Benito gave me a quick embrace and a backslap. “You have my mobile number,” he said. “If you ever need my help again…”
I nodded and thanked him.
We were airborne twenty-five minutes later, en route to London. I sat next to the stretcher, where Svetlana was strapped in, face up. Her A-shirt had come up, exposing her belly, and I couldn’t help glancing.
What I saw sickened me.
Her abdomen was crisscrossed with raised red welts that looked like they’d been made by a rawhide whip or maybe an electrical cord. I could see that the long welts extended to her lower back, and probably to her buttocks as well.
She’d been beaten, savagely and repeatedly.
But the beatings weren’t recent. Some of the welts were deep red and had begun to fade. Some of them had turned into angry new scars. There were also bruises that had gone yellow and blue and purple, indicating that they were several days old, probably more than a week.
She’d barely been a prisoner at Soler’s house for forty-eight hours. These beatings had been administered long before that.
After a while Svetlana began to stir and make little noises. Her eyes came open briefly, then closed. Her face went through a series of expressions. She wrinkled her nose, frowned. Then she made a heaving, retching sound. I was there just in time with a kidney-shaped vomit bowl and a cool washcloth.
“Hey,” I said softly a few minutes later as I released her from the gurney’s restraining straps. “Feel any better?”
She sat up and glared at me. Her eyes looked a little out of focus.
“That’s probably just a reaction to the sedative,” I said. “I’m sorry we had to do that, but you weren’t exactly cooperating. You were scared. I can’t blame you.”
“Where…where am I?” she asked in English with a strong Ukrainian accent.
I told her my name again. “Your father hired me to get you out of Soler’s house.”
“You say you work for my…father?”
“I don’t work for him. I was hired by him to do this one job. In about two hours we’ll be landing at Gatwick Airport. You’ll be home. Not a prisoner anymore.”
“A prisoner?” she said. “I wasn’t a prisoner. I was finally safe!”
I spoke very softly. “I’m sure that’s what Soler wanted you to think.”
“Goddamn you!” Then she uttered a profanity that I hadn’t heard since the Special Forces. Not something I expected out of the mouth of a fifteen-year-old girl. “Was his name Vadim Kuzma?”
I looked at her.
“This man isn’t my father! Vadim Kuzma hired you to kidnap me!”
She must have suddenly gotten self-conscious about her thin cotton A-shirt and her welts and bruises, because she folded her arms across her chest. I handed her my ancient, well-worn commando sweater. Army issue. You couldn’t buy those anymore. Now they were made of acrylic and way too scratchy. She looked at the coarse ribbed wool, the shoulder and elbow patches, with distaste, as if it were some filthy rag I’d picked up off the street, but she pulled it over her head anyway. It pooled around her, made her look like a little girl playing dress-up on the floor of her daddy’s closet.
Except for her face. There was, I now saw, a cynicism, a jadedness in her eyes that she was far too young to have.
It took a good half an hour before I was able to convince her that it was safe to talk. She clearly lived in fear of Kuzma. I assured her that I had friends in the U.S. embassy in London who could arrange for her to return to Ukraine immediately.
“I ran away from home almost two years ago,” she said. “We lived in a village in Ukraine called Povvysoke, my mother and me, but I had to leave. I was…drowning. Suffocating. I found a job in Odessa as a waitress, dancing on tables at a bar, and then a man came one day and said I was beautiful and asked if I wanted to be a model. I could make thousands of pounds a day. What should I say?”
“It was a prostitution ring,” I said. Odessa, Ukraine’s port city, had become one of the world’s hot spots for the international sex trade. The police there were underfunded and overbribed. Organized crime rings dispatched scouts there to recruit vulnerable young girls with bogus offers of glamorous jobs in foreign cities, as dancers or models or actresses, with promises that they could make a fortune. Russian and Ukrainian girls were particularly in demand.
She nodded. “They sell you to rich men in Turkey and Italy and the Emirates. But I was sold to this Ukrainian bastard who lives in London. Because he likes girls from his home country.”
“How much money did you make from the deal?”
She looked down and didn’t answer. After a long moment, she said, “I was his sex slave. Sometimes there are as many as six of us living in his house. But I think I must be his prize possession, because he takes me with him when he traveled to show me off.”
“He trusted you not to run?”
“He kept my passport. So where can I run?”
“He beat you.” A statement, not a question.
Her nostrils flared. Her face flushed. At last she nodded. “Only where others could not see. My back and my stomach and my thighs. I have to wear one-piece swimming suit.”
“Why?”
“Why he beats me?” She fell silent again. Then, in a whisper that was barely audible: “Because he can. Because it excites him.”
I felt something cold and hard in my stomach.
“How did you get to José María Soler?
“Kuzma took me with him to Barcelona. At this party I meet Soler. Later, when Kuzma is talking his business in another room, I give Soler a note. I say I am prisoner and I need to escape and I do anything he wants if he will save me from this monster. Later that night a man comes up to me and takes me out a side door without anyone notice and put me in car and drives me to Soler’s house.”
“And what did you have to do for Soler?”
“Nothing.”
I looked skeptical.
“Nothing at all. For what I should lie about this? Soler was negotiating with the Ukrainian government to get me back home to my mother. He said it would take a week or two.”
“And you think he was telling you the truth?”
“I talked to people from the Ukrainian embassy in Madrid. Soler was not lying to me. And now, you take me back to this monster!”
She looked like she was about to cry. I could see that the vulnerable little girl had just broken through the hard shell. She said in a small voice, “Help me.”
I nodded. Put a hand on her forehead and said, “I will.”
About three hours later I was driving a rented, up-armored Range Rover along Kensington Palace Gardens, talking to Benito on my cell phone. Hands-free, because it’s safer.
“Yes,” Benito said, “I spoke with the consulate in Madrid. It all checks out, what the girl said.”
“Excellent.” I’d come to a traffic light. I glanced down at the Heckler & Koch MP5K on the passenger seat and picked up the long curved magazine. It was full. Thirty rounds.
“So what you gonna do now, my friend?” Benito asked.
I inserted the magazine into its well and slapped the cocking lever forward. Something final about that well-oiled click.
“Plan B,” I said as the light turned green.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joseph Finder is the New York Times bestselling author of ten previous novels, including Vanished and Buried Secrets. Finder’s international bestseller Killer Instinct won ITW’s Thriller Award for Best Novel of 2006. Other bestselling titles include Paranoia and High Crimes, both of which became major motion pictures. He lives in Boston.