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
