scene with bulging, blood-stained eyes. It was the first time he’d seen me, and he clearly didn’t know what to make of it all. I was just as confused. Who shot the gun? Is Zero dead?

  Luc and Tetyana rooted urgently through Zero’s pockets.

  The key to get Katy out!

  Instead, Tetyana pulled out a black tube. “Would have helped to have this a minute ago.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Silencer.”

  “Did you kill him?” Win whispered in a terrified voice.

  “Just got his kneecap so he’ll be crawling for the rest of his life,” Tetyana said. “Got enough dead bodies to worry about. No need to add two more.”

  Enough dead bodies?

  “Did you stab him?” I asked, pointing at the bloodied knife.

  “Luc jumped on him when he was trying to choke you, but the man didn’t even feel it. Too drugged out. That’s why I shot him.”

  “Thanks,” I stammered, “but, but...what if someone calls the police about the gunshot?”

  “In this neighborhood?” Luc said with a raised eyebrow. “No one’s gonna want any attention on them, I think.”

  “What about our fingerprints?” Win asked. “Won’t the police come after us?”

  “No one’s going to believe a bunch of brothel girls did this,” Tetyana said, surveying the room.

  As if she’d done this a hundred times before, she fit the silencer tube onto her gun and stuck it on her belt. She ripped up the remaining piece of bedsheet and began to tie Zero up. With Luc’s help, she worked fast and furiously, shifting his limbs into the most uncomfortable positions.

  A low moan came from Zero. Her lips curled with scorn. He had only a second to whimper behind his gag before she gave him a thundering whack to the head with a gun. He collapsed forward.

  “What a coward,” she said. “You fought him well, Asha. But he’s not dead. Not yet anyway.”

  “A cop killer’s gonna get what he deserves,” Luc said, with a hint of satisfaction in his voice.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Luc rummaged through Zero’s pockets.

  With a yell, he held up a small bronze object. It took my bleary mind a second to realize what it was. I jumped on it.

  I ran to the attic door, shouting, “Katy! We’re gonna get you out!” With trembling hands, I slipped the key in the hole, swung the door open and sprang toward her.

  She’d been tied up for half a day now, and looked it. With trembling hands, I began to untie her. Win came to help me.

  While we’d been working to get Zero to open the attic door earlier, he’d done a good job tying Katy up really well. It took several tries to get her mouth gag undone and Win struggled with the knots on her ankle.

  “You’ll be fine, honey, you’ll be okay,” I kept saying over and over again as I tackled the twists in the cloth. When I finally removed the gag, I saw tears streaming down Katy’s face.

  “Oh my god, Katy. I’m so sorry.”

  She stood up shakily and reached out to me. I threw my arms around her and hugged her tightly. She started to sob on my shoulder.

  “Hey, you’re safe now. I’d never leave you behind.”

  “You’ll be okay,” said a small voice next to us. “Don’t cry.”

  We pulled Win into the hug.

  “Girls!”

  We looked up to see Tetyana motion to us. Her voice was urgent, hurried. “We can do reunions later. We need to clean up and leave now.”

  We stepped out of the room and joined them on the landing.

  Tetyana and Luc had rearranged the room.

  Zero was on the floor with my batter mixing knife in his right hand. I noticed blood seeping near his knees. The mobile phone Fred and his gang had lent to Luc was placed strategically in his left hand. The screen was lit up.

  “What about tonight’s delivery?” I asked, suddenly remembering our other problem.

  “They’ll come straight here,” Luc said. “No doubt about that.”

  “We’ll let gangs take care of gangs,” Tetyana said, with a smug smile.

  I looked at the two unconscious men in their twisted positions on the ground. “I just want that girl in the warehouse to not have died in vain,” I said.

  “I can kill them both now,” Tetyana said, with a deadly look on her face. “For that girl, I can do it.”

  We looked at her wide-eyed.

  “But it will be far more interesting to let them live.” She paused. “They’ll learn what true pain is once the cops grab them and send them to jail to meet their kind.”

  With that, we quietly shuffled down the stairs to the second floor.

  We should have felt elated to be escaping, to have got back at these evil men, but no one was smiling. No one said a word. It was like we were carrying a heavy burden on our shoulders—one that felt the suffering of all the girls these men had hurt for years.

  Something in the back of my mind bothered me. It was a memory from not so long ago, niggling to come out.

  “Hey, Tetyana,” I said, “When we were at the warehouse, you had your phone out. What were you doing?”

  “I recorded it,” she said, “to blackmail the bastards.”

  “Why don’t we send it to the cops?” I asked, feeling a smidgen of hope rise in me. “There must be good cops somewhere who’ll do something if they see it.”

  Tetyana shook her head. “I keep things simple with one SIM card for voice and I throw it away every few days. Don’t have WiFi or a data plan. No one can track my phone. Don’t know how I can do that without anyone tracing it back to me.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said. “If we can put it online, the world will know what’s really happening.”

  “I can do it.”

  We all turned to look at Win. She blushed at the attention.

  “I can put the video online.”

  “You can do that?” Katy asked.

  “I can transfer the video to Zero’s laptop so they won’t know it’s coming from you.”

  We stared at her.

  “Zero made me fix his laptop all the time. I know all his passwords,” she added, with an embarrassed shrug.

  “Wow,” Luc said, staring at Win.

  “Maybe we can tag Europol or INTERPOL or something,” I said, feeling hopeful for the first time in a long time.

  “I can send it anywhere you want, just tell me and I’ll do it.”

  “How long will it take?” Tetyana asked.

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Tetyana dug her phone out of her pocket and handed it to Win. “Work your magic, hun.”

  Win stepped toward the stairway and disappeared downstairs to the first floor, presumably to find Zero’s laptop.

  We looked at each other.

  “We can’t hang around here for too long,” Tetyana said, looking worried.

  Luc nodded. “Fred’s going be looking for me soon and there’s no police to stop them anymore.”

  We gathered around Win on the living room sofa and watched her handiwork, fascinated. It took her five minutes to upload the video. Her fingers flew across the keyboa
rd, lips pursed, face frowning in concentration.

  “So this is going out under Zero’s own name and account?” I asked.

  She nodded. “He’s the only one with the admin password to this forum.” She had logged on to a private online forum, switched its status to public before posting the video under Zero’s name.

  We looked at each other with raised eyebrows.

  “Wow,” Luc said. “You’re good.”

  “Genius,” I said.

  “How’s he ever going to defend that?” Katy said.

  “Wonder what else is on this computer,” Tetyana said in a thoughtful voice.

  While the video was being uploaded, Win began to poke around Zero’s folders. “He’s so stupid,” she muttered, as she ran a password-unlocking tool to open a folder that had a series of x’s in its name. “He doesn’t even understand the basic stuff.”

  She opened the first document in the folder, a plain text file with clearly the addresses of transit warehouses and brothels. Their network spread as far east as Russia, and as far south as Tunisia.

  “Oh, my god,” Katy said as Win scrolled through the list.

  “They’re a small part of a bigger operation,” said Tetyana peering into the screen.

  The next document Win dug up troubled us all.

  It was a list of women’s names. Only first names. We listened silently, without breathing, as Win scrolled through them, reading name after name. She faltered for only a second when her own name popped up, but she kept moving. I felt a cold shiver go through me. All these girls going through unimaginable torture.

  “Get rid of that,” Tetyana snapped. “Permanently. Safer for the girls.”

  “Didn’t realize how big this was,” Luc said, his face slightly pale.

  “How did they get away with all this?” Katy asked.

  No one had an answer, not even Tetyana.

  Win trashed the list and pulled up an app to clean the file for good. “Anyone can read files in the trash can, even after double deleting,” she explained. “I have to run a cleanup code to remove it for good.”

  “Do what you have to, hun,” Tetyana said. “How long will that take?”

  “Ten minutes, not even,” Win said, but she wasn’t even looking up, absorbed in her task.

  “You’re amazing, you know that?” Luc said, giving Win a friendly nudge. Win blushed.

  “You’re a total whiz,” Katy said.

  Win’s blush deepened. “Zero only used RSA. Anyone can break that.” She pointed at a file with a long name of numbers and letters. “Can you believe how stupid that is?”

  We shook our heads. I don’t think any of us knew what she was even talking about.

  “How did you learn all this?” I asked.

  “He gave me work to do on his computer because he didn’t know how to use it. But if I suggested something, he yelled at me and said, just do what I say. So his security is really bad. Not what I’d do.”

  “You learned all this by yourself?” I asked.

  Win nodded, her head back in the computer now. “I used it every day and took my time. He didn’t know I was trying new things. Also, he left me alone and didn’t book clients when I worked.”

  Tetyana let out a big sigh.

  The app was still running in the background when Win’s eyes fell on another folder. “This one has a long password,” she said. We waited patiently, trying not to breathe down her neck, as she tried to figure out how to open it.

  I felt goose bumps as a spreadsheet sprang to life on the screen. Win scrolled through a list of names and telephone numbers.

  “Mon dieu!” Luc said, bringing his hands to his head.

  “Jackpot!” Tetyana said.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Look at those names,” Luc said, pointing at the screen. I peered over his arm. Most were foreign names, names I didn’t recognize. Win kept scrolling. The list was long.

  “Minister Oaten,” I read out loud. “Michel Patim, Martin Shkel, Tony Berluscono, Chand Deepak, Rodrigo Duter, Mohamed Il-Fayad, Bob Halt—”

  “It’s a list of Johns, isn’t it?” Katy said. “Bob Halt’s supposed to be the next James Bond. Wow.”

  Tetyana leaned back with a self-satisfied look on her face. “That list is going to be saved and go out to the world. Hit the upload button, Win!”

  Win did so with a triumphant but shy smile on her face.

  Something about that smile made me feel sad. This is what half a decade of physical violence and mental manipulation does to you, I thought. Grooming, Tetyana had explained to me earlier. It’s when they take a very young girl, beat her and rape her into subjugation and allow no one else in her life. So she knows no other way of living. Mentally, she’s trapped. Win could have easily called for help or alerted the police through a myriad of online forums and groups, but she hadn’t. She hadn’t known any better. She’s just a kid.

  “We gotta leave now, guys,” Luc said, straightening up.

  “Where are we going?” Katy asked.

  “To the other end of the world,” he said.

  “Wonder what Fred’s going to do when he gets here,” I said.

  “If the cops don’t get here first,” Tetyana said. “Win, make sure to alert Interpol only just before we’re leaving, okay? By the time they call the right people in the right local department and they scramble their teams, we won’t be here.”

  Win nodded.

  “Time to go,” Luc said.

  We all got up to leave, except for Tetyana.

  “Hey.” I heard her speak softly to Win. “Can you check something real quick for me?”

  “Sure,” Win said, clicking open the laptop again.

  “What you doing?” Luc asked, curiously.

  Tetyana turned to the rest of us. “Go find our passports, will you?”

  Part SIX

  Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.

  Emily Dickinson

  Chapter Thirty-six

  We whizzed along the highway, passing a small Belgian town called Liege.

  On my lap was a crumpled, torn map Luc had discovered in the glove compartment of the van. The word BENELUX was written on top, barely visible and every jolt of the van threatened to dismantle this old map. Though the passing streetlights were all I had to read by, I had managed to trace the fastest path out of Brussels.

  When we stepped out of the house, leaving behind the two men tied-up, we had only one choice. There was no underground passageway as Tetyana had hoped, and we couldn’t just walk into town, so we dug the car keys from Vlad’s pocket, piled into the white cargo van and drove out as quickly as we could.

  Luc was driving and Tetyana was sitting up in front next to him. Her gentle snores meant the past few days had finally caught up with her. She’d collapsed with fatigue.

  Crammed in the backseat, big enough to hold a couple of big dogs, were Katy, Win and me. Katy and Win were fast asleep, heads nodding together. Both looked worn out. Behind us, in the back, was the open compartment in which we’d been smuggled into Belgium. It was empty with lots of space now, but no one wanted to get back in there.

  I was drained too, but couldn’t fall asleep. Now I had time to think, my mind buzzed, trying to make sense of everything.

  So much had happened since I left Toronto five days ago that even the craziest things I’d experienced then seemed like a tea party in comparison. Bibi’s scarred face, Win’s fall down the stairs, and the bloodied yellow blouse of the girl in the warehouse kept playing in a loop in my head. I wondered if I’d have nightmares for the rest of my life.

  In my pocket was the one thing that kept me sane: Preeti’s letter from India connecting me to the only family I had.

  I’d written to Preeti many times before that, but she’d never gotten my letters. I only found that out the day I discovered them intact, still in their envelopes, stashed away in Mrs. Rao’s office. That was the day I
learned she’d been working with Franky’s human smuggling ring in India all along. Franky and Mrs. Rao were good at what they did—they even tracked me down at Dick and Jose’s bakery in Toronto. I’d been so naive.

  Through all this running, evading and hiding, I never forgot my mission. No matter what happened, I promised myself, I’d get on a plane to India. I no longer had our airline tickets. They weren’t good anymore, anyway. All Katy and I had were the clothes on our backs, our passports and the packet of stolen cash.

  But it wasn’t going to be easy to get on an overseas flight. I wondered how much information the UK border guards shared with their European counterparts. I sat back with a sigh. My records weren’t squeaky clean.

  I took stock of all the crimes I’d committed in my life. It started the day I stole a pair of ruby red slippers at the market for Chanda, in my childhood home of Tanzania. My desire to see my best friend happy outweighed that theft. It was the same feeling I had when I took the packet of cash from Dick’s safe to pay for Katy’s air ticket. It was the same when I walked off with that chocolate roll from Chef Pierre’s bakery. On one hand, I felt like I didn’t have a choice. On the other, I knew I was wrong.

  Weariness finally overtook me and I fell asleep, only to jerk awake when the van revved to pass a truck.

  “Hey, Luc?” I spoke quietly, to not wake the others. “Not falling asleep or anything, are you?”

  “Nope but you can sing to me if you want.” He grinned through the rearview mirror.

  “Let me know if you get tired and we can switch.”

  “I’m good. I like driving.” His cheeky grin reappeared in the mirror. “Wish you were up here to tickle me or something though.”

  I gave him a look. “How far do we have to go?”

  “Almost at the border. Saw a sign a minute ago.”

  I wiped my eyes and sat up. I smoothed the map to see where we were and traced the highway with my fingers.

  “We’ll get to Aachen first.” My finger hovered over the small German town across the border. “Then what?”

  “I say Frankfurt. It’s a real fun city. Great place to take you out on a date.”