by SLMN
Mary-Joy took the watch and snapped it onto her wrist. “One hour,” she repeated with all seriousness.
Passion went to the rear door of the Hyundai, opened it and took out her Ops bag. A Kevlar reinforced rucksack with compartments for her gun safe, flashlights, laptop, false ID badges, tactical zip-ties, handcuffs, ski mask, black tee-shirt, cargo pants, custom all-black Converse All-Stars and most importantly the kit that would help her steal a car.
Passion changed, took the Beretta Cheetah from the gun safe, slid a mag into the stock, slammed a round into the chamber and slid the pistol under her tee-shirt and into her a belt holster. Then she jogged away from the derelict house towards the half mile distant lights of the motel and gas station.
The motel had a pleasing number of late model cars out front in the lot. Any one of them would do for the next stage the journey to…where?
Yes indeed. Where was she going?
The Agency offices where Bryan and his back up team were based was in Washington. Passion had only ever visited the nondescript boxy office building once in the years she’s been in their employ. Bryan had told her it was easier if the Agency was as weightless as possible. In fact, when she thought about it, she couldn’t be sure if the Agency was still where she thought it was. It had never come up in conversation, and Passion preferred to stay on the road, taking modelling assignments where she could, and dressing down when she was on duty.
So if not Washington, then where? Passion had absolutely no clue, but she knew getting in touch with Bryan had to be a priority to pass on the information about the island.
The gas station had two payphones on the wall facing the motel. Passion circled around the back of the gas station, and emerged from the shadow cast by the motel sign looking for all the world like she was coming from the motel to get some evening snacks before settling down for some serious TV. She ambled leisurely and smiled at a fat guy coming from the gas station with a paper bag stuffed with chips and a XL bottle of Mountain Dew under his arm. He was doing in reverse what Passion was trying to give the impression she was doing. His smile was full of bad teeth and Passion wished she hadn’t bothered.
The first payphone had a handwritten OUT OF ORDER scotch taped to the keypad, so Passion moved to the next one. She picked up the receiver and listened for the dial tone. All present and correct. Dropping coins into the slot she dialed Bryan’s number from memory.
The line fuzzed, beeped, clicked and a recorded message told her that This call cannot be placed at this time.
Passion replaced the receiver and the coins clanked into tray. She repeated the action twice more, with raising anxiety each time to the same result.
Shit. Shit. Double shit.
She went into the gas station shop, picked up some chips, Diet Doctor Peppers and a couple of ham subs from the cooler. The cashier at the counter was watching an old portable TV in the corner of her glassed off booth. Her hair was dirty blond and she was dressed like a woman in her twenties, all tight wrap over leopard print blouse, more earrings than were necessary and knuckles encrusted with fake rocks. The cashier’s face wasn’t one of a woman in her twenties, however. The skin was the deeply lined face of a woman who’d lived maybe thirty years more. The foundation was flaking on her cheeks and her lipstick had been put on with a trowel.
The cashier didn’t smile as she rang up Passion’s purchase, which was a blessing as Passion thought she probably had the same dentist as the fat guy she’d passed on the way to the payphone.
“Fifteen ninety-nine,” the cashier said with a voice so flat you could have laid a brick wall against it.
Passion handed over her credit card. “I don’t suppose I could use your telephone could I?”
The cashier pointed towards the door. “Payphone outside.”
“Yeah, I tried those. Out of order. Please, it’s really important.”
The woman looked at Passion as nothing could be more important to getting back to her episode of America’s Got Talent. “Just one call, and it’ll be five dollars.”
“Put it on the card.”
The cashier’s eyebrows disappeared into her hair. “Cash.”
“Okay.” Passion reached into her purse and pulled out a five, handing it over. The cashier slipped the bill inside her blouse to sit inside her bra, then reached under the counter to pass Passion an ancient cordless telephone saying, “nine for an outside line,” like this gas station was the Hilton.
Passion took the cordless and thumbed nine, waiting for the dial tone before pressing in Bryan’s number. Putting the receiver to her ear, Passion was dismayed to hear it doing the same shit as the payphone outside. The line fuzzed again, beeped again, clicked again and the recorded message told her one more time that This call cannot be placed at this time.
Passion looked at the phone like it had turned into a cockroach in her fingers. She sighed, and was about to try again when the cashier said, “Declined.”
Passion’s eyes snapped up. “What do you mean, declined? I didn’t get through.”
“Not the call, sweetheart. The card. You’re gonna have to pay cash, or you can put this stuff back on the shelf.”
Passion paid cash, put the food and drink into the spare section of her Ops rucksack and headed from the gas station store back towards the motel, her head fizzing to fear and anger.
Why couldn’t she get through to Bryan from any phone? Why had her credit cards, both of them, been declined? Passion suddenly felt the same chill she had experienced in Ralston’s office when she realized she was being frozen out of the investigation and was being fed pure bullshit.
No money, apart from the eighty dollars and change she had in her purse. No contact with Bryan. No chance of going to Houston PD because: Myer. Where could she go? What should she do with Mary-Joy?
First things first. A car.
She stopped, opened the ops bag and took out a small but heavy black cube of tech. There was a rubber keypad, a digital read out, and a short rubber-covered aerial. She turned the device on, and waited.
The device was a CIA grade keyless entry hack tool, given to field agents for the very purpose of stealing cars in this way. It would tap into the automatic RDIF proximity signals coming from key fobs in the motel room. When it had harvested two or three, all Passion had to do was walk around the motel a couple of times with the machine on, as it did its stuff. She returned to the parking lot, and the tech went into reverse, sending out the codes it had harvested, fooling the cars in the lot into thinking the keyless entry fobs were close enough to pop the locks.
Passion walked down the line, and the box did its thing. A red Nissan Versa clicked its locks as she approached.
Bingo.
Passion looked around as she put her hand on the car’s door to make sure no one was watching from the motel and pulled the handle.
It was then that she heard Mary-Joy screaming.
22
“Your Aunt sold you?”
Bimala nodded sadly. Her head was still hanging upside down from the bunk above, but dawn was pressing at the windows, lighting up the dormitory as the girls sleeping there began to wake.
Not at all tired, Lainey had tried to get as much information from Bimala as she could. She’d heard the entire story of her parents’ death, the deal with the Aunt and Uncle, the paranoid fantasies of the latter and then, unholiest of the unholy, the realization that her Aunt had sold her into sexual slavery on the island.
As the sun had come up, Lainey’s mood, which was already at a low point, had dropped even lower. Even in the heat, she’d wrapped the sheet around her tightly to approximate the feeling of being hugged. She felt very small, very vulnerable and after what had happened with Rosa, truly terrified.
Even though Parrish’s drying blood had been washed from her skin she could still imagine its stickiness there on her flesh. She could still hear the breathing of her father from the speaker and still taste the dirt in the air of the hole.
Lainey had to f
orce herself to tell Bimala her story, and when she’d finished it was full daylight outside the barred windows, and clouds were building up.
“I think I saw the girl who escaped,” she whispered.
Bimala’s eyes widened. “Where?”
“When the boat crew guy hit me and knocked me into the water. There was a girl beneath the jetty. She had a gun and she was holding onto the ladder. She didn’t say anything, but I could see in her eyes she was willing me not to give her away. I rolled onto my back, kicked away from her, and the crew guy dove in to get me. When I looked back she was gone. I guess she must have gotten onto the boat.”
Bimala smiled and clapped her hands. “This is the best news ever. Maybe she’ll get to the mainland and tell everyone about us.”
Lainey remembered her attempted escape from the jungle airstrip and the moat full of starving dogs. She didn’t feel hopeful that the girl had gotten away, but didn’t want to spoil Bimala’s optimism just yet. The girl was at least giving Lainey the kind of positive human connection she needed to help deal with this situation.
A trouble shared.
Two guards, perhaps those who had taken the girl in the night, appeared from the dormitory door. “Rise and shine, ladies!” the taller of the two guards said. Now that the light was better, Lainey could see his uniform name tape read “Schmidt.” The other guard, a blond stocky creature with no hair on his head but a wispy goatee on his chin, looked along the rows of girls. His face unable to hide the lust that was boiling up inside him. His name tape read “Karpov.” The bloated skin of his face was pockmarked with acne scars. He was the kind of guy who if Lainey had bumped into him at a club, would immediately go to the restroom to wash herself off. Karpov looked like dirt personified, creepily made flesh.
He approached Bimala and Lainey’s bunk, the sweat standing out on his forehead.
“Do nothing,” Bimala whispered. “Do nothing at all.”
Lainey wanted for the ground to open up and swallow her as Karpov reached up to the top bunk. His hands disappeared from view and all Lainey could hear now was the hollow in the air made by Bimala’s silence.
The front of Karpov’s pants were tented at the fly. Bimala didn’t whimper or make any sounds of resistance.
She did nothing. Just as she’d warned Lainey to do.
Lainey’s heart shivered in her chest as the guard carried out the abuse in the open, with no one to interrupt or stop him. Eventually he seemed to get bored, the front of his pants deflating, and he walked away wiping his hands on the outside of his thighs.
“Okay, ladies. Showers then breakfast. Move it!” Schmidt yelled.
Lainey filed out of the dormitory with Bimala still silent at her side. The girl’s eyes were staring forward, her hands working behind her head to re-braid her hair. Bimala’s lips quivered, but she did not cry. A tear balanced on the edge of one eyelid, but that was her only other outward show of emotion.
The showers were exactly as Lainey feared. They were all forced to strip off in front of Schmidt and Karpov who eyed them all with maximum avarice. Lainey tried to cover her breasts and groin, but Bimala silently shook her head and gently moved Lainey’s hands away from her breasts.
“If you cover up, they pick on you,” was all she whispered to Lainey as they filed past the guards into the tepid communal showers. The soap was cheap, the lather it made on the skin thin and lacking any moisturizing action. Lainey had been used to a plethora of bath oils, bath bombs, and moisturizing lotions back home. The small slivers of orange, transparent soap being passed around did the barest job of cleaning, and for a moment Lainey was almost pleased she’d been washed down after fainting.
The towels they were given to dry themselves were stiff and sandpapery, thin with age and frayed. As Lainey rubbed at her skin in silence, red scuffs and scrapes appeared along her arms and thighs. Her body was not used to this kind of treatment, and although she knew in the grand scheme of things that the rough towels and the cheap soap were the very definition of First World Problems, it didn’t stop her feeling acutely homesick and very sorry for herself.
“You’ll get used to it in time,” Bimala whispered, obviously noticing the look on Lainey’s face.
“How long did it take you?”
“Six months, maybe less.”
“Six months!”
“Compared to what else they do to us here, the towels and the soaps count as luxury.”
Huey looked out onto his future. It was not something that he wanted to do, but the realization that he had been made into meat tenderized and prepared to be barbequed over his own vanity by Rosa had a salutary and comprehensively odd effect on the Texan politician. One that he could not have foreseen merely 24 hours ago.
He’d awoken this morning, no longer broken and tearful, but resolved.
For the first time in his life, he was going to do the right thing. The thought was crystal clear in his mind. There was only one course of action.
He was going to go public on the island. He was going to telephone his old political contacts, the ones Crane had fired or estranged, and he was going to tell them the whole story. Blow the fuckers out of the water.
He didn’t care anymore, a life in prison, even on Death Row was preferable to the snapping away of his free will and setting him on the course to be a puppet plaything for Rosa and whoever the People behind the People were.
Ralston could guess at who those people were—secretive apolitical cabals who moved behind the front put up by regular politicians and businessmen. The kind of people who made money through whoever was in power—the left or the right or the centrists. The ones with no political or religious affiliations. The ones who made sure arms got sold to both sides in a war, the ones who allowed the lie of democracy where it suited them, and the ones who promoted totalitarianism where it achieved their goals.
It had all fallen into place after the video conference with Rosa. A place like the island was the natural progression for the People behind the People. A place where they could give the lie to the great and the good that they were untouchable, above and beyond the law.
Dealing in the harvesting of vanity and hubris, collecting their DNA and other evidence to be used when the time was right. These people, those Rosa said she worked for, weren’t Illuminati, Freemasons, Skull and Bones, Rosicrucians, Ordo Templis Orientis, Knights Templar or the fucking Bilderberg Group. They were, if they even existed as a group, just further fronts hiding behind the societal equivalent of shell companies. Deeper than the deep state, their near invisibility throwing the scent off for anyone investigating the case.
They weren’t secret societies or the “twelve families” beloved of conspiracy theorists. Enchanted Holdings was just an arm, the blackmailing arm needed to keep the weak-minded, and the easily flattered on their side.
But no longer did that apply to Huey Ralston.
He’d spent his life living for himself, doing what he wanted, doing it the way he desired, and that was a habit now, not one he was willing to give up. If he was going to go down, he was going to take those bastards with him.
Huey drove himself to the La Colombe D'or, on Montrose Boulevard, a 1920’s style boutique hotel where over the years Huey had more than a few excellent meetings with various extra-marital ladies. It was quiet, discrete, and the suite he always booked was pleasingly available.
He was due to meet Cal Michaels and Jerome Peterson there. They were Huey’s operators from the days before Crane. They were still shakers in the Texas GOP, and at first had been surprised by his call first thing that morning, but had agreed to meet, after both expressing their sincere condolences on hearing about the death of his daughter. In fact, Cal expressed some surprise that Huey was willing to think about politics when the grief over the death of his daughter must have been so raw.
“Of course it’s raw, Cal. I’m destroyed, but sometimes…public service has to come first. I can grieve later. This is big. Will you come? Do an old friend a favor?”
“Of course, Huey. Wild horses wouldn’t keep me away.”
Jerome had been intrigued, but was still smarting from the way he’d been eased out by Crane.
“Crane won’t be there, Jerome. This is strictly outside his purview.”
“Good. That cocksucker deserves to be hung from the highest gallows in the land for what he did to me and Cal. You know that I was very disappointed in you, Huey.”
Not as disappointed when I tell you what I have to tell you, Huey thought.
“Crane’s fingers are nowhere near this, but I’ve got something big. So big, I need your advice on how to get it out to the most people in the quickest time.”
“Any clue before I traipse all the way downtown, Huey? Christ, it’s not even 8:00 a.m. yet. Did you shit the bed?”
“I can’t say, but trust me, Jerome. This is bigger than the moon landing with Dealey Plaza sprinkled on top.”
“Ok. If Cal is on board, then so am I.”
“He is. La Colombe D'or at 9:30?”
“Old habits die hard, eh Huey?”
“Indeed, Jerome. Indeed.”
Huey was waved through by the concierge, collected his key card from the front desk and took the stairs to the first floor with a sense of righteous purpose he had never felt before.
The suite was at the back of the mansion on the top floor, overlooking a small group of palms that stopped the room from being seen from the street.
Is this what public service really felt like?
If he’d known that being civic-minded could make him feel this energized, then he wished he’d made it the central meaning of his life, rather than a succession of depraved encounters and dubious business deals around which the flotsam of his family now swirled.
He felt a twinge for Lainey.
They would surely kill her now, of that he could be sure. But what was that saying? The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few… Was that Kennedy…or was it Star Trek? Huey could not remember, but whoever had said it was correctamundo.