by Tom Crown
“Thanks for doing this. Taking us all in and doing everything you’ve been doing. I didn’t know it would get this crazy.”
“It’s not your fault. This is my mess as much as it is anyone else’s. I mean, we’re just trying to help, right? And I know this has to be tough on you. Seeing stuff like this again. Things most people aren’t used to.”
Ryan nodded. What Steve said was probably true, but it wasn’t something he liked to think about. He didn’t want to be different from everybody else. He didn’t want the Taliban to have taken anything from him, or worse, added anything to him. But of course they had.
“It’ll take a couple of days for the police to piece things together,” Steve said, and Ryan was thankful for the interruption. “They’ll have to call in help from Stockholm, which will take a day or so, but after that things will probably move quickly.”
“It’s moving pretty quickly already.
“Yeah,” Steve said with a shrug and the flicker of an unnerving smirk. “But then again, what do we know? Maybe it’s only just beginning?”
CHAPTER THIRTY
KATIA WAS WATCHING Ryan and Steve in the bedroom with her heart pounding hard in her chest. She couldn’t tell from her position by the living room window exactly what they were saying to each other, but it was obvious Ryan was getting very troubled. Seeing him like that made her nervous, scared even, and it wasn’t the numb, cold dread she was used to. She had begun to hope, to feel, and the fear inside her now was wild and raw, speeding aimlessly through her mind and body.
“You should talk to him,” Anna said, rising from the sofa. The other girls were still sitting around the living room table, huddling together like children. “You should go to him.”
The words sounded strange from the young girl, simple and assertive, with a voice that was much too serious. Her hair was still wet from the shower, and she still looked cold, pale, and scared, like she had for such a long time, but something in her eyes had changed. She was only seventeen, maybe young enough to heal, even though seventeen could be very old when every week battered you like a year.
Anna smiled hesitantly. She was a good-hearted girl, but didn’t know anything about what was going on here. She didn’t know what Ryan might find, what he possibly already had found, or how he would feel toward her when he did. Everything could turn around in an instant, when he learned more about the things she had seen and the things she had done.
Katia didn’t know what it was she wanted or expected, but something inside her struggled for life. Perhaps that’s what Anna saw, standing there with that encouraging smile on her face.
“Thank you,” Katia said and took the girl’s hand, squeezing it gently. “I will.”
“Then go.”
Katia let go of her hand and crossed the floor toward the bedroom, just as Steve turned around to face her in the doorway.
“Hello there,” he said with a brief smile. “Jenny’s in the kitchen?”
Katia nodded.
“I believe I still have some chopping to do.” He chuckled and stepped out, and sauntered on toward the kitchen. Even the way he walked made her skin crawl now. He was superficial and self-absorbed, and probably worse things as well, and those bad qualities were getting more obvious by the minute.
Ryan was still sitting at the desk, hovering over the laptop. Katia wasn’t very good with computers, not at all, but she knew enough to understand Alex and Roman hadn’t known much either. They hadn’t even bothered with passwords. It would be easy for Ryan to find what he was looking for with the most basic skills. In all likelihood, he had already found everything there was to find, even if it would take a long time to read it all, and even longer to understand it.
She felt a sudden calm. It was peculiar how she could change inside. The adrenaline seemed to drain away in an instant. Or maybe it had taken complete control.
“The things he said back there,” she said and took a step forward, “they aren’t true. He made it sound like some other life. Like I was some other person. Someone I don’t want to be. Someone I’m not.”
Ryan turned slowly away from the laptop and slowly raised his eyes to meet hers.
“All right,” he said, his face unreadable. “So what’s the truth then?”
Katia hesitated. She didn’t want to play games. She was smart enough to do it better than most, but she didn’t want to play games now, even if she knew she could win them.
“Is the truth that you got two of them recruited?”
Katia flinched. The question stung, but if it was because of the accusation, or its cold delivery, or because the guilt itself hurt she couldn’t tell. She had lived with the guilt for a long time.
“A lot of people have died this weekend,” Ryan said. “We’ve done a lot of things believing it’s the right thing to do. Don’t tell me we were wrong. Or, do tell me, if that’s the case.”
Katia took a step back. She didn’t like the direction of this at all. He was too cold, too detached, and she knew what men like that were capable of.
“It wasn’t,” she said. “What we’ve done, it wasn’t wrong.”
“Yeah? Then talk to me.”
He was angry now, and it made her angry too. He had no right to expect anything from her. And his face was still unreadable to her.
“What do you want to know?”
“The truth, for a change.”
“The truth? You don’t want to hear the truth!”
“Yeah, try me.”
Something broke inside her. She needed to tell someone. She needed to bring all her worlds together, her childhood, her nightmare, her future. It would all need to collapse into one at some point. And the time was now.
She closed her eyes. “Why would you want to know?” she asked, her voice suddenly a whisper. “About my uncle coming into my bedroom? About him killing himself when he thought I’d tell my father? About me applying to a school in Milan to get away from it all, but that there wasn’t any school?”
She opened her eyes and looked straight at Ryan, and saw him glance at the map of Europe on the desk, as if that would tell him anything. Why did he do that when she was right in front of him?
Katia grabbed the map and ripped it as she pulled it toward her. She let go and watched it fall to the floor.
“They said I owed ten thousand for travel, and when they moved me I owed ten thousand more! Is that what you want to hear? How I tried to make that money? Why would you want to hear that?!”
Ryan shook his head.
“I didn’t think so! And you know what? In the end, the only way to make enough money is to find other girls!” She grabbed the map from the floor. “It was a friend who told me about the school in Milan. And one night, on the phone, I told my friends. I told...” She felt her voice breaking and she couldn’t breathe right. She thought of a girl in Berlin, from Kazakhstan, brown eyes, black hair. She remembered how they pulled off her red dress before they lifted her out onto the balcony, and then tossed it deeper into the room, where Katia was the one who caught it. One of the men had looked at her and grinned approvingly, and the wild look in his eyes had scared her to death.
There were so many things she hadn’t wanted to think about. She had been such a foolish little girl. So foolish. She had gambled when she left home, she had known that all along, but she had completely miscalculated the odds. And it had cost her more than anyone could possibly have to lose.
Images of the last two years flashed through her mind. Everything was gruesome. Every single thing.
“In Berlin,” she continued, her voice a whisper again, “I saw them throw a girl off a balcony. And they told her, they told us, before they did it. She was so scared. She shook so much she couldn’t even fight when they grabbed her. She shook so she couldn’t stand up. They took her by her feet and arms and carried her out on the balcony. She cried so hard she almost couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t scream. She couldn’t... Then, afterward, they waited for the police to arrive. Just to show
us what they could do.”
Katia wiped away tears. She didn’t look at Ryan, but she felt him standing there, watching her. She needed to say more, she had to explain better, but at the same time she didn’t want to think about any of it anymore. She couldn’t, without taking routes through her mind that would drive her crazy. She had tried to forget, to sever the ties between her different memories, her chain of nightmares, but the ties were still there. The memories were all coming back now. She could feel it inside her, everything coming back all at once.
“I tried to run,” she continued, “but they caught me. Then they burnt me so bad I couldn’t make enough money anymore. Not that way. Not that it matters. Not that anything matters anymore. I’m guilty, all right? I’m guilty!”
She heard someone behind her and turned around. Anna stepped in and looked at her with a tenderness and concern she knew she didn’t deserve. The girl was following her as if Katia was her older sister, and she most certainly wasn’t. She just wasn’t.
“Are you all right?” Anna whispered quietly.
“Don’t ask me that!” Katia hid her face in her hands and backed into the wall behind her.
“Hey...” Ryan said and took a step closer.
“No!” Katia pulled away. There was no use. When she tried to explain, when she pulled it all up to the surface, everything that had been hidden, she could see for herself that it was no use. Too many things had happened. She had become someone else. She had become what they wanted her to be, and even if she wasn’t, the memories flooding over her would surely drown her. She had always known they would.
She felt something hard against her back. It hurt, but at first she didn’t care. Then she realized it was the door handle to the bathroom. She reached for it behind her back, pushed at it, and felt the door crack open.
“Katia,” Ryan said as she turned around, but she didn’t bother to look. Instead, she slipped inside, locked the door, and sank to the floor. And finally, she let herself cry. Her entire body shook, and for some reason she began to hit herself. She hit her legs with her fists, then hit the floor until she couldn’t take the pain in her hands anymore. She stopped when the tears came only from that fresh, physical pain. Somehow that always felt better.
She cleared her eyes. The light shone brightly through the bathroom window, and she felt the dark memories fall away. She had done everything she could. She had helped rescue the girls she knew of, and she had killed the man she most wanted dead.
Her time in this world had come to an end.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
RYAN KNOCKED ON the bathroom door but didn’t expect a reply. Several minutes had gone by since Katia had locked the door and she hadn’t answered him since. He had heard her cry, though, and had felt her body move against the door.
He understood now what she had been through must have been far worse than anything that had happened to him in Afghanistan, the fear, the physical pain, the captivity, every aspect of it. He had always known it would end someday, perhaps with his death, but even then he had known that at some point, one way or another, his kidnappers would lose. Afghanistan was going through a terrible process, like just about every country at some point had, but in the end, in some distant future, it would heal. In the end, people would be free to live as they choose, and his kidnappers would lose. Katia, on the other hand, had been a prisoner in some of the richest, most civilized countries in the world. What had happened to her had happened not because of any religion or ideology, or even the general craziness of war, but because of the darkness of human nature. That had to be a much deeper pain to live with, when you had to endure it without any reasonable hope for mankind.
Now she was crying alone, and he was the one who had pushed and pressured her to do so. He had taken his accusations too far, he knew that, but five people were dead, Mats and the whole Russian crew, six including that first girl in the van, and he needed to know that what they were doing was right. Knocking on the bathroom door, however, wasn’t getting him anywhere.
“All right,” he said and touched the door one last time, but with his fingertips now instead of his knuckles. “I’ll back off. But when you’re ready, we’re here for you, if you need anything.” He tried to come up with something more to say, but came up with nothing.
He left the door and returned to the laptop again. He brought up a file that showed several passport photos of various young girls, some he recognized, others he didn’t, and wondered how many had passed through this operation over the years, in Lapland, in Stockholm, and elsewhere, and where the missing ones had gone. Could it really be that there existed a global network of criminal groups forcing or luring young women into prostitution, a network so large that a girl from a faraway Ukraine town had ended up in here Lapland as a result of their operations? How many small towns like this were spread across Europe? Across the world? And was it worse in the major cities? London, Tokyo, New York, Dubai, the list could be made long.
He took a deep breath and concentrated on the photos again. It looked as if they had been scanned from the actual passports. A code was written beneath each one. It looked like a sequential number followed by a letter that signified a rating or classification of some sort. He had no way of knowing exactly what that meant, but the coding system could very well be documented elsewhere in the files. He didn’t have time to pursue it, but he guessed government investigators would have a fair chance of figuring it out once they got their hands on this material. That would have to happen soon. He would have to hand over the material to the authorities, and the girls would have to talk, if the police were ever going to be able to track down all the missing girls and bring them home.
But he sighed and shook his head before he even let that line of reasoning come to its conclusion. He knew it was unlikely that all those girls would ever be found, dead or alive, or that it would be possible to prove that any crimes had even been committed. But that wasn’t up to him to decide.
He heard footsteps behind him and turned around in the chair. Jenny stepped in with an accusing glare, while Steve stopped in the doorway behind her.
They must have heard everything Katia said, he realized, and everything he had said back.
“Look,” Jenny began, casting a glance in the direction of the girls in the living room. “I never liked having these girls around. But you don’t have to be a genius to understand that this is not what they want to do with their lives. How could anyone possibly believe that? How could you possibly believe they have any control in this?”
“I don’t believe that,” Ryan said. The expression on her face was making him feel very defensive. He exchanged a long look with Steve but didn’t find any support there. He had been too hard on Katia, it was as simple as that.
He looked at Jenny again. Her taking Katia’s side surprised him, but he appreciated it. Jenny had changed over the last couple of hours, ever since she told them about the money she was about to deliver to the Russians. Those men were dead now. The whole crew was dead. But did that mean Katia was now in control? Or did it mean that everything was over? Or something else entirely? He thought back to the situation in the barn, Alex’s voice, his confidence, when he had thought he was alone with her. Had the things he said been true, or had he simply tried to manipulate her? The man had opened fire on her at the very first opportunity. That certainly spoke in her favor. As did everything else about her.
Ryan realized that Jenny was still looking at him, her eyes hard and uncompromising.
“No,” he said firmly, “I don’t believe that this is what they want to do with their lives, of course I don’t. No one would believe that.”
Jenny scoffed, arms cross over her chest.
“I’m just trying to understand what we’re dealing with here.”
“What we’re dealing with?” Jenny stepped up to the desk and slammed the laptop closed. “And this is evidence then? You’re the police, and what, Steve judge and jury?”
Ryan looked at Steve agai
n, now that they were both in her line of fire, but Steve only shrugged.
“No,” Ryan said, turning to face her, “I’m not saying that.”
“What then?”
“I guess I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“Yeah?” Jenny moved closer, and he could feel her disapproval as if it was physically touching him. He pushed away from the desk and walked to the bed, where he sat down and looked at the bathroom door. He wondered how much Katia had heard. He didn’t want to push her away, just understand what had happened, and why. Those photos of the murder in the back of that van still made no sense. Everything else was fairly straightforward, Jenny confronting Mats, the car chase, the crash, finding Katia, freeing the rest of the girls. But it had all started with those photos, and they seemed to be part of a whole different story. He wanted to understand how it all fit together. He wanted, at the end of the day, to understand who he could trust. But perhaps his doubt was only something he was using now to hide behind, to avoid getting closer to the one person who could understand what he had been through himself.
He looked at Jenny.
“What I’m saying,” he said, “is that being a hostage is a difficult, complicated experience. You don’t have access to any other understanding of the world, or any other information about the world, than what they give you. It happens that hostages begin to see their kidnappers’ point of view.”
“And?” Jenny asked impatiently.
“And, eventually, it happens that hostages switch sides.”
“Well,” Jenny said, “you obviously know more about that than I do, but I don’t think these people even have a point of view.”
Ryan looked at the bathroom door again. This wasn’t about politics, he reminded himself, or religion, or ideology, this was about terrible crimes committed for monetary gain, and Katia had been pulled into it by violent force. He had been complicating things, and keeping it all at bay.