by SLMN
“Just don’t kill her. The death of a subject will trigger a twenty million dollar breach of contract clause, which will have to be paid into our account before you will be allowed to leave the island.”
“You can keep me here?”
“You think that we can’t?”
“I just thought…”
“Of course you did. Unthink it. We bring close to one hundred girls here a year, from every corner of the globe. Runaways, abandoned girls, those in the care of the state, those in the care of uninterested relatives, those who no one would miss from the trash cities of the Philippines, to the daughters of rich and powerful men. Disappearing a man like you would not even move the needle on our personal seismographs. So, again house rules. Do not kill the girl. Are we clear?”
“Crystal.”
The vertigo of that particular danger only added to the experience for Huey; it was an engine that drove him to the punishment block heady on the rarified air of ecstasy.
It was a feeling that had only been matched by the sound of the door of the punishment cage being shut behind him by the guard, and the slowly upturning face of the girl who seemed to know already exactly what he was there for.
In the end, he didn’t kill Mary-Joy.
But it had been a close run thing.
And now, a year and five visits later, Huey was in his office, looking at a screen showing Rosa, a man he half-recognized taped to a chair silently praying to himself, next to a bed to which his only daughter was chained.
“Shall we begin?” said Rosa looking directly up into the camera.
19
“No!”
Passion could do nothing to defend herself but close her eyes and shout.
The trigger clicked impotently three times.
The SIG was empty.
The bulletless gun didn’t bring Passion a complete mitigation to the distressing situation. If the gun had been loaded, the girl meant to kill her, that was clear. But at least Passion was alive to explain to the girl that asking questions might be a better option than shooting first.
Just an idea.
Passion opened her eyes just as the empty gun smashed with full force into her shoulder.
The girl had thrown it at her.
The pain seared in a nova of agony as the gun bounced off her body and clattered to the ground. Passion clutched at her shoulder and loped out of the restroom after the girl, who had already turned and sprinted away.
“Wait! I’m not going to hurt you!” Passion yelled as she ran past the body of the dead pilot in the widening pool of blood beneath the Gulfstream. “Stop! Come back! I’m not going to hurt you!”
The girl’s feet spun across the concrete crazily fast, her arms working and her head down as if she was about to use it as a battering ram. She ran towards the open end of the hangar; the nearer she got to the bright entrance, the more of a silhouette she became.
The girl was fast.
But Passion was faster.
Not a long distance expert by any stretch of the imagination, but Passion had a skill at sprinting over short distances. She competed at city level as a teen in Canada and had done well enough in the 100 and 200m races to attract the eye of a national scout. But as academic interests took over, and her mother’s work took the family abroad to several diplomatic (read: spying) postings, Passion had given up the athletics for more cerebral pursuits. But now, years later, her lithe body was still strong and her speed across the floor more than enough to reach the girl before she emerged into the bright Houston afternoon.
Passion dove at the girl and brought her down with one tackle. They spun in the dust on the concrete base of the hangar, arms and legs flailing.
“Get off me!”
The girl punched and kicked in fury, but she was no match for Passion. Within a handful of heartbeats Passion was on top of the girl, knees pinning her arms down, backside firmly pressed to the girl’s thin hips and tops of thighs so she could not raise her knees or feet to kick.
The girl could do nothing else, so she spat in Passion’s face.
Passion raised her arm to strike the girl across the face to calm her down, but the ragged pain her shoulder from the impact of the gun made her bring the arm sharply down. The collar bone didn’t feel fractured from the impact, but it hurt like hell. She was going to be stiff and bruised from the injury for some time.
The girl spat again, but this time Passion was able to get her head out of the way, and used the hand running from her good shoulder to push the girl’s head over so that her cheek was against the concrete.
“Listen to me, you little shit. I’m not going to hurt you. Whoever you think I am, I’m not connected to the people who brought you here.”
“No one brought me. I escaped!”
“Whatever. Just chill okay? I’m only holding you down so you can’t get away.”
“If you didn’t mean me any harm, you wouldn’t be holding me down!”
“Excellent logic kid, but I’m not letting you go just yet. I’ve seen that movie a dozen times and it doesn’t end well. If you promise not to spit at me again, I’ll let you move your head. Okay?”
The girl did nothing to respond.
“Okay?” Passion repeated, relaxing the pressure in her arm a smidge.
The girl nodded beneath Passion’s palm and so her head at least was released.
“Okay, introductions. I’m Passion, I’m a detective and I’m looking for missing girls. Are you a missing girl?”
The girl’s eyes widened. “You know about the island?”
“I know nothing about any islands. So let’s get the basics out of the way. Name?”
“I am Mary-Joy.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mary-Joy. Hey. Do you like ice-cream?”
Passion made Mary-Joy keep her head down as they drove out of the Roman Field Airport, past Morris’ security hut and into north Houston. As the girl covered her head and lay down, Passion saw the network of scars around her right elbow. At some point this girl suffered a catastrophically horrific injury. The scars told a story on the girl’s skin of agony and terror. Passion could only imagine what scars there were inside the girl’s mind.
Passion found a drive-thru on an anonymous strip, got them both cokes and ice-cream, which they ate in the parking lot of an equally anonymous mall. The afternoon was cooling thankfully, as the sky was moving towards twilight. The blue sky being erased into deep purples, oranges, and yellows by the rays of the horizon-bound sun.
Passion didn’t want to push the girl, but she still didn’t trust her enough to take the child locks off the Hyundai’s doors while the girl drank and ate hungrily.
“How long since you last ate?” Passion asked, passing Mary-Joy her half-eaten ice cream.
“I don’t know,” Mary-Joy replied between scoops. “Days. Three maybe.”
When Mary-Joy had finished eating and had settled a little more, Passion asked her who she was and where she had come from.
By the time she had finished, Passion was breathless with admiration for the child’s bravery, and sick to her guts to the state of the world they’d both been born into.
Mary-Joy had managed to get onto the steamer unnoticed as the commotion caused by the American girl falling off the jetty had turned all eyes in a different direction.
She’d climbed the metal ladder as high as she’d dared, and jumped across to the rusting hull of the steamer holding the butt of the gun in her mouth. While the crew was progressing down the jetty with their captives, Mary-Joy tumbled over the side of the steamer onto the deck and sprinted to the nearest tarp-covered lifeboat. There were only two, one on either side of the rusty hulk, but it would do for the journey.
Mary-Joy had waited there six hours before the steamer set off again towards the mainland. The twelve hour trip had been quiet, and she had not been discovered. They’d arrived back at the jungle port just as night was falling. The five man crew had disembarked and gone to the shack to get drunk with the Gul
fstream crew who were enjoying the sultry jungle night and were in high spirits.
Mary-Joy had made it to the Gulfstream without incident and waited. It was the most intensely sumptuous space the girl, brought up digging through trash to scrape a living, had ever witnessed. She had to mentally shake herself out of the shock of seeing such grandeur and excess in one small place. The leather, the TVs, the carpets, the bed. There was a bed! A bed inside an airplane! It was ridiculous!
Mary-Joy had never been able to measure the true distance between poverty and privilege before as acutely as she could now.
Her hands never touched such richness, even the smell of the Gulfstream interior—warm, fragrant, and lush with the aroma of newness—had made her heart beat in both wonder and rage.
But she knew these thoughts were secondary. She had to find a place to hide within the cabin, and she had to find it soon.
The next morning, the Pilot, his co-pilot, and the stewardess arrived on the plane. They had not bothered to check the storage racks beyond the wood-paneled galley and bed area. Mary-Joy had curled herself into the mahogany cupboard, pulling the door shut behind her. She draped a fur coat taken from a hanger above her head over her body.
Mary-Joy slept only in snatches, her hand always on the gun.
The Gulfstream had taken off, climbing steeply.
Mary-Joy pushed the door open a crack so she could see the length of the aircraft all the way to the cockpit door. The stewardess, a thin brunette in a blue uniform, had curled her feet underneath herself on a cream leather seat and rested her head on the window as the plane climbed. She was catching up on sleep. The pilot and co-pilot were laughing and joking in the cockpit, their voices carrying easily down the deadened acoustics of the fuselage.
Three hours later as the plane had landed, and as Mary-Joy heard the rumbling of the taxiing wheels on the tarmac of Roman Field, she had come out of hiding. As determined as she had been to take Parrish out of the equation in the dormitory, she needed to employ the same level of ruthlessness to escape the confines of the Gulfstream.
The stewardess was still asleep, not even waking up for the landing. Mary-Joy hit her with the butt of the gun, using the same ferocious force she’d used on Parrish. The stewardess didn’t even groan. She slid to the floor, blood running freely from her hairline, down the side of her face and into the corner of her mouth.
Mary-Joy didn’t pause, as she moved quickly down the cabin, its deep pile carpet completely suppressing the sound of her footsteps. The pilot and the co-pilot were talking about showers, sleep, and stopovers they’d had in past jobs. Beyond them, through the cockpit windows, Mary-Joy could see the aircraft was rolling off the airstrip, heading in a wide semi-circle that would take them towards three huge, open-fronted buildings that looked like barns.
The pilots were still oblivious to her presence, steering the jet, checking in with air-traffic control with niceties and politeness which entirely belied the operation they were part of. The normality of their conversation enraged Mary-Joy. The way they were behaving as if the flights they were taking were just part of the normal run of things. Mary-Joy could feel her limbs start to shake with anger—the bottled-up adrenaline suppressed by her escape finally being allowed to flood into her system. It was only now that Mary-Joy felt the enormity and injustice of what she had been made to endure flood through her.
The pain, the brutality, the rape, and the degradation. Being sold to a life that was worse than living on a garbage heap. A life of sexual slavery, physical harm, and psychological torture.
Mary-Joy was consumed then by that inequality, the huge power imbalance, and the sheer horror of what had happened to her. She didn’t need to think about what she was going to do now.
It was clear. It was the only way.
As the Gulfstream rolled into the middle of the three buildings and the Co-Pilot turned his head to call down the cabin to the stewardess Mary-Joy shot him in the face. The back of the co-pilot’s head came away in a cloud of blood and brain, the bullet sounding apocalyptically loud as the cockpit window was punctured.
The pilot had raised his arms, and had flinched away from the noise like a child recoiling from a wasp. Mary-Joy pointed the gun at him. “Get up. Open the door. Get me out of here.”
“We have to wait for the ground crew to arrive. We’re early! They need to push the steps up!”
“I said open the door, or I can shoot you. I can always get the woman to do it…when she wakes up.”
“Okay! Okay!”
The pilot got out of the seat, and raising his hands moved towards Mary-Joy. Covering him with the gun, the girl walked backwards down the cabin between the seats.
The stewardess chose that moment to scream and leap towards Mary-Joy. The girl didn’t know if the woman had faked being unconscious or had awoken naturally, but she heard the scream of rage from the woman, and it was that that saved Mary-Joy’s life. She sidestepped in the cabin, smashing into a dead faced TV and the stewardess stumbled past her, arms moving ineffectually in midair.
Mary-Joy shot her in the spine four times. The stewardess fell like a dolly dropped from a child’s bed and lay still, blood flowers blossoming on her back.
The pilot raised his hands higher. “I’ll open the door. There’s an inflatable ramp for use if we’re forced to make an emergency landing and we need to get out quickly. I’ll operate it. You can get down that. Please. Don’t shoot me.”
The pilot was falling over himself to cooperate now that he was the last one alive. He moved down the cabin to the door, released the lock and operated the emergency ramp. It blew out on explosive bolts. The pilot turned around, hands held so high they were flattened against the ceiling.
Mary-Joy felt the rush in her again. The sense of power that reversing the tables on the people, who though may not have carried out the thousand abuses of her young body, had been wholly complicit in it.
“Please don’t shoot me!”
Mary-Joy shot the Pilot in the mouth just to shut him up.
Passion blew out her cheeks. She’d never heard a story like it before. An island where the rich, entitled, and important could go to meet their every sick desire. Where there was no possibility of discovery, where everyone had an alibi.
It made Passion sick to the very pit of her stomach. She could almost not take it in. Her eyes were gritty with tears, her heart breaking in her chest.
Could it be true?
“Who are you looking for?”
Passion shook her head to clear it. “What?”
“Who are you searching for? I bet she was from a rich family. There were girls there from rich families. I bet their parents could afford to send someone to look for their missing children. No one would be coming for me. It’s the way of things.”
Passion knew that Mary-Joy, wise beyond her years and tougher than anyone could know, was right. No one would employ the Agency on the rates it charged to look for a girl like Mary-Joy.
Passion thumbed the screen of her smartphone and brought up a picture of Lainey as Pippa from the cloned phone.
“I’m searching for her. Lainey Ralston.”
“She’s there,” Mary-Joy said simply, with hesitation. “On the island. It’s because of her I was able to escape. While they were trying to pull her from the water, I made it onto the boat.”
The news hit Passion like a freight train. She’d been right.
Lainey was alive.
But Passion didn’t get a chance to enjoy the moment, as the glass behind them shattered, bursting apart as the air sang with gunfire.
20
Rosa held up a test tube to the camera.
“Mr. Ralston, this contains enough skin flakes and whiskers from your morning shaves in the chalet here on the island, to fix your presence here with absolute certainty. Any court in the world would convict you. Even the ones we don’t control.”
Rosa reached behind her to the table, and picked up another test tube half-filled with straw-colored
liquid, and a sachet full of brown solid matter. “If need be, we can back that up with samples of urine and feces collected from your toilet use here.”
Rosa eyed the sachet with a suspicious eye, “I’d ask your doctor for a colonoscopy if I were you, Mr. Ralston. Just a friendly piece of advice.”
On the bed, Lainey had turned her head away, but could still hear the words. The nightmare flowed into her ears as easily as it did into her eyes.
“But this sample is of course the top of the shop, the piece of resistance as the French don’t say.”
Lainey felt a rough hand moving up her inner thigh towards her crotch. The hand rested at the apex where her two limbs met and cupped the area beneath.
“How would you like, Mr. Ralston, for your daughter’s body to be found with her…juices…mixed with yours?”
Rosa let that abomination hang in the air for a full fifteen seconds, as the sickness the idea dripped with, sank into the minds of everyone listening. Even still taped to the chair, Lainey could hear Parrish groaning and weeping.
“The implication being, you’d made the beast with two backs with Alaina before consigning her body to a shallow grave somewhere out on your pathetic excuse for a cattle ranch? How would you like us to ensure the conspiracy you’ve been involved in—the taking of a girl from the Houston streets who looked approximately like your daughter and getting your people to kill, dress up, and disfigure her body, so that she could be passed off as your daughter? Then corruptly paying off the labs which had confirmed her identity? How do you like those apples, Mr. Ralston? What would the voting public make of that, I wonder?”
“Why are you doing this? I don’t understand!” Lainey’s father’s voice, broken with emotion, came through the tinny speaker in the ceiling—harsh and grating, the humanity stripped from it.
Rosa removed her hand from Lainey’s crotch and giggled with a sound like a spade breaking earth in a wet graveyard.
“I’ll admit to a small FUBAR at our end, sir. Our procurement agents—those we charge with selecting, grooming, and transporting the girls from better families to the island—picked on your daughter entirely by accident. You see, not everyone who visits the island is satisfied with poor brown flesh from the slums, shanty towns and favelas of the third world you and your kind are so busy creating, Mr. Ralston. Some members of our little club are…more discerning. They enjoy white meat, girls from the rarified end of the gene-pool. Girls like your daughter. Our mistake was not thoroughly going through her background. My operatives missed that her whole…online persona, I believe it’s called by the young…was a lie. A deception so that she could live the life of a normal, albeit rich, teen tear-away, without the knowledge of her parents. My team in the United States thought they were grooming Pippa Graves, a spoiled, little rich bitch Goth. When in reality they were trapping your daughter Alaina. Not an ideal situation, of course. I mean, we would have gotten to this point in the end…”