Lost Girls Read online

  The memories of Sergio Mendoza were impossible to leave on Denali. They had become an obstruction in her life. The women would not give her peace until she came looking for them.

  And she was terrified of where that might lead.

  2

  EDMONTON, ALBERTA, CANADA

  A queue formed at the double wood doors leading to the hotel’s banquet facility by an etched brass placard that read SASKATCHE-WAN ROOM. Linen-covered tables occupied by perky hotel clerks throughout the week had been cleared of programs and floral arrangements, leaving behind wilted petals and the handful of laminated name tags representing those who’d never made it.

  Inside the room, you could sense the mood of a final day. Airline tickets poked from pockets of wrinkled sports coats, people with slumped shoulders shuffled around coffee urns surrounded by mountains of sugared pastries. The ones with hangovers grinned slyly at co-conspirators. The gym rats still damp from their showers drew common looks of disdain.

  There was a table at the back of the room with placards that read, DUTCH, RUSSIAN, GERMAN, ARABIC, HINDI, FRENCH, where yawning interpreters fussed with headphones as they brushed doughnut crumbs from lapels and sipped coffee.

  The attendees were of all races, all cultures. They came from major cities and frontier outposts, from icy tundras to desert wastelands, as different in language and dialect and dress as anyone could be and yet there was an unmistakable sameness about them.

  You saw it first in their eyes. When you spoke to them, they were slow to answer. They didn’t seek to interrupt or contradict or impress. They looked you in the eye and listened as if the act of listening required its own exclusive allotment of time.

  The hotel’s comptroller had commented to the general manager that there was something creepy about them. “They make you feel naked, eh? Like they know your dirty secrets?”

  “Please, everyone, five more minutes.” A woman tapped the microphone, provoking feedback, and the hangovers grimaced as stewards dashed to squelch the earsplitting howl.

  The crowd around the coffee urns began to disperse, some to escape the noise, some for last-minute restroom calls in the lobby.

  This time tomorrow they would all be back home. Back to their desks and a mountain of work because everyone knew that crime didn’t take a holiday, that the world was a busy place for the most senior law enforcement investigators on the planet.

  They’d run the gamut of topics throughout the week, from experts monitoring arms sales to rogue African states to breakthroughs in a Turkmenistan pipeline for heroin pouring out of Afghanistan. Lithuanian counterfeiters were moving euros to France and Spain, and biotechnologists in Miami were discovering new ways to detect chemical scents indicative of bombs. At Scotland Yard investigators were making strides identifying a source of radioactive isotopes that were being smuggled out of the old Soviet Union, including polonium 210, which had been used to kill former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.

  There remained but one speaker to deliver a single topic this morning. More seats in the room would have been vacated by early departures but for Helmut Dantzler’s reputation. He was a law enforcement legend, to say the least. His career began with an appointment to a branch office of Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt—Federal Criminality Agency—where he studied intelligence responsible for capturing Andreas Baader of the Baader-Meinhof gang in the early 1970s. By 1977 he was a member of GSG 9, the world-class counterterrorist unit best known for secretly flying behind a hijacked Lufthansa jet to Mogadishu, where they landed, then stormed and liberated eighty-six passengers from RAF radicals. In the 1980s Dantzler commanded GSG 9 responses to hijackings, hostage takings, and bombings on foreign soils, and in the early 1990s he transferred to Germany’s covert intelligence service to interpret the terrorist threat from abroad. It was during his time in intelligence that Dantzler had a first look at Russian migration into the Czech Republic and a new kind of crime, which, having nothing to do with terrorism, tore at his very soul.

  Young women and little girls, mostly war refugees from the former Soviet states, were being routed toward the Czech border, unaware they were about to become slaves to organized crime.

  Criminals responding to the collapsing Soviet superpower had graduated from trading black-market arms to trading people, meeting the demands of Germany’s burgeoning sex-tourism industry. Dantzler, appalled, was later quoted as saying that he knew at that moment what he had been preparing himself for all his life.

  Dantzler put in his retirement papers and accepted a position with Interpol in France, where he had been granted permission to develop the first international bureau dedicated to monitoring human migration and exploitation. It would take a decade of intelligence gathering to convince the European Council to adopt a “Convention on Action” against trafficking human beings—even then a quarter of its members refused to ratify it—but by that time Germany had yielded its ignoble reputation as sex capital of the world to Southeast Asia, which in turn capitulated to South America in the twenty-first century. Brazil had become the sex-tourism capital of the world.

  Dantzler stood in the back of the room by a glass wall overlooking the Saskatchewan River Valley. The river was gray. Above it spits of snow danced like chaff in the bright morning sunlight. He raised a shirt cuff and glanced at his gold Breitling, then drew the curtains.

  The woman tapped the microphone again, gently blew into it, and smiled at the stewards waiting in the wings. Then she clapped her hands and gave them a thumbs-up.

  “As you know, we’ve all had a long week. We’ve all absorbed a lot of information.” She made a show of wiping her brow. Her red lips parted broadly; her painted eyebrows raised, she looked around the room. “No more housekeeping issues, I promise. I’m sure everyone is sick of hearing those two words.”

  There was muted laughter and sparse applause.

  “Our final speaker, Helmut Dantzler, comes from Interpol to talk with us today. His topic will suggest different things to you, different images and emotions will come to mind, but it is truly a topic common to us, a topic of our time.”

  The woman looked down at her notes.

  “Long before the United Nations could agree on a definition for human trafficking, you were waging the battle against it in your own cities and streets. From human toys shipped to the United Arab Emirates to sweatshops in New York City, you investigated these cases one at a time, tedious prosecutions where your victims, mostly illiterate foreigners, were expected to draw sympathy from jurors of so-called peers in a country they had only ever seen from a locked window. You had no international laws to draw upon. To this day, police resort to weak local and regional statutes that are all but impossible to prosecute. You charge a murder here, a kidnapping there, sometimes an immigration and naturalization violation, but rarely, ever so rarely, are the men and women who are actually in the business of human commerce prosecuted in the world’s courts. Well, the world is getting smaller, ladies and gentlemen. Forty-one countries have now passed legislation to address human trafficking, from Pakistan to Sudan, from Miami to Bangladesh. The world is beginning to react to the reality and the horror of modern-day slavery. Last year there were nearly five thousand—not arrests, mind you—but”—she raised her hands and used two fingers to denote quotation marks—“convictions,” she said loudly, nodding vigorously, “and many within third-tier countries that have been selling their offspring since before recorded history.”

  There was brief applause. The speaker took a sip of water from a bottle on the podium.

  “Helmut Dantzler, as many of you know”—she replaced the cap on the bottle—“has waged war on many continents as an officer of GSG 9, but his most recent, the one that compelled him to a new avocation, was fought closer to his home and heart, between the borders of Germany and the Czech Republic, where a new kind of crime was beginning to dawn on the world. Like many of you, he has stories to tell. Like many of you, he was caught between organized crime and the constraints of German law a
nd international politics. Helmut is no longer in law enforcement. He has joined the ranks of elite intelligence officers around the world at Interpol, where he wages his battle against human trafficking through the exchange of information. Please welcome Helmut Dantzler.”

  Tall, rigid, elegant in his mocha-colored suit, he approached the front of the room as stragglers moved in from the rear. Dantzler paced through loud applause and stood at parade rest before the audience until it ended.

  “In Brooklin, Canada, scientists are manipulating atoms in a field called nanotechnology. It is assured to be a trillion-dollar industry by the year 2015. They hope, among other things, to build molecule-sized robots they can inject into our bloodstream to fight cancer, increasing our life span by twenty years and then perhaps fifty.” He paused. “In Bihar, India, mothers poison their newborn daughters with the sap of oleander to keep them from bleating for breast milk. This happens every day of every year. There is no food in the family to support another girl.” He looked at his hands, paused, and looked back at the audience.

  “We can only wonder that these things happen in the same century,” he said. “That they happen on the same planet. Major Lamb in introducing me mentioned that the world is growing smaller. We know more about each other than ever before, and let me assure you, that knowledge is a good thing. Education is a step toward a greater humanity, toward a union of cultures.”

  Dantzler’s thick German accent reverberated across the silent room.

  “One day we hope that all people benefit from life-prolonging advances. And we should hope through progressive law enforcement to protect all people from the human malignancy that has too long hidden behind religion and politics. It is high time we direct the light upon the transgressors and not the transgression. It doesn’t take a German to know that child labor is wrong in Munich and it doesn’t take an American to realize forced prostitution is wrong in Los Angeles. These are human issues, not issues of state.”

  He dropped his arms to his sides and looked at the toes of his shoes for a long moment. “Ah,” he sighed, “but you’re thinking I am an old man, an idealist. The world is more complicated than that, you all know. There will always be borders. There will always be corrupt leaders. There will always be organized crime. And, you are thinking, there will always be laws that will constrain our efforts as investigators. So where does that leave us?”

  He looked up again, finding eyes around the room.

  Dantzler took a folded document from an inside breast pocket and held it up in the air. “I went over the enrollment last night and performed some math in my room. You are two hundred and nine people with an average of fourteen years’ experience. That means there are three thousand years’ worth of experience in this room. I retired with only thirty-two.”

  Muted laughter.

  “I didn’t come here to tell you anything today. I came here to listen. I want to hear your stories about human trafficking. You all have them, your war stories, if you will. We all possess knowledge of things our prosecutors could never introduce into a court of law. We know the tidbits of intelligence that frustrate law enforcement officers all over the world, those things we know to be certain, but cannot prove to be true.”

  Dantzler pointed out at the crowd. “And I want the person sitting next to you and the person behind you and him across the room and her by the coffee urn to hear it, too, because while the world really is getting to be a smaller place, the criminal networks are getting larger. Now more than ever we need to communicate.”

  Dantzler stepped off the podium.

  “You stare at your open cases for hours looking for the missing piece, when all along it is sitting in a jail cell in Lyon. The number of a TransAsia flight between Taipei and Phnom Penh, the key code for a Cadillac parked in Queens, New York, the name of a ship whispered softly in the alleys of Rome or Buenos Aires. In isolation these things mean nothing, but added to the sum knowledge of the investigator sitting next to you it might open new doors, so no, I didn’t come here to talk to you today. I came to listen, to hear your stories. You might not remember each other’s names a year from now, but you will never forget these stories. And that will be enough to get you talking to each other, burning up the phone lines as they say, making the world a smaller place in which to hide.”

  Dantzler stepped away from the microphone and walked to the front row. He pulled an empty chair into the aisle, put a leather loafer upon it, and leaned on one knee, elbow pressing flat the razor crease in his trousers.

  “I’ll go first,” he said. “In Germany there was a woman who operated a visa factory.”

  He spoke loudly, without the benefit of a microphone.

  “It was a difficult time for us. Our government had just relaxed border constraints between Germany and the Czech Republic. No one bothered to look at the visas anymore, legitimate or not, they mattered little to our border police. We estimated at the time that one out of twenty visas represented a human slave from the Czech Republic or more likely from Ukraine to their east. One particular woman who produced visas selected her victims from ads placed on Russian websites looking for domestic help for wealthy Germans. She required photos and proof of date of birth. She met them in front of Theater Imago in Hamburg and introduced them to their new employers—it was always one of three men who then spirited them to a windowless building in Bielefeld, where they were stripped of everything they owned, beaten, and forced to watch snuff films in the very room in which they were filmed. The psychological impact of the films was sufficient to suppress thoughts of escape. Afterward they were introduced to heroin and forced to prostitute themselves in the Mafia-owned nightclubs. If they refused, they would become one of the snuff film’s terminal stars. The woman’s name was…”

  An Inspector Singh of the Mount Lavinia police spoke next, telling the group about a man in Sri Lanka who owned a certain vessel that visited China and the coast of South Korea. Nearly a million people had been displaced in his country in the past five years, one-third of them under the age of eighteen. And they were eager for his help….

  Lieutenant George Basescu of the Romanian National Police described a warehouse in Bucharest converted to a human shopping mall. The defendants, all low-level criminals, displayed their human wares on a makeshift stage in a showroom with gaudily carpeted walls and mirrors. When the girls were not being paraded on display, they were housed behind another wall made of cinder block and soundproofing foam, in eight-by-eight-foot cells with toilets. They came from everywhere, but mostly from war-torn Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. What might be of interest to the others was that when the warehouse caught fire and police found the charred remains of the women still locked in their cells, there was a Rolls-Royce parked in a cargo bay. It was registered to a flamboyant Korean known only as Jong-pil. And Jong-pil suddenly disappeared from Bucharest’s nightlife scene. His whereabouts remain unknown to this day.

  A regional directorate of the Border National Police Service in Bulgaria once had a narcotic informant who was present at a conversation about women being trafficked from Bulgaria to Haiti. A dark-skinned, one-eyed man bragged that he tattooed the women’s faces with a voodoo image before he sold them into slavery in South America.

  A nineteen-year veteran of Thailand’s police spoke of reversing trends in Southeast Asian human trafficking. Wealthy Thai men, instead of exploiting the children of their native impoverished population, were buying Eastern European children for back-alley brothels in Pattaya….

  A Texas Ranger talked about adolescents’ being recruited in Mexico by a phony employment foundation to work in New York City hotels as housekeepers. They met in a hotel parking lot in Nuevo Laredo and were trucked across the Texas border, where they were forced to work as prostitutes in a Houston brothel.

  The stories went on for six hours.

  3

  PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

  Brigham swirled the port around the rim of his glass, laid the letter on his lap, and took of
f his reading glasses. “So what did you think of Captain Metcalf?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry?” Sherry said, feeling heat rise from the back of her neck. Brigham watched her, amused; she’d asked one too many questions about the Navy Seal since returning from Denali. He could see the color on her beautiful face. She fussed with her luxurious chestnut hair, twirling it around her fingers in a rare moment of awkwardness.

  “The senator’s son was quite taken by you, I heard. In fact, you were all he talked about once they got his sister back home.”

  Sherry kept her head down, binding the hair tightly around her finger.

  “I mean, how well you handled yourself on the mountain and all, that kind of thing.” Brigham watched her carefully. “You don’t just go out and do things like that when you’re blind. Metcalf admired your strength, he kept saying.”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “Well, I thought he was quite capable himself, very, um, competent I guess is the word.”

  “Uh-huh.” Brigham smiled, taking a sip of his drink. “Yeah, competent.”

  Sherry decided to change the subject. “He said it was very difficult for his sister to talk about what happened up there. I was given the impression she and the dead man might have gotten close on the mountain. Close, but she still didn’t know anything about him.”

  Brigham was silent on the subject.

  “I can’t stop thinking about that, you know,” Sherry Moore said.

  She laced the fingers of both hands behind her neck. “I really can’t, Mr. Brigham, and I’m trying. Honestly trying.”

  Brigham grunted. “You want to finish these or what?” He picked up the letter from his lap and flapped it noisily in the air. They were going through the week’s mail, a ritual of sorts. Sherry and Brigham would often choose a handful of letters from her public PO box and debate the merit of answering pleas for Sherry’s assistance. Sherry handled only a small number of cases a year, the most compelling usually from law enforcement, but occasionally she was so moved by a particular letter that she might contact the author. It was Brigham’s role to play devil’s advocate at those times.