The Hunted
Rachel Lee
Her story sets off a violent spark. His investigation puts them in the line of fire.Journalist Erin McKenna is not only investigating a major defense contractor suspected of complicity in the international sex-slave trade but testifying against them in court. Her world collapses when that same firm buys her newspaper and she's fired without explanation.Her home is ransacked, her computer stolen and she is attacked. FBI agent Jerod Westlake is haunted by the disappearance of his sister long ago, and has dedicated his life to ending the international sex-slave trade.When he discovers Erin wounded on the floor of her apartment, he swings into action to protect her as a witness–and as a woman. Jerod needs to protect Erin's life and track down her source. But once they start working as a team, the real danger begins….
Praise for the novels of
RACHEL LEE
“A highly complex thriller…deft use of dialogue.”
—Publishers Weekly on Wildcard
“The Crimson Code is a smart, complex thriller with enough twists to knot your stomach and keep your fingers turning the pages.”
—New York Times bestselling author Alex Kava
“With its smartly paced dialogue and seamless interweaving of both canine and human viewpoints, this well-rounded story is sure to be one of Lee’s top-selling titles.”
—Publishers Weekly on Something Deadly
“A suspenseful, edge-of-the-seat read.”
—Publishers Weekly on Caught
“Rachel Lee is a master of romantic suspense.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
The Hunted
Rachel Lee
To the lost, and the men and women of law enforcement
who try to find them.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Epilogue
Afterword
Prologue
Caracas, Venezuela
She shuddered as she heard the bolt on the door open. She always did, even after…how many months had it been?
She was sixteen, she thought. Or maybe seventeen. Had it been two years since she’d left home, or three? It was hard to be sure. When she’d been on the streets of Denver, she’d been able to keep track of time. Even though one day had been mostly the same as the next—get high enough to function, then find a john to get money for the next fix—there were cycles. There were the days when the shelters offered free lunches and showers. There were Sundays, when it was more difficult to find johns because they were trying to pretend they were good, churchgoing men. There was the change of seasons.
It was the change of seasons that had done it. She’d already decided she wasn’t going to spend another winter in Denver. Phoenix would be nice, or Los Angeles. Somewhere warm. So she’d forced herself to cut back on the crystal—what a bitch that had been—to save enough money for a bus ticket.
“Anywhere warm,” she’d told the woman behind the ticket counter.
“How about home?” the woman had asked.
She’d actually thought about it—for perhaps two seconds. It would have been Thanksgiving soon. The thought of a home-cooked feast, the memory of her mom’s homemade stuffing and savory gravy, had almost made her mouth water. She’d almost said, “Yeah, is this enough to get to Virginia?”
But there was her uncle. Living two blocks down. Coming to spend the night drinking with her dad, and then, once Dad went to bed, coming into her room. Again. At least now she got paid for it.
“Nah,” she’d told the woman. “How about Phoenix?”
That had been the last decision she’d made. The bus to Phoenix wouldn’t leave for an hour, so she’d decided to get some food and crystal money for the trip.
The john had seemed nice enough. Reserved. Not outright leering. She knew the type. In her profession, the world’s oldest, you had to learn to spot them. The type who’d settle for a straight half-and-half, a blow job and a fuck, ten minutes each, if that. He didn’t even try to bargain. A quick fifty bucks.
Looking back, she realized that should have been the warning sign. Johns always tried to bargain. She was cute and clean, slender, a natural blonde, with high, firm tits and prominent nipples that showed through her T-shirt. So she could get a little more than the older girls who had been doing it for so long they looked and felt like worn-out kitchen sponges.
Even so, fifty had been more than twice the going street rate. He’d just nodded and said, “Fine. I know a place close by. What time does your bus leave?”
And that was when she’d disappeared forever.
Yes, it had been just before Thanksgiving. But what month was it now? She had no idea. When she heard the TV from the next room, it was muffled and in Spanish. There were no windows in her room, and the weather never seemed to change here.
No cycles anymore. One day truly was the same as the next. The food was the same, day in and day out. Even the john was the same. Two, sometimes three times a day. It had been more at first. He’d gotten bored, she guessed.
That’s how men were, except for her uncle. If he’d gotten bored, she would probably still be living in the Better Homes and Gardens fantasyland of Fairfax County, in the two-story brick front on the eighth-of-an-acre lot, with the perfectly manicured lawn, the three-car garage, the giant-screen TV in the family room always tuned to whatever game was on at the time, listening through the shared wall as her brother whacked off to Internet porn.
But her uncle never had gotten bored, and she couldn’t stand him anymore, couldn’t stand wondering if her brother whacked off listening to her uncle’s grunts and the creak of her mattress springs, wondering if her brother heard or cared when she’d lain in her bed afterward, crying into her pillow and counting the days, the hours, the minutes, until she could get the hell out of that house and never ever come back.
Well, she’d gotten out. And she would never get back.
The door opened, and he stood in the doorway with a bag in his hand. He tossed it onto the bed. “Get dressed. You go home.”
He pulled the door closed as he left. He didn’t bolt it. First time ever. She pursed her lips, wondering what that meant. His words didn’t matter. She’d learned to ignore words. Home. Beautiful. Love. Whatever. But he hadn’t locked her door. That mattered.
She opened the bag. Faded jeans and a green T-shirt. No bra or panties, but she hadn’t worn them in so long, she didn’t care. The jeans and T-shirt still had store tags clipped on. She bit the tags off and felt a tooth chip. It was the diet, the gritty tortillas that wore away at the enamel. But Dad was a dentist. He’d fix it.
New clothes. The door not locked.
She was going home.
She washed up as best she could at the sink. Put on the jeans and the T-shirt. Brushed out her hair with her fingers. It had lost some of its blond luster, but the girl in the mirror still had the big brown eyes everyone had always talked about. Her face wasn’t quite as fresh. But with some exercise and makeup and a good diet again…Yeah. She could go home. She could be…
…who?
Candi was the name she’d used in Denver. Her parents had called her Candace. But no one had called her anything since she’d gotten here. Not a name, anyway. Just puta. Whore.
Who would she be when she got home? Her uncle’s puta? Candi? Would she even remember what it meant to be Candace? Or would she take one look at her dad’s face, then look at his crotch and wonder how many half-and-halves it’d take to get her tooth fixed?
“Are you ready?” he said, opening the door again. “You look good.”
Words. Whatever.
“Sure.”
She followed him out of her room and then the front room and then out into the courtyard. She’d only seen it once before, when she’d been brought here. Looking around, she realized she’d been living in the servants’ quarters. Well, that fit.
Terra-cotta tiles glistened in the morning sun. It had rained last night, and the air was thick with moisture and the sweet scents of the garish tropical flowers that bloomed in carefully trimmed beds around the courtyard. Not a stone, not a grain of sand out of place. That part was like home, at least.
The black SUV was new, not the same one she’d come here in. The leather was baby smooth under her fingers as she climbed into the backseat. He got in front and pushed a button, and a little screen came down out of the roof. “Movie?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
He put a DVD into the dashboard player, and moments later the screen flickered to life. Bugs Bunny, speaking in Spanish. He’d bought the DVD for a child. Maybe a daughter. Maybe she was sitting where this man’s daughter usually sat, watching the same cartoons his daughter would laugh at while he drove her…where? To school? To church?
She realized she knew nothing about this man. And that was probably why he was letting her go home. He was just another businessman in a foreign country. She didn’t even know what city she was in. She couldn’t identify him.
She fought the urge to look around as they drove. Part of her wanted to memorize everything, to pick out some sign, some landmark, that she could recall when she got home and tell…someone. Someone who could come and find this man. Instead, she just watched Bugs Bunny make a fool of Elmer Fudd. In Spanish.
They were climbing into the mountains. The man must have an airstrip up here somewhere. That would make sense. He could hardly put her on a commercial flight. She would probably be sitting atop a pile of cocaine. She wondered if it would be soft.
“We stop here to pee,” he said, pulling off onto a side road. “More hours to the airport.”
She didn’t need to pee, but that was fine. She was used to peeing on command. When Dad had taken the family to Yellowstone, he’d scheduled in every pee stop, a little X in yellow highlighter on his trip planner. She and her brother had giggled because Dad had used yellow for the pee stops. The thought made her smile.
There wasn’t a bathroom. That was fine. Living on the streets had taught her the more basic skills of life. She pulled down her jeans, carefully tucking the fabric back between her ankles, turning her hips forward as she squatted, pressing a finger on either side of her urethra and lifting, so she would shoot out rather than straight down, keeping her jeans dry.
She heard the schlick-schlick as he worked the slide, and she knew. Part of her thought about trying to run or turning to fight. But her jeans were around her ankles. There wouldn’t be time. It wouldn’t matter.
Fuck it.
Instead, she looked down at the leaves rippling under her stream, at how they flicked this way and that, and just waited. Her throat caught as she thought about Yellowstone, and she and her brother giggling at a yellow X. Back when she had been someone else. Someone innocent and soft and hopeful.
She heard the crack an instant before the bullet crashed through the base of her skull and exploded every thought, every memory, every sadness, every hope.
The blackness came fast.
She was home.
1
Special Agent Jerrod Westlake sat at his desk in the FBI’s Austin office, looking out a window at the late-afternoon sky. The ordinarily exquisite February weather was about to give way to one of those window-rattling, tree-toppling thunderstorms for which Texas was known.
He watched the clouds turn blacker by the second over toward Balcones. If it had been raining up in the hill country to the west, floods wouldn’t be far behind.
But Jerrod wasn’t really thinking about the storm. At thirty-eight, he had a decade under his belt as an agent, and he looked at the building storm with the uneasy sixth sense that life was about to imitate meteorology.
The case file that lay all over his desk, sorted into types and sources of information, screamed things that burned into his brain. Fourteen-year-old runaway female, last seen hawking herself on the streets of Houston. This time, unlike most times, she had been reported missing by another prostitute, an older woman who had tried to take the child under her wing and protect her. It was this woman who had reported the girl’s disappearance. Usually they just disappeared into inky silence, without a trace.
Another rumble of thunder, too low to be audible, but strong enough to be felt, passed through the office.
Lately too many of his cases seemed to settle around government contractors. The rush of often poorly overseen privatization of government work, coupled with the spending bonanza of the “global war on terror,” had led to a boom in contractor fraud. For a while, it had gone largely unnoticed and unchecked, but then courageous whistle-blowers had begun to come forward. Sadly, despite the whistle-blower protection laws, he knew that those witnesses would probably find themselves out of work and unemployable in the government-contracting sector.
But those cases were not his passion. They were just his job. As another rumble of thunder passed through the room, he looked at the framed photo on his desk. The girl who looked back at him from a face framed by blond curls appeared to be just on the cusp of womanhood, entering the awkward stage of life where her smile was the impish one of childhood mixed with the almost-sensed mysteries of adulthood. Elena. Resident forever in his heart, an ache that would never end.
He’d known he wanted to be a cop from the time Elena had disappeared. He’d been sixteen then, six years older than she was. Family tragedies hit in a lot of ways. His sister’s abduction had sent his mom into an alcoholic spiral and his dad into a withdrawal from which he’d never fully emerged.
After Elena disappeared, all that remained was the silence.
It was his father’s sudden, overwhelming sense of powerlessness that had energized Jerrod. He decided he would become a cop. He would step in for fathers whose invulnerability had been irretrievably shattered. He would rescue his father, even if he never found Elena.
That had led him into the army’s military police program, the fastest way to get into uniform and on the job, and a way to pay for the college education he would need in order to work for the FBI. His rugged athleticism and quick, keen mind had attracted the attention of recruiters in the special-ops community, shadowy heroic figures who’d told him he was destined for better things than waving cars through the front gate.
Six years later, he’d passed through the revolving door that led from special operations into private military contracting, where the pay was better and the missions even farther from public awareness. The company he’d worked for had specialized in overseas personal security, protecting U.S. businessmen and key employees in parts of the world where a U.S. passport was all too often irresistible bait for rebels who financed their operations with ransom money.
It was there, in that dark, shadowy world, that he’d learned what happened sometimes to those little girls and boys who disappeared. It was the first time he’d learned that there really was a white slave trade.
He’d become an expert in finding the missing, sniffing out clues that others might miss, able to project complex networks of informants, sources and dark alliances onto a screen in his mind. He followed links that seemed obvious only in retrospect, guided by intuition, supported by a twenty-hour-a-day work schedule when he was on a case.
And then he’d blown the whistle himself.
Ultimately, the case had gone nowhere. He knew what he knew, but too much of what he knew lay in inferences he had drawn from that screen in his mind. The investigator who had worked the case couldn’t verify any of Jerrod’s claims, at least not enough for prosecution.
But it had pushed him out of the private sector and into the job he’d always wanted. He’d joined the FBI. And he’d joined with a résumé and a passion that had quickly turned into a specialty.
He worked all kinds of cases, but Special Agent Jerrod Westlake had quickly emerged as the go-to guy on abductions. A photo album in his desk drawer was filled with the faces of kids he’d found. The bulletin board over his desk was also covered with photographs, those he hadn’t yet located.
And on his desk, surrounded by a simple white frame, was a photo of Elena.
He looked at her now, sensing more than hearing the rumble of thunder that reverberated through his window, strong enough to feel in the arms of his chair.
Elena, as sweet as a spring morning, a tiny little elf of a girl who had come into the world one day after his sixth birthday. His mom called her a surprise gift from God. His dad just plain doted.
And it still pained Jerrod not to know. Despite all the resources he could call on, he could find no trace of Elena Westlake. Not even among the hundreds of Jane Does who filtered through morgues and into anonymous plots of ground provided by cities, counties or states.
His reputation now preceded him, and he claimed a network of friends and allies throughout law enforcement who kept him abreast of new cases. When local authorities wanted help, they asked for him by name. And whatever field office he was working from, his special agent in charge would book him on the next flight out.
Twenty-two years ago this week. That was when Elena had disappeared. A ten-year-old girl waiting for her school bus had been yanked into a car by a dark-haired, middle-aged man of medium height and build, driving a late-model blue sedan. The recorded story of Elena Westlake ended on that cold February morning, the description of her last known moments dragged out of the terrified boy who had been awaiting the bus with her.
He knew Elena must be dead. Still, he hadn’t given up. One day he would find his sister’s body. At least his mom and dad would know what had happened.
The storm rumbled again. Georgie Dickson appeared in the door of Jerrod’s cubicle and placed a Starbucks coffee on his desk. Then she sat in the chair beside the desk and sipped her own coffee.
She was a beautiful woman, her café-au-lait skin shining with the good health that came from being physically fit. Georgie had no vices, although the rest of the crew was always trying to find one. It had become a game. Did Georgie ever have a drink? Did she eat meat when she thought no one was looking? Did she really go to church every Sunday?
Georgie knew about it, and Jerrod was sure she enjoyed every moment of being a mystery.
She was also one of his best friends in the office.
As if she’d been reading his mind, she leaned over and picked up Elena’s photo. After a moment, she sighed and put it down again. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.
“Big storm,” she remarked.
He nodded, glancing toward the window. There was an ugly swirl to some of those clouds now, the kind of swirl that might portend a tornado. “Has anyone listened to the weather?”
“The usual. Severe storm warning, tornado watch. Were you expecting something else?”
Almost in spite of himself, he chuckled. Georgie was good at dragging him out of his brooding.
“So how did it go, testifying in the Mercator case?”
“Pretty well, I thought. I hung around afterward to listen to some of the other testimony. I got the feeling there might be another whistle-blower, one we never identified.”
“Is it worth looking into?”
He shook his head dubiously. “I honestly don’t know. This was the stupidest case of fraud I’ve ever worked. The prosecution won’t rest their case until next week, though, so I guess we’ll hear about it if they want us to look any further.”
Government fraud cases were as varied as the human mind’s capacity for dreaming up ways to root a few extra dollars from the public trough. Jerrod divided them into three categories: the sinister, the slick and the stupid. The sinister were the most dangerous, occurring at the junction of policy and profit. The slick were the most clever, often using one set of regulations against another, tucking away sometimes obscene piles of money, so close to the legal line that they were often impossible to prosecute.
The Mercator Industries case, on the other hand, was in the category of the stupid, a case where the acts were so obvious and the payoff so small that you had to wonder why they’d even bothered.
“Really dumb,” Georgie said, apparently thinking over the facts of the case. She laughed. “I mean, c’mon. Persian rugs and Italian leather executive chairs? What were they thinking?”
“It was a cost-plus contract,” Jerrod said, shrugging almost humorously. “They were real costs, right?”
Cost-plus contracting required the contractor to itemize the costs of performing the work. The government paid the costs, plus a profit percentage specified in the contract. Slick contractors looked for creative ways to pad the costs and thus increase the base from which their profit was calculated. This padding often involved layers of subcontracts to companies that were subsidiaries or even mere shells for the principal. Those subcontracts included a profit which was added to the prime contractor’s cost, even though that cost was simply money being shifted from one accounting column to another in the corporate books.
When the contractors were slick enough, this padding slipped right through the audits, enabling them to “profit on profit.” The Mercator people weren’t that slick. Not even by half.
Instead, they’d claimed that the contract had required them to open a temporary office in Houston to oversee the work being done locally. Under the regulations, if the office was temporary—opened solely for that one contract—reasonable office costs were chargeable to that contract.
The key words were temporary and reasonable. And the office complex in Houston was neither.
Mercator had bought two floors of a downtown high-rise, and its Houston complex housed two dozen executives and their staffs, overseeing no less than ten different contracts throughout Texas and Louisiana. The lavish furnishings might still have slipped through, had Mercator not billed the whole cost of the complex on each of those ten contracts. Fortune magazine had broken the story in a three-part whistle-blower saga aptly titled Deca-Dipping.
“Y’know what I can’t understand?” Jerrod asked, as Georgie thumbed through one of the stacks of paper that had been resting on his desk.
“What’s that?”
“Why are they even fighting it? It makes no sense. They have no defense. Christie Jackson said she offered them a quarter-million-dollar fine to plead out. That’s spare change for a company like Mercator. Why not just pay the damn fine and move on?”
“They’re worried the three-strikes law will actually get passed,” Georgie said.
She did have a vice, and Jerrod knew what it was. Georgie was a news junkie. She subscribed to a dozen online newspapers, from the Times of London to the Beijing Evening News, and a score of newsfeeds. If you wanted to know whether a pilot was missing in Afghanistan or a panda mating in China, all you had to do was ask Georgie.
Which Jerrod did. “What’s that?”
“There’s a joint contracting reform bill winding its way through committee,” she said. “Among other things, it has a three-strikes rule. Get popped for fraud three times and you’re out of the government contractor pool.”
“Like that will ever pass,” he said.
She shrugged. “It might. There’s a lot of support for it in the Netroots.”
“Huh?”
“The blogosphere,” she explained. “More and more, online communities are learning how to lean on government to get things done. When it rose from the traditional media we called it a grassroots movement. When it happens online…”
“I get it,” Jerrod said. “But how much influence do those people really wield? Yeah, they can get a story from the outhouse to CNN, but these contractors give huge sums to congressional campaigns. They’ll hold a hearing or two and talk about how something has to be done, and then some lobbyist will remind them that they’d shut down a big chunk of the government if they passed a law like that. Hell, we’ve farmed out so much of what government does, it’s not as if we can just turn off the spigot.”
“Spoken like a former contractor,” Georgie said with a playful grin.
“Hey,” he said. “I was just a grunt for hire. Don’t go lumping me in with those people.”
“Whatever,” she said. Lightning flared so bright that it washed out the room, followed by a sky-rending crack. Jerrod looked out the window again, noting that heavy rain appeared to be sweeping closer. Rush hour was going to be a mess.
“So…what? You came in here just to cheer me up?” he asked, swiveling his chair to face her again. “Or did you actually have something in mind?”
“Just to tell you this is probably our one chance,” she said. She handed him a printout. “Apparently the good folks there like Houston.”
He scanned the page. It was a blurb from one of her many online newsfeeds. “MMG buys Houston Examiner. This matters to me…how?”
“MMG,” Georgie said. “Mercator Media Group. Say goodbye to one of the last independently owned newspapers in Texas.”
“Interesting,” Jerrod said. “But again, how does that matter to me?”
“Erin McKenna broke the Mercator story when she was a freelancer for Fortune.”
He nodded. Georgie’s other vice was drawing out a story just to the point where he wanted to strangle her. She knew he knew Erin McKenna. They’d never met, but her story in Fortune had been so thorough as to be a blueprint for his investigation. “And?”
“She’s not a freelancer anymore. The Houston Examiner hired her as an investigative reporter.”
“And now Mercator owns the Examiner,” he said. The pieces came together. He let out a long sigh. “Oh shit.”
“Maybe you need to go to Houston,” Georgie said. “It would be bad to come this far and lose a key witness.”
Jerrod looked at the file on his desk, the paltry window onto a life too short. Or a life that had been turned into a living hell of slavery.
“More than the Mercator case seems to have followed you from Houston. Cold case?” Georgie asked, following his gaze.
“Not quite.” He hated to leave it. But he couldn’t allow anyone to tamper with witness testimony. Reluctantly, he reached for the phone.
He was going to Houston. Maybe he could nose around on the missing-child case some more while he was there. Two birds with one stone.
Regardless, he needed to find out what was going on with Erin McKenna.
2
Erin McKenna climbed the stairs to her third floor apartment, a small box of personal belongings under her arm. As her feet hit each tread, a curse escaped under her breath.
Fired. Just like that. Oh, they called it a staff reduction, but she was too much of a reporter to believe it. Since word of Mercator Media Group’s purchase of the paper had begun to filter down, she’d known she was in the crosshairs. She’d expected pressure not to testify in the trial. The pressure had never come, and she’d gone off to Federal Court this morning and testified without one whisper of a suggestion that she reconsider.
Then she had come back to the office to find the news editor and her managing editor standing over her desk, her belongings already in a box, with the happy news that she had just become part of a staff reduction.
Hah!
Something in Bill Maddox’s face had communicated the truth. She’d been investigating Mercator again, and only Bill, her news editor, had known. In theory, anyway. And his face said as plain as day that this was no simple staff reduction.
Damn! She slammed her foot down hard on the next riser, so angry that she was grinding her teeth.
Effing giant corporations. Damn money men. Damn the whole corporate plutocracy that America was becoming. They figured money and power meant they were above the law.
She stomped down even harder on the next step. They’d taken all her files, of course, because anything she did on the job belonged to her paper. They’d taken her business laptop from her car and demanded to know if she’d kept any business-related information anywhere else.
To do so would have been a violation of the paper’s strict policy. So of course she had lied through her teeth and said she hadn’t.
Damned if she was going to tell them about the anonymous online file storage she’d started when she learned about the MMG purchase. She’d even gone so far as to go to a cybercafé to upload the info so there would be no record on any computer she used.
So the bomb was still out there, despite their best efforts. At the moment, that was the only satisfaction she had, and it was a grim one. She could still nail Mercator to the wall once she finished her research.
Reaching the landing outside her door, she leaned against the wall to hold the box in place while she fished through her vest pocket for her keys. Cell phone, extra pens, package of gum and, as always, way at the bottom, keys.
She pulled them out, sorted through them and then pushed the proper one into the lock. Or tried to. The door swung inward even as she slid the key into the hole.
Her heart froze. Someone had broken into her place. She stepped through the doorway and saw her things tossed about as if a raging tornado had blown through.
She stood stunned, barely able to believe her eyes. At that moment, a man, his face hidden behind a ski mask, burst out of her bedroom. She dropped the box, one part of her mind questioning the utter absurdity of wearing a ski mask in Houston, and charged toward him, ready to head-butt him or knock his legs out or…well, something…but before she finished her first step, she knew she’d made a mistake.
She’d exposed her back.
A rustle behind her was all the warning she had. An instant later, stars burst before her eyes; then everything went black.
She came to slowly, aware first of the excruciating pounding in her head, then, slowly, that she wasn’t alone. Hands felt gently around her head. She could feel warm goo on the back of her skull, and somewhere in her befuddled mind, the word blood registered.
But in the instant between the dim recognition that she was bleeding and full consciousness, awareness of those hands sparked a surge of fear. Someone was touching her. With her sore nose pressed painfully to a rug that had never offered much of a cushion, she tried to gather her scattered thoughts.
Break-in. Someone had hit her from behind. The fact that she could remember that much was a good sign. The concussion couldn’t be too bad.
As she lay frozen, she tried to decide what to do about the person who was with her. If he was the one who had attacked her…
Could she roll over fast enough? She realized she was still gripping her keys in the hand trapped beneath her body. Trying to keep her movements invisible, she slowly worked the keys between her fingers, turning them into a weapon.
In the distance she heard sirens, or so she thought. She couldn’t be certain, because she heard ringing bells, too. What difference did it make, anyway? She hadn’t called the cops.
Drawing a deep breath as silently as she could, battling the urge to sneeze as she inhaled whatever dust her vacuum had left in the rug, she rolled over swiftly and swung her fist and keys at the man who knelt beside her.
Moving with the speed of a striking snake, he caught her wrist. “It’s okay,” he said. “FBI. You’re safe now.”
Still holding her wrist, he reached toward his belt and pulled his badge clip free, holding it up. “Can you see?” he asked.
She swallowed. “Yeah.”
“Are you going to try to hit me again?”
“No.”
He let go of her wrist. “Don’t move,” he said. “The paramedics are on the way. I don’t know how bad you’re hurt. You have a scalp wound, and you were out for a while.”
“There were two of them,” she said. “I saw one and went after him, but another one got behind me and hit me.” Just the memory of it made her mad, and the adrenaline kicked in again. “Damn it!”
Ignoring the painful drumbeat in her head, she started to sit, but he caught her shoulders as she was halfway up. “Which part of ‘don’t move’ did you not understand?”
As the room began to spin around her, she realized he was right. It was worse than being at sea during a storm. Her stomach lurched, and she turned her head, fighting back the urge to vomit.
“Cancel the ambulance,” she said, slowly rolling onto her hands and knees, then crawling to her overturned couch and resting her cheek against the satiny fabric. If she could just make the world stop spinning, she would be fine. Really.
“I’m not going to do that,” he said.
“Are you going to pay the bill?” she asked, hearing herself almost mumble. “I don’t have insurance anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I got fired today.”
She closed her eyes for a few moments, letting the world settle down. When she opened them again, he was still kneeling where he’d been, making no attempt to approach her. Late thirties, she guessed, with a carved, hardened look you didn’t often see on FBI agents, who spent most of their lives at desks. This one had spent some time in the elements. His expression was kind, though, his mossy-green eyes concerned.
“Who are you?” she asked. “And what is the FBI doing in my living room?”
“Special Agent Jerrod Westlake. I worked on the Mercator case. You’re going to testify on Monday.”
Subject. Plus. Verb. Equals. Sentence. Except there was something missing. “That doesn’t explain you being here.”
“I just heard that Mercator bought your newspaper. I figured it might be wise to make sure no one prevented you from testifying.”
She leaned her head back. “Too late. I testified this morning. Then I was fired. Then I was robbed. If you’re supposed to be my knight in shining armor, you’re a little late. The joust is over, and I got skewered.”
He shifted, sitting cross-legged. “So it would seem. Unless there’s something I don’t know.”
Damned if she was going to tell him or anyone else. Right now, lying low and acting dumb seemed the smartest strategy, much as it flew in the face of her nature.
The paramedics arrived, complete with backboard, neck collar and that horrendously big case of stuff they used on people. At least it silenced the FBI guy’s questions.
They examined her, questioned her, took her blood pressure and tested her pupil reflexes, all the while asking her what day it was, who was president, and all kinds of other things to make sure her brain was still present and accounted for.
“You need stitches,” the female half of the team said to her. “Maybe six or so, and you should get a skull X-ray. Otherwise, you’re stable.”
They stuck a piece of gauze over the wound and secured it to her head with more gauze wrapping.
“I must look like the mummy,” Erin muttered.
The woman laughed. “You’re definitely okay.”
The police arrived just as the paramedics were leaving. The medics answered questions about Erin’s injury, then disappeared down the stairs.
“The whole damn world is lumbering through my life,” she remarked, seated against the couch. Nothing had gone according to plan since she’d left court that morning. Not one damn thing.
She might as well have been talking to herself. She couldn’t see another victim in the room, but the cops seemed more interested in her FBI rescuer. It took a minute or so, but she realized that they considered Agent Westlake’s presence to be an indicator that Erin must be up to her neck in something unsavory. She considered arguing with them, but her head chose that moment to remind her that it wasn’t happy. She winced and closed her eyes.
It didn’t matter anyway, because Westlake straightened them out.
“Ms. McKenna is a journalist. She’s also a witness in a federal criminal case. I received information that she might be in danger, so I came to check on her. I only wish I’d gotten here sooner.”
Go Agent Westlake, she thought. She was getting sleepy, and she didn’t like that, so she forced her eyes open. “The only thing I did wrong,” she announced, forcing them all to pay attention to her again, “was investigate fraud on a government contract. I guess that’s a mistake I shouldn’t make again.”
Not that she meant it. Hell, no.
Unfortunately, her bid not to be ignored in the catastrophe of her own life brought the detective over to her with his notebook.
“There were two,” she said in answer to his question. “I saw one of them as he came out of my bedroom. The other one hit me from behind, and that’s all I know.”
“What did he look like?”
“Who? The guy who came out of my bedroom? Average height. Average build. Average ski mask.”
Detective Flannery lifted one eyebrow. “Cute,” he said.
Erin managed to shrug one shoulder. “I wish I could tell you more, but they came ready for me, I guess. He was wearing gloves. I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup.”
Flannery almost smirked. Behind him, Jerrod emitted a small laugh.
“Is anything missing?”
“Good question. I have no idea. Might have something to do with being knocked unconscious.”
“Do you give everyone a hard time, even when they’re trying to help you?”
“Probably. I haven’t asked around.” She squeezed her eyes closed, then opened them again. “You’ll have to help me up if you want to know what’s gone. I seem to be on a slow-moving carousel.”
Flannery and Westlake obliged, helping her gently to her feet. In one scan she saw the crucial missing items. Or rather, the editor in her brain corrected, she didn’t see some crucial items. “My computer is gone. All my DVDs and CDs,” she said.
“But not the TV,” Flannery remarked. “Did you have a stereo?”
“Who, me? With what they paid me, I was lucky to afford that DVD player on sale. And that’s still here.”
A creeping sense of danger was beginning to run up and down her spine. Discs and computer gone? But not TV and DVD player? “This is weird,” she announced.
“Maybe you interrupted them before they could finish.”
“Maybe.” But she didn’t believe it. She looked at Westlake and saw that his eyes were narrowed, as if he wasn’t buying that, either.
“She needs to go to the hospital,” Jerrod reminded the detective. “I doubt, given the masks and gloves, that you’ll ever know who they were.”
“Not likely,” Flannery agreed, but in a way that suggested he didn’t want to cede an inch to the Feds. “Take her to the hospital, then. We’ll get the crime unit in, and she can give us a list of missing items later.”
“I can’t afford the hospital,” she reminded Jerrod.
“Sure you can. You’re the victim of a crime. The state will reimburse your expenses.”
“The hospital won’t let me through the door. I did a story on the health-care system recently. You wouldn’t believe how many Samaritans aren’t good.”
“They’ll let you in. Under COBRA, you still have insurance, but if it comes to that, I have plastic.”
“Witness protection?”
He half smiled. “Whatever it takes.”
She didn’t argue. She didn’t want to stay amidst the ruins of her life. And since thieves had already been through every inch of her apartment, she could hardly feel any more violated by the police following them.
She had to lean heavily on Jerrod to make it down the two flights of stairs. Her knees had begun to wobble as the adrenaline rush wore off. “I hate this,” she announced as they reached the street.
“Few people enjoy being robbed and battered.”
“I didn’t mean that. I hate not being able to take care of myself.”
He fell silent as he opened the door of what was apparently his vehicle. Flex Fuel, the dashboard announced with a fancy plate. Under other circumstances she would have asked about it, but right now she lacked the reporter’s energy to ask a bazillion questions.
He helped her buckle in, then closed the door. The heavy thud of the black SUV’s door was solid, sounding like safety.
He climbed in behind the wheel, and a few seconds later, pulled out into Houston’s late-afternoon traffic. He seemed to know his way around.
“How did you get on the Mercator case?” she asked, trying to distract herself from her mega discomfort.
“I was stationed here in Houston when your story came out in Fortune. I was part of the investigation.”
“Ah.” She closed her eyes, since the traffic seemed to want to spin around her. “I was pretty surprised that the FBI paid any attention to that article.”
“Why wouldn’t we?”
“Mercator is powerful, with powerful friends.”
“Thanks a lot.”
She tried to look at him, then decided the effort wasn’t worth it. “I didn’t mean it as a criticism of you.”
“Sure you did. The thing is, at my level, politics don’t matter. The law does.”
“I wish there were more of you. But right now I can only see two in the seat beside me.”
That got his attention. “You’re seeing double?”
“Not really. Well, only once or twice.”
“Christ.”
“You aren’t supposed to use that word around reporters and other persons not on the inside of your club.”
He surprised her with a short laugh. “I know some other words I shouldn’t use, too.”
“Who doesn’t? Well, don’t guard your tongue with me. I have a few favorites you might be hearing.”
“Curse away.”
She sighed and carefully lowered her chin to her chest. “Agent Westlake?”
“Jerrod, please.”
“Jerrod. I don’t think the break-in was a coincidence.”
He looked at her. “Duh. The question is why it happened after you testified.”
His comment was almost a question, but not quite. She chose to equivocate. “The question indeed.”
But she had a pretty damn good idea.
3
Four hours and five staples later, Erin was back in the car with Jerrod. In her lap were a bottle of pain meds and standard discharge instructions for wound care and dealing with a concussion. The doctor had wanted to keep her overnight for observation. Jerrod, too, had argued for the stay. Yet here she was, on the way back to her apartment.
“You’re stubborn,” Jerrod remarked.
“You don’t survive in my business if you aren’t.”
“Same here.”
“How cool is that? We have something in common besides Mercator.”
He chuckled. “Amazing, isn’t it?”
She half smiled. At least her lips were remembering that it was possible.
“But you’re not staying at your place.”
“No?”
“No. We’re going to collect some clothes and things, and then we’re going to a hotel.”
“Why?”
He looked at her. It was dark now, and flashes of headlights from oncoming traffic chiseled his face even more. “You were attacked at home. Wanna try again?”
She decided he was okay, because he’d asked her instead of telling her. “Honestly? I’m not so sure.”
“Me, either. I don’t know what’s behind this, but my instincts are telling me they’re not done with you.”
“You have good instincts,” she remarked, then wished she hadn’t, because he was no idiot and caught the subtext as if it had been a headline.
“What don’t I know?”
She hesitated. “Plenty,” she said finally. “And I can’t talk about it. Reporter privilege.” That usually shut people up. Not him.
“We’re going to have to talk about it, Erin. Later. When you feel better.”
Not likely, she thought, but at least for now he was letting her off the hook. She would take what she could get until she was back in shape.
The stairs were easier this time, and the crime-scene unit was still picking over the bones of her life like carrion birds. As promised, she noted what was missing, which hadn’t expanded much from what she had already noticed. Whoever had broken in had been looking for information, of that she had no doubt. Her grandmother’s engagement ring, a nice piece of ice, had been totally ignored. Mutely she held it up to Jerrod, and he nodded understanding. Then she slipped it on the ring finger of her right hand to keep it safe.
He helped her pack a suitcase, and she didn’t object. Not even when he scooped underwear up off the floor. It wouldn’t make any sense to object, since even the thought of bending over left her dizzy and nauseous.
Besides, he seemed as interested in it as if it had been cardboard. He was very…clinical, professional. He avoided her few good dresses and instead packed slacks, jeans, Ts and sweatshirts. Her favorite stuff, to be sure, but it began to seem he had some kind of plan. It was more than she needed for overnight.
Abducted by an FBI agent, she thought. Could the world get any crazier?
When she asked him where they were going, he shook his head and indicated the next room with a movement of his eyes. He didn’t trust the local police? Erin began to wonder what he knew that she didn’t.
“Anything else you don’t want to leave here?” he asked finally, as he prepared to latch her suitcase.
“All I have that mattered is gone.” Except for the ring on her hand.
“Let’s move out, then.”
Huh, she thought. Military background, or too many movies?
They drove off again in his car, this time headed for Loop 410. “Where are we going?” she asked again. “Or do I need to jump out of a moving vehicle?”
“That would hurt considerably more than being hit on the head. I told you, I’m taking you to a hotel.”
“I’m not in the set that can afford hotels.”
“I am. And I’m not going to leave you hanging in the breeze. Not at your place. Not even in a hotel under your own name.”
She squirmed on her seat and managed to look at him. “You’re creeping me out.”
“Good. You should have been creeped out before.”
“I was, but not like this. What are you thinking?”
“You’ve pissed someone off enough to commit felony burglary and battery. That’s very pissed off. You know something, or they think you do. You’re still alive, which can’t make them happy. Two plus two equals four.”
Gingerly, she reached up and touched the staples on the back of her head. “You have a point. Why didn’t you want to say anything in the apartment?”
He glanced her way. “Cops talk. Sometimes idly, and sometimes not.”
He was right, she realized. “So I can’t trust the cops but I can trust you? There’s a disconnect there.”
He reached in his breast pocket and tossed her a flip-phone. She barely managed to catch it, considering the world was still trying to bob on invisible waves.
“Call information. Get the number for the Austin field office of the FBI. Ask about me. Check my creds. Get my description.”
She looked at the phone. Part of her said she didn’t need to do that if he was so willing to let her; part of her suspicious reporter’s mind suggested that he might be expecting that reaction.
So she flipped open his phone, got the number and made the call. A recording answered her.
“Cool,” she said. “A recording can’t identify you.”
“Keep listening. Toward the end we finally admit that you can reach an agent right now.”
“I should hope so. The country could collapse while you guys sleep.”
“We never sleep.”
“Yeah, right.” She pressed eight when the menu promised it would put her directly in touch with an agent. After a couple of rings, a silky woman’s voice answered.
“Agent Dickson. May I help you?”
“Uh, yes. I’m with a guy claiming to be Special Agent Jerrod Westlake. Is he for real?”
The woman chuckled. “We often wonder that ourselves. Yes, he’s a real agent. Do you want his description?”
“Please.”
“Tall, green-eyed, dark and handsome. Well, not really handsome. He looks more like somebody carved his face out of wood. Nice smile, though, when you can get it out of him.”
Erin almost laughed. “That sounds like him.”
“Put him on the phone for a sec, would you?”
“Sure.” Erin passed the phone back to Jerrod.
“Westlake,” he said. “Oh, hi, Georgie. Yeah, with what she’s been through today, I don’t blame her for being suspicious. We’re going to ground overnight. I’ll get in touch tomorrow. Yeah. You got it.”
He flipped the phone closed and tucked it back in the inside pocket of his suit.
“She sounds nice,” Erin remarked.
“As long as you don’t get on the wrong side of her.”
Relieved, Erin let go of the tension. It would come back, she knew, but for now she could allow herself to feel safe. “Isn’t your office number programmed on your phone?”
“Of course. But would you have trusted it?”
“Good point.” He was outthinking her paranoia. Interesting guy. Then, slowly, she let her eyelids droop closed. It was a relief to go to sleep.
Jerrod almost woke her, remembering the doctor’s warnings about sleep, but the hotel was only another twenty minutes away, if that. He figured he could give her that much time safely.
Spunky woman, he thought, wheeling through thinning traffic. Striking. Black hair and bright blue eyes. Arresting. A fair-skinned Irish beauty, with a compact but tempting figure.
But her loveliness wasn’t what had struck him most. It was her attitude that had captivated him. Sassy, sardonic, sarcastic—and very, very sharp. Even with a concussion, all of that showed through. She didn’t like being told “No,” and she didn’t care if people knew that.
But she was also a mystery. Jerrod Westlake was no fool, and he knew she was keeping something to herself, something that had put her at greater risk than testifying at that ridiculous fraud trial. He could sense it in the almost slippery way she edged around some things, in the way she chose her words. She didn’t believe her apartment had been ransacked because she’d testified, nor did she believe she had been fired because of it.
Nor did he. She was on to something much bigger, and he wanted to know what it was.
But first he had to make her as safe as he could.
The thunderstorm had followed him from Austin. Or maybe this was a new one building. Either way, lightning jumped across the sky, cloud to cloud, a beautiful thing. He waited for the thunder, but if it reached him, it was deadened by the car. Another fork of lightning wrapped the clouds like a spiderweb. Still no rain. It wouldn’t be long.
He had chosen to go south, the least likely direction for anyone to look for him because it took him farther from Austin. He was pretty sure they didn’t have a tail, but he took some side streets to make sure before returning to the highway, and finally picking a hotel. Embassy Suites. Two rooms, which would give her a bedroom and him a front room with a sofa bed if he wanted it. Only one door.
He parked, rather than pulling up under the porte cochere. He would not allow them to be separated, even in public.
Coming around to her side of the car, he woke her gently by calling her name quietly. When her blue eyes flashed open, he saw the momentary confusion. Then he saw the return of awareness. It was almost as if something inside her closed the shutters.
“We’re at the hotel,” he told her. “I’ll get our bags, then we’ll go in.”
She wasn’t ready to talk yet, or even nod. He did catch her wince as she moved her head.
“When we get inside, take one of those pain pills.”
“I just might succumb,” she admitted.
He pulled their bags—hers newly packed, his always there in case of emergency—out of the trunk, then helped her out of the car.
“You don’t seem as wobbly.”
“No,” she agreed. “I think I’m off the carousel.”
“That’s good news.”
Inside the lobby, he checked them in, using his own credit card. He didn’t want Erin’s name on anything, at least until he found out what was going on. Check-in was easy and fast, and ten minutes later they were in their suite.
Erin collapsed in an armchair near the door, but despite her apparent physical weakness, those blue eyes of hers suggested she was regaining her full mental faculties, and along with them, a rising curiosity. Reporters weren’t much different from FBI agents. Questions were always turning in the backs of their minds. It was just a matter of who broke the ice and asked first.
“There’s a bedroom back here,” he said, throwing the door open and carrying her suitcase to one of two double beds. “And a bath. It’s all yours. I’ll stay in the front room.”
“Near the door?”
“Near the door. Guard dog on duty.” He came back out and shed his suit coat, draping it from a hook in the back of the small closet.
“My white knight,” she remarked, sounding a tad sarcastic.
He didn’t mind. He wanted her spunky as hell. “That’s me,” he agreed. Unbuttoning his cuffs, he rolled up the sleeves of his blue oxford shirt. “Hungry?”
“Not yet.”
“Stomach?”
“Unsettled.”
Her eyes followed him, and for some reason she reminded him of a cat watching a caged bird. On alert again. Returning to the strength and determination that had carried her this far.
He decided to let her watch him, and say nothing for now. He kept his belt holster and gun on, along with his badge, and went to the phone to call room service. “I can get you something later, but I haven’t eaten since this morning, and I wouldn’t want to become too weak to hold up my lance.”
One corner of her mouth curled upward in a smile. “Do they have French onion soup?”
He opened the loose-leaf binder by the phone, flipped to room service and scanned the menu. “One bowl coming up.”
“Thanks.”
He saw her pull the pill bottle from her vest pocket and went to get her a glass of water from the sink. As he handed it to her, he asked, “Do you always wear those safari vests?”
“Have you ever tried to carry a purse while taking notes on the fly, or even photos?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“I didn’t think so.” She downed one pain pill and drained the water glass before setting it on the end table. “A photographer friend gave this to me after I’d bitched about my purse for the thousandth time. I never leave home without it.”
He brought her another glass of water, then sat on the couch facing her. “I can see it’s handy.”
“Oh, yeah. It would be even handier if I kept to some kind of organization. I tend to drop everything in one or two pockets, though.” She pointed. “Phone, keys, gum, pens.” Another pocket. “Pads, tape recorder, wallet.”
“And the others?”
“Empty.”
“Kleenex?”
“Oh, yeah.” She patted a hip pocket. “Tissues are in there with the notepads. Easy to reach.”
“And now pills.”
She popped the bottle into a separate pocket. “They get their own space.” Then she touched a zippered pocket on the other side. “I forgot. Makeup. Lipstick. I don’t usually wear it, but sometimes…” She shrugged. “You do what you gotta do.”
Her hand wandered up to her neck, then slowly slid downward. “I feel naked without my press credentials.”
“I can imagine. About how I’d feel without my badge and gun.”
“We may be on the same wavelength. I can’t allow that to continue.”
He lifted a brow. “Why not?”
“’Cuz you’re a cop and I’m a reporter, which puts us on opposite sides of a huge divide.”
“Not really. I promise not to compromise your professional ethics.”
“You already have.”
He watched a look of mischief dart across her face. “How so?”
“I’m in a hotel room you paid for, about to eat food you’re paying for. That’s strictly a no-no. Print press never takes gifts, even if TV reporters do.”
“Ah.” He narrowed his eyes, trying not to smile. “Well, you’re not employed at the moment.”
“A saving grace.” She closed her eyes briefly, drew a deep breath, then opened them again. “I wish the guy with the jackhammer would clock out soon.”
“The pill should help send him on his way.”
“I hope. So.”
He raised his brows, waiting. That “so” had definitely been a segue.
“What are your bosses going to say about all this?” she asked, indicating the hotel room.
“That I exercised good sense.”
“Nice bosses.”
“Big expense account.”
A chuckle escaped her, causing her to wince. “I can’t believe you came all the way to Houston just to make sure I testified. You could have called the field office here and told them to keep an eye on me.”
“I knew you were going to be dangerous.”
She smiled. “It’s my job.”
“It’s your nature. Okay, I came partly because of you, and partly because there’s another case I’m working on.”
“I guess I got in the way of that. What’s the other case?”
He hesitated, unwilling and, in fact, unable to discuss an active investigation. But there was something she was withholding, something important, and he would never gain her trust if he didn’t give her some first.
“A teenage girl disappeared a few months ago.”
She cocked her head. “I don’t think I heard about it.”
“Most people wouldn’t. She was a runaway, working the streets. An older street woman had taken an interest in her. Called us when she went missing.”
Erin seemed almost to nod, yet barely moved her head. “You’re right, that’s not the kind of story that gets much coverage. Which is a damn shame.”
“I couldn’t agree more. Missing persons, especially children, are my specialty.”
Her eyes widened a bit. “You’re that agent I keep hearing about? The one who works all over the country on these cases?”
He nodded.
“Jeez, wouldn’t I love to interview you.”
“Maybe after we make sure you’re safe. But I can’t talk specifics about ongoing investigations.”
“I understand that. Still, you’ve got quite a rep.”
“Not enough that you recognized me right off, thank God.”
A half smile lit her face. “You haven’t quite reached your fifteen minutes of fame yet.”
“I hope I never do.”
A knock sounded at the door. In one fluid moment, Jerrod rose to his feet, indicated with one hand that she should go to the bedroom, and with the other unsnapped the guard on his belt holster. He was taking no chances.
Over the years, he’d realized something important about his psychology, and possibly the psychology of others: once the unthinkable happened in your life, there was never anything unthinkable again. Forever after, you always expected it.
And something about this situation had him at high alert. He and Erin McKenna needed to have a serious talk very soon.
“Be right there,” he called to the door, hand on his pistol butt. As soon as he was sure Erin was concealed in the bedroom, he went to answer the knock.
4
Erin kept the bedroom door open a crack so she could watch what happened. Part of her felt that all this was way over the top, utterly ridiculous, but then she remembered her apartment, and the throbbing from the back of her head reminded her that someone was pretty serious about something.
Maybe even serious enough to pursue her.
Still, it was a hard connection to make. She was one of those people who were accustomed to feeling comfortable and safe in almost any situation. Accustomed to believing she could take care of herself. The reporter in her was probably too bold by half.
In fact, she was sure of it. Her past held some episodes that made other people shake their heads and say, “Are you crazy?”
No, she was just a grade-A, dyed-in-the-wool adrenaline junkie. But while adrenaline helped the wise to flee, she had a tendency to walk where only angels dared to tread.
Knowing this about herself did not, of course, make her any more cautious. Nor did she want it to.
The room-service guy appeared to be on the up-and-up. Jerrod pulled the cart into the room without letting the waiter bring it in, and signed the slip. Moments later, the door was locked again.
Erin didn’t wait for permission to come out. She walked down the very short wannabe hallway past the kitchenette to the front room. “So what were you expecting? A team of ninjas?”
“I’m working very hard not to roll my eyes at you.”
“Don’t waste the energy. Roll away. I can take it.”
Instead he lifted the covers from the dishes. “Soup.” With a flourish, he offered her the bowl on a plate after she resumed her seat in the armchair. A napkin and soup spoon followed it.
She’d expected him to be a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy, but he’d chosen grilled salmon, salad and rice. He put his plates on the coffee table and leaned forward to eat.
“TV?” he asked.
“Why not.”
He glanced at her. “I suggested it because you don’t seem to want to talk about why someone busted into your apartment and stole anything that might contain information.”
“You sure of that?”
Holding his plate and fork, he smiled and leaned back. “You betcha.”
She set her soup on the end table. It smelled good, but her stomach rolled over nonetheless. “Maybe the court forgot to tell them I was testifying early. After all, I wasn’t supposed to testify until Monday.”
“You wouldn’t have anything on your computer that wasn’t already in the hands of the U.S. Attorney.”
“Damn, you’re good.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“I wonder if there’s any club soda on this planet.”
He set his plate down. “Stomach?”
“Awful.”
He leaned over and reached for the phone, then told room service to bring up a six-pack of club soda.
“So,” he said when he hung up and reached for his plate of salmon, “why don’t you tell me what it is about Erin McKenna that’s keeping her so calm in a situation that would have most people in hysterics.”
“I’m not the hysterical type.”
Now he did roll his eyes at her, but the way he did it was humorous. “I’d already gathered that,” he said with sarcasm so heavy it was obviously meant as a joke.
“I’m just weird,” she said finally. “I’ve always done things most sane people wouldn’t do. I’ve gone into burning rooms, walked out into forest fires, chased tornados, chatted up gangs for a mega-turd—”
“A what?”
“Mega-turd. Newsroom slang for those big in-depth pieces. The official name for them is enterprise stories.”
“Ah.” He sat back, savoring a mouthful of salmon. “Gangs, huh?”
“Yeah.” She shrugged one shoulder. “Once they knew I wasn’t a cop and wouldn’t rat on them, they were okay.”
“And fires? Did you actually walk into a building on fire? This I gotta hear.”
At that she had to laugh, despite everything that seemed to be squeezing the joy out of her. “Well, yes. But it was actually a burning room. I suited up and everything.”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“That it was one of those practice rooms.” She laughed again. “It’s like a big trailer. They have gas jets shooting fire, stuff burning, all so guys can get used to the difficulties. Even suited up, it was so damn hot in there I could barely stand it. And the equipment weighed a ton. One of the guys had to help me move.”
“And why did you do this?”
“For a story.”
“You’ll do anything for a story, I take it.”
“Well, you know, there were a whole bunch of us media types there. The chief was showing off the room and how they use it. And when he asked if one of us wanted to try it, I was the only volunteer. God, did I have those firefighters laughing. They walk around in that gear as if it’s nothing, and I could barely stand up once they got me into it. But it was instructive, too. All that protection and I still felt hot enough to burn, and the smoke made it nearly impossible to see. Believe me, I wasn’t in there long before they helped me out.”
“That’s a rough job.”
“You don’t know how rough until you’ve done a training exercise with them.” She shook her head. “I had a lot of respect for those guys beforehand, but after that, I’d give them all a medal.”
Jerrod laughed again. “You lead an interesting life.”
“Sometimes. Like any other job, there’s a lot of humdrum.”
“But you like it.”
“I love it.” The statement was unequivocal. “And at least I don’t have to cover auto accidents and plane crashes anymore. Nothing can prepare you for that smell.”
He nodded. “I know what you mean.”
She looked at him, studying him. “I guess you do.”
“So you’ve really walked into a forest fire?”
“A TV cameraman and I wanted to see what it was like. So we wandered off down this forest road.”
“And?”
“It wasn’t what I expected. This loud roar of rushing air being sucked in, and yet it’s…cold. I don’t know if it was the smoke blocking out the sun or the draft from the fire itself. Maybe both.”
“I hope you don’t plan to do that again.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“Still…”
“We came back fast, and we didn’t go that far.”
He seemed to study her for a long moment. “What part aren’t you telling me?”
“You mean, the part where we were walking back and the fire jumped across the road?”
“No!”
She nodded. “Yeah. For a few seconds all I could see was fire. Everywhere. But it was arching through the branches overhead. Not down to ground level yet. We ran like hell, and the next thing you know it was behind us. It was way cool.”
“Cool? You are an adrenaline junkie.”
She rose from the chair and began pacing, unable to hold still despite the jackhammer in her head.
“Y’know where the real adrenaline rush is?”
“Tell me.”
“Writing the piece up under deadline. Racing the clock to get the front page done when the people down in production are screaming for the layout and everyone around you is yelling at someone because they need some little tidbit to finish what they’re working on. TV blaring so if the world comes unglued we’ll know it, plus so we know what the Barbie-and-Ken world are saying about the story. It’s barely controlled chaos, a dozen blindfolded foxes chasing chickens around the same yard, knowing Farmer Time is just around the corner with a shotgun and that’s why they call it a deadline. That’s the real rush.”
She realized she’d been talking a blue streak, and sat down and went silent for a moment. He was eating his salmon, yet she knew he’d taken in every word. Finally he looked up. “I knew guys like you in special ops. The crazier it got, the more they felt at home.”
“But not you?” she asked.
His eyes took on a faraway, haunted look. “Nah. I couldn’t feel at home when I was holding an artery closed, trying to keep a buddy alive until the evac team got there. All that training and discipline and focus, and y’know what I was thinking at that moment?”
“No,” she said, and forced herself to down a spoonful of soup.
“That he and I wouldn’t be shooting hoops anymore. That’s what we’d done, last thing at night, every night. There was a basketball net in the hangar back at base, and every night, we’d wind down from the shit by playing three-on-three or H-O-R-S-E or just whacking the damn ball off of the backboard until the world no longer seemed so…loud. No way we were ever going to do that again, not with his leg hanging by a tendon and me pinching the femoral artery so he wouldn’t bleed out. That’s when I knew I wasn’t like you, that I couldn’t shut everything out and learn to love the chaos. That’s when I knew I had to get out.”
Her soup had lost its appeal. She pushed the bowl aside and looked at him. “I know. Kind of. Some stories still give me nightmares. Ever since a plane crash I covered, I still can’t eat spaghetti. A county commission meeting may be boring, but at least I know that after the deadline rush passes, I’ll sleep.”
He nodded, but offered nothing else in return. She fell silent, then got up and began once again pacing the room, hating this caged feeling, hating the notion that her movements were limited because someone was after her. They really wouldn’t go far enough to kill her—would they? It was like a bad movie. Reporters didn’t get killed for doing their jobs.
But this story…Something inside her seemed to freeze. Maybe some stories were worth killing over. Maybe this was one of them. It was certainly worth dying for.
“What are they after, Erin?” Jerrod asked quietly behind her.
She paused, then wrapped her arms around herself. She realized that someone else had to know. In case…This was too important. If something happened to her, someone else had to be able to pursue this, and who better than an FBI agent? She decided to take the leap of faith.
“I think Mercator’s in the white slave trade.”
Seconds ticked by in silence. Then he said, “You think, or you know?”
“I knew most of it. I needed confirmation.”
“Jesus.” He was quiet for a little longer. “And they took everything you had.”
She faced him. “I’m not a bimbo. When I work on a story this big, I keep backups.”
“So they didn’t get it all?”
She almost forgot and shook her head, but caught herself just in time. “I send everything I get to an anonymous e-mail account.”
“Could they trace it from your computer?”
“Not unless they’ve been following me. I used cybercafés all over town. I guess at some level I was already paranoid.”
“Not paranoid,” he said. “Careful. There’s a big difference. So…what do you know?”
“I had a source. Inside Mercator, I think, but I’m not positive.”
“Then he’s in their crosshairs, too,” Jerrod said.
She shook her head. “Maybe not. I hope not. After our first contact, I never dealt with him on my work or home machines.”
“Why did he contact you to begin with?”
“He saw the story in Fortune. He said I’d caught the jaywalkers and missed the killers.”
“He said that?”
“Word for word,” she said. “He said it was one of the perks Mercator offered for some customers. Buy Mercator’s stuff and they’ll get you a girl.”
His face seemed to freeze. “Shit.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Can you prove it?”
“That’s what I was working on.”
He nodded. “And your boss knew about it?”
She faced him. “Yeah.”
He sighed and rubbed his face, as if he were tired. “You really do need protection.”
“They don’t know I have anything. With luck they think they took it all.”
His cheeks were taut, the muscles in front of his ears flexing as he drew a slow breath through his nose, as if trying to hold back some part of him that she found almost…frightening.
“They want the whistle-blower. They think you know who he is. Or she. That means they need you, Erin. And you don’t want to even think about what they have in mind once they have you. You don’t know these people.”
“And you do?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I do. I was one of them.”
5
“Okay, who are you really?” Erin asked.
It was a good question, Jerrod thought. He wasn’t sure it had a good answer. “I’m not who I was.”
“So who were you? You said special ops before. But that’s not what you meant just now.”
He nodded. “Once I got out, I did what a lot of special ops guys do. I went to work for a PMC.”
“Private Military Corporation,” Erin said. “So you were a mercenary.”
He’d always hated that word, but he couldn’t deny it. “Yeah. I was a mercenary. Private executive security at first. Then K-R-and-R work. Kidnap, Rescue and Recovery. There are a whole lot of fringe groups whose main source of income comes from kidnapping foreign executives or their families. The execs usually have insurance for it, if the companies they’re working for want to spring for it. Some of them buy it for themselves. The company I worked for had a K-R-and-R team that contracted out to the insurance companies. We’d handle the ransom negotiations, cover the exchange, and generally keep stressed-out people from making stupid mistakes.”
“And rescues?” she asked. “You’d try to find the victims and get them out without having to pay?”
He stifled a bitter laugh. “I wish I could say yes. That’s what I’d hoped I’d be doing.”
“But you didn’t?”
“Almost never. It was a straight business deal. Negotiate the ransom down to a reasonable amount. The insurance companies had actuaries who actually had tables of this stuff. A site manager for a Fortune 500 company is worth X. Chief engineer is worth Y. Everything according to the ransoms that were customarily paid. The kidnappers knew it, and we knew they knew it. So they’d give their demands, we’d go through the motions, and they’d eventually come down to the standard asking price. We’d show up at one side of a bridge with a big bag of cash. They’d be at the other with our client. Sometimes the guys even shook hands at the exchange, like they’d bought a house or a car.”
“Sounds…cold,” Erin said.
“It was.” He chewed his lip for a moment. “It was like a big play. GloboCorp wants to build a pipeline in some dust- or mud-covered corner of the world. The locals have two legal choices—go to work for GloboCorp and help tear up their ancestral homeland or be out of work. So they pick door number three. They get together and give themselves some fancy name…the People’s Liberation Army of Revolution or some such. They write a big manifesto against GloboCorp. GloboCorp buys K-R-and-R insurance and sends in a supply of easy-to-abduct workers, guys who want the hazard pay or whatever.
“The People’s Liberation Army abducts a few of them a month, not enough to really upset GloboCorp’s pipeline project, because then the gringos would come down in force and stomp the ‘movement’ into so much jungle jelly. So long as the kidnappers don’t get too greedy, the insurance geeks dutifully pay up. GloboCorp builds its pipeline. The locals make some money in the process, plus they feel as if they stood up to big, bad GloboCorp, fought the good fight, even if they lost.”
He shook his head. “Truth is, they were all just going through the motions. The K-R-and-R insurance and our fees and the rest of it was budgeted from the start, assessed within two or three percent by some math whiz wearing Coke-bottle glasses sitting in a Manhattan office and crunching numbers. It was all just the cost of doing business.”
“Pretty pragmatic,” Erin said.
“Hell, yes,” Jerrod agreed. “A few years later, the locals find a way to live with the pipeline and the guys who were running around the jungle kidnapping people are running for office, talking about how they fought for the people, and how they’re going to reform the government and end corruption. But by then, they’ve made so much money from the Globo-Corps of the world that they’re as corrupt as the rest.”
He paused. “And if they weren’t, if they were really serious about protecting their native land and culture…well, then they’ve gotta go. We send in one of my former colleagues to plant a car bomb or, even better, to set it up so the local cops or army can do it. Some lieutenant in the godforsaken army gets a medal, and good ol’GloboCorp keeps racking up the profits. The Dow Jones Index goes up, and all is right with the world.”
In the silence that followed, Jerrod realized he’d said way too much. He tried not to let himself think about those days. And this was why.
“And I thought I was a cynic,” Erin said. Her eyes were neither approving nor judgmental. There was something else there, something he couldn’t quite read. “So what really happened, Special Agent Westlake?”
He shook his head. “Another time. Or…not.”
He expected her to fire back another question. But this time she did seem to take “No” for an answer. He turned on the TV to a low volume, some program about global warming. He stared at the scenes of disappearing glaciers, while Erin dozed off. Meltwater running down through moulins, cutting loose the Ross Ice Shelf. The world coming apart.
But the scenes of dying glaciers merely provided a backdrop to his thoughts. White slavery. It existed. Law enforcement knew that without a doubt. But it was rare to find anyone involved who wasn’t beyond reach. Or to be able to prove the case once they were caught. The Dutch, a few years ago, had managed to crush some powerful white slavers who were bringing women out of Russia, promising them good jobs and then throwing them into brothels, where threats of violence against their families held them silent.
But there was another, even dirtier, side to that kind of operation. A much more clandestine one. The kind where individual children were snatched off the streets, young girls and boys, and sold to the twisted wealthy and powerful in other countries.
Those were the ones almost impossible to trace. The scumbags law enforcement found too slippery to grab. Somehow when Erin said that Mercator, a huge defense contractor, was involved in white slavery, he didn’t think she meant the kind of rings the Dutch had broken. There would be no advantage to Mercator in such a thing.
He closed his eyes against the doom portended by rapidly calving and melting glaciers, and turned inward to dark places he had to visit too often in his job. Places where innocent children were nothing but things to be used by someone with sick desires. Places where Elena lurked even yet.
If those were the kinds of things Erin was uncovering, then he wasn’t going to tell another soul. Not if Mercator was involved. That company had too much power and too much influence, and all too often he had seen where that could lead. They might take a hit on a penny-ante corruption case, but on something like this, they would be covered nine ways to Sunday.
The Mercators of the world didn’t get caught for things like white slavery.
Emotions he didn’t allow himself to have any longer tried to wedge their way up to his heart and mind like those moulins melting their way through the glaciers. They would have their day, but their day would be destructive. He forced them down again, and instead focused on the cool anger and determination that had proved his best friends for many years.
No heat. No passion to interfere with reason. He might be propelled by passion, but he steered by cold reason. Passion must be kept in the background, simmering and providing energy, but never dined on. Never indulged.
He opened his eyes again to discover that the very place he was sitting would probably be underwater in a hundred years. He supposed the global scale of the impending climate crisis might cast his obsession with the missing into obscurity, at least to some, but he felt differently.
That was why he climbed out of bed every morning.
Erin stirred, murmuring something in her sleep, and he took that as a good sign. She hadn’t sunk into a sleep so deep it meant the concussion was creating a problem.
He needed more information from her. Much more. Then he could decide a course of action. Although if she was right about what she claimed, then only one course lay ahead of him.
On the television, the narrator’s focus had shifted from glacial flooding to mega hurricanes. Erin spoke without opening her eyes. “Rita was a rush.”
“What?”
“Hurricane Rita. I covered it. Can’t say it was a happy rush.” Her eyes opened, as blue as gas flames.
“It hit us hard. It kind of got lost in the wake of Katrina. It wasn’t as bad because there were no levees left to break.” She stretched and yawned, then winced a little. “My neck is getting stiff.”
“Not surprising. You took a pretty hard blow.”
She stretched again, more cautiously, and curled up in the other direction. The TV commentator was now talking about desertification. Erin indicated the TV with a slight wave of her hand. “You listen to too much of that, you might get depressed.”
“It’s background noise. I already know about it.”
“Yeah? Do you do anything about it?”
He tilted his head a little to one side. “Do you?”
“Parry,” she said, with a smile that barely creased the corners of her eyes. “You’re as good as I am at dodging questions. Ever consider becoming a politician?”
“I’d have to sell my soul. And you didn’t answer my question.”
“That’s a two-way street. But yes, I try to do my part. I walk or take public transportation. I’ve replaced all my incandescent bulbs with those compact fluorescent ones. I don’t turn on my heat unless my fingers turn blue, and I do without air-conditioning unless it’s night and I can’t sleep. I also try not to buy anything that had to come from far away. You can’t always tell, but ‘grown in Chile’ or ‘made in China’ are good indicators.”
“You’re doing better than I am, then.”
“Aha.”
But the reaction lacked spirit. They were walking around the edges of a peril that could destroy them both, trying to reach for some level of normalcy and banter.
He knew all about that, and he suspected she did, too, from the way she was behaving. Sometimes you just had to ignore the elephant in the room, especially when you couldn’t deal with it right that instant. The other elephant, the one unfolding before them on TV, seemed more like a parable than a science program.
Finally Erin spoke. “I guess I’m going to have to trust you.”
He looked at her. “That’s another two-way street.”
“Is it?” She appeared dubious.
“Yes. I could get fired, too. I could get killed, too.”
“Then why?”
He returned his gaze to the TV, knowing he had to offer an answer, but unwilling to get too personal.
Finally he found a way. “I’ve spent my entire career in the Bureau trying to nail white slavers. I spend my personal time on it. It’s an obsession.”
She fell silent in thought. “But you do other stuff?”
“Of course. It’s part of my job. But finding the missing is my specialty. It’s what I do best. And my life doesn’t matter a hill of beans if I can put one white slaver into prison or save the life of one kid.”
He turned to her again and found her eyes had darkened, as if someone had turned down the gas flame and replaced it with blue ink.
“I believe you,” she said. “It’s like that for me, too. I don’t have a personal score to settle or anything, but the idea of those little kids…” She trailed off, frowning. “I make my living with words, but I deal in facts, so it’s hard for me to explain what I’m feeling. I just knew, when my source tipped me off to this, that it wasn’t a story I was going to let go.”
“Then we’re on the same page.”
“Maybe.” She stared at him hard, as if trying to see into him. He stared right back. He wasn’t one to blink.
“Okay,” she said finally. “Where do I start?”
“How about telling me just how much about this you shared with your editors? Then I’ll have some idea what the bad guys know.”
“I didn’t tell them much.”
“Apparently it was enough.”
She sighed and touched the side of her head.
“Where are those pain pills?”
“In your upper left vest pocket.” He went to the kitchenette to retrieve a club soda out of the fridge and then poured it into a glass for her. Then he returned to the couch, crossed his legs loosely and waited while she swallowed the medicine.
“You don’t trust easily, do you?” he asked.
“Apparently this time I trusted too much.”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “That’s how we learn, Erin.”
“Yeah, right. By being whacked on the head.” But he saw her gaze drift to the badge clipped to his belt. “I usually have an adversarial relationship with cops.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, I jolly around with them and build relationships, but I’m always trying to learn things they don’t want me to know. Things they’ve done wrong. Things they haven’t done that they should have. They see my role as being their mouthpiece. I see my role as being the public’s eyes and ears. The two are not the same.”
“Of course not.”
She raised her gaze to meet his. “It’s going to be weird being on the same team.”
He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands. “Here’s how I see it. You’re not going to walk away from this story, no matter what they’ve done. Firing you. Taking your work. Breaking into your place. Putting you in the hospital. You’re not giving up, right?”
“No way!”
“If I can see that, having known you only a few hours, then they know it, too. So now you’re the best source I have on an international crime ring, and the bad guys know you’re not quitting. I wouldn’t walk away from the crime regardless. I’m also not walking away and leaving you in their crosshairs. Since we’re stuck with each other, we may as well work together.”
She seemed to consider it for a moment before replying. “You have access to resources that I can’t get to on my own. So sure, we can work together. Just don’t try to shut down my story once this is over. You can put these people in jail, but I can put them on the nightly news. Which do you think will cost them more?”
He nodded. “You can write it once we’ve got the case. I won’t gag you. But look at it this way, Erin. Right now, right this very instant, while you’re hesitating about what to share, they’re still trying to find you. Because you can lead them to their leak. Quit wasting time. They sure as hell aren’t.”
She lowered her head briefly. “It’s easier to walk into a forest fire,” she said quietly. “At least you can see where the danger is.”
“The problem is, you’re already in the fire. Now we have to walk through it.”
“Yeah. Okay. Nobody knows how much I know. Nobody knows who my source is, not even me. My editor knows only that I have one, and that he’s feeding me information to check on. And that so far I’ve been able to verify most of what he’s shared.”
“How much is that?”
She shrugged. “Not enough. This guy is scared to death. He’s handing out information as if it were nuggets of gold. A little here, a little there. Then he seems to panic and shut down. After a while, he comes back.”
“So you think he works for the company?”
“I don’t know how else he would get flight information.”
“Flight information?”
“Yeah. He’s told me that some shipments out of Colorado Springs are listed as going to one country but actually go to another. But the manifests don’t add up.”
“How so?”
“Equipment that’s supposedly being shipped isn’t leaving their factory. They list it as being shipped by cargo carriers, but they’re not cargo carriers. They’re private jets. Too small for the equipment that’s on the manifest, and not going to the country that’s supposedly getting the equipment.”
“So he got curious?”
“Yeah. And then one night he worked late and overheard a conversation about how the cargo had to be sedated.”
“And that made him think it was white slavery?”
“It made him curious. Curious enough to go out to the corporate airport and try to check on the cargo, thinking maybe he’d miscounted the inventory back at the warehouse, because his first count showed no product in transit. So he started looking around, and that’s when he saw two kids being carried aboard a jet, both of them asleep.”
“Some executives’ kids being flown back home, maybe?” Jerrod asked, almost wishing it could be that innocent.
“Home to Venezuela?” Erin replied. “Somehow I don’t think so.”
“He knows the flight went to Venezuela?”
She nodded. “Flight plan was for Brazil, but the aircraft never went there.”
“How would he know that?”
She shrugged. “That part I’m not sure about yet. But his e-mail sounded pretty sure, and everything he’s told me before has checked out.”
“Does he have any idea why Mercator would be doing this?”
Erin shook her head. “Not yet. I mean, would Mercator be trafficking in kids just to get contracts?”
He glanced her way. “Every foreign-arms sale has to be approved through the government. Which basically means armaments are going only where our policy wonks want them to go, never mind that we may live to regret it two or three years later. Which means there’s a certain amount of quid pro quo going on between government and contractors.”
Her eyes widened. “You mean, the government might…know about this?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But I’ve found it’s always dangerous to underestimate your enemy.”
6
Jerrod and Erin left the hotel before the eastern sky began to brighten. At a gas station, Jerrod bought them large coffees in metal travel mugs and breakfast tacos he’d heated in a microwave.
“Sorry it’s not a better meal,” he said as they pulled away. “We’ll get something farther down the road.”
“It’s amazing what we’ll accept as food,” Erin said with a sleepy laugh. “I wonder if there’s anything organic in these things?”
“Probably not,” he said, chuckling. “But at least they’re calories.”
She nodded as she chewed and swallowed. “And they aren’t the most horrible thing I’ve ever tasted.”
He laughed as he ate. “No. If I close my eyes and let myself imagine, I can almost believe they’re fit for human consumption.”
She laughed with him, trying to cling to the humor of the moment, knowing it couldn’t last. It didn’t.
“I’m going to keep to the back roads for a while,” Jerrod said. “I’ll make sure we don’t have a tail.”
Erin’s neck prickled. “What if we do?”
“I’ll drive off that bridge when we get to it.”
It was an odd kind of confidence, she thought. They had only the barest notion of a plan and no real idea what might happen, yet he seemed comfortable with that, as if the uncertainty itself were a security blanket. Then again, given what he’d told her—and what he hadn’t—he likely had a lot of skills that she didn’t necessarily want to think about.
Some of the prettiest countryside in Texas slid by, invisible in the predawn darkness. There were no headlights to be seen, and rarely a streetlight. They could have been driving through grass-scented ink, with only the thrum of the tires and the occasional chuckhole to pull them back to reality.
They rode silently, sipping coffee. Just as trees were beginning to emerge from the darkness, Jerrod spoke.
“I’ll have to stop by my office and do some things, but I’m going to leave you somewhere while I do.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s in the Houston police reports that I found you. And someone may also have reported that I took you away from the apartment. Point is, it’s no secret we met. So I don’t want anyone to know you’re still with me.”
“You think they’d be watching that closely?”
He glanced over at her before returning his attention to the road. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know what to think. I’m not used to being paranoid.”
“Like I said, you’re the only link they have to your source. They want to know who you’re talking to. Then they want you both dead.”
“Thanks for the message of cheer,” she said. “So they think I’m going to lead them to this guy?”
“That’s what they’re hoping. They’re hoping we’ll do exactly what we’re going to do. Find the source. So we have to do that without them knowing we’ve done it.”
“And if we can’t?”
He looked at her. “Then we’ll be taken out of the equation, and a whole lot more girls will go into it.”
“The equation?”
He nodded. “Ever ask yourself what it means when a corporation changes the name of its ‘personnel’ department to ‘human resources’? We’re not people to Mercator. We’re variables on a balance sheet. Until you tumbled onto this story, the paper had you in the assets column. But once you got onto this…”
“I became a liability.”
He sipped his coffee. “It’s as easy as that, when your personnel are just human resources. Move them from column A to column B. Eliminate as necessary.”
She shivered. “I don’t like the world you’ve lived in, Jerrod Westlake.”
“Neither do I.”
“Are you going to tell your office about this?”
“No.” Unequivocal and flat.
“I guess the FBI has human resources, too.” She settled back and sipped her coffee again. “So we can’t trust anyone. Hell, for all I know, you were sent here to gain my trust so I’d lead you right to my source. For all I know, you’re on cleanup detail.”
He laughed quietly. “Now you’re thinking like me.”
“I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.”
“Actually, it is. You’ll live longer.”
No clouds marred the sky of Austin when they arrived. The heavens shone a breathtaking blue, and the air invigorated her with just a touch of winter’s chill. Erin could have wallowed in the lack of humidity.
Jerrod surprised her. She’d half expected him to put her into another hotel, but instead he left her on the St. Edward’s University campus in South Austin.
“It’s busy, and it’s public. Nobody will bother you here. And their library will have Internet access.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll be back in two hours. Will you be okay?”
“Sure.”
When he glanced into his rearview mirror, he saw her disappear into the library. Then he sped north to the Federal Building, already planning his story.
Inside the library, Erin found quite a few students working busily. Near the elevators, she found a pair of public computers that required no log-in, linked into the library database and the world beyond. While she couldn’t connect to her anonymous account, she could look up “white slavery” on Google and see what was out in the public domain.
While some dismissed it as myth and others as women knowingly entering the sex trade for its economic opportunities, the statistics were staggering. Whether abducted, enticed, purchased from their parents or simply drawn by the lure of leaving home and gaining some measure of social and psychological independence, women and teens entered the international sex market on a horrific scale. Most knew they—or the daughters they were selling—would soon be working as “bar girls,” “comfort women,” “escorts” or “house girls.” What they too often did not know was the degrading, violent and often deadly conditions under which that work was done.
Although the U.N. and many countries had funded countless studies and passed legislation to eliminate white slavery, the trade went on. In some societies it was accepted as a matter of course. Girls were imported, often as young as eleven or twelve years of age, and then schooled in the skills of their new profession. By their midteens they were ready for resale, often convinced that they were graduating into the adult world, a world where their bodies were fungible assets.
Waves of revulsion rolled through Erin as she read. Most repulsive of all was a question that slowly grew and began to gnaw at the back of her consciousness: what if these girls were not brainwashed, not victims, but self-motivated entrepreneurs who had chosen what they saw as their most accessible path to economic independence?
Some of the girls interviewed in the studies almost seemed to have been put forward as poster girls for prostitution, with gilded stories of having paid for college and opened doors that would otherwise have been forever barred by using their earnings. If she let herself see their perspective, it was almost as if prostitution was the female equivalent of military service: trading one’s youthful body for the rights and opportunities of adult citizenship.
But for every one of those stories, there was a story of another kind, of beatings, of rape, of feeling one’s heart and soul hollowed out, twenty minutes and as many dollars at a time, trying to pay off the “loan” that had brought the girl from Russia or Thailand, Burma or Brazil, until she realized that she could work the rest of her life and never be free of the debt…or the memories.
The more Erin read, the more convinced she became that the human species could rationalize away the most abhorrent evils imaginable. If this was the best humanity could do, she thought, perhaps a radical global climate change would not be a disaster at all.
Perhaps it would simply be Mother Earth washing herself in disgust.
Alton Castle was probably the least important accountant at Mercator Arms, and that was fine with him. He handled shipping invoices on classified projects. Like everything at Mercator, his job was compartmentalized, so that none of the junior employees would have a full picture of what they were doing on any contract. It was standard security doctrine, and Alton liked it that way.
In fact, he would have vastly preferred not to have learned what he knew.
When he’d joined Mercator seven years ago, he’d had ambitions. He’d seen his job as a stepping-stone to greater things. He’d poured heart and soul into his work, aware that accuracy was crucial on government contracts, aware that inspectors didn’t always give warning before they arrived. He’d wanted to ensure that Mercator was doing everything by the book, so Pentagon Inspector General teams would never have reason to challenge the company on anything he’d been involved in.
But he also had a daughter. Like many employees, he kept a picture of his wife and their child on his desk, a reminder that his job was a means and not an end in itself. First-time visitors to his office often commented on how beautiful both were, and his chest swelled with pride each time. They were beautiful. Stunningly, amazingly so.
He might be a mere “bean counter,” as other parts of the company referred to the huge staff of accountants and lawyers, but bean counting was essential to the company’s life. Absolutely essential, he often thought, for if the government noted any discrepancy in the billings, they might be audited, and while the audit continued, the government could refuse to pay the company’s bills on suspect contracts. He might be a cog in the wheel, but he was an important cog.
He sat in his small cubicle, matching bills of lading with contracts and invoices. He also maintained completion tallies, so he could report on the accounting status of each of the contracts he managed.
But he had been too diligent. He’d tumbled into a snake pit, one his conscience would not let him ignore. Every time he looked at the face of his daughter, he felt the jolt of his discovery anew.
“Alton?” One of the women in his group appeared at his doorway with an armful of papers. “These bills of lading are all verified as to contract. The preliminary invoices are clipped to them.”
“Thanks, Cecile. Just put them in my in-box.” He had to check over all the prelims, then make any necessary adjustments.
She did as asked, gave him a flirtatious smile and sashayed out of the cubicle.
He returned to the file he was pretending to examine and tried to calm himself. The increased security at the plant, begun only a few days ago, had unnerved him. As yet the changes were minimal, but given what he knew, and that he had shared it outside the company, he was sure that every new edict was aimed directly at him. He felt as if he were wearing a neon sign.
His computer dinged at him, and he turned to check his mail. His heart stopped.
We have reason to believe there has been a security violation at our Colorado Springs facility. All briefcases and purses are subject to search, and all telephone calls will be randomly monitored. Other measures may be instituted as deemed necessary.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Neils Ingram, Facility Security Officer
“Jesus,” he whispered, then looked swiftly around to ensure no one had heard. He skipped to the next e-mail, something less likely to give him a heart attack, and pretended to read it.
His heart slammed so hard and so loud he was certain someone else in the office must have heard it. But outside his cubicle, nothing seemed to change. Phones still rang, voices could be heard talking quietly, the copier thunked away in the nearby copy room.
The e-mail could be about something else. Of course it could. He hadn’t taken anything out of the facility. He hadn’t made a single phone call from the office or home about this. He hadn’t even used his own computer here or at home to send information.
If they had tumbled to the leak, there was no way they could trace it to him. No way. Besides, who would think that kind of a leak could issue from some cog in the accounting department?
Gradually calming, he forced himself to begin looking through the invoices on his desk, as if he were working industriously. He was safe. He had ensured that with his caution. Even his nosing around in inventory was so far in the past now that the computer audit trails had probably been erased. They would be investigating persons closer to the activity than a mere accountant.
A half hour later, he was almost back to normal. But he had decided he wasn’t going to do another thing to help that reporter. She had enough information now. Let her do her own work. He’d done his by tipping her off.
When Jerrod returned to pick up Erin, he found her sitting outside the library with a visible bubble of empty space around her. That was hardly surprising, given the angry scowl on her face. The students milling around had obviously seen it, too, and had instinctively kept her at a safe distance. He didn’t have that option.
“Come on,” he said. He figured she would tell him what had ticked her off if she wanted to.
When they reached the parking lot, she looked around. “Where’s your car?”
He pointed. “It’s the white one. I couldn’t take a Bureau vehicle for this. Especially since it has a LoJack and we could be tracked.”
“And yours?”
“Nothing trackable. Just your basic four-wheel-drive Suburban.”
This one was smaller, with a gray cloth interior, much better suited to the hot Texas sun. Not to mention that it was fully equipped with his collection of Willie Nelson CDs.
“What did you tell them?” she asked, as they pulled out of the campus lot and started north on Congress Avenue. Here Austin still reflected its small-town roots, from the days before zoning. Houses and businesses met and mingled, and the trees were old and grand.
“Who? You mean, my bosses?”
Her hands clenched into fists on her lap. “Who else would I mean? Did you tell them about me?”
“No. I’m not telling anyone anything they don’t absolutely need to know.”
“Then how can you get away?”
“I have a certain amount of leeway when I’m investigating something.” He braked at a stoplight and looked at her. “What has you so upset?”
“I was reading about white slavery.”
“And?”
She looked at him, and her blue eyes seemed to burn. “I’ve never seen anything so twisted in my life.”
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