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’
