Cross the Line (Alex Cross #24)(42)

I smiled and crooked a finger at her. Goddess acted like she didn’t understand. I went over and crouched next to her.

“You can stop pretending that you don’t know any English,” I said.

She looked at her lap.

“We’re here to help,” I said. “But we need your help in return.”

There was no change in her affect, just a casual glance up, as if she were looking through me toward something far away.

“Suit yourself,” I said. “But U.S. Immigration will be getting involved soon enough. If you want a chance at staying in this country, you need to start talking.”

Her pupils dilated and her breath quickened. I saw both tells, shrugged at her as if I were done, stood up, and took a few steps toward Sampson.

She called after me in a thick accent, “You get me a pack of Marlboros and I try to help you.”





CHAPTER


49


“YOU BELIEVE HER?” Bree asked when I finally got home around eleven that night after one of the more upsetting days of my life.

“I’ve got no reason not to believe her,” I said, eating leftover lamb kebabs with a sweet, fiery peanut sauce Nana Mama had come up with. “Several of the other young ladies who spoke English told a similar story. The young boys too.”

“It’s inhuman,” she said.

“No argument there,” I said, my thoughts traveling back to Mina Codrescu sitting on her snorkel coat and taking a long drag on that first Marlboro before she spoke.

Mina was nineteen and from the city of Balti in northern Moldova, a small, impoverished country between Hungary and Ukraine. Her mother was dead, she’d told us; her father was a drunk. She had no assets other than an ability to speak English and a dream of someday going to America, so when a Russian man she met in a bar told her there was a way she could go to the States, she’d been interested. He took her to Chi?in?u, the capital of Moldova, where she met a second Russian man.

“He said he would bring me to America in return for five years of work,” Mina had told me, blowing out smoke from her cigarette and looking away.

“What kind of work?” Sampson had asked.

“Sex work,” she’d said defiantly.

“You agreed to it?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” she said and took another drag.

I said nothing.

Mina waved her cigarette at the scenery and in the same defiant tone said, “This was worth it. For this, I would do it again. Look, I am here, in America. I can smell my dream here. If I didn’t say yes, none of this happens.”

“We’re not judging you, Mina,” I said. “Just listening. Tell me how it worked after you agreed to the deal.”

Mina said she had had sex with the second Russian for three days, and then he’d handed her a ticket for Miami. A woman she knew only as Lori met her in Florida.

Lori took her passport and cell phone. She told Mina she’d get the passport back in five years and the cell phone once she was assigned to a particular locale. Lori brought Mina to a truck depot in the middle of the night. Delivery vans pulled up, and other women and boys began to pour out.

Piles of old winter clothes were dumped out on the ground and they were told to put them on. Lori had set aside the snorkel parka, pants, and boots for Mina, and she’d helped her into the refrigerated truck with assurances that her life would be much better at the other end of the drive. Luxurious, even.

“It wasn’t bad for me because it gets cold where I come from,” Mina had said. “But others, they barely had any clothes. We tried to keep them warm, but some of them were sick and too weak already from traveling, and they just died.”

“How long were you in the truck?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t have a watch or phone. Two days? Maybe more?”

“Any other young Moldovan ladies here?”

“Two,” she had said. “There are more from Hungary and Slovakia.”

Several had been recruited as Mina had, she’d told me. Others had worked in brothels in Germany before being “transferred” to the United States, and—

“It’s sad,” Bree said, breaking me from my thoughts, “that there are parts of the world now where there’s so little hope that young women and boys desperate for something better will sell themselves into sexual slavery.”

“It sounded more like indentured servitude,” I said.

Bree arched an eyebrow. “You honestly think those Russians were going to turn Mina loose after five years? No way. They were going to use her up, spit her out. Someone would have found her in a ditch.”

“Maybe, but she’s got a chance now,” I said. “When the INS special agent in charge from Virginia Beach showed up, I had Mahoney single her out as critical to the investigation and in need of political asylum.”

“That’ll help her.”

I nodded, trying to feel good about that rather than tired and emotional, but my exhaustion must have shown because Bree said, “You okay, Alex?”

“Not really,” I said. “The whole ride back on the helicopter I was thinking about Jannie and Ali, and us. We all won the lottery at birth and got to grow up here in America, not someplace where we’d have to prostitute our way out of misery. I mean, I’m sorry, but something’s wrong or out of balance when that exists. Or am I overthinking things?”